I appreciate this. How do we stick up for people with Downs Syndrome when it comes to their eugenic erasure? It’s this big nasty grey area that pits pro-choice against anti-eugenics, which inadvertently summons the anti-choicers to join the cause, despite the goals being different. The whole thing is so fucked up. What’s next to the table? Autism? Mental illness?
There are definitely already people campaigning for the eugenic elimination of fetuses with basically any condition identifiable in utero, and campaigning for diagnostics to get more diseases identifiable in utero such as autism.
Ultimately, I think the most effective way to campaign against eugenic abortions is to campaign against ableism in general. People seek to abort disabled fetuses because they believe that it’s impossible for someone with these conditions to lead a satisfying life, or potentially because caretaking for disabled babies and children is prohibitively expensive.
Both of these underlying beliefs can be addressed by having more visibility of disabled spokespeople, more widespread accommodations for these conditions, and better support systems for both disabled people and our caretakers.
As an example of what this type of campaigning against ableism can look like, I recommend ths video.
It’s a really, really simple message– the video sums it up with one text screen at the end: “People with Down syndrome can live a happy life.”
But it’s an effective answer to all the fears about “My child will never…” that expecting parents might have, and to the overarching assumption that life with disability isn’t worth living.
Don’t let anyone forget the fact that the President of the United States skipped out on visiting military graves for Armistice Day’s 100th anniversary.
Because of rain.
He has golfed in the rain. He was inaugurated in the rain. Other leaders–and his own subordinates–made it out there in the rain.
President Trump, though? The man who loves our troops and our country? Yeah, it’s weird that he didn’t go to the ceremony and chose to stay in his hotel room. He left our country on Veteran’s Day weekend to visit Paris for the reunion, but could not be bothered to face a little rain in order to pay his respects to the troops.
He forgets the names of the fallen. He cuts funding for veteran welfare programs. He sends our soldiers to the border for needless exercises in intimidation. Then he claims that others are weak on the military and don’t respect our troops?
What a joke.
Oh, and when I say “don’t let them forget”, I mean “every time some alt-right nutjob comes at you, hit them with that question”.
Also, if you need to cite facts:
An hour. This isn’t a “scheduling thing”, this is something that should have been planned. At the least, the President doesn’t have staff who know how to plan a trip.
The thing is, this drags military respect into the conflict.
If you want bonus points, remind them of the time Hillary got pneumonia from attending a 9/11 memorial.
Never trust someone who fetishizes the military in one breath and spits on veterans in the next; just saying.
Here’s the thing. It’s good to remind them, because their hypocrisy needs to be out in the open, but none of them care. Even most conservatives don’t care. Trump isn’t going to ever live up to his office and because he’s Their Guy they aren’t going to ever agree with that until after he loses an election and like after Dubya left office they’ll all pretend they weren’t ever in his corner. They’re not for him as much as they are against “the other team,” and he’s just the man they think is capable of scoring right now.
They care about Hillary fainting because it overlaps with their biases that she’s weak as a woman. They care what Obama wore because it overlapped with their biases about black stereotypes.
When they talk about disrespect, they aren’t talking about a thing that rich white conservative men can ever do, because it’s never been about someone’s actions disrespecting anything. It’s been about people in power not being who they want to see there, and these assholes thinking that those leaders’ very existence disrespected the country.
Growing up my parents taught me that if you’re too sick to [insert responsibility here] then you’re too sick to [insert something that makes you happy here].
It took me a really long time to unlearn this. When I would get sick or have a “bad day” I would deprive myself of anything that made me happy. Watching movies, eating something I enjoyed, going for a walk, playing video games or just browsing online looking at funny cat videos. I wouldn’t let myself do these things because I was always told that if I’m too sick to go to work, or do homework, or go to school then I must be too sick to play Mortal Kombat or watch Unsolved Mysteries lol.
Whenever I wouldn’t feel good, which I later learned as an adult was due to sleep deprivation caused by my ADHD and depression (and of course the depression itself would cause me to feel like shit), my parents would tell me “if you’re not throwing up, then you’re not sick.” And when I would stay home from school (or even work in my later teen years) my parents would make sure that I didn’t have any “fun.” No TV, no movies, no games, no going outside, no arts and crafts, no books, no nothing. Just lay in bed and feel miserable.
I’m happy to say that I no longer do this to myself. Now when I’m having a bad day or I’m sick (cold, flu or whatever) I allow myself to do the things (within reason lol) that I actually love doing. If I’m not too sick to step outside for a few minutes then I’ll go for a walk. I’ll watch my favorite movies and if it’s a bad day or a cold (something that doesn’t hinder my appetite too much) I’ll eat my favorite foods. I don’t guilt trip myself anymore for having a “sick day.”
Just because you’re sick (whether physically, emotionally or mentally) doesn’t mean that you can’t do things you enjoy. You’re not any less sick because you watch TV. You’re not any less sick because you’re playing video games.
Actually you SHOULD be doing these things when you’re not feeling good because they make you feel better. The better you feel, the faster your heal.
Yeah, those rules are useful for when parents aren’t sure a little kid is actually sick, or just pretending; malingerers will generally go, “Okay yes, I would rather spend the day at school than be super bored.” And when they go to school everything’s fine.
But we’re grownups now! You’re the boss of yourself! And if you know that you’re actually sick, that if you went to work you’d be miserable and unwell, then you pass the test those rules were supposed to be.
At which point: Take care of yourself and cheer and comfort the sick as much as possible.
…Here’s how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
…[The] runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding what made them different by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that had ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.
…And here is the most devastating fact of Frank’s posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: We know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don’t want to hear it.
The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift, it is worth noting, at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” three weeks before she met people who weren’t.
Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: They murdered six million of them. Anne Frank’s writings do not describe this process. Readers know that the author was a victim of genocide, but that does not mean they are reading a work about genocide. If that were her subject, it is unlikely that those writings would have been universally embraced.
We know this because there is no shortage of texts from victims and survivors who chronicled the fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents has achieved anything like the fame of Frank’s diary. Those that have come close have only done so by observing the same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don’t insult their persecutors. The work that came closest to achieving Frank’s international fame might be Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank’s experience, recounting the tortures of a 15-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Kept Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story, but it exploded with rage against his family’s murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version of the book under the title Night—a work that repositioned the young survivor’s rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how his society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame God. This approach did earn Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as a spot in Oprah’s Book Club, the American epitome of grace…
One night several years ago, a man on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana held his partner against her will, beat her, and then choked her until she passed out.
After she came to, she escaped and informed law enforcement about what happened. This incident wasn’t the first; the man had a history of domestic violence and abuse. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
The woman found help at the Blackfeet Domestic Violence Program and tried to move on with her life. But this year, her ex was released from prison and returned to his home on the reservation.
He was told to stay away from her, says the program’s lead advocate Marilyn Gobert, but the woman still fears for her life.
This case is not unique – it’s one of hundreds Gobert sees a year, a small glimpse into the sexual violence epidemic that has plagued tribal communities for as long as she can remember.
A new Department of Justice study shows that of over 2,000 women surveyed, 84 percent of Native American and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence, 56 percent have experienced sexual violence, and, of that second group, over 90 percent have experienced violence at the hands of a non-tribal member.
Most women reported they were concerned for their safety, and around half said they had experienced physical violence like pushing, shoving, or being beaten.
Over 60 percent had experienced psychological aggression or coercive control. Experts say these record numbers still underestimate the number of women affected by violence, and the infrastructure for women to report and handle incidents is underfunded.
Currently, tribal courts do not have the jurisdiction to prosecute non-tribal members for many crimes like sexual assault and rape, even if they occur on tribal land. This is a huge issue, because non-Native American men commit the majority of assaults against Native American women.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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