Escapism With Birds

throwback to that time in my existentialism class where the professor asked ‘who thinks hell is other people’ and half the class slowly and meekly put their hand up

then the prof was like ‘…i mean who originally said it’

there are some posts that sound utterly made up for the joke or for the notes, but this one I whole heartedly believe 

Sounds right to me…

That quote is amazing to me in that it’s quoted completely accurately and yet in a way that means something completely different from what it meant in context.

(Sartre was claiming that Hell was other people. He was not claiming that other people were hell.)

…I can’t actually tell what distinction you’re drawing there. Can you expand?

The line comes from No Exit, which is set in Hell. Spoilers for No Exit follow

In particular, three people who have been condemned to hell are trapped eternally in a room together. And at first they think they got off easy without any pitchforks or fiery lakes or anything. But over the course of the play they discover that they have been chosen very specifically to have neuroses and character flaws that interact with and torment each other.

Each one needs the approval of a second in an unstable RPS cycle so that any time one of them might be satisfied by a second, the third swoops in and ruins it.

And when they figure this out, one of the characters expresses his understanding, that hell isn’t physical torture. “Hell is just—other people.”

So the point isn’t that other people, generically, are hellish; it’s rather that you can build a hell out of other people.

But when I hear people quote it, it’s usually sort of an introvert-pride thing. “Other people are hell; you should spend time alone.” And that’s not the point at all. It’s a statement about how bad unhealthy relationships can be, not a statement about how all relationships are unhealthy!

See also Sartre’s own comment here:

Reblogging for the original post which was hilarious and also for that explanation which is beautiful

ive been reading a book that basically explains how so-called “brain differences” between the genders is the result of gendered socialization and not the cause of it. i honestly expected the book to be very cis-centric but its actually the opposite, the author stresses that testimony from trans ppl is actually indispensable because we’ve, in a sense, “lived both experiences”

more cis feminists should have this mindset

one of the first examples that she uses to introduce her point about how perception by others can shape a person’s performance actually uses a trans woman. it explains that as a certain trans woman became to be seen as a woman more and more frequently, the ppl arond her eventually started viewing her as being ill equipped for tasks that they did not bother her about pre-transition. eventually she even found herself underperforming in these tasks herself.

whats the name of the book

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

Here’s a pdf, babes <3

I knew it was this book before I’d finished reading the first two lines. Honestly this book is indispensible if you want to debunk any gender determinism people claim is science. I can’t recommend it enough.

She’s written a new one! It won the Royal Society prize for science book of the year, and it’s called Testosterone Rex, and it is excellent.

(Bonus: it’s making old white men really really mad.)

(Bonus bonus: I am myself a neuroscientist, and the old white men mentioned above – who are not – could not have missed the point harder if they’d actively tried. Which. Maybe?)

alcohol culture is so wild…people all over fb will be sharing a meme like “i can’t have just one glass of wine, it’s always 2 bottles and 3 people i can never look in the eye again” as if that’s normal? but if a meme like that was going around about cocaine or any other drug, everyone would be like “sounds like a drug problem bruh” 

alcoholism is SO normalized and it’s such a toxic environment honestly 

This article is a fascinating and horrifying observation of alcohol culture in present-day America – especially in the context of women and the “wine mom” attitude seen on Facebook in particular. It’s one of the most eye-opening things I’ve ever read, tbh.

Man, when I was like 16 I got so sick of being made fun of for being the fat kid that I took an axe down inna woods, chopped down a tree, and started doing log-lifts all the time. I got strong as fuck, but I didn’t lose no weight. I actually got bigger.

Same thing happened when I got into fighting. I got even stronger, and I got *fast*, man, and nimble, like a cat. Still chubby.

Body-building culture is a bunch of crap, my dude. Functional muscle is not necessarily toned or lean. You can be swole as hell and still be heavy. And that’s cool.

Embrace your inner barbarian. And when fatphobic little gym twinks try to body shame you, you should DESTROY THEM with your MIGHTY AXE

Can comfirm, i am Quite Fat ™ but i still hit my punching bag hard enough last week make it touch the ceiling and broke a finger in the process

You know, I train with (martial arts) a bunch of dudes, and a few bodybuilders have showed up over the years. 

And every damn one of those huge shredded motherfuckers has the endurance of a fucking newborn puppy. Fifteen minutes into warmups and they’re panting for air like like they’re about to die. I’ve sparred them and every one of them telegraphs their moves about two weeks in advance, and are slower than my dead grandpa because their huge useless muscles get in the damn way. 

Now. I also work with a couple of guys who are not weightlifters. They do, however, do very physical jobs and are Big Dudes. Picture this sort of build. 

No abs to speak of, a bit of a tummy, and those motherfuckers can pick up one of the weightlifters and throw them. 

And they’re fast. Like, unfair fast. 

Bodybuilding culture is bullshit. Embrace your status as a giant barbarian and if anyone gives you crap throw them off a mountain. 

i love and support all strong, fat people

No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.

Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.

None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.

This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.

Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….

I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.

Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item. 

People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”: 

The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.

Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.

This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.

Let’s examine a traditionally male-dominated role that is very well-respected, and well-paid, in many parts of the world — that of a doctor. In the UK, it is listed as one of the top ten lucrative careers, and the average annual income of a family doctor in the US is well into six figures. It also confers on you significant social status, and a common stereotype in Asian communities is of parents encouraging their children to become doctors.

One of my lecturers at university once presented us with this thought exercise: why are doctors so highly paid, and so well-respected? Our answers were predictable. Because they save lives, their skills are extremely important, and it takes years and years of education to become one. All sound, logical reasons. But these traits that doctors possess are universal. So why is it, she asked, that doctors in Russia are so lowly paid? Making less than £7,500 a year, it is one of the lowest paid professions in Russia, and poorly respected at that. Why is this?

The answer is crushingly, breathtakingly simple. In Russia, the majority of doctors are women. Here’s a quote from Carol Schmidt, a geriatric nurse practitioner who toured medical facilities in Moscow: “Their status and pay are more like our blue-collar workers, even though they require about the same amount of training as the American doctor… medical practice is stereotyped as a caring vocation ‘naturally suited‘ to women, [which puts it at] a second-class level in the Soviet psyche.”

What this illustrates perfectly is this — women are not devalued in the job market because women’s work is seen to have little value. It is the other way round. Women’s work is devalued in the job market because women are seen to have little value. This means that anything a woman does, be it childcare, teaching, or doctoring, or rocket science, will be seen to be of less value simply because it is done mainly by women. It isn’t that women choose jobs that are in lower-paid industries, it is that any industry that women dominate automatically becomes less respected and less well-paid.

http://cratesandribbons.com/2013/12/13/patriarchys-magic-trick-how-anything-perceived-as-womens-work-immediately-sheds-its-value/

“Men may cook or weave, or dress dolls or hunt humming birds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, votes them as important. When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important (Mead, 1949, p. 159).” https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-19279160/in-a-complex-voice-the-contradictions-of-male-elementary

“The wage gap is a myth”

The entire field of veterinary medicine says hello.

the idea of people having to be ‘useful’ is just so gross, like people do not exist to be used

having to produce something and have a use is a capitalist ideal and not an intrinsic part of humanity

just by being alive you are human and you are worth something and you can never be useless

this applies to animals as well

“Having to like DO THINGS is SO OPPRESSIVE. No one had to like DO THINGS before evil capitalism. In ancient times food, water, and shelter just existed and everything was taken care of for me”

Guess what happened to people who didn’t do things before capitalism? They died. Cause if you weren’t hunting, gathering, or useful in some aspect of nature. You were killed, died or starvation, dehydration, or exposure. 

Being useful is literally part of our biology. Fucking moron. You pull some idea out of your ass because you literally don’t want to get off your ass. 

I’m not saying nobody should ever do things ever, I’m saying people don;t have to produce to an arbitrary standard in order to prove their right to live

And if you really think disabled people deserve to die if we can’t ‘contribute’ or be useful in a way you approve of then congrats youre a fucking monster

actually there’s significant evidence in terms of Neolithic burials that disabled people who would not have been able to hunt for themselves (the archaeological evidence mostly shows mobility disabilities because it’s visible in the bone record) were well fed and cared for by their communities

so the “people like you would have been left to die” argument isn’t just cruel and violently ableist, it’s extremely historically inaccurate and based off of projecting modern prejudice on prehistoric cultures

sources because I’m on my laptop now!

note: in the neolithic era, a person in their 40s or 50s would be considered elderly

12,000-year-old burial of a woman about 45 with mobility disabilities both congenital and acquired

burial of a 40-50 year old Neanderthal man who had survived to old age with a deformed right arm and a long-healed head injury that would have made him blind in one eye

neolithic burial of a man in his 50s who lost the use of his left arm in adolescence

neolithic burial of a man in his 40s with evidence of a significant mobility disability caused by an injured hip and leg, some time in adulthood but long before his death

neolithic Asian burial of a man in his 20s with a congenital disorder which would have made him a quadriplegic around age 14. He survived for 10-15 years after that.

5th century burial of child with Down Syndrome

Our society continually propagates the myth that our ancestors’ lives were miserable, but the truth is human beings figured out how to live cooperatively and humanely a long time ago. Really the agricultural revolution fucked everything up.

Cuz clearly people only died and starved before capitalism

Anthropologically, proof of fixed femur fractures in ancient hominids shows that is one of the signs of civilized people– caring for the sick and injured is a cornerstone of civilization. So lmao go fuck yourself with the injured and disabled died thousands of years ago if they couldn’t help provide for their group.

Stop turning ancient hominids into these cruel “survival of the fittest” images. Especially cause that isn’t even what is meant by that phrase.

Even Neanderthals cared for their sick and injured. Which says a lot about those who are against the idea.

Another point: back in the ancient times, pretty much ALL work that got done was work of the “if it doesn’t get done, you starve” variety, perhaps embellished a bit by the “if it doesn’t get done, you’re uncomfortable” sort. Work was vital, yes, but all the work that was vital was vital.

Nowadays, on the other hand, we have excess, and waste, and an absolute shitpot of arbitrary work that gets shoved into the “necessary and vital” pile just because somebody else can make a buck off it, made as much off of cut corners and financial shenanigans as of anybody’s honest labor. Shitty Wal-Mart plastic pitchers and crap toys that capture attention and drop it just as fast, “fast fashion” that you wear twice and it falls apart, shiny chrome washer-dryers that are going to be replaced in five or ten years because planned obsolescence meets upgrade culture, and produce that gets rejected because it doesn’t look shiny and uniform and perfect.

If you’re a cashier, you have to stand even though you could do your job just as well sitting. A fast-food place throws out pounds of fries, empties the whole assembly-line of prepared food into the dumpster at the end of the night, and if you take any of it home to eat, that’s called stealing. Grocery stores throw out entire cartons of eggs because one out of twelve is cracked and lock their dumpsters so nobody can scavenge food from the tons of what’s thrown out still edible. Tech stores demand that unsold computers be destroyed with a sledgehammer before being thrown out, and all the labor that went into making it, assembling it, forming its component parts and mining its raw materials, is all wasted.

We can see this shit going on, we encounter it and sometimes we’re ordered to carry it out, in our workplaces that pay us shit, and let me tell you, there’s a hell of a difference between “if you don’t get the wheat harvested we’ll have no bread all winter” and “you need to spend the next eight hours cooking food so we can hold a profit after throwing a quarter of it in the garbage.” A multitude of people would benefit greatly if allowed to access that waste or allowed to not produce what’s likely going to be wasted.

It’s not that we want something for nothing–it’s that we want the stuff we’ve put work into creating to benefit us, or someone who could use it, and not see good work twisted into benefiting no one while still being demanded and still being underpaid.

If people in agrarian societies of the past starved it was frequently due to an uncontrollable act of nature (drought, flood, locusts, plague).

Now people starve because they don’t “produce” in an acceptable way for our capitalist system, which has a very narrow and limited definition of what being “useful” is, and because our corporate overlords would rather throw food away than feed someone who is starving.

We have enough food, but people are starving to death.

We have enough houses, but people are dying of exposure because they’re homeless.

We have enough medicine, but people are dying because they can’t afford to pay for it.

And we accept this as correct because we’ve been brainwashed that only “useful” i.e. “capitalist productive” people deserve to have food, shelter and healthcare.

That’s fucked up.

caring for the sick and injured is a cornerstone of civilization

I’ve used this in arguments for years. Those in need are never a drain on a society – but the way they are treated is the measure of one.

I’ve debated for a while about sharing this, but I think it’s important, and, to be fair, plenty of antis have shared the stories of their abuse.

So:

I support people creating romantic content similar to my abuse, even though that content contributed to my abuse.

Let me explain. I was very, very into Twilight when I was around 14. A couple years later a girl called me her lamb, and used the romanticization of jealousy and danger from that novel to excuse things like cutting me, stealing my phone, and demanding my passwords. Among other things. This continued until the end of high school, and it ripped apart every significant relationship in my life without anyone really realizing what was happening.

It’s definitely true that I didn’t recognize jealousy as abuse instead of romance. It’s true that I didn’t recognize “I love you” and “you can’t love anyone but me” as contradictions, and a part of that mentality came from the media I consumed. And she sure as fuck sent me fic - even forced me to write fic - which echoed those values. On a very base level, it is easy to blame my abuse on that fiction, on the unhealthy ideas of romance it gave me. For several years after getting out, I did blame romance like Twilight. I got angry when people I loved enjoyed it, and I thought I was protecting them by demanding that they stop.

But I was wrong.

Let me go out another level.

First of all, I grew up in a deeply homophobic town. There were exactly no adults in my life that I could have even told that I was in a relationship with a girl, let alone that I thought something was wrong. Abuse thrives in silence.

Second of all, I’d been homeschooled most of my life, which meant I had zero education on healthy relationships. I had no context outside of romance novels and fan fiction, which no adults knew I was reading. My view of romance was shaped by media because there were no other sources even trying to compete.

Third of all - and maybe this is most important - writing that fanfic, while in that situation, gave me a voice to things that I couldn’t even admit I was feeling. I wrote fic where a human loved a vampire, but they were scared, they were so scared, it felt like having a gun to their head all the time. They were so scared even as they loved the vampire, and they wanted them, and they wanted to help, and they wanted to be better. (She didn’t like that fic.) It took years before I would call what I experienced abuse, or seek out resources for victims. But fiction gave me a voice right then, when I needed one most.

Media didn’t get me abused. A society which failed utterly at telling me what a healthy relationship looked like got me abused. Parents and teachers and authority figures who were wildly homophobic got me abused. Fiction contributed, but if it wasn’t Twilight, it would have been something else - hell, apparently she repeated the same pattern after me with 50 Shades, and then with Captain America (somehow). Because above all, my abuser got me abused. She used fiction as a tool, but it could have been anything. If I hadn’t read Twilight, it would have been Johnlock, or Drarry, or Russia/America. All those things had more than enough content which portrayed danger and jealousy as sexy.

Do I still read Twilight? Fuck no, it’s a huge trigger. But I’ve stopped blaming it for what happened, because it was never Twilight’s job to teach me about romance. Nor was it fandom’s job to tell me, “if someone actually terrifies you, that’s dangerous, even if it’s sexy. If you love someone but they’re hurting you, you need help, not to try to fix them.” What hurt me most wasn’t fiction; it was the silence from every other quarter.

Media isn’t education on healthy relationships. It can’t be, and it never will be. “Fan fiction made me think that this was ok” means that there were no voices in our lives that we trusted more than fanfiction telling us that it wasn’t okay.

There will always be media that abusers can twist to make it look like what they’re doing is romantic and okay. Always. The abuse is still their fault, and the inability to counter harmful messages is the silence of society’s fault.

I’ll leave you with this: after I got out, I continued reading fic that featured jealousy and possessiveness as something hot. Because I did think it was hot; I now just knew firsthand that it was a kink to only be indulged in controlled situations. Firsthand experience is the harshest teacher, but it does work.

I just tag my own fic that features jealousy and possessiveness as “#abusive behavior.” Because if there is another girl like me out there, being sent these fics by her abuser, stuck in a situation she doesn’t understand - well, if it wasn’t my fic, it’d be someone else’s. The kink’s going to keep on existing. But maybe she’ll see the tag and figure something out.

Fiction is a tool, and taking one tool away won’t stop an abuser, because fiction isn’t causing abuse. If it wasn’t fiction, it’d be something else.

Stop blaming fiction for the actions of a cruel person, and the silence of the people who should have been protecting you.

It hurts to lay the blame at the feet of those you love, but if we deny the problems we will never fix them.

Be safe. Be kind.

When children are getting their only education on a topic from fanfiction, they have already been failed.

I get so annoyed when people are like “we don’t need to be teaching sex ed to kids and teens who aren’t having sex” then why are we making kids and teens do fire drills and lockdown drills if no emergencies are happening???? because when the time comes they’ll know what to do to stay safe you stupid onion peel

you stupid onion peel

If you’re using the terrorist attacks in London to try and push your political ideas or islamophobia, fuck right off.

No, we do not need guns in the UK. The availability of guns wouldn’t have helped the situation, but made it 100 times worse. Those terrorists attacked people with knives. Imagine the absolute fucking carnage if they’d been able to shoot.

No, the policy of ‘keep calm and carry on’ does not demonstrate our weakness. It’s the ultimate act of defiance against terrorism, which by it’s very definition attempts to disrupt our lives and make us too afraid to continue. I agree that action must be taken, but our refusal to submit to fear is one of the things I am proudest of about our country, and in all honesty, what else is there to do? Action is being taken against terrorism - MI5 stop dozens of terrorist plots each year. But if we can’t eradicate the cause of this hatred and violence, terrorism will never end. We can’t catch every terrorist. Someone will always slip through the cracks.

No, Muslims are not the problem. Muslims are not terrorists. Terrorists are extremists, whose actions have nothing to do with the faith that they falsely swear allegiance to, for Islam is a religion of peace, and Islamic extremism is nothing but a perversion of that. Having seen Trump’s tweet about his ‘Muslim ban’, I have never been more furious. That ban is not an anti terrorism measure, but a policy of racism and islamophobia, and I speak for the majority of Britain when I say that we want nothing to do with it.

Now is not the time to argue, to profess ignorant political ideas or to perpetuate racism. People have died. Have some fucking sympathy. Let us grieve.

David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” Loss: The Politics of Mourning, pg.355-6  (via felislunensis)

this honestly just came out of left fucking field i would have never expected to hear anything like this in this show. consider me Pleasantly Surprised tbh

While this totally applies to other marginalized groups, I’d like to remind everyone House is specifically talking about an autistic child here.

Remember that.

[x]

#get with the program the new humor is benevolent surrealism (x)

I always wanted to know what to call it.

This is something I’ve been meaning to talk about, and I may do a full blog post at some point, but here’s a capsule version:

The Benign Violation Theory of humor, which is probably the best one out there, suggests that something is perceived as funny when it is simultaneously perceived as violating how the world “should” work and as benign. Something like the “gun” meme, for example, is funny because it violates our sense of how a joke should progress, and at the same time it’s harmless. 

Racist/sexist/etc shock humor violates our sense of how the world work–in either a “that’s not true!” or “you’re not allowed to say that!” way–and therefore whether you find it funny is based on whether you find it benign, which is to say either you think it’s harmless or you don’t care about the people it harms. (This is the root of the punch up/kick down distinction–jokes that punch up are funnier than jokes that kick down because the people they target are less vulnerable and therefore less likely to experience harm.)

So yes, science agrees that if you think racist jokes are funny, the reason is that you don’t care about the feelings of the people the joke is about. There’s a word for that.

it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.

I get really confused when americans, when talking about universal health care are like ‘yeh but it’s not free sweaty :) :) you have to pay it through taxes :) so gotcha!!’

and I’m like ….???? That’s the whole point??? Everyone pays their fair share so that no one has to be turned away because they don’t have insurance??? And no one has to set up a Fundraiser page just so that they DONT DIE???? So people don’t put off going to the doctor because they’re scared of going bankrupt?? Because healthcare is a RIGHT and should be free at the point of access?!?

“So no one has to be turned away” she says hahaha go to a universal health care country and get a necessary operation in less than a few years and come back and talk shit.

Look at the cure rates compared to mortality rates in universal health care countries and compare them to ours, then talk shit.

Tear your ACL in a universal health care country and see what the people say if you should go to their hospitals or go to an American hospital, then talk shit.

I do live in a universal health care country, actually. And I HAVE had a necessary operation here myself. I broke my arm years ago - the ambulance came within 5 minutes. I was seen in A&E by a doctor within 20 minutes. And I had the operation to put my arm back in place within hours - despite my condition not being life threatening. Hmm, don’t see what was so hard about that? And oh yeah, it was all free of charge.

You don’t seem to understand about how it works. Firstly, operations are prioritised. If someone comes in with an emergency, such as a ruptured aorta and bleeding out - of COURSE they will get an operation STRAIGHT AWAY. Like what do you think doctors do here, twiddle their thumbs while patients die? 

And if someone has something that is not quite an emergency, but is serious, such as a bowel cancer, they will have their surgery within 1-2 weeks of seeing a specialist. And it’s free. The poor patient who is already stressed and worried sick about their cancer, will NOT also have to worry about insurance and bills and going bankrupt.

Sure, some operations that are not quite as urgent will have waiting lists. My gran just had her cataract operation - this is something that isn’t life-threatening, not causing her pain at all, but of course is still affecting her life because she couldn’t see very well. She had to wait a few months, which of course in an inconvenience, but she still got her operation, and she definitely didn’t have to wait years (and I have never heard of anyone waiting years for an operation, and as a med student I have talked to a LOT of patients) so I don’t know where you got that from (probably some right-wing american media, I assume). And like, I’m sure most people would rather wait a bit longer than have to pay, or not ever get their operation because they can’t afford it?

And I’m not sure what you mean by your last bit. Are you really implying that countries other than the US couldn’t repair an ACL tear? Like, really? Do you think countries with universal healthcare have no resources or money? Sorry to burst your deluded bubble, but other countries can handle an ACL tear, and many other operations (even neurosurgery - shock horror!), just fine thanks. I’ve never seen a patient shipped off to America. 

“I’ve never seen a patient shipped off to America” daamn, i love this post

Not to mention that in countries like Australia, there are *also* private hospitals. If you *want* to spend tens of thousands of dollars to avoid waiting, you can?

Don’t make fun of right-wing children. Don’t bully right-wing children. Don’t scream at, lecture, or swear at right-wing children. I say this because I was that child. I was the child forced by my parents to stand outside of clinics holding signs that say “Abortion Kills Children.” I was the child who went to church every Sunday and could parrot every bull shit argument opposing gay marriage. I sounded smart. I sounded like I formed those opinions on my own. The reality was I was being psychologically abused. I was brainwashed and indoctrinated. I had no sense of self until I was much older. I had been wiped clean and filled with garbage. I have PTSD in part because of my childhood. Today, I am telling you, that those children NEED you! They need you to show love and patience and compassion. They need you to guide them out. Those children holding those signs are children begging to be seen. See them.

To add - this is a tactic right-wingers use to push their kids further right! The kids see well-meaning lefties being assholes and think “wow, I guess my parents were right, lefties ARE bad people who don’t think of the well being of the children and attack the underdog” etc., for real, these are kids and have in all likelihood experienced some degree or other of cult conditioning/abuse.

This is so fucking telling, it really, really is.

The point about the rich, privileged right wing in America.

They can’t understand basic reality or practicality. 

Or how the real world works in the end.

He literally compared needing life-saving healthcare to wanting a nice, fancy expensive sofa.

I mean, my God. Think about this.

That statement is shuddering and downright creepy.