This Diagram Shows Our Cosmic Address At A Glance. We See Our Planetary System Around The Sun, Our Stellar

A Beautiful Railway Track <3

Untitled by Stanley Huang

What’s problematic with this caste-is-dead narrative is that not only is it incorrect and untrue but also that it benefits the savarna in ways that keep the social stratification intact. By denying the current impact of caste on the Dalit’s access to resources, the savarna uses his/her caste privilege to compete for the same set of resources while justifying his/her resentment for affirmative action policies. In so doing, the savarna leverages the widely popular anti-government stand to criticise reservation schemes but continues to reap the benefits his/her caste privilege offers him - social mobility; access to education, healthcare, and career opportunities; possession of ancestral land, property and wealth; trans-national networks and partnerships; and the ease of social acceptance for his/her lifestyle, choices, behaviour and relationships. The savarna, in effect, looks as if s/he is liberal and modern - liberal enough to criticize the state, and modern enough to not believe in the caste system. But if the savarna is indeed that modern, should we not expect him to remove the sacred thread, or not speak in a dialect that gives his/her caste away, or not be particular about marrying into the same caste, or say no to caste-based rituals and festivals? If indeed s/he is that liberal, isn’t it only logical that we expect him/her to shame the state for not addressing caste-based atrocities, or not display selective outrage for only terrorist attacks and animal torture, and show action-oriented solidarity with anti-caste movements? Shouldn’t the savarna demonstrate his/her newly discovered modern identity, which s/he claims is very different from his/her conservative parents, in ways that are more credible and believable? And more importantly, should we not expect the savarna, especially the one who wears the progressive and politicized label, to primarily question his/her privilege and his/her family’s on account of being dominant caste? Most often, the savarna, regardless of his/her social labels, does not feel the need to live up to any of the above expectations; s/he believes his caste privilege also offers him immunity from all kinds of criticism. S/He is at liberty to pick and choose aspects of his identity and lead a lifestyle that is under no compulsion to corroborate his cover story. His/Her privilege allows him to practice caste under the guise of ‘cultural roots’.

Christina Thomas Dhanaraj, “Caste, Friendship, and Solidarity” (via asianamericanfeminisms)

وجمعة مباركة للجميع

While these may be controversial & provocative, Muslims have no right to be offended by it. What’s offensive is that atheism is punishable with the death penalty in Saudi Arabia & many other Muslim-majority countries both in the middle east & outside of it. Not all Muslim-majority countries have the death penalty, but there are other punishments like prison, lashes, annulment of marriage, loss of child custody & family inheritance, seizure of property, loss of employment, & others.

Even if these laws didn’t exist, atheists still experience oppression from society. Most will not come out to their families for fear of being disowned, kicked out, or even worse, killed. If the apartheid laws weren’t bad enough, you still have to worry about how your family, friends, & neighbours will react to your lack of faith. So these pictures aren’t offensive, they’re resistance against oppression & apartheid. When you oppress a group of people so much & take away their right to live, expect the frustration to be released one way or another, even if it pisses off your oppressors.

While one can try to argue that the death penalty has nothing to do with Islam, the politicians & clerics who advocate the law use Sharia, verses from the Quran, & hadiths to support it. Only a tiny minority of clerics & fiqh experts oppose it, & they are constantly being accused of apostasy themselves.

Thirteen countries punish atheism with the death penalty. These are Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Qatar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, & Sudan. All are Muslim-majority & use Sharia to varying degrees, except for Nigeria but the death penalty only applies in certain Muslim-majority states in the north.

Until these laws no longer exist & atheists can finally live, Muslims have no right to be offended by legitimate resistance & our response to oppression.

Testimonies from Saudi atheists I personally know:

“It’s hell. Religion is always pushed down our throats. We’ve worked so hard to get rid of the brainwash we’ve been receiving all our lives just to put on a mask every fucking day in front of people. A socially acceptable mask. It’s like we’re in a zombie apocalypse & we’re disguising as zombies to not have our brains eaten. You MUST agree with them. You MUST wear that mask every fucking day of your life. You start to get less & less chances in life of taking that mask off & relaxing for a bit & the more you wear that mask the more painful it gets because that fucking mask is poisonous. But you wear it anyway because the alternative is getting killed.”

“The first thing I’d start with is how hard it is to live a double life. Religion & the place I’m living in are some of the reasons why I’m suffering from severe depression. Religion haunts me. I’m always having nightmares that I’ve been caught & will face beheading. My life is in danger 24/7.”

“In Saudi Arabia, god is your judge, jury, & executioner. God is not in the sky but on the ground in the form of long bearded men with evil in their eyes. God wanted me dead but now god can’t reach me (thanks to getting asylum). How godly of him.”

“Being an atheist single mother is terrifying. I’m always paranoid someone will find out & take my son away from me because I’m an “unfit mother”. It breaks my heart that I have to lie to him about god & religion because he’s too young to realize how dangerous speaking the truth is.”

“I can’t think of anything that would describe it better than hell. It’s way too risky to say anything.”

“I seriously don’t want to think about this shitty place we live in becuse I’m already depressed as fuck.”

Black on Black

Empathy for others’ pain rooted in cognition rather than sensation

The ability to understand and empathize with others’ pain is grounded in cognitive neural processes rather than sensory ones, according to the results of a new study led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers.

The findings show that the act of perceiving others’ pain (i.e., empathy for others’ pain) does not appear to involve the same neural circuitry as experiencing pain in one’s own body, suggesting that they are different interactions within the brain.

“The research suggests that empathy is a deliberative process that requires taking another person’s perspective rather than being an instinctive, automatic process,” said Tor Wager, the senior author of the study, director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU-Boulder.

A study detailing the results was published online today in the journal eLife.

Empathy is a key cornerstone of human social behavior, but the complex neural interactions underlying this behavior are not yet fully understood. Previous hypotheses have suggested that the same brain regions that allow humans to feel pain in their own bodies might activate when perceiving the pain of others.

To test this idea, the researchers compared patterns of brain activity in human volunteers as they experienced moderate pain directly (via heat, shock, or pressure) in one experimental session, and watched images of others’ hands or feet being injured in another experimental session. When volunteers watched images, they were asked to try to imagine that the injuries were happening to their own bodies.

The researchers found that the brain patterns when the volunteers observed pain did not overlap with the brain patterns when the volunteers experienced pain themselves. Instead, while observing pain, the volunteers showed brain patterns consistent with mentalizing, which involves imagining another person’s thoughts and intentions.

The results suggest that within the brain, the experience of observing someone else in pain is neurologically distinct from that of experiencing physical pain oneself.

“Most previous studies focused only on the points of similarity between these two distinct experiences in a few isolated brain regions while ignoring dissimilarities. Our new study used a more granular analysis method,” said Anjali Krishnan, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral research associate in the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU-Boulder while the research was conducted. She is currently an assistant professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

This new analysis method identified an empathy-predictive brain pattern that can be applied to new individuals to obtain a brain-related ‘vicarious pain score,’ opening new possibilities for measuring the strength of activity in brain systems that contribute to empathy.

The results may open new avenues of inquiry into how the brain regions involved in empathy help humans to relate to others when they experience different types of pain. Future studies may also explore the factors that influence one’s ability to adopt another’s perspective and whether it might be possible to improve this ability.

Richard Feynman (above) included a poem in his address to the National Academy of Sciences:

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. 

There are the rushing waves mountains of molecules each stupidly minding its own business trillions apart yet forming white surf in unison Ages on ages before any eyes could see year after year thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet with no life to entertain. Never at rest tortured by energy wasted prodigiously by the Sun poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity living things masses of atoms DNA, protein dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the Universe.

Image source

#UnfairAndLovely: South Asians Fight Back Against The Stigma Surrounding Dark Skin 

One of the campaign starters had the best thing to say about it, too.



Mercury is officially “out” of retrograde! Know what that means? That the planet doesn’t appear to move backward in the sky due to our motion relative to the “backdrop” of space, because that’s what retrograde notion is – an optical illusion.

So, observers from our past who knew nothing of celestial mechanics and orbital motion (let alone that we are among billions of other solar systems in the universe) perceived Mercury’s odd “movement” as some kind of foreboding communication from the cosmic beyond which indicated a disturbance of reality, rather than consulting (and trusting) an actual astronomer on this “phenomena”.

Still blaming Mercury retrograde for your problems? Congratulations, you’ve managed to remain ignorant after nearly 500 years of scientific progress.

“Astrology is bunk, it’s fraud.” – Carl Sagan

Society as a whole has yet to understand that gender is non-binary. Tumblr at least can be a cathartic place to deal with those stigmas and misunderstandings. One comic uses numbers to beautifully show how binary gender is bullshit.

Sexist ✓ Racist ✓

This meme is perpetuating one of the worst stereotypes black women face.