can we get a shoutout to trans girls who don’t wear makeup
i don’t need to just keep practicing I don’t need to just learn to contour or whatever the fuck else I’m 100% happy being bare-faced and the only times i ever felt compelled to do makeup was for other people’s benefit!
watch the mfs with zero reading comprehension get ahold of this and act like I’m personally attacking them for wearing makeup
I have never worn makeup in my entire life and if you reblog you will give me the energy I need to continue doing fuck all
One time in Army we got into a big nerf gun fight inside our building and a bunch of people got really mad and decreed that all kinetic weapons including nerf guns fit the legal definition of firearms under the UCMJ and made us go secure our nerf guns in the armory.
I hid mine tho. I said this is goddamn America and we got a second ammendment.
the legal definition of firearms (in the US) requires propellant or explosive discharge, spring-loaded weapons therefore cannot be considered firearms
I don’t think I can adequately explain how stupid the Uniform Code of Military Justice is or how much discretion ppl have in applying it
the UCMJ is like. a lawbook built for an authoritarian regime. Not even getting into “military bad/America bad” stuff, the UCMJ is *bad.*
If your commanding officer decides you fucked up, you can get demoted and have your pay docked at their discretion. There is an absurd amount of institutional and social pressure not to take it to court; if you insist on getting court-martialed rather than Article 15’d, you’re probably gonna lose anyway so you just let your commander demote you for petty bullshit. If that same commanding officer decides his friend the E-9 who’s a chronic day-drinker and drunk driver is good and cool, he can wave any military discipline for tomfuckery away with the stroke of a pen.
When you enlist in the US military, you waive away your rights. Whether you’ll get to exercise your rights or not ultimately depends on how much scrutiny your chain of command gives you and whether they think it’s cool for you to do the stuff you’re doing. If your commander is a milquetoast liberal or a cryptofascist or overt fascist, you can say all the fascist shit you want on your public Facebook profile but god forbid you say labor unions are good sometimes under that same commander. If your commander is a liberal with something resembling a backbone (a notochord, perhaps), they’ll punish the fascist and the union advocate equally. Your commanding officer will almost certainly never be a leftist so I’m not going to bother trying to explain how such an imaginary person would enforce the UCMJ. The UCMJ is the legal framework within which this inconsistent bullshit resides.
Don’t enlist. Don’t fuckin enlist. You become, for all intents and purposes, US government property for the term of your enlistment. Don’t do it. You wanna blow shit up? Join a demolition contractor. You wanna shoot guns? Get a job at one of those machine gun rental places. Being subject to the UCMJ should be enough to disincentivize enlistment. The DoD is a cult and the UCMJ is its rulebook.
^ Yeah, all that stuff
My father was the son of a carpenter (no HS degree) and a nurse (associate’s degree). His parents couldn’t afford college for him, but he scored high enough on college exams that a state school offered him a scholarship. He ended up enlisting for three reasons.
One, he lost his scholarship (D in history, geez, Dad). Two, with a draft afoot, enlisting was the only way to make sure he had any choice (however slim) in what he’d do and be. Three, the military paid for his bachelors, his master’s, and his doctorate – and that education is what got him out of that small southern Georgia town and into teaching at some of the most prestigious universities on the US’ eastern seaboard.
Enlisting has always been trade-off. If you come from middle class or higher, then you probably don’t need major financial assistance for your education, or a down-payment on a car or house. Even if you’re legacy military, once your family’s middle-class, the tangible benefits aren’t as great, relatively.
But if your parents are farmers, factory workers, miners, or similar labor-intensive blue-collar workers and it’s looking like your only choice is to follow them down that same road or learn to be a waitress? The military has been, for several generations now, your best ticket out of a dead-end town, job, or life.
A lot of the time, it’s your only ticket.
The whole point of the GI Bill was to make enlisting worth the risk of dying in a foreign land for some rich man’s war. You put in so many years of your life and (assuming you survived), you’d walk out well-trained or even well-educated, with good job prospects and a social network of fellow former military to help you land softly. You’d have decent healthcare, a good pension, and access to a fair home loan. (And if you didn’t survive? The VA provides for children & widow/ers, so at least your family would see the benefits.)
Yes, to everything @johnbrownfunclubofficial and @natalieironside said above, because all of that is true. (Hell, it’s not much better when you’re a dependent, although the enlisted-wives and officer-wives bullshit is lot better than it used to be.) But it’s also true that depending on where you’re coming from, sometimes that trade-off is worth the price.
But we have to unpack that to see the real problem: we have no other consistent and reliable means for people to hoist themselves out of a lack of generational wealth or skills. There’s no broad-based funding for kids in poorer counties or states to get solid training or education (let alone with room & board provided plus a small stipend!).
The challenge of “if you want to do X, go learn how to do it” doesn’t work, if you’re coming from that far down. Learn it? From whom? And you pay for that training, how? And who pays for you while you do it? Education of any kind costs money and time. You may have the time, but without the money? It remains a pipedream.
Does the military take advantage of this? Absolutely. Blocking all other options for kids with minimal/limited prospects is by design. The US military complex absolutely wants those kids to see no way out except to hope they can survive that war in a foreign land fighting on behalf of rich men who couldn’t give a damn what those kids did, and will, sacrifice.
But now we come to a parallel truth.
This is a less-discussed but important contributing factor in the pushback on universal basic income. The Pentagon (and American imperialism and its wealthy cronies) are fully aware that, given any other choice, the average blue-collar, labor-raised, lower-class kid would not join the military. In short: basic income would cause enlistment to plummet.
It’s not difficult math. Beyond even the truth of the internal tyranny of the DoJ and the UCMJ and just the sheer madness of the insular culture known as ‘living on base’, most human beings prefer careers where “high chance of potentially being killed” is not in the job listing. And I’d be willing to bet an even larger number of human beings, given any other choice, would want nothing to do with a job that requires “potentially killing other human beings.”
As for those who would, they can just go be cops.
Blocking all other options for kids with minimal/limited prospects is by design.
God could you imagine how mad geologists must have been to slowly watch the “hey all the continents kinda fit like puzzle pieces :)” guy get proven right
It was a woman that did it!
I love girl talk, especially when it’s complex geological theory
WONDER WHY THOSE ALL DON’T LOOK LIKE THE SAME COLOR? BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT
OTHER THAN BEING PART OF THE SAME FAMILY OF BLUES, THEY ARE NOT ALL THE SAME FUCKING COLOR! WHY WOULD THEY ALL BE THE SAME FUCKING COLOR! DO YOU THINK WE JUST NAME NEW COLORS FOR KICKS!?!?!?
WHEN DESCRIBING A CHARACTER’S GOD FORSAKEN EYE COLOR, PICK ONEYA GODDAMN HIPPIE
As someone who is colourblind this post is fucking hilarious because they are in fact all the same fucking colour
things heating up in the fuckin uuhhhhhhhhh BLUE fandom
While I understand this is probably venting, I have some thoughts I wish to share.
If you don’t want a career, you want to craft, maybe look into the trades. I’ve started working as an elevator mechanic recently and, holy shit it’s changed my life.
Like, seriously. While the work is tiring, it’s deeply satisfying too. To me, very similar to getting a pattern in crochet or sewing figured out. It involves using your hands, using your brain in a similar way crafting does, and it can also pay incredibly well (meaning you can use your left over pay from making things in your day job to making things just cause you want to with your evenings and weekends).
With fewer and fewer people going into trades, there’s more and more demand, making it easier to get in. My province is currently paying eligible students to become trade workers, so you can see if you have a similar program where you live. (if there are any Quebecers here interested, check out Operation Main D'oeuvre and call your local Emploi Québec office for information).
And for Mentally ill people, I’ve found construction insanely helpful for managing my conditions. Like, regular exercice helps the management of so many conditions, right? But I’ve always hated exercise for the sake of exercise. But now my work has me moving every day, making my depression and ADHD way easier to manage. Nothing like beating a recalcitrant rail support into place to help work off the nervous energy creates by anxiety either. I’ve been struggling with my mental health for well over a decade and I do not have words to describe how good it feels to wake up and have no dread about the work I have to do today. I might be tired and grumpy, but even then, there’s no soul crushing dread.
I’ve also found it empowering and it helps me with my crafting (it teaches precision and gives you a really good eye for measurements, depending on the trade). It gives you financial power as well as power over your space (I’ve changed all the switches in my apartment for dimmers, easy peasy).
So yeah, TLDR, don’t want a career, want to craft? Maybe manual trades are the route for you. I know they were for me
Computer repair was easily the best most fulfilling work I ever did. Just me and a little puzzle I knew how to solve.
if you have autism please look into welding. you get earplugs and gloves and a cozy helmet. you do the same shit the same way every day. you are surrounded by the weirdest and most dysfunctional men ever invented and you don’t have to respect any of them. you go to your little horse stall and glue bits together until it’s time to go home. it’s exhausting and sometimes painful work but i have worked retail and i have sucked dick for money and i can say with my whole chest that welding is significantly less stressful in terms of time, effort, pain, and dealing-with-people.
if you have ADHD i do have to warn you that welding gets boring after awhile and you are discouraged from making little bugs out of scraps. you can do it anyway. but you have to hide them from your boss.
