I was fired from my job for reasons related to my disabilities in October. I've been looking for a new job but no luck yet; 25% of my country is unemployed or underemployed. 50%+ of the queers I know locally.
My wife is in school and won't be working for months yet.
Our household had COVID in February and now my wife and I are both struggling with long COVID symptoms.
Then a plow smashed into my car and two others. Mine is totalled. Insurance is not even fully paying off the loan; I still owe $2,000 on a car that does not exist anymore.
I cannot get financing for a replacement car because I don't have a job. I don't have the money to buy a car outright.
Please, help a pair of queer, trans, active community members who are going through a lot 🙏
If you can't donate, please reblog/share around if you can. Thank you so much. ❤️
http://spot.fund/HelpUsGetMobileAgain
*spotfund is the easiest place to create beautiful and free online fundraisers. It takes just minutes to start raising money today.
today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
The website is actually a great read. The "distro", as it were, is a modified version of Debian where the only change is removing the "age" field from a database in systemd. The whole point is protesting the unjust law that protects no one and is unenforceable in practice.
no see the problem is BOTH people here should be allowed a testosterone prescription no questions asked.
if a cis woman needs T to alleviate sexual dysfunction then that's a valid treatment for a medical issue. "sexual kicks" is... certainly a way to describe a legitimate medical issue!!!! definitely no internalized sex-negativity here!!! (sarcasm)
I agree 100% that trans people have a RIGHT to HRT. HRT is life saving care for dysphoria and life changing for trans people who want HRT for their transitions.
but this framing to me feels the same as when people are like "why do junkies get free narcan when my insulin costs me $800???"
like. the problem is not the free narcan, your insulin should be free too.
Circular economy spans from residential communities to industrial sectors
Shanghai is moving from simple recycling towards operating a zero-waste circular economy. Household recycling is up to 45% due to mandatory sorting requirements and industrial recycling is nearing 98%. Recycled items include everything from aluminum to kitchen waste to industrial and medical waste.
Sewing "a little bit" is one of the most useful skills you can possibly have proportional to how cheap and easy it is to learn.
So many of the items in our daily lives are sew-able. A simple needle and thread changes the way you think. When an item breaks, you no longer think, "I guess I must buy a new one..." Instead, you think, "I guess I must fix it..."
How many of these everyday items rest for eternity in a landfill, because of a simple break that a needle and thread could have fixed? How many excess items were manufactured to make up for the forgetting of the humble needle and thread...?
a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"
then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric
you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them
in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"
"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions
but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery
so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!
a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
I was recently reading Odyssey, and I noticed how important hospitality and charity was there... Except it was the same trick as Christianity - using gods to make it transactional.
Gods would pretend to be beggars and would punish mortals if they weren't generous to them or would mistreat them.
Personally, I'm pretty sure vast majority of people are evil and completely devoid of humanity. I'm disabled and not fit for work and only recently managed to get benefits after figuring out a hidden way to do it and getting a private diagnosis.
When things were bad, I was trying to find help but, in my communities, almost nobody would help and out of those who helped almost nobody would help more than once. It's really eye-opening when one is in need.
Also, my disability benefits are like 1/2 of minimum wage despite that I have to pay spend more for medicines, the voters in my country want disabled people to either die or rot in abject poverty. So, obviously, my country is filled with evil inhumans.
Christianity is just a trick to make evil people think that helping others is in their self-interest. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." is just an updated version of gods pretending to be beggars trick.
People in reblogs invent dozens of copes, but let's be honest, most of them are probably a part of the problem. The fact that no fit for work disabled people get forced into abject poverty or left to die is an objective proof that vast majority of people are evil.
I'm also a disabled person who's physically unable to work right now. Incidentally.
Personally, the severity of my current medical situation is very likely temporary, for which I am very lucky. But I will never be able to work the vast majority of jobs without society-wide accessibility changes, and I will never again be able to work a 9-5 schedule in my life. My disability prevents it. For the past 5 years, I have been physically unable to work like 90+% of jobs. My life history is painfully full of medical neglect and abuse.
And I still disagree.
The fact that disabled people are treated like shit is for a lot of reasons, which imo does not include the idea that people are inherently evil, but DOES include that a fuck ton of the foundational medical, psychology, and disability researchers from the 1800s up to like the 1970s (generously) was literally done by eugenicists and literal Nazis
And the governments who got to pass laws were (and in painfuly many cases still are) (with varying degrees of secrecy) chock full of eugenicists and Nazis
Eugenicists and Nazis spent most of the past 200+ years telling literally everyone that disability is caused by disabled people's inherent "uncleanliness" and "moral deficiencies" and "their own fault" and "what they deserve" and "you can't hide an ugly soul on your face" and "a blight on humanity" and other horrific and violent lies, and then passed thousands and thousands of eugenics laws and policies that we have not yet entangled...
Is far, far more of the reason that disabled people are treated like shit than anything else, at least these days in Western culture, imho
And far more provable.
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated
millions in the quest for a co-called "Master Race," and IBM aided
And I think it's premature to attribute the lack of support and care for disabled people to human nature instead of Big Pharma, drug companies, medical lobbyists, insurance companies, capitalism, billionaires, eugenics lobbyists, and unchecked corporate greed.
You don't have to agree with me. You probably won't; frankly, a lot of people have very real reason to think humans being evil is the case. That's not something I am in denial about. It's something I am trying to dedicate my life to help fix
(far, far easier said than done)
All of that is true - and also, personally, I would really like to at least try getting rid of billionaires, Nazis in government and medicine
More and some source links below the cut.
And regardless of the truth of human nature, I am so sorry for what you have been through and that people have treated you like that. None of I'm saying at all changes the fact that that was unfair, and I'm sure often cruel, and completely fucking sucks. I hate that for you and I'm so sorry
While, I'm at it, the US Supreme Court decisions (specifically Clarence Thomas's) are literally currently being funded by the massive personal fortune of a billionaire Nazi.
Look. I haven't lived your life, or anyone else's life.
But it has genuinely been my experience that the reason the vast majority of society treats disabled people like shit is all the lawmakers and doctors and police officers and billionaires who are (with varying degrees of secrecy or the total lack of thereof) eugenicists and/or Nazis
Ultimately, you are the only one who has lived your life. You are the only person who has seen and knows what you have seen and know. There are absolutely many painfully, painfully valid reasons to look at the world right now and come to that conclusion. Some people have had to live through a truly, unspeakably horrific amount of shit, and a great many of those people are disabled (many of them actually as a result of various horrific shit)
All of that is true.
And also:
At least for me, I would really like to least try banning billionaires and de-Nazi-fying our governments (esp but absolutely not limited to the US government), and ending for-profit health insurance, first. I think that would really genuinely change the world, and I'd like to see what kind of world we could build in the aftermath before deciding that humanity as a whole is evil
Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think it's particularly likely - I'm actually also a trained professional factchecker, in my offline life, so I did not come to my own beliefs on this quickly or easily or lightly
And still -
I'd like to keep trying to find out, first, before coming to such a brutal conclusion
easy to miss that one of the reasons maternal mortality is diminished so extremely by modern medicine is that modern medicine makes it so much more possible to identify the pregnancies that will die and take you with them, or are otherwise unacceptably high risk. and then discontinue those ones safely, before it's too late.
thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.
except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.
like yeah one reason for that is we vaccinate everybody ffs.
Note: after the end of Roe v Wade in the US, the maternal mortality rate (and the infant mortality rate) are showing clear increases in the states with the strictest anti-abortion laws.
Forcing people to carry high risk or non viable pregnancies to term kills.
The energy-efficient desalination system produces fresh water without chemical additives and transforms leftover salts into useful materials
Desalination is the process of generating freshwater from brackish or saltwater, usually through the process of reverse osmosis. While this can be a very useful tool in water shortages, it also has some pretty huge drawbacks--reverse osmosis requires a lot of energy, requires chemical treatment of the water, and produces concentrated brine as a waste product which can be harmful to aquatic ecosystems.
Researchers have recently discovered a new way to perform desalination using solar energy, which doesn't require chemical inputs and collects waste salt instead of producing brine. Concentrating the waste salt in a solid form instead of brine means that it can later be processed to extract valuable minerals like lithium.
I was put here to love @rainbowwolfie - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
