So I used to have a Russian friend who had a pretty thick accent and like a lot of Russians tended to eschew articles. She would say things like “Get in car.” And stuff.
Well one day this asshole who had been kind of tagging along with us asks her why she talks like that because it makes her sound dumb and I still remember her response word for word.
“Me? Dumb? Maybe in America you have to say get in THE car because you are so stupid that people might just get in random car, but in Russia we don’t need to say that. We just fucking know because we are not stupid.”
One time I was proof reading a paper for a Russian student. As I was correcting her paper with her, the many mistakes in her grammar started weighing on her. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, almost sobbing,
“In Russian I am so intelligent and clear. In English I am like [an] idiot”
Respect to anyone trying to master a foreign language. I get so sad thinking about that student.
Full offense but people who make fun of someone else’s accent or belittle their limited vocabulary when they’re speaking a language not native to them are fucking disgusting and are just begging to be punched.
They’re speaking your language because you don’t know theirs. That’s not something they should be made fun of, it’s something that should be commended because learning a language is hard fucking work.
if you’re not committed to antiracism, you’re not a good doctor.
I remember when I had pneumonia I was so sick and exhausted and in pain that I couldn’t get out of bed for *days* — I eventually pushed myself to walk across campus to the doctor’s office (it took me literally 45 minutes to walk there bc I had to walk so slow) and when I got there…the doctor made it seem I was only trying to get out of writing an exam lol. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I was going to be withdrawing from the class anyway bc I hadn’t had the energy to get to lectures at all that semester. She lectured me about how she sees students do this all the time and she can’t take a risk in trusting me when the only thing that was wrong with me was exhaustion. “We all have off days” is what she said lolol.
I was so humiliated at her insinuation that I eventually just nodded when she said it “didn’t seem like I had any issues” and went back home. It wasn’t until I fainted walking down the hallway like 4 feet outside my apartment that I started panicking and called someone to take me to the hospital. When I got there even the receptionists looked genuinely pale to see how hard it was for me to walk and how much it hurt to breathe or talk.
It would take *6* different antibiotics for the really advanced pneumonia to finally die out, the last of which was delivered intravenously in my arm for 10 continuous days — I still have the scar where the initial IV was and I have another mark on my wrist. I *literally* couldn’t walk or lay on my back for 8-9 weeks. I would sleep sitting up with pillows on a chair and when my breath would involuntarily deepen as I started to fall asleep I would jerk awake bc of the sharp pain my lung where the pneumonia was.
That same doctor who thought I was lying about being sick would then call me like 34 times in a row when my blood test results came to her office and the hospital sent her my chest x rays lolol, obviously worried about looking bad and having called me a liar and sending me home when I had such a serious bout of pneumonia.
In the 3rd year of my premed degree I would learn that doctors in North America — and specifically white women in nursing lol — often see south Asian women as malingerers who exaggerate their pain. In a UK study there were neonatal nurses who went so far as to say that south Asian women also lack maternal instincts, care more about their pain meds than their child and “can’t handle” child birth.
Yosif al Hasnawi — an Iraqi Canadian teen — died at the hands of two paramedics who did not believe he had been shot and claimed he was “acting” when he was actually internally bleeding. They made him walk to the ambulance with a bullet in his stomach, from which he would later die after not being transported to the hospital for 38 minutes.
Just yesterday My cousin, totally healthy, just died of a brain hemorrhage and often complained about ongoing migraines that could’ve been telltale signs of hypertension that were totally ignored by her doctor for years.
and just a day before that Kim porter who was otherwise healthy just died of pneumonia while having expressed her symptoms and pain to doctors for days — I would say that I’m shocked by this but the implications faced by brown people and racism in the healthcare system is 10x worse for black women who are often seen as liars and in it for the meds as a result of historical anti blackness and systemic rejection of black patients’ pain.
doctors are literally trained to perceive racialized people as malingerers who are trying to scam for meds or medical attention instead of people in pain. It’s 100% systemic and actually integrated into medical education.
Yeah exactly this
Medicine is no less likely than any other field to have problems with racism. But when it’s someone’s life at stake (or at minimum someone’s comfort), it is really critical that this kind of prejudice is rooted out.
Most likely everyone’s seen this notorious page from a nursing textbook, but in case you haven’t, enjoy some piping hot medical racism:
…this is ….published in 2014….i don’t know what to say
All of them are talking about how we pray the pain away or overreact to the pain… amazing
THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.
No. Just NO.
I’m so glad someone put it into words.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and he’s absolutely right.
And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling. I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person. I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.
And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.
If you put a single crab into a bucket, it will climb out and escape from becoming someone’s dinner.
If you put a whole bunch of crabs in a bucket, however, the crabs in the bottom of the bucket will pull the crabs at the top of the bucket back down if they try to escape. Instead of allowing some or all of the crabs to survive, the group of crabs will ensure that every single one of them ends up on a plate.
This same phenomenon is seen in human communities, where it has become known – appropriately – as crab bucket mentality. From the outside, these crab bucket communities might look like support groups, or places to get feedback and advice. But in reality, they are black holes – these are communities where people go to tear each other down, and to actively be torn down in return. Instead of lifting each other up, these communities burrow further and further into their buckets, until everyone is too bitter and broken to ever climb out.
And you might be part of a crab bucket community without even knowing it.
Some online communities are obvious crab-buckets. The so-called “incel” community might be the most obvious example; these are angry young men who tell each other over and over again that they are worthless, unattractive, and that they will never be loved. Lonely teenagers enter the incel community to talk about how frustrated and insecure they are after dealing with romantic rejection, and they quickly find themselves pushed toward hopelessness, violent misogyny and suicidal fantasies. Likewise, the “pro-anorexia” and “thinspo” communities are crab buckets, where members encourage each other to adapt more and more extreme disordered eating, and often invite other members to make cruel comments about their bodies and food journals. Insecure young women (and some men) go to these communities because they want to like their bodies more, and end up weighed down with self-hatred.
But not every crab bucket is obvious.
Although there are lots of wonderful and supportive spaces online for LGBTQ+ people, the internet is also littered with LGBTQ+ crab buckets – especially for trans people. Some trans communities are almost entirely dedicated to discouraging and criticizing other trans people for not “passing”; these communities will pore over each others’ pictures, pointing out lingering masculine or feminine features, comparing each other to “a man in a dress”, or outright convincing each other that there is no point in transitioning, as they have no hope of ever “passing”. Anxious trans or questioning people join these groups to navigate a very difficult time in their lives, only to have their own insecurities magnified and distorted.
Communities and feedback circles for writers and artists can also be crab buckets. Again, while there are wonderful and supportive spaces available, there are also toxic black holes out there, masquerading as genuine communities. I’ve belonged to writers’ groups where every single piece of writing was viciously torn to shreds, no matter how promising it might have seemed, and there were constant discussions about how ‘pointless’ it was to try to get published. Members were so insecure about not “making it” that they frantically tried to crush the hopes and dreams of anyone who might be competition. Instead of producing better writing, these kinds of groups eventually produce no writing at all.
Activist communities are often crab buckets. On the surface, people join activism communities to lift each other up and feel less alone in their cause; in reality, however, many activist communities have underlying cultures of suspicion, gossip, and hostility. Members gleefully comb through each other’s posts and content carefully, constantly looking for any small mistake or out-of-context comment that will allow them to declare that someone is “trash” or “cancelled”. People join these causes to fight back against their own feelings of powerlessness, and often report developing anxiety, depression and panic attacks as a result.
The list of crab bucket communities goes on. Any kind of group can become a crab bucket group under the right conditions; just because a community is created by and for a marginalized identity, it doesn’t mean that that community is actually safe for that identity. As humans, we like to band together in groups to accomplish large goals and feel less alone… but sometimes, we turn those groups into echo chambers for our own toxic ideas, and try to drag as many people as we can down into our buckets of despair with us.
If you’re in a group that you suspect might be getting a little crabby, it’s probably time to leave. Turning a whole group around by yourself is an enormous and thankless task, and it’s not one that I’d wish on anybody. Once a group of people have formed a collective identity around proving why they’re all worthless or fat or problematic, it’s hard to turn that ship around, and any attempts to do it might be met with hostility. It’s okay to give up on toxic communities, and look for healthy ones that build you up instead of tearing you down.
It’s okay to climb out of the bucket.
If the support group is making you feel worse, it’s not a support group. If the particular activist group is holding people back, they’re not really activists.
will there ever be a better example of internal conflict than merlin’s fierce loyalty and love towards arthur vs. his innate desire to be true to himself and practice magic freely?? i think Not
merlin 