@th3saltyac3 - Tumblr Blog

Listen to me. Listen very carefully:

They are trying to wear you out.

They are trying to wear you out, and they own most major social media now, along with many major media outlets. The disinformation machine is cranking along. You are going to have to slow the fuck down and read things before you help them wear out other people, too.

So you just saw a post about a real scary bill, hunh? Republicans want to make it a capital offense to pet dogs and repeal The Sky Is Blue Act of 1793, declaring the new official color of the sky to be squant? Damn, that sounds scary.

Let's go look up this fictitious "Make The Sky Squant Again Act" on GovTracker* & on the official legislative tracker on congress.gov!

Tracking legislation and votes in the United States Congress.

U.S. Congress legislation, Congressional Record debates, Members of Congress, legislative process educational resources presented by the Lib

Well, let's see... GovTracker estimates it has a 1% chance of even getting out of committee and a 0% chance of being enacted, while congress.gov says this bill has 2 cosponsors who have been in the House and combined total of less than a month. The bill doesn't have any actual text, and it was referred to 5 different committees.

That fictitious bill and a hundred others like it are quite literally not worth your time, and more than that, continuing to wring your hands about it and tell other people about the scary scary squant sky bill only does their work for them. It scares people, it makes them spend time and energy on it, and it wears them out. It is a legislative Gish Gallop, meant to throw so many things at people that we can't keep up.

Even calling or messaging your Rep in this case means their staffer has to waste time responding to you and letting you know that Representative Buttzonheads definitely won't support making petting dogs a capital offense, a thing that will never, ever happen regardless.

Staying engaged in this environment is going to require protecting your heart and protecting your energy, yes, but also protecting the energy of others. This is why WWII propaganda posters also included ones taking people to task for spreading panicky rumors and undermining morale.

Do you know why most observant Jews don't eat chicken and dairy together, even though the ban is on red meat and dairy together bc you're not supposed to cook the calf in the milk of its mother?** It's not because we think that chicken might secretly lactate or Just Because. It's because the rabbis decided that if I'm sitting out in public and eating turkey and cheese together, someone might glance at the turkey and mistake it for red meat and think, "oh, well, I know that Spider is a good Jew, there must have been a change, or maybe I can just justify it to myself that if Spider does it, it must be permissible to bend the rules just that much." And I would then be accidentally leading my fellow Jew astray. We are responsible for being even more careful for the sake of others than we are for ourselves.

It's the same principle here. We need to really be careful about the information we are spreading and check things past reading a news site. Is it true? Is it relevant? Is it meaningful? Is the news site one I recognize? Can I find meaningful independent corroboration on another site, which is to say, if I find an article about it on a second site, is it just quoting or rephrasing this site?

Yeah, that is a lot. But that's how we keep them from using us to lead our fellows astray.

*GovTracker is an independent site. They explain their methodology in their About section.

**I cannot say enough how I am not at this time interested in going on a Jewish Side Quest About Dietary Laws on this post. Usually, I love it, but hold off this time, please, y'all. Let's stay on target this once.

darker-than-disco

I'm pretty sure that's the main reason for most of Trump's Executive Orders on day 1. A lot of them are unenforceable, others are blatantly illegal or even unconstitutional, but people will be distracted in the courts trying to shut them down, and it's splitting everyone's focus away from the few that are genuinely dangerous. Splitting people's focus is the one thing that Trump is genuinely good at, distracting the public while the Republicans are doing more subtle awful things in the background.

vaspider

Yeah. Though taking those apart in court is more necessary than dealing with these nothingburger bills.

belovedbright

Relatedly, if you want to keep up with everything, because that’s responsible, but it’s crushing because it’s horrific?

Try “What the Fuck Just Happened Today?”

Your essential guide to the shock and awe in national politics. A sane, once-a-day newsletter helping normal people make sense of the news.

It’s a news digest with sources. You can stay informed without completely losing your mind.

Also, our legacy media have proven to be cowards at best & complicit at worst. As a librarian, while I will consider some articles on some topics from CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc., they’ve sadly shown we cannot trust them. This is the problem with 1. Never paying for news, and 2. Monopolies

So where do you look? (And support!)

1. The Guardian. Independent news that’s not behind a paywall & is in the UK. They’re more trustworthy while still being traditional.

2. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom. Their work has won Pulitzer Prizes.

Where else?

1. Seth Abramson is an independent journalist (among other things). He’s done deep dives into both Trump, Musk, and Jan6. Those deep dives were extensive “meta journalism,” pulling on many fragmented sources to get to a full picture.

2. Mother Jones : Another nonprofit news organization. Traditionally a bit leftist for sure, but fact-based. they’ll be the counterbalance to the propaganda we’re facing.

3. Any other non-US news sources that are fairly reputable. Getting perspectives from outside of our country will be hugely beneficial in the coming years.

vaspider

These are good resources! I also like 404 Media for tech news and Assigned Media & Erin Reed for trans news. Jessica Valenti's "Abortion, Every Day" is a good source for reproductive health care news, too.

nihilisticvaginas

I really love the Citations Needed podcast! They're a completely ad free leftist media analysis podcast. They tend to take what's in the news currently or broad political trends and contextualize it in historical precedent. They're asking things like "Where have we seen this type scaremongering before and who perpetuated it against who? What has this type of rhetoric this newspaper is promoting led to in the past? Who is this ultimately harming and befitting?" LOTS of really helpful insights, and they always bring experts on to discuss the topics more in depth.

vaspider

Good deal! I'm gonna include the rest of the links from above bc Tumblr stripped them out, annoyingly.

404 Media is a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox

Founded by Evan Urquhart, Assigned Media is a news site dedicated to daily coverage of anti-trans propaganda and its effects.

News and discussion on trans legislation and life. Click to read Erin In The Morning, by Erin Reed, a Substack publication with tens of thou

the-future-is-chrome

repeat after me. humans are not inherently evil humans are not like a virus on this earth humans do not “deserve” to go extinct or anything like that. we are living breathing animals that deserve space just like every other creature on this planet. there’s just a tiny amount of us that have a fuck ton of money and power and they really suck

lgbtlaughs

ACT UP, 1990

mytearsrricochet

json-derulo

I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.

"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!

The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.

Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup

lliveonthesunn

i get why people don't believe in marriage as a social construct but legally it is the best and easiest way to say "this is who i trust to take care of me when i can't take care of myself" and i'm so glad gay people fought for that right bc when shit gets scary at least i know im in good hands

darlingofdots

This is how I convinced my conservative grandma that the gays do also need marriage, actually. My grandad died when I was 4 and I asked her to imagine not being allowed to see him or make decisions for him or be entitled to an inheritance and she got very quiet and conceded the point. Marriage doesn't intrinsically mean anything but as a legal framework it is really, really important

cptapathy

I've had a couple of 10k posts so please help to spread this for me

Last year we broke the record for an LGBT+ mass lobby of Parliament. Will you help us break it again? Join us on 25th June 2026 to demand be

On the 25th of June people in the UK will be attending parliament to lobby their MPs asking them to challenge the new transphobic EHRC guidance.

The new guidance bans trans people from all toilets. Trans people will be excluded from their genders toilets by virtue of being trans, trans people will be banned from their AGAB's toilets by virtue of not looking like their AGAB.

Trans people are being pushed out of existence. Our MPs have an opportunity to oppose this becoming law, but they won't do it unless they are scared of the electorate kicking them out of office.

We need to show up in force, we need to show them that passing these laws and the upcoming section 28 2.0 will alienate the voters and they will lose their seat.

Please spread this, please come, please write to you MP.

Here is a link to a letter writing guide

The EHRC's new guidance marks a dangerous step backwards for Trans+ rights in the UK. Far from protecting equality, it risks giving cover to

Last year we lobbied against the ruling, and we had the largest public lobby in queer history, larger than the lobby during the AIDs crisis. Join me in the streets as we fight for our rights and let's make this the largest lobby in all of history.

byjove

whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.

and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.

lyricwritesprose

My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.

mutedtempest

I think about this a lot.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.

hyperactivehedgehog

Diabetes is one of these illnesses that really throws medical history into perspective. It's so common, everyone knows someone who has it, people live pretty normal lives with it. And yet, a hundred years ago, it was an instant death sentence. And then we were able to treat people with insulin and yet - it was extremely disabling. The insulin was extracted from animal pancreas had severe side effects, even with how similar the hormones are, there is always an averse reaction to proteins from foreign species, especially during long-term treatment. Injections had to be given every few hours, at-home-tests were only available from the 70s onwards. Insulin pumps entered the market in the 80s. Genetically produced insulin - humanized insulin - was first available in the US in 1982, in many countries only around the year 2000.

In 1930, having diabetes type I would basically mean being hospital bound, being woken every few hours for regular injections.

In 1965, you'd be able to live at home and get by with a very strict diet and a few timed injections. You'd struggle with chronical side effects. Having children wasn't done - passing on your genes would be immoral, and it might not even be legal for you to marry.

In the year 2000, you'd have a device clipped to your belt that would measure your blood sugar and distribute insulin, you only need to change the needle a few times a day. You might even be allowed to join in P.E. class

In 2025, you stick on two patches that do the same thing. They're synchronized through your phone.

That wasn't fate. It's not natural development that made diabetes a common chronic illness. It was hundreds of people who cared. It was the people who created the keto diet. It was the people who came up with tests. The ones who went through different species, trying to figure out the closest analogon to human insulin. It was the people who fought in court to get genetically produced insulin approved for medical use. It was people who looked at a rare, incurable disease and said "but what if it wasn't?"

prismatic-bell

Back in the 1960s, my dad was one of the first 100 successful open-heart surgeries in the world. He needed it to fix a hole in his heart, a condition that up until then was basically "take him home and make him comfortable."

He's lived long enough that three of his grandkids have been born with the same condition, and he's been there to assist with the recovery after the laparoscopic version of the same surgery he had.

He has a scar from collarbone to waist that's as thick as my finger--thicker, in some places. My nieces and nephews have scars so tiny you could mistake them for being from a particularly bad cat scratch. And their recovery was measured in weeks, instead of months.

Medicine has improved so much, so fast, that he's lived to see the research done on him save his grandchildren.

vaspider

Every time I inject my insulin, I think about the doctors that developed it, and every dog that died in that process.

There were a lot of them. Yes, it gets to me every time. I don't die in agony because of determined scientists and some unspeakably good dogs.

cheezeknif

Bird painting

status-quo-hater

I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.

He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense

status-quo-hater

Y'know I'm so glad someone reminded me of this. Because this was also discussed.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

He brought up people consensually hurting each other, didn't go for one of the obvious answers like boxing or body mods or something, no he went STRAIGHT TO BDSM and he DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE ACRONYM

naps-and-nonsense

The classic experiences of figuring out you're asexual include:

1) "There's something wrong with me."

2) "There's something wrong with everybody else."

3) "There's something wrong with me but thank God."

4) "Everybody experiences things differently." (There's something wrong with everybody else.)

vacuously-true

It is extremely rare that I get unintentionally rickrolled. It is extremely common that I look at a link and think to myself, that's a rickroll, and I click on it. Then I get to enjoy the satisfaction of being correct, as well as the entirety of Never Gonna Give You Up. That shit is a banger. If someone offers me a link directly to that song you think I'm not gonna take it? No. You know the rules and so do I. It's Astley time.

ravenlynclemens

calvin and hobbes

rocktopussy

pomme-poire-peche

"You misspelled Weltanschauung" is one of the funniest punchlines I've ever encountered.

blessedbycoyotes

werothegreat

one of my faves

dittoexodus

theshitpostcalligrapher

req'd by @firiona

okay i was given context for this

text: Don't talk to me until I've finished my morning bean

firiona

Bonus actual mug for this double entendre

sokka-with-his-hair-down-2

“the parallels between Zuko and Sokka-” hey HEY. I am grabbing you. The parallels between Katara and Azula. Both the younger, gifted bender. Each one being the inverse of the other: a living, breathing what if. Katara being horrified at what her bending can do when pushed to its limits vs Azula always trying to push hers further. Katara instinctively trusting everyone so easily, even though it burns her sometimes, and Azula saying trust is for fools, fear is the only reliable way but still losing everyone she cares about in the end. Katara yelling at her dad and being hugged in return vs Azula doing everything possible to please her father still being harshly reprimanded, so you know exactly why they both turned out the way that they did. Katara’s trauma being connected to losing a mother vs Azula’s being connected to having a mother. Katara ultimately being the one to take down Azula and standing over her, staring pitifully because that’s who she could have been, in another life. is this thing on

godblessthesickos

World historical loser

drwiltz-official

exxos-von-steamboldt

delicatefury

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

beardedmrbean

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

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