tidbits

“

God we fuck up teenagers’ heads. We tell them that biological conditions are moral punishments and then we get all shocked when they don’t practice rational risk management of biological conditions. We teach them “sex is super desirable and all the cool kids do it, and it’s hideously shameful and will destroy your life” and we wonder why they act an eensy bit neurotic about it. If you tried to design a system for making sexually active kids confused and unsafe, you couldn’t do much better than the American media and school system.

And for once, the answer is relatively simple. Just talk about sex like it’s a part of life. Some people have sex and some people don’t, because people are different. STIs aren’t bad because they’re Dirty Crotch Rot; they’re bad because they’re contagious illnesses like strep throat or whooping cough, and you can ask a doctor to check for and treat them just like you would with strep throat. Unwanted pregnancy isn’t a scarlet A; it’s a mostly-preventable accident that sometimes occurs when people are going about their normal business of having sex. You can ask the school counselor about a variety of topics, including career planning, problems at home, questions about sex, or conflicts with teachers.

If we could just get the goddamn stick out of our collective ass and accept that sex is a human activity and teenagers are humans, maybe there wouldn’t be quite so many plaintive “I don’t understand my body and I’m confused and scared and I don’t know anyone I can ask in person” messages flying out into the world.

” The Pervocracy - “Teenage Panic.” (via klonazepam)

YES.

(Source: fuckyeahsexpositivity, via wilwheaton)

“

I, and I suppose many others, am perfectly aware that this NSA program is not *new*. I’m also perfectly aware that the program is probably legal under every existing rationale applied to the Fourth Amendment by our nation’s courts.

[…]

…consider the backdrop of these revelations. This week, the Supreme Court announced that law enforcement could collect DNA samples from non-criminals provided there was an arrest. There are thousands of pre-textual arrests a day, and a speeding ticket could lead to your DNA being logged and your being held in jail for 24 hours without trial, arraignment or access to counsel. We are a nation of mass incarceration, often for non-violent crimes like drug possession. So for many many Americans it is only ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ that they aren’t in jail, with the loss of autonomy and voting rights that entails. We have spent the last decade debating whether it’s OK for the government to visually inspect our genitals to determine whether we’re going to blow up a plane. This story is not merely about a single program, though that’s how the discourse has treated it so far. This thing is about a state whose relationship to its citizenry is out of balance. This is not the state the Founders envisioned.

” TPM reader ML (via wilwheaton)

Just some perspective…

(via wilwheaton)

“At the heart of it, I thought of the Great Society as an extension of the Bill of Rights. When our fundamental American rights were set forth by the Founding Fathers, they reflected the concerns of a people who sought freedom in their time. But in our time a broadened concept of freedom requires that every American have the right to a healthy body, a full education, a decent home, and the opportunity to develop to the best of his talents.” -Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963-1969, New York: 1971, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 104. (via lbjlibrary)

Everyone deserves these rights.

(via npr)