@8lottie8 / 8lottie8.tumblr.com
As an avid fan this sucks, but there are more important things right now. My values and morals are too important to me to support EBUs decision not to ban Israel from Eurovision.
I watch a ton of great youtube videos about halting and reversing desertification but now youtube recommends me a ton of videos of people using those techniques to turn desert ecosystems into farmland. If you see these too, please downvote them. Going to desert ecosystems and planting food forests is not a trend we should be starting. Many plants and animals are endemic to those areas and those ecosystems are worth protecting. Deserts are not wastelands. These videos mislead people into thinking that this is a good thing for the environment just because there is more green. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are so many actual forest ecosystems that need to be restored, we should not be wasting energy foresting deserts that have been deserts for millennia.
this is a niche one but instead of "they would not fuckin say that" it's "they would not fucking use American sign language".
ASL is not the only sign language. two british characters in your fanfiction would not be using ASL. England in fact has its own kind of sign language, BSL, that forms a sign family with many other sign languages around the world.
ASL isn't even the original member of its sign family, it comes from french sign language. do you know sign languages aren't related to spoken languages? that's an important one! it's not a direct 1:1 with people speaking English around the world. people in other countries don't learn ASL just in case they run into an usamerican or Canadian (who do often use it)
i know the entire world is the USA or whatever and sign languages do sometimes borrow from ASL for signs they don't have, but please be aware that there are other sign languages and families in the world that are not in fact ASL.
and on a mostly related note, a lot of media seems to only ever depict sign language in the context of mutism instead of the WAY WAY more common deafness. especially in fanworks where they don't want to have to deal with a character being more inconveniently disabled than just "can't talk", but it's still noticeable in normal media also.
going to a collection of signing characters and going "well you can't all be hearing but mute". like the ratio of deaf to mute characters would be so disproportionately innacurate it's almost insulting. past a certain point it feels like you just don't want to deal with deaf people.
Quotes (internal links preserved)
First: Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon.[1] Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[2] although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
and
Second: The number of sign languages worldwide is not precisely known. Each country generally has its own native sign language; some have more than one. The 2021 edition of Ethnologue lists 150 sign languages,[5] while the SIGN-HUB Atlas of Sign Language Structures lists over 200 and notes that there are more that have not been documented or discovered yet.[6] As of 2021, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language is the most used sign language in the world, and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most "spoken" language in the world.[7]
just wanted to add that sign languages, like spoken languages, have regional dialects - for example when we were trying to learn BSL in the 80s in Bristol, our teacher explained that Bristol signing had its own sign for sugar (scratching the cheek), based on generations of deaf people in the past working on the docks there where sugar was imported, and getting a skin condition called sugar dermatitis from carrying the sacks over their shoulders
we just wanted to draw further attention to how rich these languages are
I have tried learning BSL about five times, each time from someone teaching in a different dialect.
Each one had a different, non-mutually-intelligible sign for the number 9. You're not out of the fundamentals of counting to ten before you hit dialectal variations.
I learned this year I can't fingerspell my way through it because in the city where I now live, several letters of the alphabet are different.
The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.
Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”
It is very rare that posting actually is activism.
But in this case, getting this man's name trending on multiple platforms could literally save his life.
Exactly this ^^^
This is one of the very rare cases where the only thing we are being asked to do is make something go viral.
Some ppl are like "I'm a kinky sex-positive pervert freak!!!" and then make fun of virgins and asexuals..... sure, reclaim freakiness but keep working on that because teasing ppl for their sex lives (or lack thereof) is, unfortunately, very normie mainstream vanilla behaviour. the right to sexual determination includes NOT having sex. 101 shit. Like this isnt subversive dude, it's using the edge of an ideology for bullying
"sex positivity includes people who are positive they don't want sex."
I cant believe this tweet is how I find out
now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense
holy shit.
oh so they’re just saying the quiet part out loud? Good to know they’re just out and open now
That’s not the quiet part.
There’s something else, something they might not even be fully aware of themselves. The real quiet part is that if it was *their* child or *their* ectopic pregnancy they’d pull out all the stops to save their life or get their grandchild aborted. Planned Parenthood sees reactionaries and regressives all the time, and they are every bit the nightmare patients you’d imagine them to be. But the one thing all those patients have in common is that *their* abortion is *justified*, and the next week they’ll be outside the clinic again, rejoining the protestors for “killing their baby”.
It’d be one thing to have ghoulish principles, but the far-right have none at all.
When I was younger and had more time to waste on the internet, and spent a lot of time in various online forums getting into arguments -- on purpose -- I made up a game I called Six Degrees of Slut.
The game (which is a variation on the well known Six Degrees of Bacon) was very simple. In any discussion of abortion, see whether you could get the other side to articulate, within six back-and-forth exchanges, some variation of The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. Regardless of where their argument started, the goal of the game was to get them to admit that.
I never once lost a game of Six Degrees of Slut. On a few occasions the match was inconclusive - the other person left off arguing before we reached round six - but I never lost; I never once reached six rounds of debate with a prolifer without them expressing some variation on this sentiment. But what was really remarkable to me was, a lot of times, that there was no effort involved at all -- they would blurt it out themselves, with effectively no provocation.
Scratch a prolifer, and you'll find right under the surface the conviction that The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. I have never once yet found an exception. Sometimes you don't even have to scratch.
I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.
One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.
Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.
Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.
So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.
It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.
That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.
News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.
Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:
The flip side of the post-World War II cries of “Never again” was an unspoken “Never before.” The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
All the dumbest people are telling on themselves by treating a social media app as a news source and are so mad at the possibility that they might have to read real news articles instead of getting misinformation spoon-fed to them through an algorithm and short videos that nuke their attention span and critical thinking skills lol
Wow.
You should really listen to the WHOLE thing because this woman does not mince words
