thecringeandwincefactory:

lamb-of-dog-activated66642069:

killergirlfromouterspace:

Excuse me, but what the fuck is going on?

looks like someones been taking medical advice from the 15th century

I… can’t believe this needs to be said? DON’T FUCKING INGEST TURPENTINE.

More history there, including in the US: The Long, Strange History of Medicinal Turpentine [Drinking it was thought to cure nearly everything. (But you shouldn’t try it.)]

Turpentine is antiseptic, too, and the terrible taste and harsh effects could have been interpreted as signs that it was working. “King of the [medicines] was turpentine, a product of the tidewater pine forests,” Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark wrote. “Turpentine had three important medical requisites: It smelled loud, tasted bad, and burned like the woods on fire.”

“Traditional remedy” really, really is not automatically synonymous with “safe effective remedy” 😱

saxifraga-x-urbium:

moranion:

historicaltimes:

One person’s weekly rationing allowance in England in 1951

via reddit

… what the hell, this is like breakfast, lunch and dinner, and where’s anything along the lines of bread or at least flour, or rice, or smth grain-related, or potatoes??? or where those things not rationed?

Not rationed by 1950. Also it’s the 40s & 50s, you make your own damn bread. This is a reduction from the number of things rationed during active wartime

More info on rationing during and after WWII

That photo looks like it only includes “luxury” food products, which were being rationed at the time, Temporary bread rationing apparently did start after a wheat crop failure in 1946 (continuing into 1948), but staples like bread and potatoes weren’t rationed most of the time.

This did go on surprisingly long after the war ended:

February 1953: Confectionery rationing ended.

September 1953: Sugar rationing ended.

4 July 1954: Meat and all other food rationing ended in Britain.

Meanwhile, our local street market was apparently a persistent major source of black market goods. Besides food, that included items like new clothes sold as secondhand or “shop-soiled”. Kind of interesting history. (Not as good a source on that as I’ve seen before, but I could find it quickly.)

aegipan-omnicorn:

gluey-porch-treatments:

iprayinthespeech:

gluey-porch-treatments:

just-shower-thoughts:

Cinnamon is just delicious sawdust.

… No?

It’s true! Cinnamon (or more commonly cassia because it’s cheaper) is the bark from trees of the Cinnamomum family. It curls up when it’s been peeled and dried, thus cinnamon sticks. But we grind it down to use it, so it’s pretty much sawdust.

Well shoot. I guess you really do learn something new every day

That’s true of true cinnamon, too.  They’re both evergreen trees in the same family.  I double checked it on Wikipedia.

That’s why the “Cinnamon challenge” is so dangerous: it’s sawdust, and when it mixes with your saliva, it absorbs the moisture and swells up, and you can choke (not to mention that high doses are toxic).

Mix it with melted butter on your toast, cut with sugar, and know that a little goes a long way.

brainstatic:

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

Rap lyric Insta post ‘a hate crime’

gingerautie:

argumate:

arjan-de-lumens:

argumate:

Prosecutor Angela Conlan said Russell’s defence also argued her
profile “wasn’t public”, but it had been proved in court that anyone
could access it and “see the offensive language”.

She said
prosecutors also “sourced case law that showed that posting the profile
on her account constituted sending it and making it public”.

@stumpyjoepete

I am trying to find what lyrics in that song would make a good
“tribute to a boy who died in a crash”

This part actually felt like it did make sense to me, albeit in a rather roundabout way.

Looking at this thing, it kind of felt natural for me to start with the official music video for the song in question (content warning : lots of drugs, gun violence, N-word use etc):

ok, so relatively aggressive gangsta-rap type stuff. Looking a bit further, the police scene in the first 30 seconds of the video is apparently actual real-life footage of Detroit police interfering with the recording of the video, and from his life story, I seem to get a bit of a sense that this thing is to some extent based on actual real-life experiences of his (his father being a drug dealer, his brother dead from gang violence, himself apparently having done a lot of street gang stuff, eventually seizing upon rap music as a way to try to escape that kind of shitty life situation, that level of stuff) – which adds a fair bit of a “real deal” feeling to something that seems otherwise easy to dismiss as ludicrously exaggerated.

Adding to this that the car crash victim in this case was a 13-year-old boy living in an area that’s apparently well-known for having issues with criminal youth gangs – it seems to me at least very understandable that this sort of music would hold a very strong appeal to such a boy, to the extent where he would probably openly proclaim to anyone willing to listen that this was his favorite or something like that –

if this is correct, then it would seem … actually rather natural for people who knew him and his reasons for liking this sort of music to actually post this sort of thing as an attempt to make a tribute to his memory.

Which … is a bit fraught – it makes sense in enough context, but when posting an isolated Dogg lyric like that on social media, it’s kind of hard to convey that sort of context (especially to people outside his social circle), and … ignoring that sort of context, having a chunk of naked text that looks like

“I hate fuck shit, slap a bitch n***a, kill a snitch n***a, rob a rich n***a I think I’m trippin’ “

does come across as rather crass.

Yet … even without this specific context, gangsta-rap with this kind of language have been kinda ubiquitous for a rather long time now, to the point where even UK’s state-run BBC has been running an entire radio channel for years full of content like this (content note : N-word usage from roughly the 1-minute mark onwards):

which makes this particular court ruling come across as … basically insane from pretty much any perspective I can muster.

“She was charged after Merseyside Police were anonymously sent a screenshot of her update.”

seriously we could automate this process by scraping Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and put half of Liverpool behind bars.

Free speech laws in the UK are atrocious. A hate speech conviction for quoting song lyrics is ridiculous. 

Honestly this probably should have failed the “in the public interest” requirement for prosecution. If it’s fine for this song to play on radio1x, then its fine for someone to quote the lyrics. Maybe into the realms of social disapproval, like someone should tell her to censor the n-word even when she’s quoting, but not into the realms of prosecution.

Would this have been fine if she’d starred out the n-word? Then it’s probably not hate speech. If someone were to say e.g “All n-words must die” then that’s hate speech even if you censor the slur. 

I feel like her lawyer really let her down. It’s a quote, this is stupid as fuck.

I’m also really uncomfortable with the quote from the police. 

The screenshot was passed to hate crime unit PC Dominique Walker, who told the court the term was “grossly offensive” to her as a black woman and to the general community.”

It’s a bit tricky to articulate, but I feel like that’s a really inappropriate stance for the police to take. The role of the police is to enforce the law neutrally, not to take offence? Would the prosecution not have happened if the officer on duty at the time had been white? Police officers shouldn’t be talking about their personal views. “The black community finds this offensive” is fine, but “I personally find this offensive” seems inappropriate for a police officer. 

And from a legal perspective, if the claim had just been about the community, then there would maybe have been a sensible argument about if the black community in the UK as a whole finds rap lyrics using the n-word offensive, rather than just this one police officer. 

This looks more like a case of someone with a grudge against this girl using overly broad, rarely enforced laws to score points than a sensible use of the law.

Rap lyric Insta post ‘a hate crime’