Epic Sax Office 

A helpful guide to some common birds here in the western US

Responding to a pandemic in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation:

OMW I always thought the well-known nebula images were some sort of false-colour, invisible-wavelength stuff. If asked I'd have said the first one was how we'd see it. You've no idea how happy I am to discover the iconic photos are of visible light, it's like the person who thought narwhals were imaginary and discovered they were real

Sometimes… there’s more than meets the eye. 👀 You’re looking at two very different takes on an iconic image. ⁣

Human eyes can see only a small portion of the range of radiation given off by the objects around us. We call this wide array of radiation the electromagnetic spectrum, and the part we can see visible light.

In the first image, researchers revisited one of Hubble Space Telescope’s most popular sights: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. Here, the pillars are seen in infrared light, which pierces through obscuring dust and gas and unveil a more unfamiliar — but just as amazing — view of the pillars. ⁣ ⁣ The entire frame is peppered with bright stars and baby stars are revealed being formed within the pillars themselves. The image on the bottom is the pillars in visible light.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team⁣

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Just so you all know..

This blog is 100% anti PETA.

We love our vegetarian and vegan friends and family (and I have a lot of them!!). We don’t support an organization that claimes to love animals and does nothing but hurt them and the people who love them.

Hugs and support to my extended dog show family at Crufts.

hey what if we didn’t combine dozens of unrelated political positions into two color-coded options

OK but there’s another “critical” here, and it’s also getting confused with the others. Critical as in critical theory, critical consciousness, actually does mean “being able to see and point out all the ways in which a thing is Problematic”, and when that gets (combined/confused?) with literary criticism/critical thinking, you end up with “analyse(critical thinking) a fictional work(literary criticism) by looking for all the bad things(critical consciousness)” and interestingly enough that ends up being very similar to what would happen if you just went at it with a hammer

Why did “be critical of your media” turn into “find all its flaws and hate it” why did people become allergic to FUN

me to baby, after twenty minutes of trying to get him to chill: …and if that purple yacht gets sunk, Mama’s gonna buy you a pickup truck. And if there’s a pickup truck recall, Mama’s gonna buy you a wrecking ball. And if that gets CPS involved, Mama’s gonna buy you an age-appropriate doll -

me to baby, after forty minutes: …and if Olympus Mons gets razed, Mama’s gonna buy you some flying sleighs. And if the flying sleighs get banned, Mama’s gonna buy you a Congressman. And if he still won’t pass your bill, Mama’s gonna buy you a Silmaril. And if that starts an awful war, Mama’s gonna buy you a dinosaur. And if your dino won’t ride to battle, Mama’s gonna buy you a magic saddle -

Allyship does not mean seeing yourself as worthless

There are people who like to make others feel worthless. Some of them use the language of social justice to get away with it.

Often, this comes in the form of proclaiming to hate allies and then demanding unbounded deference from allies. This is typically conflated with accountability, but it’s not the same thing at all.

Hatred and accountability are different things. Accountability as an ally means, among other things:

Listening to the people you’re trying to support instead of talking over them.

Making good-faith efforts to understand the issues involved and to act on what you learn.

Understanding that you’re going to make big mistakes, and that sometimes people you’re trying to support will be justifiably angry with you.

Accepting that your privilege and power matter, not expecting others to overlook either, and taking responsibility for how you use both.

Facing things that are uncomfortable to think about, and handling your own feelings about them rather than dumping on marginalized people.

Being careful about exploitation and reciprocity, including paying people for their time when you’re asking them to do work for you.

Understanding that marginalized people have good reason to be cautious about trusting you, and refraining from demanding trust on the grounds that you see yourself as on their side.

When people use the language of social justice to make others feel worthless, it’s more like this:

Telling allies explicitly or implicitly, that they are worthless and harming others by existing.

Expecting allies to constantly prove that they’re not terrible people, even when they’ve been involved with the community for years and have a long track record of trustworthiness. 

Berating allies about how terrible allies are, in ways that have no connection to their actual actions or their actual attitudes.

Giving people instructions that are self-contradictory or impossible to act on, then berating them for not following them.

Eg: Saying “Go f**ing google it” about things that are not actually possible to google in a meaningful way

Eg: saying “ shut up and listen to marginalized people” about issues that significant organized groups of marginalized people disagree about. https://www.realsocialskills.org/blog/the-rules-about-responding-to-call-outs-arent

Eg: Simultaneously telling allies that they need to speak up about an issue and that they need to shut up about the same issue. Putting them in a position in which if they speak or write about something, they will be seen as taking up space that belongs to marginalized people, and if they don’t, they will be seen as making marginalized people do all the work.

Giving allies instructions, then berating them for following them:

Eg: Inviting allies to ask questions about good allyship, then telling them off for centering themselves whenever they actually ask relevant questions. 

Eg: Teaching a workshop on oppression or a related issue, and saying “it’s not my job to educate you” to invited workshop participants who ask questions that people uninformed about the issue typically can be expected to ask.

More generally speaking: setting things up so that no matter what an ally does, it will be seen as a morally corrupt act of oppression.

Holding allies accountable means insisting that they do the right thing. Ally hate undermines accountability by saying that it’s inherently impossible for allies to do anything right. If we want to hold people accountable in a meaningful, we have to believe that accountability is possible.

Someone who believes that it’s impossible for allies to do anything right isn’t going to be able to hold you accountable. If someone has no allies who they respect, you’re probably not going to be their exception — they will almost certainly end up hating you too. If someone demands that you assume you’re worthless and prove your worth in an ongoing way, working with them is unlikely to end well.  

If you want to hold yourself accountable, you need to develop good judgement about who to listen to and who to collaborate with. Part of that is learning to be receptive to criticism from people who want you to do the right thing, even when the criticism is hard to hear. Another part is learning to be wary of people who see you as a revenge object and want you to hate yourself. You will encounter both attitudes frequently, and it’s important to learn to tell the difference. Self-hatred isn’t accountability.

Tl;dr If we want to hold allies accountable in a meaningful, we have to believe that accountability is possible. Hatred of allies makes this much harder.