masterofmidgets | Entries tagged with politics

Dear person in my non-fiction class whose essay I am reading today, and who seems to believe that it is her life's calling to educate those poor, misguided fatties about proper eating and health,

Despite what you may think, the number of fat people who are ignorant of how a healthy diet works is in fact far, far less than the number of people who know how they "should" be eating but do not:

have geographical or transportational access to stores that sell good quality produce and whole foods at a decent price (hello food deserts!)

have the money to spend on fresh rather than processed foods, especially when they are trying to feed multiple people on a very small budget (ask me how many times, in adolescence, I lived off ramen and peanut butter because we couldn't afford anything else)

have the time or the energy to cook fresh meals when they get home from working the extra hours it takes to afford that food in the first place. As a college student you may not know this, but work is exhausting and even cooking something easy can seem overwhelming, especially if no one's ever bothered to teach you how.

have the health necessary to eat as well, be as active, or maintain the weight you think they should. Some people have food allergies or GI conditions that restrict their diets. Some have chronic pain or skeletal or muscular injuries that make exercise agonizingly painful. Some require medications that make them gain weight. Some have conditions like PCOS that make it very difficult to lose weight. There are A LOT of medical conditions that can affect your weight and overall health in myraid ways.

have the metabolism or the body type necessary to conform to your standards. Some people can eat nothing but potato chips and pizza and be skinny as a rail. Some people are raw food vegans and marathon runners and still fat. Biology is a bitch. Equating weight with health is a mistake.

As a fattie of long standing, trust me when I say that WE HAVE FUCKING HEARD IT. We have heard it over and over and over again from television, from magazines, from friends, from well-meaning relatives, from strangers on the street who think our bodies are their personal business. We don't need you to tell us about eating vegetables, about going running every morning, about processed foods, about diabetes, about BMI, about the obesity epidemic, about how our bodies are Doing It Wrong. We have heard it, and obsessed over it, and internalized it, and hated ourselves for it, and refuted it, and argued against it, in general lived with it in every way possible. While you might think you are being supportive and helpful, you mostly come across as patronizing and intrusive. My body and my lifestyle are NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS.

You're a nice person, and while we've been in class together I've liked you a lot. But if you really do want to be a doctor as you've said in your essay, and this is really the attitude you take toward issues of weight and body politics, I feel terrible for any and all of the fat patients you have. You are not going to help them as much as you think you are.

No love,

The class's token fat girl

Things I haven't missed about being back in this state:

What are afternoons spent making awkward conversation around a hospital bed.

Nothing earth-shattering or life-threatening, so it seems, just the diuretic medication my grandfather is on for the fluid around his lungs being too strong and overtaxing his already low-functioning kidneys, leading to extreme pain for him and an evening in the ER for all of us. But the pain is under control, and the edema, and the medication will be adjusted, and another crisis is averted. I'd forgotten in the last several months how exhausting this is, that's all.

( cut for opinions of a political nature )

I didn't really mean this to be a political post, but it's been a long damn day.

Last night I dreamed that President Obama was speaking at my high school. Not as a formal speaking event - a bunch of us were sitting on the stage in a circle with him, asking him questions. I had my hand raised the whole time, but he never called on me. So after he got up to leave the auditorium, I stalked him and ambushed him outside the door so I could flail about the Lily Ledbetter Act and ask him questions about health care reform and why he wasn't coming out more strongly against the Stupak Amendment. When we finally got to his trailer (he had a trailer, like a movie star), he said he was very impressed with my questions and my persistence/stalking, and offered to sign my jacket. While I was wearing it. Even in my dream I was a little off-put by how incredibly hot I found that part.

Rahmbamarama, you are creeping into my dreams and it scares me.

Hope everyone is having a happy Thanksgiving! Unless you aren't American, and then I hope you are having a happy random day in November that isn't a holiday of gratuitous consumption. We are taking our pie and our rolls and going to some friends of my aunt and uncle's for happy food times.

As if this week hasn't been stressful enough, I come home to an anonymous comment in my email to the post I made at the beginning of the summer about Dr. George Tiller's death that pretty much filled me with indignant rage. My reply, such as it is, got long enough that I feel it warrants reposting. Original comment (which was quoting extensively from my original post) is in quotes; everything else is my response.

"Yeah, characterize a whole group of people based on the actions of a few radicals. The vast majority of pro-lifers were horrified by Tiller's murder, and deplore violence in general."

Information collected by the National Abortion Federation and the United States Department of Justice on abortion clinic violence, including bombings, shootings, and acid attacks:
http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/violence/history_extreme.asp
http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_viol.htm
http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/crim/faceweb.php

My statement was perhaps overly generalized, and for that I do apologize. There are many in the pro-life movement who do respect life and do not condone violence. However, the fact is that Dr. Tiller's murder was not an isolated incident, and the (active politic) pro-life movement as a whole has a history of endorsing and encouraging this kind of crime.

"If you don't want a child, don't conceive one. It's not that difficult to figure out."

And what about the women who are raped? What about the girls who are molested by a family member, a teacher, or a religious leader? What about the girls whose boyfriends promise them they'll pull out in time, they'll marry them, they'll stick around? What about the ones who grew up in a state with abstinence-only sex education, where no one has ever told them they can get pregnant the first time? Or, to more accurately reflect the women that Dr. Tiller was dealing with, what about those who find out too late their baby will live only minutes past birth, or is already dying? Those who have babies without faces, or brains? Those who get pregnant only to learn that carrying a baby to term will probably kill them? It's easy to say women who don't want children shouldn't have them, but it's not that simple.

"Have you ever bothered to talk to any members of the pro-life movement? Educate yourself, instead of letting NARAL or Planned Parenthood think for you. Many pro-life websites have links to crisis pregnancy centers, places that actually help women instead of murdering their children."

Yes, thank you, I have on occasion talked to people who are pro-life - including some of my close friends and family. As far as pregnancy crisis centers go: all women should have access to information and counseling before and after they make what can be a very difficult choice - which should include information on other options aside from abortion. I'm not arguing that. But pregnancy crisis centers, in many cases, misinform and harass women who come to them for help in order to prevent them from choosing to have abortions.

""Dr." Tiller was a murderer. Does that give anybody the right to kill him? Of course not. But to refer to him as a hero is horribly misguided."

This is something I doubt we will agree on. I do not consider abortion murder, because I do not believe life starts at conception. I do not consider a fetus alive until it is capable of sustaining life outside of the mother's womb. But that's my opinion, and you are entitled to yours. But it's not really about that, and it never has been. It's about the right of a woman to decide what she can do with her own body. Whatever individuals within the movement may believe (I don't know you, and I don't know your motivations for being pro-life, so I cannot comment on that), the pro-life movement as a whole exists because its leaders and its fiercest advocates want to control women and their sexuality. I'm not okay with that. Dr. Tiller is a hero to me because he understood that, and devoted his life to giving women in desperate, dire straits a choice. Not an obligation, not a mandate - just a choice.

"My heart goes out to Tiller's family and the children he murdered, and all the women he's hurt."

My heart goes out to Dr. Tiller's family. And to the families of the other abortion providers who have been senselessly attacked and murdered in this crusade. And to the women who have been guilted or shamed or frightened or threatened or forced to have children, and for the children who grow up knowing that they weren't wanted. It's a bad situation all around.

I haven't seen Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on health care yet, since my laptop is a powerless hunk of plastic right now. But other people's posts on it reminded me of an entry I've been meaning to write for some time, and now is as good as any (even if I'm writing in the computer cluster right now). So:

My mother is self-employed as a landscaper/gardener - her job description is fairly fluid, but she does a lot of weeding and pruning, removing stumps, planting trees and flowers, just generally heavy-duty yardwork (a lot of it for older people, especially women, who aren't comfortable having a strange man on their property for hours at a time). Her boyfriend G was, when she met him, a bouncer at a club, but that job ended some time ago and for the last year he's been doing landscaping with her. What this means is that a) they do not make very much money, and b) they do not have health insurance.

Early this summer, G developed a problem with one of his teeth. I was going back and forth between her apartment and my dad's house about once a week, and every time I saw it he was complaining about it - it hurts, his face is swollen, he can't eat, he can't sleep. But it wasn't bad enough to put him out of commission, and they didn't have the money for the dentist if it wasn't an emergency, so he popped pain pills and smoked weed and tried to wait until it went away.

In August, it was finally apparent that this wasn't something that was going to fix itself, and after a week straight of being unable to eat anything from the pain G dragged himself to the dentist. Where he was told that the swelling around the tooth was too bad for them to be able to remove it. He was given a course of antibiotics and told to come back in a week. A week later, when he went back, they told him to go straight to the emergency room.

At the emergency room they told him the infection from his tooth had moved into his jaw. The swelling in his throat and mouth was so severe that it was restricting his breathing, leaving his oxygen saturation in the low 70s (by contrast - my grandmother, who is on permanent oxygen therapy for a collapsed diaphram, almost never goes below 80). The surgery to extract the tooth and drain the infection took four hours. And he spent almost a week in the Intensive Care Unit, in a medically induced coma, with a breathing tube down his throat. More than a month later, he still doesn't have all his strength back. His doctor said if they had waited to go to the emergency room that night, instead of that afternoon, he would have died.

The medical bill for all of this emergency intensive care treatment for what should have been an easily fixed tooth infection: $60,000.

And you know the really frustrating thing? I can understand exactly what was going through his head, this entire ordeal, because I WOULD DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

This is something I'm not sure people who are used to having health insurance can understand. But if you grow up in, or you spend a long time in, a situation where you cannot afford medical care, you think about it differently. I can count on my hands the number of times I've been to the doctor in my life - not because I've never gotten sick, but because in my family, in my experience, doctors are for emergencies only. Doctors are the last ditch solution, if you've tried over-the-counter medications, and the antibiotics you didn't finish the last time you got sick, and just ignoring it and hoping it will just go away, and nothing's worked. No 'I just want to make sure this isn't anything serious.' No 'I was wondering if you could do anything about this rash.' No preventative care. Because that isn't what doctors are for.

Proper medical treatment should not be a luxury. Being healthy should not be a luxury. Being alive shouldn't be a luxury.

Senator Ted Kennedy died tonight.

I think we all knew it was coming, if not now, then in the near future, but it's still a blow. And I hate that with all the things he accomplished in his life and career as a US senator, he died in the last months of the fight for one of his most ardent causes, without seeing it to the end. We've lost a great man and an American institution. Whatever you may think of his politics, he was a man of great integrity and convictions. I can't believe he's gone.

I hope he's in the Summerlands now, knocking back beers with Jack and Bobby and checking out the gams on the hot dead chicks. I hope he's at peace.

Tuesdays are boring and I am completely useless, but here's a list of things I did actually do today:

1. Tried to talk diamminesilver into replacing her (dead) iPod with a Zen player, which is what I have, and man oh man do I love it. I'm pretty strongly anti-Apple - their computers may be good, but the OS is incompatible with the way my brain works, everything is absurdly overpriced, and from what I've heard from my Apple-using friends, their customer support is rubbish. Not to mention that diamminesilver's iPod has been malfunctioning every two weeks for as long as I have known her. Whereas Reno, my Zen V+, would probably still run if I ran him over with a bus. Not that I've tried this, although I have on more than one occasion had him violently yanked out of my pocket while biking and sent flying. He's a hardy little bugger, is my point.

2. Perved over foreign heads of state with

colourofsaying . The original post on Rahmbamarama seems to have been taken down, but consensus was that although Gorden Brown is a bit sweet and needs a hug, he's not actually attractive in any way. Sarkozy has never yet ben photographed in such a way that he doesn't look like an enormous sleezy douchebaggy creep, probably because that's what he IS. And Vladimir Putin is one sexy, bad-ass, spy-photographing, judo-chopping, tiger-shooting motherfucker who I want to ravish me in a manly fashion. Um. Is it unamerican to want to sex up an enemy leader if he's really really hot?

3. Worked on the anti-sex pollen Kirk/Spock fic. I still hate Spock voice, although it is going to be fun to get to the part where Kirk gets kidnapped and Spock goes very quietly, calmly, logically batshit and insists on going in personally to hurt people and save him even though they can't get within ten feet of each other without passing out. Hey, I read Price of the Phoenix at the lake last week, losing it over shit happening to Jim is what Spock does. McCoy hates them both so much.

NOTE FROM ME: I can't even begin to imagine what the people in Iran must be going through right now - all that fear and violence and anger - their lives are changing (and ending) while I'm sitting here. At least I can spread the word.

i realize now i do not fear death... i fear my daughter will not be free when i die

- From the Twitter of an Iranian medical student

"If it bothers you so much, then why don't you stop watching?" seems to be the question of the last few days from my friends and family who know how invested I have become in the cause of the Iranian people (as I have explained in great detail here) The answer is simple: one day of caring is not enough. We must be the voice for the people of Iran who would otherwise be silenced. They are without reliable news sources, they are without mobile phone calls, text messaging, facebook, twitter, youtube, AIM, Yahoo, Google, and pretty much every other useful outlet for information you can think of. Yet they persist on the streets and on the internet in any way they can. The least we can do, whether we are across continents, oceans, or time zones, is spread their words safely.

My death is irrelevant.Wht is important is that u do not forget my words.We want freedom.i will die 4that

- From the Twitter of a protester in Tehran

Right now, brave men and women in Iran, both young and old, are sacrificing their lives for their voices to be heard. They must fear not only the police, but also the Basij -a force of men loyal to the government who plant themselves among crowds in plain clothes in order to discretely attack protesters and incite chaos.The protesters are peaceful. They mass together in crowds that are reported to grow in size every day. At night they have very few, if any, safe places to stay. Houses with satelite dishes were attacked by the Basij tonight, and during the 50 minutes of Twitter's maintenance, another university was attacked.

140 characters is a novel when you're being shot at.

- From another Iranian Twitter

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO HELP?

The most obvious thing to do is stay informed. Keep an eye on reliable sources on Twitter, refresh blogs and news sites that are covering the stories.

If you are on twitter, retweet information from reliable twitters, but REMOVE THE USERNAME if they are in Iran. People have died because of the lack of responsibility by fellow tweeters and the media in this front. They can be tracked down by the government of Iran.

Spread the information elsewhere. Repost this article or write your own on Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr, or anywhere else you can think of. If you write your own, make sure you are concise and accurate. Link to your sources for people to learn more.

Change your location on Twitter to Tehran or Iran, and your time zone to GMT +3:30.

DO NOT auto-refresh and take down websites, even if you are asked. It slows down the internet for the rest of the people in Iran.

If you make a proxy DO NOT post it publically, otherwise it is useless. Send it in a direct message to a trusted source.

DO NOT spam the hash tag #IranElection with useless things to "confuse the government". This does not help at all.

USEFUL SITES TO FURTHER HELP

Cyber War Guide for Iran Elections

Green Revolution - How to Help

Anonymous - Why We Protest - Iran

STAY INFORMED!

Follow on Twitter: @ProtesterHelp and @StopAhmadi

(REMINDER: DO NOT REPOST PERSONAL TWITTERS OF THOSE INSIDE THE COUNTRY, EVEN IF THEY ARE RELIABLE!)

Chronology of events

Live-blogging by Andrew Sullivan

General information from a poser on Fark.com

Live-blogging on HuffingtonPost

دنیارابگوییدچطورآنهاانتخاباتمان دزدیده اند
Tell the world how they have stolen our election

- original article by one_hoopy_frood on LJ

New Hampshire Governor Signs Legislation Legalizing Gay Marriage

Welcome to the Club Of Awesome States, New Hampshire. We're all very proud of you. And I have to admit, I thought this battle was going to fall apart in NH after the governor sent the bill back the first time and the legislation couldn't get the revised bill passed, but they came through in the end. Who cares if they had to add extra language emphasizing that anti-gay marriage churches don't have to perform gay marriages - it's not like they didn't have those protections ANYWAY, under the CONSTITUTION, and at least it will shut up some of the religious rights jerks. The important thing is that gay couples in New Hampshire are no longer second-class citizens when it comes to marriage.

6 states down, 44 to go. New York, it's time to get your overpaid liberal ass in gear.

Dr. George Tiller, pro-choice advocate and one of only a handful of doctors in the country who perform late-term abortions, was shot and killed today while attending church.

I'm horrified, and I'm disgusted, but I can't say I'm surprised. Not when all the right-wing rhetoric I've been hearing for the last 4 months has been a call to violent rebellion. Not when the "pro-life" movement has made a decades long history of using these kinds of tactics - assualts, attacks, bombings, murder - to scare doctors, and scare women, away from even medically necessary abortion. People like this are terrorists, plain and simple.

Dr. Tiller provided a vitally necessary service to thousands of women. Most women don't get late-term abortions for kicks - you don't carry a fetus for 7 months and then decide 'oh hey, I'm sick of this, abortion time!' Women get late-term abortions because their babies are dead, or dying, or have such severe birth defects they won't live after they leave the womb. Women get late-term abortions because THEIR PREGNANCY WILL KILL THEM. And even if they did do it because they just don't want to be bothered anymore...well, that is their choice. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want, and no child should be unwanted. But now those women have one less option. And since Dr. Tiller's clinic was in Wichita, Kansas, there are few enough options to begin with. What will happen to all those women? Why doesn't the pro-life movement care?

Dr. Tiller was a hero. He did a difficult job, despite the fact that he was harrassed, that he was sued, that he had to work in a clinic shielded by bullet-proof glass and hire a bodyguard to accompany him when he left. Despite the fact that he has been shot before, in 1993, by the same kind of person who killed him today - someone who doesn't really care about life, but about sex and controlling women. RIP, Dr. Tiller.

Abortion is murder? MURDER is murder, you ignorant bigoted hypocritical fucktards.

ETA: Feministe has a list of pro-choice charities you can donate money to here. I usually give to Planned Parenthood, but given the nature of this murder I'm donating to Medical Students For Choice, which funds the training of med students and residents in abortion and other reproductive health service, so that we actually have doctors who can perform the medical services we have a legal right to receive.

Had no less than three people (all members of my family, because I come by my geekdom naturally) call me in the last few days to tell me all the same thing, which is that a certain man, who might just happen to be president of a certain country, maybe you've heard of him? Is going to be doing a town hall meeting tomorrow evening.

AT MY HIGH SCHOOL.

WHILE I AM A THOUSAND MILES AWAY BECAUSE MY SCHOOL IS ON THE STUPID QUARTER SYSTEM.

WHY AM I SITTING HERE STUDYING WHEN I COULD BE THERE HEARING OUR PRESIDENT BE AWESOME?

I won't even get to watch the real-time news coverage, because I have to work tomorrow night; I'll watch it on MSNBC or C-SPAN or whatever when I get home, but it's really not the same. And it's not even close to the possibility of actually being there, in the SAME ROOM, actually hearing him talk.

I HATE MY LIFE.

(almost as much as I love my president)

I spent the entire afternoon playing phonetag, trying to get any one of a half-dozen people to talk to me to distract me from terminal boredom while waiting for the bus/bus-sickness once the bus finally came. How dare everyone I know have lives that include plans on a Saturday afternoon that aren't talking to me! *huffs*

The evening was devoted to watching the White House Correspondents' Dinner on C-SPAN, because I am a gigantic dork. But, but, you guys, my president! He is so awesome! And adorable! And funny! And he made jokes about Michael Steele, and Rush Limbaugh, and people pissing on poor Timmy! And a joke about gay-marrying Axelrod OMG HOW IS THIS MAN THE PRESIDENT I LOVE HIM SO FUCKING MUCH.

(Also Wanda Sykes was brilliantly fabulous and I want to marry her in Iowa. I could not stop cracking up all through her bit about Michelle's sleeves, and Faux News' blow-up tomorrow about her calling Limbaugh treasonous and how Keith should waterboard Hannity is going to be beautiful to behold)

I've been writing a little. On occasion. When I'm not distracted by shiny things like the President. Aside from all my non-finished yet fanfics, I'm (theoretically) working on a bunch of Five Things stories for The Big Damn Superhero Novel - it's a good way of getting a grip on my characters and their backstories, and adding to my lists of Things What Happen In The Novel.

From the Jake/Shane list (Five Times Jake and Shane Held Hands): the first time Jake meets Shane, he's a stranger in a mask, asking him to join a team.

“So you’ll do it?” Shield asks, and Jake likes to believe there’s a trace of a hopeful waver under that infernally calm and even tone.

“I’ll think about it,” he growls. It’s a lie. He’ll give it a few days maybe, but his mind was made up before Shield spoke. If the man had asked him to jump out a twentieth-story window, his boots would be scraping the windowsill before he had second thoughts. But he can’t say that.

Shield holds out a gold-gloved hand for him to shake, and Jake ignores the momentary impulse to refuse it, just to see that steady smile fade. Even through two layers of thick, stubbly leather, he can feel the heat of Shield’s skin, all the energy pulsing through his veins. His grip is measured tight, his handshake is firm, and Jake can’t resist holding it a beat too long.

“I will see you again,” Shield says, and steps backward off the rooftop.

Jake stands still as a shadow, studying the scrap of paper left in his hand. It refuses to give him any answers – just a date, an address across town, and the scrawled words ‘meet me here.’ He does not think about the lingering warmth clinging to the black leather where his hand touched Shield’s.

Three blocks away a siren wails to life, and the Watchman hears it.

This Just Popped Up On My Radar.

Congratulations, gay people in Maine: you can has legal marriage now! I just...I...three states. THREE STATES IN A MOTHERFUCKING MONTH. Two through the legislature! Do you remember five years ago, when that would have been political anathema?

New Hampshire's waiting on their governor's signature. New York has started the process. New Jersey's talking about it. The Maine governor who signed used to be against gay marriage, but said today that he has ben forced to reconsider and change his mind. Washington, DC voted yesterday to recognize gay marriages performed in other states.

FUCK YOU CALIFORNIA. But you know, Prop 8, as awful as it was, turned out not to be the end of the world. Who would have thought on Nov 4 that things could change so quickly?

A Gaythering Storm from Jane Lynch

Not quite as funny as Stephen Colbert's video last week, but it has George Takei in it, and that automatically gives it a billion extra awesome points.

Did you know that merely mentioning The Gay automatically makes your book porn? Amazon sure thinks so!

In order to limit the visibility of adult material, Amazon has been stripping the sales rankings (and searchability) from a number of books based, apparently, on some fairly broad and INCREDIBLY MORONIC criteria. Books that are marketed as erotica are included - but so are non-explicit GLBT romance novels, non-fiction books about homosexuality/homophobia, YA and kids' books about sexuality, classics with GLBT themes, gay parenting books - basically anything with any kind of GLBT themes. Cause Heather Has Two Mommies is just packed with lesbian porn, don't ya know! Meanwhile, many books with explicit heterosexual sex that aren't marked are erotica are being left with their rankings.

SO MUCH FAIL. I assume this is something along the lines of DeleteGate - Amazon got complaints about adult material, got all freaked out, and started yanking everything that came to mind without thought or reason or any consideration of the PR nightmare this would cause in the Twitter age. Not deliberately discrimatory, per se, but still fucking dumb and bigoted in effect. I'm a pretty frequent Amazon shopper, but I think I'll be going elsewhere until this clears up.

It's not like this is a new stupidity - I know Marvel has had a policy for awhile that comics with GLBT themes/characters have to be marked for adults, thus severely limiting their marketability. It is just mind-boggling to me - what do people really think is going to happen? Oh no, my kids now know there are gay people in the world, whatever shall I do? Newflash: if your kids are gay, no amount of shielding them from the existence of homosexuality will change that, and if they are straight, no amount of exposure to gayness will turn them. All this does is engender hate and bigotry.

http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html - a list of books that have been removed from Amazon's sales rankings
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy - a petition to Amazon protesting this policy
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?ie=UTF8&type=email - contact Amazon directly at their support page
Amazon Rank - Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is doing a google bomb

Current Music: Dar Williams - Spring Street | Powered by Last.fm

So, I lurk on occasion on

ontd_political , since it's nice once in a while to have one's political news filtered through a lens of wank and slash loving. Also it's a good way to find less mainstream stories. Just now, I was reading this article about NY's state assembly passing an anti-bullying bill (and yay for them!), and came across this in the comments:

"I agree with this bill except for the weight and religion part.

I think children should be bullied on things that are fixable, things that can be changed. I'm obviously against bullying based on gender, sexual orientation, nationality, physical disabilities, genetic disorders etc

but weight (and sometimes) religion can be changed. and such a change, for example losing weight will better the student's life. it'll give them more confidence and make them more healthy (that is if they lose the weight in a healthy manner)

...

If I could find the people who bullied me all those years I would tell them thanks.

also kids who kill themselves because they're bullied are weak. there's more to life than grade school/high school/college. You just have to stick it out and endure it for awhile, but it's not the end of the world."

FUCK YOU. JUST...FUCK. YOU. DIE IN A FUCKING FIRE.

I know I shouldn't let myself be so bothered by something some random person on Livejournal says. I should ignore it, I should brush it off. But it does really, really bother me. I am fucking seething right now. Because I know this kind of attitude is so widespread and so common and it is horrible. I hate people who think people are bullied are just weak, that if only they would just stand up for themselves they would be fine.

Bullies do not back down just because you ask them nicely. Most of the time they don't back down if you tell them to fuck off and die. They don't go away if you ignore them. That is a lie. And it's a pernicious lie - that attitude, and the attitude of the person who said those things that there are somehow people who desrve to be bullied, it makes it so hard to be taken seriously by adults when you are being bullied. And there is nothing more painful than being a victim, and finding that your attempts to be heard and helped are ignored or dismissed.

And yes, I was bullied. I'm a bookish, overweight, poor anime geek with no dress sense or interest in pop culture, what do you think happened? In middle school, my class had a competition centered on avoiding or insulting me. One girl stalked me and threatened to kill me - a teacher intervened after I started crying in the middle of the hall after she threatened me, but she didn't stop. I will never be able to trust a guy who comes onto me or tells me I'm attractive, because so many times in elementary, middle, and even high school I've had guys come up to me and tell me their friend thinks I'm cute and wants to talk to me, or wants my number, only to run away laughing because apparently it's really fucking funny to embarrass your friend by making the fat girl think he likes her.

I want people to take this seriously. Because it is serious, and the damage it does is serious, and it won't stop until we face that.

Vermont Legislature Overrides Gubernatorial Veto: and becomes the first state to legalize gay marriage through the legislature rather than the courts - taking the wind right out of the sails of the ACTIVIST JUDGES OMG!!!! whackjobs. Congratulations!

And congratulations to Iowa for getting rid of their marriage ban last week - Iowa! Iowa is doing better than motherfucking California! - and apparently since they have a much more rigorous standard for constitutional amendments there, it is much more unlikely it will get overturned by ballot like it did here. Go them.

And congratulations to DC, which decided today not to legalize gay marriage, but to recognize gay marriages performed in other states. The lack of respect for the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution in regards to gay marriage is sickening and hypocritical, and DC finally owned up and tossed it out. Go them. It's a good step, even if it's not good enough.

California may have been epic fail this year, but more and more it feels like they voted on the losing side of history - gay marriage, thank the goddess, is starting to look like an inevitability. Which is good - I do not want to live in a country that treats a whole huge group of people like second class citizens.

New Mexico Abolishes Death Penalty

I actually hadn't been folowing this story, on account of NM news mostly doesn't make my news sources, but my dad mentioned it last night, and then it turned up in Daily Kos this afternoon and I did a happy dance.

Go Bill! I have (justifiably) criticised you before, and even called you an opportunistic carpet-bagging bastard, but seriously, major awesome points to you.

I am marginally in favor of the death penalty in theory, in cases where a person has done something so barbaric and heinous that killing them is better than taking the risk they might ever, for any reason, be released again. But in practice, the system is completely, irreparably broken, corrupt, and racist. There is no justice in our system as it is, and far too many people being killed who were innocent. I hope other states follow suit, because this is a damn good thing.

Current Music: Dashboard Confessional - Stolen | Powered by Last.fm

Went to the mailbox today and had a package from my Aunt. Check out what she sent me - totally fucking awesome, y/y?
( T-shirt pics under the cut! )
I don't wear white shirts as a rule, but I think I'll be wearing this one XD

I love my family so much sometimes.

Mine signed into law the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which disallows discrimination in pay based on gender. Yes, women still get paid less than men - especially educated women working in professional fields. But now it will be that much harder for them to do so.

We can't stop fighting for women's rights yet, but that's one less battle. I'm so proud of my Congress right now. I'm so proud of my president.

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Love In The Asylum

Dude, you're confusing reality with porn again.

Entries tagged with politics

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\o/

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