god this is a big ask but I really wish there were like….. a site where you could plug in your state/district/whatever and tick some boxes on issues you prioritize and then the site would give you a rundown of the potential candidates in your area and where they stand on those issues in like….. clean simple bullet points. gimme the cliffnotes, I literally do not have the time or energy to comb through god knows how many articles and shit to figure out who to support, just tell me what their stance is on X, Y, and Z, and that’s gonna have to be enough.
It goes through who’s on your ballot and explains things like that based on your address.
this is really great. it gives you bullet points on what each candidate has said and done on each issue.
very illuminating, frankly, seeing the candidate’s own words and actions. for instance, under ‘defense/veterans’ the republican candidates almost always say something about a well-funded military, and the democrats almost always say something about getting veterans the medical care they need. makes it pretty obvious that republicans don’t care about soldiers once they’re done with them.
Republicans seem to care an awful lot about the ~possibility~ of rape when it’s a question of undocumented immigrants (of color) or trans women who just need to use the bathroom. They LOVE fearmongering about what a horrible crime rape is… until real rape actually happens.
Because when rape actually does happen, it’s usually perpetrated by cis men.
a lot of people I know have come out as trans or transitioned in just the last few years, as it’s become a lot more socially acceptable in liberal places. this is great, but I‘m getting the impression that because of this, some of you are unfamiliar with the (American) legal battles that were underway/lost before this time, and are under the impression we had rights or protections we don’t in the United States, or are unclear on how legal definition of gender works here.
trans people in the United States have no protection from the federal government. this isn’t because of Trump. It was true before him. Obama briefly tried to issue guidance on how the executive branch would define “sex discrimination” that would have provided limited protection, but then a conservative judge blocked the measure. even if he hadn’t, this would be limited in impact to programs like title ix that are actually interpreted according to the executive branch’s discretion. there really is not very much the president can do about this either way by himself. (for stuff he might try to do, that twitter thread I posted yesterday is helpful.)
every attempt to pass an actual law protecting us – or lgb people! – has failed to pass; there are a couple of bills still floating around that might go somewhere if/when we take back Congress but certainly won’t until then. there are some states and municipalities that have passed antidiscrimination laws. most of you are probably aware of the north carolina bathroom bill preventing trans people from using the correct restroom, which is no longer in effect. there are some legal decisions protecting eg. bathroom rights in schools in certain circuits, which might potentially be challenged and overruled by the supreme court. Unless you are in school, this won’t affect you. It’s very bad for trans kids, obviously, who are the most vulnerable of our population, but it still has limited impact.
in general, there isn’t a central database of people in the United States that lists your gender or a federal definition of gender or anything. When we talk about “legal gender,” we’re usually talking about the marker on ID obtained for other purposes.
It is entirely possible and common for trans people to have different ID with different genders. If you have eg. a United States passport saying F and a driver’s license saying M, it doesn’t mean you’re “really” one or the other legally. It means as far as your state’s DMV is concerned you’re a man, and as far as the United States Passport Services is concerned, you’re a woman. Part of the reason for this situation is that because different agencies are setting their own standards for how they fill out and change ID stuff, they have different requirements for what evidence you need to show to change your gender marker. This is possible because there isn’t a centralized record of gender. Given the political opposition to an American national registry or national ID card – which is shared by Republicans – there is not likely to be one any time soon.
This absolutely causes problems for people in situations where people want more than one kind of ID and want to know why it doesn’t match, but if the United States Passport Services insists on issuing you with a female passport even when you transitioned to male ten years ago and obviously aren’t a woman, this isn’t necessarily going to cause any problems for you unless you’re in a situation where you need a passport. (Obviously, if you need to leave the country, especially in a hurry because of future totalitarian developments, this is terrifying – but it’s good to know that refusing to issue you a correct passport does nothing to your driver’s license/etc.)
I think it’s also worth pointing out that in a nightmare scenario where most of the checks on the government evaporate and the Trump administration revokes all passports which have had the gender marker changed or something, it’s entirely possible that eg. Canada would allow us to enter on them anyway. People’s actual reception of refugees isn’t necessarily in line with their stated values, but it’s a possibility. Unless the American federal government also set up an exit visa program – a known thing in the history of totalitarianism, but it would upset everyone, including the Republican base – this might not stop us from leaving.
Louis Rossman is one of the highest-profile independent Apple repair
technicians, famous in part for fixing devices that Apple has declared
to have reached their end-of-life, diverting these devices from landfill
and keeping them in the hands of the people who paid good money for
them.
Rossman has to engage in lots of creative tactics to source parts for
his repairs, including buying refurbished parts that have been removed
from real Apple products; but Customs and Border Protection now seems to
take the position that anything imported with an Apple logo on it must
be counterfeit. They just seized 20 laptop batteries that Rossman had
paid $1,068 for.
Seeing some people on Tumblr still bitching about how it’s too late for voting and the only thing that will fix things is revolution.
How about you fucking vote anyway? It’s not going to seriously cut into your “sitting on the couch waiting for a revolution to start” time.
There’s no “none of the above” option here. You want a revolution, fine, but there’s still little shit to do in the meantime.
You can vote AND protest. They’re not exclusive. Hell, you can even protest the person you voted for when they fuck up. You’re not signing a blood oath with your ballot. But a desire for an ideologically pure candidate or nothing only serves the status quo right now.
Brand Silva (b.1993, México) is a photographer, and visual artist. He create digital art where use the buildings, landscapes, characters, cities, elements of identity of specifically regions and areas, for constructs and reconstructs elements, transforms them, creates new spaces of existing ones, decontextualizes, deforms, invents or disappears, to narrate visual stories through the memory of the spectators. Marking the idea of the feeling that gives the color, and how it influences our way of perceiving the reality and time.
So for grad school on Monday, I have to teach four Latin words to the rest of the class (all language teachers, none of whom know Latin, all of whom know my antics) without explaining what they mean in English.
I’m thinking of coming in in full Athena/Minerva costume, labeling my spear, shield, helmet, and aegis, and just yelling at them in Latin like I am a vengeful goddess carrying their doom at the end of my craft foam spear.
Thoughts?
So the costume was 100% the right call.
I wore my peplos over my regular clothing, hiked up so it was hidden under my jacket. The rest of my costume was tucked into a duffle bag, and my classmates had spent all class trying to figure out what was inside, while I just smiled and gave no hints.
I was the last to present.
“So you all know me well enough by now,” I said, “to know that I’m a ‘go big or go home’ kind of person.” And I casually took off my jacket and unrolled my peplos, put on the aegis, helmet, and shield, and held aloft my spear, shouting, “SALVETE, MORTALES!”
One of my classmates whispered, “That is such a power move,” while my professor absolutely lost it laughing in the back of the class.
I kept the helmet on after presentations were over, and my professor used my spear as a pointer for the rest of his lecture. I have no idea how my grade is going to turn out, but it was a good time.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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