Tag: old crank mode

clatterbane:

One of my cousins did get diagnosed with whooping cough when we were maybe 4, well before the antivax BS had started rolling. His pediatrician couldn’t figure out how he would have even been exposed to it, when they hadn’t had any other reported cases anywhere nearby for years at that point.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if his problem had really been a particularly nasty bout with the exact same Family Asthma Hell set off by a cold/flu. (Pretty much that whole side of the family does it.) Which was how I spent most of every winter from the time I started school, with the constant exposure to minor bugs.

(And it went unrecognized/untreated as asthma until I was about 14, precisely because it does sound like some terrible hybrid between croup and whooping cough. Antibiotics do nothing, but they kept trying escalating courses anyway on the basis that something that awful sounding had to be coming from a chest infection. They just were not looking for asthma nearly as much then, especially dealing with girls.)

But, I’m still boggling at the contrast between when we were kids and now. “Where the hell could this kid have even caught it?!” to whooping cough parties 😱

Oh yeah, and as I recall my cousin was apparently put under health department home quarantine for a while. Because that’s how much they wanted pertussis spreading, even with pretty much everyone vaccinated then.

One of my cousins did get diagnosed with whooping cough when we were maybe 4, well before the antivax BS had started rolling. His pediatrician couldn’t figure out how he would have even been exposed to it, when they hadn’t had any other reported cases anywhere nearby for years at that point.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if his problem had really been a particularly nasty bout with the exact same Family Asthma Hell set off by a cold/flu. (Pretty much that whole side of the family does it.) Which was how I spent most of every winter from the time I started school, with the constant exposure to minor bugs.

(And it went unrecognized/untreated as asthma until I was about 14, precisely because it does sound like some terrible hybrid between croup and whooping cough. Antibiotics do nothing, but they kept trying escalating courses anyway on the basis that something that awful sounding had to be coming from a chest infection. They just were not looking for asthma nearly as much then, especially dealing with girls.)

But, I’m still boggling at the contrast between when we were kids and now. “Where the hell could this kid have even caught it?!” to whooping cough parties 😱

jnco-jorts:

solacekames:

solacekames:

venuselectrificata:

possibly controversial opinion: i think “natural” makeup is, over time, more damaging than bold, obvious makeup

I don’t think that’s controversial at all. 

@qualr sure I’ll explain 🙂

Mainly because makeup itself, the generic concept, is an integral part of human identity. People have always done it (even Neanderthals used makeup) and we’re always going to keep doing it. The concept of decorating our faces/bodies with colored pigments is practically hardwired and on a deep level just plain FUN (look at how much kids love to get their faces painted at fairs and carnivals and so on). The concept is also totally gender neutral. In some societies, men traditionally do it more than women, for example. Using your own body as a canvas for art taps into a mystical, childlike sense of wonder. First you look one way, then… another! Like magic. 

But mainstream commercial makeup culture as it exists today is incredibly exploitative, misogynist, colonialist, colorist, and hurts women, especially poorer women and women who don’t fit the racial ideal as expressed by the mainstream corporate beauty industry. And a big part of that is pushing “natural” looks. All women are supposed to look “naturally” poreless, for example (which isn’t realistic or healthy) and are punished socially and often financially if we aren’t. Another example: contouring is supposed to accentuate the “natural” lines of your face but for me and a lot of other Asian women with moonfaces, it’s the furthest thing from natural! The further you are from the rich thin young lightskinned bigeyed straightsmallnosed highcheekboned look, the more weirdly artificial the word “natural” becomes. We’re supposed to sink all this time and money and resources into achieving this bullshit “natural” look until it all feels a bit like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill. 

Putting a bright blue streak on your eyelids and walking out the door might take five seconds and probably makes you feel expressive and happy and good about yourself, even if it seems “tacky” through the lens of mainstream makeup culture. But taking an hour and trying soooo hard, using all the latest expensive products to make it seem like you’re not really trying at all, makes a lot of women feel worse about themselves, not better. In fact it leads to a lot of women feeling insecure about their real face and their real skin. There are many ways to look garish, but only ONE way to look “natural”. Instead of turning your own face into a canvas where you’re the creative artist, you’re following a ruthless set of instructions and doing a sort of strict paint-by-numbers that you’re never going to do right anyway. So it represents giving up more power over your own face/body than you’re actually getting back. Subjugation to the social norm, not creativity.

Additional note about nose shape – notice how MUAs with broad noses contour them to look much smaller? (there’s a Lot of racism in the history behind the contouring movement)

I would go further with this one.

If kids are limited to “simple plots, with clearly defined teachable morals, uncomplicated characters, explicit statements on what you should take away from the story, etc. etc.”…how/when are they going to learn to deal with more complexity or ambiguity?

That seems like an excellent way to get adults who do continue to have trouble with this. And who too often do want to restrict everyone else’s access For Their Own Good. It’s kinda self-perpetuating, no matter the ideological details that behavior comes wrapped up in.

I mean, I have written a little before about how disconcerting some common base assumptions can be, to a former hyperlexic kid with some weird special interests raised by a librarian. (With a decent grounding in critical thinking, very much including “anybody sufficiently motivated can write any type of horseshit they want, and likely get it published”.) Not going to repeat half of that now.

But, I am personally not so sure that “[a]lso, children should not be reading material dealing with that stuff anyway” is a safe starting assumption.

Why would anyone expect to find European fair folk there? Not their tramping ground either.

That’s also just about the same explanation as the Devil, in context, for “stuff I have no other real framework to understand or develop stories about”.

Not that I would actually expect much unusual to happen if I went there, but let’s just say that European mythological beings would not feature in even the 5th possible explanatory story springing to mind. (Counting assorted versions of that old standby, The Devil, in that category too.)

I realize that appealing stories are the intention there, and this is another case where I’m not even wanting to single anybody out–because it is such a common type of thing.

But, that makes another example even more disturbing, in a way. Few settlers seem to even consider some implications, or why some things might not always go over well. Just one relatively small illustration.

imgetting2old4diss:

screamingburritoes:

quick survey: please reblog if the way someone chooses to dress themselves has NEVER had a negative impact on your education

I was at school/collage between 1984 and 1997 and was in uniform till 87 then my own clothes till i left full time education in 87 we never got told what to ware in school, only not to have racist,sexist or rude slogens on our tshirts or tops.we could (and did) colour our hair what ever way we wanted (i started year 9 with purple hair and left collage with a bleached blonde pixie cut)the class was mixed sporty, preppy ,hippy, rocker and gothsand we all did well and worked together how we dressed had no effect on our work some times it even helped with conversations in group work .the only people that had problems with our clothing were the pervy teachers and we told them to fuck off if they made a comment “as it wasnt being very inclusive to students.”

I have to add again that, IME, the return this stuff is fairly recent in the US too.

I graduated from HS in 1993, and we never had anything like that. What did get described as potentially “distracting”? The main restrictions I recall: “no hats inside, no obscenities/nudity/obvious drug or alcohol references on clothing”. You were covered to where you wouldn’t get arrested on the street? Fine.

Applied in a totally gender neutral way. Even that one crank of a middle school principal I mentioned there who hated shorts and tank tops (but was fine with any skirt length) didn’t want any students wearing them, period.

They at least didn’t seem to think they could get away with blatantly sexist regulations like that in public schools, even if some of them probably would have been fine with the idea otherwise.

It wasn’t until later in the ‘90s-early 2000s that I started hearing anything about "unnatural” hair colors getting turned into a problem, for that matter. And my mother (who did grow up under similarly restrictive dress codes) was complaining then that she thought this shit was settled by the early ’70s. So many things.

The changes there are still pretty disturbing. Not least because of the creepy attitudes from adults on open display 😨

I don’t have a lot of wording spoons right now, and possibly less patience. But, several earlier reblogs tie together pretty well to describe some of the frustrations I keep running into with people Doing Politics.

There was one post from comcastkills, then two connected posts from theunitofcaring. (I picked that reblog of one not so much to point at the commenter specifically, but because that does express such a common set of ideas which are unfortunately relevant here.)

It gets frustrating enough sometimes, trying to deal with people who really do not seem to recognize or value many modes of interaction other than Asshole Wars. That obviously does not describe everyone trying to Do Politics, but the ones going for AW as praxis are difficult to avoid. They want it that way, and the weird self-righteous dominance behaviors apparently keep working for them.

Chances of getting much constructive done plummet, the more of that behavior gets tolerated and the more other people get driven off by it. AW as praxis mostly leads to more AW. Hardly surprising, but such a depressing pattern.

I just really do not have the spoons to start into some of the reasons I think this keeps happening right now. But, I wish I had more reasonable expectations of those factors getting successfully addressed anytime soon. Without some serious cultural changes.

But, I even started writing this because I got reminded yet again of how much I love the frequent conflation of approaches rooted in progressive pragmatism (or assorted other non-Western political philosophies), with being a Filthy Centrist Collaborator who expects people to kiss up to The Oppressor.

There are some pretty big differences there, to the point that it’s not really part of the same game at all.

(Righteousness is a very dangerous word in English and in European history…

Both idealism–the idea that God is on someone’s side–and vilification–the idea that one side is evil or fundamentally in the wrong–are barred from this process. #)

But, too many people don’t know or care to find out what someone is even talking about when it’s easier to force-fit everything into their existing widgets. Crucial to the Asshole Wars, whatever the front. And disturbing how many people do seem to regard that as the default.

berlynn-wohl:

ismenetruth:

berlynn-wohl:

arandomguy163:

Its like the 80’s all over again, a remorseless madwoman runs the UK, a maniacal bastard runs the US, the world’s on the brink of nuclear war and all I want to do is listen to synthpop

star wars, ghostbusters, and mad max all pass the bechdel test now tho

that helps with the deja vu but tragically not the crushing fear of nuclear apocalypse

try the synthpop again