His Eyes Were As Blue As Blue Eyes.

Ted Cruz just suspended his campaign. This means that Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.

This is going to be an interesting six months, in the most Minnesotan sense of that word possible.

The funny thing about the expression “carpe diem” is that people use it to mean “Go out and achieve your dreams” but actually it was a pick up line.

This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:

In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.

(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)

When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)

(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)

(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)

Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.

But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them. 

And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.

*Sends a virtual hug*

When your partner misgenders you 😁😁😁😁😁

PSA for everyone seeing civil war early: PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL CIVIL WAR FOR ANYONE!!!!! If not for their sake, for your own, because if you start spreading civil war spoilers on this website you will most likely not survive the experience.

Need a cheat sheet for wizard finance? We got you

Based on the calculations of an inspired fan, we put together a list of how many galleons you can expect to shell out to peep the next Chudley Cannons game.

SEE MORE ITEMS

this one kid’s test answers are so funny xD you won’t BELIEVE how clever they are

Note: The phrase “the chart” refers to the graph in iamretrograde’s post, titled “Comparisons of Intimate Partner Violence Against Various Categories.”

I did a reverse image search on the chart, followed by searching for the text. This led me to this site http://chart-mining.com/comparison-of-intimate-partner-violence-against-various-categories/, which has the graph followed by a source. They source it as being from http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS04C02 . I followed the link, but it didn’t have the image, just a page telling me that I could use the website’s search bar to help find what I was looking for.

I tried searching for some of the keywords used on the image with the site’s search bar and discovered two things:

1. The site has an extreme anti-LGBT+ agenda and is extremely biased.

2. I could not find any mention of the supposed statistics. I did find this article: http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF08L44.pdf , which says, “ ‘Domestic violence is reported to occur in about 11 percent of lesbian homes,’ the article [this is referencing another study] states. It goes on to claim that this is ,about half the rate of 20 percent reported by heterosexual women.’ However, this comparison fails to note that the highest rates of domestic violence among heterosexuals occur among those who are divorced, separated, cohabiting, or in sexual relationships outside of marriage; married women experience the lowest rates of domestic violence of any household arrangement.” Which, as far as I can tell, is claiming that this is study doesn’t count because heterosexual married women are less likely to experience domestic violence than unmarried heterosexual women who have a male partner. This may be true, I’m not sure, but I fail to see how this proves their point. In addition, these figures are significantly lower in both cases than the figures given on the graph.

I then looked up the article they reference. It’s here: http://www.glma.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageID=691 . The organization publishing it, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (yes, they will also be biased) has removed the statistic and didn’t cite their sources, so that’s mostly a dead end. I found a few other sources, but all of them have various flaws (convenience sampling, over-specificity, etc.) that make them not useful.

Overall, I could not find anything to back up the statistics in that graph. If we accept the statistics provided by an anti-LGBT+ organization, who have a vested interest in the opposite result, then we have clear evidence that domestic violence occurs at lower rates among two-woman couples than one-man one woman couples. Since two-woman couples would have twice as many opportunities to occur, this would seem to indicate that, from a domestic violence point of view, it is safer for a woman to be in a relationship with another woman than with a man. Furthermore, it is safer overall for everyone than that chart indicates. (This does not mean the given statistics are good! However, they are less bad.)

If someone can find a source to back up the chart, I will absolutely reconsider this; until then, it looks like its claims are false.

Heterosexuality is Stockholm Syndrome

I have officially committed to a college!

@allyfallsdownstairs @themoriarkitty

Amandla Stenberg Opens Up About Her Gender Identity

The 17-year-old, Hunger Games actor Amandla Stenberg has come out as non-binary. Stenberg - who plays Rue in the adventure film franchise – says she feels like she’s not a ‘woman’ all the time, and non-binary is a term that she feels comfortable using to describe herself. (She is using female pronouns).

“The 17-year-old, Hunger Games actor Amandla Stenberg has come out as non-binary.

Stenberg – who plays Rue in the adventure film franchise – says she feels like she’s not a ‘woman’ all the time, and non-binary is a term that she feels comfortable using to describe herself. (She is using female pronouns).

Writing on Tumblr, she said she is organizing a workshop on feminism, specifically how ‘mainstream feminist movements have continuously excluded women who are not white, thin, cisgender, able-bodied and neurotypical’.

Something we are struggling with is understanding the intersection of feminism and gender identity…

We’re both people who don’t feel like “women” all the time – but we claim feminism as our movement.

Basically, we’re trying to understand the duality of being a non-binary person and a feminist. How do you claim a movement for women when you don’t always feel like one?”

Read the full piece here: 

#1: THANK YOU AMANDLA FOR YOUR CONSISTENT AWESOMENESS AS AN INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST AND ROLE MODEL FOR YOUTH & EVERYONE ELSE!

#2: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A WOMEN OR CIS TO BE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS. Just like white people can and should advocate for racial equality, everyone can and should advocate for gender equality. 

I give Amandla a TON of credit for having to not only grow up in public, but grow up as a non-binary POC in a white / sexist / cisnormative society! She is young and figuring herself and society out.  I’m Team Stenberg and am not looking to call her out, I just wanted to make this crucial clarification. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, We Should All Be Feminists