“Oscar gets more unsolicited comments about how cute he is, more uninvited pinches on the cheek and ruffles of the hair and demands for affection from strangers, than anyone else I know. I made a point, from when he was very young, of teaching him to express his discomfort: he says ‘I want some space’; he says ‘I feel shy’; he says ‘I don’t want you to touch me’; he says ‘I don’t like that, please stop.’ These statements from him are almost always laughed at, and then ignored, until I step in on his behalf.”
Kids no matter how small are fully conscious people who can have a strong sense of being patronized and disrespected. I remember being barely two and furious at how adults would talk about me like I couldn’t understand or wasn’t listening, then talk to me like they might talk to an animal.
Exclusive: Senior health professionals and campaigners have now come together to take legal action and demand a judicial review
Jeremy Hunt is the longest serving health secretary Getty
Legal action is being taken against Jeremy Hunt and the Department of Health over their proposals to restructure the NHS, The Independent can reveal.
Plans have been tabled to convert the NHS into a public/private enterprise, which critics say is based upon the US private health insurance-based system.
Senior health professionals and campaigners have now come together to
take legal action and demand a judicial review, to ensure full
parliamentary scrutiny of the proposals.
Under NHS England’s new plans, the boundary between health and social
care would be dissolved and new systems and structures would allow
alternative funding sources, ultimately leading to the creation of new
healthcare overseers called Accountable Care Organisations (ACOs).
ACOs would permit commercial, non-NHS bodies to run health and social
services. They could be awarded huge contracts to manage and provide
whole packages of care, allowing the ACOs to either provide the NHS
service themselves or sub-contract it.
This means ACOs will have control over the allocation of NHS and
taxpayers’ money but their accountability for spending it and their
obligations to the public will be under commercial contracts, not
government statutes.
Solicitors representing prominent NHS campaigners have now contacted
Mr Hunt to inform him that they are seeking a judicial review in an
attempt to ensure parliament can fully scrutinise the proposals.
They claim the Department of Health’s consultation process was
limited, inadequate and unlawful due to the lack of national
consultation or parliamentary approval…..
Protip for men: if marriage is a horrifying concept for you and you think it is an evil trap, do not buy a ring and ask a woman to marry you
I’m way over seeing radical feminist bullshit on my dash. This isn’t even social justice or a real issue.
sorry that not marrying someone you dont loathe is radical feminism i guess?
women: don’t propose or get married if u don’t like the thought of marriage
men: what kind of sjw fuckery
the other bit that this implies is:
If you like your wife, act like it. Even around your friends. Be open and honest about liking your wife, liking spending time with her, and not being resentful of the shared work of building a household. Let your buddies know you can’t hang out with them because you’d rather be home with your wife, whom you like, because she is your legit bff, even though you know your buddies are gonna mock you for it.
Stand up to your buddies. Tell them mocking isn’t cool and you don’t want them to do it anymore. Challenge the other men in your life to be better men.
That is what “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” implies to men who are married. And while it’s all completely reasonable I imagine that it’s scary as fuck when it’s just so much easier to har de har har the little woman’s such a nag, ain’t she, don’t we all hate being married so much? with other men.
In that context, “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” is kindof a radical statement.
The number of guys I work with who are engaged who started pulling the “uh oh, life over soon, har har” shit that I have completely shut down with a simple “well if you don’t want to get married, then don’t”…*sigh* And they’re just like, hem, haw, welllll if I don’t then she might not stay with meee, which I respond to with “well, sounds like you need to have a pretty serious and honest conversation with your fiancee about your feelings then” and then the *panic!* look…When you remove that easy “hah hah ball-and-chain” narrative, watch the reaction. Some of them (to a female friend) will mumblingly admit that they love their fiancee and are excited to be married. Others…all you get is fear.
That’s the disservice we do men by refusing to teach boys how to explore their emotional needs. It hurts everyone. I watched three male friends walk into marriages I can tell they weren’t ready for and didn’t want, just because it was expected and they had no tools for emotional self-examination. Two of those marriages are (shockingly) in crisis, a couple years later. One has kids involved now. It’s more than a little heartbreaking. The marriages I see that are working? Are the guys with the emotional maturity to talk to their wives and who don’t care if everyone knows they’re in love with them.
SERIOUSLY.
My friend is getting married this summer and when I congratulated her fiance on their engagement he said to me “Yeah well you know, women. This is what they want so you have to bite the bullet.” and my other friend’s husband who was sitting next to him laughed and agreed. If this is how you feel, don’t get married. Don’t propose. Just…. Don’t. Do it. Any of it.
Straight people think that doing things you really don’t want to do – like marriage and having kids – is normal cos they’re still stuck in a fucking 19th century mindset.
It’s why I know my best friend got a good one, he’s open about how much he loves her and he’s excited to be getting married and regularly contributes ideas and has his own input, it’s nice to see
It filters through as well. Even being gay, a lot of my straight friends don’t understand why I spend so much time with my husband. Because I love him? Because I enjoy his company? Because he’s my best friend? I can’t count the amount of straight people that have told me that they think it’s “weird” that my husband and I spend so much quality time together. The only person who understood was my mom, whose response was: “If you love someone and genuinely enjoy their company, why WOULDN’T you want to spend your free time with them?!”
How can anyone look at their impending marriage and think ‘oh no, it’s all over now’ like???? I’ve only felt so close to so many people in my life, but those small few were like?? I’d wake up in the morning excited to be awake just to look forward to SEEING them. I’d catch myself with this stupid idiot grin in broad daylight just THINKING ABOUT BEING AROUND THEM. I’d sleep easy with them in my head, shitty days became perfect once I spoke to them. THAT’s how I imagine feeling again someday. I think about feeling that way for someone again and it’s like the whole future opens up. Marriage is finding your best friend in the whole wide world and wanting to have a sleepover every single day, and to agree to it and then go around groaning like your freedom is being stolen is a HUGE disrespect. If you have the freedom to share your life with anyone you like and you throw it around like baggage you really can’t expect it to grow, can you? You gotta care about yourself a little more than that I think
All of this.
Not to mention this mentality makes it’s way TO THE DAY OF THE WEDDING. How many weddings have we seen with something like this:
Like what kind of toxic mentality do you have to have to say this as the bride is about to walk down the aisle and marry someone who it’s now suggested doesn’t even want to be there?? How is this cute? How is this supposedly charming? This is supposed to be the person you love and want to be with! And not to mention that you send this down the aisle with a small child (the ring bearer or the flower girls)…I have a special loathing for things like this.
Holy shit I didn’t know that was even a thing.
This reminds me of a study I read about years ago with statistics on happiness/stability in relationships of people of various genders/orientations, and straight people were at the very bottom. (And lesbians were at the top! Not a huge surprise, given that women are generally more inclined to communicate and work out emotions and issues.)
This was a big thing with an old friend group that played Magic. Most of them were straight men and they would joke like “I finally got away from my wife and I get to do Nerd Man things” and I was always like “wait, why doesn’t she play too?”
I don’t think it’s at ALL a coincidence that there are a lot more women at the other store I play at now.
Still not as many, but more. Several of whom, omg, come with their husbands and have fun.
hey, i’m åsa, an 18yo german individual. i’m severely mentally ill, but the mental illness most important for this post is anorexia nervosa. i’m trying to enter remission for it, but i do not have a therapist atm, so i’m p much all by myself. i am in desperate need of groceries, of safe foods, and my dad is usually responsible for providing those. however, we have been arguing about an old hospital bill of 200€, which i cannot pay.
i am looking for a job as a tutor, because that is one of the few things i can do alongside school and with a mental illness, and to pay the bill, but right now i cannot pay and he refuses to. due to this argument, we have also been arguing about groceries, and he told me i was “too expensive”, and that was all he said on the topic, not going grocery/food shopping with me.
so i am asking for donations in order to buy myself food and other necessities, so that i will not literally die of anorexia. anything i receive that does not go towards groceries will go towards the hospital bill, so that i will not get in legal troubles for it. right now, without the groceries, i have enough to last me about a week, and after that, if my dad has not calmed down, i will only be able to eat in the weekends at my grandmother, and maybe once a week at my mother’s. that is way too little for anyone, let alone for someone trying to recover from anorexia.
my paypal is paypal.me/aasab / my email is jembach@t-online.de . in return i am able to offer help with german, latin grammar, or English. i could also write poems. thank you
On a Sunday afternoon in late April, there was a small but buoyant dance party at the fairly new outdoor AIDS memorial in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which had once been ground zero of the AIDS epidemic.
[…]
The reason for the party? It was to celebrate and promote the fact that we now know with certainty that people with HIV whose meds make the virus undetectable in their blood (as confirmed by lab tests) cannot transmit the virus to sexual partners. In New York City, a host of organizations – including the health department and Housing Works – have been part of an effort in recent years to end New York State’s AIDS epidemic by 2020. Now, they’re rallying behind the Undetectable = Untransmittable or U=U message, which is the national rallying cry of the Prevention Access Campaign.
In recent months, a stunning array of prominent international agencies and individuals have signed onto a U=U consensus statement saying that, based on modern science, undetectable people cannot transmit HIV. They include AIDS United, GMHC, the Human Rights Campaign, the International AIDS Society, the UK’s National AIDS Trust and the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD), to name just a few.
“U=U is such incredible news that we’ve been saying we should be dancing in the streets about it,” says Bruce Richman, who started Prevention Access Campaign. Richman says he’s been eager to get the U=U word out since he learned in 2012 that because he was undetectable he was not infectious. (He was diagnosed with HIV in 2003.)
Even since then, scientific evidence for U=U has continued to mount in a series of very large studies, such as one released early last year finding that among nearly 900 serodiscordant (one HIV+, one HIV-) gay and straight couples followed over 16 months, there was no evidence of HIV infection despite their having condomless sex.
This has massive health, prevention and legal implications. It means that HIV-positive folks and their HIV-negative sexual partners can all but stop freaking out about the possibility of transmission. It also renders even more outdated various state laws from the 1980s and 1990s that criminalize HIV-positive people for endangering sexual partners when they don’t disclose their HIV status. Finally, it should serve to reduce the stigma suffered by HIV-positive people, who are often made to feel as if they are second-class citizens for carrying an infectious virus.
But despite all that – and despite the fact that U=U has essentially attained global scientific and advocacy consensus – national, state and local entities still do little to broadcast this fact to the general American public. A brief review of the main HIV webpages for health departments nationwide serving those states and cities hardest hit by HIV found that not one stated in clear language that people with undetectable HIV were incapable of transmitting the virus.
[…]
“None of the websites are saying this, none of the marketing campaigns,” says Richman. “I’ve found that people who know this information tend to be privileged, have private insurance, are often white. That is so unjust that information that concerns our social, sexual and reproductive health and lives is being withheld.”
Richman can become very passionate when talking about how little the HIV health establishment has done thus far to make U=U general knowledge. “When I realized that the power structure thought people with HIV were irresponsible and couldn’t understand this info, I was furious,” he says. “This information changed my life, lifted my feelings of shame and being toxic. That was so freeing.”
“Everyone,” he adds, “should clearly have that information.”
These mountains hold jungles. Some days, the air is so thick it latches to your skin. All this moisture creates a very special kind of forest. One that I could spend a lifetime roaming. Still, this land would never run out of things to teach me.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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