The root of a lot of enabling is the belief that people shouldn't face consequences for or be impacted by their own actions in any way. That belief is one of the cornerstones of our society, and once you understand that, so much of the cruelty and abuse we endure day to day makes so much sense.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Another star spirit, inhabiting a porcelain doll and calling herself Celeste, comes down to the surface to seek answers about the Star Road her kin will not offer her. Her discovery of a star-warrior sent down to find the Road's pieces, along with his merry band, is a pleasant surprise.
This fic was literally written by both me and Lilbluebox! She wrote the beginning scene, then we literally just shared a doc and wrote the rest of the fic together, it was great fun!
Here we're introducing Celeste into the mix, as well as diving a bit deeper into Geno's thoughts and history, and bits of Star Road culture!
Often, what would have been considered the most brutal treatment when done to a slave is lauded, even fiercely and forcefully demanded when done to a child. Most adults think of children as lower than the lowest slave.
Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that âdonât affectâ us and it seriously breaks my heart
[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:
Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.
We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]
But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?
You are all lovely and kind and correct, but letâs also name the moth:Â Ceratophaga vicinella
I canât find any information on how to promote or donate to moth conservation, but the tortoises are endangered, and support to habitat conservation in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are a good way to help both the tortoises and the moth!
https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/animals-we-protect/gopher-tortoise/
âI will burn the session to the ground over this bill," state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh said of a bill that would ban gender-affirming therapi
It was a mundane, unanimously supported bill on liquor taxation that saw state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh take to the mic on the Nebraska Legislature floor last week. She offered her support, then spent the next three days discussing everything but the bill, including her favorite Girl Scout cookies, Omahaâs best doughnuts and the plot of the animated movie âMadagascar.â
She also spent that time railing against an unrelated bill that would outlaw gender-affirming therapies for those 18 and younger. It was the advancement of that bill out of committee that led Cavanaugh to promise three weeks ago to filibuster every bill that comes before the Legislature this year â even the ones she supports.
âIf this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful â painful for everyone,â the Omaha married mother of three said. âI will burn the session to the ground over this bill.â
True to her word, Cavanaugh has slowed the business of passing laws to a crawl by introducing amendment after amendment to every bill that makes it to the state Senate floor and taking up all eight debate hours allowed by the rules â even during the week she was suffering from strep throat. Wednesday marks the halfway point of this yearâs 90-day session, and not a single bill will have passed thanks to Cavanaughâs relentless filibustering.
Clerk of the Legislature Brandon Metzler said a delay like this has happened only a couple of times in the past 10 years.
âBut what is really uncommon is the lack of bills that have advanced,â Metzler said. âUsually, weâre a lot further along the line than weâre seeing now.â
In fact, only 26 bills have advanced from the first of three rounds of debate required to pass a bill in Nebraska. There would normally be two to three times that number by mid-March, Metzler said. In the last three weeks since Cavanaugh began her bill blockade, only three bills have advanced.
The Nebraska bill and another that would ban trans people from using bathrooms and locker rooms or playing on sports teams that donât align with the gender listed on their birth certificates are among roughly 150 bills targeting transgender people that have been introduced in state legislatures this year. Bans on gender-affirming care for minors have already been enacted this year in some Republican-led states, including South Dakota and Utah, and Republican Governors in Tennessee and Mississippi are expected to sign similar bans into law. And Arkansas and Alabama have bans that were temporarily blocked by federal judges.
Cavanaughâs effort has drawn the gratitude of the LGBTQ community, said Abbi Swatsworth, executive director of LGBTQ advocacy group OutNebraska. The organization has been encouraging members and others to inundate state lawmakers with calls and emails to support Cavanaughâs effort and oppose bills targeting transgender people.
âWe really see it as a heroic effort,â Swatsworth said of the filibuster. âIt is extremely meaningful when an ally does more than pay lip service to allyship. She really is leading this charge.â
Both Cavanaugh and the conservative Omaha lawmaker who introduced the trans bill, state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, said theyâre seeking to protect children. Cavanaugh cited a 2021 survey by The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQ youth, that found that 58% of transgender and nonbinary youth in Nebraska seriously considered suicide in the previous year, and more than 1 in 5 reported that they had attempted it.
âThis is a bill that attacks trans children,â Cavanaugh said. âIt is legislating hate. It is legislating meanness. The children of Nebraska deserve to have somebody stand up and fight for them.â
Kauth said sheâs trying to protect children from undertaking gender-affirming treatments that they might later regret as adults. She has characterized treatments such as hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery as medically unproven and potentially dangerous in the long term â although the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association all support gender-affirming care for youths.
Cavanaugh and other lawmakers who support her filibuster effort âdonât want to acknowledge the support I have for this bill,â Kauth said.
âWe should be allowed to debate this,â she said. âWhat this is doing is taking the ball and going home.â
Nebraskaâs unique single-chamber Legislature is officially nonpartisan, but it is dominated by members who are registered Republicans. Although bills can win approval with a simple majority in the 49-seat body, it takes 33 votes to overcome a filibuster. The Legislature is currently made up of 32 registered Republicans and 17 registered Democrats, but the slim margin means that the defection of a single Democrat could allow Republicans to pass whatever laws they want.
Democrats have had some success in using filibusters, which burn valuable time from the session, delay votes on other issues and force lawmakers to work longer days. Last year, conservative lawmakers were unable to overcome Democratic filibusters to pass an abortion ban or a law that would have allowed people to carry concealed guns without a permit.
Cavanaugh said she has taken a page from the playbook of Ernie Chambers â a left-leaning former legislator from Omaha who was the longest-serving lawmaker in state history. He mastered the use of the filibuster to try to tank bills he opposed and force support for bills he backed.
âBut Iâm not aware of anyone carrying out a filibuster to this extent,â Cavanaugh said. âI know itâs frustrating. Itâs frustrating for me. But there is a way to put an end to â just put a stop to this hateful bill.â
Chambers praised Cavanaughâs âperseverance, gumption and stamina to fight as hard as she can using the rulesâ to stand up for the marginalized, adding, âI would be right there fighting with her if I were still there.â
Speaker John Arch has taken steps to try to speed the process, such as sometimes scheduling the Legislature to work through lunch to tick off another hour on the debate clock. And he noted that the Legislature will soon be moving to all-day debate once committee hearings on bills come to an end later this month.
But even with frustration growing over the hobbled process, the Republican speaker defended Cavanaughâs use of the filibuster.
âThe rules allow her to do this, and those rules are there to protect the voice of the minority,â Arch said. âWe may find that weâre passing fewer bills, but the bills we do pass will be bigger bills we care about.â
Chambers said this is a sign that Cavanaughâs efforts are working. Typically, the Speaker will step in and seek to postpone the bill causing the delay to allow more pressing legislation such as tax cuts or budget items to move forward.
âI think youâre going to start to see some of that happen,â Chambers said. âI think if (Cavanaugh) has the physical stamina, she can do it. I donât think she shoots blanks.â
Abuse is incompatible with happiness. it's incompatible with life, bonds, family, trust and safety. Often, it is incompatible even with survival. Abuse does not bring anything worth having into your life. Nobody needs abuse to be strong.
If you genuinely feel this way, don't waste my time talking to me at all. I don't want to waste time on people who are pretending to care to get something out of me. I want those who are genuinely interested in what I have to say.
People are going full mask-off and showing us how deeply authoritarian and closed minded human beings actually are, and I argue that's a good thing.
I'd rather they stop hiding so I know for sure who is terrible and who is not. Anyone who has a long DNI list is usually one of those terrible people, so unless I know them in real life, I block and ignore them in kind.
Privacy Possum is an anti-tracking extension that not only blocks commercial trackers, it also fucks with them by generating nonsense data.
Forget Me Not is a cookie management tool that lets you choose whether/how sites can store cookies on your computer on a site-by-site basis.
Bypass Paywalls Clean does exactly what it says: allows you to bypass paywalls on news sites and the like.
SponsorBlock uses crowd-sourced data to block sponsored segments on YouTube videos. Now you never have to hear about NordVPN or Raycon ever again!
Breakthrough Twitter Login Wall is another âwhat it says on the tinâ extension. It stops Twitter from trying to force you to log in, so you can browse anonymously in peace.
Without the abuse, I wouldn't have been this scared in every human interaction. I wouldn't feel like my life depends on saying the right thing and finding my way out of this situation safely. I wouldn't be this timid, this cagey, reluctant, imagining every worst scenario that can come out of a social situation. I wouldn't have images of torture in my mind when attempting to say no. I wouldn't find it this hard to refuse being useful to others when it violates my freedom.
I would be able to speak my mind. I'd be able to be honest in my own way, instead of finding reasons and reasons why I have to be as pleasant and non-demanding as possible. I wouldn't be afraid to ask for information when I want it. I wouldn't be scared to check what my options are.
Abuse forces me to walk the thinnest line of being convenient and nothing else. I don't get to have a personality, there's only fear. I'm different when I'm alone, I'm not afraid, I know what I want. But if you put another human being next to me, all of my convictions are overwritten by survival instinct to appease and escape.
me, contemplating building a social connection: I'm just too demanding and I need too much understanding and compassion from people... nobody would ever be able to give me as much as I need :/ it would never be enough for me
me, upon getting someone's bare minimum: ...this is the best thing I ever got in the world I can't believe someone would go this far for me, this is the dream also if I lose this I'm gonna implode
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search termsÂ
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
â
Google is so powerful that it âhidesâ other search systems from us. We just donât know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
In the first lawsuit of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a husband seeks damages from women who allegedly helped his ex-wife obtai
A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the stateâs near-total ban on abortion last summer.
Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the stateâs prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.
Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.
The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages filed as part of the complaint seem to show they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived. A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home. The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.
Silvaâs wife filed for divorce in May 2022, court records show, two months before the alleged abortion. The divorce was finalized in February. They share two daughters, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit relies heavily on screenshots from a group chat the ex-wife had with two friends seemingly seeking to help her terminate her pregnancy. Her friends expressed concern that Silva would âsnake his way into your head.â
âI know either way he will use it against me,â the pregnant woman said, according to text messages attached to the complaint. âIf I told him before, which Iâm not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.â
âDelete all conversations from today,â one of the women later told her. âYou donât want him looking through it.â
The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Texasâ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.
The legality of abortion in Texas in July 2022 is murky. The stateâs trigger law, which makes performing abortion a crime punishable by up to life in prison, did not go into effect until August. But conservative state leaders, including Cain and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have claimed that the stateâs pre-Roe abortion bans, which punish anyone who performs or âfurnishes the meansâ for an abortion by up to five years in prison, went back into effect the day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June.
The legal status of these pre-Roe statutes remains a contentious question. In 2004, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that those laws were ârepealed by implication,â which U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman reaffirmed in a recent ruling. But Cain and others have repeatedly argued that the Legislature restored those laws into effect with recent abortion legislation. This issue went before the Texas Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed before a final ruling.
In 2021, the Legislature passed a law making it a state jail felony to provide abortion-inducing medication except under extremely specific circumstances.
Joanna Grossman, a law professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, said this lawsuit is âabsurd and inflammatory.â Since the pregnant patient is protected from prosecution, there is no underlying cause of action to bring a wrongful death suit in a self-managed abortion, she said.
âBut this is going to cause such fear and chilling that it doesnât matter whether [Mitchell] is right," Grossman said. âWho is going to want to help a friend find an abortion if there is some chance that their text messages are going to end up in the news? And maybe theyâre going to get sued, and maybe theyâre going to get arrested, and itâs going to get dropped eventually, but in the meantime, they will have been terrified.â
But itâs possible this lawsuit could get traction, said Charles âRockyâ Rhodes, a law professor at South Texas College of Law.
âItâs scary to think that you can be sued for significant damages for helping a friend undertake acts that help her have even a self-medicated abortion,â Rhodes said. âObviously, the allegations would have to be proven, but there is potentially merit to this suit under Texasâ abortion laws as they exist now.â
Mitchell and Cain intend to also name the manufacturer of the abortion pill as a defendant, once it is identified. âAnyone involved in distributing or manufacturing abortion pills will be sued into oblivion,â Cain said in a statement. Silva is asking a Galveston judge to award him more than $1 million in damages and an injunction stopping the defendants from distributing abortion pills in Texas.
