theriotmag:

Fund set up to help the cheerleader who was not only thrown off her high school’s squad for REFUSING TO CHEER FOR HER RAPIST, but saw the case against her school thrown out of court as “frivolous” and was ordered to pay her high school $45,000 in legal fees.

That’s right.  She was raped and now she has to pay her school $45,000 because she DARED to be upset about it.

This fund is helping to raise the $45,000 and, hopefully, to raise awareness of the treatment of rape victims in our society, both socially and legally.  People wonder why victims don’t call the police when they’ve been raped?  Well, gee, maybe it’s because if you do tell someone about it, you’re met with scorn, derision and disbelief, while the criminal is protected.

This is NOT OKAY.  It doesn’t matter if the victim is a cheerleader, a mother, 11-years old, 65 years old, a virgin, a sex worker, cis, trans, or any other of the numerous distinctions we can make between each other.  THIS.  IS.  NOT.  OKAY.

huffingtonpost:

There’s a larger theme running through the events of this story — if you’re a school girl who’s been raped or sexually assaulted, don’t expect any support.

Apparently, that’s how things are done in Texas. A recent New York Times story about the alleged gang rape of an elementary school girl in another Texas town suggested that some in the community believed the fifth-grade victim brought the attacks upon herself, expressing sympathy for the alleged perpetrators and their futures, especially the ones who were high school athletes. The physical and emotional injuries the 11-year-old girl will live with the rest of her life were given little thought until weeks, and much criticism, later, when the Times ran a more thoughtfully researched piece.

The way these stories are reported gives the sense that the important issues to be discussed involved the legal system or internal school rules. The important nugget of what’s really going on is missing, though — these stories are about power and control, where authority figures push troubling actions under the carpet and put school athletics and the interests of sports boosters ahead of the physical and mental welfare of our daughters.

A similar theme played out in the coverage of journalist Lara Logan’s brutal sexual attack while reporting on the recent uprisings in Egypt. Many people raised the question of whether Logan had brought the rapes on herself by daring to be a woman reporter — and a very attractive one — in a Muslim country, implicitly suggesting that women who dare to step outside of certain boundaries should be prepared for whatever negative consequences come their way.

You’d think things would be a little better in 2011 for women and girls who try to put their lives back together after they’ve been raped. Whether you’re a girl who won’t cheer for the boy who raped you or a woman who dares to be a journalist covering an important, but dangerous, story, there’s scant support from institutions of authority. Of course, as one friend only half-seriously quipped, if that Texas cheerleader had said it was against her religion to cheer for her rapist, she’d be standing victorious on the Supreme Court steps today.

scientista:

blinddog:

here we go.

I wish I was surprised in any way.

I knew the next few years were going to be bad, but I didn’t think it was going to get this bad this fast. I am legitimately scared for our future now.

(Source: blinddog)

A whole orchestra of sexist racists! Delightful.

I just.

I.

WHAT.

ETA:

Apparently he is an ex-judge, having been fired for “some “highly inappropriate comments” to female inmates during bond hearings.”

All surprised, say aye.

*crickets chirp*

GUELPH  No votes cast Wednesday in a special ballot at the University of Guelph should stand, according to the Conservative Party of Canada.

The party wrote Elections Canada on Thursday to request that none of the votes collected during the U of G session be included in the final tally of votes in the Guelph riding. The letter was sent by lawyer Arthur Hamilton, of Toronto-based law firm, Cassels Brock.

The move has generated considerable controversy at the university, home of the first youth “vote mob” encouraging students to vote.

In his letter, Hamilton alleges the polling station was illegal and also that partisan election material was present at it, which is a violation of the Canada Elections Act.

The polling station in question was located on the main floor of University Centre, where approximately 700 students cast sealed ballots.

Elections Canada media advisor James Hale said this was the third election during which the University of Guelph held a special ballot on campus. And this is the first time it’s ever been challenged, Hale said.

What. WHAT.

Okay, Conservatives? When a bunch of students show up saying they’re going to vote so you’d better pay attention to them, this is exactly the wrong kind of attention to be showing.

There’s not a lot of supply, so the price goes up. In this case, Goldman and the other banks had introduced this completely unnatural and artificial demand to buy wheat, and that then set the price up. Now, a lot of people are saying, “Oh, it was biofuel production. It was drought in Australia. It was floods in Kazakhstan.” Let me tell you, hard red wheat generally trades between $3 and $6 per sixty-pound bushel. It went up to $12, then $15, then $18. Then it broke $20. And on February 25th, 2008, hard red spring futures settled at $25 per bushel. This is completely beyond the pale, particularly at a—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Almost ten times its historic price.  

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah. It was just completely out of control. And, of course, the irony here is that in 2008, it was the greatest wheat-producing year in world history. The world produced more wheat in 2008 than ever before.  

And here’s the other outrage of it, which is that at the time that Goldman and these other banks are completely messing up the structure of this market, they’ve protected themselves outside the market, through this really almost diabolical idea called “replication,” which is what I discovered when I was looking into how they had structured this. What they do—let’s say, Juan, you want me to invest for you in the wheat market. You give me a hundred bucks, OK? Well, what I should be doing is putting a hundred bucks in the wheat markets. But I don’t have to do that. All I have to do is put $5 in. Good-faith promise. And with that $5, I can hold your hundred-dollar position. Well, now I got ninety-five of your dollars. What am I going to do with them? Well, what Goldman did with hundreds of billions of dollars, and what all these banks did with hundreds of billions of dollars, is they put them in the most conservative—no fools, they—they put them in the most conservative investments conceivable. They put it in T-bills. And then what did they do? Well, now that you have hundreds of billions of dollars in T-bills, you can leverage that into trillions of dollars. This is what I’m talking about, large pools of cash for themselves. And then they take that trillion dollars, they give it to their day traders, and they say, “Go at it, guys. Do whatever is most lucrative today.” And so, as billions of people starve, they use that money to make billions of dollars for themselves.  

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the result was, as the price went up, that there were food riots around the world.  

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah.  

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the human dislocation that occurred?  

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah, in 2008, there were food riots in more than thirty countries. The global price of food rose over 80 percent. This had an effect not only on wheat, but on corn, on soy, on cooking oil, on rice. You know, people talk about globalization. “We don’t need to set prices or have tariffs, because we’re globalized. You know, people can buy their wheat, anyway.” Well, gee, guess what happened.

introvertsarepeopletoo:

dimespin:

fuckthereallife:

blackbrother:

• 0 - 32 = low (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 20)
• 33 - 52 = average (most women score about 47 and most men score about 42)
• 53 - 63 is above average
• 64 - 80 is very high
• 80 is maximum

13, really? o_O

57. How useless is an above averagely empathetic hermit?

Yeah, 13.   Thiiiiirrrrrrteen.   Empathetically retarded.

(Still, I’d like to see the validity of this.)

No words for how angry this test makes me just with that ranking system alone. People with autism and asperger’s aren’t automatically incapable of empathy. That’s a terrible myth and one that’s used to justify a lot of cruel emotional abuse towards them.

The only thing known for sure is that autism and asperger’s tends to result in the inability to express emotion in ways that most people are used to understanding, and conversely being unable to read body language or subtle social cues from people they’re interacting with. In fact, there’s a current hypothesis that autistic individuals feel too much emotionally and shut down their responses in an attempt to deal with it.

Priority is also managed in different ways, especially when OCD is involved. Sometimes rearranging a desk just has to take priority over helping you cook dinner, or else they can get considerably distressed. That doesn’t mean that they don’t care how you feel, or even that they can’t imagine how you feel — all it means is that their brains are wired differently when it comes to ranking tasks and managing emotion.

If you really want a better idea of how the world looks to them, check out Myth: Autistic People Lack Empathy or Who cares? Or: The Truth about Empathy in Individuals of the Autism Spectrum from the GRASP website.

“Civilization would probably pay a terrible price if the genes that cause autism and Asperger’s Syndrome were eradicated. The world might become a place full of highly social yakkity-yaks who would never do anything new or creative.”

— Temple Grandin

P.S. The concept of women being more empathetic than men on average is a social construct if it’s anything at all, primarily brought about as a result of women being forced for decades into occupations that demand empathy as a matter of course (child care, nursing, teaching, etc.).

P.P.S. And why on earth does the scale run from 0 to 80?

(Source: revcleo)

heysawbones:

weja:

i don’t have much to add myself, since david gaider has uncorked the flow of the brainsense sap. i also haven’t played the game, just heard an awfulot about it—a good portion of the lot being negative, making this the DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH of DA2 offsputter (:

This is pretty amazing. I particularly like the part about Isabela being ‘exotic’ and ‘not an option most males would like’.

Wow, I got through the first paragraph and just about closed the window in disgust. Then I got to “but you have to understand, the Straight Male Gamer, cannot be just lumped into a single category” (which is exactly why you’re referring to all of them ever as “the Straight Male Gamer”, of course), laughed, and closed the window in disgust.

Seriously, people like that make me rage so bad I just don’t even.

So sorry you don’t have a “No Homosexuality Allowed” option, buddy. I’m sure you’d like one in real life too so you wouldn’t have to deal with all those uncomfortable homosexuals. Though if you ever figure that out, let me know so I can get one and set it to “No Shallow-minded Pickups Allowed” or “No Lewd Comments Allowed”, or, better yet, just ban you and your interactions outright from anything I ever play.

itsjustsex:

I know I write about labiaplasties a lot, but it’s research now. I’m doing a final paper on the procedure, so there might be more posts like these in the months to come.

Australia, you have some messed up laws when it comes to porn magazines and labia sizes. Then again, I guess I shouldn’t talk because I have no idea if such laws exist in the US. This video clip is also NSFW.

What. I just. This. WHY.

Seriously? Just…. seriously? If this had been covered by anyone else I would have taken it for satire, that’s how ridiculous this is. How is he getting away with this? And how can we make it so he’s not?