The use of plastic straws by disabled people became a moral detriment suitable for public shaming before lack of accessibility became a moral detriment suitable for public shaming.
My disabled YouTuber friend now gets harassed when she uses a plastic bending straw (an accessibility tool, something she NEEDS in order to drink, no alternative currently works) in her videos.
Reminder right here: no matter how someone looks, their disability will not always be apparent to you.
But when my disabled friend is denied emergency evacuation plans out of a building because the elevators get shut off and she uses a wheelchair, does the building owner get shamed or harassed? No.
Those are the power dynamics at play here.
Imagine if ableds cared about accessibility as much as they care about banning plastic straws.
anyway it’s fine for disabled people to….not want jobs. it’s not a fucking crime.
the fact that it’s normalised for the disabled and mentally ill to be grilled by private contractors to get pittance from an all-seeing wing of the government is terrifying. more so when that wing punishes the smallest transgressions so severely that it condemns the victim to death or suicide.
the scariest thing of all though? public apathy to our thousands of deaths. it’s fucking nauseating.
This is important for people to remember – Not everyone can function in the same way as you. There are some people that have issues just maintaining their basic human needs on a daily basis. Asking them to work to earn their basic human needs in top of their existing struggles is like a second job. They’re alreaady full time employed maintaining their existence.
Not to mention the idea that we should EARN our basic needs is toxic and anti-human.
I like to believe that all the dragons in the world were magically cursed and turned into cats. But cats have never forgotten where they come from, hence the attitude.
I nearly didn’t reblog this but the above comment makes more sense than anything I’ve ever heard.
…that’s…that’s actually a story my mom used to tell me when I was little? That a dragon showed up at someone’s cottage so they gave it milk. And the dragon enjoyed the milk, so it kept coming back and got smaller and softer and purry-er until eventually it wasn’t a dragon anymore, it was a cat, and that’s where cats came from and why we keep giving them milk.
She might have gotten the story from Ursula K. Le Guin, or I have confused it with a different dragon story.
That’s also why cats tend to hoard their toys behind the couch!
Actually the story is even older. Written by a woman named Edith Nesbit, first published in 1899, it is called “The Dragon Tamers”. It predates Leguin and other fantasy biggies like Lewis and Tolkien.
Nesbit actually can be credited with being one of the first authors that began to shift myths and legends to more fantasy-like stories (fantasy as a genre how we know it, wasn’t around then because it was just part of literature, especially British literature). In fact, many scholars who study fantasy literature and children’s literature believe that, since her children’s stories were so popular with children in England, the stories and their content prompted Tolkien (the first to coin fantasy as its own genre in his essay “On Fairy Stories”) to take up the stories of dragons and elves and fairies as they’d have been children when she was writing.
Tolkien was born in 1892. He would have been 7 when “The Dragon Tamers” was first published. Edith Nesbit did a LOT for modernizing myths, legends, and lore as a children’s author, maybe more than we will ever know.
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers.
…
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology.
They had come with questions of their own.They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
rich people are fucking terrifying
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
eat the rich before they eat the rest of us
It never occurs to them to simply fractionally improve the lives of the poorest people. Never occurs to them to live more sustainably. These men could still live in fabulous luxury while also making our planet a paradise for all but their obsession with having the most means they’re blind to that and instead they come up with ridiculously complex contingency plans for when people are finally too hungry and too desperate to be shit on any more.
“Be nice” never occurs to them. Shock collars for their own personal slave army does.
I couldn’t find the picture of the guillotine this time sorry guys just pretend it’s there
Dear rich people, you sound like literal Star Trek villains wtf is wrong with you stop it
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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