Since the holiday toy drive post is circulating again, I figured this would also be helpful! Food insecurity is such a massive problem in America, in general, and if you have the means to help feed others, I think you should take that opportunity. Here are some other tips:

1. If you’re planning on donating items from your own pantry, please check the expiration dates on the packaging. Think of your donations as gifts to bestow, not castoffs to be rid of. It’s awful to think of people feeling like they got scraps someone else just didn’t want. Everyone deserves dignity with their meals.

2. If you’d rather give money to a food bank, that’s also great since they buy food in bulk and know what items are most wanted/needed!

3. Not everyone has access to appliances like stoves or microwaves or hot plates so if you can donate items that don’t need to be heated up, that would also be greatly appreciated!

🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽

Spreading the word! This also applies to donations for crisis relief shelters!

i hate viruses so fucking much. literally getting attacked by a fucking shape. a concept. consumes no energy. responds to no stimuli. its only existence is to fuck with you. like fuck offf

prev's tags are too good not to save

a bi coworker was recently talking about his ex and about how awful their marriage was because when they watched movies or read books she’d talk about how sexy the characters were and how this was really hurtful to him and then turned to me expecting me to agree and I was at a loss for how to respond. sir in my culture if your wife says she thinks legolas is super sexy then it is customary to commission her an erotic digital painting of legolas with his dick out. I have no advice for you.

I learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese in two separate psychology classes, at two separate universities. It was studied as an example of the “bystander effect”, which is a phenomenon that occurs when witnesses do not offer help to a victim when there are other people present.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

this was one of the first lessons I had in psych too and we were never told about this either nor was it in any of the reading materials

I never knew this.

I also never knew this about Kitty Genovese, but I do know that, in fact, many of the dozen (not thirty-eight) people who witnessed some part of the attack (which took place after 3AM, on a chilly night in March when most people’s windows were closed) tried to help in some way.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

(Also, going by the content of the murderer’s confession, it was indeed a random attack.)

how on EARTH was this “scientifically” studied but the details gotten so wrong and the wrong as hell conclusion published and taught in schools?!?!?! where were those scientists observation skills?! on vacation?!

How to take facts and turn them into an urban legend that gets taught in schools: Make a bad made-for-t.v.-movie about it, watch it, believe everything the movie says, annnnnnnd go!  That’s how it gets taught as this supposed “scientific study.”  Someone got fucking lazy.

Spread the real deal, kids.

A book about this, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Nonfiction this year! if anyone wants to check it out try your local library!

I want to add one crucial but telling detail: the story about the 38 witnesses didn’t come out of nowhere, it was handed to the New York Times City Editor by the Police Commissioner in order to distract said editor from asking unwelcome questions about a different case, and the story that was eventually written and which made headlines was almost entirely composed from police sources. 

At the time, the NYPD was coming under quite a bit of criticism about rising crime rates and the seeming ineffectiveness of the police’s response to the problem. In the Kitty Genovese case, even though people did in fact call the police, it took about an hour for them to show up and the first detectives didn’t arrive until three hours later (at which point they mostly spent their time interrogating Kitty’s girlfriend about their relationship, because for “some reason” they considered her to be the most likely suspect for the murder. In fact, the police wouldn’t catch the actual killer until six days later when he was picked up for having a stolen TV in the trunk of his car, at which point he admitted to having committed a total of three murders). It’s not an accident that one of the things to come out of the Genovese case was the establishment of the 9-1-1 system, because at the time that the attack happened, you had to call the specific number of a particular police precinct and it was up to the duty sergeant on the desk to take action - which was usually to send someone out from the precinct to the address reported, because cops on foot patrol wouldn’t be outfitted with two-way radios for several years. It’s more than a little convenient that at a time when the NYPD is coming in for public scrutiny about its ability to do the basic job of responding to reports of crimes in a timely fashion, the Police Commissioner happens to hand the City Editor of the city’s most prominent newspaper a story which puts the blame for the slow response on the apathy and inaction of New Yorkers, neatly absolving the NYPD for its ridiculously poor performance in this case in particular and its response to the rise in crime in general. 

It’s also quite telling that the New York Times ran with the story the way they did. It’s not like there weren’t people on the scene who said they had called the police, or that the basic facts about how many witnesses there were and what they had seen didn’t match the account that the commissioner had given. The writer the Times sent out chose not to include this information because “it would have ruined the story.“ The Times wanted to frame the story as a narrative about how the root of NYC’s problems was urban apathy and anomie - and the news organizations that picked up on the Times’ reporting and made the Kitty Genovese case a national and global story wanted to frame the story as proof that NYC was a dangerous urban jungle that deserved its decline because of the bad character of its residents.  I think the takeaway from this case isn’t just about sloppy scientific research, it’s that you have to always consider how official narratives are used to assign blame to specific individuals and groups and absolve larger institutions of responsibility. 

This comic makes me so stupid emotional. She might have never known.

huge carrot recall affecting canada and the united states, including puerto rico, due to shiga toxin-producing e. coli

november 16, 2024

this recall may expand. see below for details.

(emphasis mine)

affected whole carrot brands and their bag sizes:

affected baby (cut and peeled) carrot brands and their bag sizes:

formatting on tumblr is difficult, please see the FDA outbreak investigation page for the affected ranges of best-by dates for baby carrots, and pictures of the affected carrots.

as of time of posting, the main FDA recall page and the CDC investigation page have an error and do not list Kroger or LIDL baby carrots, while the FDA outbreak investigation page does. I am assuming that this means they are part of the recall and that this error will probably be fixed soon.

the recalled carrots are thought to be associated with an E. coli O121:H19 outbreak. 39 illnesses, 15 hospitalizations, and one death have been linked to this outbreak so far.

as always, these numbers are expected to be lower than the true number of illnesses and deaths, and will likely rise. not everyone seeks medical attention, and even when all testing and reporting procedures go as smoothly as possible, it can take weeks to officially link an illness to an outbreak.

noteworthy from the FDA investigation page:

in short, there is a possibility this contamination may affect more than just the recalled carrots. keep up to date with these pages to stay on top of this outbreak.

the recalled carrots are no longer on shelves. but if they are in your fridge or freezer, destroy or discard them and clean anything they may have touched.

do NOT eat these carrots! this strain of e. coli is dangerous and at least one person has died.

if you think you got sick in relation to this outbreak, please seek medical attention, even if just to get your illness officially associated with this outbreak.

te pāti māori haka in response to the first vote on the racist anti māori treaty principles bill introduced to parliament today by david seymour and the act party. toitū te tiriti

btw if you have been moved watching this haka (or any haka in your life) i encourage you to sign the petition against the bill that this haka was responding to. you can sign it from anywhere.

Knitting, 2021 - by Joseph Ford, English

this is one of a [series] and they're all fantastic

joseph ford is the photographer and the knitter who made the pieces is nina dodd (ninadoddknits.com)

If I was a baker and you ask for a dozen I'm making 13 cause fuck 12

Kneesvember Day 14

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