like it doesn’t matter if a person is so fat they’re immobile & have infections in their skin folds & need assistance with everything from hygiene to cooking to cleaning etc. they should still get good medical care.
the fattest person you possibly imagine still deserves medical care. it also doesn’t matter why they’re fat, even if that person got fat because all they did was eat and eat without ever exercising, they still deserve medical care.
There is no 'what ifs' for this. If a person is suffering, get them help instead of shaming them so you feel better. Even if they caused the ailment on their own, get them help.
Once again John Oliver proves that you can do anything with money and lawyers
Oliver then proceeded to detail how with $50 and knowledge of the law he was able to successfully apply online to create a debt buying company named “Central Asset Recovery Professionals,” or as Oliver put it, “CARP” named after “a bottom-feeding fish.”
After setting up a rudimentary website for CARP, the satirical, but still real company was offered a $15 million package of medical debt for $60,000.
Oliver explained that the debt was out of statute, which means it is the kind of debt that a collector can only continue to collect, but not sue the debtor for.
Then, instead of chasing down the 9,000 debtors in the debt package as a normal collection agency would, Oliver decided to stage the largest one-time giveaway in television history and work with the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt to forgive the $15 million with no consequences for the debtors.
You dont have to be rich to do a bit of this actually
RIP Medical Debt is a charity (and therefore takes donations). They buy the rights to medical debt and then forgive them. So far they’ve forgiven over 1B in medical debt.
So a little ray of hope for someone out there today.
I got a letter recently letting me know that a $3k medical bill from an emergency room visit in 2018 had been purchased by Undue Medical Debt and destroyed. Gone forever. They were very clear that I didn’t have to do anything, but they would appreciate it if I would talk to people about it to spread the word about what they were doing. Fucking phenomenal.
Now this is an effective boycott. It is targeting (ha) a specific company with a clearly stated goal. The amount of time is long enough to be noticed, and could be extended if needed. Anything that can be purchased at Target can also be obtained elsewhere, so it is actually possible to boycott this specific company for a very long time. Target is caving to fascism and rolling back their diversity and inclusion policies. The goal is for them to reverse that decision. This is an achievable goal.
Boycotting everything all at once, for one day or for as long as you can, because everything is terrible and we’re mad about it…does nothing. It’s vague, disorganized, and frankly impossible. We have to buy things sometimes. You can’t just target the economy as a whole. You have to be specific.
If you want to start a boycott, use this one as an example. Choose one target. Provide one (simple, clear, easy to explain) reason why that company deserves to be boycotted. Explain what you want them to do differently. Make sure that it is something that can actually be done. Then tell people about it.
it exists to divide the working class. All labour is skilled labour. Yes including that one. Yes, including that one too.
Do you know what's unskilled labour? Owning capital. There's no labour involved, thus requires no skill. And you can tell because people can be born into owning capital.
Not sure how many of y'all saw this, but the combined misogyny-ableism-transphobia was off the charts. I am glad that he did get his top surgery, has support, and that its pursuing it's goals to advocate for other disabled + trans people.
in 2004 george w bush won the presidential election and promised in his acceptance speech to codify a federal ban on gay marriage. 30 states passed bans on gay marriage in the wake of his re-election. and then they fell. one by one by one. it has to get worse before it gets better.
queers. trans people especially. our attitude for the next decade has to be “we’re not fucking scared of you”. do you understand? this has always been at the core of who we are and what we do. we fucking move. we take up space or carve out our own with our bare hands. we take care of us.
do you know the other queers in your neighborhood? do you know who you can call at a bad time? do you know whose house you can crash at? do you know where you can go for a free meal? do you know where you can bring meals to the hungry? do you know the LGBT resources available in your area? do you know the informed consent clinics in your area?
do you know how DIY HRT works? do you know and have friends who don’t? do you know our history? have you read the works of james baldwin and leslie feinberg? are you equipped with knowledge about the forces that work against us? do you understand dialectical materialism? do you know what to say if stopped by the police? do you know what good opsec is? are your legal documents in order? do you know how to get them in order?
scream, cry, rot in your bed, do whatever you need to do to process this, then find something to do. do not fall into despair. in the face of extermination say “fuck you.”
Keep calling it the Gulf of Mexico or whatever your term is for it. Do not allow the Republican regime to label that body of water the Gulf of America to the world. The name came from a the term Mexica, what the Aztecs called themselves. It’s been called the Gulf of Mexico since the 1600s.
Keep calling it Denali. The original name before it was Mount McKinley. Don’t let the Indigenous Peoples/First Nations be erased.
It may sound stupid and petty. But it is an attempt to rewrite history and make us forget the origins. It is a literal white washing of history. This type of censorship is a beginning to greater evils.
I am exceptionally lucky in that my parents never hit me, grounded me, confiscated my things, banned me from my hobbies or threatened any of these actions to make me behave as a kid. as an adult it has made me realise how very very long a road most people have to traverse before they can take a statement like 'no rule that must be enforced by threat is legitimate' seriously.
I really do mean this sympathetically. we are not well equipped as a culture to grapple with the implications of power and violence, because we are intimately saturated in it from birth. cruelty feels natural, and that's hard to unlearn.
a bunch of things that I know are going to sound really corny (which honestly I think is half the cultural problem - the idea that non-coercive parenting is touchy-feely, ineffectual or just kind of cringe - but that could be a whole other post)
the main thing was that they always explained things to me. if I wanted something I couldn't have, they explained why (from 'we can't afford that', 'it's bad for you', 'it's dangerous', all the way up to 'it's made by a big company that treats its workers badly, and we don't want to give them money'). If I threw a tantrum, they either waited it out until I got tired and bored or they redirected what we were doing ('we have to be patient and wait in line. if we don't wait in line, we can't go into the theatre. we can't wait in line if you scream and upset people. okay then, we're going home.')
beyond that, they always spoke to me like a full person. they asked my opinion on things and took it seriously, and asked me why as much as I asked them. apparently I had a phase as a toddler where I always wanted to be the first one on the swings / down the slide, and would throw almighty fits about it, until my mum took me aside one day and said 'why do you want to be first? are you worried the slide will get used up?' I laughed like it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and never kicked up a fuss about taking turns after that.
on the granular level, they focused on positives over negatives. My mum would draw little good behaviour charts for me, featuring e.g. me walking a long winding path through the woods with my soft toys. the path would be made up of, say, 30 stones, and every day that I was well behaved I'd earn a sticker on one of them. when I reached the end of the path, I got to pick a treat. something like a new plastic animal for my collection, or a day trip to the aquarium.
I do remember them sitting me down once and asking me to come up with what I thought would be an appropriate punishment if I ever did something really bad. I think my first suggestion was something like 'no TV', which was a real nice try because we didn't have a TV at the time. I don't remember what I finally decided on, it might have been 'no dessert for a week'. We wrote it down together and I signed my name, and they sealed it in an important looking envelope which they put in my dad's filing cabinet (for important documents). This would be unsealed if I ever did something Really Bad. the eventuality never came up, but the act of participating in the exercise kept me mostly on the straight and narrow. It's funny, the conceptual punishment itself wasn't even that bad. It was the seriousnes of the adult commitment I'd made to Behaving Well that did the trick.
When I DID do the standard naughty stuff, my parents would just sit me down and explain to me seriously why it was wrong and what impact it had caused for other people. They'd ask what motivated me, and why I acted on those feelings in that specific way. They would, of course, tell me they were disappointed. If necessary, they would tell me how things would have to change as a result of what I'd done. They were always, always open to hearing out my side of the story, and always, always took my feelings seriously even if they disapproved of my behaviour. they would ask if I was ready to say sorry and get a hug. if I wasn't ready, if I was still upset or angry, they would give me space in my room and ask me to come find them when I wanted to make up. and I always did, because I always knew they would accept it.
In the heart of Sudan, my family's world was torn apart by fear, violence, and… Tull Osman needs your support for Escaping Hell: A Family's
Current progress: $22,104/$23,804 (urgent short term goal)
Elaf's campaign is vetted on SudanFunds
Elaf's family was able to afford evacuation to Egypt, but their family is now experiencing a medical emergency. They need urgent help to save their aunt's life!
Elaf's aunt was diagnosed with brain stem hematoma and has been saying at the ICU in the hospital. The bleeding from her brain has affected her respiratory system and she has had to be put on a ventilator to help her breathe.
The hospital is demaning $1,700 from Elaf's family. The doctors already stopped giving Elaf's aunt medicine and the family is afraid they will shut off the ventilator too if they are unable to pay.
Elaf's aunt will die if she is taken off the ventilator. The family urgently needs to reach $23,804 to continue her treatment. Elaf gave the update about their aunt 2 days ago and there has only been 2 donations since!
Please donate and share, there is no time to waste!
Tagging for reach. Please share if you see this. Thank you
No change has been made. This is urgent! Please donate and share! There is $1,515 USD left to reach the amount needed for Elaf's aunt! You can match me! I have given $5, but you are more than welcome to give any amount!
Verification: #165 in the vetted fundraisers' spreadsheet by @/el-shab-hussein and @/nabulsi. Also listed on sudanfunds.com!
Tagging for reach. Please leave a reply if you wish to be removed. Thank you.
You've gotta love trans folks more than you hate TERFs.
You've gotta love your unhoused neighbors more than you hate the billionaires.
You've gotta love immigrants more than you hate ICE.
You've gotta love queer kids more than you hate christian fundamentalists.
You've gotta love fat people more than you hate the diet industry.
You've gotta love disabled people more than you hate the insurance companies.
You've gotta love your fellow humans more than you hate the worst that humanity has to offer. You don't have to like every person you're fighting for, and you sure as hell don't have to give up your righteous anger, but hate is ultimately corrosive.
^^ I was thinking, like, "surely we all remember this from last time," but then I thought about it again, and realized that there are people who voted this year, who wouldn't even have been in their teens during the previous Trump rodeo.
So yeah, if you weren't following it last time, there will be a lot of Executive Orders that get walked back, struck down, or, once subjected to even mildly rigorous legal interpretation, turn out to have little or no effect.
When you see that Trump has signed an EO about something that seems drastic and scary, take a breath and wait a few hours, then see what the experts are saying about it.
It's so, SO important to share success stories like this. I know an actual JPL engineer who doesn't believe in climate change because, "you never hear about acid rain anymore."
He thinks climate change can be lumped in with acid rain and the ozone layer of "things that were overblown and not really important because no one talks about it anymore."
It didn't even occur to him that we actively fixed the problem. Here's the EPA page on acid rainfall.
From the page:
It's also important to talk about success stories tonfuel hope that we can overcome current and future conservation and environmental issues.
