I guess it was about time I did these!
To match: beta kids, lowblood trolls, midbloods, highbloods.
goddamnit
oh Dirk.
Anonymous asked: How do you feel about people who abuse government assistance? People who use their food stamps to buy forty dollar steaks, get angry when their fried chicken dinners aren’t covered, and leave in their brand new Mercedes?
Abuse happens, period. It doesn’t matter what, some people will do anything to get an “advantage” in the world. But since such abuse is statistically uncommon, while it might be aggrivating, you don’t rip out the safety net from everyone else benefiting from the programs just because a few people fuck up—that’s like saying that no one should be allowed to drive, because some people drive drunk.
The widespread myth of the “Welfare Queen (or sometimes, though less frequent, King)” you have just described (thanks, Reagan!) does nothing but harm the reputation of those who abide by the assistance program’s rules and regulations. It’s these harmful stereotypes, which you are actively perpetuating, that turn those who are privileged enough to not have to rely on assistance against their fellow human.
What do I think? What do I think?
I think you don’t fucking know a person’s circumstances, and you shouldn’t fucking judge them. Who knows when the Mercedes entered their lives? You certainly don’t—you don’t know them, so you assume the car is brand new, and it just helps to reinforce your hateful bullshit. It could have been a gift, it could have been purchased prior to the crisis or unfortunate circumstances that lead to them needing government assistance.
Or, more importantly, it could be none of your goddamn business what kind of car they drive.
So, poor people don’t get to enjoy “good” food? Why? Because they’re poor? Because they deserve to be punished? Because why waste such good lobster on such a waste of person, right? Jesus christ, fuck you. I work in a grocery store—no matter WHAT a person paying with E.B.T. buys, it is ALWAYS scrutinized and judged, in ways that absolutely no one else’s groceries do.
A single mother comes up and buys a basket full of frozen foods, and my coworkers roll their eyes, thinking her lazy, thinking that their “hard-earned tax dollars” shouldn’t be paying for junk food. And they ignore the chorus of shouts and playful laughs of the kids running around her, her children, and the exasperated and exhausted expression on her face, because it wouldn’t help to fuel their self-righteous, “I’m better than you!” hate storm to think that maybe, just maybe the quick dinners are all she can do, because unbelievably she DOES work and DOES try to make ends meet, while at the same time attempting to raise her children and make time for them and their school and their love and their raising, and meals might not be a top priority for her.
A man shows up with a cart full of natural foods, good-for-you foods, healthy foods—sometimes, there might even be a steak or lobster. He buys mostly vegetables and fruits, and seems conscientious of the things he buys—and he pays for it with his EBT card. IMMEDIATELY a chorus of “Well I don’t get to eat that well!” starts up, once again making his private shopping trip suddenly open for comment and criticism.
You just can’t fucking win, people are programmed to judge you for what you buy no matter what—they are programmed to judge EVERY ASPECT OF YOU AND YOUR LIFE that would otherwise be considered rude or hateful behaviour—so what do I think about the people who use their food stamps to buy steaks? Or who seem frustrated because a food product they want isn’t covered? I don’t fucking care. Just because you’re poor, broke, or just plain in need of a little help doesn’t give me the right to turn what you buy and eat into public dialogue.
tl;dr: I don’t feel anything except extreme outrage at the self-righteous pricks who get to decide what another person “deserves” in life, and whether you intended it or not, your message reeked of judgmental implications.
Awesome reply by my incredibly brilliant girlfriend, you can find her blog here.
THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. To the people who think welfare means living high on the hog - how about you try getting fired from your job, going on food stamps, and seeing how fucking easy it is?
wow “get angry when their fried chicken dinners aren’t covered” #assholealert
And the thing that gets me is this “omg these people shouldn’t be buying steak or this or that” and it’s like - why do you even CARE? If someone who is on food stamps uses all of their money to buy steak or w/e, do you know what happens to you? Absolutely nothing. That person gets the same amount of money whether they buy $1 boxes of crappy mac and cheese or steak. They don’t get more if it runs out, so it’s not like them choosing one thing over another affects anyone but them and their family. It’s theirs to spend on whatever food they wish to, it’s none of your business either way what they do with it and why do you feel entitled to pry into someone else’s life to that degree anyway?
This is so perfect, for the time you look at this image, you don’t know if it’s a boy and girl, a girl and a girl, a boy and a boy, a black man and a white girl, a white man and an asian girl, you know nothing. Just the simplicity of the connection and the beauty of two human beings sharing love and that is all that should ever matter.
If you’re an Osteologist you know exactly what the sexes, ages, and races of those bones are.
; )
even without that kind of education i can tell a lot about their facial structures from this image
#the left is male and the right is likely a female #both appear to be in their prime#likely european judging by thier noses and cheek shape #though the left is ambigious to me #might be more eastern #regardless i find the slope between his nose and forehead interesting
Yeeeeeah I really hate the notion of “we’re all the same on the inside~!”
whether literally or figuratively
because
we’re not
and while ppl think they’re promoting diversity when they say that all they’re really promoting is the idea that in order for people to care about each other they have to be alike
and that is butts
(Sorry tumblr, professionally obligated to offer up this abbreviated rant on the subject. I’ll try to keep it as non-jargon-y as possible. Off the top of my head, so hopefully I don’t fuck something major up and shame the whole profession.)
Going to have to call bullshit on the “likely European” just from looking at profiles and x-rays like this. Determining ancestry and likely social race from skulls is a sticky area, anthropology wise: it can be important to identification in forensic contexts so it’s still used, but there’s a lot of racist bullshit pseudoscience that goes mostly unexamined and is still pushed as fact. Most of the people (even very experienced, very famous anthropologists) who claim to be able to tell just by looking at a skull what social race an individual would likely have been identified as (self-identification is a whole ‘nother ballgame) fail to acknowledge that they’re actually using a lot of non osteological factors in their determination. Stuff like knowing the population demographics of the area where the skull came from or even the demographic distribution of the individuals you see most often in your casework (like an anthropologist I met who proudly proclaimed that they could correctly assign race at just a glance in 95% of cases… and then two minutes later admitted that since they worked near the US border with Mexico 95% of their cases were undocumented workers who had died in the while attempting the desert crossing; so even just guessing “Hispanic” 100% of the time they would have appeared to have a very high rate of successful identification without having ever looked at a skull).
Off the top of my head I can only think of one method that just looks morphological traits (shape and physical features of a skull) that has any sort of statistical validation to it at all, and that method is limited to “white”, “black”, or “Hispanic” classifications (most methods also sidestep the fact that Hispanic is an ethnic identity, sooooo). The method with the most statistical validation requires careful measuring different points of the skull and then plugging those metric measurements into FORDISC, a program that uses descriminate function analysis to assess the degree to which a particular skull matches measurements taken from skulls from different known populations around the world.
FORDISC itself isn’t perfect and has it’s own biases when it comes to what groups it includes in its reference samples (it’s been a few months since I’ve used it but IIRC the “Chinese” sample isn’t all that big and doesn’t take into account the fact that a country with over a billion people is going to have loads of internal diversity and variation) and it can’t really account for individuals of mixed background, but it at least gives you a statistical output that you can use to judge the validity of the program’s sorting.
Also going to have to call bullshit on the biological sex identification. When attempting to establish biological sex just from a skull alone you look at a specific grouping of traits (nuchal crest, mastoid process, supraorbital margin, supraorbital ridge/glabella, and the mental eminence if you’ve got the jaw are the most standard features used) and score the individually in an attempt to reduce bias. I’ve not tried it with just an x-ray and I’d have to look up the literature to see if you can even attempt it with any sort of validity, but just looking at this image at this scale and quality (and with that hand blocking the mastoid process and some of the jaw’s goinal angle [corner of the jaw] on the individual on the right) I wouldn’t put too much stock in it for this case.
The backs of both skulls are cropped out of the image, meaning you can’t use nuchal crest. Not only is the mastoid process (muscle attachment site just behind the ear) difficult to see here, but you can only see one side (you need to use both if possible) and you can’t really get a good idea at the true size and shape of it in this flat 2D slice. Supraorbital margin (the shape of the edge of the upper rim of your eye socket) is also out (maybe with enough magnification and a clear x-ray you could make a call, but I’ve always found it easier to feel with my own fingers). You CAN at least look at the shape of supraorbital ridge/glabella (where your frontal bone/forehead meets your nasal bones/the upper part of your nose). You can’t look at mental eminence (how your chin looks face-on) at profile at all.
So for this x-ray, that’s one trait out of five. Pretty piss-poor for an any osteology-based attempt at sexing.
As for age, they’re adults and have all of their teeth in (looks like the person on the left has had their third molars out, while the person on the right still has theirs, partially erupted), and maybe with the full-size ex-ray you could narrow things a bit by looking at their tooth roots, the shape of their pulp chambers, and the amount of wear to their tooth cusps (or you could get creative and look for evidence of arthritis in the bones of the hand), but other than that? Adult, early to mid twenties and up, but who knows how far up, much less whether their age falls into what they would culturally identify as their “prime”.
We are all different inside, shaped by our genetic histories, our environments, and the lives we’ve lived. That diversity is beautiful and fascinating and why I went into anthropology in the first place. There are some trends and patterns within that variation that make it possible to look at bones and infer some things about the person in life, but we have to be careful in our observations, measurements, and interpretations lest we fall back into the same tired, biased, non-scientific, biologically essentialist bullshit that’s characterized much of anthropology’s past (mostly to the benefit of the privileged white, upper-class, educated men writing out all of those supposed “rules”).
Oh hey, awesome points.
Goddamn I love a good well-written well-reasoned explanation.
Working on a blood swap cuz they’re fun. WIP of Azure!Eridan.
one of the few bloodswaps that i’ve actually ever liked, daaaang
Look how lovely he is.
I’m pretty sure at some point during the Avengers I turned to my friend and said “Wow the Fantastic Four are a bunch of dicks if they’re not responding to this.”
#Spider-man gets a pass because he’s probably in school or some shit
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