The indoctrination never stops.
Conservatives need a minority target to keep their followers focused/unified on hate. As the followers obsess on hate, their lives/emotions are much easier to manipulate.
Conservatives always vow to restore the country to some distant past that never existed.
It's an endless loop of failure.
So obviously furries exist but the Tories and the British media trying to whip up a culture war frenzy about “Kids in schools identifying as cats” runs into one major problem…
Kids fucking love to wind adults up, especially those in positions of perceived authority.
Imagine sitting in class, knowing if you say something funny that it could end up on national news because your head teacher is a frothing culture war bigot.
Imagine all the other kids going along with it and backing them up.
I want slower packages delivered by transportation workers who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding
Some of us are old enough to remember when literally everything took about 4 weeks to ship.
My couch is arriving in 4 weeks and company gave us a $200 gift card in apology after telling us it would take 4 weeks when we bought the thing. I-this instant gratification is really doing something to us. I know I sound like a grumpy old woman but it is ok to wait for things if it means fellow human beings are treated fairly.
something that rly creeps me out…..occasionally ill see videos or articles for christians or christian missionaries that say something like “what you need to do is make friends with non christians and really get them to trust you and THEN you start preaching to them and bringing them to jesus” and that is….man how much would it hurt to know that the only reason someone’s hanging out with you is to convert you to a religion you were never interested in. maybe this is a real friend, someone you really really feel like you connect to, and all of a sudden you cant hang out with them without being scared they’ll bring out the jesus stuff.
charlie youre blowing my third eye WIDE open
hahahaha like a year ago I tweeted “Christianity’s attitude toward Jews resembles nothing so much as the attitude of a man toward a woman who won’t fuck him” and people got SO MAD at me
me: haha oh god this is so bad im making so many unsupported claims and pulling all this analysis out of my ass
my prof in the margins: excellent analysis!
me:
when i was in high school i used to write my papers thinking wow i’m just bullshitting all of this. then like a week before my senior year ended after all the grades were set, i was talking to my english teacher and told him you know i just bullshitted every paper i wrote. he told me that while i may have thought i was just pulling it all out of my ass, i genuinely knew what i was talking about and made well-supported analyses. i only thought i was bullshitting because it didn’t take much effort and it all seemed obvious to me. if you do well on your essays even though you think you’re just making it up as you go, chances are you’re not pulling it out of your ass. you’re just a genuinely talented analyst, even if the analysis that you’re making comes from a subconscious understanding of the material rather than a conscious effort to study it. give yourself some credit.
anything you pull out of your ass had to get there somehow
I think people need to get better at saying “maybe, maybe not” or “do I really need an answer?” when faced with uncertainty. this is something that gets taught to people with OCD, but I think the masses would benefit
“what kind of attraction am I feeling?” would it be the end of the world if that question didn’t have an answer?
“am I allowed to identify as x when I’m not sure if it applies to me?” maybe! who cares!
literally. you can apply the “fuck around and find out” method to anything
continuously feeling the need to hunt for answers is going to eat you up inside. take it from me. your life gets so much easier when you let yourself be unsure
life actually gets better when you leave the house consistently btw like im serious
if you don't know where to go, just wander! go to the store and don't buy anything, go to the library just to sit and do whatever you were going to do at home, go to a park and just walk around/sit outside for a bit (weather permitting, of course)
just put some headphones in and walk around the block a couple times if you really have nothing else to do, just getting a bit of air and change of scenery is so good for you
me the first few weeks of forcing myself to go on daily walks (it gets better tho)
i really need tumblr to learn the concept of “if you physically cannot do this then this post is not talking about you” because jesus christ.
@a-spectacular-pigeon you get it.
white people please just purchase native artwork and jewelry from native people i keep seeing idiot white people be like “waaah i wish i could support native creators but its cultural appropriation” girl why would beaders sell you their earrings then. just dont get a medicine wheel or a thunderbird then like damn it is that easy
If Native folks are making it to sell to white people with the approval of their tribe, it’s not “appropriation”–its support and appreciation! So yes, buy that native-made dream catcher, but not the mass produced fakes made by white people. Like, you can go to a pow wow and buy native crafts there, too.
here are some places to get native/indigenous goods and merch online if you can’t find something local or if physical access is an obstacle:
https://sweetgrasstradingco.com/
https://nativeharvest.com/
https://byellowtail.com/
https://www.salishstyle.com/
https://trickstercompany.com/
https://hutxh.com/
https://www.thentvs.com/
https://urbannativeera.com/
https://www.oxdxclothing.com/
https://kotahbear.com/
https://www.totemdesignhouse.com/
https://ginewusa.com/
https://eighthgeneration.com/
and the only native-owned comic shop in the world:
https://redplanetbooksncomics.com/
This semester in college we’ve been working with a company in an indigenous museum to help their sales
They work with native artists in all of Brazil, so the site is in portuguese
Buying from indigenous artists is not appropriation!
Luddites didn’t hate looms. They smashed looms because their bosses wanted to fire skilled workers, ship kidnapped Napoleonic War orphans north from London, and lock them inside factories for a decade of indenture, to be starved, beaten, maimed and killed.
Designing industrial machinery that’s “so easy a child can use it,” isn’t necessarily a prelude to child-slavery, but it’s not not a prelude to child-slavery, either.
The Luddites weren’t mad about what the machines did — they were mad at who the machines did it for and whom they did it to. The child-kidnapping millionaires of the Industrial Revolution said, “There is no alternative,” and the Luddites roared, “The hell you say there isn’t!”
Today’s tech millionaires are no different. Mark Zuckerberg used to insist that there was no way to talk to your friends without being comprehensively spied upon, so every intimate and compromising fact of your life could be gathered, processed, and mobilised against you.
He said this was inevitable, as though some bearded prophet staggered down off a mountain, bearing two stone tablets, intoning, “Zuck, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles, and lo, thou shalt mine them for actionable market intelligence.”
we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.
when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.
the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.
my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.
when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.
and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.
in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.
I imagine that the last generation to really feel this way, to really feel a before-and-after kind of world, was at the last turn of the century, which had 3 huge, life-changing inventions happen all at once.
In 1890, everybody rode horses, used candles to see at night, and communicated through letters.
By the 1920s (only 30 years later!), everybody had automobiles (or access to another form of 'self-driving' transportation like busses or trams) and nobody had horses. Nearly everyone had electricity in their houses. Nearly everyone had a telephone, or access to one.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine growing up, being taught by your parents all about how to ride horses and care for them and hitch them to a wagon, only to...not ever use that knowledge as an adult, because you have a car? Can you imagine learning how to make candles, finally getting good enough at it to be useful to your family as a teenager, only to flick a switch to turn on a light bulb as an adult?
I feel like that last huge change in technology is the same thing we are going through. I know how to read a paper map. I will never need to use this knowledge. But it's still in there; including the many patient hours my mother spent teaching me, and a lot of fond memories I have of her doing it. I know how to research a topic in a paper library, with actual books. Pretty sure I will never do that again. I memorize phone numbers, 'just in case'. In case what? The automobile (smartphone) gets un-invented? But I hold that knowledge in my head. It's there. It's part of me.
I wish I could speak to my great-great-grandmother, who had her first baby in 1900. To ask her, if what Millennials now are going through is what it was like for her Centennial generation. The absolute whiplash, from one way of life to another.
Kids born in 1890 knew how to make candles, and kids born in 1920 could not fathom why you would need to know this.
valtharr