i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

Sometimes, people are really great.

This is also an example of picking One Thing and putting most of your Better The World efforts there. We have so many different important issues to care about and act toward, and it’s tempting to try and do a Little for Many Things - and I’m not saying that little bits of effort don’t add up! They do. But often you’ll make a bigger impact (and possibly have less compassion/activist fatigue) if you direct the majority of your efforts toward one or two things.

Happy winter solstice! The light begins to return tomorrow!!

Hello, good day!! There is more light today than there was yesterday! It's finally coming back!! I would like to thank the southern hemisphere for returning it safely.

mutuals do this

I am dead serious: If you are a Walmart employee, at any level and in any store — like if you are a high school kid with a part time job stocking shelves — message me any question you have about unions. Like ask me “What’s a union” if you want. I will explain it to you. I am a grievance chair for a white collar union whose workplace only unionized within the last five years and whose management fought as every step of the way, but in the end we fucking won. It can be done, and I can tell you how.

Rb to kill wal mart

Unionizing is our wet dream I promise you.

I like how it’s described as a union could “cripple American Capitalism” when more precisely it’s just that a union would be so powerful as to force WalMart (or any other company) to pay their workers like human beings. That’s not going to break Walmart. They’ll barely notice.

They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”. 

But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.

Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.

Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.

But thousands of people, millions of people? Better chances.

To anyone that wants to claim it wouldn’t work:

Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.

Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.

So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.

Cause if you, an individual, complain, they just fire you and laugh about it. A union is a collection of hundreds up to MILLIONS of people, supported by lawyers, going against employers for you.

In Denmark, due to union negotiations & refusal to work for slave wages, the McDonald’s basic pay comes out to about $20 US / Hour. The big mac there costs about 60 cents more.

Actually crippling capitalism is good and cool anyway

Reminder than Walmart won’t even be paying time and a half during thanksgiving and Black Friday to their employees. They only give them a DISCOUNT On two specific days. Shit pay and their only “perk” is to give the money back to Walmart by shopping there.

Fuck Walmart. Unionize. Burn the waltons down.

I want slower packages delivered by transportation workers who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding

Wow. The patience, kindness and calm communication skills. Outstanding.

From raindovemodel

This made me cry. I wish all situations could be handled as perfectly as this

I just want to point out the core of what the diffuser did in this conversation

They recognized that the mother was also expressing a vulnerable truth about herself - that she felt like a bad mother because her child was expressing gender feelings she wasn’t equipped to help with - and met her where she was, a concerned parent with limited information - to point her where she should be heading, research and resources.

Im going to make more of an effort to stop reflexively pushing people away when they express biases and make more of an effort to hear the underlying fears when i can

“it’s easier to love ourselves when we feel loved as ourselves”

damn that is so  powerful though

God this always makes me tear up ahaha…

a little concerned about Wade

It’s called “environmental amnesia” and it’s an actual issue environmentalists discuss how to combat. The climate crisis makes it more widespread but it’s been something that’s happening for generations. The story of The Lorax describes it beautifully. The idea that what you remember is what you consider normal, but if the changes happen slowly over generations, you don’t see how large they are because you don’t personally remember them being very different, even if you were told stories about it.

Yeah, this chick is more guilty than OJ.

Who live tweets their crimes, though?

For those who have overactive guilt complexes like me…

suzhou embroidery by 倾卿苏绣 | based on art 千里江山图 ten thousand miles of mountains and rivers by 王希孟wang ximeng(1096—？）

Drinking that rainbow milk to appeal to the kids

playing the first dishonored in 2021 like... your home is now a police state, the plague is only affecting the lower classes, the cure is available only to higher classes, the church is more powerful than ever, the rich are trying to get back to normal by opening establishments only for their pleasure and throwing parties, the authorities completely fucking up how to handle the pandemic, there’s a night curfew punishable by law, everyone’s businesses are closed and im just sitting through it like

post CANCELLED turns out this is the most 2021 thing in the game

Prediction:

1. 30 countries will move toward this within the next 5 years.

2. It won’t even enter American political discourse for 5, 10 or 15 years from now.

3. If it’s proposed it will incite a moral panic, as the usual suspects raise the alarm about the specter of communism, a lazy labor force, etc.

4. Measures of lifespan, health-span and well-being will increase in the countries that adopt it.  These same measures will fall in the U.S. and virtually no one will notice.

5. The usual rhetoric about American exceptionalism and USA #1 will carry on as usual.

I would say your prediction is dead-on.

when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW

op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light

Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman

I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

I’m having some emotions about it!

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

God I’m not okay about it

“We don’t often talk of friendships with this sort of power. The most important relationship in your life is supposed to be your romantic one (and you’re supposed to have a romantic one). Love for anyone but a spouse or an extremely close blood relation is often considered a nice bonus, but not the thing that life is made of. Most of us understand the importance of friendship, but are not often given the language with which to express it. This is especially true for men. But here is a man who has all those things—a talented and beautiful wife, three successful kids—taking time to recognize the power of friendship, and speaking of it in the grand, metaphorical language we typically reserve for romance. “