frauchun-racun-deactivated20220:
Disabled people not having marriage equity is eugenics as policy
I.. I don’t think eugenics is the right word bestie
discrimination? yes. it is definitely discrimination. ableist? also yes. it is also definitely ableist.
but eugenics???? no. no it is not.
please, learn what words fucking mean before you string them together.
In every regional jurisdiction in the United States, Canada and the UK, disabled people who have been cleared by a licensed doctor as unable to work are ineligible for income support and state health insurance - all for the crime of cohabiting with other adults who care for us (aka having a family) while disabled.
This means that 1. we are 100% financially dependent on our spouses and 2. since most abled, working age adults in 2022 barely earn enough to support a single person & many don’t offer health care benefits, we must choose between starting a family and having income to pay for rent, clothing, toiletries, transportation, OTC meds etc.
Where I live, the regional government has known for decades that disability income assistance amounts to more than 50% below the same government’s definition of “the poverty line”.
If they cared about us, they have the power to change it overnight.
We have the resources to not condemn disabled folks to a life of poverty, isolation and worsening health. What we lack is political will.
But they haven’t, because under white supremacist capitalism, which upholds ableism as the status quo, disabled people are seem as “useless eaters”. We are black holes of consumption, eating the benevolent government out of house and home:
(We’re really getting away with it aren’t we, having to supplement the entire stipend we hand over on the first of the month as rent).
Many of us are then left dependent on charity: food banks (not accessible, no variety of foods, they are so burdened they often limit clients to one or two food hampers per month). Food banks are not a solution to disability hunger & poverty - they are a reminder that we are worth nothing more than last Thanksgiving’s expired canned goods.
For those of us lucky enough to have family & friends that wish to help, whether in kind (sharing meals, helping us buy necessities we can’t afford like winter shoes and coats) or with direct cash, we must navigate a labyrinth of esoteric rules, all in the name of “fraud protection”.
Get a gift over $600? It will be deducted from your income payment the following month (6-8 weeks later).
Feeling healthy enough to work part time? You get to keep the first $100 you make, increasing your monthly income to $1269.
After that, every dollar earned will be taxed at 50% - a rate that only disabled/ poor folks & the owning class pay. You’re working side by side with your fellow cashier, doing the same work. Only she gets paid $14/hr for it, and you get paid $7/hr (this system exists to disincentive disabled people from working, which serves two purposes for government: it creates artificial scarcity of workers in a region that hasn’t had sufficient living wage jobs since 1989, and it leverages real, living people as political pawns to hold up at election time (“we can lower taxes as long as we kick all the disability fakers off of support”), just because we happen to be disabled.
Once again, and I cannot emphasize this enough: you lose your pittance and government health insurance if you so much as cohabit with another adult. Even a roommate, friend or parent - our government has a history of setting up snitch lines inviting vengeful exes and other busybodies to which people can call in and report a “spouse in the house”.
A single, disabled parent will not be granted adoption. In fact, if we become a stepparent or have a child or our own, we will be scrutinized by OB/GYNs, social workers/child welfare agencies & our child/ren’s teacher, as we are presumed incompetent for parenting just as for work, simply because we are disabled.
To conclude:
If government policy forces disabled people to choose between having our own income or starting our own family,
In a society where employers don’t want us,
Where that inadequate income is nevertheless our best chance at avoiding housing/food instability (which in Canada, means risk of exposure and death)
Of course we choose loneliness, isolation and to give up on our dreams of having our own family.
If you can’t start your own family without making a conscious choice to give up shelter and food, it’s not a choice. It’s eugenics.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s likely because you are focusing on and begrudge us “$1169 of free money & government health insurance”. It means that either you’re not disabled or if you are, your disability doesn’t impact your employer’s/potential employers’ confidence in your competence, productivity and value.
And if you’re spending energy on ablesplaining to multiply marginalized disabled people speaking on our lived experience that we are wrong about being targeted for eugenics - when the cost of cohabiting/being married is our life-sustaining social assistance, where most disabled folks have ongoing & complex health care and medication needs, and where eugenics has been employed in recent history to stop disabled people from starting our own families - well, it tells us you value us about as much as our government representatives, employers and the majority population do.
That is to say, worthy of less empathy, protection, investment and support than animals. The Ford government has spent more money on embarrassing “Ontario: Open for Business” signs and on off-track horse race betting, than on disabled people. And if you thought the pandemic might be the catalyst for long-overdue change - think again. In 2020, Ottawa disbursed $12 billion to Ontario as emergency COVID funding, earmarked to support ODSP/social assistance recipients (only people who had earned >$5000 in 2019 were able to access the Canada Emergency Response Benefit). As of December 2021, the Ford government continues to withhold and hoard the money.
The Empire of the Petal Throne, printed first in 1975, was the first real “campaign setting” ever created in the early days of roleplaying games, at least as we would recognize it, e.g., the idea the setting has unique characteristics and history, magic has certain rules, the tech level means a wildly different equipment list…as opposed to just being a platform for campaigns, discovered as the characters explore and move around, which was often the default in most early tabletop games. You can’t think of the first generation of tabletop gamers without seeing the huge influence of Empire of the Petal Throne in nearly everything; in the 70s, at the scale games worked at, this was a big deal.
As for the setting itself, it’s often fascinating to me how divergent thinkers tend to diverge alike. Nearly all “weird and different” tabletop settings (e.g. Talislanta, Skyrealms of Jorune, heck, even Synnibarr, the Uwe Boll of this subgenre) follow the blueprint of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books, in that it usually is a setting of impossible antiquity that at one point was starfaring but reverted to barbarism, so a feudal society is surrounded by alien artifacts and superscience they barely understand, with ruins of 20,000 years and so on. That’s the world of the Empire of the Petal Throne, an earth colony that reverted to barbarism when it was sucked out of the planet’s orbit 40,000 years ago and into a dimension with vastly different physical laws. It led to impossibly stratified, priest-ruled cultures where social standing had to be factored into everything, more like precolonial India. Artists tend to make it look vaguely like precolonial South America, as their overly busy ornamentation seems to be visual shorthand in the western mind for “culture that is truly alien and wildly divergent.”
The creator of the setting was M.A. R. Barker, a professor of Indian and Middle Eastern studies who was a white Midwesterner who converted to Islam and changed his name to Mohammed Abdul Rashid (before weebs and Japanophilia, the culture nerds tended to obsess over most was the Middle East, India, and Persia, just ask Harold Lamb, John Milius, or even Lovecraft, who gave himself the “Arab name” of Abdul Azhared and wrote “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”). Barker was essentially every single teen dungeon master, myself included, with dozens and dozens of marbled composition books with all kinds of detailed notes on their settings. The interesting part is that as he was a linguist, he created artificial languages for his settings, and with Tolkien, who Barks is often compared to, it’s challenging to discover whether he started setting-first, or created the setting as a vehicle for his constructed languages. The amazing thing is, when he started writing about his setting, there was no tabletop gaming; he first saw it as a vehicle for a novel, then wargaming, then when D&D came into existence, he started running games there that lasted for decades and were published.
Barker ran a famous “Thursday night game” for decades in Minneapolis set in the Empire of the Petal Throne, one of his players was D&D founding father and co-creator Dave Arneson. The fascinating thing about early D&D in these days is how cliquish it was; everyone knew everyone through personal connection. Professor Barker was in the right place at the right time - the midwest wargaming scene in the early 1970s - to befriend the first circle of D&D gamers, impress them with the sheer shocking depth of the worldbuilding he created at a time when that wasn’t anywhere near close to normal, and get a release of a boxed set of his world setting in ‘75, making it the first true game world setting as we know it.
Details in worldbuilding are great but eventually, there’s a point of diminishing returns. M.A.R. Barker reminds me of a documentary I saw called Jiro Dreams of Sushi where the guy who runs one of the most famous sushi restaurants in the world insists octopus be massaged for 45 minutes before serving. All while reading about Barker, you ask one question: does he care a lot and is he detailed, or is this unhealthy compulsion or obsessiveness? The line between being detailed and “caring a lot” vs. truly obsessive behavior is kind of blurred sometimes, like for instance, when you hear that Barker had a collection of over 2,000+ miniatures he personally created for Empire of the Petal Throne (rather like how sometimes the line between collecting and hoarding is vague). I mean, I don’t even think I can answer that because the line between the two is blurred: was Barker a genius who created a towering achievement, maybe the most detailed fantasy world of all time….or was he an obsessive eccentric with an unhealthy fixation, like a slightly less reclusive Henry Darger?
My personal approach to worldbuilding is to start story first and build the world around the story. Don’t create any details you don’t intend to be important or to create a conflict. If it doesn’t come up, it might as well not be there. Story comes first, not setting. If you want the finale of the first adventure to be in a volcano, put a volcano next to the starting town. Only bring up that trolls once invaded the world from another dimension if you intend for Trolls to return and their dismantled gates to reactivate, and so on. If you create a rule that sorcerers lose their powers when they fall in love, have one get in danger of falling in love. If you have a rule that all clones go insane, but cloning doesn’t come up at all, what was the point of that mental energy and effort, anyway? My point is, you can get away with flimsy worldbuilding and good stories, but never the opposite.
The danger of truly strange settings is that as there’s nothing to mentally compare it to, it all comes off as insane and disconnected - and that’s more a problem with tabletop games than any other, which have to have 6+ people “on the same page.” That’s why games are at their best at genre simulation and it is difficult to do truly unique concepts, e.g. “you’re all superheroes in Marvel Comics.” Someone, I think it was James Rolfe, once pointed out that nobody ever finds it weird or strange that Godzilla has atomic breath, because he kind of looks like a dragon, and breathing fire is a thing dragons do. But when Gamera, another monster, tucks his head and limbs in and starts flying like a pinwheel, it looks crazy and kind of hilarious because that comes from absolutely nowhere.
Here’s one final question to ask about the first true game setting: can you run a game in it? I’ve found that in my case, the answer is no. It’s such a product of the distinctive genius/insane mind of M.A.R. Barker that it’s hard to see how anyone else could do something with it or approach the material. I admire and love Empire of the Petal Throne, but it’s the only game setting I ever got I haven’t used. It’s interesting that D&D never revived Empire of the Petal Throne; I suppose it was too much of a product of a single stubborn vision to be absorbed into the D&D cosmology or multiverse. You will not see the armadillo men with 8 sexes who defecate in public get a listing in the Monster Manual in any future edition.
Some vintage RETURN OF THE JEDI merch. (Action transfers, 3D stickers, pillow cases.) I always love the art of such items—it has a pop art quality to it.
FUCK THIS SHIT
FUCK THE POLICE
FIGHT FASCISM NOW.
update: MSNBC is currently airing coverage of this story (9:39 pm EST Fri July 17) hopefully other news organizations will follow suit
From @rojiman: “本日「ねこの日」に6thシングルをリリース😼🎤✨ それでは聞いて下さい。 『春一番』🌪” #catsofinstagram
[source: https://instagr.am/p/CAd8Tz-lMkr/ ]
“Our sweet rescue baby Ruby Jane, comforting one of my foster kitties as he’s getting a bath❤️ It’s the sweetest. Enjoy!“
Video/caption by Stephanie Vice - SPCA Florida
This changed my life
i am full on crying
Sometimes… when you sniff the pads of a dog’s feet, they smell a lot like Fritos.