I'm Ḥesed (pronounced חסד). Gay Jewish guy (he/him/his). 24 yrs. ♌🐀. I love to cook. Aes blog is @fadedflorallace and it probably updates more than I do. note: due to low energy I can't make my blogs screenreader-accessible. Most reblogged posts will not be captioned for the foreseeable future. US-based. In love with user quitetheketch. Feel free to msg me whenever!
☆ Happy Disability Awareness Month from your local little person! ☆ (they/them)
This post has gotten over 700 notes in less than two days, so I thought I’d take the time to drop some #education:
I was born with Achondroplasia - the most common of over 500 types of dwarfism. It causes not only stunted growth, but the common bowing of bones, arthritis, and hearing issues.
Dwarfs are a small minority (pun intended) and one that is majorly misrepresented through media. Whether it be through the mythical “dwarves” in Lord of the Rings or mini me in Austin Powers, the public has incredibly squed ideas of what real life dwarfs are. Historically little people were kept as slaves, pets, and public oddities, and today we still face major discrimination and objectification. And we often fall between the cracks when it comes to disabled representation.
I posted this photo set in the hopes to represent my community in a positive light, and to hold my place in the disabled community. I stand at the intersection of many minority communities - I am physically disabled, hard of hearing, nonbinary, queer, autistic. I hope this reaches people with other intersections. I love you. I see you. Happy July lovelies :)
hiii i hate to make this post again bcs i made it like almost a year ago and it kind of flopped but here i am again bcs i refuse to learn lessons …..
anyway college is a scam and i have to pay $10k by aug 30 to register for my senior year this fall ): i have about $3k saved and im working ~40 hr weeks (its more but half of it is “unpaid” for now bcs im working two school jobs) to pay more but if i could reach my gfm goal (please pm for other methods of donation) it would help me so much towards paying everything off. it’s already affecting one of my summer jobs because access i need for my job has been revoked. if 600 people could just donate $10 i’d reach my goal almost immediately. please please if you can donate, but if that’s not possible PLEASE reblog!! thank you so much!!
As many of you know, I put a lot of work into my blog. I spend a lot of time educating people about racism and direct action efforts and social movements. It has been extremely rewarding but also can be exhausting at times, so I really appreciate the kind words you all share with me in return. It keeps me going.
I also decided to give y’all another way to support me, through ko-fi. I’m not in dire need, so please don’t give me anything at the expense of your own comfort. But I am jobless thanks to covid, so it will be greatly appreciated. I am so grateful for all your support 💖✨🌈
I’m moving back to Minnesota in a few weeks and when I do, I’ll have a lapse in my insurance. Medications I rely on to function are extremely expensive without insurance so any help I can get would be appreciated! Thank you ✨🧚🏾
I’m insured again now so I no longer have to worry about paying for meds! Next on my list is to get my health back in order so that I can go back to work. I have to see my gp, a dermatologist, an adhd specialist, possibly a neurologist, and get back into going to therapy. My goal is to have a job by the end of the summer but I could still use some financial help for general survival until I’m no longer unemployed. Thank you all for your support, it means a lot ✨🧚🏾🌈
So I can’t see a dermatologist until October to get back on my immunosuppressive injections so in the meantime my gp put me back on the only ointment that helps with my eczema (which puts me on the verge of needing to be hospitalized when it flares) but my insurance will not cover it despite my doctor’s appeals. Shits expensive even with GoodRX. I’m at my wits end with dealing with this bullshit. Please help me if you can. I can’t get a job if I’m constantly fighting off eczema flares so by helping me pay for my ointment, you’re helping me stabilize my life. Thank you in advance.
Also please do not give me unsolicited advice for how to deal with eczema.
he performed this when he came to my school and that shit was funny as fuck especially because a lot of the audience was LGBT ppl and we like Got It he’s so ridiculous
He’s also the guy who uses his twitter verification to pose as people and tweet ridiculous shit ie.
sometimes I see tiktoks that are aiming to teach some sort of political info (cross posted on other websites, I dont use tiktok) and sometimes theyre genuinely good and informative but even then they’re limited to 1 minute which is… incredible limiting for anything you want to communicate and doesn’t allow for ANY nuance or depth, but forces you to strip your message down and make it easily digestible. for this purpose it’s even worse than twitter (because at least there you can make threads) and i am scared at the thought that many young people are having their politics informed by tiktoks
(edit: have been told that they’re limited to 3 minutes now, not 1 minute)
i replied earlier with: tiktok demands that political information be formatted as entertainment in order to be consumed by a mass audience…dystopic!!—but i want to expand on this further:
the format of tiktok is inherently at odds with the kind of reflectivity and depth that political thought demands. neil postman critiqued this same tendency—but in 1985, in reference to television—in amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business, which i return to often because
i hate TV (and also my parents didn’t want to pay for it so i never really had it growing up!!)
new technologies and new forms of communication rarely escape the norms and values of older ones, but build on top of them, and i find 20th cent. critiques of TV to be incredibly valuable for understanding the new forms of video production/consumption that we have now.
postman writes:
[O]n television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.
one of the most influential ideas from the book is postman’s critique of the now…this! tendency in TV (and intensified by instagram stories/tiktok):
[“Now…this”]: the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor’s cheerfully exclaiming “Now … this,” which segues into a story about Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.
what does it do to our sense of scale and urgency if a 3-minute video about a human-rights catastrophe is followed with a 1-minute thrift flip video?
of course tiktok (and instagram, and twitter, and essentially every new medium we have today) can also a site of consciousness-raising, of disseminating social justice theories etc…i mean, i learned about intersectional feminism from…jezebel!!! but:
[E]very technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.
or, as the historian melvin kranzberg has said: “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” technology can be subversive; it can be conservative. always, always, always it gravitates towards the existing power structures and fissures in our society.
this is getting vv long so i will close with a quote from amusing ourselves to death that @wildersage’s post immediately reminded me of:
Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing…when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
We
would rather nobody buy any Frito-Lay products, Fritos, Doritos,
Tostitos, Funyuns, Cheetos, all those, while we’re on strike. We make
all of those in Topeka, Kansas. We also would rather nobody buys PepsiCo
products while we’re on the line. PepsiCo is the owner of Frito-Lay.
After 37 years, I still get forced to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Seven years ago, my wife passed away and I spent a lot of time in grief counseling, and I told the company, I don’t want to work 12 hours a day seven days a week. I ended up getting FMLA [Family Medical Leave Act unpaid leave], but they’re still having me do it sometimes. You come in at 7 a.m. and not only do you work eight hours, but when you get off at 3 p.m., they suicide (force you to work a double shift) you and have you come back at 3am. There’s 850 employees and it’s true for half or three quarters of them.
This job wears you down, it tires you, and makes you mentally exhausted. It plays with your mind. Some of these guys who work 12 hours a day everyday are destroying their marriages. They’re destroying their families. My wife passed away and I don’t have a wife to go home to to say, ‘Hey babe I’m only working eight hours tomorrow,“ but a lot of these guys come in with the understanding that they’ll be here for eight hours but then they got to call their wives and kids and say, "Guess what? It’s not eight hours. It’s 12 hours and then I have to go back to work at 3am.”
Frito-Lay has been told they need to fix this but unfortunately, when they bring in new people, they force the same schedule on them and they quit. Frito-Lay has waited so long to replace workers, and now Frito Lay has a horrible reputation in town so a lot of people won’t work here.
“I think people are pushed to the edge. COVID created some of this. During COVID, managers got to work from home. People see that and realize they have other options.”
This is not a good job. At 7am, our warehouse is 100 degrees. We don’t have air conditioning. We have cooks in the kitchen on the fryers that are 130 or 140 degrees making chips and sweating like pigs. Meanwhile, the managers have A/C.
I make $20.50 [an hour] after 37 years here. Most people make between $16.50 and $20 an hour. I haven’t gotten a raise in a decade. Three years ago, I got a $600 bonus that was taxed, and three years before that I got another $600 bonus. That was my only “raise” for the past 10 years. This is from a Fortune 500 company that is making billions.
