#but we can fucking do something

[messengerhermes]

The US Supreme Court Shit is Real Bad Y'all

Okay

Okay look

I know I keep harping on this with like every US Supreme Court update post I reblog but please. Please.

I need y'all to understand this shit's real fucking bad.

Right now our tally in terms of SC rulings is at:

-Dismantles the precedent that protects indigenous sovereignty (which paves the way to destroy the protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act) (Done on June 29, 2022) Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta

Repealing of Roe v Wade (which has led to 13 states enacting trigger bans on abortion, two of which--Louisiana and Kentucky, are being held back by the courts) (Done June 24, 2022) Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

Severely limiting the Miranda rights by saying that a police officer cannot be sued if they fail to read someone their Miranda rights (ie "you have the right to remain silent") and then uses information that person shares against them in court (Done on June 23, 2022)

Overturned the precedent of separation of church and state in Kennedy v Bremerton School District by ruling in favor of a coach who led a Christian prayer on the football field (Done on June 27, 2022)

Restricted the EPA's power to limit carbon emissions from power plants. (Done on June 30, 2022) West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency

Ruled that people can carry handguns outside the home, without special reason. (Done June 23, 2022) New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen.

Ruled that private religious schools cannot be barred from accessing public funding, further damaging separation of Church and State (Done June 23, 2022) Carson v. Makin

Ruled that those who were detained and tortured in Guantanamo Bay do not have the right to ask details about their torture from the agents that committed the acts, or from the US Government (Done March 3, 2022) United States v. Zubaydah

The Conservative Bloc on the Supreme Court currently holds an egregious amount of power, and is using that power to rapidly dismantle a lot of "settled law" AKA shit that has longstanding precedents from prior court decisions. This behavior is generally considered a dick move in terms of legal shit, but is also a massive red flag. I'm particularly wigged out because 7 of these 8 decisions have happened this month. While it isn't unheard of for the court to pass a lot of rulings in a short time, the extreme nature of these rulings and the hard line most of them have between conservative and liberal justices indicates a rapid grab for power here. Congress can do a number of things around this:

Suck the power out of these upturnings by codifying shit like Roe v Wade into law.

Expanding the Supreme Court (which has been done before) to balance the current lopsidedness of the court.

Impeach the four Supreme Court justices who've lied during their consideration hearings.

Pull an Abraham Lincoln and refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the court rulings

This isn't a complete list, but one meant to point out that while a branch of federal government is off the fucking rails, that does not mean there is nothing to be done--or that we should accept apathy from our representatives. Shit to do:

Call/email your representatives demanding they do all or one of the above and stop asking your ass for money

Write a letter to the editor of a local paper publicly calling your representative to do shit since that's what their job is

Plug into mutual aid networks, around abortion, bail funds, and legal aid among the basic needs. The government's not going to save us, but community safety nets are in place.

Get a VPN and use it. Check out digital security and what it means when apps track your data.

Figure out where you might fit into activism. Movement work isn't just protests. It's child care, it's hotline networks and food programs, and clothing drives. It's support groups.

Get your oxygen mask on first. If your basic needs are not being met, if you aren't getting time for rest and pleasure and care then you're not going to be able to show up for long haul sustained work. Do what you need to stabilize and give yourself time before jumping into shit.

This is in no way a complete list, instead it's meant to be something you can grab onto if like me you're reeling with the barrage of frightening rulings and rapid escalation from the US government. All is not lost. The US has been a fascist mess invested in the exploitation of vulnerable people for far longer than this (you know, since it's founding, really). But there is power in community and grassroots movements have been working for decades to catch people who fall through the cracks of government support systems. Find them. Be each other's hope in the storm.

[inkskinned]

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

[latenightsundayblues]

Fucking love the final flashback montage in saw VI because the way they edited it makes it look like hoffman is pissing directly on an unconscious erickson's bald head

Ive been cry laugghing for five fucking minutes

[egophiliac]

starting off with an amuse-bouche of some of my initial favorite bits! y'all, this update was WILD.

[astrowarr]

grian, etho, and cleo are just....

sometimes love is three damaged people knee deep in lifetimes worth of loss and grief, painting their walls green together. maybe love is those three people thinking over a dinner table, "you wouldn't die for me, and there's no greater solace than that."

love, actually, goes like this. let me look at all the damage you've done, both now and before, and let me raise you this: every wound you have inflicted, i too have exacted. all the havoc you have wreaked sits in a mirror with all the desolation i will soon impose. because if all six of our hands are stained bone-deep with blood, and there are no others to compare, doesn't that make them just hands?

[sandinthepipes]

The fact that I can wholeheartedly enjoy ofmd and good omens and appreciate the angst because I KNOW there will be a happy ending.

See, I’ve never had that. None of us queer folks have ever had that.

[uncanny-tranny]

I think it would really benefit people to internalize that mental illnesses are often chronic and not acute. Some of us will never be able to jump the hurdle of managing illness, much less sustaining a sense of normalcy. Many of us will never "recover," will never manage symptoms, will never even come close to appearing normal - and this is for any condition, even the ones labeled as "simple" disorders or "easy-to-manage" disorders.

It isn't a failure if you cannot manage your symptoms. It isn't a moral failure, and you aren't an awful person. You are human. There's only so much you can do before recognizing that you cannot lift the world. Give yourself the space to be ill because, functionally, you are.

[telesilla]

Not gonna go out on this limb on a 25k post, but maybe it’s okay that kids today don’t know as much about using an actual computer as we do/did? Is it useful knowledge? Of course it is. So is using a sewing machine or being able to rebuild your VW with a copy of that one book every VW driver used to have. That’s not the right question—most practical knowledge is useful after all. The question should be “is it relevant to the way people live right now.” “How to Keep Your VW Alive” is a timeless fucking classic; my ex and I kept our copy long after he sold his VW. But I’m not buying a copy now because it won’t exactly help me keep my VW ID4 on the road.

And it’s funny, because I tend to read along with those posts and nod my head, because back in my day we HAD to know all that computer stuff. And then for some reason today, I remembered a conversation my mom and I had with my grandma in the mid 70s when I was a teenager. Grandma made my mom’s wedding dress. She worked at a department store doing alterations on foundation wear, which if you look at 1950s foundation wear, you’ll realize was both necessary and difficult. So she was shocked when I said most of my friends didn’t know their way around a sewing machine. “But how do you make sure your clothes fit?!” Well, Grandma, people don’t wear heavy foundation wear any more and clothes don’t need to be as tailored as they did back in the day—it’s 1975 and the only alterations I need to do is hemming my flares so they just touch the floor when I’m wearing platforms.

Now you can back up and look at the broader picture, the one that says, but your car should be repairable by you as long as you have clear instructions, and you should be able to alter your clothes or make your own, and yes, you should know how to organize the files on the desktop of your laptop. But the fact that for the most part it’s become easier and easier to just not do those things (if they can be done at all) isn’t exactly the fault of Kids Today. And it’s certainly not meeting them where they are or even trying to understand why they feel they don’t need that knowledge if, instead of looking at why they don’t have it and maybe even don’t need it, you just decry their lack of the Deep Wisdom.

[thisismisogynoir]

I love it when women hate men. I love it when women are allowed to vent to each other about how horrible and creepy men are. I love it when women form friendships with and prioritize each other over relationships with men(whether they're attracted to them or not). I love it when women put men dni in their bios and on their nude photos and on posts on their blogs. I love it when women refuse to mollycoddle and accommodate entitled male feelings with "but this doesn't mean I hate all men, I know a few men who are great, I love my father/sons/brothers/uncles/male cousins/guy friends" I love it when women complain about men WITHOUT "not all men" being a disclaimer. I love it when women avoid socializing with/refuse to be around/befriend/get close to men because they know men can't be trusted. I love it when women make "kill all men" jokes. I love it when women offer absolutely no concern or care for men's feelings and if their misandry offends men whatsoever because why should we, men are the oppressor class who have raped and killed and abused us and kept us as subjugated as second-class citizens for millennia, they regularly mistreat us and the women in their own marginalized communities still every single day and make this world so much harder and more awful for us to be in, and if we choose to hate them and not spare them any sympathy then so be it, and I don't just mean "men as a class" either, you can be a woman who doesn't want to have anything to do with any man on an individual basis and completely cuts off men from her personal life too and ykw I will love and fucking support you in that because men deserve absolutely NOTHING from us. If they're so tough and strong then they can handle it just like they can handle being lonely. If you are a woman who hates men, ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A LESBIAN AND/OR A TRANS WOMAN, then just know that I love you. I love you, I support you, and you are safe here.

[lululeighsworld]

it was literally their moment and they just let us watch

(if you need me i'll be marinating in this for the foreseeable future)

[thronealigned]

no it's fine this mind flayer is totally my friend and 100% honest with me all the time it's ok it likes me everything's so normal

[blueskittlesart]

deeply refreshing to see someone critical of Swift who also like, genuinely likes her. Like i'm neutral to positive on her, but the online discourse has been absolutely rancid. flipping between "Taylor Swift has never done anything wrong ever and she's a fucking genius" and "Taylor Swift is the worst lyricist of all time and also a bad person" is exhausting, so thank you for like. nuance or something lmao

not to make it serious for a sec but i genuinely think that being able to like things that are bad is really important. like I think that it's an important skill to be able to look at something and see what you personally enjoy about it and then take a step back and acknowledge that objectively it's flawed. and to also be able to acknowledge that liking something isn't necessarily an identity or a moral stance. and i think that fandom space in general could really benefit from more people taking the time to learn how to do that. it's okay to like things that are bad

[inkskinned]

so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.

first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.

it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.

and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.

you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.

and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.

your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.

in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.

in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.

so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.

you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.

once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.

and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"

you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?

hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!

you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.

we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?

[puppyeared]

Why are ppl scared to call it what it is and say we’re still going thru covid on top of seasonal illness. Like. That’s pretty important right. I was watching the news and they were like oh yeah we have an unprecedented number of flu cases “as well as other sicknesses” without actually saying Covid. No announcement abt vaccinations or masking or anything. Also if I hear someone joking abt “war flashbacks” for mentioning covid I fucking hate u

[procrastinationaccount]

Every part of HtN is the best part to reread With Context. But that moment at the very beginning of the book when she almost gets smothered, Gideon's "Good. Good." when she gets her attacker off of her has me curling into a ball on the floor. It just feels weighty to me. She's so fucking worried about her and she's not even trying to to mask it anymore.

[shadowtraveled]

“will you do it? will you do it? i will help you.” this is it for me