I'm Nic; I practice guilt & shame
Though I’m not superstitious, I keep having dreams about people I used to know dying abruptly. And never getting the chance nor the nerve to tell them that nothing was their fault, nothing they did is the reason why. It’s been keeping me up.
I don’t mean anyone any offense. But I feel like this is a bad timeline, where in a good timeline I just never would have met, befriended or established relationships with anyone in my adult life in the first place
Coming up on the anniversary of Ruining Fucking Everything, I have to figure some kind of commemoration I think
Yeah, sure, high on the list for 2018 midpoint goals was “develop a minor eating disorder and progressively alienate the only remaining significant relationship in my life”
Who up its real regret and shamed isolation hours
rude opinions hour maybe but it’s truly Not comparable to oppression when a gay person is disinterested in hearing abt yr opposite-gender relationship just bc your sexuality is theoretically not exclusively heterosexual
Reblogged from startorrent02
Here’s an even harder truth: The adoption industry is a business. It generates billions of dollars each year and requires other people’s children in order to stay profitable.
Here’s the toughest truth yet: Those children are almost always the children of poor and working class people, people of color, native and indigenous people, and young people. The people who adopt them, who directly benefit from the economic and racial oppression of these groups, are most often middle and upper-middle-class people and are primarily white.
The mainstream feminist movement has been, by and large, pro-adoption and has resisted an explicitly intersectional position on the inequities and injustices that typically bring adoptive families together. There are many reasons for this, but here are the two I think about the most:
1) Mainstream feminism has historically assumed that the decision to relinquish a child for adoption is a choice that people make freely, and that the people who choose it do so because they don’t believe in abortion.
2) Mainstream white feminists are part of the primary demographic that stands to benefit the most from adoption.
There will likely always be children who need to be adopted into loving families and held tightly by those families, their communities, and high quality support services across a lifetime. But if, as feminists, we believe that all people should have the ability to make informed and supported choices about becoming parents or not, then we should work to make these instances rare. That means, of course, there will be fewer adoptable children, but we must understand that families are not interchangeable and that the desire to become a parent through adoption does not make anyone entitled to someone else’s child. As it stands in this country, market forces in adoption, coupled with racist and classist state interventions and a reductive societal narrative that sees adoption as a fairy-tale ending where everybody wins, mean that people who have class and race privilege will continue to build their own families through the constrained choices, coercion, and loss of those who do not. This is a feminist issue.
The Reproductive Justice movement, pioneered and led by Black feminists and women of color, teaches us that all people should have “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” If we think about adoption through this lens, and in particular, the right to parent the children we have, we see that we must ask something very different of mainstream feminism. Committing ourselves to reproductive justice, to human rights, demands that we fight for the economic and racial justice to ensure all pregnant people are able to make informed, authentic decisions for themselves, and that families who want to stay together have the autonomy and support necessary to do so.
Reblogged from monpetitlys
My little bogzoi…swampzoi…bogdog…
The Deadfly Ensemble - “Horse On The Moor” (An Entire Wardrobe Of Doubt And Uncertainty, 2007)
Reblogged from canisbeta
Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.
This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.
- At least two dozen people have been falsely convicted due to “Bite Mark Analysis”.
- “Burn pattern analysis” put an innocent man to death in Texas
- “Blood Spatter analysis” such as that shown on the TV show Dexter is actually completely unreliable even according to the US Department of Justice
- Forensic hair comparison is also widely believed to be junk science and the FBI is currently reviewing convictions based on hair analysis due to the unreliability of their results
- Handwriting analysis has an unreasonably high error rate, by some accounts as high as 43%
- Lie detector tests, or polygraphs, are notoriously unreliable and based on bad science. Even though everybody knows this, they are still constantly being used in criminal investigations among other places.
- Toxicology labs can be poorly supervised and badly run, producing false and even fraudulent results
- Due to sloppy procedure at many labs and lack of regulation even DNA testing is often unreliable
- Even when correct results are produced, genetic profiles may be less useful than we have been lead to believe
- Fingerprinting analysis is not foolproof and actually has not been thoroughly tested, as this Frontline special discusses
Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.
Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.
In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one.
Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:
Santae Tribble served 28 years for a murder based on FBI testimony about a single strand of hair. He was exonerated in 2012. It was later revealed that one of the hairs presented at trial came from a dog.
So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.
the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation
It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies.
Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another.
Reblogged from insurrectionarycompassion
If you’re going to call someone a TERF, you should ask yourself these three things;
1. Are you about to accuse a trans woman of being a TERF? (very important)
2. Is this person actually a radical feminist, or are they just a general transmisogynist?
3. Is this person actually trans exclusionary/transmisogynistic? Or do you recognize the same kind of radical feminism posts that TERFs sometime reblog that have nothing to do with trans exclusionism?
An example for number one would be ace discourses accusing trans women of being TERFs for being cishet exclusionists.
An example for number two would be, Mike Pence might hate trans women but he is not a TERF.
An example for number three would be, posts going against the porn industry and posts about compulsive heterosexuality have nothing to do with trans exclusionism and are things that are important and should be talked about.
(Source: toadprince)
Reblogged from grimlygroovy
The concept of credential inflation has pissed me off ever since I learned it
If college being free for everyone would make a college education worthless you are blatantly admitting a college education exists to be a class gateway
Reblogged from antoine-roquentin
Crude mortality rates are lower among U.S. military members than their civilian counterparts; service members must be healthy when they enter service and deaths from illnesses are relatively infrequent. From 1990 through 2011, there were 29,213 deaths of U.S. military members while on active duty (crude overall mortality rate: 71.5 per 100,000 person-years). Th e most deaths occurred in years when major combat operations were ongoing; from 2004 to 2007, war-related injuries accounted for approximately 40 percent of all deaths. From 2000 to 2011, two-thirds of all deaths unrelated to war were caused by transportation accidents (n=4,761; 37%), other accidents (n=1,358; 10%) and suicides (n=2,634; 20%). From 2005 to 2011, the proportion of deaths due to suicide increased sharply while the proportion due to transportation accidents generally decreased; as a result in 2010 and 2011, suicides accounted for more deaths of service members than transportation accidents…. In 2005, in the general U.S. population, the crude overall mortality rate among 15-44 year olds was 127.5 per 100,000 p-yrs.
