Literary Vanity Project Or:

the whole “i used to be a teen who hated authority only to grow up to become the authority that hates teens” is a bad bad thing that practically every other generation has fallen into and we all need to make an extremely conscious effort not to repeat the fucking pattern

Studies have shown that the shift starts to happen around age 30. If you’re close to that, make a conscious effort to be open to and accepting of younger people. I’m 31 and paying close attention to how I react to young people and new trends and shit and trying to keep myself from developing those thought patterns.

Hey so this shouldn’t be fucking happening

right to assembly my ass. this is intimidation. it ain’t gonna be a peaceful demonstration either because neo nazis are a violent terrorist organization 

all neo nazis need to be booted out of society. no “freedom of speech” or “right to assemble” bullshit. get the fuck out. I don’t care about their rights, they gave up those rights when they decided they wanted to organize to harass, bully, and ultimately murder Jews and Roma people.

Trigger warning for some truly fucked-up stuff.

This week, it was revealed that at least 27 people, most of them gay, were slaughtered in a single night by officials in Chechnya, Russia. A newspaper even released the names of the dead. Chechnya has reportedly been rounding up and torturing gay and bisexual men for several months.

To make matters even more real and terrifying, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov gave an interview this week where he said that gay people are devils, not people. He claims there are no LGBTQ people in Chechnya, but that if there are any, they should leave immediately. 

People are being murdered, a foreign leader is giddy about it, and radio silence from Trump. Remember that the Russian LGBT Network is helping people evacuate the area; you can donate to them here. 

This fucked up. This is so fucked up.

Right on!

Guys, the first images of Irma’s level of devastation are coming out of Barbuda and it’s heartbreaking. The President of Barbuda says that 90% of the island is uninhabitable, upwards of 60% of the TOTAL population are now homeless because the hurricane destroyed virtually every building and home on the island, and that the estimated damage is valued at no less than $200 million dollars. That’s money a small island like that doesn’t have. They’re saying it’s going to take years to rebuild and Hurricane Jose is right behind Irma on the same path which means they could be hit twice. This is just one of the islands being affected.

Please, show up for the Caribbean like you did for Houston. There is no safety net for any of these islands including mine. They’ll rely entirely on foreign aid. Find local charities or global trustworthy charities (NOT the Red Cross) and make a donation asking them to aid the Caribbean. There’s whole countries being turned into rubble with no financial means to repair their infrastructures. They’re going to need help.

half of north america is on fire and the other half is getting pounded by abnormally powerful hurricanes

future’s looking pretty bright lads

literally anything west of like colorado that isn’t a desert is basically on fire

It’s almost as if the globe was like, getting warmer.

It’s funny how this map stops at the US/Canada border, yet Western Canada has been on fire since June

Algorithmic price hikes in times of emergency 

“Airline customers looking to get out of the path of Hurricane have been met with dramatic fare spikes for air travel tickets… Airlines have countered that they have not changed the algorithms that determine their pricing, and that the surges are a simple matter of supply and demand with scores of people trying to book last minute flight out of the storm’s path.“ - Guardian 

“As Florida stocks up on supplies for another monster storm, those looking for bottled water on Amazon have been frustrated to find monster price tags to match. Prices for water on the site reached as high as $100 for a single 24-pack of bottles or $63 for a single 100-ounce jug as of Tuesday morning, according to screenshots from people in the area. While most of the more outrageous listings seemed to come from third-party sellers, at least a few were also set by the company’s own price algorithm.”  - Mashable 

capitalism is violence.

God @ northern liberals w that “southerners deserve natural disasters for voting for trump” as if there aren’t a ton of poor people and people of color and other vulnerable people.. y'all think it’s the rich republicans that will die if a hurricane hits Florida??? Naw so shut the fuck up

Listen this is why gerrymandering is such a massive, massive problem down here in the south.

Texas has been slowly becoming a Latinx majority state for decades. You wouldn’t know it by the way Texas votes because gerrymandering exists. Rich southern conservatives always win the votes because of this. (Lack of decent education doesn’t help.)

Worst of all, they try to teach us in school that the federal government bullies the state by making the state submit its redistricting plans for approval before redistricting can take place.

In reality, it’s because the gerrymandering would get even worse if the state was allowed to do as it pleased.

Gerrymandering and voter suppression are why the south looks the way it does in elections. The south is poor and more diverse than a significant part of the rest of the country, and all of the marginalized people get thrown under the bus by the whole country and by both parties.

So yeah when you wish bad things on the south, you’re being pretty indescribably shitty because let me tell you, the south already has “bad things” happen in significant amounts.

There’s so many people in the notes that are like ‘yes! So go vote!’ It’s like talking to a fucking wall.

I really wish people really considered what voter suppression actually MEANS. It’s not ‘voters are discouraged a lil’. There are laws and regulations designed to disenfranchise people of color, especially black people, and prevent us from voting at all, and failing that, water down the power of that vote as much as possible.

Changes are also enacted that make it more difficult to vote–DMVs business hours changing, fewer places available to vote with increasing distances between them (but more affluent and whiter areas having less distance to travel, morepolling places and therefore shorter wait times…) offices in predominately pooorer and blacker towns being reduced obtaining a photo ID requiring you to jump through more hoops, it’s a lot.

And that’s just he obvious direct point a to point b shit. That’s not talking about felon voter rights being taken away, while people of color (again, especially black people) are charged for crimes that white defendants walk for, with less evidence and harsher sentencing, including what may be considered a misdemeanor for a white person being charged a felony.

And cops have come forward and admitted they’ve been told not to prosecute drug crimes in white neighborhoods, so it’s foolish to pretend that mandatory minimum sentencing and zero tolerance policies are meant to be anything but another tool to disenfranchise us. This is an especially notable problem in Florida, which plays into why that map looks like that, too.

You cannot tie a people’s hands behind their back, gag them, tie them to a chair, and then tell them that all they gotta do is stand up, and wonder why you’re having no issue doing so while they’re struggling.

You know what changes the Democratic Party could implement if they truly wanted to increase voter rights in these areas? Find and provide free child care while voting is taking place–and feed those children too. Organize and fund car pools to voting areas.

Months before the deadline, have PAID workers from these communities show up in person to recruit voters and discuss any possible difficulty getting to the polls, explain how absentee ballets work and how to access them.

It’s not cheap, but when the dems are happy to fundraiser shocking amounts of money to pay for an already insured building, it ain’t impossible.

Instead of smugly ‘going high’ when they go low, help those of us being hurt by them going low. Instead of fucking funding their voter suppression lol.

Like, voting is not going to save us. It’s just not. At best, it must be seen as a form of harm reduction. But we still cannot practice it as a form of harm reduction when we can’t actually access this shit.

Also, the problem with “just go vote” is that gerrymandering means that even if people make it out to vote, the crazy way districts are set up is designed explicitly to cut the other party (in this case Democrats) off at the knees, even if there’s a majority overall.

Tulsa, Ok. Tornado Alley.

Election night 2016.

White friends in affluent white neighborhood stood in line for 10 minutes.

Black people in predominantly Black part of town standing in line for ~4 HOURS. Single poll worker.

Even if you are able to get your ID and shit sorted out and get there, there is no guarantee you will functionally be able to vote.

Fuck every single person who acts like natural disasters are fair punishment for living here.

Especially since if you’re LGBT, you are likely to be disadvantaged economically ANDalso get blamed by the conservatives for natural disasters.

If anything, people in shitty states deserve more support. We are fighting poverty AND prejudice. (And the possibility of dying in a tornado.)

And moving is fucking expensive. Don’t even suggest it.

We should have

Those would go a long way to end voter suppression, and then we could seriously tackle the gerrymandering problems.

Yeah, working the 2012 election in South Florida was a head trip, because you get these incredibly poor neighborhoods smack up against these luxurious gated communities, and of course everybody in the latter is going to vote because they all have cars and perfect paperwork. I got some fancy lady volunteers like two weeks out from election day who refused to go knocking on doors in a gated community someone had given us the entry codes for because ‘those people had paid money’ to not have people able to knock on their doors, and I was like, okay but they didn’t pay that money to us, we owe them nothing, half our volunteers don’t even have cars, who do you want me to send?

Nobody. Apparently election volunteering means harassing poor people only. Rich people data is none of anyone’s business.

My first reaction to finding out someone has a felony conviction is still to find out how long ago, so I know whether to reach for the civil rights reinstatement form–the disenfranchisement sometimes has an option to expire, but you have to submit your paperwork perfectly for it to take effect, and apparently nobody gets told that.

(For Florida it’s seven years without arrest after completing sentence and parole, which is especially fucked up because you don’t have to have actually done anything wrong to be arrested, and you need to submit the form along with certified court documents from your trial, and then a Clemency Board considers your case, so it’s basically been made as hard as possible.)

Side note, Democratic ground game training needs to get better, because they had us handing out those forms to people without telling us about the court document part or even where they should submit the damn things, which felt a lot like having provided fake help when I found out.

Hey IDK if national news is covering this since there’s so many other terrible things going on, but the entire West Coast is on fire right now

There are currently 74 wildfires burning in the western United States, many of them are approaching heavily populated cities such as Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. The La Tuna fire is now officially the brush fire in LA history. Air quality warnings are being issued across the entirety of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. I’m in Portland, about 40 miles out from the nearest wildfire, and it’s raining ash and difficult to breathe due to the haze.

If you live anywhere near these fires, you’ve probably heard this by now, but please be safe. Stay indoors if at all possible and keep windows closed. Keep pets indoors as well. Hopefully some of our trademark Portland rain will come soon to help minimize the damage.

Yeah y'all I live here and it’s goddamn awful I can barely breathe when I walk outside

Do not forget that Florida isn’t the only one getting hit by Irma. Puerto Rico and the other islands are going to be hit. This hurricane is huge. It is going to practically cover Puerto Rico. It’s bigger than Ohio.

Don’t be quiet about Puerto Rico and the other islands. These people will need help as well. Not a single part of Puerto Rico will be untouched from the hurricane.

Capitalism is evil.

Full thread here by @cullenenn

Books @cullenenn recommends for white leftists:

(I’ve read this one^^ 4 times, it’s amazing)

…it was literally founded on genocide and slavery but k

we literally fought a war to gain independence and another war for racists to keep slaves….