Homeboy is doing fouettés on the basketball court.
i really hope y’all understand how fucking difficult those are to do in a dance studio in dance shoes. even just one takes a long time and lot of practice to accomplish.
the ability to do them in tennis shoes on (what i think) is concrete? this person’s talent is unreal. i am honestly floored. and that’s not to mention their general technical skill. look at the way they bend their knee, the elevation of their foot, the way their leg stays at an even level, the way their arms move, and the spotting! it is all absolutely perfect. i am in awe. i want to watch them dance forever.
everyone save this. if anyone ever alludes to PoC not being able to classically dance, pull this out and make them watch it. then tell them to fucking try it. that shit takes so much time and energy and dedication. it is a craft, an art form, and this person is a master.
As the No. 2 most-harassed Jewish journalist on Twitter per the Anti-Defamation League, I've become intimately familiar with the colorful cast of anti-Jewish bigots that populate social media. There are those who will photoshop you into gas chambers and concentration camps. Others like pairing Nazi ...
But there is one particular type of anti-Semitic troll that I find particularly pernicious: the racists who use their accounts to impersonate Jews and defame them. The con goes like this: The troll finds a picture of a very Jewish-looking person online—typically a Hasidic Jew in full regalia—and makes it his avatar. He puts a bunch of very Jewish descriptors in his bio (“Orthodox,” “Zionist,” “enemy of the alt-right”). He then proceeds to insert himself into conversations with prominent Twitter users—conversations that will often be read by tens of thousands of followers—and say horrifically racist things. Thus, it appears to unsuspecting readers that Jews are outlandishly bigoted. The same has been done with other minorities, from Latinos to African-Americans to Muslims.
***
The problem is, most casual social media users aren’t even aware that this sort of racist deception is being perpetrated, let alone trained to be vigilant for it. And Twitter isn’t really capable of the detective work to identify these accounts and take them down as they spring up.So the question becomes: How can users fight back? Can this insidious tool of anti-Semitic harassment be defanged like the (((echoes))) that were previously used by internet bigots? The answer is yes, and it takes the form of a Twitter bot.Working with developer Neal Chandra, we created an automated Twitter account that exposes these imposters in real-time. Meet Imposter Buster, social media’s new sheriff. He is programmed with an updated database of impersonator accounts, and every time one of them tweets, he automatically replies and exposes them with pre-programmed evidence:
The bot is kind of amazing. And Rosenberg wants more jobs for it.
So, have you encountered a racist troll impersonating a Jew, African-American, Latino, Muslim, or other minority on Twitter? Send it my way at yrosenberg@tabletmag.com and we’ll put the bot on the case. And do be sure to follow Imposter Buster and his exploits on Twitter!
…in many accounts the creature is brought to life for a specific purpose: to defend the Jews against the pogroms associated with the notorious blood libel. That libel asserted that before every Passover the Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake matzoh.
At least in legend the Golem is a counter-myth in which artificial life undermines threats of death: dumb clay leavened with life’s breath denies a slander about life’s blood in unleavened flour.
michelle obama really is the most beautiful first lady we’ve ever had
Jackie Kennedy???
no. anyway michelle obama really is the most beautiful first lady we’ve ever had
“Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, if first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.”
— Love in Translation by Lauren Collins from the New Yorker, August 8 & 15, 2016 (via lesgardenias)
service dogs are doing a job and usually people want to pet them but then theyll interrupt the job the service dog is trained to do. so the rule of thumb is dont interact with a service dog unless the owner says you can
YEET idc I’m petting the dog anyways
Okay, well.
You shouldn’t pet strangers’ dogs without asking either.
In Boston while waiting for the T, there was a woman with her service dog in full gear also waiting. Two young women went right up to the dog and the moment one of the women reached out to pet the dog, the older woman slapped her hand away and said “My dog is working, do NOT pet.” And I smiled because those young women were in the wrong.
If you came up to my dogs and didn’t ask to pet them, I would slap your hand away, and they’re not even service dogs.
If you pet my service dog without permission, you are stopping him from doing his job.
One of my dog’s jobs is detecting seizures. He gives me a few minutes warning. If he can’t warn me because he’s distracted, I could fall and hit my head.
I could die of a head injury because I wouldn’t have time to find a place to sit and sit down.
But, hey, a stranger gets to pet my dog.
I guess that’s worth it. /sarcasm
Seriously, this is why you DO NOT FUCKING TOUCH A SERVICE DOG
Here’s an article on what happened when someone pet a service dog and it DID distract the dog resulting in the owner suffering a seizure and injuries.
For anyone who doesn’t feel like reading, here is the key points:
Hailey has multiple illnesses including Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and epilepsy. Her service pup in-training, Flynn, has the important task of alerting her roughly 10 minutes before she has a seizure. This gives her time to find a safe place so that she does not injure herself while seizing.
Although the other human meant no harm, her action nearly resulted in tragedy. Because Flynn was distracted, he failed to give Hailey proper notice of her seizure. By the time he was able to alert her, it was already too late.
“My service dog is my lifeline. I don’t say that to be cute. He helps keep me alive just like life support. If he gets distracted this happens. If he gets distracted I can die. Do not pet service dogs. Do not call to service dogs. Do not taunt service dogs. Do not talk to service dogs. Do not do anything to service dogs.”
1) Would you grab a person’s wheelchair and start rolling it forward and back for your own amusement? Would you randomly touch someone’s hearing aid while it’s in their ear? No? Then don’t pet someone’s service dog!
2) Don’t pet anyone’s dog unless you have the owner’s permission. If the dog gets nervous around strangers and you invade its personal space it might bite you out of fear, which could lead to the dog being put down. Not to mention it’s just disrespectful. Asking takes about five seconds. Just do it.
Signal boosting! A service dog is a working dog, and they need your respect more than your affection. If you want to deliver a compliment, let their human know what a great job they’re doing. It will be appreciated.
i swear these lil focusing/productivity tips are for people who already have willpower made of steel and just need the tiniest nudge to get them to study or whatever. “place a sweet at the end of every paragraph to motivate you and reward you for finishing that section of reading!” i could just eat them all though. right now. i will. “here’s an app where a tree grows when you leave it undisturbed, but dies when you keep checking all your other apps!”
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella - gay rights, gay marriage, gay community - when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
