Okay, I am fucking ready to throw hands with the Florida Government. This “Don’t Say Gay” bill would prevent both LGBTQ children and teachers from talking about that. A literal child wouldn’t be able to talk about their own parents if their parents are LGBTQ. Not oy that, but this is severely detrimental to the mental health of both out and closeted children. I for one am disgusted by this bill and beg everyone to sign the petition to get it abolished. Signing is free and takes less than five minutes. Please, this legislation is disgusting, an infringement on people’s rights, and just plain fucked up.
So, the Australian government today announced, that they are abolishing the piss poor replacement piece of shit body that governs infant formula marketing.
The marketing code in Australia only covered infant formula up to 12 months, so “Toddler formula” with the exact same branding and messaging as infant formula was created. But at least there was something..
So far, there’s nothing that will replace APMAIF. Tony Abbott is once again a huge fucknuckle of a syphillitic scrotum, who believes that anyone who is not rich as fuck white man (or one of the women he owns) is not worthy of any government spending.
Now, there will literally be nothing to stop unethical marketing to persuade new parents who are extra vulnerable to marketing to buy their brand of formula. Nothing to make sure that if extra ingredients in infant formula are beneficial for babys development, that they are put in ALL infant formulae, and not just the premium priced ones.
Nothing to stop unethical marketing practices that serve to convince new parents that they should doubt the lactation process without good reason. Nothing to stop infant formula and baby food manufacturers from encouraging parents to introduce foods in ways that might be damaging to their baby even though it lines the pockets of the greedy rich fucks.
The Colour of the Climate Crisis is a project by Do The Green Thing, an environmental social initiative that uses creativity to combat the climate crisis. Come say hi.
Observed every 10 October, the World Day Against the Death Penalty unifies the global abolitionist movement and mobilizes civil society, political leaders, lawyers, public opinion and more to support the call for universal abolition of capital punishment. The day encourages and consolidates the political and general awareness of the world-wide movement against the death penalty.
On 10 October 2021, the World Day will be dedicated to women who risk being sentenced to death, who have received a death sentence, who have been executed, and to those who have had their death sentences commuted, exonerated, or pardoned.
Extensive discrimination based on sex and gender, often coupled with other elements of identity, such as age, sexual orientation, disability, and race expose women to intersecting forms of structural inequalities. Such prejudices can weigh heavily on sentencing, including when women are stereotyped as an evil mother, a witch, or a femme fatale. This discrimination can also lead to critical mitigating factors not being considered during arrest and trial, such as being subjected to gender-based violence and abuse.
While working towards the complete abolition of the death penalty worldwide for all crimes and for all genders, it is crucial to sound the alarm on the discrimination women face and the consequences such discrimination can have on a death sentence.
THE DEATH PENALTY IN PRACTICE:
(Statistics from Amnesty International unless otherwise specified)
Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide estimates that there are at least 800 women sentenced to death around the world.
At least 7 countries are confirmed to have a woman under the sentence of death in 2020: Ghana, Japan, Maldives, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, Zambia. The number of countries is, in reality much higher, like in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but where there is no accurate breakdown of death-row statistics by gender.
In 2020, amongst the 483 individuals who were executed, 16 were women located in Egypt, Iran, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
108 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes.
28 countries are abolitionist in practice
55 countries are retentionist.
In 2020, the 5 countries that carried out the most executions were: China, Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:
@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.
unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.
in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.
the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.
but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominancewhich they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.
when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.
this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.
history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.
and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.
and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.
I’ve gotta say, I wound up somehow being shown two whole articles about how Sad it is to be estranged from your kids on Mother’s Day and man were those WEIRD to read
Like, yes. I am SURE it is painful to not be contacted by someone who cut you off, who you had no reciprocal interest in cutting off, on a day when everyone else is fuzzily celebrating connection.
But if someone you raised for eighteen fucking years won’t even talk to you, lady, consider please that they must feel very hurt, and why that might be and what it might be about.
Vague “I know I carry fault because I didn’t know what I was doing” doesn’t seem like that, at least not to me. It may be true, but… there are a LOT of people in your life who aren’t going to be close with you, who you hoped would. That’s how things work. No one is REQUIRED to establish or maintain a bond with anyone.
You’re not entitled to it.
You may have grown and changed from the hurtful person you seem to admit having been. That’s an accomplishment, if so!
But I don’t think you’re in the place you should be until you understand that while you’re absolutely allowed to want that person’s time and attention and to be a total emotional wreck because you don’t have it… you’re not entitled to it.
If you can start there, you’re truly on your way.
I’m not exactly opposed to anything in this post, and really I agree with everything in it at face value, but… It kind of bothers me that I’ve long perceived a sort of double standard – in most spaces I’m around but particularly on Tumblr, the nexus of a sort of radical children’s-rights-ism – where (adult) children are allowed to cut off their parents but parents aren’t allowed to cut off their (adult) children. Or to put it another way, when a parent cuts off a child, it’s by default the parent’s fault, and when a child cuts off their parent, it’s also by default the parent’s fault (as is strongly implied in the OP).
I don’t want to speak for Fierceawakening here, so I won’t, but how many people could we imagine expressing those exact same views but with the roles reversed (leaving out the specifics of Mother’s Day)? I can’t imagine many.
Obviously I’m completely against parents cutting off their children while they’re still growing up or even when they’re early in emergent adulthood (this spring semester I had one student whose father severed all ties with her in the middle of the semester, and I was telling someone about this and we were agreeing that there’s really no conceivable justification for cutting off your kid in the middle of college unless you discover that they’re the Tinder Swindler or something). It is not okay to cut off your offspring when they’re still dependent on you, just because (I suppose?) you don’t like their choices or “lifestyle” or something.
But, a lot of the people I know of my age are more financially secure than their parents are (and yes, I know the generational trend goes the other way, but that’s far from absolute), and/or they’re considerably healthier and/or generally more able. Just because there’s a massive, massive power differential between parents and growing children, a dynamic that many parents abuse, doesn’t mean that the power differential remains operative between those relations for life.
The OP is right about considering the possibility that you badly hurt someone if they feel the need to cut you off despite close family ties (while I think at the same time we’d agree that you shouldn’t automatically blame yourself when someone else cuts off a relationship), but I don’t see why that shouldn’t apply in general between close, fully grown-up family members.
Sorry if I’m hijacking this by injecting a new element that wasn’t part of the feeling behind the OP, it’s just an aspect of the issue that I find myself noticing and thinking about from time to time.
The Interpal UK team has arrived safely in Lebanon to begin their trip to our projects in the refugee camps.
We began by giving out the sweet cones that you so generously donated to children in need of a little love and care this winter. Many of these children will have seen horrors we cannot even imagine and face a future of economic uncertainty, poor education and a lack of opportunities.
As we travel through Lebanon over the coming weeks we will be visiting innovative and sustainable projects through which Interpal carefully uses you kind donations to really make a difference to these people’s lives. Displaced Palestinians face a harsh winter ahead with poor infrastructure and restrictions on outside support. You can help us to make a difference and keep them #OutOfTheCold this winter.
Follow our adventures on Instagram @interpal_uk or add us on Snapchat for exclusive clips from the field including interviews with staff and beneficiaries so you can witness first-hand what life is like for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
To donate to our Urgent Winter Appeal call us on 0208 961 993 or visit www.interpal.org
We’re excited to order our copy of the new book by Ahlam Bsharat,Code Name: Butterfly out now from Neem Tree Books!
“With irony and poignant teenage idealism, Butterfly draws us into her world of adult hypocrisy, sibling rivalries, girlfriends’ power plays, unrequited love…not to mention the political tension of life under occupation. As she observes her fragile environment with all its conflicts, Butterfly is compelled to question everything around her. Is her father a collaborator for the occupiers? Will Nizar ever give her the sign she’s waiting for? How will her friendship with the activist Mays and the airhead Haya survive the unpredictable storms ahead? And why is ‘honour’ such a dangerous word, anyway?”
Okay, I am fucking ready to throw hands with the Florida Government. This “Don’t Say Gay” bill would prevent both LGBTQ children and teachers from talking about that. A literal child wouldn’t be able to talk about their own parents if their parents are LGBTQ. Not oy that, but this is severely detrimental to the mental health of both out and closeted children. I for one am disgusted by this bill and beg everyone to sign the petition to get it abolished. Signing is free and takes less than five minutes. Please, this legislation is disgusting, an infringement on people’s rights, and just plain fucked up.
why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:
@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.
unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.
in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.
the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.
but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominancewhich they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.
when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.
this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.
history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.
and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.
and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.
look everyone knows I’m a feminist don’t get me wrong but i can’t fucking stand the huge ass blind spot in feminist narrative which is the lack of anyone giving a single vocal fuck about children’s issues. does anyone in this fucking world understand that a violent childhood does tend to lead to higher rates of abuse and rape like you wanna work on a big portion of the fucking problem of misogyny and a culture of violence in general?? start the fuck at home. if people are not exposed to/don’t experience sexual and physical violence, they’re less likely to employ sexual and physical violence as an adult it’s such a simple concept your experiences shape you many people exposed to violence the way so many children are more likely to be abusers and victims so why the fuck ain’t that part of the feminist narrative that everyone is always going on about? Seriously? There is nothing to be lost, only a shitton to be gained. Like why the fuck does it feel like only a handful of people give a shit about this?? Hey, how about instead of debating on an object of religious practice like the hijab and whether or not it fits your fucking narrative for women to make the choice to wear it which is actually something that doesn’t fucking effect most of the people fucking debating it you can focus your attention on something that would fucking help everyone
No but seriously this is why I think that automatic postal banking along with automatic voter registration should be a thing.
If everyone gets a free bank account on their 18th birthday that means that everyone needs to be issued legal ID and a PO box mailing address on their 18th birthday and has a place that no one is allowed to access their money on their 18th birthday. Do you know how many awful stories there are about teens who were saving up to move out who had their money used by abusive parents because it was in a joint account and they have no recourse because it was equally everyone’s money in the account?
Do you know how overwhelming it can be to try to get a bank account when you don’t have proof of legal residence because you are eighteen years old and your parents never let you have a drivers license or get a job and you don’t pay bills or have a rental agreement? How is an eighteen year old in an abusive household supposed to become financially independent if you need a credit card to get your prepaid phone to function but you can’t get a credit card until you’re 21 and you can’t get a debit card because you can’t get a bank account because your parents won’t let you use your birth certificate to get a state ID or drivers’ license? How is someone supposed to get away from an abusive partner when they need two forms of ID and two forms of proof of address and they get no bills and aren’t on any insurance paperwork or vehicle registration because their partner specifically prevented that?
Fuck that. National system. You go through the post office. Your PO box is through the post office, you bank with the post office, you can apply for an ID and request copies of legal documents through the post office.
Make it impossible to close an account too; that way it’s normal for EVERYONE to have a bank account that is all their own and that nobody else can shut down without a death certificate so you can’t pressure your partner into shutting down a possible escape route.
Is it logistically complicated? Yeah. Would it be expensive? Yeah. Is it more reliance on the state and a system of capitalism than I would prefer? Yeah. But everything fucking sucks so let’s try *something.*
“but everything fucking sucks so let’s try something” is my philosophy now and forever
In my opinion, you should be able to have your own bank account as soon as you are legally old enough to get paid.
Otherwise these fuckers will just steal the money right before the kid turns “18″ which is actually not a magical age.
Brothers Mo’ayed, 13, and Majed, 18, cannot hear or speak, but they scored top marks at school in Raqqa, Syria, before fighting forced them to flee to Damascus. The brothers managed to stay in school in Damascus, despite having to get up at 5:00 am to get through all of the checkpoints. Eventually forced to flee to Lebanon, they have now been out of school for three years.
Kids under age 18 soon will no longer be able to buy e-cigarettes in the United States, according to new regulations announced last week by the Obama administration. Yet it remains legal for kids as young as 12 to be exposed to nicotine working on US tobacco farms.
