Listen, you should never film strangers in public without their consent, but I swear there need to be fines or something for people who do that shit in some spaces. For example: I had to go to the ER last night, and some jerk filmed a woman who just came in and was clearly having an asthma attack. She immediately got to go back, and he was unhappy about that. Believe me, I get that it sucks having to wait when you’re in pain, but you don’t get to pick who deserves care when. The medical system in the US is a nightmare, and the ER could be the worst moment of someone’s life. No one deserves to be recorded because some jack ass believes someone doesn’t look like they need care.
This is fine to reblog. People who film strangers should be shamed if nothing else.
I know a lot of EFR instructors (Emergency first response, the people who teach CPR classes) who used to be ambivalent about this and now are firmly in the “fuck you fuck your phone category.
Maybe its demographics, EFR instructors do tend to be older and less online, but there’s been a shift from voyeur filming being seen as irritating and tasteless to actively harmful.
I met one lady who had an entire section of her lecture based on how to divide labor in emergency and one of those steps was crowd control. If you are taking charge of an emergency situation, you delegate tasks. Point at one person and tell them to call 911, Point at another person tell them to warn traffic, Point at another person tell them to get the first aid kit if you know where it is. You assign small tasks to individuals instead of asking a crowd that way the task actually happens, and you’re not sitting around 20 minutes later wondering why the ambulance is taking so long to show up and it turns out that everyone assumed someone else called.
Now there is another step. Pick a big dude and tell him to stop people from filming. Which is actually the tamest version of what she said, because this lady went on and on about how phones are fragile, light, small, pieces of computer equipment that can be easily punted into oblivion.
And yeah, she’s probably the most vocal proponent of property destruction in the face of voyeur filming I’ve heard lately but she’s far from the only person in emergency services who’s frustrated with the eternal quest for viral videos of strangers pain.
And to be clear there is a huge difference between the paramedic who doesn’t want you filming and the cop who doesn’t want you filming.
me when one of my girlmutuals posts about how they got a little coffee beverage or took a nice walk or started a book they’ve been meaning to read for a while or otherwise found meaning and joy in simple pleasures
people will genuinely try to describe lancelot as swashbuckling and charming and a flirt and it’s like….no that’s gawain, gawain will fuck your wife and then help you, an errant knight, try to track down sir gawain because he fucked your wife and you want to duel him and after like two weeks he’ll smugly tell you that well actually, i am he, sir gawain but it doesn’t matter because you’re now in love with him too. but also gawain is insane and nothing makes him happier than killing and also flirting with anyone who crosses his path. gawain’s REAL good at killing and he doesn’t care about morality or right or wrong and can we just fight already? lancelot cries if you look at him wrong and is allergic to every other human emotion and has a moral dilemma every other week and feels bad about how good he is at killing but he’s REALLY good at killing but also he just wants to go and visit his mom, okay?
hey now that it’s disability pride month can you please remember to include people with Down syndrome and other chromosomal defects into your activism. they’re so often left behind. I literally never see anyone spreading Down syndrome awareness that isn’t close family of someone with Down syndrome. They exist and they’re living breathing humans who deserve just as much activism as every other disabled person
when a british actor does an american accent everyone’s like “i didn’t even know they were british until they were on colbert.” but when americans do a british accent everyone’s like “they’re supposed to be from east cocksford but their glottal e’s are north dicksford. shameful.”
Saw an interesting interview with Hugh Laurie talking about this (on playing House and ‘getting away with’ doing an American accent):
“…. because they’re much less interested…they don’t have that 'Professor Higgins’ ear for…. class and background and geography and the way the British are much more attuned to wait a second where are you from and what trick are you trying to pull on me by… with that particular choice of words. I think partly again because it’s such a big country nobody really…. it doesn’t bother people so much where you’re from or why you sound the way you sound. America’s a country that’s too big to know itself. Someone living in Florida’s go no idea how people behave or what they eat or how they dress in Oregon, it’s just so far away - whereas we know, of course, we know absolutely everything about… every British drama we watch, we’re like, well that’s High Wycombe, that could never happen because it’s a one way system there! whereas America’s so mythically grand, it’s too big to know it'self, and that actually has an affect with things like accent. ”
I’ve seen the use of the “crazy sjw feminist” stereotype from gamergate days die down a little but one thing that remains ever present is the way fat activists are treated. Anything they say is dismissed and ridiculed, they have insults hurled at them with so much cruelty and disdain. The moment a fat person asks any group of people to change their worldview on fatness, it’s immediate insults and brick walls. This includes left leaning people. Everyone loves to gang up on fat people, it hasn’t changed a bit.
I find that left-leaning people almost always justify their fat bigotry in science-y terms (not actual science on fatness, which they never know anything about when questioned), and right-leaning people in terms of character traits they believe are associated with fatness.
To me, it’s all excuses to keep enjoying higher social status and apparent moral superiority for the non-act of existing in a thin(ner) body, or having lost weight. In other words, people are addicted to their thin privilege and are not about to let reason stand in the way of their enjoyment of said thin privilege.
Yeah, I find that thin leftists predictably buy into the “obesogenic environment” (what Cat Pause called the “poor fatties can’t help but make unhealthy decisions”) theory, and will outright say “once we make the world a better place fat people will stop existing!”
Which both ignores that body variation is natural and there will always be some fat people, and ends up positioning being fat as the worst thing in the world and the driving reason for change. All of the things that are advocated for under this umbrella (better access to a wide variety of food, exercising in a way you enjoy, less crushing work days, etc) are good things in and of themselves! You don’t have to argue that they’re good because they get rid of fat people, and if you frame that as their main benefit you’re doing everyone a disservice.
