Let’s Be Honest Though, Millennial Hate Is Totally A Thing Rich Folks Started Because They’re Pissed

ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this.  you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.

humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.  

i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy. 

Rape Escape

Easy and very effective

Requires nothing but your body

Includes attack

the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” is actually not the full phrase it actually is “curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back” so don’t let anyone tell you not to be a curious little baby okay go and be interested in the world uwu

If you are so committed to being perfectly lawful that you cannot see the value of breaking a law to defend yourself or others, you’re not good, you’re obedient.

Unbiased journalism is not pretending both sides are equally valid. Unbiased journalism is reporting the facts even if those facts include that one side is irredeemably awful. False neutrality is propaganda.

okay, so I’ve seen multiple posts just today that were basically like “haha who ever said adulthood was having your life together and everything figured out, I’m 28 and real life is drowning me as much as it ever was”

and like…the answer to that is…adults. adults said that. generation after generation, the narrative from adults to young people has been, “you are a dumb kid who doesn’t know the world or yourself but I am a Grownup with Life Experience™, and that’s why you’re supposed to do what I tell you, that’s why I don’t need to listen to your thoughts and feelings, that’s why society imagines me as a full human being and you as something that’s going to grow into a full human being.”

there’s a great book all about this that I’ve had a lot of my students read - Childhood and Society, by a sociologist named Nick Lee. Lee argues that the child/adult binary is a socially constructed one, based, like any other such binary, on an imagined idea of clearly oppositional characteristics. specifically, he says that children are imagined as incomplete, unstable (as in their lives and experiences are constantly changing, not as in mentally unstable), and dependent, and adults as complete, stable, and independent. those characteristics don’t match up to reality if you think about them too hard for even a moment - no one is truly independent, adults’ lives aren’t stable, what does judging a human being’s “completeness” even mean - but it doesn’t matter, because our culture is so obsessed with believing in them.

and adults being forced to pretend they’re complete and independent and living stable lives is one of the toxic ways all this plays on people of all ages.

I really hope that seeing my generation talk like this - just flat-out admit that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing any better than we did ten years ago - means we have the potential to break this cycle. but honestly, entering my 30s and having seen so many people my age turn into those adults who act like they have life so well figured out compared to those dumb kids, it doesn’t seem likely. we might be a little better than we could’ve been, but too many of us are going down that tired old road of transitioning from talking about how much smarter we are than our parents to talking about how much smarter we are than our kids, just like every generation does when it hits this age.

I guess what I’m saying is, please, young 20-somethings of today, be better ten years from now than we are.

hey kids

you know why I like redemption narratives? because a redemption narrative says: no matter how broken or wrong or bad or stupid or ridiculous or harmful or sad or terrible, you can atone.

there is still a road back. it might be rocky and steep, complicated and messy. walking it may take all your life. you may lose your foothold, slip and fall back into the abyss, but the wall is still there. the ascent is still there. hard is not the same as impossible.

you are never too far gone. you are never beyond saving. 

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

Watch: Carl Sagan schooled B.o.B. on his flat Earth theory more than 30 years ago

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