It is also asking them to “prevent the promotion of a redefined version of marriage in public schools” – effectively de-facto banning teachings about same-sex marriage or same-sex couples.
The group also wants them to protect “the right of organisations and individuals” who disagree with same-sex marriage – permitting discrimination against same-sex couples.
Incredibly, despite the overtly homophobic measures proposed by the anti-gay group, four of the Republicans vying for the Presidential nomination actually signed the pledge.
Rick Santorum, Senator Ted Cruz, Dr Ben Carson, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal all agreed with the group’s mission to strip gay people of their basic rights to marriage and protection from discrimination.
It is not a particular surprise from any of the four, all of whom have equally vile records of homophobia.
Spread their names, remember their pledge, tell everyone. Don’t forget this after election season.
Fuck them so much! what kind of evil monsters are you?! You call yourselves Christians yet the only thing you prove to me is that demons exist. And you’re not possessed, you are the demons themselves. I’m so ashamed that you dare to associate yourself with my God. Disgusting.
This disgusts me.
RICK SANTORUM
TED CRUZ
BEN CARSON
BOBBY JINDAL
Never forget these monstrous people who show us exactly what NOT to do to develop this nation.
I’m wondering when they’ll announce the required display of a sign or emblem on all LGBT people. Pink triangle, maybe?
Why yes, you are correct im-the-asshole-that. I really really hate boomers constantly shitting on my generation.
At my job, I once had to take a training course called “Dealing with Difficult People.” And during that course, for no apparent reason, the instructor started off on a rant about millenials which quickly devolved into the entire room of boomers bitching about my generation. At one point, one lady called us “animals.”
When I raised my hand to point out that this was disrespectful, I was told “it’s okay, you’re not like them.” At which point I snapped and asked HOW. My experiences are their experiences. You know what we saw when we grew up? We saw a housing market collapse. We saw the beginning of a war on terror so vaguely defined as to have no visible end. We saw an entire generation stick their fingers in their ears and shout “GLOBAL WARMING ISN’T REAL AND IF IT IS IT’S A PROBLEM FOR THE NEXT GENERATION.”
We’ve been told that “you better go to college if you want a good job” only to graduate to find that there are no jobs available because the work force ISN’T RETIRING. We’ve seen the cost of higher education increase OVER 1,000% in the last four decades. A college credit that cost an day’s minimum wage in the 70’s costs us 60 days of work. Those of us who graduate with student loans are told that if we couldn’t afford it we shouldn’t have gone. Those who don’t go are told that we can’t expect a job without a college degree.
We’ve grown up in a world where the acceptance rate at Harvard is higher than the acceptance rate at a new Walmart. We’ve been told that you were grateful for you job flipping burgers, but you were paid the equivalent of $14-$15 an hour to do so. We’ve had employers cut our work week to 39 hours to get out of paying for our healthcare.
I’ve worked in fast food and you want to know a secret? I have never had a problem with teenagers. If they get rowdy or messy they mean no harm. In fact, most of them will stop if you tell them. All they want is a fucking milkshake and a corner to themselves The customers that cause the most problems? They’re middle aged. I had a customer berate me, cuss at me, and call me stupid and ask if I failed math when I told him he hadn’t given me enough money to pay his check. When he finally accepted he was in the wrong, he told me I shouldn’t have made such a big deal out of it because it was “bad customer service” even though any shortage comes out of my paycheck. That sense of entitlement is something I rarely see in millenials.
We’re told in legitimate publications, in TIME MAGAZINE, just how little you think of our generation, how little you RESPECT us and yet you ask for our unquestioning devotion. Well guess what, IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. You’ve ruined our economy, our housing market, our job market, our environment, and our climate. You continually mock us, demonize us, and leave us to clean up your messes.
RESPECT IS EARNED, and you have done nothing to earn it. And it’s ironic that I have to have this discussion here because at this moment you are the difficult people I am having to deal with.
I was then told I was overly confrontational and would apparently benefit from being sweeter when being called an animal (I may have continued loudly talking over the “instructor” when she tried to cut me off). But the other sole millenial and I shared a loving glance across the room and absolutely lambasted this instructor in the evals and she’s never been invited back to teach that course, so it’s all okay.
“With regional variations, millennials have absorbed our parents’ world view. We consider these expectations reasonable, and we blame ourselves for not living up to them.
Of course, it’s all a trick. The global conditions that enabled a middle-class existence are evaporating, and are being replaced by an economic system whose function is the transfer of wealth to the lucky few.”
[…]
“…the point of this ideology is to discipline young people’s behaviour through weaponised self-loathing. Instead of demanding better, we engage in futile competition over crumbs. Instead of questioning why life often feels meaningless, why we feel so alienated and inadequate, we turn these beliefs inward. Instead of using this shared experience to build solidarity with each other, we feel shame.
[[ Image Description: A photo featuring a tuxedo cat lying down, its body in the background, and its paws towards the viewer and together, with a post on it by user @aleclightwoodsbooty.
The post reads: “If you think we need more asexual, pansexual, and bisexual characters in books today clap your hands” ]]
I have, on more than one occasion, had my writing workshopped and gotten feedback about how “such-and-such character isn’t sexual enough” and that “all boys just want sex”
Let me elaborate on that last reblog, just to make it clear for people who haven’t worked at or near minimum wage.
My last retail job paid $10 an hour, one of the highest starting wages for a entry-level retail position in NYC at that time (and still higher than the current NYC minimum wage of $8.75). I had the occasional forty-hour week, but mostly, I worked thirty-two hours. If we assume that as the standard week, it’s $320 a week.
Between state, federal, and city taxes, at this level, you end up paying around 26% of your wages in taxes. If your paycheck for two weeks is $640, you actually take home $473.60. Your yearly pay after taxes is $12,313.60, or $1,026.13 a month.
You find an apartment to split with three roommates. Your individual rent is $700. That leaves you with $326.13 for the month. You collectively decide not to get cable and only get internet, so your bill is $75 split four ways–$18.75 for you. Your power bill is around $100 and your cooking gas bill is around $30–$32.50 between the two. That’s $51.25 for bills. That leaves $274.88. You get a cheapo phone plan and pay $50 a month. That leaves $224.88. You get an unlimited MetroCard because individual rides make no sense with you working nearly full time, especially if you go literally anywhere else in your week besides work and home. $116.50 per month. That leaves you $108.38 for the month.
You have $3.60 a day to feed yourself, clothe yourself, do anything for fun, deal with medical emergencies, and so on. And that’s at a full $1.25 above city minimum wage, or $2.75 above national minimum wage.
I was once talking to a colleague about how great it is that Obama wants to make two years of community college free for American citizens, thereby reducing the amount of debt students come out of school with, and providing more educational opportunities to the wider populace and to those who couldn’t afford any higher schooling in the current system.
She responded to me: “I don’t support it, that means our taxes will go up.”
I asked her: “Why wouldn’t you be okay with your taxes being higher if it meant that literally millions of people could pursue an education, including your own children? There are virtually no drawbacks.”
She replied by saying: “I had to work to go to school, why should they get to go for free?”
And that is a huge fundamental problem with this country:
Whether it’s better healthcare, climate change, or education, we are so consumed with the state of ourselves, we’d abandon our own children.
i see a lot of reblogs for Bernie here but we have to make sure we’re taking actions to ensure he has a fighting chance in this arena. His opponents have the money and the media circus backing them but he has us, so let’s run it!
The primaries are elections held months before the ACTUAL presidential election that basically decide who the main candidates for each party will be, specifically, who will be listed on the ballot in the election in november. if we want Bernie to stand a chance at all he MUST be on the ballot in November. For that to become a reality we need everyone reading this to get them and their friends to vote in the Primaries! I’ve used the site www.voteforbernie.com to list the following info below so you can all see it easily enough and share it with just a click. Check your state below for the appropriate information on when and how to vote in the primaries!
Below are the registration and voting dates for all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington DC (as a separate voting date). Be sure to register! Click your state to find out how! Below is a key to reading the following information!
Some states have open registration meaning it doesn’t matter which party you’re registered as, you can still vote for Bernie.
*** Some states are CLOSED meaning you MUST be registered as DEMOCRAT by the date’s i’ve listed to vote for Bernie.
*~* Some states are SEMI-CLOSED meaning you must be registed as DEMOCRAT or UNDECLARED to vote for Bernie.
# means you can register or switch parties the day of voting at the voting station.
NEW YORK!!! you have less than 30 days to register even tho your primaries aren’t until April. PLEASE GO REGISTER AND TELL EVERYONE ELSE!
Alabama – Tuesday, March 1st (register by February 19th) Alaska – Saturday, March 26th *** # (register by January 19th) Arizona – Tuesday, March 22nd *** (register by February 22nd) Arkansas – Tuesday, March 1st
(register by January 31st) California – Tuesday, June 7th *~* (register by May 23rd) Colorado – Tuesday, March 1st *** (register by January 1st) Connecticut – April, 26th *** (register by January 26th) Delaware – Tuesday, April 26th *** (register by April 2nd Washington, DC – Tuesday, June 14th*** (register by May 15th) Florida – Tuesday, March 15th *** (register by February 16th) Georgia – Tuesday, March 1st (February 1st) Hawaii – Saturday, March 26th *~* #
(register by February 25th) Idaho – TBD (check the site early next year!)*~* Illinois – Tuesday, March 15th *~* #
(register by February 16th) Indiana – Tuesday, May 3rd
(register by April 4th) Iowa – Monday, February 1st *~* # (can register day of!) Kansas – Saturday, March 5th *** (register by March 5th) Kentucky – Tuesday, May 17th *** (register by April 18th) Louisiana – Saturday, March 5th *** (register by February 4th) Maine – Sunday, March 6th *** (register by February 14th) Maryland – Tuesday, April 26th *** (register by April 5th) Massachusetts – Tuesday, March 1st *~* (register by February 10th) Michigan – Tuesday, March 8th
(register by February 7th) Minnesota – Tuesday, March 1st (register by February 9th) Mississippi – Tuesday, March 8th
(register by February 7th) Missouri – Tuesday, March 15th
(register by February 17th) Montana – Tuesday, June 7th
(register by May 8th) Nebraska – Saturday, March 5th *** (register by February 19th) Nevada – Saturday, February 20th *** (register by January 20th) New Hampshire – Tuesday, February 9th *~* #
(register by January 30th) New Jersey – Tuesday, June 7th *** #
(register by May 17th) New Mexico – Tuesday, June 7th *** (register by May 10th) New York – Tuesday, April 19th *** (register by October 9th 2015) North Carolina – Tuesday, March 1st *~* (register by February 5th) North DakotaTBD (check the site early next year!) Ohio – Tuesday, March 15th *~* (register by February 14th) Oklahoma – Tuesday, March 1st *~* (register by February 5th) Oregon – Tuesday, May 17th *~* (register by April 26th) Pennsylvania – Tuesday, April 26th *** (register by March 27th) Puerto Rico – Sunday, June 5th (register date TBD) Rhode Island – Tuesday, April 26th *~* (register by March 27th) South Carolina – Saturday, February 27th
(register by January 28th) South Dakota – Tuesday, June 7th *~* (register by May 23rd) Tennessee – Tuesday, March 1st
(register by January 31st) Texas – Tuesday, March 1st
(register by January 31st) Utah – Tuesday, March 22nd *~* (register by February 21st) Vermont – Tuesday, March 1st
(register by February 24th) Virginia – Tuesday, March 1st (register by February 8th) Washington – Saturday, March 26th
(register by July 6th) West Virginia – Tuesday, May 10th*~* (register by April 19th) Wisconsin – Tuesday, April 5th
(register by March 16th) Wyoming – Saturday, April 9th*** (register by March 26)
REMINDER: About half of the states allow 17 year olds to vote in the primaries if they will be 18 years of age by the actual election. Check if your state let’s you do this and you can help if it is a state that allows this!
You know what’s a major pet peeve for me when it comes to arguments against raising the minimum wage? All the references to food service workers as “burger flippers”. Burger flippers are not a thing. You’re never going to see a restaurant post a sign that says “help wanted: hiring burger flippers.” “Burger flipper” is a term used pretty much exclusively to condescend to food service workers and downplay the real work and stress that goes into food service. It makes out like minimum wage workers are lazy people who are literally just standing at a grill, occasionally moving a spatula, all day, mindlessly, and that is their one and only responsibility, which anyone who has ever worked in food service can tell you is not what that job entails. It’s rhetoric used solely to designate them inferior. It doesn’t reflect the reality of minimum wage food service work. It’s annoying.
to put this in perspective, my job consists of:
prepping hundreds of pounds of vegetables alone per week, using knives, a heavy-duty meat slicer, and a vegetable chopper, any of which could easily take off a finger from a careless move
cooking on a 200°-400° F grill for anywhere from 2-6 hours per day, often intentionally putting hot oil on it upon customer request
ensuring meat is not over or undercooked as to prevent food poisoning
quality control of every single topping on the line (freshness, consistency, overall taste and appearance), as well as making sure to regularly change gloves
being conscious and accommodating of any allergies or dietary restrictions
talking to a wide variety of customers each day, with a mandated Cheerful Smile, regardless of any events in my personal life or how they treat me
having to explain prices and menu options as well as toe the company line by upselling certain deals to every single person
and above all making sure all dishes and the entire rest of the store is clean and sanitary, as well as making it neat and orderly for customers.
every one of my coworkers does all of this every single day. every day my coworkers and i plunge our hands into scalding water to ensure dishes are properly sanitized, every day we take blades within an inch of our hands so that people have an enjoyable variety of food to eat. it is not uncommon to leave a shift at work with a second-degree burn at the very least.
what do i personally earn for this? $7.50 an hour, and that was after a 25 cent raise. this is an emotionally and physically taxing job. this job is non-stop customer service with concern for public health hanging over every move i make. what about this sounds easy? what about this sounds desirable for such a pittance? if i cared a little less about my job, hundreds of people could get sick in a single day if i served onions i dropped on the floor, or meat i undercooked, or if i sneezed and didnt take the time to wash my hands and change my gloves.
but sure. i guess i just flip burgers.
and it’s not just the folks in the kitchen! service staff who work out on the floor also have a huge variety of responsibilities. in a normal lunch shift, i have to constantly go back and forth to tables to offer drinks, fetch refills if the customer wants them, clear dirty plates and glasses to the dishwasher’s station, completely clear off and reset tables with fresh linens and silverware whenever anyone leaves, and usually i’m dealing with 4 or 5 tables at once. that doesn’t even include setup beforehand (I work at a private business club that does private events along with dining, so the setup of rooms gets completely changed up on the daily) or setup/cleanup of the wait station. plus, the supervisors tend to get irritated if they see anything needing doing, like an empty plate on someone’s table, that you haven’t gotten to yet, even if you’re occupied helping another table. it’s not impossible, but it’s definitely demanding and stressful!
I’m sorry, but I’ll be the first to say that I have a problem with the raise of those who work in food service and I did work at McDonald’s for about two years. Now, I agree about the fact that the level of stress that goes into working in fast food is ridiculous and yes the whole “burger flipper” thing was always something that was brought up in conversation when I said I worked at Mcdonald’s. But Christ, 15 fucking dollars an hour? That’s ridiculous. So say someone who works at McDonald’s works about roughly 30 hours a week for a month. They would make about 2,000 dollars that month. That’s more than a Private First Class would make in the Marine Corps. We’re talking about someone who signed up to serve the nation and sacrifices so much to fall short on his paycheck to a McDonald’s employee. So no sorry. I don’t agree. I think America needs to get it’s shit together and prioritize.
Why is that ridiculous? Have you seen the cost of living? Here in Boston your rent is at minimum $800 IF YOURE LUCKY otherwise on average you’re looking at $1200-$1500 how the fuck you supposed to pay that on top of food, school, utilities etc on $7.50/hour? You act like people work just to go shopping. People have bills to pay.
Dragging the military into it.
It’s true a private first class (e-2) in the marines makes less than 2000$ a month, but you have to take into consideration:
an e-2 in the military probably lives on base, most unmarried e-4 and below are either required or heavily encouraged to live on base. And guess what? It’s free to live in the barracks. There is no rent. Also, very cheep food in the galley, cheep, relatively healthy food.
You want to know what else military personnel don’t have to pay for?
health care
dental
college
some child care
private tutors
gym membership
MWR sponsored events
private trainers
Yeah, so although they are being paid under $2000 a month (the military is paid below minimum wage btw) they literally only have to pay for entertainment (even then, there’s tons of free things open to them).
Just because someone isn’t deemed “worthy” in your eyes, doesn’t mean they don’t have the right TO LIVE.
Don’t use the military to prove your point. It’s irritating honestly. Because if you’re not in it, you have no idea what the heck you’re talking about, and if you are, you’re bitching about nothing.
What 16 trillion dollar debt? I have no idea how my free stuff is going to appear. I just know I want it.
He’s raising taxes on the rich
He’s planning on stealing more from people… ok that makes sense. Just because *They* are rich doesn’t mean those people deserve to have more of their wealth stolen from them.
Yes because the wealthy billionaires that steal and undervalue labor, and companies that scapegoat paying taxes are really hurting
why even bring up the national debt if you don’t want people to pay taxes
I’m on the phone half asleep, but yeah, Thank you for real
I don’t think OP understands what rich people are. Like they literally won’t even notice the taxes. It will make no impact on the wealthy at all. You could take literally 50% of the income of the top 10% and they would have to make zero changes to their lifestyle.
Money to them is just a high score. They whinge when you take them down a bit but it makes literally no difference because they’re still winning the fucking game.
They do actually 100% deserve to have their money taken. People are starving to death because we think disability payments shouldn’t be enough to live on and minimum wage should be half of what you need to survive so yeah, I think millionaires and billionaires deserve to have a tiny fucking fraction of the money they could never spend in a fucking lifetime so I can fucking EAT AT ALL.
I also don’t think people understand actually how much a billion dollars is. Like. it’s such an enormous number.
We think of numbers that big like a set of stairs, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, ten million, a hundred million, a billion.
With each jump just being another step on the staircase and not realising HOW FUCKING HUGE each step is, and how vast the gap is between each of them.
Aside from the fact that even a million dollars is far more than you need, a billion is disgusting excess. There is no conceivable way one person could justify needing a billion dollars when you know HOW MUCH that is.
To put it in perspective: a million seconds is 11 and a half days a billion seconds is 31 years and 9 months.
Another example would be Warren Buffett: He made $US12.7 billion in 2013. That was his yearly income, not his total worth. Just his income for 2013.
That’s $37 million per day; $1.54 million per hour; $25,694 per minute
How much do you get per hour? Is it enough to live on? the minimum wage in america is $15,080per year That man makes more money per minute just for being alive, even in his sleep than most of you do in an entire year.
also, just using seconds for reference again
15,080 seconds is just over 4 hours. 12.7 billion seconds is 402 years and 4 months.
Can someone please make a staircase graph with dollar amounts?
I have discalcula and have a hard time conceptualizing numbers. I feel like that’s a great analogy and would help me.
Ok so I tried and the number differences broke the weird little graphing thing I was using.
so here we have one thousand (1,000) not showing one million (1,000,000) at one pixel
and one billlion (100,000,000) is the big pilon there.
I added fifty million in to show because that graph goes in increments of 50 million.
So how much is 50 million compared to a million though, it’s only one pixel?
so smol. But still we’re trying to get down to a thousand, (which is ten hundred-dollar-bills.)
So what does a million look like compared to a thousand?
oh. We broke it again. It will only go in 50 thousands. So we got to look at how big 50k is compared to our wad of hunjies.
ok.
This is why i like using the seconds instead of graphs… But I won’t give up here.
the reason it’s so so hard to process is because a BILLION is an enormous number. there comes a point with numbers where we can’t actually process them and its just like…a lot. And more than “a lot” is still “a lot”.
So we need visual representation. Lets use pennies (thanks megapenny)
Imagine a penny. Just one.
Ok, you get a thousand pennies a week, and you end up with 52 thousand in a year. If they were dollars that’s a nice paying wage.
with me?
now this is a thousand pennies.
this is 50 thousand pennies (1 square foot solid of pennies! COOOOL) It’s roughly how many pennies you would have in a year if you got a thousand pennies a week.
This is a million pennies
And this is a billion pennies
(Which is 5 schoolbuss sized blocks of solid pennies.)
that is so many.
.
The problem with numbers is that we see them written like this
1 100 1000 1000000 1000000000
And we kind of subconciously go “well… it’s only increasing a little at a time, like a staircase. When the progression is more like
And so on. which is not a staircase I want to climb because it starts off reasonable and then jumps to building size, then mountain size.
We ‘add a zero’ which is confusing because it’s timesing (x) not adding (+).
to make ten thousand dots, I would copy all the dots in my thousand pile, and paste them ten times. to make a hundred thousand, I would copy all the dots in my ten-thousand-dot pile and paste them ten times. thats what “times by ten” means.
That’s what adding a zero is, it’s multiplying (x) the last number we had by ten. (i also say timesing: as in copy and pasting it ten times) try it with a word document and see how many pages it takes to get you a billion dots, and how many it takes for 15 thousand (minimum wage anual)
hopefully this was at least somewhat useful.
Anyway, the point is that if we imagine them as dollar coins, and one square block is established as good enough to live by a year, there’s no reason one individual deserves 5 bus-worths.
Omg this is excellent! Thank you so much, that does really help! The pennies in particular
Check out this awesome visual representation of how messed up our society is, everyone!
In conclusion, there’s absolutely no reason why the rich people need all this money and taxing them more is a very very good idea