#Welfare system
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Thinking about how DS9's Season 3, two part finale is not an epic, interplanetary war- no evil aliens hell bent on the extermination of the human race. But there IS a run in with a twenty-first century social welfare system...
#star trek#ds9#sisko#bashir#dax#s3 ep12 'Past Tense'#trek posting#social welfare#welfare system#3 hr wait times and everything!#I liked how they showed the social workers as separate from the system. they humanised even the dickhead security guy. there's such a#love for humanity in this series. even when it's addressing our worst issues
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The Rest of the Story: Indigenous Resistance
U.S. Supreme Court building, credit: wikimedia commons In this episode, we revisit two stories concerning indigenous rights we’ve covered in the past. In the first half, Rebecca Nagle joins us to discuss the Supreme Court decision to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act and why the legitimacy of the law is so important to tribal sovereignty. We also talk about the right’s legal strategy in the…
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#adoption#Amah Mutsun#courts#environment#ICWA#INDIAN CHILD WELFARE ACT#Indigenous#indigeous sovereignty#judicial#Juristac#justice#mining#native#protest#Rebecca Nagle#sacred site#Santa Cruz#Supreme Court#tribal#Welfare system
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#jim crow#black family strength myth#black history#white supremacy#brian donalds#black republicans#welfare programs#government assistance#racial injustice#homestead act#new deal#gi bill#white privilege#wealth disparity#racial hatred#black family oppression#white supremacist narratives#systemic racism#black family resilience#jim crow laws#black family strength#black republican lies#government welfare#oppression of black people#historical racism#welfare myths#black history distortion#economic disparities#homestead act benefits#new deal exclusions
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Happy 10th year of me doing this dorky comic! Hope people don't mind the fact that I haven't really dabbled in Cap stuff for a few years, except for my weird yearly July 4th ritual. On AO3 here, and tumblr tag here. (2022 was about Dobbs, 2020 was about seeing the stars, 2019 was about building new systems, 2018 was about voting, 2017 was about immigration.)
@histrionic-dragon tagged me yesterday and posted a bunch of cool links of ways to help: https://histrionic-dragon.tumblr.com/post/721837010124488704/almost-captain-americas-birthday
Rail workers paid sick leave: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
Lots of posts out there on the 2023 Minnesota legislative session, but here's the OG tumblr roundup post.
California is trying to divest its two largest pension funds from fossil fuels, but apparently today they decided to table it until next year. :/ I guess more meetings are needed! (productive ones, not ones that could have been an email.)
#happy birthday steve#guess it was hubris to lay out the comic on Jun 28th#because at the time i was pretty happy about protecting voting rights and indian child welfare#and things mostly seemed like a wash#Sam's question at the beginning is basically me#honestly I don't know if I've managed to convince myself of Steve's perspective#but i *have* been in some pretty productive meetings lately#gotta improve systems one boring meeting at a time!#steve rogers#bucky barnes#sam wilson#mine#my comic#4th of july
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🗣️
I WAS NOT MY MOTHER’S ENEMY BEFORE MY BIRTH.
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MY CHILDREN WERE NOT MY ENEMIES BEFORE THEIR BIRTH.
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GENERATIONS ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY OPPRESSED BY A SYSTEM THAT DEVALUES MOTHERS, CHILDREN, AND THE UNIQUE ECOLOGY THEY SHARE AS BONDED INDIVIDUALS.
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IF YOU WANT TO HELP THE WOMEN OF TOMORROW, STOP EXCUSING THEIR DEATHS IN THE WOMB TO ENABLE THE OPPRESSION OF A SYSTEM THAT HATES US FOR EXISTING.
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IF YOU WANT TO HELP THE WOMEN OF TODAY, STOP TELLING THEM THAT LEGAL CHILD KILLING IS THEIR ONLY ANSWER TO RESIST OPPRESSION AND MAKE REAL CHANGES IN OUR WORLD.
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THE SYSTEM WILL ONLY BE BURNED TO DUST IF YOU STOP ENABLING THE UNJUST KILLING OF TOMORROW’S ACTIVISTS.
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THE SYSTEM WILL ONLY CHANGE WHEN WE NO LONGER BASE THE FOUNDATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS ON THE INDUSTRY OF CHILD KILLING.
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IF YOU CONTINUE TO PIT WOMEN AND CHILDREN AGAINST ONE ANOTHER IN A SYSTEM THAT BENEFITS FROM THIS FALSE WAR, THEN YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
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WOMEN AND CHILDREN ARE NOT ENEMIES. STOP SCAPEGOATING FEMALE BIOLOGY AND CHILDREN TO BENEFIT A SYSTEM THAT DEPENDS ON YOUR INTERNALIZED ANTI-NATALISM AND SEXISM TO THRIVE.
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For real tho health freaks who scream about how sugar and salt will kill us all and try to push for restrictions on things like candy and chips for SNAP recipients or politicians who try from time to time to replace food stamps all together and give out Government Approved Staples like bread and peanut butter and Government Cheese are gonna kill a whole lotta sick and disabled people like
Diabetics
POTS sufferers
Hypotensives
People with peanut allergies
People with celiac disease or wheat allergies
The lactose intolerant
People who can't eat solid food
People who are undernourished for any reason and need all the calories they can pack on
So-called "picky eaters" who can't tolerate certain tastes and textures without getting violently ill
A myriad of other human conditions that cannot be neatly tallied into categories because the human body and human experience is vast and infinitely variable
But I don't think ableds really care about us and our health like they like to claim so they can harass us about it, do you?
#tag yourself I'm five out of ten#health food is gonna kill me one day i swear to God#vasovagal syncope/POTS was actually a fun disease to have since the treatment is honestly junk food#to get my sugar and sodium levels up quickly so i don't pass out#but then the United States government in their infinite compassion slashed my food stamps in half#and now i can't afford 'luxeries' like enough chips and candy i need to not faint and concuss myself. again#add the celiac and to a lesser extent the lactose intolerancy and now two fruit allergies...#and I'm paying three times the amount for like fifteen food items and that is accounting for the food inflation even ableds are facing#whatever food shortages ableds are going thru right now i swear to you it's much much worse if you're sick/disabled#stop policing what food people buy with the money their given i don't care if it's a paycheck or welfare#SOMETIMES I'll get a pitiful and defensive 'well how was i supposed to know?!' when i confront people bugging me about this#you don't know so shut your trap about it in the first place#most people just ignore the reason and accuse me of making up excuses to eat 'unhealthy' foods tho#health nut#ableism#systemic ableism#food#Salt blessed Salt
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"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." —Dom Helder Camara
l Dorothea Lange l Migrant Mother l 1936
#quotes#words#photography#helder camara#photos#poverty#equity#social welfare#social justice#social systems#human rights#dom helder camara#dorothea lange#migrant mother#1930s
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It should be a criminal offense if an insurance company is responsible for a delay in a policyholder's necessary health care.
Withholding prescribed treatments, even for just a day, can be anywhere from inconvenient to catastrophic for the victim. Medical providers may not withhold necessary treatment from any patient on any grounds, as it is their duty to provide it-- it should be justly illegal for any "middle man" to interfere with a medical provider's legal and ethical obligation to treat a patient.
Severity of the charge and its legal consequences should depend upon the scope of the offense (length of delay) and its consequences to the victim (impact on the person).
The testimonies of the victim, the pharmacy, and the medical provider who prescribed the treatment should be key considerations for the determination. Additional important testimony should come from the victim's other medical providers, housemates, family, educators/mentors, colleagues/coworkers, or employers.
The charge should become criminal record for the company. The company (perhaps the agent's office) should be fined per day delayed.
Some taxation can be applied; just to pay off the folks who do the filing, advocacy, testimony, processing. A hefty majority of the fine should be compensation owed to the victim.
If delays became a criminal charge on companies' records, then companies would have a strong motive to terminate agents who aren't performing with punctuality. It would become their best financial interest to invest only in timely agents who would, in turn, gain a best interest to invest only in timely subordinates.
I posit that insurance delays would wane significantly, resulting in more timely delivery of treatments to policyholders, and many people's qualities of life would improve drastically for it.
#of course. this is an idea that sticks /within/ the overall capitalist framework.#the purpose is to promote the welfare of the people /while/ they are trapped within the structure#hopefully helping enable them to -- among other things -- abolish and emancipate themselves of the structure altogether#i know that the ''real'' problem is the /existence/ of insurance companies#the privatization of health care. the profitability of health care.#the fact that money is power in our system. the fact that whoever has it is allowed to control the lives and deaths of others#the true solution to the problem presented here is the abolition of the capitalist system that manufactures it.#what i provided is a sort of ''meantime mitigation'' strategy#*sigh*#rant#psych major rants#fuck capitalism#guillotine the rich#health care#insurance#pharmacy#socialism#leftist#leftblr#anticapitalist#ableism#healthism#classism#medical abuse#medical neglect#systemic inequity#accountability
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okay since humans are viewed as 'pets' by the aliens in alien stage... I think it'd be really funny if ALNST is like the equivalent of horse racing or fancy dog shows in our world (except the contestants are culled on live TV when they lose the competition). So while there are diehard fans and a respectable amount of casual fans for it, there is also a significant amount of folks who just don't care about it at all.
(I know ALNST is a huge thing in-universe as shown in the TOP 3 video, but i just think it'd be interesting if it's not as far-reaching as the alien show-runners/sponsors want audiences to think.)
#alien stage#alnst#like. imagine a dog show where the dogs are executed in real time when they lose#and people outside of this kinda niche competition circuit don't care about what goes on#that'd be so fucked up#i mean. it's still fucked up that people are dying for the entertainment of the masses#but it's a slightly different flavor of fucked up#and imo it'd also make sense for there to be human welfare groups like how we have animal welfare groups#maybe even groups that want to get rid of the human pet system entirely because it's inhumane#(i think it'd be really cool if human rebellion cells actually do have contact with the more explicitly anti human slavery groups)
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"The Progressives’ design for the penitentiary did alter the system of incarceration. Their ideas on normalization, classification, education, labor, and discipline had an important effect upon prison administration. But in this field, perhaps above all others, innovation must not be confused with reform. Once again, rhetoric and reality diverged substantially. Progressive programs were adopted more readily in some states than in others, more often in industrialized and urban areas, less often in southern, border, and mountain regions. Nowhere, however, were they adopted consistently. One finds a part of the program in one prison, another part in a second or in a third. Change was piecemeal, not consistent, and procedures were almost nowhere implemented to the degree that reformers wished. One should think not of a Progressive prison, but of prisons with more or less Progressive features.
The change that would have first struck a visitor to a twentieth-century institution who was familiar with traditional practices, was the new style of prisoners’ dress. The day of the stripes passed, outlandish designs gave way to more ordinary dress. It was a small shift, but officials enthusiastically linked it to a new orientation for incarceration. In 1896 the warden of Illinois’s Joliet prison commented that inmates “should be treated in a manner that would tend to cultivate in them, spirit of self-respect, manhood and self-denial. . . , We are certainly making rapid headway, as is shown by the recently adopted Parole Law and the abolishment of prison stripes.” In 1906, the directors of the New Hampshire prison, eager to follow the dictates of the “science of criminology” and “the laws of modern prisons,” complained that “the old unsightly black and red convict suit is still used. . . . This prison garb is degrading to the prisoner and in modern prisons is no longer worn.” The uniform should be grey: “Modern prisons have almost without exception adopted this color.” The next year they proudly announced that the legislature had approved an appropriation of $700 to cover the costs of the turnover. By the mid-1930’s the Attorney General’s survey of prison conditions reported that only four states (all southern) still used striped uniforms. The rest had abandoned “the ridiculous costumes of earlier days.”
To the same ends, most penitentiaries abolished the lock step and the rules of silence. Sing-Sing, which had invented that curious shuffle, substituted a simple march. Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, world famous for creating and enforcing the silent system, now allowed prisoners to talk in dining rooms, in shops, and in the yard. Odd variations on these practices also ended. “It had been the custom for years,” noted the New Hampshire prison directors, “not to allow prisoners to look in any direction except downward,” so that “when a man is released from prison he will carry with him as a result of this rule a furtive and hang-dog expression.” In keeping with the new ethos, they abolished the regulation.
Concomitantly, prisons allowed inmates “freedom of the yard,” to mingle, converse, and exercise for an hour or two daily. Some institutions built baseball fields and basketbaIl courts and organized prison teams. “An important phase in the care of the prisoner,” declared the warden of California’s Folsom prison, “is the provisions made for proper recreation. Without something to look forward to, the men would become disheartened. . . . Baseball is the chief means of recreation and it is extremely popular.” The new premium on exercise and recreation was the penitentiary’s counterpart to the Progressive playground movement and settlement house athletic clubs.
This same orientation led prisons to introduce movies. Sing Sing showed films two nights a week, others settled for once a week, and the warden or the chaplain usually made the choice. Folsom’s warden, for example, like to keep them light: “Good wholesome comedy with its laugh provoking qualities seems to be the most beneficial.” Radio soon appeared as well. The prisons generally established a central system, providing inmates with earphones in their cells to listen to the programs that the administration selected. The Virginia State Penitentiary allowed inmates to use their own sets, with the result that, as a visitor remarked “the institution looks like a large cob-web with hundreds of antennas, leads and groundwires strung about the roofs and around the cell block.”
Given a commitment to sociability, prisons liberalized rules of correspondence and visits. Sing-Sing placed no restrictions on the number of letters, San Quentin allowed one a day, the New Jersey penitentiary at Trenton permitted six a month. Visitors could now come to most prisons twice a month and some institutions, like Sing-Sing, allowed visits five times a month. Newspapers and magazines also enjoyed freer circulation. As New Hampshire’s warden observed in 1916: “The new privileges include newspapers, that the men may keep up with the events of the day, more frequent writing of letters and receiving of letters from friends, more frequent visits from relatives . . . all of which tend to contentment and the reestablishment of self-respect.’? All of this would make the prisoners’ “life as nearly normal as circumstances will permit, so that when they are finally given their liberty they will not have so great a gap to bridge between the life they have led here . . . and the life that we hope they are to lead.”
These innovations may well have eased the burden of incarceration. Under conditions of total deprivation of liberty, amenities are not to be taken lightly. But whether they could normalize the prison environment and breed self-respect among inmates is quite another matter. For all these changes, the prison community remained abnormal. Inmates simply did not look like civilians; no one would mistake a group of convicts for a gathering of ordinary citizens. The baggy grey pants and the formless grey jacket, each item marked prominently with a stenciled identification number, became the typical prison garb. And the fact that many prisons allowed the purchase of bits of clothing, such as a sweater or more commonly a cap, hardly gave inmates a better appearance. The new dress substituted one kind of uniform for another. Stripes gave way to numbers.
So too, prisoners undoubtedly welcomed the right to march or walk as opposed to shuffle, and the right to talk to each other without fear of penalty. But freedom of the yard was limited to an hour or two a day and it was usually spent in “aimless milling about.” Recreational facilities were generally primitive, and organized athletic programs included only a handful of men. More disturbing, prisoners still spent the bulk of non-working time in their cells. Even liberal prisons locked their men in by 5:30 in the afternoon and kept them shut up until the next morning. Administrators continued to censor mail, reading materials, movies, and radio programs; their favorite prohibitions involved all matter dealing with sex or communism. Inmates preferred eating together to eating alone in a cell. But wardens, concerned about the possibility of riots with so many inmates congregated together, often added a catwalk above the mess hall and put armed guards on patrol.
Prisoners may well have welcomed liberalized visiting regulations, but the encounters took place under trying conditions. Some prisons permitted an initial embrace, more prohibited all physical contact. The rooms were dingy and gloomy. Most institutions had the prisoner and his visitor talk across a table, generally separated by a glass or wire mesh. The more security-minded went to greater pains. At Trenton, for example, bullet-proof glass divided inmate from visitor; they talked through a perforated metal opening in the glass. Almost everywhere guards sat at the ends of the tables and conversations had to be carried on in a normal voice; anyone caught whispering would be returned to his cell. The whole experience was undoubtedly more frustrating than satisfying.
The one reform that might have fundamentally altered the internal organization of the prison, Osborne’s Mutual Welfare League, was not implemented to any degree at all. The League persisted for a few years at Sing-Sing, but a riot in 1929 gave guards and other critics the occasion to eliminate it. One couId argue that inmate self-rule under Osborne was little more than a skillful exercise in manipulation, allowing Osborne to cloak his own authority in a more benevolent guise. It is unnecessary, however, to dwell on so fine a point. Wardens were simply not prepared to give over any degree of power to inmates. After all, how could men who had already abused their freedom on the outside be trusted to exercise it on the inside? Administrators also feared, not unreasonably, that inmate rule would empower inmate gangs to abuse fellow prisoners. In brief, the concept of a Mutual Welfare League made little impact on prison systems throughout this period.
If prisons could not approximate a normal community, they fared no better in attempting to approximate a therapeutic community. Again, reform programs frequently did alter inherited practices but they inevitably fell far short of fulfilling expectations. Prisons did not warrant the label of hospital or school.
Starting in the 1910’s and even more commonly through the 1920's, state penitentiaries established a period of isolation and classification for entering inmates. New prisoners were confined to a separate building or cell block (or occasionally, to one institution in a complex of state institutions); they remained there for a two- to four-week period, took tests and underwent interviews, and then were placed in the general prison population. In the Attorney General’s Survey of Release Procedures: Prisons forty-five institutions in a sample of sixty followed such practices. Eastern State Penitentiary, for example, isolated newcomers for thirty days under the supervision of a classification committee made up of two deputy wardens, the parole officer, a physician, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, the educational director, the social service director, and two chaplains. The federal government’s new prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, opened in 1932 and, eager to employ the most modern principles, also followed this routine. All new prisoners were on “quarantine status,” and over the course of a month each received a medical examination, psychometric tests to measure his intelligence, and an interview with the Supervisor of Education. The Supervisor then decided on a program, subject to the approval of its Classification Board. All of this was to insure “that an integrated program . . . may lead to the most effective adjustment, both within the Institution and after discharge.”
It was within the framework of these procedures that psychiatrists and psychologists took up posts inside the prisons for the first time. The change can be dated precisely. By 1926, sixty-seven institutions employed psychiatrists: thirty-five of them made their appointments between 1920 and 1926. Of forty-five institutions having psychologists, twenty-seven hired them between 1920 and 1926. The innovation was quite popular among prison officials. “The only rational method of caring for prisoners,” one Connecticut administrator declared, “is by classifying and treating them according to scientific knowledge . . . [that] can only be obtained by the employment of the psychologist, the psychiatrist, and the physician.” In fact, one New York official believed it “very unfair to the inmate as well as to the institution to try and manage an institution of this type without the aid of a psychiatrist.”
Over this same period several states also implemented greater institutional specialization. Most noteworthy was their frequent isolation of the criminal insane from the general population. In 1904, only five states maintained prisons for the criminally insane; by 1930, twenty-four did. At the same time, reformatories for young first offenders, those between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five or sixteen and thirty, became increasingly popular. In 1904, eleven states operated such facilities; in 1930, eighteen did. Several states which constructed new prisons between 1900 and 1935 attempted to give each facility a specific assignment. No state pursued this policy more diligently than New York. It added Great Meadow (Comstock), and Attica to its chain of institutions, the first two to service minor offenders, the latter, for the toughest cases. New York‘s only rival was Pennsylvania. By the early 1930’s it ran a prison farm on a minimum security basis; it had a new Eastern State Penitentiary at Grateford and the older Western State Penitentiary at Pittsburgh for medium security; and it made the parent of all prisons, the Eastern State Penitentiary at Philadelphia, the maximum security institution. Some states with two penitentiaries which traditionally had served different geographic regions, now tried to distinguish them by class of criminals. In California, for instance, San Quentin was to hold the more hopeful cases, Folsom the hard core.
But invariably, these would-be therapeutic innovations had little effect on prison routines. They never managed to penetrate the system in any depth. Only a distinct minority of institutions attempted to implement such programs and even their efforts produced thin results. Change never moved beyond the superficial."
- David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Revised Edition. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002 (1980), p. 128-134
#penal reform#progressive penology#progressive politics#rehabilitation#penal modernism#american prison system#penology#prison sports#prison community#prison discipline#convict uniforms#prison routine#classification and segregation#history of crime and punishment#mutual welfare league#utopia of classification#academic quote#reading 2023#david rothman
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so i've been watching the olympics!
i ideologically reject the olympics & they should not be held. however, it is fun to watch sports on television, especially if you, like me, are a fan of weird sports that aren't televised often (equestrian sports!).
there are a lot of problems with equestrian sports, mostly that they're capital-intensive, which is to say that they're inaccessible & elitist. the big controversy this olympics relates to animal welfare, though. there have been scandals in the past, but this year, right before the olympic games, charlotte dujardin, a very famous & celebrated dressage rider, withdrew from competition pending an investigation for animal welfare by the FEI & british dressage federation after the release of a video that is at least two years old (age contested) of her repeatedly striking at the legs of a client's horse with a long whip during a training session. i will note that she has previously had to withdraw from an international competition after blood was found on her horse (they check bits & spurs every round). charlotte dujardin is famous & celebrated because she has had incredibly good, record-breaking results in international competition, despite her relatively young age (gold medalist in her 20s, when people remain competitive in this sport into their 60s). she also competed in international dressage wearing a riding helmet, which was not at all conventional in the 2010s, although it is now in part because of her influence. when she won her gold medals at the 2012 olympics, she was riding at home & was met with a massive swelling of national pride by british viewers.
international dressage competition was dominated by german riders (isabell werth is like, the queen mother of dressage basically), and there had just been a huge controversy about animal welfare centering on the practice of rollkur, a training method in which the horse's head is pulled in very close to their chest, which is a very unnatural way for a horse to move & involves a lot of force exerted on the bit(s) in the horse's mouth. i strongly agree that rollkur is bad and should not be done, but the public discussion about it immediately became extremely messy, because a) some fans were looking for a reason to discount german records & decry german horsemanship and b) we couldn't agree what rollkur actually is! the FEI said that you can't do rollkur, but that it's fine to use a "deep & round" training frame, which is, um, different, because it's not mean? which is nonsense, or at least very difficult to enforce by eye, but sort of understandable; i myself have spent plenty of time on a horse (my beloved friend, strudel the pony) who habitually ducks behind the bit & carries his head low & behind the vertical. while it's straightforward to identify & sanction extreme cases (e.g., patrik kittel's blue-tongued horse), it can be much harder to agree on other instances, keeping in mind that you only see a very small piece of a rider's general practice in competition. judges are supposed to penalize movements in which the horse's head is behind the vertical, but in practice they spent years penalizing carriage in front of the vertical more sharply & consistently (this has begun to shift in the last couple years, but the rollkur stuff was happening in like, 2010). this sport is an old, strange, slow-moving patchwork of styles, full of people who are deeply particular, territorial, & aesthetically conservative. there's also a huge variation in how horses themselves behave; they have character, personality, & preferences. none of which lessens the burden of responsibility on riders & people who work with horses to make sure that they are cared for well, but does make adjudicating an individual case complicated. of course, it's also intensely emotionally charged, because we are, & ought to be, outraged by animal abuse.
anyway the thing i'm trying to get at is that we don't have a cultural consensus on what animal welfare in equestrian sports ought to look like. i realize that sounds like rank apologia, which i am not trying to do; i have not watched the video of charlotte dujardin in the training session, because i don't have the stomach for it & am not interested in trying to argue about this one case. the bigger & more interesting issue to me is that i think there's a general cultural shift, in the sport & beyond it, around what we think is appropriate to ask from a horse. like i said, people have long careers in this sport, & it's culturally conservative on its own; i rode a couple times with a celebrated british rider whose father was responsible for determining which horses to care for & which to put down during world war ii (!!!), which obviously accompanied an extremely different attitude towards horses & the labor we expect from them than anything you might find in a modern barn. many of these determinations about equine welfare are being conducted on the public stage, by people who have never spent significant time around horses; the video of dujardin hitting a horse aired on good morning britain. there's also a vibrant, very opinionated amateur community, who have spent time with horses but aren't professionals. i do think there's a meaningful difference between having a horse who is your buddy & spending all day working with horses, having sort of done both; i don't think it's particularly edgy to say that you treat an activity differently when it's your job than when it's a thing you're doing for fun & stress relief.
when i was taught to ride, i was told (& of course believed!) that it's fine & appropriate to punch a horse with my stupid seven-year-old fists if they knocked me around with their big horse faces, which made me feel weird when kim raisner was banned from the german pentathlon team for same, but then she obviously was not seven. i'm not quite sure what i think about it; the argument in favor of smacking a horse is that they're big & dangerous if they don't have manners, & in my experience they didn't really care. i feel some shame & conflict about this now that i am years away from working with horses, but i also recall trying to make sure that the horses i was around knew me & weren't afraid of me. we had solid working relationships from my perspective, but of course i can't go back & ask the horses. increasingly, i think excellent animal welfare is probably just not compatible with large-scale competitive sport, or, perhaps, with a capitalist environment. hot take, i guess!
one thing i think about a lot is that while there obviously is money in dressage, there's not nearly as much money in it as there is in horse racing, which is, from my perspective, a hugely destructive & cruel industry for horses & for people. horses die racing. people die caring for them, almost all of them undocumented barn workers. dressage defines itself in opposition to this approach—many amateurs pride themselves upon the differences—but i'm not convinced that the kinder ideas we have now of how to coexist with animals scale with revenue-generating industry, even outside of racing.
anyway, it makes people uncomfortable, and it makes me uncomfortable too. i think we'll see some comparatively rapid change in the next five years or so. the future of equestrian sports in the olympics is in question, as the olympics desperately try to stay relevant & interesting to younger generations (do kids like, uh, breakdancing? skateboarding? metal bands???). there's also an image crisis more broadly. the olympic ideal has shifted over the years, but a lot of the people involved in planning the games have self-aggrandizing ideas about what they're doing & the utopian potential of sports. equestrian sports have a martial history, which commentary generally elides, but is revealing in its way about the historical purpose of the olympiad. if the public conversation is focused on how this sport, which is expensive to put on & pulls low viewership numbers, is a harm to horses (&, in the popular mind, is not so much a sport as an exercise in expensive sitting, cf. the comedy around the romney-owned dressage horse), then the whole facade is crumbling. i guess it's better for the IOC for us all to worry about charlotte dujardin's heavy whip hand than it is for us to ask why israel is competing, or how well the unhoused people of paris are faring during these expensive spectacles, but surely they'd rather we set aside those conversations to talk about how inspiring the whole games are.
#hey did anybody want a rambling essay about. uh. equestrian sports in the olympics? well if you did you're in luck#semi-professional horse girl#[former; gender-neutral]#this is a discussion of some equine welfare scandals. it does not describe abuse in detail but heads-up#there was a longstanding idea still somewhat in force that abuse is the retreat of unsuccessful riders & i think that's questionably true#there's also a sort of weird mysticism that goes on which i find tedious & unhelpful. horse whisperer stuff.#all those proprietary systems sold to middle-aged white women. yes i'm talking shit on pat p*relli
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"mobility scooters should only be for people who cannot walk at all" babe if I can't walk at all how do you think I'm gonna get on and off the scooter.
#disability venting#mobility aid#physically disabled#i know some people have lifts and stuff but dw these dipshits don't know that#also getting a lift? in THIS economy? the welfare system would simply murder me first lol
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the kids looking at me like 🤨🤨🤨🤨 when i said if i knew a legal way to get out of paying income tax i would still pay
#sorry that i recognise the benefits of the welfare system? likw what?#txt#‘if i coupd get out of it i would’ ok well not me#‘if i could cheat and not get caught i would’ WELL NOT FUCKING ME#i hear this sentiment in particular from other teacher sympathising w students who use ai#lile ‘i understand if i were them i would too’ like? no the fuck i would not#can i logically understand where they’re coming from? yes. but i cannot w any degree of honesty say that#i would do that#entertaining the thought alone makes me feel bad#‘we would too’ who is this we i would not#well that was a somewhat unrelated rant ok
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Help Oliver and his siblings have a simple cat house and enough food.
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#cat#cat food#stray cat#street cats#cat feeding#furbabies#gofundme#gogetfunding#cat distribution system#neko#animal welfare#cats of tumblr#cats of the internet#animal rescue
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As the world races to meet net-zero targets, emissions from all industrial sectors must be reduced more urgently than ever. Agriculture is an important area of focus as it contributes up to 22% of global greenhouse gas emissions – almost as much as the energy sector. One approach to decarbonising the agricultural sector is agrivoltaics. It involves integrating solar panels – or photovoltaics (PVs) – into fields of crops, greenhouses and livestock areas, which can help farmers reduce their carbon footprint while continuing to produce food. Agrivoltaics can also mitigate one of the main criticisms often made of solar power – that solar farms “waste” vast tracts of agricultural land that could otherwise be used for food production. In reality, solar farms currently occupy only 0.15% of the UK’s total land – not much compared to its 70% agricultural land. The simplest example of an agrivoltaic system would be conventional, crystalline silicon PVs (the market-leading type of solar panels), installed in fields alongside livestock. This method of farm diversification has become increasingly popular in recent years for three main reasons. First, it enhances biodiversity as the fields are not seeing a regular crop rotation, being monocultured, or being harvested for silage. Second, it increases production as livestock benefit from the shade and the healthier pasture growth. Finally, the solar farm has reduced maintenance costs because livestock can keep the grass short. All this is achieved while the solar panels provide locally-generated, clean energy.
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#world#agriculture#solar energy generation#agrivoltaic systems#biodiversity#animal welfare#increased production#crop shading
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I've had more than one anarchist I associate with be surprised to learn I'm actually not an anarchist. But like. I'm a huge proponent of the Welfare State, and you kind of need a state for that
#welfare#welfare state#food stamps#Medicaid#medicare for all#universal healthcare#ubi#ssi#if a government isn't going to take care of its people then the government has no use to the people at all#so like I'm down for dismantling a system that only exists to rule and oppress and watch us die#and i don't mean 'fascists are okay if they make the trains run on time' type shit bc I'm staunchly antifascist#but like i do think a government can take care of even the most vulnerable of its populace if it really wants to. it just doesn't want to#undesirables who can't turn the cogs of capitalism are to be disposed of in most governments. esp the United States via#passive eugenics#anyway#revolution or not if the medical infrastructure goes down for any reason then me and a fuckton of other undesirables are dead#also this next statement is less towards anarchists specifically and more for like utopic commune people but anyway#if your utopia is based on 'work to live/earn your place' you are not a leftist you are a capitalist with a woke vocabulary#and i hate you
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