“HELLO NEIGHBOR STEVE, I WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO BARBEQUE ON THE EVE OF THE BLOOD MOON. I FEEL WE GOT OFF TO A BAD START.”
“NEIGHBOR STEVE, DO YOU NOT WISH TO PARTAKE OF THE UNCLEAN FLESH-MEATS OF PIGS AND THE POLLUTED ESSENCES OF TOMATO? PERHAPS YOU ARE A CAROLINA STYLE MAN, NEIGHBOR STEVE?”
“PUT THE GUN AWAY NEIGHBOR STEVE, YOU KNOW I SHALL ONLY RISE AGAIN WITH THE DAWNING OF THE MOON. WE HAVE BEEN THROUGH THIS MANY TIMES.”
“LOOK AT THIS PICTURE MY SON DREW OF YOU AND CHILD TIMMY, YOUR SON. ARE THEY NOT THE PICTURE OF PACT-MATES? THIS COULD BE YOU AND ME, NEIGHBOR STEVE.”
“YOU MISSED THE UNHOLY NEXUS OF POWER THAT IS THE KEY TO MY CORPOREAL FORM, NEIGHBOR STEVE. YOU WILL NEED TO RELOAD NOW, SO I WILL GO INSIDE TO MY HELL-WIFE AND PUT YOU DOWN AS A SOLID ‘MAYBE’.“
Drew a comic thing of the neighbors.
I love it when a post gets better the second time it circles around to my dash again.
Politicians around the country are trying to pass leglistation that prevents transgender people from using the restroom consistent with their gender. This is my response.
The anti-trans bathroom and locker room initiative being headed up by a campaign called Just Want Privacy is offically beginning the long slog of collecting signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Because that’s what this initiative would do—it would override the existing protections for trans folks under the state’s nondiscrimination language by requiring that they use not the restroom which best fits their identity, but rather, which fits their sex at birth.
This, of course, represents a basic misunderstanding/ignorance about trans individuals—not to mention in direct contradiction with, you know, medical science—but that’s sure not stopping these alleged humans from creating marketing materials like this:
LOLLLLLL I CAN’T EVEN TELL YOU ALL THE WAYS THIS IS AWFUL.
Anyway, despite only having about two months and change to gather close to 300k signatures (GOOD LUCK), a feat which will likely take literal millions of dollars (which they are not exactly raking in, even with the help of all these bigots!) and may still not end with a spot on the November ballot.
As we have warned about before, this is 100% not actually about the safety of women and children (it, for example, would not have done anything to thwart this recent incident of bathroom grossness at SeaTac airport!). It will protect no women. What it will do is make trans and non binary folks in our community less safe, and will essentially legalize transphobia by business owners, patrons, and schools.
It’s a bad initiative. Don’t sign it. To help, we’ve updated out What to Sign guide:
Do you live in Washington? Are you going to any festivals or street fairs this summer? Print out this handy guide so you know which signature gatherers are worth you time and which you can ignore!
If you’re registered to vote in California for the Democratic primary please check your voter status here
Many people are starting to discover that they’ve registered with the American Independent Party (AIP) instead of an actual independent on their voter registartion. The AIP is the third largest party in California, but instead of being a standard independent status for voting purposes, the party is affiliated with right-wing politics and isn’t an actual independent status.
But most importantly, if you’re registered as an AIP affiliate, you cannot vote in the California primary on June 7th
Most people have registered with the party in error, as many as 500,000 people could be excluded from the Democratic Primary, so please check your voter status if you registered as an independent
They have a chronic physical or mental illness that causes pain, depression, or other serious symptoms. They don’t have access to medical care, and self-medicate.
Between their low-paying third-shift job, caring for their children, and caring for an older, ailing relative, they average three hours of sleep a night. Uppers help them stay awake at work.
They live in a home where a roommate, significant other, or relative smokes weed frequently. They breathe a lot of secondhand smoke. They would like to move out, but first and last month’s rent is too expensive.
They have a serious addiction. They’d like to stop, but they don’t have access to drug rehab programs that work.
They have an addiction. They are not ready to quit yet.
SNAP benefits can only be used to buy food. Millions of Americans depend on this program to feed themselves and their families. Drug testing is expensive for taxpayers. It is invasive and humiliating for the people on these programs. It is also ineffective. People on public assistance have a much lower rate of drug use than the general population.
If you live in the United States, pleasefind your representative and email them to let them know you oppose H.R. 4540. It only takes a minute.
This is not the way to deal with drug use. Starvation is torture, not a treatment program.
– They live in a state where medical or recreational marijuana is legal, but it’s recently been ruled you can still use a marijuana test to discriminate against/not hire/fire someone who tests positive, since it’s illegal at a federal level still. So maybe they are taking legal marijuana for a chronic condition, or just because it’s legal and they like it more than a beer after work, & lost their job or have kept their job(s) but are now failing the SNAP test.
Isn’t that a fucked up loophole?
Why is it that these bills always ignore the fact that the person receiving SNAP is often not the only person eating?
My mother smoked a lot of pot when I was a kid. It was cheap, she had friends who would provide her with it, she had gone from being a trophy wife to a single mother of three with serious emotional issues, and she was doing physical labor to make ends meet. She was in physical and mental pain. Pot helped. But even without that justification–even if she was just getting high because it was fun–my sisters and I deserved to eat. Saying “sorry, you tested positive” wouldn’t have just starved her. It would have left three little girls who were already food insecure (because SNAP is not enough) starving. How is this a reasonable thing to want to do, as a civilized society? “Sorry, kid, you popped out of the wrong womb and your mother did a drug, so no eggs for you this month.”
Our foster system is overloaded. Taking children away from their families is not the answer. Allowing their families to eat is at least a help.
And yeah, women want white collar jobs too. Go figure – A diverse population of women, with different abilities, interests and levels of education, are all fighting for the right to seek diverse forms of employment. Fighting for equality in one sphere doesn’t mean that we’ve forgotten about the others.
Just because you aren’t paying attention to the feminist movement doesn’t mean that the feminist movement is nonexistent.
Many jobs such as these (although I don’t know that this is the case for these exactly) have been denied to women based on the idea that doing a particular type of labor or being in a particular environment would be too harmful to women.
And by “too harmful to women” I of course mean “too harmful to their uterus.*”
Like, there was a case back in the… 80s, I think? where some women worked at some sort of factory or plant or something. (I’ll be honest, I don’t remember a lot of the details of this— Google, however, informs me that I was right and it was in the 80s).
Anyway, there were hazardous materials in the plant. And, using laws that were intended to protect pregnant women, the company basically realized, “hey, wait a minute, we don’t need to have any women working here and we can get away with it!” Because, see, hazardous materials like that are bad for fetus.
So the company basically told a bunch of women “you can’t work here anymore because you can have babies and it’s not safe for you.” But, you know, one thing they could do would be to get sterilized, and then they could keep working there. So women did— women who would not otherwise chosen to have been sterilized got sterilized because it was either that or lose the jobs that they desperately needed.
Stuff like this gets ignored all the time. I hear the argument all the time “well women can’t be drafted…” Well, first off, let’s set aside the whole issue of the draft because that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms. But you’re acting like there aren’t any women who would want to volunteer to be in the military. There are plenty. Only lots don’t because they’re discouraged from it or aren’t allowed to serve in the role they want. Or they do join but often leave because of severe sexual harassment and even sexual assault.
Saying that women “don’t want” these jobs is ridiculous on multiple levels— but what it does do is work to affirm the idea of women as illogical, weak, and “naturally” not suited for particular jobs.
*It is important to acknowledge that being a woman =/= having a uterus. However, such associations are made and utilized in this particular discourse (i.e. people equate being a woman with having a uterus, and that gets tied up in the discourse surrounding excluding women from jobs).
is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea
its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea
I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea
i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea
why don’t white people just say tea
do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea
why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”
the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like
there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai
They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.
What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.
(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)
“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.
“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.
We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom.
We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.
Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).
Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)
Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).
So, can we all stop making fun of this now?
Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”?
It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to.
The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).
And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.
