April is the cruelest month

the only things i know about jimmy carter are:

-he looked straight up dead when he turned 100 and voted early cos he was straight up dead and now he's actually dead dead

-was president during the three mile island reactor partial meltdown incident and because he had worked on nuclear subs before he knew that shit was fine and went over there to be like lalala i <3 reactors while the media were shitting their britches over a teeny tiny amount of radiation

look at this shit he was deader than prince philip was

look at him swagged out in nothing but yellow booties to protect him this man knows his nuclear reactors and he doesn't gaf about this supposed dangerous radiation the only thing dangerous here is the mud which might dirty his shoes

Okay so I realize you're being lighthearted here and I don't mean to take away from that (he would appreciate you noting both his civic duty and his education in nuclear energy), but I will never turn down an excuse to talk about why I love my man Jimmy Carter.

--personally brokered multiple peace agreements as a mediator between other countries--basically he was the guy who kept things calm and civil so stuff could get signed, both during and after his presidency. This included the Camp David Accords, widely considered the most important peace document in the Middle East

--not actually a very good president BECAUSE HE WAS TOO HONEST

--was a peanut farmer and got a ton of flak for it because "lol poor peanut farmer" but it was his family's farm and he was genuinely proud, not ashamed, of his work

--Married to his wife Rosalynn for 77 years and they were so deeply in love that when she died I said "he won't last a year now" and I was right, they were really two halves of one very incredible whole

--worked for Habitat for Humanity after his presidency, and not as an admin, either; there are lots of people out there who can say Jimmy Carter helped build their house

--he and Rosalynn fought for DECADES to eradicate Guinea worm, which is an extremely painful and disabling parasite, AND THEY ALL BUT SUCCEEDED. When they began their work in 1986 in tandem with the WHO, over three and a half million people were infected every year. In 2023 there were twelve. To be clear: not twelve million, not twelve thousand, not twelve hundred. TWELVE. One-two with no zeroes after it. As of today, his death date, the 2024 case count is seven. One digit. If we can hit zero in 2025 and 2026 it will be only the second disease in all of human history to be eradicated completely by humans (the first was smallpox)

--there is increasing evidence that he actually did solve the Iran hostage crisis and Reagan bribed the Iranian government to not release the hostages until after the election in order to make Carter look weak and boost his own chances

--left the Baptist church because while he considered himself a devout Christian he absolutely could not abide their views re: women, and said women should be full equals with men

--established the Department of Education

And finally:

--during his reelection campaign, he met my uncle. My uncle is mentally disabled. Carter was visiting his workplace. My uncle biked right past the Secret Service, which they took about as well as you'd expect, held out a hand, and said "hello, Mr. Carter, my name is David Lastname and I sure am glad to meet you." Carter would have been perfectly within his rights to have my uncle arrested as a security risk, and in 1980 basically nobody would have come to my uncle's defense. Instead he waved off the Secret Service, shook my uncle's hand, and said "hello, Mr. Lastname, my name is Jimmy Carter and I sure am glad to meet you." I don't know if he intuited that mirroring is one way we help my uncle to understand stuff or if it was a natural habit of his, and I don't care. What I care about is that more than a decade before the ACA he made a conscious decision to take the time to treat a mentally-disabled man with courtesy, kindness, and dignity, with no idea whether that man could even vote.

Jimmy Carter was not a great president, but he was a great man. There's a saying in Christian circles that if you have lived well G-d will greet you at the gates of heaven with "well done, thou good and faithful servant," and let me tell you, if heaven exists but that isn't standard procedure then G-d damn well better have made an exception today. He was a good and faithful servant, to all of us.

May his memory be for a blessing.

About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.

there is nowhere you can look that doesn't have an ad somewhere except national parks.

has anyone noticed that to clean smth u often have to get smth else dirty

massively fucked up

like where does it end

onwards, comrades

had a dream last night where I took a uquiz called “what do you serve?” and at first the questions were standard but as the quiz progressed they became more and more highly specific to me personally and the answers became more and more similar and I realised the quiz Knew me and was forcing me into being honest by giving me no other option so I tried to click out but it just went to the next question which was “are you the spider? or are you the web?” and it had an option for each but I didn’t click either so it then turned to a text box and I typed “I think I’m the fly” and the quiz paused for a while and then took me to a results page that said “you serve truth” and the description just read “what you know will kill you but you will die laughing” so like. good morning everyone I guess :/

OP I think the devil visited you in your sleep

“What you know will kill you but you will die laughing” needs to be added to that list of profound statements from unlikely sources.

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense

holy shit.

It's 100% because of abusers parents and guardians who want to deprive their children of a secular upbringing and indoctrinate them into whatever nonsense they believe in, as well as discipline them however they see fit and exploit them for money.

Specifically, Articles 13 and 14 are concerned with the freedom of expression, the freedom to seek out, receive, and impart information, and the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Article 17 concerns access to mass media of both national and international origin. Article 19 concerns protecting children from abuse and neglect. Article 24 concerns access to healthcare. Article 28 concerns access to education, and Article 29 further stipulates that education should promote tolerance and respect of other people and cultures. Article 32 protects children from economic exploitation.

In the USA, the land of the free, we can't have any of that! If a parent believes the outside world is evil and wants to keep their kids from reading books that aren't about how God will send them to Hell for speaking out of turn, they have that freedom! If a parent believes that medicine is evil and wants to keep their kid from being vaccinated or put their kid on a raw meat diet or use homeopathy to treat an inflamed appendix, they have that freedom! If a parent wants to teach their kid that white people are the master race and that it is their duty to massacre everyone else, they have that freedom! And if a parent wants to take their kids out of school to work on the farm or get into the acting business, they have that freedom!

Sure, a horrific amount of children might be subject to abuse that will scar them forever and potentially lead to their untimely deaths, but that's just the price we pay for freedom! Freedom for parents to treat their kids like property, that is. The kids don't get any freedom.

Pay attention to specific educational scenarios conservatives deem inappropriate and you notice a lot of them are actually tied to prevention of child abuse (such as teaching about consent and identifying inappropriate touch)...

If I'm gonna say something nice about using Tumblr for social media it's that Tumblr doesn't make you aspire to something and that's a positive.

The big draws of Instagram/Tiktok/Facebook seem to be about proving you have a perfect life and a perfect face and a perfect body and then getting really sad when you don't stack up. Tumblr is a bunch of anime profile pictures loitering at a gas station.

in primary school we had a creative writing assignment where we had to ‘write about a character in a new, strange situation!’ and i wrote about a squid that was somehow teleported from the ocean to the forest floor and slowly choked to death for two pages and i’ll never quite forget my teacher’s face because it turns out she wanted ‘this new school is scary, i hope i make friends!’ and not a graphic description of a squid dying

well that’s just the risk you take if you decide to teach creative writing

just because someone can articulate their point better doesn’t make them right, it makes them articulated. 

and you aren’t stupid for having trouble articulating yourself.

Don’t threaten us with a good time now, Denmark.

i love following richard siken on twitter

divinity kink in less of a "fuck me in a nun habit" way and more of a "put me on my knees and rewrite my understanding of faith and show me what a loving god's hand feels like and give me mercy and wrath and splendor and leave your communion dripping from my lips and teach me how every part of my body was meant to worship you"

"John Waters Is Ready for His Hollywood Closeup", The New Yorker