so in 2007, there was a law passed that said if you have student loans
and you worked in public services & made student loan payments on time
for 10 years, you’d get loan forgiveness. fast forward to 2017, and guess what happens under this admin with Betsy Devos?
out of 30,000 public service applicants, the Devos/Trump team only forgave the loans of 96 people. imagine 10 years ago deciding to work in public service with shitty pay to pay off loans the govt promised they would and then 99% of applications get rejected. thats absolutely despicable. wtf.
couldn’t post the links since this website is hell and won’t let it show up in searches anymore, but here’s the links. apparently there IS a class-action lawsuit going, and here’s a link to a petition being done by the same union who filed the lawsuit (it’s at the bottom). not sure how much it’s helpful but it’s worth a shot i guess
Speaking as someone whose parents and family members still refuse to be persuaded to keep their cats inside, if your cat dies as a result of being allowed to roam freely, whether hit by a car or killed by another animal or disease or whatever, that’s 100% on you. The owner of the cat is responsible for the death of that animal as surely as if they killed it themselves because it was completely preventable. This makes people upset to hear, but you can’t claim to love something in one breath and then completely abandon them to the many dangers of the world in the next. If you love your pet you do everything in your power to keep it safe.
We need to keep saying “what happens to an outdoor cat is 110% the owners fault” until owners realize this. That person who hit the cat probably already felt horrible and if they couldn’t stop, they couldn’t stop. They didn’t mean “I was too busy, I couldn’t care to stop” they were literally saying “they could not physically stop the car in time to not hit the cat”. It was never their fault, and it wasn’t the cat’s either because they don’t know any better. It’s 110% the owners fault and I’m going to keep saying it until every horrible cat owner puts there cat back inside where it belongs.
Also think about your kids if you don’t care for the cat. How do you think that 9 year old, who didn’t know outdoor cats were bad, felt? They had no idea this would happen because of their ignorant parents. Their parents ended a life and damaged their child’s. This is a traumatizing event for a young child. And it’s so unfair for everyone involved… Except the parent obviously.
Just keep your damn cat inside or do an actual humane thing and just don’t fucking get one.
K all of this makes sense, but cats are meant to roam and play. You SHOULD let your cat outside, at least into the backyard if you feel safer that way, so they can get the excersize they need to live a happy life. Also, this play time ensures that the cat’s extra energy burns (mostly) off and they won’t destroy your belongings because they’re just so. bored. that they scratch things. Train it to walk on a leash if you have to, but let your cats outside.
Although contained outdoor time or walks on a leash are good enrichment they’re not a necessity, cats can thrive without ever being allowed outside in any capacity.
If your cat is bored and destructive inside it’s because you are not engaging in enough interactive play to keep them entertained, it’s because you are not providing them with enough environmental enrichment to meet their needs.
I should be going to sleep but I’m a sucker so I’m going to break this down instead.
Cats require exercise, this is integral to both their physical and emotional wellbeing. Permitting them unrestricted outdoor access can absolutely meet their exercise needs, but it is not safe to do so, and as their caregivers we must balance their health and their happiness instead of choosing one over the other.
The reason there’s this misconception of indoor cats being bored and depressed, which can lead to inactivity and weight gain, or destructive is because cat owners do not play with their cats enough.
Only 64% of the owners in this study played with their cats twice a day, of that a meager 25% reported 10 minute play sessions. It was also reported that the cats with 5 minute play sessions displayed fewer behavioral problems than those with 1 minute play sessions.
Engage your cat! There’s this huge misconception that cats are low maintenance pets, they’re aloof and independent and they’ll take care of themselves and that’s not true! They need more from than to leave out some toys and scoop their box.
Jane Ehrlich, from the cat division of the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants, recommends multiple 20 minute sessions of real interactive play each day. A key term here is real, behaviorist Pam-Johnson Bennett has an article on proper interactive play with cats, it’s important to be involved and to let them complete the sequence of the kill.
Environmental enrichment matters too! Outdoors your cat doesn’t just get exercise stalking prey [or running from loose dogs, fighting other cats, etc] you’ll often see them climbing trees, atop of fences, and so on.
“”Not everyone can do this!”” Interactive play and environmental enrichment are the minimum standards of care for a cat, if you’re unable to meet the bare minimum standards of care for an animal you should not have that pet. You are not owed a cat, you are not entitled to one, if you’re unable to adequately provide for a cat than do not have a cat.
There are people who work full-time jobs, who work multiple jobs, who attend school, who live with mental and/or physical disabilities, who live in small apartments, who have a low income, etc. and are still able to meet their cats needs. I know because many of my followers fall into one, or more, of the aforementioned categories.
Cats are a menace to the environment. This pertains to the persons tags, the damage domestic cats do to the environment is so well documented I can’t believe people still try to deny it. Them again, there are still people who deny climate change, so I guess it isn’t too suprising.
There’s not only the issue of mortality due to predation, but cat saliva is full of pathogens that birds, reptiles, and rodents are sensitive to. Even if a captured prey-item is alert and unharmed to the untrained eye they may still die later as a result of being exposed to these pathogens, as a result of the stress of being predated upon, or as a result of internal trauma that can’t be detected without being seen by a wildlife veterinarian.
You’ll often hear outdoor cat proponents claim it’s feral cats that are an ecological disaster, not their beloved Fluffy, but I’ve broken down before how owned free-roaming cats are far from blameless.
Also…. Cats tend to be communal creatures that will play with each other! That means, if you can get a pair of kittens (instead of one) do so! They will play with each other and be generally better socialized than just one kitten on their own. If you’re “too busy to play with your cat” (I literally take a couple minutes, 3-5 times a day to play with my cats) then it’ll help them get the exercise they need as they play fight with each other and run around the apartment. (I have 2 bed 2 bath to give an idea of space that my girls are running around).
Cat trees are the best thing. While they are EXPENSIVE, they’re also fairly easy to build (if you’re able). And in the mean time you can set up things that are less expensive. Floating shelves for them to jump between for example, as well as just scratching posts (15 dollars or even cheaper if you just get hanging things for them to scratch on) old blankets or towels on the floating shelves would also work and you can just use cheap wood instead of something fancy (Home Depot/Lowes/Ace are your friends). Heck do both.
me, gay and running out of breath going up the stairs: I bet I could run a farm
me, gay with scoliosis and a joint problem and depression and anxiety and running out of breath going up the stairs: I CAN run a farm I just have to do it in my own way!!
2 yrs later:
Me, gay with a chronic hip injury, anxiety, depression, ADD and STILL running out of breath from stairs even as I type this from my bed in the farmhouse:
Being someone with chronic pain, you guys are giving me hope for what I can achieve in the future
I LITERALLY THINK THIS EVERY TIME THE SONG COMES ON
What song is this talking about?
‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’
Otherwise known as the original ‘Blurred Lines’
HEY FRIENDS HISTORICAL REMINDER: ‘WHAT’S IN THIS DRINK’ ISN’T TALKING ABOUT DRUGS, HE IS NOT TRYING TO ROOFIE HER
THE SONG IS TALKING ABOUT ALCOHOL
but still a pushy song
historical reminder that the reason pina coladas and pink squirrels are known as “girly drinks” is because they mask the taste of alcohol and men were know to give women these drinks without informing them that they were alcoholic. It takes a couple of drinks to realize you’ve been consuming alcohol and by then you’re more susceptible to suggestion, making it easier for him to convince you to stick around and have a third drink. When this song was written in 1944 most women didn’t drink regularly, meaning they had a low tolerance and it would only take 2-3 drinks to get her drunk enough that she wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight. This was the 1940s version of being roofied
No no no it was not.
“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.
See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do – and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.“ But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink – unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?“ It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.
Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because unlike in Blurred Lines, the woman actually has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposedto, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…" She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.
So it’s not actually a song about rape – in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.
Reblogging for that last bit because this is what I rant about to Kellie every time this discourse happens on my blog but I’m too lazy to type it out. SO thank you to @dangerwaffle for not being as lazy as me. This song has a cultural context, and a historical context, and it’s worth talking about how fucked up that context is, but you have to get WHICH context it is right first.
I see the Annual Discourse has been reblogged, it is Christmas in fact an deed
broke: tracking christmas by calendar date
joke: tracking christmas by christmas song google searches
woke: tracking christmas by baby it’s cold outside discourse
everything can be magical if you let it be. i remember the first time seeing red-winged blackbirds i was just…enthralled. i watched them for maybe an hour. i thought they made the sweetest noises and were just so pretty. and i found out later on that people consider them nuisances and pests. they’re literally common all over the united states but because they weren’t familiar to me they weren’t a burden or an annoyance but something beautiful. if we don’t let other people tell us how to feel about things, maybe we can just like things for what they are
this is a hotter, deeper take than i ever expected to see from this blog, but you’re so fucking right and i think this is a good ass post and a sentiment everyone should at least think about
my tumblr dash has legit moved from “haha i h8 myself” to “minecraft is about self care and moving on from past trauma’s”. I’m glad yall are doing better.
Asian wlw and mlm are amazing and deserve everything good in the world
hi I made this post bc I have never seen a post supporting Asian lgbt folks and know a fence but supporting your local gays means supporting us too, especially when we aren’t as visible as others.
I’ve grown up living in a predominantly straight white world and consumed mostly western media all my life and idk bout you but there’s not a lot of us out there in the media or the entire entertainment industry actually. Asians in western media is already cutting it fine. Asian lgbt folks in the media? there’s like 3 people I can think of off the top of my head.
anyway I’m getting carried away here so. All I’m asking is for u to pls reblog this. give love to ur local Asian gay bc we don’t get enough
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 