Notices by benignstein (activationfxn@todon.nl)

I have bad takes sometimes, but I really hope I alienate people who feel offended by discussions of white supremacy. It's literally the main fuel of fascism right now. If people can't even handle that, they can't handle opposing fascism in even the smallest ways.

"You see, your white supremacy is interrupting your connection to the spiritual realm"

Tell them being racist is toxic to their auras.

Someone tell "spiritual" cis white women that being transphobic causes their chakras to rot.

Just a reminder that tech companies move heaven and earth to keep children from seeing boobs, but pretend like deplatforming queerphobes, supremacists, and literal nazis is an unassailable technical challenge.

At one point the internet was literally mostly porn, and it's still way harder to filter porn than fash stuff. The decision to let fascism proliferate on the internet was an intentional decision, for god's sake quit giving the techbros who made these decisions ANY benefit of the doubt. Look at the ugly ugly truth, stare it in the face, it's good for healing from gaslighting. The internet doesn't suck, techbros suck.

@GreenandBlack @conatus

the capitalist class petitioned for the formation of police departments as a direct response to textile worker strikes in the early 1800s

apparently there weren't cops in most Northern U.S. states until the 1820s

Anybody know why we're not constantly rioting? Sincere question.

In the 70s colleges literally had to build "riot-proof dorms" because there was so much rioting.

If you're confused about why CNN seems to be focusing on Republican talking points and encouraging the candidates to attack each other:

CNN recently hired a new head politics editor, Sarah Isgur, who's a former Trump staffer and RNC employee with no journalism experience. She's a GOP shill.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/20/18233154/sarah-isgur-cnn-backlash-2020-coverage

if there's a way to feel good every day without being horribly ignorant about literally every sociopolitical issue, I'm going to find it

is there any difference between a nazi and a nazi-sympathizer?

This is why I'm all in on defeating fascism. If the world doesn't figure out a system that contains the fascist impulse before climate stuff happens, I don't want to be around. Capital is militarizing, technology is being bent into surveillance, and genetic/neuroscience techniques are advancing pretty rapidly. I don't want to see what it looks like if it all comes together. The people considered "other" will continue to shift as always, and you never know where it's going to land.

And that's why nazis won't stop at hurting people who are currently considered "non-white." Fascist regimes always become more exclusionary and seek to enact violence on as many "others" as possible. Notice how fascist regimes that are initially stoked by racism almost always go after the rights of women, queer folk, neuroA folk, religious minorities, political minorities, and disabled people. Causing suffering is the point, and the only real way to know you have control is if you can hurt "others" without consequence.

The Civil Rights Movement helped spread the idea that harming and excluding the "other" was a social ill, and many families who are now considered "white" benefited. This is one reason why I think people drastically overestimate how much oppression has anything to do with the targeted groups. Aside from economic considerations, it's more often driven by a desire to feel powerful or superior by enacting sadism and violence. As long as we live in a society that leaves these impulses unchecked, new out-groups will be created out of whole cloth. In fact, that's how the modern conception of "race" was invented.

In many workplaces in the first half of the 20th century, you would be given access to jobs and paid explicitly based on your "whiteness." For instance, in mining towns in Arizona in the first decades of the 1900s, there was a hierarchy of "whiteness" that determined your wage. Scandinavians, Brits, and Scots got paid the most, followed by the Irish, then followed by the Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards. Next were Mexicans and finally the Chinese. In a lot of cases, black and indigenous people didn't have access to jobs at all (and this hasn't changed as much as one would hope).

There are a lot of silences in American history, and one is how much the Civil Rights Movement helped the Italian, Irish, and Eastern European communities who were still considered "sub-white" into the 1950s. While never oppressed nearly as harshly as black and brown people in the U.S., they faced employment discrimination and lynchings by "whiter" people.

If the nazis get their way, I wonder what percentage of people currently considered "white" will still be considered so. Whiteness has a fascinating history of constant change. I have some morbid curiosity as to how it will evolve if we can't shake it as a construct - especially considering how much genetic data is floating around now.

The baby bugs can't find the tree on their own, so mom-bug collects the fruits for them and brings them back to the nest. Mom-bug walks across the forest to this one specific type of tress and moves from fallen berry to fallen berry, probing them with her little insect legs to see if they're ripe. It can take hours to find and collect a single ripe berry.

Kind-of amazed by the persistence of creatures with extremely specific living requirements. There's this insect called the Japanese red bug whose offspring can initially eat only the ripe fruit from a specific type of rare tree.