Dov Sherman has a Tumblr

[gregxb]

[thisisthinprivilege]

I work at a daycare with infants.

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.

[thecrazygeek-rant]

This reminds me of a cousin of mine who ended up with her kids being taken away from her by social services for a number of reasons but mostly for nearly killing her baby daughter. How?

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

(Note. She still, to this day, maintains the view that she was right and the doctors were wrong. “They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes.” = her actual words.)

[sinthiasweet]

My mom had me dieting with her when I was eleven. She had me eating less than 600 calories a day because she was worried I was going to “get huge.” She even grounded me once because she found out my friends were bringing me lunches! I ended up passing out, going to the ER, and getting two IVs at once BC I was so goddamn dehydrated. Soooooo surprised they didn’t call child services… And looking back, this was the root of my anorexia. I’m nearly 22 and still fighting it. Please don’t starve your fucking children.

[viergacht]

For fucks sake babies are SUPPOSED to be fat, what is wrong with people? It’s just stored energy, and growing children need stored energy - an 11 year old is just about to hit some major growing years. Damn. 

[fattyatomicmutant-deactivated20]

Fatphobia

Is

Real

and it kills

[mexicanxthighs-deactivated20190]

This is no joke. people will literally starve their own babies cause they don’t want them getting fat. A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick. the parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parent straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day. ONCE A DAY. A FUCKING BABY. they even had the nerve to say because they didn’t want the baby to get fat. people like this are real. they would rather have a dead baby than a fat one.

[bigfatscience]

My youngest son is a very big boy and has been since he was born. When he was 10 months old I took him for his well-baby check and vaccinations. The nurse noted his weight and said, quite casually, “He is in the 99th percentile for weight so he is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that.” I said, “He is exclusively breastfed. He refuses to eat any solids yet.” What did she expect me to do? What would it mean to “keep an eye on” an exclusively breastfed baby’s weight? 

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

We need to completely eliminate weight talk from medicine, especially when it comes to children. Even the smallest exposure can have terrible consequences.

[loverofbrownsugar]

Wtf…

[mainstreamqueen-deactivated2020]

A friend from college had been going to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. She was told to lose weight. Over the course of several years, she went back to the doctors time and time again, telling them that she’d been sticking to the diet but because of her breathing problems she had been unable to even walk for more than 20 minutes at a time. The doctor got her into an exercise programme and told her that she just needed to really try to lose weight because that was clearly the reason for her breathing problems. By the time they found the tumour on her lungs, it was inoperable. She only lived three months after diagnosis. She was 25. She’d had the tumour for over five years. The doctor was so focused on the fact that my friend was “fat”, that they refused to look for any underlying cause. They killed her.

[thisisthinprivilege]

Weight-first treatment KILLS. Fatphobia KILLS.

[lady-yomi-deactivated20171102]

I have 2 scary stories to share about fatphobic doctors & parents harming their childs/patients’ health:

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

It’s a real shame that we all have so much stories to share about this issue. A REAL SHAME.

[agreekdoctor]

Future doctors, interns, and residents following me:

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

Don’t let bias against your fat patients kill them!

[clatterbane]

(#and this is just when we actually go to the doctor and tell them we have problems #how many of us just give up #or won’t mention anything that seems like too much of a ‘fat’ problem)

[thelittlestastronaut]

i’d really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. fat people are already here for each other, we need you guys to help us out too. this is something i never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it’s disappointing. be there for your fat siblings, too.

[transhumanist-viking-deactivate]

Anti-trans group admits bathroom predator myth is made up

Empirical research shows bathroom predator concerns are baseless.

“Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions.”

COLOUR ME FUCKING SURPRISED

[transhumanist-viking-deactivate]

I want people, in particular cis people, to read this and understand what it means.

It means that these groups, these organizations, are so Hellbent on getting trans people outlawed, hurt, and killed, that they will openly lie and admit to lying to stir up emotions. They have no qualms with actively lying and distorting reality. 

They have no qualms about misleading people. Actively lying to people. 

They don’t care how immoral their actions may be, how much their rhetoric flies in the face of reality, as long as it reaches their end goal of the destruction of “transgender ideology.” 

MassResistance and all their ilk want us dead, and should never be trusted, not even for the most trivial of matters. They should be rejected, reviled, despised, because nothing they do is in service of anything but hatred and evil. 

And in case anyone actually doubts this, and wants to cry “fake news,” here’s MR’s actual article. Should it get deleted, here’s an archived version. Some choice bits under the cut, if you want to see how vile these people really are. 

Keep reading

[tharook]

Two things I’d like people to pay particular attention to:

What these safety concerns were fabricated as a proxy for—not genuine (but harder to argue) concerns but utter rejection of the “ideology” of “mentally dysfunctional men wearing dresses”.

Their enemy is not (just) trans people but “the LGBT lobby”; i.e. any and all LGBT/queer people.

TERFs, and others that align with these people (or are happy to use their arguments), may be happy to present themselves as representing women and/or lesbians, but it is evident that they do not have their interests at heart.

[bloodytales]

I want more women to feel empowered to do this.

Scars from breast cancer can be both hard to hide and embarrassing for some women. I wish they weren’t, because scars mean you’re a fighter and a bad ass.

Women have told me after their mastectomy they felt self conscious about someone seeing their chest. My grandmother wore her false breast (she had only one boob removed) around even the house for a long time. (Of course, now when we were taking about the procedure she asked “want to see my boob?” And had to go fetch it from the other room. It was an interesting conversation to say the least.)

Anyway, breast reconstruction can be expensive, and some women either don’t want it or can’t have it done for various reasons.

But you know what, chest tattoos are easily accessible. There are even tattoo shops that give discounts to women covering up breast cancer scars. And women who no longer have a nipple? You can get a bad ass tattoo

Check out

P.ink

P.ink [www.p-ink.org] provides tattoo ideas, inspirations and artist info to mastectomy patients.

Their site starts like this:

They host pink day:

Check out some of the work on their site:

You can donate to the organization, or if you know a tattoo artist you can let them know they accept volunteers to be a part of their community of artists.

Here is another badass lady and her bad ass tattoo (found on pinterest)

[bloodytales]

I am sharing this again because @staff might decide this is “adult content”.

These are cancer survivors reclaiming their bodies.

Banning all “female presenting” nipples ignores a commuity of women who are total bad asses who said “fuck you” to their cancer scars and turned them into art.

Not every image of a female nipple should be sexualized. This is not porn, this is courage and strength.

Are the new regulations going to delete this post. Does a post supporting a cancer survivors violate Tumblr’s community guidelines?

If it does, maybe the guidelines are wrong, and not the post.

[bloodytales]

Hey @staff, per your guidelines this isn’t explicit content.

Yet this post was flagged. Maybe figure out an appeal process.

[bloodytales]

I asked for a review and they responded:

So women reclaiming their bodies after breast cancer is “sensitive content” and should be hidden from minors.

Tumblr has some messed up morals.

[keagan-ashleigh]

Fucked up how they don’t respect their own terms and conditions…  And of course, how is THIS sensitive content? How do you decide that it is sensitive content? What are the conditions? the real ones? Does someone just looks at it, ignores all the message that is given in this post, ignores the fact that some context does exist in their terms and conditions that allows some nude content, and decides this is sensitive content? This is arbitrary. They arbitrary chose this was indecent because those are boobs and there’s three blurred nipples in three of those pics. They don’t give a shit about what this post was about, they saw the nipples as if they’ve seen Satan himself and it was enough to judge. Given that, a woman breastfeeding her child will be flagged and considered “sensitive content”, a trans person showing himself after a gender confirmation surgery (they never said they didn’t allowed male to female confirmation surgery but I bet they meant only the male presenting breasts are acceptable) will be considered “sensitive content” as well. Because they don’t give a fuck about the exceptions they made in that announcement, those guidelines are a bunch of lies. 

This is wrong in many ways. Censoring “female presenting nipples” is way wrong in itself, but this is the epitome of absurdity. 

[katherineshep]

For God’s sake. This post is very important and I’ll reblog the hell of it.

[neil-gaiman]

Why is it sad that tumblr has implemented its policy. If people started pasting sex ads in your books in book stores, would that be okay with you? If your publisher had a policy against it would you say it’s sad? I get frustrated with NSFW tumblrs when they follow my pop culture tumblr. I know they are not interested in comics or movie reviews and when I block them I’ve had to see some pretty disgusting photos and videos.

Because tumblr isn’t a book of mine. It’s, at its best, a community, which includes a number of things, and sexuality is one of the things it includes.

I’ve got about 400,000 people following me here, and I’ve never stopped to investigate what any of them are or what they like. But sometimes I’ll click on the tumblr of someone who’s asked a good question or reblogged with an interesting comment, and found myself in very NSFW places.

I was impressed by this piece on Medium today: https://medium.com/@vexashley/porn-on-tumblr-a-eulogy-love-letter-6d45e70fefff which is far more knowledgeable about these things than I am.

Porn on Tumblr — a eulogy / love letter – Vex Ashley – Medium

I started taking my clothes off on the internet in 2011, I was 21 and at university looking to make extra money and explore my…

[betterthanabortion]

“My body, my choice” only makes sense when someone else’s life isn’t at stake.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Fun fact: If my younger sister was in a car accident and desperately needed a blood transfusion to live, and I was the only person on Earth who could donate blood to save her, and even though donating blood is a relatively easy, safe, and quick procedure no one can force me to give blood. Yes, even to save the life of a fully grown person, it would be ILLEGAL to FORCE me to donate blood if I didn’t want to.

See, we have this concept called “bodily autonomy.” It’s this….cultural notion that a person’s control over their own body is above all important and must not be infringed upon. 

Like, we can’t even take LIFE SAVING organs from CORPSES unless the person whose corpse it is gave consent before their death. Even corpses get bodily autonomy. 

To tell people that they MUST sacrifice their bodily autonomy for 9 months against their will in an incredibly expensive, invasive, difficult process to save what YOU view as another human life (a debatable claim in the early stages of pregnancy when the VAST majority of abortions are performed) is desperately unethical. You can’t even ask people to sacrifice bodily autonomy to give up organs they aren’t using anymore after they have died. 

You’re asking people who can become pregnant to accept less bodily autonomy than we grant to dead bodies. 

[albinwonderland]

reblogging for commentary 

[generalmaluga]

But, assuming the mother wasn’t raped, the choice to HAVE a baby and risk sacrificing their “bodily autonomy” is a choice that the mother made. YOu don’t have to have sex with someone. Cases of rape aside, it isn’t ethical to say abortion is justified. The unborn baby has rights, too. 

[fandomsandfeminism]

First point: Bodily autonomy can be preserved, even if another life is dependent on it. See again the example about the blood donation. 

And here’s another point: When you say that “rape is the exception” you betray something FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN about your own argument.

Because a fetus produced from sexual assault is biologically NO DIFFERENT than a fetus produced from consensual sex. No difference at all.

If one is alive, so is the other. If one is a person, so is the other. If one has a soul, then so does the other. If one is a little blessing that happened for a reason and must be protected, then so is the other. 

When you say that “Rape is the exception” what you betray is this: It isn’t about a life. This isn’t about the little soul sitting inside some person’s womb, because if it was you wouldn’t care about HOW it got there, only that it is a little life that needs protecting.

When you say “rape is the exception” what you say is this: You are treating pregnancy as a punishment. You are PUNISHING people who have had CONSENSUAL SEX but don’t want to go through a pregnancy. People who DARED to have consensual sex without the goal of procreation in mind, and this is their “consequence.” 

And that is gross. 

[thekaraokeninja]

^ THIS. This is this this THIS THIS THIS. THIS!!!!!

[updatepls-deactivated20180722]

This is probably the strongest and well worded/supported argument for abortion that I have ever read.

[dancinggrimm]

WHY THE FUCK HAS TUMBLR FLAGGED THIS?! i’M FUCKING FURIOUS!!!

[atlinmerrick]

Yep, this was flagged for me too. Which is why I’m going to reblog it several time until Tumblr implodes.

[dovsherman]

The choice to have sex does not cost you your right to bodily autonomy.

Going back to the accident example, even if you personally caused the accident that injured your sister, they still couldn’t force you to donate your own blood to save her life.

And it’s particularly pernicious to suggest that, in contrast to rape victims, choosing to have sex should cost your right to bodily autonomy. On the one hand, rape victims had their bodily autonomy taken from them by force and now, for anyone who wasn’t a rape victim, you want to take away their right to bodily autonomy, too? So that winds up being all women having no bodily autonomy; they either lose it at the beginning or after but they all lose their rights. How can anyone not see how wrong that is?

[aninactivebloggfgfgf]

An Open Letter to Tumblr about the Adult Content Ban and How it is Hurting Your Users:

Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more. 

You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again. 

We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue. 

 Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole.  There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough. 

You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:

Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind. 

We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.

 If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to. 

You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.

If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

@staff @support

[aninactivebloggfgfgf]

They flagged this post immediately and I’ve submitted it for review… this is… quite a week.

[aninactivebloggfgfgf]

If you believe these words, reblog it, please. I want this to be right in their face because I couldn’t email them directly. 

[micdotcom]

Watch: Meghan Tonjes just gave body shamers the biggest middle finger.

[nellygwyn]

Britain’s oldest erotic film, ‘Lady in her Boudoir’ (1896) 

It simply shows a pretty woman undressing but would’ve been considered titillating at the time. 

Found at BFI’s online erotica collection, The Pleasure Principle 

[senpai-noticed-you-and-he]

Female-presenting ankle

[my18thcenturysource]

O live this video and the amount on info about female fashion it gives us.

Also: big mutton sleeves are everything.

And that comment about the female-presenting ankle made me spill my drink XD

[tranarchist]

When Tumblr bans porn, who loses?

Verizon is leaving the engine of internet culture to sputter and die, and its communities to scramble for a new home.

A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.

Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure out how to better monetize.

On that note-

Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge, “Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to [make] a ton of money.”

[smitethestate]

Capitalism is disgusting and ruins everything.

[prokopetz]

I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.

There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:

1. Social media platform becomes popular

2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base

3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.

4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users

5. This does not, in fact, occur

6. Social media platform crashes and burns

You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point.

[stjeffofthenorth-deactivated202]

Heaven by Bryan Adams

I don’t know what that means…But it is my life

[give-pete-a-chance]

Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

Hmmm…my love of naps and fear of abandonment all rolled up into one song?

[toosweet4rnr]

Greatest Love of All…Whitney Houston

Math checks out.

[cattyfantastic]

“Holding Back the Years,” by Simply Red.

huh.

[robredux]

Upside Down by Diana Ross. Kinda fits…

[davesnothere]

Play That Funky Music - Wild Cherry

[manofnumbers]

True by Spandau Ballet

[saltieyogaprof-deactivated20181]

[strangeasiteverwas-deactivated2]

Cutting Crew - (I Just) Died In Your Arms

[ultraswissarmywife]

(Everything I Do) I Do It For You by Bryan Adams…  Well that’s scarily accurate.  

[aerylon]

Livin on a Prayer - Bon Jovi  

Well if that doesn’t just sum it all up.  fml

[robotsandfrippary]

I’ll Make Love to You - Boyz to Men.

UHHH. 

[dovsherman]

[themarysue]

In a Catastrophically Bad Move, Tumblr Will Ban All Adult Content

The ban on adult content is a misguided action from Tumblr that will see it lose many users. Even worse, it will disproportionately harm marginalized creators.

[daeranilen]

"Should parents read their daughter's texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?"

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.

[daeranilen]

Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:

Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.

Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.

Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.

Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”

TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:

You do not respect their rights as an individual.

You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.

You probably haven’t been listening to them.

Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.

[daeranilen]

Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.

[isitscary]

I love this post.

Too many parents wonder why their kids aren’t honest with them, and never realize their own non-receptive behavior and their failure to listen are the reasons why.

At one point or another, a child WILL keep a secret from you, but if it’s to a point where all their emotional feelings are being poured away from you as opposed to toward you, it’s probably because you haven’t been emotionally trustworthy or open. 

[intersectionalparenting-deactiv]

Adultism :(

[sw-or-gtfo-deactivated20211219]

not to mention, you then take away one of your child’s coping mechanisms. if your parents read your journal, you’re never writing in it again. if your parents monitor your conversations with friends, you won’t tell them when you’re depressed anymore. if you have a therapist that reports what you say to your parents, you won’t tell that therapist anything. now all those methods of venting, feeling better, self-soothing, sorting out your issues, and feeling safe are gone. “i want information” is not synonymous with “i want my child to talk to me.” those are two separate goals, but i think parents conflate them – i want my child to talk to me, but since they won’t, i’m stealing information from them. no. you didn’t ever want them to talk to you. you wanted information. if you wanted them to talk to you, if that was your entire end goal, you would have approached things completely differently. stealing information from a child ensures they will never talk to you again. but if all you want is information, then you can take it however you want and call it a parenting success. if what you wanted was a child who talks to you, you would apply the same principles you do to literally any other human interaction in your life, and cultivate a relationship and trust.

[cryoverkiltmilk]

I had to stifle my horror and revulsion at my last job, when a conversation about removing the door from a child’s bedroom came up, and I was only one not in favor of it.

May be worth noting I was the only millennial in a conversation that was otherwise full of baby boomers.

[dovsherman]

And when you do talk to your child, you MUST listen to them. Don’t make it about yourself. Don’t be defensive or dismissive. If you tell your child that you don’t believe them or that you don’t think your child’s problem is serious enough for you to care or that you’re angry with your child because their problem is going to inconvenience or discomfort you, your child will never tell you about their personal feelings ever again because they will believe that doing so will just bring them more pain and self-doubt.

[corporationsarepeople]

@amillennialdog on twitter: The DHS posted a 14-word headline that started with “we must secure” holy absolute fuck

[clayandsorcery]

With a link to the site. Can confirm: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-and-build-wall-make-america-safe-again

[soul-hammered]

update: so at least one guy in the higher up dhs echelons has been outed as a white supremacist lmao

[rodentmancy]

Amazon workers 'refuse' to build tech for US immigration, citing Hitler

'IBM’s systems were employed in the 1940s to help Hitler. We will not let that happen again'

People working for Amazon have written to the company’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, to protest the sale of facial recognition tools and other technology to police departments and government agencies.

The workers cite the use of Amazon technology by the US Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which have been criticised for enforcing Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which has seen parents separated from their childrenat the US border.

“As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used,” the letter states. “We learn from history, and we understand how IBM’s systems were employed in the 1940s to help Hitler.

“IBM did not take responsibility then, and by the time their role was understood, it was too late.

“We will not let that happen again. The time to act is now.”

Holocaust experts claim IBM’s German subsidiary directly supplied the Nazis with technology which assisted the operation of concentration camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

In their letter to Mr Bezos, the Amazon workers said they would “refuse to build the platform” which powers ICE, or any technology used to violate human rights.

Listing three demands, the workers called on the CEO to stop selling the technology to law enforcement, stop providing infrastructure to partners which enable ICE, and implement stronger transparency measures.

“Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations,” the letter concludes.

[kipplekipple]

Fucking badasses every single one ❤️❤️❤️

[morepopcornplease]

#get fucked jeff

[uchuu-galaxy]

Get fucked jeff

[judo-ichidai-deactivated2018121]

Imagine Amazon workers going on a Wildcat strike at Christmas.

[aw-but-i-didnt-get-you-anything]

Twitter made the Jewish lady that posted this delete it for “threatening violence.”

Her followers spent the rest of the day tweeting this. Trolls couldn’t keep up.

[asingularcanadian]

Coming from someone who studies the Holocaust and the history surrounding it, It is important to remember that Nazis were human, not monsters. It’s important because if we dehumanize them we create a level of separation between us and them. It’s important because if we create that level of removal, we start ignoring the subtle signs of antisemitism because “Oh, well they’re just a normal human, not a monster, i’m sure it’ll be alright.” It’s important because when we create that level of removal, they come back in waves. It’s important because when you create that level of separation, you get the problems that we have now.

[occamstireiron-deactivated20190]

There is a very simple set of brain equations involved when we dehumanize the enemy, and it goes something like this:

“Nazis are monsters” “I would not be friends with a monster” The CORRECT conclusion is “I cannot be friends with Nazis” BUT PEOPLE KEEP BELIEVING THE COROLLARY “None of my friends are Nazis” “…even that one guy who keeps posting ‘ironic’ Pepe memes, who never really grew out of his 4Chan /pol/ phase, and who keeps trying to have really intense conversations with me about ‘globalists’. But he’s my friend! I’ve known him forever! He doesn’t REALLY believe any of that stuff. He’s just kind of an asshole, and we love him anyway.” This is a very bad corollary. It is an extraordinarily dangerous corollary. When we sincerely believe that we would not be friends with bad people, we ignore the signs that our friends are bad people.

(Friendly note: you can replace “Nazi” above with “sexual predator” or “racist” or “abuser”. Same hat, pretty much. There are very real reasons not to dehumanize the enemy, and they have nothing to do with the enemy’s right to humanity, and everything to do with the enemy’s ability to sneak past our lines wearing a nice-person mask.)