PEOPLE ON PARLER ARE PLANNING SOMETHING ON THE 19TH. EVERYBODY BE PREPARED AND STAY SAFE. PLEASE SPREAD.

I don't think people point this out often enough but think about every single fucker that stormed the Capitol:

- An adjunct professor

- A lawyer

- A real estate agent

- A state legislator

- A CEO of a company

A LOT of these people, thorough their occupations, family connections, what-have-you, all had varying degrees of institutional power to inflict their menacing politics on people and harm them. Do you think a MAGA real estate agent is gonna help a black family looking for a good home at a fair price without regards to whatever the neighborhood is? Do you think that MAGA teacher or that MAGA university adjunct professor is treating his non-white students fairly? Are you sure that MAGA CEO gives a single fuck about creating a safe working environment or not discriminating against employees that aren't white? We all know the power of a racist legislator, but even a single racist, with the backing of the white supremacy system, can ruin a life pretty effortlessly.

White supremacy is a cancer. It infests and infects every aspect of a person's life. It is truly insidious.

I don't know how to wrap this up conclusively but maybe this tweet thread will sum it up better

People really need to get rid of the belief that it's only rural, poor, uneducated white men who are racist and capable of exhibiting the extremist views that are nurtured in our white supremacist society.

It's doctors and teachers and first responders and bankers - all sorts of fucking people who hold a lot more power than being in a giant pick up truck tailgating you on a dirt road. There's literally no escaping them. They made the system.

I think there’s a really strange phenomenon going on with both classism and racism in how Trump supporters are perceived. Trumpism has created this false “working class” and “common man” front for his supporters where basically upper middle class Republicans can cosplay as everymen when they show up to his rally and now this riot. And it gives them this convenient pretense of being an underdog fighting against the elite when they are in fact the establishment in their hometowns and counties.

And it really cuts both ways because liberals look at those people and how they dress and comport themselves and conclude “those must be those lower class Trump supporters who are uneducated and bigoted” when in fact only the bigoted part is true but they are often educated and in quite well paid business or knowledge or government positions.

saw a picture of the terrorists storming the capitol right now and one of them was holding a “jesus saves” poster and i think it’s time we have the conversation about christian terrorism in the united states

Atheists have been trying to tell you for years. 

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Christians are well aware of the people who use the faith for their own means. This is one such occasion. Plenty of Christians (including americans) don't agree with what Christian nationalists are doing, and are quite vocal about it.

“One such occasion”

These wackos have been terroririzing abortion providers since 1982.

Tiktok is on FIRE calling out the white supremacy we witnessed today!!!!

[Transcript: Regarding the news today, I don't see a lot of people making this connection, so I'm gonna make this connection. This is not the first coup to happen in America. The first successful coup in America was the 1898 Wilmington insurrection in which a biracial government was overthrown by white supremacists. 60-250 black citizens were murdered and over 100 black politicians were removed from their offices. In the aftermath over 100,000 black registered voters fled North Carolina. They will not teach you this in school. When I look at the attempted coup taking place right now, especially on the day where we just elected our first black senator from Georgia, all I can see is a nation that has failed to address white supremacy and anti-blackness at the core. I've been sitting around all day watching people on the news say “This is crazy. This is America, this shouldn't be happening.” Yeah. This is Amerikkka. That's why it's happening.]

So someone pointed out to me recently that in a few years, maybe a few decades, the history of the us during covid is probably going to get twisted. The fact that we all had to make and wear cloth masks is going to be hailed as a symbol of how we “"came together as a nation”“” or whatever the fuck propaganda spin they try to put on it.

So I just want to say, for the record, the time of the corona virus pandemic was not a time when america came together.

This was a time when people hoarded toilet paper and sanitizing supplies either for themselves or to sell at absurd prices to the desperate people who didn’t get to the store soon enough during the shortages

This was a time when scared parents were sending their kids to finish school in the spring in plastic trash bags because they couldn’t think of any other way to possibly keep their families safe

This was a time when grocery store and retail and service workers were forced to keep working whether they wanted to risk their health or not because they couldn’t make rent otherwise and the people with enough privilege to have remote jobs tried to repay them with applause instead of fair wages

This was a time when nurses had the hold the hands of multiple dying people every day as their families watched their loved ones die over a video call because the hospital couldn’t risk having visitors

This was a time when city governments had to handle so many eviction hearings that they rented out convention centers and called in the national guard instead of doing a rent freeze to stop predatory landlords

This was a time when racism and police brutality were so unbearably horrible that people protested in the streets for months even though there was a god damn pandemic that our federal government wasn’t doing shit to stop and the cops were so mad that they were being asked to stop beating up black people that they were beating up everyone

This was a time when schools being forced to reopen in the fall or lose their federal funding had to draft templates for letters if a teacher or a staff person or a fucking child died from exposure to corona at school

This was a time when the president of the United states demanded that the cdc stop releasing data about all the people who were dying because of the warnings he ignored for months were making him look bad

This was a time when some state governments didn’t mandate masks and forced businesses to reopen because they didn’t want to pay unemployment to people trying to stay safe at home anymore

This was a time when Jeff Bezos was on track to be a fucking trillionare because everyone was ordering things on amazon instead of going to the store and the people he worked to death to get it didn’t see a single cent of it

This was a time when instead of providing homeless people with housing, we painted boxes on the ground to show homeless people how far away the had to be on the street to maintain social distancing

We did not come together to make cloth masks. Cloth masks represent nothing less than the absolute and utter failure of a nation’s government to inform and protect its citizens

This was not a time when we came together. This was a time when we survived, and not all of us made it.

This was a time when people casually talked about how many human lives the economy was worth without considering the evil that had just come out of their mouths.

This was a time when thousands of us died for profit and the ego of a cheating narcissists con man who scammed his way into the white house

This was a time that we survived. Most of us tried to do the right thing, stay home, limit trips to the store and socializing, wear a mask. And still, so many of us were lost. Thousands every day.

But that wasn’t a good enough reason for some people, for those among us who were too selfish to recognize the responsibilities we have toward one another as human beings.

This was not a time that we came together

This was a time that we survived

Not all of us made it

And those of us who did survive will never forget the evil we saw daily in our politicians and those around us

Google's unionizing

Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of CWA Local 1440. The union is called The Alphabet Workers Union (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called “Alphabet”).

Speaking of legal fictions, the union is opening membership to “TVCs” - temps, vendors and contractors - employees who have deliberately misclassified so as to avoid paying them benefits or extending normal workplace protections to them.

It’s a bold move, a countermeasure to thwart the other commercial advantage from worker misclassification: by creating multiple categories of workers, bosses can pit employees against one another, by dangling privileges in front of one group but not the other.

But it comes at a high price: to gain official legal recognition, more than 50% of eligible workers must join the union. By including more workers, the union is setting a higher bar for official status.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an5q9/google-workers-publicly-launch-union

But the union has momentum: a series of high-profile googler uprisings - driven by official tolerance for sexual misconduct, complicity in US military drone programs, secret collaboration with Chinese surveillance and censorship, and more - show how radicalized googlers are.

Google’s management - who cultivated an air of participatory, cuddly collaboration - have arrived at a point where the contradictions between their “values” and the company’s profits can no longer be reconciled.

In Dec 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru, an eminent Black AI scientist who refused to retract a paper critical of its profitable Big Data research. Management compounded their sins by making false claims about Gebru’s dismissal.

The unionization drive is under the CWA’s #CODE (Coalition to Organize Digital Employees) project. Though CODE is no stranger to conflict, Google represents a serious challenge, thanks to its partnership with notorious union-busters IRI Consultants.

(IWI’s tactics pale in comparison to the mercenaries that Amazon has hired to bust its unions: the Pinkerton company, who have spilled rivers of workers’ blood in their murderous history):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

For important context on the drive, check out Collective Action in Tech’s article on the announcement, which explains why googlers have formed a “non-contract union” that does not yet have official recognition.

https://collectiveaction.tech/2021/the-abcs-of-googles-new-union/

“Non-contract unions embody the idea that worker power does not come from legal processes, but rather through building power through solidarity.”

This is huge. Not only is it great for Google’s many workers, but the company’s management has long been far to the right of their workers in terms of politics, and Google is a large enough private government where worker organization could serve as a lever of changing company policy, and thus public policy

"I hope you never have to experience what it feels like to be terrified to fall asleep"

~Life with Type One

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Burn these corporations down!!

Y’all ever heard of copy right? You know there is other varieties of potatoes to grow they the ones bred specifically for lays potato chips?

hows that boot taste

If anyone every tries to lecture me on why copyrighted plants are a good thing I will kick them in the throat

no thats too close to their mouth, they might lick your boot

Wait, why is “The Dodo” bad?

I got quite a few questions and responses about why the online brand / website / Facebook page “The Dodo” shouldn’t be supported. Here’s a quick rundown:

Overall, “The Dodo” is not a news site. It’s a brand. It’s a website designed to get views and make money - it will do anything just to get those clicks. But it tries to sell itself as news, and therein lies the issue. They use strong language, buzzwords, and clickbait titles in order to push a vague, biased agenda that hurts those of us who work in zoos and other animal facilities.

Here is another strong, detailed breakdown of some of their common practices written by Why Animals Do the Thing

Not to be furiously antimodern but like. Existence has meaning

Existence has meaning, some of which is found and some of which is created, and doing this is among the noblest of human quests

this changes everything oh my god

do you understand why it trips me out that people can drive 45 minutes and be in aNOTHER COUNTRY? I drive for 45 minutes and im like

a city over 

I live in “Italy” and took a day trip to go to “Austria” and “Germany”

 #it is literally impossible to leave texas #you will be in texas #FOREVER

Chums, that’s sweet, and all, but Australia just ate Texas for breakfast. 

If you drive for 45 minutes in Australia you aren’t a city over, you’re just 45 minutes away from the city.

If you drive for 45 minutes in Australia you may not even leave the cattle station.

If you drive for 45 minutes in Canada you may not even leave your driveway.

If I drive 45 minutes in the us I’m just at another mcdonalds

If I drive for 45 minutes in Northern Ireland I’m 10 minutes into the sea.

I can’t drive. 

Most of the comics from the Lost Adventures anthology are just cute little oneshots or provide extra details about certain plot points, but Relics felt like it could have been an actual episode, and reveals some crucial (and very sad) information about the history of the airbenders.

It takes place during Book 1, when Aang still has a tiny bit of hope left that other airbenders could have survived by hiding–which actually makes a lot of sense, since the likelihood that every single air nomad (emphasis on nomad) alive would have been in the temples during the Fire Nations attack is incredibly small.  He finds a merchant selling airbender relics and claims to have bought them from a mysterious stranger living alone in the mountains. 

Aang heads out by himself to investigate and discovers evidence of an air nomad settlement. For a split second he thinks he has found another airbender, that he isn’t actually the last one…

…before the ‘airbender’ turns out to be the merchant to from earlier working with Zhao and his men to lure and trap Aang. 

This is sad enough, but Zhao then reveals some truly horrifying information: this was the same kind of trap that Fire Lord Sozin used to secretly continue his genocide of the airbenders. 

It turns out that a number of airbenders did avoid the main Fire Nation attack and went into hiding. This was apparently anticipated by Sozin, though, and he managed to lure and kill most, if not all, of the survivors in with similar caches of airbender relics.

Aang manages to escape Zhao, but the comic still ends on a dark note, with him not only accepting that he is the last airbender but also processing yet another atrocity inflicted by the Fire Nation upon his people.

There’s this person ok Tiktok that talks about their experience (and recovery) of growing up as the child of a mommy blogger and literally……..there’s going to be so many fucked up kids in the future and so many tell alls, books, movies, and shows about kids who grew up with bloggers and vloggers as parents. Hearing them talk about it reminds of like amazing amy from gone girl :/

https://www.tiktok.com/@throughandlou

Sometimes people are just soooo close to getting it.

Check out accidentally left wing on twitter it’s gold

same energy

also check out r/SelfAwareWolves

This reminds me of the antivax nursing student who couldn’t find enough sources for her antivaccine paper