compassionlotion:

compassionlotion:

My birthday is in two days and all I want is to not be in the negative & deal with overdraft fees without going broke! Please help!

Cash.me/briellenicol3

paypal.me/brienicol3/briellemarciano@yahoo.com

venmo: @miss-brie-nicole

thank you💜✨

Today is my birthday & currently my acct is $100+ in the negative. Literally all I want is to be debt free. If you can help make that a reality I would love you forever💜✨🧜🏾‍♀️

please help a mentally ill trans woman of colour make rent next month!

visualexperimentslain:

visualexperimentslain:

hi everyone,

so my last post didn’t really take off so i’m gonna try this again. my landlord fucked me over by not giving me rent receipts that i needed to submit to the welfare office until halfway through the month, not giving me enough time to actually get everything sorted, and there’s definitely no way i’m going to be able to make rent on time and i’m really scared of getting evicted as this will be the third time in the year i’ve been living there that i’m late on rent, and it’s obviously starting to irritate him.

i need $300 in order to pay my rent, and any excess money will be used for groceries, medical bills (i have $50 outstanding from an ambulance ride when i thought i was having a stroke 2 months ago) and staying afloat (since i have no income apart from the occasional freelance computer repair gig, and i generally make just enough money from clients to afford food for the day, as it’s a PWYC service).

thank you all so much for reading, and anything helps. a dollar, a reblog, anything that’ll stop me from being homeless this winter.

so i’m a whole fool and forgot to add my email so uh

raven.faith@outlook.com is my paypal & interac

anything helps!

putzes:

putzes:

putzes:

putzes:

Hey yall I really hate having to make these posts but I’m in a really tight spot again. I’m a disabled trans woman & I’ve been doing survival sex work to get by while I’m transitioning into a new living situation, but due to some technical difficulties (along with increasingly severe psychotic episodes) I haven’t been able to take a client in over a month. I just used the last of my savings to pay rent & now I’m completely broke. I’m looking for other work in the meantime, but I could really use some help getting by until i find a reliable source of income.

My cash app is $ruthieghould

Venmo is ruth-sohmer

Any help would be greatly appreciated! If you can’t donate, please reblog. I love you!

sorry to bring this back but im really desperate at this point. the one client i was supposed to see last week flaked on me & im kind of up the creek at this point on rent. I need help raising $350 for rent and utilities. any help would be so, so nice.

i can offer tarot readings (basic or in-depth), poetry commissions, and custom nude photos or videos in exchange for donations (message me for rates)

Thank you all so much in advance ❤️💞💖💗❣️

reminder that all the goods and services described within are still available!!! some reviews: 

“wow your tarot reading was so accurate to my current lifestyle and where i see myself in 5 years. also your boobs look great” - client who received a nude tarot reading

can we send some love to a sick jewish prophet on XXXMas Day? subvert goyische consumerism and the chaotic, bloodthirsty bustle of the American Public Mall System by sending cash directly to me. for a limited time only, all senders of donations will receive instructions on what sigil to paint in lambs blood over their door to prevent the Fel Demon Sandy Claws from stealing your body fluids this night

Ships are just giant floating computers, filled with ransomware, BadUSB, and worms

mostlysignssomeportents:

A coalition of shipping industry associations has published The Guidelines on Cyber Security Onboard Ships, laying out best practices for the giant ships that ply the seas, and revealing that these behemoths are routinely infected with worms, ransomware, and malware spread by infected USB devices.

The document recounts incidents in which infected ships were stranded because malware caused their computerized navigation to fail, and there were no paper charts to fall back on; incidents where fleet owners paid off ransomware demands to keep ships at sea safe, and where the entire digital infrastructure of a ship at sea failed due to malware that spread thanks to weak passwords.

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/13/floating-computers.html

'Yemenis are left so poor they kill themselves before the hunger does'

aka14kgold:

As peace talks to end war in Yemen continue, three local aid workers describe its devastating impact.

Executive Dysfunction and the Breaking of the Will

santorumsoakedpikachu:

(I did not mean to structure the title of this post like a Harry Potter title.)

I recently read the book Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. It’s a great review of the literature showing that behaviorist techniques (reward and punishment) undermine intrinsic motivation and don’t get people to do better work. He focuses on three different contexts - the boss/employee, teacher/student, and parent/child relationships - and reviews the research pertaining to each one, showing how behavior modification is harmful in that context.

I don’t think he goes far enough in talking about the boss/employee relationship - he shows that workers feel disrespected and demotivated when they’re subject to financial incentive programs at work, and that there’s no correlation between job satisfaction and money earned for most people once basic needs are met, but doesn’t go so far as to say that basic needs being met should be unconditional. But every argument he makes in that book points in that direction.

He talks about how the ubiquity of behaviorism results in “reward-addicted” people who are reliant on getting some kind of external reinforcer to be motivated to do things. I agree that this is a problem, but I think it goes deeper and goes back much farther than behaviorist ideology in psychology. I’m tentatively calling the problem “breaking of the will.”

One of the reasons he gives for behaviorism undermining intrinsic motivation is that people perceive reward and punishment programs as a unilateral exercise of control (especially when the program governs access to things they need or really want), and that the resulting powerlessness demotivates them. I think that’s right. I think that all employment under capitalism has this issue, even in what are considered great places to work. And I think the control is the fundamental issue, and the fact that it’s exerted by means of reward and punishment is secondary.

A lot of diagnoses have some concept about a lack of motivation, paralysis of the will, or inability to take action as part of them. In ADHD, and sometimes other disorders, it’s called executive dysfunction. In autism, it’s called autistic inertia. In schizophrenia, it’s called avolition (literally “lack of will”). If the disorder is considered neurological rather than psychiatric, it’s called aboulia (also literally “lack of will,” but in Greek). In depression, it’s called… well, depression. In ©PTSD and dissociative disorders, it’s sometimes conceptualized as a dissociative freeze response or hypoarousal (and specifically in DID/OSDD, it can be one’s system blocking actions via passive influence).

These concepts seem to me to be connected in a “blind men grasping the elephant” sense. (The concept of “learned helplessness” is also connected: it’s extreme inaction when one has been faced with inescapable punishment.) 

And I think having one’s will broken by having been subject to coercive control underlies many, probably most, cases of this cluster of symptoms.

You don’t have to have been subjected to a formal behaviorist program, or have undergone something the DSM would call a trauma that can cause PTSD, to get this kind of damage. Growing up in a society where you’re legally your parents’ property, going to school, having to sell your labor to a boss in order to not starve, can do it. It’s meant to break your will, just in a way where you internalize authorities’ judgments and get really good at making yourself obey them without being told. People who end up with disabling executive function problems are visible casualties because we didn’t learn the lesson the “right” way, but I don’t think it’s possible to actually emerge unscathed.

(Have you ever noticed that most advice to artists, writers, etc. is about how to force oneself to do the art one presumably loves? Why would this be most artists’ main problem?)

Western culture used to be more honest about wanting people’s wills to be broken:

As self-will is the root of all sin and misery, so whatever cherishes this in children, ensures their after-wretchedness and irreligion; and whatever checks and mortifies it, promotes their future happiness and piety. This is still more evident if we consider that religion is nothing else but the doing the will of God, and not our own; and that self-will being the grand impediment to our temporal and eternal happiness, no indulgence of it can be trivial; no denial of it unprofitable. Heaven or hell depends on this alone. So that the parent who studies to subdue it in his children, works together with God in the saving of a soul. The parent who indulges it does the devil’s work, makes religion impracticable, salvation unattainable; and does all that in him lies to damn his child, soul and body, for ever!

This, therefore, I cannot but earnestly repeat, – break their wills betimes; begin this great work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, or perhaps speak at all. Whatever pains it cost, conquer their stubbornness: break the will, if you would not damn the child.

- John Wesley (huge trigger warning for child abuse at that link)

But these concepts are still ubiquitous, if usually disguised. If you read Punished by Rewards, you’ll find a lot of managers, teachers, and parents who think that their underlings will have no motivation to do anything at all without carrots and sticks, that no work would get done at all without the promise of money (i.e. the threat of starvation), that kids have to be forced to learn things they hate because that’s what the world is like, etc.

So if this is the scope of the problem of executive dysfunction - the near-universal breaking of people’s wills due to capitalism and what people usually called “kyriarchy” a few years ago - what’s to be done about it? How do you gain the strength to start being able to do things you want to do, enough to live your life as happily as you can while the world remains full of unjust exercises of power?

If I had a good answer to that… well, I’d actually do things more frequently than once in a blue moon. But I think viewing this through a trauma lens and a justice lens is a place to start. I certainly don’t think that trying to run a behavioral program on yourself, or have a therapist do it to you, is going to be anything but counterproductive in the long term.

demigynoid:

my name is Jess and I am struggling. I am a 30 year old trans lesbian with C-PTSD, ADHD and OCD. I am a lifelong abuse survivor and I am trapped in a financially dependent relationship with my immediate family. Although they could afford to fully support me as their disabled daughter and only child, what they give me is absolutely nowhere near enough to live on and keeps me in forced contact with them as well as struggling profoundly to recover from three decades of psychological abuse, which will continue as long as I am forced to maintain contact. They are financing their upper middle class retirement plans and almost yearly world-travel by artificially keeping me in poverty.

I want nothing more than to gain financial independence, but right now I am unstable, unemployed, and in serious need of financial help to pay for my basic needs. The income I get from my family is hundreds of dollars less than my basic living expenses every month, and I am absolutely not ok enough to work more than a very small amount right now. I am trying to get off of an anti-depressant with a withdrawal commonly described as “worse than heroin” (venlafaxine/effexor) and I’ve still got about 40% of my max dose left to go. I have severe anxiety and depression from my C-PTSD, I spend most days battling viciously self-destructive intrusive thoughts, and I am physically debilitated from withdrawal symptoms to the point where I can’t currently hold employment with any reliability whatsoever. I’m trying to find something I could do part-time from home with my own hours, but haven’t had any luck so far.

I am fighting as hard as I can for my recovery and for the highest level of autonomy and self-sufficiency I can possibly achieve. I have wonderful friends, two impossibly perfect fur-babies and an incredible girlfriend that absolutely make my life worth living and fighting for.

But until I can get past this completely brutal withdrawal and hopefully get some help from EMDR, which I am about to start in a couple weeks, I need help pretty badly.

My girlfriend and I have two electric/heat bills due which total $567.55. She makes $9 an hour part time and is disabled herself. The income I get from my family is also now going down every two months until it’ll barely cover rent by this summer, because they believe that their money “enables” me and because I inconvenienced them too much by surviving an electrical fire which destroyed half of my earthly posessions earlier this year.

We’ve applied for LIHEAP (no answer yet) my girlfriend gets food stamps and medicaid, and we have no car or savings. If you can afford to donate anything to help right now, please help us. I know I’ve been asking for donations here for a very long time now, and I am so grateful for the huge outpouring of support I’ve received so many times before. I promise I am trying as hard as I can to recover so that I don’t have to do this anymore.

cash.me/$isoxys

paypal.me/helpjessicasurvive

Trans Women Writers Collective is creating a new wave of trans literature | Patreon

This is late, but I hope that today trans people will find some comfort in the writing of trans women that has been published in this series. And I hope that everyone who isn’t a trans person struggling with the loss of their trans siblings will finally refuse to fetishize our deaths by thinking of us only as numbers and tragic fates and that they will read our work, take us seriously as artists and visionarie and as ordinary people struggling to live our lives, and perhaps even change their lives to act in ways that help us survive.

compassionlotion:

Help a black trans girl get thru another week💘✨🦄

So my funds are in the negative ($-4.00) today & My metrocard ($32) expires in 3 days. I won’t be getting paid until a week and a half till now. I could REALLY use some help so if if u have it out of the kindness of your heart to give my info is down below. Thank you in advance for reading/helping/boosting!

venmo: @miss-brie-nicole

paypal: paypal.me/brienicol3/briellemarciano@yahoo.com

Cashapp: cash.me/briellenicol3