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@influentshadow
call me a dirty communist radical but I think everyone should know if they live near toxic waste
if youre in the united states and would like to learn new and terrible things about where you live, you can visit the EPA's Environmental Justice Screening map and put in your location or zipcode
click on superfund proximity to see how close you are to a superfund site (location contaminated with hazardous material)
heres Niagra Falls NY! google love canal!
its a good tool to see what environmental factors could be harming your health that you may not know about. this is not limited to toxic waste so look around at it
my favorite is looking at roads. there are some interesting correlations. Here is a map of Buffalo NY with traffic proximity
here it is again but with where people are getting asthma :P
crazy
heres where the people of color live in Buffalo btw
in case you where wondering what the explanatory factor here is, its the 6-lane expressway that they ran through a residential community in the 50s. a redlined neighborhood btw. the road used to be beautiful parkway. thank you Urban Renewal, thank you Robert Moses, and thank you Kensington Expressway
ok heres the link again because now you really want to go look at it lol
anyways yeah um environmental health issues are super insidious and not talked about enough. i know thinks seem daunting and scary when we talk about environmental problems, things like climate change are huge and all-encompassing. The way you can make the most impact, real tangible impact is by learning about things local to you!!!!
learn about them, talk to other people about them, organize or find a way to get involved with orgs that already exist. grassroots activism is infinitely more effective than they want you to know and its your responsibility to yourself and your neighbors to try to make things better good luck I love you all
One day I showed up to D&D and one of the guys in our group, before we could even start playing, was like "guys, look at this thing I found." And pulled up either this exact map or a very similar one that cross checks environmental hazards from industrial facilities with average income (more detailed than by zip code, it was pretty cool). And we use a big TV embedded in the game table for maps and stuff, which he pulled this up on, so we spent like half an hour looking at where we all lived and going "oh. Shit." And then we sat there a bit kind of ambling through some cool down small talk.
And like, the thing that kind of made it real for everyone was the context of it being on the screen we use to look at world maps for a fantasy game. It was very surreal for some of the guys at the table, the more conservative ones in particular, like they could see the map and it was showing them the forces of Mordor marching to their doorstep. And for a short time they understood that there are actually vast and evil forces in this world that they could defeat with a weapon, they were just large corporations commiting environmental crimes with very well protected CEOs and fantastic lawyers.
check out your location while you can!!! Part of Trumps immediate changrs includes getting rid of public information sources like this one. I don't know if they will keep this website up for much longer so go on and download any reports or pollution information you might want
so as of today, February 5th 2025 this website is down. This is coinciding with mass censorship of other government agencies online from the Trump administration. Those who were able to download their data before the removal, keep it and learn it and share it with your peers. Those who did not get the chance, know that there are other avenues and follow them. Information is power and they are trying to take it away from you. Do not let them.
here are some other mapping resources from the notes. this is not everything, but it is a start.
Check the quality of your tap water here:https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
Check your climate vulnerability here: https://climatevulnerabilityindex.org/
explore historical redlining maps here: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining
this is just the wikipedia page of current superfund sites, take a look and see where your state has hazardous waste sites.
look into the history of your area and TALK ABOUT IT. be annoying and loud about it. don't stop learning and don't stop talking.
update! here is a clone of the website, thank you @boots-fastened-slip-fashion for linking this in the replies I'm putting it here so it can be accessed along with the other sites :)
hey! if you're in the notes worrying about how the website is down, you should be rbing this version, which has a replica of the site and a bunch of other resources!!!
"READ MY DNI" no. use your block button like an adult. i'm not scrolling through the many-paragraphs-long pinned posts of every blog i reblog something from. if you insist certain types of people aren't welcome in the notes of your posts then it's your responsibility to curate that. or choose a closed social media platform like facebook or instagram. or go and live in a barn away from humanity if you really don't like sharing the world with people who are different from you
I think that DNIs are a really clear example of the backwards understanding of boundaries that a lot of people have. Some people think it works like: "My boundary is that YOU can't do this thing I don't like"
When really it's more like: "My boundary is that if you do this thing that I've told you I don't like then I will remove myself from the situation"
The former does not work. The latter is more effective, it takes responsibility for yourself, and also it puts the power over your wellbeing into your hands and not in the hands of strangers who may or may not be malicious.
This is the only valid use for death of the author.
#subnote it is so fascinating that you can pin the exact age and generation that became perfectly okay with and loving 9/11 jokes#those who do not remember it and do not care for american war fueled propoganda?
I actually very much remember 9/11.
I was 8 years old. My dad flew around the country for work a whole fuck of a lot. He happened to be home that week and thank fuck for that.
But yeah, I remember 9/11. I remember watching people jumping out of the World Trade Center. I remember the estimated death toll of 10,000 dead.
I remember all of it.
I also remember a great deal of life before 9/11. My family flew a lot, and we used to go to O'Hare to pick my dad up from the gate when he came back from work trips.
Basically, I remember enough of pre-9/11 life in America to have been fully cognizant of this country's full-throated descent into willing paranoia, which is why I make jokes about it. I don't think people realize how fucking weird it is, historically, for the whole "never forgor" phenomenon to be as strong as it is.
It's been 2 decades and everyone still gets their nuts in a twist about it. Pearl Harbor didn't remain a political touchstone in 1963. People were making Kennedy Assassination jokes in 1985.
I guess what i'm getting at is, I don't make jokes about 9/11 because I don't remember it, I make jokes about 9/11 because i can't forget it.
I'm several years older than OP is and I agree with all of that.
Things got INCREDIBLY stupid for a while after 9/11. Freedom Fries and "free speech zones" and a lot of precursors to the nationalist bullshit we're all suffering through now. There was a period of several years where it didn't seem like you could go anywhere without fucking God Bless The USA playing. There were flags fucking everywhere. You could IMMEDIATELY buy scads of 9/11 Commemorative Merchandise, often of the dumbest possible shit, something that continues to this day.
It sucks for the loved ones of people who died, but I also kinda feel like if we, as a country, actually gave a shit then maybe, perhaps, the first responders - many of whom got all kinds of terrible cancers - wouldn't have such a terrible time trying to access benefits and healthcare? We won't take care of you while you're still alive, but once you die we'll put your name on a plaque or some shit!
It's also kind of hard to take 9/11 seriously as The One Big Tragic Thing when we were losing a 9/11's worth of people every week to COVID for ages and damn we don't hear about THEM very often. People gripe nonstop about being asked to mask around vulnerable people and get really angry if you remind them that people can still die and become disabled from COVID. Over a million people died in the US alone, but if you bring that up you're apparently just some kind of weirdo who's just paranoid about COVID.
At any rate, people who want to keep being solemn and tragic about the whole thing do not have sole ownership over the experience of Being Old Enough To Clearly Remember 9/11.
controversial take but math really isn’t that hard and i don’t understand why the criticism of anti-intellectualism stops at math. people will go on about poor media literacy and then be like oh but math is too hard, gays can’t do math, i’m just a girl and math is scary.
sorry but understanding fractions is just as important as recognizing literary themes. if you want to protect yourself from propaganda and misinformation you need to understand statistics and be comfortable thinking with numbers.
Not to get data science-y on the art blog... but - So much this. There are so many nuances when interpreting data and statistics. A number is only as good as the context it's presented in, and that context can be manipulated to alter the message.
Let's say you read '4% of Americans are currently behind on their mortgages'... What exactly does that mean? What can you infer about the state of loans in general?
One might ask themselves: Is that of all Americans or mortgage holders? What about couples that have both their names on it? What's the typical delinquency rate? High or lower than 4%? Has this rate changed rapidly? Are foreclosures included? Foreclosures within the past how many months?
Understanding the basics of statistics can lead you to ask these kinds of questions, but brushing off math as something you 'just don't get' is excusing yourself for not putting effort into a very key aspect of critical thinking.
"homicides have doubled in this town over the last twenty years!" and the population has quadrupled, so per capita murder rates have actually been HALVED.
you are going to be the most gullible fucking idiot on earth if you don't know how numbers can be used to manipulate you into supporting policy initiatives that make no sense
god I could be so wealthy if I had no ethics. that's so fucking frustrating. I'm living paycheck to paycheck because I'm not grifting vulnerable idiots on TikTok. I feel like I have the ability to very easily scam people. I could make a killing with AI. but god. I have morals and ethics and so I get to be poor as shit. I hate this fucking world
I could have made a killing as a psychic, but noooo I have to feel bad about lying to people ugh
I think abt this all the time because the thing is, evil rich people truly believe that they’re geniuses who have discovered a way to make money that the rest of us dummies haven’t…but the truth is that they are just willing to do evil shit that everyone else would prefer to not to because we have standards
When I attended my graduate school job fair, Raytheon (unprompted, hearing me say my degree at the next table) offered me $230,000/yr to come work for them. That was their opening offer after hearing nothing more than my degree, in a city with a very low cost of living. The only catch was that the job was working on vision systems for missiles. (i.e. those 'targeted' missiles which kill a ton of civilians as collateral or intentional damage)
I ended up taking an $85,000/yr job as an optical research scientist at Corning instead.
It is an odd feeling, having a price put on your soul. I'd be a millionaire with a house by my mid-30s if I'd accepted that. And the offer is still open, in fact I'd have an even more generous one waiting for me with the skills I have now.
In all seriousness, if you have the right skillset, you can actually sell your soul. This very week. You will live in comfort and moderate luxury for all your days. Two of my family members did that work decades ago, until they couldn't stomach it any longer, and it set up the rest of their lives.
But I promise you, it's not worth it. It's been almost 50 years for one of them and it still haunts him. He says the worst part was the way they (him included) talked about human lives as things. Numbers on a spreadsheet, sterile corporate jargon in meetings. A lifetime later and you can still see it in his eyes when he talks about it.
You can't take it back, treating humans like things.
USDA had suspended funds for child nutrition program after state said it would not bar trans girls from girls’ sports
reblog to give your headache to elon musk instead
I’d just like to point out the growth in this post has mostly coincided with elon’s public spiral downward and I’d like to think we’re all a small part of that
bro can’t think because he’s just got a rager of a migraine 24/7
yes I would like to give elon musk my menstrual pain. I think he deserves it
Reblog to also give Elon Musk your menstrual pain.
i've got some chronic pain he can have. hope he enjoys his fucked up knee
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”
Reblog for disability commentary.
That last paragraph is absolutely important.
“How come nobody ever heard of ‘dyslexia’ until widespread literacy became a thing?”
sensory
These are what the gifs are called i’m
That Ben Affleck was Adele all this time has left me amazed. Truly his greatest role.
I think Neil Gaiman is one of the only celebrities that truly understands what Tumblr users want.
amused-snorted at the post first, wondered what the hell previous commenter meant, backtracked to check op username and took it like missing a step down the stairs
On the issue of the ‘q slur’...
So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:
The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.
Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.
Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion.
Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity.
In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.
“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”
Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.
Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.
Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.
“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”
Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”
Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”
Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?
“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”
“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”
“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”
Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.
No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.”
Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.
But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:
Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism.
This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.
I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?
Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”
And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!
But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group!
If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.
If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.
Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.