So apparently the US military is buying location data about Muslims using Muslim prayer and Dating apps - so to my fellow Muslims:
DELETE MUSLIM PRO OFF YOUR PHONES.
(If you’re not Muslim you’re free to rb)
Tbh I am an extremely chill person as long as certain things go exactly the way I need and expect them to every single day
okay but lightheartedness aside, this is really bad.
paypal.me/asteronauts | venmo: $asterlux | cashapp: $asteronaut | gofundme
let me start from the beginning. my name is aster. im a black nonbinary person who was born with a genetic connective tissue disorder called ehlers-danlos syndrome, specifically hypermobile type. among being prone to frequent sprains, subluxations, and dislocations and a nervous system that doesn’t work properly, h-eds affects my mouth, causing me to have a high, crowded, and narrow pallette. i’ve had dental issues since i was really little. i didn’t realize the exact reason why until last year (12/2019), when i finally got my official diagnosis of h-eds after five years of knowing i have it.
my mother has always been distrustful of medical professionals due to the years of medical abuse and discrimination our family has faced due to our blackness, womanhood, and chronic illness, so i rarely went to the doctor growing up. this includes the dentist.
three years ago, my bottom right wisdom tooth broke due to a cavity. it hurt a lot, but i was so stressed dealing with trying to work while severely disabled and dealing with extreme poverty that i just ignored the pain and went on with my life. after all, i am in pain every day. what’s a little more? but last year, after two years of oral pain causing me to be unable to eat at times, i finally went to the dentist. they said that i had a tooth infection and the beginnings of gum disease, that i was at risk of losing my teeth, and recommended that i get all four wisdom teeth removed and a deep cleaning. the price of it all scared me away, so i resigned myself to ignoring the pain for another year.
now, my gums are extremely swollen. i can’t chew on my right side at all and all of my teeth hurt. so i finally decided to brave the dentist again. i made and cancelled and missed appointments about 8 times before i finally decided to force myself to go today. ive heard a lot of horror stories about people getting infections in their faces or even going septic from infected teeth and gums, and that was enough to scare me into braving my fear.
they pretty much said the same thing as they said last year, except its worse now and about 2000 dollars more expensive - and that’s if my medicaid decides to cover my wisdom teeth removal as an emergency expense.
here is a summary of all the stuff they wanna do. im going to try and skimp out on a bit of it - i need bone graphs for my bottom two wisdom teeth but i figured just getting them removed would be enough. they recommend general anaesthesia, especially because my eds makes me insensitive to local anaesthesia so ill still probably feel everything if they use it. they also want to do a deep cleaning of my teeth for my periodontitis so it doesnt get worse and i end up losing more teeth
i would try and get dental insurance, but my income is too low for me to qualify for any state health plans other than medicaid and they only cover up to 1,000 in emergency dental work per year, so i’m out of luck on that front. im too disabled to work full time again especially with covid but im not disabled enough to qualify for disability because my disorders arent “well documented” enough so im kind of screwed on that front too.
i know this is a lot. thank you to everyone who has helped me in recent months. im trying really hard to hold onto hope that things will get better, but its really hard some days. being able to ease at least some of my pain would be a huge weight off my shoulders. i would ask my family for help, but we’re pretty much estranged and my mom is the full time caretaker of my developmentally disabled little brother and pretty much lives off his disability checks for the moment. please don’t ignore this post. remember that shares are much more valuable than likes and that anything helps. thank you. <3
paypal.me/asteronauts | venmo: $asterlux | cashapp: $asteronaut | gofundme
please keep sharing this!!!! we are at 300/5000 so far! i am going to try and call around monday to see if there are any dental schools that can do the deep cleaning for cheap too, but i will definitely need to crowdfund general anesthesia for the wisdom teeth removal since local doesnt work on me (thanks eds!). the surgery is on december 9th!
I keep seeing people be like "oh don't say defund the police you're scaring the white moderates equivocate and say stuff like reinvest in community safety" and it makes me so angry because
1. Politicians aren't running on "defund the police" even lefty ones like AOC sort of tiptoe around it. That's language that Black Americans who deal with police brutality every day came up with. Shouting them down and telling them to be more civil is mind-bogiling
2. Black activists have moved the needle on defunding the police from being a impossible dream to bring something that more than a third of Americans support in a matter of months. This has been helped by having a clear, easy to understand, and hard to misconstrue message. "reinvest in community security" and other proposed alternatives are could mean literally anything, including giving the police more funding
3. When the freedom rides first happened only 22% of Americans approved of them. They were incredibly unpopular with white moderates. Does that mean they were a mistake? Of course not, The point of the activism is to push the limits of what bigoted society says is acceptable. And that's what the freedom rides and activist projects like it eventually did. That's what activists today are doing, and the people tone policing them are worse than useless
Also I've seen people jump off from this point to branch off and encourage people to tone police themselves on other topics like planned parenthood or gun control and it just demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of american politics. The majority of Americans support abortion and gun control. If we had a functioning democracy that actually represented the will of the people, America would be a center-left country. The problem is voter suppression, not activists.
I. Just saw someone on Discord respond to "practically all modern famines are caused by political mismanagement" with "Counterpoint: the Dust Bowl". How do I even BEGIN with this one
WOOOOOOOOOW.
That…I just….wow.
Well what you’re gonna have to do is ask them if they’ve ever actually read a fucking book in their entire life.
I mean, if I’m remembering right that wasn’t caused by political mismanagement, just the regular kind. If you mean that the government should’ve been quicker providing relief, that stands, although Roosevelt’s response was impressive for the US.
I dunno, the gov’mint doing their level best to exterminate the indigenous population and forcing the rest onto reservations and then parceling out that stolen land to white settlers who didn’t know shit about how to sustainably farm it and who immediately stripped off all the prairie that stabilized the topsoil to farm water-intensive crops in an area with frequent droughts seems like a lot of political mismanagement to me.
Oklahoman here, and can confirm that @systlin is correct. Even the locusts can be ultimately blamed on government mismanagement, as the stripping away of prairie soil also led to loss of habitat for multiple ground dwelling bird species that normally eat the locusts when they swarm.
Oh, and by the way? The government also paid people not to grow crops -and- would destroy crops and livestock, because they were trying to ensure that people had to buy food to prop up the local merchant economy. My grandmother used to get a haunted look on her face when she described the mounds of dead cattle and pigs and chickens that had been doused with turpentine so that the meat was inedible. She was born in 1919 and was ten or eleven when the Dust Bowl took place.
Detailed examples in Little House on the Prairie of deliberate Climate Change; discuss.
Well we can START by pointing out that their first family homestead on the prairie was illegal because they just fuckin moved into the Osage tribe reservation (with a load of other white settlers) and started plowing it up on the assumption that it was going to be opened up for white settlers soon. Marinate that with Ma’s open racism against Native Americans and how she’s constantly sure they’re going to rape and murder her, WHILE she is the one currently actively stealing treatied reservation lands out from under the Osage’s noses.
One can pick up clues about the richness of the Kansas prairie before white settlers by some of the observation Pa makes RE; the abundance of game, the streams full of fish, ect ect. All of those were, of course, dependent on the prairie ecosystem which was intentionally maintained by the native tribes.
There are several references to large packs of wolves, which thrived on the abundant large mammal life that the grazing lands of the prairie supported. The settlers immediately go about attempting to shoot all of the wolves; for the importance of large predators to an ecosystem please see the ecological impact of re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone national park. There are, of course, no wolves living wild in Kansas any longer.
The regular prairie fires that are an integral part of a healthy prairie ecosystem are here seen as a terrible threat, and the settlers are suspicious of the Native Americans because they assume that the fires were set to get rid of the settlers.
The settlers, of course, immediately start plowing it up as fast as they possibly can. Notes are made that the sheer density of the roots of the prairie plants make it difficult for even a steel moldbord plow to cut through the mass. (Half of a prairie’s biomass is the root systems of the plants that live there!) It is specifically this dense root and vegetation growth that secures the soil in place during windstorms and drought, and prairie plants grow very deep root systems (up to seven feet deep!) in order to access water even during droughts. The family plant wheat and corn, both of which are shallow-rooted, and while wheat is less water-intensive than corn it is still unsuitable for areas such as the High Plains that simply do not get enough rain to grow it without extensive irrigation. Corn is a water-intensive crop and not suited for long drought periods.
It is precisely these actions that in the long run destroy the entire tallgrass prairie ecosystem nearly completely (less than 5% survives today) and lead ultimately to the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s. Thank you everyone for coming to my TED talk.
Can lesbians use the slur Fruit?
sorry i must’ve missed the meeting where we made me Head of Slurs