The thing about this is that sculptures like these in art history were for the male gaze. Photoshop a phone to it and suddenly she’s seen as vain and conceited. That’s why I’m 100% for selfie culture because apparently men can gawk at women but when we realize how beautiful we are we’re suddenly full of ourselves…
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.” ― John Berger, Ways of Seeing
I know I’ve reblogged this before but it’s so important.
‘Queer’ was reclaimed as an umbrella term for people identifying as not-heterosexual and/or not-cisgender in the early 1980s, but being queer is more than just being non-straight/non-cis; it’s a political and ideological statement, a label asserting an identity distinct from gay and/or traditional gender identities.
People identifying as queer are typically not cis gays or cis lesbians, but bi, pan, ace, trans, nonbinary, intersex, etc.: we’re the silent/ced letters. We’re the marginalised majority within the LGBTQIA+ community, and
‘queer’ is our rallying cry.
And that’s equally pissing off and terrifying terfs and cis LGs.
There’s absolutely no historical or sociolinguistic reason why ‘queer’ should be a worse slur than ‘gay.’ Remember how we had all those campaigns to make people stop using ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘bad’?
Yet nobody is suggesting we should abolish ‘gay’ as a label. We accept that even though ‘gay’ sometimes is and historically frequently was used in a derogatory manner, mlm individuals have the right to use that word. We have ad campaigns, twitter hashtags, and viral Facebook posts defending ‘gay’ as an identity label and asking people to stop using it as a slur.
Whereas ‘queer’ is treated exactly opposite: a small but vocal group of people within feminist and LGBTQIA+ circles insists that it’s a slur and demands that others to stop using it as a personal, self-chosen identity label.
Why?
Because “queer is a slur” was invented by terfs specifically to exclude trans, nonbinary, and
intersex people from feminist and non-heterosexual discourse, and was
subsequently adopted by cis gays and cis lesbians to exclude bi/pan and ace
people.
It’s classic divide-and-conquer tactics: when our umbrella term is redefined as a slur and we’re harassed into silence for using it, we no longer have a word for what we are allowing us to organise for social/political/economic support; we are denied the opportunity to influence or shape the spaces we inhabit; we can’t challenge existing community power structures; we’re erased from our own history.
Pro tip: when you alter historical evidence to deny a marginalised group empowerment, you’re one of the bad guys.
“Queer is a slur” is used by terfs and cis gays/lesbians to silence the voices of trans/nonbinary/intersex/bi/pan/ace people in society and even within our own communities, to isolate us and shame us for existing.
“Queer is a slur” is saying “I am offended by people who do not conform to traditional gender or sexual identities because they are not sexually available to me or validate my personal identity.”
“Queer is a slur” is defending heteronormativity.
“Queer is a slur” is frankly embarrassing. It’s an admission of ignorance and prejudice. It’s an insidious discriminatory discourse parroted uncritically in support of a divisive us-vs-them mentality targeting the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQIA+ community for lack of courage to confront the white cis straight men who pose an actual danger to us as individuals and as a community.
Tl;dr:
I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m too old for this shit.
I know I keep reblogging posts like this, but it matters to me. “Queer is a slur” is a TERF dogwhistle, and a lot of the younger generation is falling for it. Please pay attention to history and ask questions about who’s behind social media campaigns that undermine the inclusivity of your community.
assuming vampires breathe, and are therefore alive, what do they do
If they’re alive and they need it to survive, it’s permitted (provided they don’t kill people in so doing).
If they’re not alive, halacha doesn’t apply to them.
Either way, there is no reasonable halachic restriction on a vampire drinking blood.
but would it need to be from a kosher animal can they drink, like, dolphin blood
Okay now that gets interesting and I would want to actually ask a rabbi whether that would be a thing. like, if one must consume the blood of living things to survive, does it make a difference whether one limits it to the blood of kosher animals or not. I could see it being ruled either way. (I would think if there is only one type of blood one can metabolize or if only one type of blood is available, one can consume it regardless.)
I remember learning that human blood (not sure about animal blood) is permissible to consume if it has not been “poresh” (”separated”) from the body (in the context of “if you cut your lip or your finger and immediately and instinctively put it in your mouth, you don’t have to spit out the blood”).
So
Drinking blood out of a goblet or vacuum-sealed bag would be assur, but sinking your teeth into someone and drinking directly (so that the blood never touches the air or is in a vessel) would be okay.
I know that applies to one’s own blood, but I don’t know if the principle applies to someone else’s. But it may count as a possible precedent!
Okay, so I asked my rabbi about this (… yes, my actual rabbi). Short answer, @fenrisesque, is that the ideal situation is for the vampire to intravenously ingestblood that was donated by a human in order to stay alive, assuming that donation doesn’t kill the person. If homemade intravenously doesn’t work, then storeboughtoral ingestion is fine too. This applies whether or not the vampire can drink animal blood. Long answer, which I find fascinating but is long so under a cut:
THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL please thank your rabbi for me
(also, consuming blood from a live person who will not be harmed by the loss of blood is completely different from killing and eating a person – because it is forbidden to derive material gain from a corpse, which includes using it for food, separately from any kosher/nonkosher issues.)
Lobbyists for “creators” threw their lot in with the giant entertainment
companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU
Copyright Directive by a hair’s-breadth this morning, in an act of
colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by
the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.
Here’s what the EU voted in favour of this morning:
* Upload filters: Everything you post, from short text snippets to
stills, audio, video, code, etc will be surveilled by copyright bots run
by the big platforms. They’ll compare your posts to databases of
“copyrighted works” that will be compiled by allowing anyone to claim
copyright on anything, uploading thousands of works at a time. Anything
that appears to match the “copyright database” is blocked on sight, and
you have to beg the platform’s human moderators to review your case to
get your work reinstated.
* Link taxes: You can’t link to a news story if your link text includes more than a single word
from the article’s headline. The platform you’re using has to buy a
license from the news site, and news sites can refuse licenses, giving
them the right to choose who can criticise and debate the news.
* Sports monopolies: You can’t post any photos or videos from sports
events – not a selfie, not a short snippet of a great goal. Only the
“organisers” of events have that right. Upload filters will block any
attempt to violate the rule.
Here’s what they voted against:
* “Right of panorama”: the right to post photos of public places despite
the presence of copyrighted works like stock arts in advertisements,
public statuary, or t-shirts bearing copyrighted images. Even the
facades of buildings need to be cleared with their architects (not with the owners of the buildings).
* User generated content exemption: the right to use small excerpt from
works to make memes and other
critical/transformative/parodical/satirical works.
Having passed the EU Parliament, this will now be revised in secret,
closed-door meetings with national governments (“the trilogues”) and
then voted again next spring, and then go to the national governments
for implementation in law before 2021. These all represent chances to
revise the law, but they will be much harder than this fight
was. We can also expect lawsuits in the European high courts over these
rules: spying on everyone just isn’t legal under European law, even if
you’re doing it to “defend copyright.”
In the meantime, what a disaster for creators. Not only will be we liable to having our independently produced materials arbitrarily censored by overactive filters,
but we won’t be able to get them unstuck without the help of big
entertainment companies. These companies will not be gentle in wielding
their new coercive power over us (entertainment revenues are up, but the share going to creators is down:
if you think this is unrelated to the fact that there are only four or
five major companies in each entertainment sector, you understand nothing about economics).
But of course, only an infinitesimal fraction of the material on the
platforms is entertainment related. Your birthday wishes and funeral
announcements, little league pictures and political arguments, wedding
videos and online educational materials are also going to be
filtered by these black-box algorithms, and you’re going to have to get
in line with all the other suckers for attention from a human moderator
at one of the platforms to plead your case.
The entertainment industry figures who said that universal surveillance
and algorithmic censorship were necessary for the continuation of
copyright have done more to discredit copyright than all the pirate
sites on the internet combined. People like their TV, but they use their
internet for so much more.
It’s like the right-wing politicians who spent 40 years describing
roads, firefighting, health care, education and Social Security as
“socialism,” and thereby created a generation of people who don’t
understand why they wouldn’t be socialists, then. The copyright
extremists have told us that internet freedom is the same thing as
piracy. A generation of proud, self-identified pirates can’t be far
behind. When you make copyright infringement into a political act, a
blow for freedom, you sign your own artistic death-warrant.
This idiocy was only possible because:
* No one involved understands the internet: they assume that because
their Facebook photos auto-tag with their friends’ names, that someone
can filter all the photos ever taken and determine which ones violate
copyright;
* They tied mass surveillance to transferring a few mil from Big Tech to
the newspaper shareholders, guaranteeing wall-to-wall positive coverage
(I’m especially ashamed that journalists supported this lunacy – we
know you love free expression, folks, we just wish you’d share);
What comes next? Well, the best hope is probably a combination of a
court challenge, along with making this an election issue for the 2019
EU elections. No MEP is going to campaign for re-election by saying “I
did this amazing copyright thing!” From experience, I can tell you that no one cares what their lawmakers are doing with copyright.
On the other hand, there are tens of millions of voters who will vote
against a candidate who “broke the internet.” Not breaking the internet
is very important to voters, and the wider populace has proven
itself to be very good at absorbing abstract technical concepts when
they’re tied to broken internets (87% of Americans have a) heard of Net
Neutrality and; b) support it).
I was once involved in a big policy fight where one of the stakes was
the possibility that broadcast TV watchers would have to buy a small
device to continue watching TV. Politicians were terrified of
this proposition: they knew that the same old people who vote like crazy
also watch a lot of TV and wouldn’t look favourably on anyone who
messed with it.
We’re approaching that point with the internet. The danger of internet
regulation is that every problem involves the internet and every poorly
thought-through “solution” ripples out through the internet, creating
mass collateral damage; the power of internet regulation is that every
day, more people are invested in not breaking the internet, for their
own concrete, personal, vital reasons.
This isn’t a fight we’ll ever win. The internet is the nervous system of
this century, tying together everything we do. It’s an irresistible
target for bullies, censors and well-intentioned fools. Even if the EU
had voted the other way this morning, we’d still be fighting tomorrow,
because there will never be a moment at which some half-bright, fully
dangerous policy entrepreneur isn’t proposing some absurd way of solving
their parochial problem with a solution that will adversely affect
billions of internet users around the world.
This is a fight we commit ourselves to. Today, we suffered a terrible,
crushing blow. Our next move is to explain to the people who suffer as a
result of the entertainment industry’s depraved indifference to the
consequences of their stupid ideas how they got into this situation, and
get them into the streets, into the polling booths, and into the fight.
them: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST MEANS HUMANS MUST BE INDIVIDUALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT AND COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT
biologist:
Like literally the only reason we didn’t go extinct is because we are aggressively social creatures who community organized and helped each other when faced with disasters that drove other species over the brink.
(Like we’re so aggressively social that we looked at APEX PREDATORS and went ‘they look soft! Friend????’)
(The answer was yes because wolves are also aggressively social and they adopted the strange tall not-wolves just as eagerly.)
humans @ wolves: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll let us pet them?
wolves @ humans: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll pet us?
Capitalism is only sustainable through a system of violence and social control
I still have a copy of the t*rget team lead guide to dealing with union activity that I nicked from the office when I worked there, it’s mostly the same stuff but it also revealed just how much of their management tactics were intended to frustrate any unionizing activity. For instance, they said that cross-training in multiple departments was the best way to get reliable hours, and encouraged everyone to do it; according to the manual, however, it was their way of keeping departments mixed up and jumbled, making it impossible for any single department to unionize (and forcing anyone who wanted to unionize to get the entire store to do it).
And that’s just part what the store managers are taught. Throughout, it mentions holding off on action and consulting a labor relations officer in the company on how to proceed. Who knows what kind of shady shit the people a step above do?
If you’re in retail and wondering how to go about unionizing, contact an existing retail workers union.
They are all very familiar with the anti-union tactics of retail owners and managers, and will have some advice for you, some literature to distribute, and strategies to counter these tactics. It has historically been extremely hard for retail and fast food employees to unionize specifically because the owners and managers keep us scared, disorganized, and are happy to fire us for unionizing, labor laws be damned. Their entire business model hinges on us being overworked and underpaid. Contact a union for help organizing in your store.
Can anyone offer me a direction to go to see about organizing direct care/Human services employees?
