Recently, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Mel Stride announced measures to reform PIP (Personal Independence Payment). It's a benefit given to disabled people, whether they are employed or not, to help provide support for the extra costs incurred due to being disabled. PIP can be paid on anything you need, such as a carer, adaptions, your bills or a night out (yes, disabled people are entitled to a social life I'm NOT arguing with anyone about this!) On top of the changes to sick notes, the announced reforms are an assault on disabled people to desperately cling to power!
Below is an explanation of PIP and the reforms so people can answer the open consultations, call for evidence, and sign a petition. We need as many people in the UK as possible to answer both to try to stop these reforms from happening.
What is PIP?
The Tories are saying PIP is a one-size-fits-all benefit, which again is a lie as PIP is designed to look at how your disability affects your daily life and how difficult it makes it for you to participate in society, not whether you have this specific disability so it only affects you in these ways! It doesn't matter whether you're diagnosed or not, either. There are two categories they look at throughout, known as the 'Daily Living Component' and the 'Mobility component' The process involves 50 pages you have to fill out (link to Turn2US for proof https://www.turn2us.org.uk/get-support/information-for-your-situation/claiming-personal-independence-payment-pip/fill-in-the-personal-independence-payment-pip-form#:~:text=You%20usually%20get%20the%20paper,it%20is%2050%20pages%20long.)
With hundreds of letters from Doctors as proof of your condition! And then an assessment in which you will answer all sorts of demeaning questions, give in-depth answers that you don't feel comfortable sharing, and hope the assessor has understood how it affects your life and written it down properly and that you'll get the right amount of money at the end of this assessment or re-assessment.
To get the standard rate in both components, you need 8 points; to get the enhanced rate, you need 12 points.
They'll then give you two, three, five, or ten years (10 years is known as a fixed-term award and a light-touch review) to undergo the terror of the PIP assessment again.
The reforms proposed and why they're terrifying!
The reforms they've suggested so far are
One-off grants for aids and appliances
receipts to then be claimed back at a later date
the changing of eligibility for PIP or the category 'Long Term sickness'
Vouchers instead of cash payments
If you've read those four options and thought they were cruel, infantilising and impossible to make work, then you'd be right.
As a disabled person, bills don't magically disappear. You still have council tax and rent to pay or a carer. Will landlords and councils accept these vouchers? A one-off grant won't work here either. The vouchers also signal that we can't be trusted to pay for our own needs and aren't responsible—which is far from the truth!
Aids and treatments are already covered by the NHS, so this is redundant and will be futile, especially when you consider the long waiting lists for mental health treatment (and just generally) on the NHS—and even if they aren't, we do know that and will use PIP to save up for it, etc. It's easier and more economical to give us cash payments.
To have the receipts to claim back expenses, we need to have the money to spend on said expenses.
Changing the eligibility will (much like these other suggestions) put more disabled people at risk. If you want mental health to improve: Fix the NHS, wages, sort out the cost of living crisis and fund the research/support for Long Covid sufferers.
How you can help! - UK-based people, plz sign everyone else. Please reblog & signal boost!
If you live in the UK, there are currently two consultations open ( the sick note one closes on 8 July 2024, and the PIP one closes on 22 July 2024). Ideally, the responses will be used to decide whether these reforms go ahead.
Here are links to the two reforms for PIP and changes to the sick note process.
This consultation seeks views on the approaches government should consider around modernising the welfare system for people with disabilitie
Please note that the PIP consultation ( the first link) is 6 pages long and must be completed in one go. It's also filled with typos, repeated questions, and very difficult wording in many places, so be on the lookout for that! People are rightfully complaining about its accessibility, so the link and end date may change. I will update this post if this happens. I also know answering stuff like this is overwhelming, so here is a thread by PeachyInWales on Twitter about how they approached the consultation. If I see any samples by any disability activists or organisations, I will post them here, too!
This second link is the second consultation or call to evidence. Which GPs are being stripped of the ability to sign sicknotes for people on benefits, which is again ridiculous!
And the last link is a petition from SCOPE to stop the government from demonising disabled people further.
Sign the petition
Ultimately, we're trying to stop a benefit that is difficult to get and barely covers costs for many applicants from getting worse.
If I've missed anything then let me know! I'm sorry the post was so long, but it's a lot to go through! Again, UK-based people, please share your thoughts if you can and sign the petition! If you are not currently living in the UK, please share these links or the post so other UK-based users can see this and try to help.
With the Labour government now in charge, I hoped this reblog would be positive regarding the planned PIP reforms the Tories were trying to enforce.
Unfortunately, that isn't entirely the case. The consultation isn't being dropped and is still going ahead! (I would've dropped it if it were me at the DWP. Especially as the form is an accessibility nightmare and a pain to answer!)
However, I'm not surprised, as before the post was left empty in the current Labour reshuffle, the Shadow Minister of Disabled People stated at an Inclusion London event, " Labour would look at them (the consultation), and sorry for a fudged answer."
That means people in the UK have just under two weeks to get as many answers to the PIP consultation as possible!
The consultation closes at 11:59 PM on July 22nd.
LINK TO THE PIP CONSULTATION:
This consultation seeks views on the approaches government should consider around modernising the welfare system for people with disabilitie
Once again, can everyone please signal boost this, reblog, and, especially if you're in the UK, try your best to fill out the consultation
And a big thank you to everyone who has already signal boosted, reblogged, and filled this out. You have no idea how this small action has helped us out!
actually japanese cat twitters sound verbose to us because the translation loses a detail: it’s all written in katakana, which is considered childish or illiterate!
Also the only reason the Russian sounds semi childish is because of the lack of definite or indefinite articles (the, a/an), which Russian just doesn’t have in its language anyway
The corrected translation with English grammar would be “I am a wave” which is neither childish or verbose its just factual and simple
I disagree. There should always be restricted species lists, noxious weed lists, and environmental hazard lists from council to try and prevent intentional spread and propogation of ecologically damaging species.
Likewise, not planting certain species in and/or clearing fire coridoors are super important.
I mean, sure, there are exceptions in areas of extreme fire danger or things like that?
But most of the generic landscaping trees, ornamental plants and lawn grasses in the ecologically barren suburbs, cities and towns where people aren't allowed to garden are already invasive. In the United States (where this is an issue) virtually every "lawn" grass is invasive.
The current state of affairs is that people are basically mandated to cultivate invasive species. Giving people the right to grow what they want almost can't possibly make it worse
Anyone can already walk into a Home Depot and buy as much English Ivy as they want. They can put it directly in the ground and no one can stop them. Since we already live in that reality we might as well give everyone the opportunity to garden and make a personal relationship with it. There will still be the people who demand their bradley pear (for some reason), but the more people can engage with gardening with their own two hands, the more personally invested they'll become.
When someone lives in an apartment in a city where the only green they've got are sidewalk dandelions and whatever grows in abandoned lots, or are in the burbs with an HOA with a mob on standby in case anyone decides to put a pot on their front porch, of course they don't care about what's invasive and what's native. Making ecological stewardship personally relevant in their lives will be a much more reliable way of building that sense of responsibility than trusting people to take interest in it as an abstract subject.
To too many people nature is still something 'over there in the corners of the world' and not 'here'. It's baby steps. Once we can make nature 'here' at home, then that grows to the strip of dirt outside of work, then it goes to the bus stop, the side walk, and so on. It'll teach people to see the opportunities to grow and see through the plant blindness to learn what's already there. The power of a garden can be transformative through the intimate slice of nature it shows. We gotta give it time to work first and then grow on that foundation.
thank you for saying it in full I was just going to be like "if someone replaces their HOA-mandated lawn with kudzu, the quality of the environment is the same or marginally better, so who cares"
but for real no invasive species can be as harmful as the vast and devastating separation between humans and the ecosystem that cares for them
so i think going into it all authoritarian style is the wrong way. show people the joy and peacefulness of gardening and oftentimes you won't even HAVE to squish them with rules.
but anyways, every nursery and home improvement store sells invasive species by the truckload, so. Priorities
Anyway, I don’t just bring this up when I talk about Twilight, but I do bring it up every time I talk about Twilight:
Reminder that the Quileute tribe, whose sacred stories made author Stephanie Meyer a multi-millionaire, never received any money from the enormous success of the Twilight books or films.
Their entire community is located in a Tsunami disaster zone, in a region where a world-changing earthquake and tsunami are expected to hit perhaps within our lifetimes.
They should be set for life financially based on the use of their stories in Twilight. Instead, they have to publicly raise funds to move to higher ground and have been raising the same funds for years.
Anyone is encouraged to donate, but if you have personally purchased a physical or digital copy of any Twilight media or Twilight merchandise, I recommend matching the purchase with an equal donation to the Quileute People.
Recently, they successfully moved their school to higher ground! It was a major accomplishment to ensure Quileute children can learn in a safe environment! But there is still much to be done .
Statement from the Tribe (link to the source):
“Living in a tsunami zone at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, a catastrophic earthquake can wipe out our community in less than 10 minutes – an entire generation of the Quileute people will cease to exist.”
You can even set up a monthly donation. I don’t have much, but I’ve had a small monthly donation coming out of my PayPal for a few years now.
Quileute Move to Higher Ground |
Many people don’t realize that the tribe didn’t profit off of Twilight, so I mention it whenever I bring up the series!
If you want to read more about how Twilight impacted the Quileute People, check out “The Truth vs. Twilight.”
Now that the school is safely moved, Phase 2 of the move to higher ground aims to relocate the senior center out of the tsunami zone, as well provide housing for the community in the safety zone.
The Quileute Tribe has been fundraising to save its community for years. Let’s make this happen!
Once again, if you purchase any Twilight media or merchandise—even from independent fanartists—please match with a donation to the Quileute people!
this is the anti-defamation league’s hate symbol database. it’s massive and includes details about what symbols mean and where you might see them.
i’m a tattoo artist and use this all the time when i see a symbol i don’t recognize—better safe than sorry. it’s saved me from working with white supremacists a few times.
while it's all well and good to teach people how to understand and criticize the messages and morals in fictional media, i think it's ultimately more important to teach people that they shouldn't be getting their understanding of ethics from fiction full stop period.
This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.
e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.
I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.
This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.
And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.
I swear a solid eighty percent of these "Tumblr's aging userbase" jokes are just people telling on themselves that they were never expected to cook or clean as a child.
I fucking despise when things fake being higher quality than they are. I don't mean like slapping a slightly misspelled brand name onto an identical non-designer product for purely aesthetic reasons I mean like rivets or thread that are actually glued down rather than punched or stitched. Fake pockets on jeans that are actually just an extra seam. Heavy looking chain that's plastic or very soft flimsy metal rather than anything sturdy. I bought boots which looked like they had a stitched sole 8 months ago and lo and behold the glue holding the sole on is revealing itself by falling apart. You PUT a STITCH IN THERE. YOU HAD THE NEEDLE AND THREAD. AND YOU DIDNT ACTUALLY STITCH DOWN THE FUCKING SOLES. Oh it makes me so mad. Cheap cunts taking the aesthetics of durability or practicality while handing you a product that won't last you the year
the current thing trad losers are losing their minds over is one singular dude on reddit that refurbished and hand painted a grandfather clock and they keep saying the guy “ruined its value” or “threw thousands out the window by vandalizing a precious heirloom” and let me just say as someone densely familiar with the world of antiques, there’s a 99% chance that this clock was a mass produced reproduction and there’s a 100% chance that clock is not as valuable as ppl think it is. when people hear the word ‘grandfather clock’ they’re always gonna assume you’re talking about something that was handmade in a woodshop by a jolly old man when rlly repros take up a waaay bigger slice of the market far more than any handcrafted items. and besides people will repaint or redecorate these ‘oh so sacred handcrafted items’ every day there’s a huge market for them. it’s the same reason why people like long furbies or dolls that have been customized to have like gore mouths or something. this is literally like watching a bunch of pretentious farts make a mountain out of a molehill. also the clock is kinda cool if I’m being honest
this is what’s got them so mad. like the dude didn’t destroy it or anything, just made it more interesting to look at. when I see this I don’t go “this man is a danger to society because he RUINED a precious antique” i just think to myself “huh that’s actually some very impressive work with patterns, getting all those intricate geometric shapes done with just paint must’ve been hard work and it looks cool and the colors really pop” but idk maybe that’s just because I’m not completely deranged
This is all work that can be stripped if anyone wants to restore it to its original state in the future (I mean, why would you but ok), and the fact that they restored it, including putting hands on it and getting it to work, obviously, has far greater value than preserving the original wood finish of what looks like an 80s repro of a Victorian aesthetic.
the same guy also made this which looks to be an actual Old Thing but still cannot be called anything but an unambiguous improvement, and also holy shit it fucks severely
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