Actually, you’ll find that leather/kink has long and deep connections with Queer culture. It may not be your thing but it is part of our history. The Pride flag isn’t just about sexuality and gender… it’s about expressing and being WHO YOU TRUELY ARE. Believe it or not but the leather culture is a huge part of some people’s Queer lives.
Also…..its been there forever???? Like so long????
As it’s Pride month and as I don’t think people realise the Pride flag has been adapted a lot over time (I’ve seen over 20 versions so far). I thought it would be nice to shine a light on a few of the alternative versions of the Pride flag.
As a community, we should be working together to battle inequality. POC don’t feel part of our community so if having the More Color More Pride flag helps even slightly then please don’t stand in anyone’s way. It’s not replacing the Gilbert flag, just like none of these flags have replaced it.
Also, just consider this comment I found on FB: ‘The “But we don’t need it because it already represents everyone” complaints sound very much like the straight people who are uncomfortable with the attention we get and try to put on straight pride.’
Depiction of Anarchism as a snake with knives for teeth, threatening the aristocracy and government power.
Text: Ihr aber, die ihr blicht Mit zornigem Neid Auf fürsten pracht und herrlichkeit, Auf all’ die großen dieser Erde: Seid glücklich, daß ihr unten seid, Seid froh, versteckt im Thal zu wohnen, Im engen Haus, am stillen gerde, Und laßt, wer will, hoch in Gefahren thronen.
Translated (As best as I could): But you who are blind with an angry envy At princely splendor and glory At all the big people of this earth: You are lucky to be underneath, Be glad to live hidden in the valley, To dwell in the narrow house, in the quiet place, And let, whoever will, dwell high in peril
this was supposed to be a hit at anarchists and instead it makes us look and sound cool
IDK how things are for everyone else, but the fact is, the medical community in my state is starting to skew REALLY HEAVILY into “self care” “coping” sort of stuff. Like I have been suggested mindfulness for literally every condition I have. Every single one.
And all the recovery posts for the most part, are those same sorts of “coping” suggestions. And maybe for someone who doesn’t have access to mindfulness somehow it’s helpful. But for me who is constantly offered that stuff IN PLACE OF ACTUAL MEDICAL INTERVENTION I cannot not see this as a victim blaming thing.
Like any sort of “behavioral change” treatment for any condition fucking terrifies me because I have never had a SINGLE HEALTH CONDITION that could be treated with lifestyle changes that I haven’t constantly and consistently, been told “you don’t want to get better” when I say “x treatment didn’t work” or “I am doing this already and this is included in my baseline”. It doesn’t matter I do stretches every day, I still need to go to PT again to relearn them and redo them because if it’s not working, I am doing something wrong.
I think for some people, this is the new “religion”. Like I live in a liberal area. The atheists probably outnumber religious people. They have no power. The republicans won’t even listen to them. But the new age hipster yoga people? Oh they are in huge number. The health nuts who ride a bike to work, shame people for not using the right lightbulbs and buying fancy ass 6$ smoothies every day for a nutrition boost.
I get this is probably a reality in a handful of bluest blue states, but “recovery” and “self care” and “health” has become performative the same way caring about other social issues has become. It’s become a thing disturbingly similar to the reactions of like, religious people who won’t help people who don’t meet their standards of decency.
Because it’s no different then religion. It’s a mindset to convince
yourself if you work really hard to better yourself, you will be able to
become healthy. People who cannot do that have to be labeled as people
who didn’t work hard enough, if you want to continue believing that.
For me it’s scary.
For me it’s the reason, that no one even tested me for a lot of stuff for years and years. They wanted it to be in my head, fixable with mindfullness, they WANTED to be able to blame me for not getting better because me doing my best and failing means they need to adjust their world view. Basically, it’s a “coping technique” allowing certain people to convince themselves, at the expense of others, that if they really try they will be ok.
And when it’s not just people on tumblr, but a good minimum of 60% of all the doctors I have seen in the last decade, that is potentially deadly.
Often an emphasis on self help and (in the DD system) “natural supports” (meaning support from people who aren’t paid for it) is a way for any of a number of systems to pass the buck back to the clients and recommend things that cost little to nothing of the systems’ time energy or money.
Another objection i have to mindfulness as the medical profession currently promotes it: Contrary to what you’ll be told, it’s a religious practice. From a specific religion. People have a right to know they’re being taught a technique tied to a religion. We have a right to know which religion and exactly how it’s tied to said religion and its beliefs about the world. We have a right to know all this before we consent to even give it a try.
Because believe it or not, not everyone wants to be taught a religious practice in the name of medical care. Not everyone wants to learn a technique derived from a religion not their own. Not everyone has a religion and many who don’t, don’t want to be involved with religious practices of any kind. And even people who would agree to do it, ought to be well informed about what they’re getting into, including possible negative effects, before they make a choice.
When I say this online, people have a very weird response. They assume I’m a fundamentalist Christian. I’m not Christian at all. And they accuse me of being intolerant of other religions. They say this without even being aware if I practice mindfulness or not.
To be clear:. I have nothing against other religions. I see religion as a cultural thing that is deeply personal. I have something against a specific religious practice masquerading as a secular medical practice suitable for people of all religions. I don’t think it’s very religiously tolerant to mislead someone into doing something that may even be against their own religion. Or to get staunchly non-religious people to take part in a religious activity unawares. It’s because I respect other religions that I believe people should be aware of the nature of any ties between an activity (mindfulness to Buddhism, yoga to Hinduism, Tai Chi to Taoism, etc.) and a religion, in order to make a fully informed decision. Also, respecting a religion and wishing to practice it or something derived from it are different, entirely different, things. You can have either one without the other, easily.
But when I bring this up I get a whole lot of self righteous harrumphing from people who insist that they, unlike me, believe in “tolerance” of all religions and that since they respect Buddhism they have no problem doing a Buddhist practice. Fine, good for them. But it doesn’t follow that everyone who respects Buddhism has to take part in Buddhist or Buddhist-derived practices. And half the people saying this probably have a very distorted, Orientalist view of what Buddhism is, rather than the actual understanding that would be more conducive to actual respect. Also, I’m pretty sure all these same people would balk at taking part in something that, unbeknownst to them, turned out to be Christian Science Faith Healing packaged up in a secular-looking context and presented to them as a medical treatment. Not that I see that as equivalent to mindfulness as practices, but that it’s a good example of why there’s a difference between a secular medical treatment and a religious practice, and why there’s a good reason people ought to be informed about “medical” practices heavily derived from a religious source.
So yeah if anyone thinks I’m knocking Buddhism or that I’m Christian they’re barking up a couple wrong trees here. Also I practice Tai Chi for medical reasons. I’m well aware it’s an outgrowth of Taoism. I decided I didn’t mind that. Other people have the right to know and make such decisions about Tai Chi, including the opposite of my decision. It drives me up the wall to see things like mindfulness, yoga, and Tai Chi treated as secular or religion-neutral in medical contexts, and then people penalized for not trying them, or treated as “intolerant” for bringing up this problem.
Also within religious contexts things like the psychological and emotional dangers of meditation are understood and planned for in a way that these faux-secular versions don’t, so a person practicing mindfulness meditation may suddenly be physically and cognitively incapacitated by terror worse than that of a panic attack, and be sent to a psychiatrist for “panic attacks” when that isn’t what’s happening there. The parts of Buddhism that practice this meditation are well aware of these issues and have their own ways of dealing with them. That’s another negative effect of divorcing a practice from its roots. And nobody is warned this can happen, let alone why it happens.
If something has the potential to help, it also carries the risk of unwanted side effects and actual harm. Beyond the basic fact that the same approach is not going to work in every case. People’s systems are going to respond differently. There are also going to be limits to what any given approach can reasonably treat. None of this is limited to drugs and more invasive medical procedures, but applies to any intended treatment. There’s always the potential to throw things out of whack even worse, and they need to be prepared for that possibility.
Similar concerns about medicalized mindfulness have come up here before, in the context of CBT’s largely unacknowledged potential for just plain dangerous interactions (with OCD, specifically there). As madeofpatterns put it in that discussion:
The thing that scares me most…is that it doesn’t have a plan b for what to do if it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for everything, and it doesn’t work 100% reliably for *anything*.
It’s worrying whenever these considerations get swept under the rug. Much less when we’re talking about powerful techniques ripped totally out of their original spiritual context, to get pushed as a risk-free medical treatment by people who generally don’t know very much about what they’re doing at all. Including how to recognize what’s happening and help people when things do go wrong–which will inevitably happen at some point.
That’s irresponsible, beyond the other concerns Mel raised. Even if it weren’t frequently getting pushed as a panacea to replace other treatments, and the patient getting blamed when that just does not go well.
Freshly developed Mantang Narrow-mouthed Frog (Microhyla borneensis/nephenticola), more commonly known as pea-frog, one of the tiniest frog species in the world.
Being a good person is a choice. Don’t let people fool you into believing that truly good people never have bad thoughts, are never tempted by the easier path, by the low road, never mess up or act out selfishly. Never believe a person can be good without making a conscious effort.
Every single time you do something good, you’ve made a decision to make the world a little brighter.
Goodness is not an inherent trait, it is a choice. Keep making it! I see you, I’m proud of you, and I’m rooting for you!
This and… lots of things I have no way of articulating, along the same lines.
I try to keep this blog pretty neutral on political issues, however I am also becoming increasingly aware of the general public’s gross misunderstanding of why ADAPT and other disability groups are protesting so prominently against the senate’s healthcare bill- and it’s a lot more complicated than preexisting conditions and losing insurance.
If you can make it through this, there are cute puppy photos of VSEPR at the end (from when he was an 8 week old ball of fluff).
I will start by saying I, like everyone, am quite biased on this subject. I am disabled, I am involved with several disability advocacy groups, disability activism groups, and disability coalitions. I am close to people with all sorts of disabilities. And many of them are a part of the community doing wonderful work because of medicaid.
There’s a perception that institutionalizing people with disabilities (physical and mental) is a thing of the past. And that institutions and nursing homes are significantly safer and more dignified than they were “way back when”. Neither of these are true, and a big part of whether someone who is disabled is a part of the community or is locked away in an institution has to do with where you live and your access to medicaid.
Medicaid is the primary insurer of low income individuals and individuals with disabilities, and almost half of children born in the US. Without the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), it is often the only insurer for people with disabilities.
On a federal level, medicaid must cover the cost of a nursing home, but individual states can elect to offer what are called waivers for home-care for “non-skilled” and “skilled” medical care. “Non-skilled” is typically an aide who helps an elderly person or person with a disability function in the community but not providing skilled nursing. This can look like anything from helping someone with a physical disability dress and feed themselves to transporting someone to community events to attending doctors appointments to simply using the bathroom. “Skilled” care might be an in home nurse for maintaining IVs and IV medication or nutrition, in home physical therapy, helping with feeding tubes, or any number of other things an individual may not be able to do effectively by themselves. These services are what allow many disabled people and elderly people to stay in their homes and a part of their community. Private insurers generally do not pay for these services long term. Disabilities, however, exist long term.
Without medicaid waivers, becoming significantly disabled and not having access to a very dedicated family or an enormous amount of money to pay for these services means you are sentenced to live in an institution, away from the community.
The federal government is not saying “no” to waivers with the AHCA, they are restructuring the way they pay for medicaid. Rather than reimbursing states for how much medical care actually costs, the federal government would only pay a set amount per person (like a block grant). So, states that currently offer waivers would no longer be reimbursed for those waivers and often don’t have the budgetary means to offer them. This means that more and more people with disabilities will likely lose their access to the community and ability to live independent, dignified lives if the AHCA is passed. I, and most of the protesters, believe the right to get dressed and go to work, use the restroom, and be bathed without being institutionalized is a basic right that should be protected by the federal government. The AHCA deeply threatens that.
This is just one aspect of why this bill scares me and so many other people with disabilities. The bill and the issues surrounding it are complex and take years to understand. There are many problems with insurance and our healthcare system and medicaid is no exception, but in my opinion, gutting medicaid is not the right answer.
Help us be a part of society and contribute by educating yourself on this and expressing to your representatives how you think they need to vote to protect your community’s needs.
And as promised, puppy pictures:
It is not ~only natural~ to suddenly have to be taken out of your home, away from your independence, family, friends, pets, etc., because of who you are. American society largely thinks it is, but it’s not. Losing these things is devastating to anyone. It’s also totally unnecessary. There is nothing magical about places like nursing homes and other institutions that make them provide something that can’t be provided to us in our own homes. We’ve just been culturally conditioned to believe there is. I’m on my state’s developmental disability Medicaid waiver program and everyone here is scared shitless of what could happen, both to disabled people and to the jobs of the people who currently provide us services. (My home care agency is one of the largest employers in the county. This stuff affects (both disabled and nondisabled) staff, case managers, administrators, etc., not just (disabled) clients.) Disabled people are often the first people who start dying (and putting us in institutions kills us faster, this is known – even aside from the other things we stand to lose, of which I’m not sure if losing my cat or my freedom is worse) as a result of budget cuts when times get tough in a country. Wherever you live, don’t let us disappear without a fight. We are not tragic figures who need to accept that we’ll live in institutions forever and/or die before our time because that’s Just How Things Are. We’re people just like you who it harms just as much to forcibly imprison us against our will just because of how our bodies/minds work, and if you don’t think that’s what it means you aren’t paying close enough attention.
All of us have been brainwashed to some degree to accept this state of affairs but it is in no way normal, natural, inevitable, or right. I am still angry that when I was a young child, my neighbor disappeared forever and was sundered from most of her family relationships in any real way, and nobody thought there was anything massively messed up about this. She had severe MS that came on suddenly. She never left the nursing home. Her family occasionally visited her. People think this is normal, so they get sad, but they don’t often get mad. People think that our disabilities are to blame, that this is the only “cost effective” way we can exist, and that “cost effectiveness” is an okay way to judge ethics even though we don’t judge other accommodations for the limitations of nondisabled people that way.
(Don’t believe me? Calculate up how much money is spent on walking people who expect chairs and benches to appear every single place they go, on sighted people who need lighting to navigate in the dark, etc. That’s not a joke, it costs a crapload of money but since they are accepted by society as normal, nobody forces them to live in special places that are the only places that have lights or chairs. Nobody then blames them for being unable to handle a world with no lights or chairs – the world outside these few special institutions that have funding to give them lights and chairs. If this sounds ridiculous to you, it is – but it’s equally ridiculous to act like having a feeding tube or a wheelchair means you need to live in a special designated place for people with feeding tubes and wheelchairs, away from everything and everyone familiar that you care about.)
So please. If you’re sleeping here, wake up to the fact that none of the way disabled people are treated by most of American society is even slightly inevitable. Wake up to the fact that there are already alternatives – these are not a hypothetical utopian world, they exist now. And don’t go back to sleep. Don’t watch us die and get disappeared into institutions – both are already happening and can happen more – and do nothing about it. Unlike most oppressed groups, disabled people are a group that anyone can join at any time in their life with no warning at all. And whether we were born this way, acquire disabilities, or both – we are still human, we still have all the same innate wishes for life that everyone else does, and it still harms us just as much to decide that we’re not capable enough for normal society and need to be put away for our own good or to avoid becoming burdens or other BS. And this state of affairs is not a tragic and sad inevitability, but rather an injustice, a horribly widespread crime against humanity, that needs fighting, fixing, and changing. And needs to be prevented from getting worse and worse.
I know it is hard to face this. I know that denial is easier – especially if you’re not disabled and think that if you just do such-and-such a thing it will never happen to you. Especially if your fear of disability is still bound up with a fear of death – since so many treat the two as nearly identical, or disability as innately worse than death (so why help us live good lives, that’s ~impossible~, right?). Just please, please pay attention and do something. Even if you’re not disabled now, likely you or someone you are close to will be within your lifetime, and wouldn’t it be better not to have to fear being abandoned or institutionalized (or both at once) when the inevitable disability happens? And not to have such a fate treated as the sad but inevitable thing you must accept as a consequence of changes in your body that you had little to no control over?
The store had put a sign by it encouraging people to touch it and watch it move. Sensitive plants have an unusual habit: If touched, they curl up their leaves. I understand that’s fascinating, irresistible for many, and a good selling point for the store.
But most plants don’t like to be touched a lot, even if they’re not sensitive plants. Too much touching can result in part or all of the plant withering or dying.
Plants find it very hard to move. This is why most plants move too slowly for people to see it. Plants that move quickly are using up a huge amount of their energy reserves.
The sensitive plant with the sign next to it? Leaves were already withering, turning brown, and dropping off. It did not look happy. It looked like it was being overworked by all the physical attention, and like if that kept up it might not even survive.
Just because something can move, doesn’t mean it should spend its timein constant motion just because people find it fascinating. And just because something responds when you poke it does’t mean poking it to see the response is the best idea – this can be a metaphor for a lot of things but I really mean it literally too. Sensitive plants can move fast, but it’s exhausting and not something they can keep up constantly. They remind me of a spider I was trying to get onto a piece of paper to take it outside – I never touched it, but it died of overwork, because that kind of spider was only designed for short bursts of energy. I’m not a spider person (at the time, I was a barely-recovering full-blown arachnophobe) but I felt terrible when I learned what I’d done.
So try not to poke the sensitive plants, even if you find their responses amazing or interesting. It’s not very amazing or interesting to have a dead houseplant because you couldn’t resist poking at it.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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