Nothing is more devastating than this. The UN World Food Program has officially suspended aid delivery to northern Gaza, citing violence and lack of safety as major reasons the aid trucks aren’t getting through. Israeli officers are liberally shooting at Palestinians who try to approach the trucks in hopes of getting even the smallest morsels of food, despite the fact that Israel has allowed only one crossing for the already woefully low numbers of aid they’re permitting entry. Reportedly this number has fallen from 140 a day in January to just 60 a day this month, and now 16% of all Gazan children under 2 are “acutely malnourished.” Meanwhile, the US vetoes a call for a ceasefire for the third fucking time. It’s so inhumane in its cruelty it’s actually shocking to see it being allowed to go on and on, and on an international level no less.
(via quixoticalpostsager)
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I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole “regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man’s way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems” nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.
I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won’t take out the hospital’s life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.
I’ve done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren’t going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn’t accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn’t leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.
Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.
from what I know of just the general history of building codes and osha rules, I would not be the least surprised if every single one of those healthcare codes exist not just to prevent someone from dying, but because pre-code, someone did.
(via gebranntgebrannt)
There’s something so deeply calming about watching megafauna prance and gambol about like they’re little lambs
Bison pronking is already so magical, and then the double rainbow and the happy birdsong just put it way over the top
(via doriandangerous)
On Discomfort and Morality
My father finds gay men uncomfortable.
He’s told me before that it’s like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn’t consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.
In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn’t homophobic. He wouldn’t participate in insulting queer people, he didn’t care if someone was gay, he wouldn’t have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That’s how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.
When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.
My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn’t believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.
He taught me that just because you’re uncomfortable with something, doesn’t make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don’t understand this.
I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.
The next time you see something and you automatically think it’s disgusting, or wrong, or immoral, I invite you to ask yourself: is this actually wrong or does this just make me uncomfortable?
(via queermarzipan)
How did you pick your Tumblr username?
It’s my name/initials/nickname
It’s something generally fandom related
It’s something fandom related to a specific character
It’s a joke/wordplay
It’s related to song lyrics/a quote
I just picked specific words I like or associate myself with
I made up a new word (f.ex. by smashing words together)
I literally just keysmashed something
Multiple of these
Other (please explain in comments/tags)
See ResultsIt was for a school project, and stuck.
Mine is a play on the Necronomicon, but using my first name (properly greekified, which was easy since my first name is of Greek origin already) as the first part. So rather than the Book of the Dead, it’s the Book of Me.
Unmute !
(via muse-meter)