when you know that the word woke is aave and refers to someone who’s informed about systemic antiblack racism all those conservative rants about “the woke mob” are that much more transparent. whether or not they know what it actually means, the effect of misusing it in the way they do is the same. most people will end up thinking it just means “the radical left” or some other nebulous and vague anti-conservative movement, and whatever topic du jour is considered “woke” ends up completely sweeping any discussions about the antiblack systems that the us is built upon under the rug
sometimes people ask why I block out names when roasting an opinion and I think fewer people would ask that if they clicked through a few popular posts and saw that the people who got clowned on are still receiving anon hate years down the line
for every opinion I hold lightly enough to joke about, there is someone whose entire life revolves around holding a much more intense and aggressive version of it. every time a post gets reblogged, the odds of that person not seeing it get closer to zero
HONESTLY also like. part of combatting misinformation is just accepting that you’ll fall victim to it sometimes. no-one can be an expert on every imaginable subject and most people don’t have the time to factcheck every single piece of information that comes their way. the key thing IMO is responding appropriately when someone points misinfo ie not doubling down and being like ‘no there’s no way I could be wrong about this’.
like a big part of studying history is learning that your previously held beliefs are hotly debated or even outright wrong and sometimes it feels bad bcos you realise you bought into what was, with the benefit of hindsight, an obvious lie.
and other times it feels bad bcos it’s actively disappointing!! often the lie feels better than the truth! historical myths get popular bcos they are, typically, better, punchier stories than what actually happened.
Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.
have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.
and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.
black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.
if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you’ve ever met. it doesn’t have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don’t know much, look it up and learn about it together.
This is Juneteenth.
white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.
I really appreciate Mama Doctor Jones talking about the cultural perceptions around menstruation, especially wrt to its connection to the moon, and how people with those cultural beliefs (not New Age bullshit) are often some of the most educated about the realities of menstruation AND that companies and individuals shouldn’t be using those beliefs to sell unnecessary and often dangerous “health and hygiene” products.
I think more medical professionals should be educated about cultural beliefs and how to work with them instead of against them, especially when it’s negative attitudes about a patient’s culture that ends up pushing so many vulnerable people, especially women of color, straight into the arms of scam artists and con men looking to make a quick buck.
but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.
sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.
their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.
caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes
discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.
and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.
the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.
and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth.
its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.
if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreckbecause its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.
If I died a painful and terrifying death somewhere my body was unable to be recovered for a proper burial and all that could be done was let me rest where I was, I think my spectral ass would be pretty damn pissed if a bunch of people traveled to my gravesite to gawk at my body and post photos of it to their travel blogs.
We have such a disconnect from the humanity of tragic gravesites. Touring shipwrecks, using bodies on mountains as landmarks, making youtube videos in a forest known for its suicides, displaying the bodies of sacrificed children behind glass in museums… … .
It’s scary, how little disregard we as people have for these tragedies, for the realities of these gravesites, for the people they were and the lives they lived and the horror they went through and the grief of their families.
People on tiktok will say complete and absolute nonsense, bordering on conspiracy, and then their video gets a million likes and is shared everywhere because they were wearing scrubs or a stethoscope.
You all know that you can just like… buy those, right? People don’t receive their stethoscopes when they’re handed their medical degrees. A person doesn’t get hired at a hospital and then kneel before the board while their brand new white coat is draped across their shoulders.
I fully agree with the sentiment here you CAN just buy stethoscopes and scrubs, and I believe there are lies spread by people doing this.
However! The ceremony described is very close to what ACTUALLY HAPPENS when doctor’s get their degrees:
Lol at me waking up to a white British person telling me that Americans from immigrant families need to drop our cultural heritage and assimilate into American culture “no one outside the US calls themselves an italian-american or irish-american no one uses a hyphen they PICK ONE 😡” they picked two groups that two generations back were extremely oppressed here bc they didn’t wanna seem racist by saying ones that are oppressed today and told me “well my Jewish Italian British boyfriend only calls himself English” your boyfriend is afraid to be proud of his heritage around you bc you’re an assimilationist or more likely he doesn’t exist lol “if you go to the country of origin you’ll find everything unfamiliar and people will laugh at you” I literally went to Italy once and everything was familiar as fuck and when I told people I was half Italian they welcomed me and gave me free bread lol just say you hate immigrants and shut up like you can just admit it say it with your whole chest “I don’t like when immigrant families are proud of their cultural heritage because I want everyone to look and behave the same way as me” is a much simpler way to express your whole gripe about it
Oh and then this white goyische slavic-brit brings up nazis out of absolutely nowhere which should be on a bingo card for online jews being yelled at by any goy about any topic bc they loooooove to do that LOL
This is just a reminder to everyone out there who gets annoyed by safety laws. They exist for a reason, and if you don’t want to follow them at least make sure to have the decency to only hurt yourself.
[Image description:
A photo of a lighthouse against a cloudy sky with white text along the top and bottom. The text reads, “There is no meme. Regulations are written in blood. Cost cutting ensures negligence, negligence means death.”
In the United States, many jails and prisons can and will charge you money for every single night that you spend imprisoned, for the entire duration of your incarceration, as if you were being billed for staying at a hotel. Even if you are incarcerated for years. Adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. What happens when you’re released?
In response to this:
—
So.
You’re getting charged, like, ten dollars every time you even submit a request form to possibly be seen by a doctor or dentist.
You’re getting charged maybe five dollars for ten minutes on the phone.
Any time a friend or family tries to send you like five dollars so that you can buy some toothpaste or lotion, or maybe a snack from the commissary since you’re diabetic and the “meals” have left you malnourished, maybe half of that money gets taken as a “service fee” by the corporate contractor that the prison uses to manage your pre-paid debit card. So you’re already losing money every day just by being there.
What happens if you can’t pay?
In some places, after serving just a couple of years for drugs charges, almost 20 years after being released, the state can still hunt you down for over $80,000 that you “owe” as if it were a per-night room-and-board accommodations charge, like this recent highly-publicized case in Connecticut:
Excerpt:
Two decades after her release from prison, [TB] feels she is still being punished.
When her mother died two years ago, the state of Connecticut put a lien
on the Stamford home she and her siblings inherited. It said she owed
$83,762 to cover the cost of her 2 ½ year imprisonment for drug
crimes.
[…]
“I’m about to be homeless,” said [TB], 58, who in March [2022] became the
lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state law that charges
prisoners $249 a day for the cost of their incarceration. […] All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars
[…].
Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by
putting former inmates in debt for life. Efforts have been underway in
some places to scale back or eliminate such policies.
Two states — Illinois and New Hampshire — have repealed their laws since 2019.
[…]
Pay-to-stay laws were put into place in many areas during the
tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s, said Brittany Friedman, an
assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern California
who is leading a study of the practice.
[…]
Connecticut used to collect prison debt by attaching an automatic lien
to every inmate, claiming half of any financial windfall they might
receive for up to 20 years after they are released from prison
[…].
Text by: Pat Eaton-Robb. “At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt.” AP News / The Associated Press. 27 August 2022.
—
—
Look at this:
To help her son, Cindy started
depositing between $50 to $100 a
week into Matthew’s account, money he could use to buy food from the
prison commissary, such as packaged ramen noodles, cookies, or peanut
butter and jelly to make sandwiches. Cindy said sending that money
wasn’t necessarily an expense she could afford. “No one can,” she said.
So far in the past month, she estimates she sent Matthew close to
$300. But in reality, he only received half of that amount. The balance
goes straight to the prison to pay off the $1,000 in “rent” that the
prison charged Matthew for his prior incarceration. […]
A PA Post examination of six county budgets (Crawford, Dauphin,
Lebanon, Lehigh, Venango and Indiana) showed that those counties’
prisons have collected more than $15 million from inmates — almost half
is for daily room and board fees that are meant to cover at least a
portion of the costs with housing and food. Prisoners who don’t work are
still expected to pay. If they don’t, their bills are sent to
collections agencies, which can report the debts to credit bureaus. […]
Between 2014 and 2017, the Indiana County Prison — which has an average
inmate population of 87 people — collected nearly $3 million from its
prisoners. In the past five years, Lebanon’s jail collected just over $2
million in housing and processing fees.
Text by: Joseph Darius Jaafari. “Paying rent to your jailers:
Inmates are billed millions of dollars for their stays in Pa. prisons.”
WHYY (PBS). 10 December 2019. Originally published at PA Post.
—
Pay-to-stay, the practice of charging people to pay
for their own jail or prison confinement, is being enforced unfairly by
using criminal, civil and administrative law, according to a new Rutgers
University-New Brunswick led study. The study […] finds that charging pay-to-stay fees is triggered by criminal justice
contact but possible due to the co-opting of civil and administrative
institutions, like social service agencies and state treasuries that
oversee benefits, which are outside the realm of criminal justice. “A person can be charged $20 to $80 a day for their incarceration,” said author Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of Rutgers’ criminal justice program.
“That per diem rate can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in
fees when a person gets out of prison. To recoup fees, states use civil
means such as lawsuits and wage garnishment against currently and
formerly incarcerated people, and regularly use administrative means
such as seizing employment pensions, tax refunds and public benefits to
satisfy the debt.” […] Civil penalties are enacted on family members if the defendant cannot pay and in states such as Florida, Nevada and Idaho can occur even after the original defendant is deceased. […]
Text by: Megan Schumann. “States Unfairly Burdening Incarcerated People With “Pay-to-Stay” Fees.” Rutgers press release. 20 November 2020.
—
So, to pay for your own imprisonment, states can:
– hunt you down for decades (track you down 20 years later, charge you tens of thousands of dollars, and take your house away)
– put a lien on your vehicle, house
– garnish your paycheck/wages
– seize your tax refund
– send collections agencies after you
– take your public assistance benefits
– sue you in civil court
– take money from your family even after you’re dead
I’ve said it before I’ll say it again I hate when leftists on here glorify nuclear power for green energy like yes basically all energy options are pretty suboptimal, solar and hydroelectric carry a lot of baggage but mindlessly championing nuclear rn, like all of these options, is going to negatively impact indigenous communities - in this case, overwhelmingly native Americans, and my own tribe at that. Illegal uranium mining poisoned us years ago and now there are plans to store the waste near us again. Which will be transported via pipeline over the land. Coming in from all over the US and Canada. You guys don’t see the implications of this? I mean, you probably don’t even know about it, which is why perhaps we should do more research before posting about the energy crisis on Tumblr.edu
