dirt enthusiast
pixel skylines
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
@theartofmadeline
AnasAbdin
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
i don't do bad sauce passes
oozey mess
Today's Document
DEAR READER
h
No title available
occasionally subtle
Jules of Nature
shark vs the universe
wallacepolsom
almost home
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@queenofthedarkhorizons
there isn’t a single living organism i don’t like, don’t think is cute, or don’t love and appreciate.
in fact, even the rocks are beloved critters to me. the sand and the stones. the wind, the water, the chemicals and the clay.
no one aspect of the natural world is worth more than another to me. not to me, and not to nature.
when we learn to love ALL the earth, that is when we learn to protect it.
i love my planet. all of it.
For anybody not caught up: Tennessee just passed a new map that pretty much makes it so black neighborhoods have no power in local votes. Two things about this. While protestors were chanting "No Jim Crow", white Tennessee lawmakers were caught laughing on video. On top of this, Representative Justin Pearson and his brother KeShaun Pearson were arrested for trying to give their takes on the matter (which is not only their legal right but literally his job). If you give a shit about black people, help fight this. We can't allow a return to Jim Crow.
Heyyy guess where I live
A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:
The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.
Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.
Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.
They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.
Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.
Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.
And stomps the ashes.
KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.
KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.
Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.
Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.
The city most affected by the redistricting is Memphis, where locals are fighting against xAI's data center, which has been operating with very little oversight and is poisoning the people who live there. Here is a previous post on that with more information and more sources.
what makes a lichen a lichen? (what makes it different from a moss or other plant?)
Lichen aren't moss or plants, even though the look and act an awful lot like them, in some cases. Lichens are a symbiosis between a fungus (typically an Ascomycete fungi) and a photosynthesizing, unicellular organism (usually either a green algae and/or a cyanobacteria). The fungi (the mycobiont) provides structure and protection, and the photosynthesizers (the photobiont) provide nutrition. Because we think of the mycobiont as the obligate member of the symbiosis, and because it makes up the bulk of the organism, we classify lichens taxonomically based on the mycobiont. So I often describe them jokingly as a fungi that wanted to be a plant so bad that it domesticated a bunch of unicellular organisms to be its chloroplasts. A farmer, if you will.
How do you tell if you are looking at a lichen or a plant? Its easy with a microscope. With that you can see that the internal structure of a lichen is VERY different from a plant. But with the naked eye? Mostly its familiarity. For every rule I can tell you, there exists an exception to that rule. So you kinda just gotta know its a lichen because of the way it is. So you know, get out there and start meeting them!
Reactionary man with humiliation kink: the most humiliating thing I can imagine is to dress up as a woman.
The entire political spectrum, to trans women: Haha wow that guy's like you, isn't that hilarious?
When the gender conservatives try to do this shit it at least fits their agenda of, you know, propagandizing against trans people. But then left-wing non-transfeminized people go all like "curious. you hate trans women and yet you dress up as a caricature of one. how intriguing!" like. sigh.
Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794-1871) was a brilliant self-taught marine biologist. She is also remembered as the inventor of the aquarium.
The dressmaker
Jeanne was born in Juillac in 1794. She knew how to read and write. Her youth was marked by a series of tragedies: first the death of her younger sister, then that of her mother. In 1812, at the age of eighteen, Jeanne moved to Paris.
She made the journey on foot, under the care of a cousin and with a herd of cattle bound for the slaughterhouse. On the way, her cousin assaulted her, forcing her to take refuge first in a police station and then in a convent. But Jeanne eventually reached Paris and found work as a milliner.
She was soon taken under the protection of a famous dressmaker. In 1816, Jeanne worked on the wedding dress of Marie-Caroline of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. Thanks to her talent, the dress caused quite a sensation.
It was around that time that Jeanne met James Power, an Irish businessman living in Messina, Sicily. She followed him there and married him in 1818.
Studying nature
Jeanne now lived in comfortable conditions, but she had no desire to remain idle. She quickly integrated into social and scientific circles. She learned English and Italian and explored Sicily extensively.
She went on to write two guides based on her explorations, the most complete being Guida per la Sicilia. In it, Jeanne offered an extraordinarily thorough overview of Sicily’s flora and fauna, cataloguing 267 species of birds, 627 plants, and 600 mollusks. She also described natural, historical, and cultural sites of interest. One section of her work focused on Mount Etna’s eruptions and their effects on vegetation. The guide became extremely popular among Sicilians.
The argonaut’s shell
Between 1820 and 1838, Jeanne conducted many observations in marine biology, mainly on mollusks and octopuses. To keep her specimens alive, she invented several pioneering devices:
one made of glass to study live mollusks
another made of glass and surrounded by a cage submerged in the sea to study small mollusks
a cage for larger mollusks, which could be sunk and anchored at a specific depth
These inventions represented a major step toward the development of the modern aquarium. Her work was recognized by Catania’s Academy of Science, and Jeanne became its first female member. In 1858, the naturalist Richard Owen acknowledged her as the inventor of the aquarium in his work Mollusca:
“But to Madame Jeannette Power (née de Villepreux), according to the testimony of Professor Carmelo Maravigna in the Giornale Letterario dell'Accademia Gioenia di Catania (December 1834), ought to be attributed, if to any one individual, the invention and systematic application of the receptacles now called Aquaria to the study of marine, and principally of molluscous animals.”
Jeanne also settled an important scientific debate concerning the argonaut's shell. Did the argonaut grow its own shell, or did it behave like a hermit crab? Thanks to her experiments, Jeanne demonstrated that the argonaut indeed produced its own shell. She managed to have her discovery recognized and accepted as scientific consensus. In 1839, she became a member of the Zoological Society of London, as well as of sixteen other European institutions.
Return to France
Jeanne was also a talented artist. Sadly, most of her artwork was lost in a shipwreck, except for a single surviving painting of an argonaut. In 1842, she and her husband returned to France and settled in Paris. She continued her scientific work and, in 1860, published observations on martens.
In 1871, Jeanne took refuge in Juillac to escape the siege of Paris. She died there the same year.
Jeanne was soon forgotten, until historians restored her contributions to collective memory. In 1997, a crater on Venus was named in her honor.
If you enjoy this blog, you can support me on Ko-fi!
Further reading:
Association Jeanne Villepreux-Power - Femme de science et artiste
Arnal Claude, Jeannette Villepreux Power à Messine: l’Argonauta argo et l’invention de l’aquarium (1832)
Debaz Josquin, “Jeanne Villepreux-Power : une pionnière de la biologie marine”
Owen Richard, Mollusca
I highly recommend watching this testimony from Aliya Rahman, the disabled woman who was dragged out of her car and kidnapped by ICE on her way to a doctor appointment in Minneapolis a few weeks ago.
Truly my worst nightmare.
Transcript of Aliya Rahman's speech:
Thank you members, for taking the time to be here today, and thank you staff for making this happen.
My name is Aliya Rahman, and I am a resident of South Minneapolis. I am a Bangladeshi American born in Northern Wisconsin. And I’m a disabled person with autism and a traumatic brain injury.
Not all autistic brains do this, but mine fixates on sounds, numbers, and patterns. And while what the world saw happen to me exactly three weeks ago today on video was a terrible violation it is still nothing compared to the horrific practices I saw inside the Whipple center.
So I am here today with a duty to the people who have not had the privilege of coming home, and I offer this data because these practices must end now.
On January 13th on the way to my 39th appointment at Hennepin County’s traumatic brain injury center, I encountered a traffic jam caused by ICE vehicles and no signs indicating how to get around it. I had not wanted to pull in to a blocked, chaotic intersection, but verbally agreed to do so and rolled down my window after an agent yelled, “Move! I will break your f-ing window!”
His first instruction.
Agents on all sides of my vehicle yelled conflicting threats and instructions that I could not process while watching for pedestrians.
Then, the glass of the passenger side window flew across my face.
I yelled, “I’m disabled!” at the hands grabbing at me and an agent said, “Too late.”
I felt immersed in a pattern, and I thought of Jenoah Donald, an autistic black man killed by the police during a traffic stop in 2021.
I remembered mister Silverio Villegas González, who was killed by ICE in his vehicle last year.
An agent pulled a large combat knife in front of my face, which I thought was for cutting me, and later learned was used to cut off my seat belt. Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground face first and people leaned on my back.
I felt the pattern, and I thought of mister George Floyd, who was killed four blocks away.
I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury and was disabled. I now cannot lift my arms normally.
I was never asked for ID.
Never told I was under arrest.
Never read my rights.
And never charged with a crime.
Approaching the Whipple center, I saw black and brown bodies shackled together, chained together, being marched by yelling agents outdoors. I continued to hear the word “bodies”, because that is how agents referred to us:
“We’re bringing in a body.”
“They’re bringing in bodies 7, 8 at a time, where do I put ‘em?”
“We can’t use that room, there’s already a body in there.”
You have no reason to believe you will make it out alive if you’re already being called a body.
Agents repeatedly had to stop and ask how to do tasks. I received no medical screening, phone call, or access to a lawyer. I was denied a communication navigator when my speech began to slur. Agents laughed as I tried to immobilize my own neck. I asked for my cane and was told no, pulled up by my arms and prodded forward in leg irons by agents laughing and saying, “Walk! You can do it, walk.”
Agents did not know if the facility had a wheelchair.
When I was finally placed in one to be taken to interrogation an agent taunted, “You were driving, right? So your legs do work.”
I pleaded for emergency medical care for over an hour after my vision had become blurry, my heart rate went through the roof, and the pain in my neck and head became unbearable.
It was denied.
When I became unable to speak my cellmate pleaded for me.
The last sounds I remember before I blacked out on the cell floor were my cellmate banging on the door, pleading for a medic, and a voice outside saying, “We don’t wanna step on ICE’s toes.”
When I opened my eyes at Hennepin County’s emergency room, I learned I was brought there to be treated for assault.
The impacts of DHS detention on my physical, mental and financial well-being and safety have been very severe, but I do not deserve more humane treatment than anyone else, US citizen or not. And I am here today with a strong spirit and a duty to the many people who haven’t had the privilege to tell their stories or see their loved ones come home. I am extremely distressed by the pattern that violence from law enforcement has been happening to black and indigenous communities for centuries, and to DHS survivors for over 20 years.
We call ourselves a civilized nation, but we lack rules and accountability around what a person claiming to be law enforcement is permitted to do to another human being.
I am not afraid, and I’m not afraid to keep working on this problem even after ICE is gone. Thank you for your time.
A brown crab shoves an anglerfish out of the way. Filmed in Norway. From Sea in Motion - Wonder of the North Sea (2023).
“Get off my lawn punk!”
That is absolutely an anglerfish (Lophius piscatorius), in fact the anglerfish, the original fish known by that name - as well as monkfish, devilfish, goosefish, and many other monikers besides.
And if it was a wobbegong, it would be even more unusual to find a tropical Indo-Pacific species in Norway.
@fish-identifier
yes, that is a fish 👍
Just to clear up any confusion this is a
MONKFISH (goosefish, anglerfish etc.)
WOBBEGONG SHARK
DEEP SEA ANGLERFISH
Some people don't even know that there are anglerfish outside of the deep sea abyss. Anglerfish up here in the sunlight are either flat like the goosefish or they resemble sea sponges and rocks, what you might know as "frogfish."
Walking batfish, on the other hand, are a group of anglers that look exactly as weird in both the deep-sea and sunnier reefs.
I had to find more pictures of the walking batfish and it only got better
I've loved them since I saw them in books as a little baby but they are in NO media ever for some reason
Here's this from The Atlantic
if the current moment proves anything to you, let it be that most people are indeed good. most people care. most people value community and kindness and inclusion. those behind this administration are few and we are many, and they have worked hard to keep us from knowing it - but we wouldn’t be here as a species if we didn’t love each other.
The trained big government zombies all chortling and rolling their eyes at nazi comparisons evidently didn't listen to a single history lesson or they went to a school with only those abridged texas history books, because the nazi movement and in fact every tyrannical empire of the modern world went precisely through the stage of "cracking down on illegal citizens" under exactly the same excuses of "keeping our own people safe" and "just enforcing our laws."
And there's NO case in which a country did this that *wasn't* tyrannical. There is no instance, anywhere in our history, in any nation, of a government hunting people down on its own soil for paperwork infractions that actually solved or even slightly improved any problem it was claimed to address.
This is not hyperbole. An "illegal alien crackdown" has never had benefits worth even just the money it cost, not ever not once, let alone the fact that such a course of action has never not ever not once managed to only persecute "bad people." I'm not even talking about the margin of error or inevitability that "some" innocent people get "mistakenly" arrested, I mean this type of movement has destroyed more good people than violent people EVERY time, always, invariably.
It has never been done and can't be done. There has never been a benevolent, beneficial justifiable example of a nation's leaders trying to cull the population based on "legal citizenry." Every government that claims to have done it and seen improvements to crime rate or the economy is just plainly lying about that, and it's stupidly easy to just check. Like it's not even an actually good lie or even a propaganda campaign, they just ruin a bunch of lives and say it was good and that's it. They get away with it because their supporters don't care if there's a good reason or a payoff anyway, they just wanted to see fewer "foreigners" at the supermarket. That is the benefit in their eyes and any other repercussions are worth it to them.
Average bug guide
Voting did matter. Even the worst democrat or in all honesty the next worst republican was not going to do all this exact same crazy shit. Voting cannot fix a broken system but if the system asks you to weigh in on how much more broken it wants to get, you can tell it "no, not that far please" instead of effectively "I don't care, go hog fucking wild"
So please vote in the midterms, for the least evil options on the ballots, instead of telling them you just don't mind who they put in charge of whatever the hell they want.
These gentle, 400-pound giants are splashing back from the brink of extinction.
Green sea turtles have been an iconic endangered species since the 1980s, mostly due to bycatch in fishing nets and taking adults and eggs for food. I have core childhood memories of watching Steve Irwin talk about sea turtle conservation in front of a beach full of nesting green sea turtles.
After 45 years of conservation efforts, their population now meets the IUCN criteria for Least Concern rather than Endangered.
For a species with such a slow life history (it takes green sea turtles decades to reach sexual maturity) and a nearly global population, this is a Really Big Deal. This is the kind of long term conservation victory that many of the amazing humans who started working on green sea turtle conservation back in the 80s didn't live to see.
Just because something isn't fixed right away doesn't mean it won't ever be fixed. Just because the work is slow doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
Here’s your present
Like... If you have regret and sadness about doing something don't fucking do it, you bunch of turds
The problem is that they can't afford to. The Supreme Court ruling means that JK Rowling can single-handedly force these organisations into bankruptcy if they don't fold to her wishes, especially as she can afford really, really expensive lawyers and then, if she wins, get the organisations charged with paying her costs. Up until this year, this was a lower risk, because the gender criticals rarely won their cases and had to crowdfund their own legal fees. The Supreme Court has changed that.
Amazon, Warner Brothers and the Harry Potter fandom at large have successfully crowdfunded the campaign to exclude trans women from public life in the UK.
So like, a government is making these kinds of personal "moral" social decisions, purely emotion-driven cultural choices, for non-government entities who do not share those ideas, and a singular wealthy asshole was able to just up and fucking...buy that. A rich person can pay a government to police things that just make them personally uncomfortable.
A thing that pisses me off about this is that the people who applaud it the most are often "don't tread on me" libertarians, "small government" conservatives, "hands off my womb" feminist liberals, people whose entire CLAIMED ethos is supposed to be against exactly this level of government interference.
If other people's gender ideas can make you uncomfortable, I know I can't change your mind about that. But if you root for the ability of a fucking celebrity to team up with their state and encode that personal discomfort into national policy, you are 100% in favor of big brother control freak government power and need to stop pretending otherwise. Your alleged aversion to that should have been for everybody, regardless of whether they make you feel weird.
I mean, god, this is what we were saying last year. Speech and language decay due to cognitive decline ignited by dementia does not look like someone giving a coherent, substantive speech on politics but stumbling over a couple words. The content of someone’s speech being coherent, but the delivery occasionally getting jumbled is perfectly in line with speech impediments, which everyone knows Joe Biden has had his entire life. We tried to tell people how ableist it was to look at normal manifestations of a speech impediment and go “lulz braindead!!!!” but no one cared.
As it’s been stated endlessly by liberals, Trump is a babbling mess at this point, and he absolutely was on the campaign trail, too. The content of his speeches often makes no sense, not simply because he’s a moron who can’t answer simple questions but because his answers dissolve into babbling about whatever topic his brain lands on in gradually syntactically-simplified utterances…which is actually a sign of language ability eroding due to cognitive decline. But the media has been dedicated to sanewashing him for 10 years. Like I said the other day, if they really thought Biden was unfit for office, they’d be treating Trump’s babbling (combined with his falling asleep in public, secret MRI scans, and mysterious constantly-bruised hand) as a code red scandal, but their behavior makes a lot more sense if you consider that they knew they were lying about Biden to ratfuck him out of the White House to get Daddy Trump back, and they’ve just been covering their own asses for the past year, similar to how they never took responsibility for the “EmAiLS” scandal that enabled Trump in 2016
@bucksboobs The man has a FUCKING STUTTER and has had it his whole life!!!!
Sorry but as a fellow stutterer it’s like… to have a decline you have to decline from baseline and if he stutters that IS baseline!!!!
Right, and that’s what people were trying to say last year. Biden really doesn’t sound different now than he did during the Obama years. He’s quieter and moves slower because he’s older, but he’s been stuttering and making “gaffes” his entire life. That’s his baseline. People either actively lied about that or they never actually watched the news enough to know that’s what Biden has always sounded like
@ulyssessimpsongrant Literally being gaslit by the media in the most ableist way 💀. I feel bad for anyone with speech impediments who looked at Biden (a man with a speech impediment who managed to attain the highest office in the US, a role where public speaking as a cornerstone, and that after a long career in the senate) as a kind of representation and then saw how the media has been treating him.
Does anyone else remember that clip of Biden talking to that young boy with a stutter, relating to his struggles and saying he knew talking on the phone is difficult, and I think the boy was actually invited to speak at some Democratic event later? It’s been years so I can’t remember the details, but…I said it last year and perhaps my mutual in the previous response could relate, but as someone with a childhood speech impediment that comes creeping back sometimes, it was/is really terrible to sit there and watch people like “lulz this fucking drooling braindead dementia patient” all because Biden does something that you do. I don’t stutter, but I know what it’s like when the words are right there in your brain and the muscles in your mouth just don’t cooperate. Childhood speech therapy helped a lot, but being stressed or tired can bring out a speech impediment, which also explains why Biden struggled the night of the debate, when he was exhausted and sick.
And I still remember standing there just earlier this year while my liberal coworkers laughed about Biden having dementia, and I felt like asking, “So do you think I have brain damage because I need to stop and restart my sentences sometimes?”
2024 really was this societal-wide gaslighting event, where anyone who knows anything about speech impediments and dementia and Alzheimer’s were like “??? What are you talking about???” But it feels like too many people in 2024 were dedicated to being as awful as possible, too invested in doubling down on grievances and alternative versions of reality, and it led us to where we are now.
And if you go on twitter today, what do we see?
The top fucking headline in the algorithm, despite everything Trump is doing and his own incoherence.
I would not be surprised if this entire ratfucking saga discouraged some people with speech impediments to pursue a career with any kind of public speaking.
I might be wrong on this: I think it actually is significant to not solely focus on but note how bad that essay is, because 1) it would pass no evaluation in any context and 2) because the TA was extremely generous towards it. She did everything right, every single thing right in responding to a student who was clearly expressing that in their ideal world she would not exist. She shoved all of that down, responded strictly properly by rubric, and was still sold out by her institution, what should have been her class solidarities, even though she held to exactly what the people who vilify her insist she is incapable of: engaging, “academic neutrality”, etc. She did it, as is extremely usual. They didn’t care. They were ranging for her and they’re goddamn hypocrites. People I think should know that; at least for her.
For folks who may not know what this is in reference to;
A University of Oklahoma instructor has been placed on leave after a student complained about receiving a failing grade on a paper
So I reblogged this once already so I could more easily read and respond to it on my computer (typing on a full keyboard is way easier than on a fucking phone).
This is genuinely one of the most infuriating things I've read about recently. This girl just straight up DIDN'T DO THE ASSIGNMENT. Then complained about discrimination because the person grading it was trans.
She got a ZERO because she didn't do the assignment. She didn't even properly CITE her source, which was the bible. There is absolutely a proper way to cite the bible, btw. And she didn't do it.
This was the assignment, btw:
She did not do almost ANYTHING this assignment required. She deserved that zero.
this was the TA's reaction, btw:
"Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs, but instead I am deducting point for you posting a reaction paper that does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive. "While you are entitled to your own personal beliefs, there is an appropriate time or place to implement them in your reflections. I encourage all students to question or challenge the course material with other empirical findings or testable hypotheses, but using your own personal beliefs to argue against the findings of not only this article, but the findings of countless articles across psychology, biology, sociology, etc. is not best practice. "You argue that abiding by normative gender roles is beneficial (it is perfectly fine to believe this), but to then say that everyone should act the same, while also saying that people aren't pressured into gendered expectations is contradictory, especially since your arguments reflect a religious pressure to act in gender-stereotypical ways. You can say that strict gender norms don't create gender stereotypes, but that isn't true by definition of what a stereotype is. Please not that acknowledging gender stereotypes does not immediately denote a negative connotation, a nuance this article discusses. "Additionally, to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population. You are entitled to your own beliefs, but this isn't a vague narrative of "society pushes lies," but instead the result of countless years developing psychological and scientific evidence for these claims and directly interacting with the communities involved. You may personally disagree with this, but that doesn't change the fact that every major psychological, medical, pediatric, and psychiatric association in the United States acknowledges that, biologically and psychologically, sex and gender is neither binary nor fixed. "I implore you apply some more perspective and empathy in your work. If you personally disagree with the findings, then by all means share your criticisms, but make sure to do so in a way that is appropriate and using the methodology of empirical psychology, as aligned with the learning goals in this class. If you have any additional questions or concerns about this or would like some additional educational resources, I would be happy to discuss this further and provide you with them."
(all typos are mine, I had to type it out from screenshots in this article, which ALSO CONTAINS THE WHOLE ESSAY SHE WROTE)
Can we talk about how PERFECT this response is? This TA did their due diligence when grading this paper. The essay? It was hot garbage. I read the whole thing.
The other instructor for this course AGREED WITH THE TA!
"Samantha, I am the other instructor for this course, and I have also take the time to read your paper. I concur with [redacted] on the grade you received. This paper should not be considered as a completion of the assignment. "Everyone has different ways in which they see the world, but in an academic course such as this you are being asked to support your ideas with empirical evidence and higher-level reasoning. "I find it concerning that you state at the beginning of your paper that you do not think bullying ("teasing") is a bad thing. In addition, your paper directly and harshly criticizes your peers and their opinions, which are just as valuable as yours. Disagreeing with others is fine, but there is a respectful way to go about it. That goes for discussion posts as well as reaction papers. "Please employ more thoughtfulness in your future assignment."
There is genuinely no reason, at all, for this TA to be placed on leave. The TA was just doing their goddamned job.
As someone who had to write all kinds of essays about all kinds of things in high school (and in college, but that's somehow less relevant to this). I was able to write about being pro-gay marriage (before it was legalized in the US), being pro-abortion and being LGBTQIA+ AT A CATHOLIC SCHOOL. And I still managed to get As. Do you want to know how? I used real sources and cited them. I actually followed the assignment while still getting my point across.
It is absolutely possible to write essays disagreeing with the premise without completely flouting the assignment. I promise you it's possible.
I could vent about this for HOURS. That's how much it pisses me off.
Based on the essay itself, this genuinely feels like the student is such a bigot that she doesn't want a trans teacher and is using a RIGHTFUL zero to try and get that TA fired. She is claiming discrimination while actively discriminating against the TA.
We need to stop ignoring the obvious: this was a setup.
The essay is intentionally bad. You cannot write an essay that bad unintentionally, and even if you could, you would not then cry discriminating for being part of the biggest religious group in the US.
This woman saw that she had a trans woman in front of her and decided to try and ruin that trans woman's life to kickstart her own career in the reactionary talk show and podcast circuit. She already had an appearance on Fox, iirc.
This was planned, and what she wanted, and her victim did nothing wrong and was STILL placed on leave simply for happening to be trans. Since when are people just placed on leave when someone challenges a paper worth 3% of the final grade, especially when it is a paper so clearly intentionally written to be offensive, and to be failed? She was abandoned by her University, so so this fucking vulture can make her name for robbing a trans woman's life.
The student responsible for this originally "broke the story" through notable corpse Charlie Kirk's TP USA, and now TP USA is already promoting events where she will be speaking. This is was literally all a publicity stunt where the worst people on earth took advantage of the fact that everyone in power is a coward who would much rather destroy the life of a trans woman than stand up for her
