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[takealookatyourlife]

[Image: Tweet by Emily Mullin (@EmilyLMullin) and tweet by Isobelle Winter (@IsobelleWinter), both about the dangers of Facebook’s new preventative health screening tool. Images have been modified for visual ease but information has not been changed.]

Something to know about Facebook’s new “screening tool,” and advice/info that can most certainly be used outside of this specific situation.

For spoonies, the biggest deal is how this data, if leaked, could affect you in professional and insurance spheres.

Here’s Emily’s full thread, which discusses the details of the tool, and here’s Isobelle’s full thread, which extrapolates on specific dangers.

In the end? It’s another data grab. Data is worth money; don’t give yours away, especially not to Facebook.

[takealookatyourlife]

[takealookatyourlife]

On this day, 4 June 1976 an 18 year-old Sikh schoolboy, Gurdip Singh Chaggarwas, was fatally stabbed in a racist attack outside the Dominion theatre in Southall, London. When one passerby asked a police officer who had been killed, he responded “just an Asian”. His murder triggered riots in the area, and prompted local Asian and black youths to form the Southall Youth Movement, which took the fight to racists in the streets. More info in this account of Asians’ struggles against racism in the UK: https://ift.tt/2qAgIYT For all of our our anniversaries, follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wrkclasshistory https://ift.tt/2JqWCgd

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CW: this post may contain images of elders who have died.

It's only 1 week until people will no longer be legally permitted to climb Uluru.

Shame that it took legal changes to get white Australians to comply with the wishes and decades of requests of the Yankunytjatjara, Yanangu and Pitjanjatjara people for whom the monolith is sacred and a spiritual ancestor.

The pins and climbing chains are to be removed after climbing closes October 28 2019.

I don't know the identities of the photograph subjects, except that they are elders of the Pitjanjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people.

Image credits: EPA

[takealookatyourlife]

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.

[takealookatyourlife]

Anika Moa

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 21 May 1980  

Ethnicity: English, Maori

Occupation: Musician, singer, presenter, activist

[takealookatyourlife]

Laverne Cox attends the 71st Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California (September 22, 2019)

[takealookatyourlife]

Wow. JVN spoke his truth about being abused by an older boy at his church, filling his emotional void with junk food and then drugs (meth and coke) and sex, selling his body to make money cuz he was too embarrassed to ask his mom for help, flunking out of college, relapsing after rehab twice, and finding out at 25 that he was HIV positive. His journey’s been harrowing and yet he seems like such a radiant and positive person. He’s even braver than any of us realized.

[takealookatyourlife]

James Corden Responds to Bill Maher’s Fat Shaming Take 

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your childhood is gay, and there’s nothing you can do about it!

or, a celebration of some children’s characters we love to relate to (even if it makes cishets mad). hope you all had a happy pride month 🌈

[takealookatyourlife]

At this point, any comments on a post by the nz human rights commission justify the need for the nz human rights commission. But oh wait the Christchurch massacre was an isolated incident not reflective of the attitudes of nzers 🙄

[takealookatyourlife]

strange and weird that me not shaving my legs & leaving them in their natural fuzzy state and really never thinking about it is seen as an active choice, and maintaining nakey bald legs with careful weekly upkeep is seen as a default

[takealookatyourlife]

Take care of yourself. And don’t trust strangers easily— it might be lethal! Being a girl is scary in so many ways. Yeah it can happen to men, but cmon they see females as an easier target.

[takealookatyourlife]

“Some time ago, I was having lunch with a group of friends—four men, one woman, and me. I’ve known most of the group for five or six years. We were talking about shared past experiences when one of the men mentioned that he missed Larry. “Gotta like a man who can make a good cup of coffee,” he said. “No, I don’t,” I blurted out, and described how that man knew precisely where the lines of “inappropriate” behavior were drawn, and had spent the last couple of years nudging those lines whenever he came across a woman he considered “available.” I mentioned he’d been called out for failing to heed polite turn-downs, that he got offended when the turn-down became less polite. I mentioned how women who weren’t even the focus of his attention breathed a sigh of relief when he left the room. None of the men discounted my experience or my descriptions. But every one of them said they hadn’t seen or noticed anything like that. I do want to be clear that their responses were not in the spirit, tone, or words of dismissal. Instead, they were genuinely puzzled that their observations had missed something they assumed would be obvious. One said he felt bad he hadn’t realized what was going on. So I pushed the issue. Without explaining what I was going to do, I got up and stood behind one of the men. I put my hands on his shoulders, then stretched my fingers as far down his chest as possible while still seeming to give a platonic shoulder rub. I pulled him back against my chest, digging my fingers in when he resisted. That action alone let him know I acknowledged he didn’t want me to be pulling on and touching him, and I didn’t care. “You look so tense,” I said in a nice, soft voice. Not sexy, not husky, but more intimate than standard conversation. Not intimate enough to be “inappropriate,” though. “You just let me give you a rub and I’ll make you feel better. I can tell you need that.” Then, while he say immobile with surprise, I leaned past him to pick up his coffee cup, keeping my chest close to his face and my other hand firmly on his shoulder. To the others, it likely looked as if I was just resting my hand there. That man, though, could feel the pressure I exerted to keep him pressed close to me. He would have had to make an obvious, rude-looking push to get away. “I’ll get you some more coffee, too. You just let me take care of that.” I gave the man a sweet smile in answer to his shocked stare, then returned to my seat, put my napkin back on my lap, and said, “That’s what Larry does.” The man I’d touched totally understood in that moment. He’d experienced how it felt—even at the hands of a friend—to have your personal boundaries violated and your “polite” signals of resistance ignored. The other men had that slack expression that comes when surprising facts suddenly jolt long-held assumptions. “Creepy” was uttered, as was “awful” and “scary”. Their words held a tone of… almost fear? As if they were suddenly running through all sorts of past interactions in search of similar behaviors, and finding some. *Now they are able to see it.*”

— - Blair MacGregor, “Seeing is Understanding” (via geardrops)

[takealookatyourlife]

I know it’s trendy right now to say that adopting more of an eco-friendly lifestyle is pointless because the only way to save humanity is to destroy capitalism, but we should remember that many of those lifestyle changes help us build skills and social networks that would be important in a post-capitalism future. 

For example, if we’re going to end reliance on factory farming, it would really help for more people to learn to garden and grow food. Same for other hands-on skills like cooking, crafts, home repair, tech repair, etc. Even small things like using re-usable water bottles and bags or thrifting/swapping items to cut down on waste would be regular features of a post-capitalist society, so making them more widely practiced now is a great thing. 

Systemic changes are necessary for sure, but they *will* involve lifestyle changes too, and it’s important to do your part to create that from the ground up. We don’t get to a better system by destroying the old one, but by building up the new one. 🌱