“When the new year begins next week, President Trump will have an acting chief of staff, an acting secretary of defense, an acting attorney general, an acting EPA administrator, no interior secretary, and no ambassador to the United Nations. The officials originally in all those positions have either been fired or have quit in various measures of disgust or scandal. His former campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security adviser and personal lawyer have all pleaded guilty to crimes. His campaign, his transition, his foundation and his business are all under investigation. The United States’ allies are horrified at the chaos Trump has brought to our foreign policy. The stock market is experiencing wild swings as investors are gripped with fear over what might be coming and what Trump might do to make it worse — a situation alarming enough that the treasury secretary felt the need to call up the CEOs of major banks to assure them that everything is under control. And, oh yeah, the government is shut down. This, my friends, is exactly what we were afraid of when Trump somehow managed to get elected president two years ago. This is what we warned you about.”
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
“Your regulations are written in blood.”
These regulations were not written on a whim.
They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Please note the recalls etc. we’re already seeing with the current US government going after those regulations, and please see Doug Ford up here trying to weaken our water safety regulations again - the last time that happened, under another Conservative government, Walkerton happened and people died. Some died quickly, some lived for years with debilitating illnesses and then died.
merry christmas to everyone who didn’t get presents today because their family couldn’t afford it and merry christmas to everyone who couldn’t make it home for the holidays and merry christmas to everyone spending it alone i want you all to know that i hope you all have a great great end of the year and i love you all and even if your holidays weren’t how you pictured them i hope you still have a good rest of the holidays and year
Why do (esp white) men love having fights about politics where they change topics 6x to confuse you and then try and make you look dumb because you can’t jump between the points bc you’re too busy arguing the separate distinct points bc you thought that’s what the fight was about
“The Gish gallop allows a debater to hit their opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate. In practice, each point raised by the “Gish galloper” takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place,[4] which wastes the opponent’s time and can cast doubt about their debating ability in an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved.[5] …If one is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique can be countered somewhat by preempting and refuting their commonly used arguments before they have the chance.[7]“
Or sometimes it could help to point out that they’re doing it, though I suspect the kind of person who does this is the kind of person who responds to “Wow, you’re Gish galloping” with “ad hominem!”
THIS WILL AFFECT THE WAY EVERYONE USES THE INTERNET!
DO YOUR RESEARCH!
CALL/EMAIL YOUR MEPs!
KEEP THIS HORRIBLE LAW FROM GETTING PASSED!!!
Just fyi this will likely affect non-Europeans as well. It’s easier for a website like YouTube to just restrict ALL copyright instead of just sectioning off what they need to. They’ll probably let bigger YouTubers still operate, but small time content creators will be a thing of the past.
Does this look like it has fingers or toes? Hmm? Does it???
None of this is even considering that a fetus at seven weeks doesn’t have the right to violate the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy.
At 8 weeks:
You’re right that the tiny fetus is moving at this point, but plenty of single-cell organisms are capable of moving as well. We don’t throw fits about taking medicine to kill, say bacteria–a single celled organism, some of which have the capability of movement–when we get sick, now do we? But the rest is bullshit:
“Her hands are developing ridges where her fingers will be. However, her ankles, thighs, knees and toes are not yet distinct.”
How can something without proper hands be left or right-handed? Oh right, because this is mindless fear-mongering, outside of the realm of reality:
“Most children have a preference for using one hand or the other by the age of about 18 months, and are definitely right or left-handed by about the age of three.”
Notice how it says children, and not fetuses.
Oh, man, and I forgot to mention, at 8 weeks, it doesn’t have the right to violate the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy.
A FETUS NEVER HAS THE RIGHT TO VIOLATE A PREGNANT PERSON’S BODILY AUTONOMY!
This mindless fear-mongering only hurts pregnant people who seek to have an abortion for whatever reason they’d like, which is, scientifically speaking, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
Anyway, ultimately your decision about what to do with your body is literally up to no one but you. And trying to take that right away from people is gross. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.
-mod Aleksandr
The thing that’s so wonderfully baffling to me is that 90% of the prolife argument is built on just making up blatant lies like most conservative causes at least make an effort to have an argument but the prolife movement really out here just makin up shit
Is every middle-aged white lady completely psychotic… is it just in their blood…
Tell me white privilege doesn’t exist when you have a white, middle-aged woman purposely telling 911 dispatch that a POC was (falsely) hurting her–knowing that any law enforcement that came to the scene would take her side unless he hadn’t video recorded the whole damn event. White people know what they’re doing. They just don’t want to admit that privilege exists or else they wouldn’t ever be able to benefit/or directly use it…
