lovepsychothefirst:

isaiahmustafa:

Watson and I feel that, in order to do our best work, the chemistry needs to be right.

#see THIS is what makes Sherlock in Elementary so unique#a lot of versions of Sherlock#or pretty much Any modern crime drama would have the brilliant detective calling the other detectives ‘idiots’#or ‘amateurs’ or basically insulting their intelligence and ability as detectives#here Sherlock is both acknowledging their skill as detectives and crediting that to their Captain’s leadership#while also acknowledging that he can’t work with them because THEY don’t like him#all the while he is accepting as fair because he’s self-aware to know he’s not easy to work with#there are ways to depict an anti-social genius without being a huge asshole to everyone#and this is it

fidnru:

middle aged white man with trump maga van sends pipe bombs and anthrax to 13 prominent democratic politicians, donors, and media outlets.

middle aged white man who claims he ‘doesn’t shoot whites’ attempts to enter a black church for a massacre, fails, and murders two random black strangers in a grocery store.

white man yells ‘all jews must die!’ before entering a synagogue during shabbat and opening fire. the news is still breaking, but at least eight people are confirmed dead.

it’s been 48 hours.

enoughtohold:

metadata-uber-alles:

netfliximab:

enoughtohold:

if you’re considering not voting because you don’t like the democrats, i sympathize. they are not so inspiring.

but races for elected office are not all that’s on the ballot. there are also ballot measures, where you get to vote directly on the law.

consider taking a minute and looking up this year’s ballot measures for your state. there may be some that would directly help, or directly harm, your community.

to give just a few examples:

  • in Alabama, Amendment 2 would restrict abortion rights, completely banning it if Roe v. Wade is overturned, which is now likely.
  • in Arkansas, Issue 2 would disenfranchise voters by requiring photo ID. 
  • in Florida, Amendment 5 would make it much harder to raise taxes.
  • in Louisiana, Amendment 1 would ban people with felony records who’ve served their time from running for office for 5 years, even if their offense was just e.g. marijuana possession.
  • in North Carolina, the Income Tax Cap Amendment would cap income taxes, and the Voter ID Amendment would disenfranchise voters by requiring photo ID. 
  • in Oregon, Measure 105 would repeal its sanctuary state law protecting immigrants, and Measure 106 would restrict abortion rights by banning public funds from being spent on abortions.
  • in West Virginia, Amendment 1 would completely ban abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned, which is now likely.

meanwhile, on the brighter side:

  • in Arizona, Proposition 127 would require renewable energy.
  • in Arkansas, Issue 5 would raise the minimum wage to $11.
  • in California, Prop 2 would fund housing for the homeless, and Prop 10 would allow local rent control.
  • in Colorado, Amendment A would fucking ban slavery as punishment for a crime. (yes, that’s a real thing.) Amendments Y and Z would hopefully limit gerrymandering. Amendment 73 would tax the rich to pay for education. Proposition 111 would crack down on predatory payday loans.
  • in Florida, Amendment 4 would restore voting rights to people with felony records who’ve served their time, and Amendment 9 would ban offshore drilling (and also vaping in the workplace, because Florida is weird).
  • in Idaho, Proposition 2 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
  • in Louisiana, Amendment 2 would repeal a Jim Crow–era law that aimed to “increase the supply of free prison labor and nullify the voting power of black jurors” by making it possible to convict someone of a felony without a unanimous jury.
  • in Maine, Question 1 would fund a universal home-care program for disabled people and older adults.
  • in Maryland, Question 2 would allow election-day voter registration.
  • in Massachusetts, Question 3 would protect the state’s transgender anti-discrimination law which is under attack.
  • in Michigan, Proposal 1 would legalize recreational marijuana, and Proposal 3 would strengthen voting rights by instituting automatic voter registration, expanding absentee voting, pushing back deadlines, and more.
  • in Missouri, Amendment 2, Amendment 3, and Proposition C would all legalize medical marijuana (but they’d tax it different amounts and use the taxes for different things — you be the judge). Amendment 1 would make reforms to lobbying, campaign finance, and redistricting, and Proposition B would raise the minimum wage to $12.
  • in Montana, I-185 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
  • in Nebraska, Initiative 427 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
  • in Nevada, Question 5 would allow automatic voter registration, and Question 6 would require renewable energy.
  • in North Dakota, Measure 3 would legalize recreational marijuana and expunge existing marijuana convictions.
  • in Ohio, Issue 1 would downgrade drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors and provide for some criminal justice reforms.
  • in Utah, Proposition 2 would legalize medical marijuana, and Proposition 3 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
  • in Washington, Initiative 940 would train cops not to murder people, and Initiative 1631 would charge polluters a fee on carbon emissions and fund environmental programs.

the outcomes of these and other important initiatives will be determined at the ballot box. you can make a direct impact on these issues in your state by doing your research and voting.

can’t vote? search for an organization supporting (or opposing) the initiative you care about, and consider donating your time or money to help them out.

(please note that i’m not an expert on all of these initiatives. you may conclude for example that one of them sounds good, but isn’t implemented well so you can’t support it. that’s fine! but now you know what’s going on in your state and can have your say, and that’s a good thing.)

Prop 2 in Michigan is designed to rectify the gerrymandering fiasco there too. All three Michigan proposals are good progressive steps!

Ditto on Michigan’s Prop 2, I volunteered with the group that got it on the ballot. It’ll make it so the voting districts are drawn by an independent commission and they’re going to put the whole process out in public. (Currently the state legislature does it, so whichever party has the majority on census year gives themselves the advantage for the next decade).

cool! yeah, i skipped a few redistricting ones because they can be tricky to evaluate, but i’m glad to hear good things about it

boatiechat:

frislander:

moghedien:

Apollo: Sister, what are you the goddess of?

Artemis: *lounging by a spring on piles of deerskin surrounded by three dozen naked girls with a dead pan expression* Virginity.

“Heracles, they’re lesbians”.

Note that the concept of “virginity” in Ancient times merely meant “unmarried”, and had nothing to do with sexual activity. Some priestesses were “virgins” because they chose (or were committed to) a life of worship, but it was merely a question of social status, not of personal choice or practice. Of course, one can suppose that this lifestyle would be rather attractive for lesbians.

So when Artemis is said to be the Goddess of Virgins, it is meant to be understood as “Goddess of Unmarried Women”, or, quite possibly literally, of lesbians. 

(It’s only Christianity that reframed the concept of virginity to mean “never had sex”. Many ancient religions has “Virgin goddesses”, which symbolized feminine power, and in this case too it meant “untied to a man”, or “whole for herself”)

kawuli:

jamyesterday:

tiliatree:

just-shower-thoughts:

Cave woman would have not known about the menopause until the life expectancy increased. Maybe there is another human hormonal change that we are not aware of as we have not reached the particular age it happens.

Totally incorrect! Actually, the fact that human females live past their reproductive life span is responsible for a great deal of human evolution, especially the ways in which we differ from our close ape relatives. This is called the Grandmother hypothesis.

Let me explain.

So the idea that human life expectancy has increased due to modern advancements is a myth. The average life span has certainly increased, however this is not because humans live longer (we have always lived to around 70-90yrs), but because infant mortality has decreased. In other words, modern medicine and abundant access to resources have decreased how how many children die, therefore increasing the average years humans live past birth.

So, Humans have known about menopause since the beginning, and it’s actually a huge part of our evolutionary history. Other apes do not live past their reproductive life span, as their bodies degrade shortly after ceasing to be fertile- evolution is all about how many offspring can be produce after all. Its generally a waste of resources to continue feeding adults who cannot reproduce when fertile adults and children are competing for those same resources.

So the fact that human females live for upwards of 30yrs past fertility was considered an evolutionary paradox. The key is that humans are really smart (sort of). We require a very long time to develop our brains, and so our infants are completely useless- unable to evan walk for a year, much less feed or protect themselves until middle childhood. They require a lot of attention and caring for, constant vigilence, not to mention hours spent teaching them basic survival tasks.

As a result, humans developed cooperative childraising systems, in which members outside of the child’s immediate family are responsible for caring for the young. However, if all the adults are busy raising their own children, no one would ever care for anyone else’s, except the older, not-yet-fertile children (who do assume childrearing roles, but are still developing and therefore are not good at it.) As a result, the females who stayed alive past their reproductive life span, no longer responsible for their own children, were able to care for the children of their children, allowing for their genes to be passed down more successfully. This creates a positive feedback system in which females lifespan progressively increases, since the older the grandmother, the more children the mother is able to have, and the more successfully they will be raised to adulthood, passing on the genes for long life to their children in turn.

This effect however decreased with subsequent generations: it’s less economical to have a grandmother AND a great grandmother taking care of the young. The payoffs aren’t high enough to push our lifespans even higher.

Tldr; humans have always had unusually long lifespans BECAUSE menopause occurs, and this is an integral aspect of our evolution, causing us to be as intelligent and adaptive as we are.

Even better, one of the ways we know about the grandmother effect is because you also see it in orcas! They can live to 80, but generally stop breeding in their 30s. There are three known species that have this kind of menapause– us, orcas and the Short-Finned Pilot Whale (also another very social species).

There’s a really nice explanation on this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/15/killer-whales-explain-meaning-of-the-menopause

So a few years ago I was working with a nutrition project in Mali targeting child malnutrition. A lot of these kinds of programs target young mothers for nutrition education, because women are the ones who cook, mothers feed their kids, makes sense.

Actually, these folks found that it was most effective to target not mothers, but grandmothers. Because in the big extended families most Malians live in, the grandmothers have more influence, so they can negotiate a better distribution of food. Usually, everyone in the family eats out of one big bowl (or a handful of big bowls, because sometimes families are 50+ people). The men always eat first, then the women and kids, so the men get all the good bits of meat that were in the stew. Because “they’re working in the fields more so they need more food.” This is a tricky thing to change, and young women have very little influence over intra-family dynamics. Older women, though, can organize their sons, can talk to their husbands, often control meal planning and budgeting, so if you help them understand that actually, kids need more nutritionally dense foods because their stomachs are smaller, so giving them the leftovers all the time isn’t good enough… then you’re more likely to see actual change in kids’ diets and health.

So yeah, grandmothers are important.

tehriz:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

talesofthestarshipregeneration:

dsudis:

thelingerieaddict:

lesbiai:

elizabitchtaylor:

I learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese in two separate psychology classes, at two separate universities. It was studied as an example of the “bystander effect”, which is a phenomenon that occurs when witnesses do not offer help to a victim when there are other people present.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

image

this was one of the first lessons I had in psych too and we were never told about this either nor was it in any of the reading materials

I never knew this.

I also never knew this about Kitty Genovese, but I do know that, in fact, many of the dozen (not thirty-eight) people who witnessed some part of the attack (which took place after 3AM, on a chilly night in March when most people’s windows were closed) tried to help in some way.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

(Also, going by the content of the murderer’s confession, it was indeed a random attack.)

how on EARTH was this “scientifically” studied but the details gotten so wrong and the wrong as hell conclusion published and taught in schools?!?!?! where were those scientists observation skills?! on vacation?!

How to take facts and turn them into an urban legend that gets taught in schools: Make a bad made-for-t.v.-movie about it, watch it, believe everything the movie says, annnnnnnd go!  That’s how it gets taught as this supposed “scientific study.”  Someone got fucking lazy.

Spread the real deal, kids.

A book about this, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Nonfiction this year! if anyone wants to check it out try your local library!

We Snuck into Seattle’s Super Secret White Nationalist Convention

feministvenus:

theexistentialanarchist:

berqamot:

koobaxion:

gendernihilistanarchocommunist:

White nationalists generally don’t want to look like characters out of American History X anymore. Fashion choices at the convention ranged from Ruby Ridge to Mad Men, but most of the people there looked like you might run into them on Capitol Hill or in the U-District. That said, there is a type. According to my observations, the standard Seattle Nazi is a white male under 30 who either works in the tech industry or is going to school to work in the tech industry. “You’re also a coder? Do you mind if I send you something I’ve been working on?” I heard that more than once.

“That movie Hidden Figures was bullshit,” a guy dressed like John Goodman in The Big Lebowski said out of nowhere. “We never went to the moon, Stanley Kubrick faked all of it.” Water almost squirted out of my nose and it was the closest I came all night to breaking character.

“ Much bleaker is Dr. Johnson’s Seattle-suitable, “secret agent” racism plan. Basically, white nationalists meet in secret at conventions like Northwest Forum while paying “lip service to diversity” at their day jobs. They move into positions of power where they can hire other racists and keep non-whites from getting into the company. Two years ago, this method would have seemed like a total joke, but these guys really do mostly work in tech, and they were doing a lot of networking. When talking about the people he has counseled on the “secret agent” method, Dr. Johnson has written that they include “college professors, writers, artists, designers, publishers, creative people working in the film industry, businessmen, and professionals, some of them quite prominent in their fields.” ”

I wonder when liberals are going to stop pretending racists are just a bunch of rural rednecks and start taking a serious approach in combating racism. And conservatives are outraged whenever they perceive an “Inquisition” like “you can’t hold conservative views anymore in your job:(” gee I wonder why my guy.

Lol I keep trynna tell people seattle is racist but they don’t hear me tho

notice how the standard racist was a man under 30. Often people think that racists are old boomers who are “going to die soon anyway”. And, as stated above, they are infiltrating the workplace and oppressing minorities in their career fields. These men aren’t retiring (or dying) anytime soon. White millennial racism is prominent, and it is dangerous.  

We Snuck into Seattle’s Super Secret White Nationalist Convention