i dont think “lightning has a better chance of killing you than a cop” is a point, much less a good one
i havent been told from birth that:
-i should summon lightning if im in trouble
-i can trust lightning and should always tell it truth
-any sort of trouble caused by lightning is just bad lightning, and not at all related to the simple fact of its fucking lightning
-lightning will be there for me, and will never let me down
-lightning kills people, but if that happens they were scum or thugs or they ran because theyre guilty and so who cares lightning killed them stop complaining
theres no videos of eight lightning bolts hitting someone thirteen times each. these are different things and “the cops might summarily execute you” isnt the sort of thing we should analyze as some random chance consequence of existance
16 people died from lightening strikes in the usa in 2017.
1129 people died at the hands of cops in the usa in 2017.
we don’t pay for lightning to exist
And lightening doesn’t strike brown, black and disabled people at several times the national average because it’s fcking lightening
[Image description: Tweet by Brandon David Wilson @Geniusbastard
It positively chills you to the bone the degree to which white people will accept almost any atrocity if you convince them it’s only happening because THESE PEOPLE WILL NOT FOLLOW THE RULES]
Dr. Michelle Martin is a researcher and professor at California State University, Fullerton. She has a Masters of Social Work, Masters in Global Policy, and a Ph.D. in Peace Studies (Political Science). She teaches Social Welfare Policy in the Master of Social Work program.
The following is her write-up on the separation of families at the border. She dispells a lot of common myths going around and provides sources which are linked. This might be helpful in your personal debates and discussions.
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There is so much misinformation out there about the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy that requires criminal prosecution, which then warrants the separating of parents and children at the southern border. Before responding to a post defending this policy, please do your research…As a professor at a local Cal State, I research and write about these issues, so here, I wrote the following to make it easier for you:
Myth: This is not a new policy and was practiced under Obama and Clinton.
FALSE. The policy to separate parents and children is new and was instituted on 4/6/2018. It was the “brainchild” of John Kelly and Stephen Miller to serve as a deterrent for undocumented immigration, and some allege to be used as a bargaining chip. The policy was approved by Trump, and adopted by Sessions. Prior administrations detained migrant families, but didn’t have a practice of forcibly separating parents from their children unless the adults were deemed unfit.
Myth: This is the only way to deter undocumented immigration.
FALSE. Annual trends show that arrests for undocumented entry are at a 46 year low, and undocumented crossings dropped in 2007, with a net loss (more people leaving than arriving). Deportations have increased steadily though (spiking in 1996 and more recently), because several laws that were passed since 1996 have made it more difficult to gain legal status for people already here, and thus increased their deportations (I address this later under the myth that it’s the Democrats’ fault). What we mostly have now are people crossing the border illegally because they’ve already been hired by a US company, or because they are seeking political asylum. Economic migrants come to this country because our country has kept the demand going. But again, many of these people impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy appear to be political asylum-seekers.
Myth: Most of the people coming across the border are just trying to take advantage of our country by taking our jobs.
FALSE. Most of the parents who have been impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy have presented themselves as political asylum-seekers at a U.S. port-of-entry, from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Rather than processing their claims, according to witness accounts, it appears as though they have been taken into custody on the spot and had their children ripped from their arms. The ACLU alleges that this practice violates the US Asylum Act, and the UN asserts that it violates the UN Treaty on the State of Refugees, one of the few treaties the US has ratified. The ACLU asserts that this policy is an illegal act on the part of the United States government, not to mention morally and ethically reprehensible.
Myth: We’re a country that respects the Rule of Law, and if people break the law, this is what they get.
FALSE. We are a country that has an above-ground system of immigration and an underground system. Our government (under both parties) has always been aware that US companies recruit workers in the poorest parts of Mexico for cheap labor, and ICE (and its predecessor INS) has looked the other way because this underground economy benefits our country to the tune of billions of dollars annually. Thus, even though many of the people crossing the border now are asylum-seekers, those who are economic migrants (migrant workers) likely have been recruited here to do jobs Americans will not do.
Myth: The children have to be separated from their parents because the parents must be arrested and it would be cruel to put children in jail with their parents.
FALSE. First, in the case of economic migrants crossing the border illegally, criminal prosecution has not been the legal norm, and families have historically been kept together at all cost. Also, crossing the border without documentation is typically a misdemeanor not requiring arrest, but rather has been handled in a civil proceeding. Additionally, parents who have been detained have historically been detained with their children in ICE “family residential centers,” again, for civil processing. The Trump administration’s shift in policy is for political purposes only, not legal ones.
Myth: We have rampant fraud in our asylum process, the proof of which is the significant increase we have in the number of people applying for asylum.
FALSE. The increase in asylum seekers is a direct result of the increase in civil conflict and violence across the globe. While some people may believe that we shouldn’t allow any refugees into our country because “it’s not our problem,” neither our current asylum law, nor our ideological foundation as a country support such an isolationist approach. There is very little evidence to support Sessions’ claim that abuse of our asylum-seeking policies is rampant. Also, what Sessions failed to mention is that the majority of asylum seekers are from China, not South of the border.
Here is a very fair and balanced assessment of his statements: [ source ]
Myth: The Democrats caused this, “it’s their law.“
FALSE. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats caused this, the Trump administration did (although the Republicans could fix this today, and have refused). I believe what this myth refers to is the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which were both passed under Clinton in 1996. These laws essentially made unauthorized entry into the US a crime (typically a misdemeanor for first-time offenders), but under both Republicans and Democrats, these cases were handled through civil deportation proceedings, not a criminal proceeding, which did not require separation. And again, even in cases where detainment was required, families were always kept together in family residential centers, unless the parents were deemed unfit (as mentioned above). Thus, Trump’s assertion that he hates this policy but has no choice but to separate the parents from their children, because the Democrats “gave us this law” is false and nothing more than propaganda designed to compel negotiation on bad policy.
Myth: The parents and children will be reunited shortly, once the parents’ court cases are finalized.
FALSE. Criminal court is a vastly different beast than civil court proceedings. Also, the children are being processed as unaccompanied minors (“unaccompanied alien children”), which typically means they are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). Under normal circumstances when a child enters the country without his or her parent, ORR attempts to locate a family member within a few weeks, and the child is then released to a family member, or if a family member cannot be located, the child is placed in a residential center (anywhere in the country), or in some cases, foster care. Prior to Trump’s new policy, ORR was operating at 95% capacity, and they simply cannot effectively manage the influx of 2000+ children, some as young as 4 months old. Also, keep in mind, these are not unaccompanied minor children, they have parents. There is great legal ambiguity on how and even whether the parents will get their children back because we are in uncharted territory right now. According to the ACLU lawsuit (see below), there is currently no easy vehicle for reuniting parents with their children. Additionally, according to a May 2018 report, numerous cases of verbal, physical and sexual abuse were found to have occurred in these residential centers.
LIKELY FALSE. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on 5/6/18, and a recent court ruling denied the government’s motion to dismiss the suit. The judge deciding the case stated that the Trump Administration’s policy is “brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency.” The case is moving forward because it was deemed to have legal merit.
Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
god so much of Wizards of the Coast’s writing for D&D is screwed over by the fact that they use the same creature type for “person” and “low-level intelligent enemy”
@bit-by-a-dead-bee essentially the thing is that orcs and kuo-toa and gnolls and stuff are intended to be tutelary monsters – orcs are gruumsh’s revenge for not being included with the other gods, kuo-toa are religious fanaticism gone off the deep end, gnolls are primal unchecked savagery, etc.
in game terms they’re humanoid solely because low-level spells only affect humanoids and those are the low-level enemies, but that type is also shared by low-level enemies who are meant to be monsters in the real-world sense – people, like elves and dwarves and humans, who’ve simply chosen evil on a personal level.
so the implication is that these tutelary monsters are as natural and as “people” as elves and dwarves and humans are, because they share the humanoid type, and since there isn’t a distinction in creature type, what the books end up saying is “certain kinds of people are monsters”
granted D&D says that you should make your own lore but it’s still fucked-up that this gets in the actual books
Hi. I reblogged this earlier (I’m not sure if the notification showed up since I deleted it, but I didn’t want to seem like I was trying to start something then run away when that isn’t the case). I deleted that post because I think I misunderstood what your point was in the original post I made and I apologize for that. Basically I thought your entire point was the classification was wrong because they were more monstrous than humanoid.
I’m a bit confused as to what your explanation is trying to convey. Is it that these creatures shouldn’t be classified as humanoid but rather something like goblinoid so that there’s a distinction between a “person” and a “monster?”
Something like that, yeah. The fifth edition Monster Manual says the following, emphasis mine:
Humanoids are the main peoples of the D&D world, both civilized and savage, including humans and a tremendous variety of other species. They have language and culture, few if any innate magical abilities (though most humanoids can learn spellcasting), and a bipedal form. The most common humanoid races are the ones most suitable as player characters: humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings. Almost as numerous but far more savage and brutal, and almost uniformly evil, are the races of goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), orcs, gnolls, lizardfolk, and kobolds.
The idea that there’s creatures that have culture yet are somehow almost uniformly evil has some very nasty real-world implications, especially when they’re the same type of creature as those that have culture and human capacity for good and evil. If you want goblins and orcs to be another kind of people (as I do, and the Eberron setting does), then it’s fine for them to have the same creature type as the standard PC peoples, but their cultures can’t be uniformly evil; if you want goblins and orcs to be uniformly evil, because they’re not people, they’re monsters that look like people, then I think we need to create a new creature type to distinguish “that’s a thinking person” and “that’s a person-shaped monster that reflects our fears about ourselves, but is weaker than a fiend or fey”.
Because: the intent behind evil fantasy humanoids is that they’re reflections of our worse side, like I said before, and that’s a fine trope. It’s just not fine if that reflection is itself a person, because then the trope shifts from “destroy this monster as metaphor for the evil within” to “destroy this other civilization because everyone knows they’re evil”.
[the “is this a pigeon?” meme. the guy is labelled “Fanfic writers”, the butterfly is “Brown skin”, the subtitles read “Is this something I can eat?”]
interesting how ben sisko thinks and philosophizes and struggles morally as much as any other star trek captain (cough picard cough) and regularly uses strategy and wits and manipulation to outsmart his enemies rather than approaching conflicts through force (this is the man who walked onto the station and within like an hour had smooth-talked quark into sticking around, before even dukat showed up)
and also is a single dad and a good dad and the only captain who is a parent within the show, a family man, and generally as a character has a complex inner life and complex motivations and goals and methods of achieving them
but the one main element of his character some segments of the fandom seem to focus on is action man, gets shit done, and while that’s true enough sometimes especially compared to other captains (cough picard cough) the main thing anyone seems to cite is that he punched q in the face that one time and that’s it and what’s more i’ve frequently seen him be ascribed qualities that as far as i can tell he really does not have in any greater abundance than any other star trek captain, like, uh, angry, for example, hmm
which how anyone can do a critical reading of ds9 that leads them to come away thinking that anger is a prominent feature of benjamin lafayette sisko’s personality or motivations when throughout the show he’s often the voice of measured reason, juxtaposed with kira nerys, former terrorist, is beyond me, except actually it’s not at all because like I Know Why, but, you know
moral of the story is…..being racist and bitter makes you age like milk
this bitch is FORTY THREE????
43 decades
Yet this post is the most racist shit.
How… Is this racist what?
Racism goes both ways.
How is this post racist
If I made a post that compared black people’s skulls to white people’s I’d get called a racist. Here you are saying white people age faster.
This post is about a specific racist woman. But funny you read the statement ‘Racist people age faster’ and immediately saw it as an attack on white people.
Almost as if there’s an antiwhite bias on this site. And racism doesn’t suddenly become okay when it’s directed toward a racist.
My point is this isn’t racism. Even if racism against white people was an actual harmfull issue, nowhere in this post is the race of her or any of the other women mentionned or alluded to. This is about racists.
So you’re trying to tell me that it’s just a coincidence that all the women on the right side just so happened to be white?
Dont @ me but if ur a white content creator u should probably examine your brown characters (especially the darker skinned ones) and see if u aren’t following a certain trend of making them all aggressive, violent, surly or otherwise outwardly angry
Honestly this comes insidiously in subtle ways I think
Are your brown characters always scowling in the art u draw? How about emotionless asians? Do u have white antagonistic characters that get to be cute or beautiful, while ur brown characters ONLY get to be confrontational?
one of my ex-friends once asked me and my sister (both of us being filipino) how to say rude or mean things in filipino for her character and never asked anything else about being filipino-american
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