In a victory activists were unsure they’d get, Uganda’s Constitutional Court overturned the country’s draconian Anti-Homosexuality Act today, declaring the anti-LGBT law “null and void” because of a parliamentary technicality in how it was passed.
The court determined that when members of Parliament passed the law in December 2013, Speaker Rebecca Kadaga had not established quorum — a required minimum number of members present to vote — effectively invalidating the law.
THIS IS FANTASTIC NEWS FOR ALL LGBTQI UGANDANS RIGHT HERE <3
And fantastic news for the LGBTQI community worldwide too
Toronto-based editor Lyndsay Kirkham has started a firestorm this week after overhearing what was apparently an incredibly sexist conversation between IBM executives at lunch — and live-tweeting it.
Unaware that they were transmitting sexist nonsense to cyberspace, the IBM executives openly discussed “why they don’t hire women.” If you take Kirkham’s account at its word, it actually gets way worse.
We are smart enough to know hot things should be hot.
We are sorry if you don’t
fun story about the reason they do that (at least in America)
once this lady spilled her McDonald’s coffee on herself and ended up getting like 3rd degree burns and since there was no warning on the cup she was able to claim she didn’t know it would be hot (or at least that hot) and won a lawsuit against McDonald’s for $1 million
That’s what the media smear campaign against her would have you believe, anyway. The truth of the matter is that the McDonald’s in question had previously been cited - on at least two separate occasions - for keeping their coffee so hot that it violated local occupational health and safety regulations. The lady didn’t win her lawsuit because American courts are stupid; she won it because the McDonald’s she bought that coffee from was actively and knowingly breaking the law with respect to the temperature of its coffee at the time of the incident.
(I mean, do you have any idea what a third-degree burn actually is? Third-degree burns involve “full thickness” tissue damage; we’re talking bone-deep, with possible destruction of tissue. Can you even imagine how hot that cup of coffee would have to have been to inflict that kind of damage in the few seconds it was in contact with her skin?)
Yeah I’m tired of people joking about either the “stupid” woman who didn’t know coffee was hot or the “greedy” woman making up bullshit to get money.
She was hideously injured by hideous irresponsibility, it was an absolutely legitimate lawsuit and the warning on the cups basically allows McDonalds to claim no responsibility even if it happens again. Every other company followed suit to cover their asses.
So they can still legally serve you something that could sear off the end of your tongue or permanently demolish the front of your gums and just give you a big fat middle finger in court. “The label SAID it would be HOT, STUPID.”
obligatory reblog for the great debunking of the usual ignorance spouted about this case
obligatory mention that the media smear campaign to twist teh facts on this case and get public opinion against the victim was deliberate and fueled by the right wing tort reform movement
it was seized upon to limit the rights of consumers to hold giant corporations accountable for wrongdoing
watch the documentary Hot Coffee, it lays out all of the facts and examines the response to this case and explains why everything you think you know about this case is bullshit, and explains why tort reform is bullshit in an entertaining and informative manner
The woman injured in Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants was 79 years old at the time of her injuries, and suffered third-degree burns to the pelvic region (including her thighs, buttocks, and groin), which in combination with lesser burns in the surrounding regions caused damage to an area totaling a whopping 22% of her body’s surface. These injuries that required two years of intensive medical care, including multiple skin grafts; during her hospitalization, Stella Liebeck lost around 20% of her starting body weight.
She was uninsured and sued McDonald’s Restaurants for the cost of her past and projected future medical care, an estimated $20,000. The corporation offered a settlement of $800, a number so obviously ridiculous that I’m not even going to dignify it with any further explanation.
The settlement number most often quoted is not the amount that the corporation actually paid; the jury in the first trial suggested a payment equal to a day or two of coffee revenues for McDonald’s, which at the time totaled more than $1 million per diem. The judge reduced the required payout to around $640,000 in both compensatory and punitive damages, and the case was later settled out of court for less than $600,000.
Keep in mind that at the time, McDonald’s already had over 700 cases of complaints about coffee-related burns on file, but continued to sell coffee heated to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (around 90 degrees Celsius) as a means of boosting sales (their selling point was that one could buy the coffee, drive to a second location such as work or home, and still have a piping hot beverage). This in spite of the fact that most restaurants serve coffee between 140 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 71 degrees Celsius), and many coffee experts agree that such high temperatures are desirable only during the brewing process itself.
The Liebeck case was absolutely not an example of litigation-happy Americans expecting corporations to cover their asses for their own stupidity, but we seem determined to remember it that way. It’s an issue of liability, and the allowable lengths of capitalism, and even of the way in which our society is incredibly dangerous for and punitive towards the uninsured, but it was not and is not a frivolous suit. Please check your assumptions and do your research before you turn a burn victim’s suffering into a throwaway punchline.
I’m gonna show you what a girl typically working out would look like versus what you want me to look like
perfect person award
YES IT’S BACK
She also put on lip stick, eyeliner, let her hair down, and put on hoop earrings.
^ that’s the point of the video, though. This asshat was bitching about how “unfeminine” female Olympians are, when that shouldn’t even be a focus for people. There’s plenty of time for makeup, eyeliner, bikinis, whatever (if that’s their thing!) outside the Olympics.
It’s degrading to female athletes to have their accomplishments pushed to the side, things they’ve worked their whole lives for, and instead be judged on appearance at the one place they shouldn’t be.
^^^ YES. people need to know the context of the shit their about to comment on lol.
This post reminds me of something that happened a few years back.
I once served as art director for a project where the illustration spec called for characters of a variety of races (in the real-world sense, not the Dungeons & Dragons sense - though the latter was involved as well).
We had one particular artist, tasked with drawing a series of elves, who didn’t quite seem to get what that meant. Their output was basically “white elf”, “another white elf”, “white elf with a tan”, “white elf looking a bit pale”, “yet another white elf”, etc.
When this was pointed out, they were like “oh, yeah, now I get it - I’ll totally fix that with my next piece”.
They proceeded to turn in a picture of a blue elf.
In the end, we had to provide specific quotas for specific levels of racial representation in order to get the point across. It all worked out in the end, but it’s stuck with me ever since that this artist examined the original spec, looked at our feedback, and came to the conclusion a blue elf was more plausible than a black one.
In conclusion: this is awesome.
Read that last paragraph as many times as you need to.
I was in love with this boy once so I started to beat him up everyday but people thought we were rough housing bc boys can’t like each other and one day I was like “dude I like you a lot but I can’t cope with my feelings so I beat you up im sorry” and he was like “dude that’s really chill we can hold hands if you want??? Btw you have really good punches.” And that’s the story of how I had my first boyfriend
According to Stop Patriarchy, Mark Ruffalo sent a speech to be read at an abortion rights rally this weekend in Mississippi in which he expressed his frustration with the state legislature’s ongoing attempts to close every last women’s health centers that offer abortion services.
The Clarion-Ledger reports that over 100 supporters gathered at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and listened to a personal account of Ruffalo’s about the issue of abortion rights, in which he mentioned his mother’s struggle to obtain an abortion when she was young:
I am a man. I could say this has nothing to do with me. Except I have two daughters and I have a mother who was forced to illegally have an abortion in her state where abortion was illegal when she was a very young woman. It cost $600 cash. It was a traumatizing thing for her. It was shameful and sleazy and demeaning. When I heard the story I was aghast by the lowliness of a society that would make a woman do that. I could not understand its lack of humanity; today is no different.
Ruffalo reportedly referenced the United States as it existed pre-Roe v. Wade as “relic of an America that was not free nor equal nor very kind”, saying that it “we have worked long and hard to leave behind” that time:
My own mother fought to make herself more than a possession; she lived her life as a mother who chose when she would have children, and a wife who could earn a living if she so chose. I want my daughters to enjoy that same choice. I don’t want to turn back the hands of time to when women shuttled across state lines in the thick of night to resolve an unwanted pregnancy, in a cheap hotel room just south of the state line. Where a transaction of $600 cash becomes the worth of a young woman’s life. So that is why I am lending my voice to you and your movement today. Because I actually trust the women I know. I trust them with their choices, I trust them with their bodies and I trust them with their children.
Ruffalo has been politically active before; he’s a vocal opponent of fracking. And while his characterization of the impact of Roe v. Wade as a “law of the land for decades” is slightly historically inaccurate – anti-choice supporters have been chipping away at Roe v. Wade since that Supreme Court ruling came down – his decision to discuss abortion via women who have actually gone through it is a welcome relief from all the men talking about how they know thetruth about the experience.
