Day: August 14, 2017

You are always so unfailingly polite to people who suggest things that are either incorrect, deadly for you, or “hello, this is a chonic thing do you REALLY think I haven’t tried that?” goals, tbh

hussyknee:

thebibliosphere:

I try to operate on the basis that people want to help, and that is a very good and kind thing. They don’t have to care, they don’t need to try and help someone in some small way, but they try anyway, and that’s to be encouraged.

Sometimes the information is wrong or just doesn’t work for me, but however mildly frustrating it is for me to have to repeat myself, it’s infinitely preferable to dealing with people who don’t care and would step over someone suffering, or worse, dig the boot in. 

I get a lot of…bad messages, on tumblr. From people who are willing to show the world just how cruel they can be because I don’t allow for anon messages. So they’re bold in their hatred for a sick person, wishing they would “shut up or die already” because in their mind I either deserve this or I talk about it too much and I’m not their idea of how a sick person should be (whatever that means)…and I tell them sincerely I am sorry for whatever they are going through that prompts them to act as such, and wish them well. Sometimes I’ll get a hearty “fuck you cunt” in return and that’s my cue to hit the block button. Other times it opens up a dialogue that other person has been needing and they will usually apologize and move on. But some of them stay, and I get to watch them learn, and change, and understand what it means to take light into dark places.

I can still lose the rag sometimes and need to vent, but I always try not to lash out directly at that person unless their rhetoric is truly abhorrent. Sometimes I’ll say, you know your message really hurt me, but I thought about it and realized you must be hurting worse to want to do something like that to another person, so whatever you’re going through I hope you find peace.

Because for every awful message, I get ten good ones, from people who want to help. So even if they are wrong, or I know it already, or I’m having to repeat myself for the hundredth time that day…I’ll take the world where people care, rather than one where they don’t.

You are amazing and a light in this world, Joy.

santorumsoakedpikachu:

autistic-knight-errant:

I honestly think that we would eliminate one of the major causes of ableism if we stopped basing people’s worth off how much revenue they generate.

This measure is worthless. Actually, it is worth less than nothing.

I used to be a programmer for a spammer. Being rather young, naive, and also desperate for some kind of income, I had no idea what “lead generation” meant and had no idea that the fact that they didn’t talk about how their nebulous product actually helped anyone was a huge red flag. I took the job, slowly learned the codebase, and it took me months to figure out what kind of practices this place actually employed.

I was asked to put in obnoxious popups, but hide the popups for traffic coming in from Google so that Google wouldn’t cut off their sponsored traffic because the site violated their standards, a few months into my time there. That was when I began to realize the kind of place I was working at. Then I was asked to create a throwaway email account to test something, and I found out what actually happened to the poor people who put their information in for Free Insurance Quotes. They were inundated with spam. I found out the company had no site of its own, just hundreds of these “Free Insurance Quotes” sites all with slightly different stock photos and slightly different forms and a “complaints” page that was very hard to find with an email that was never checked.

I was a Hardworking Taxpaying American when I worked at that job. I was, according to this capitalist logic, contributing to society and of much more value than a disabled person who supposedly is a leech on society.

I was making the world worse by working at that job. I would have been making the world better if I did absolutely nothing but stare at the wall all day rather than work that job.

Many jobs are like this. Anyone who works at an oil company is making the world worse. Anyone who works at a tobacco company is making the world worse. People in various abusive therapy industries are making the world worse. I’m sure you can name plenty of other jobs in this category. The world would be better if those jobs did not exist.

Now, I am disabled. I am chronically ill, and I cannot even work a sedentary job because having to sit up for eight hours at a time would make me have to lie in bed for days.

I am making the world much better now by replacing the invasive grasses on my front lawn with strawberries that attract native bees, by sealing my house to increase its energy efficiency, by taking care of a flock of chickens and doing my best to ensure that they have a good happy life, by replenishing the soil in the yard with compost and chicken manure, than I was at that job. And I don’t do very much – I can’t.

Equating the arbitrary numbers one accumulates for oneself to one’s actual value or contribution is a dangerous lie, and it is poisoning the planet.

*sees yet another blanket statement about socially acceptable emotional expression and gender, which seems simplistic even when read as specific to the OP’s own culture*

*keeps scrolling 😑 😩*

Mr. C actually ended up getting into a rather prolonged argument with the TV licensing agency, because for several years after moving he kept an older Swedish-sold set that just didn’t work with British broadcast television at all. (That was also in like 2002.) Just used it for gaming and videos/DVDs.

No, he didn’t end up paying them. Finally did get a replacement after it went on the fritz not long before I moved in.

(ETA: From some other things I’ve seen, their system also seems to be just going “Someone is currently living at this address; therefore, they must need the license.”)