bro I show up to this place and do menial tasks for them and then they give me money? suckers. does anyone else know about this hack?
wait a minute.. they get more money than they’re giving me? and the money comes from my menial tasks in the first place?? wtf??? guys watch out for this this is a scam
I’m having feelings about capitalism again. Mostly about the lack of respect shown for the workforce. I deleted a whole post because it got to be like seven paragraphs of me yelling about cheese and I sounded absolutely batshit.
The summary of it was that y'all are seeing empty shelves and the workforce quitting en masse because 2020 and 2021 were “fuck around” and brought us to 2022’s “find out”.
The supply chain has been collapsing far longer than consumers noticed. Yeah, maybe you’ve been coming into the store and buying goat cheese crumbles on a regular basis and figured that there was no problem, but you didn’t see me behind the scenes being shorted two out of every three orders I placed for them, and just trickling out my backstock a little at a time so I never had an emptyshelf, just nearlyempty.
The warehouse workers noticed before I did, because they’re the ones who got product from the processors or manufacturers. And the manufacturers noticed before that, because they knew when they weren’t getting the raw materials. And the transportation workers are the ones who could see this happening all along, because they’re the ones who are with the supply chain every step of the way.
The shelves have been empty for a long time. People are just noticing it now because it got to the store level.
You know when you’re drinking a thick milkshake through a straw, and you run out of shake, but it takes you a few seconds to notice that your cup is empty because you’ve still got some shake in your straw, and you don’t know it’s gone until you hit that air bubble? It’s like that. The cup’s been empty for a bit. We’re just now hitting the air bubble.
[just gestures at the notes of this post]
Everyone is feeling the crunch. And I keep coming back to the thought that so many people are leaving their jobs not because of illness, but because they (understandably!) can’t deal with the pressure anymore. It’s been constant, and it’s physically, emotionally, psychologically draining work. The workforce has been metaphorically crumbling for longer than it’s been literally crumbling.
We’re tired, and the corporations and consumers want us to pretend like nothing is wrong. Just use the backup product. Use the other brand. Don’t wear the gloves unless you have to. Just put something on the shelf to fill the holes. Pretend like nothing is wrong so that everyone else can keep pretending like the pandemic is over and life is normal again.
I mean, we’re doing what we can. We’re all doing important work. It doesn’t always seem like it. We’re just shelf stockers, we’re just transportation drivers, cashiers, baristas. But you know! You’ve lived in this Covid world too! You know how necessary morale boost is. You know how important it is for your mental well being to be able to go get a fluffy coffee drink when you’re sad. To hop over to the store for a pre-made salad so you can spend your own energy on something else and not worry about nutrition. To know that your garbage will be picked up so you don’t have it in the house. The world is filled with people doing little day to day jobs so that you don’t have to worry about them. And we’re trying to keep those things going, even through the struggle and the shortages.
The bottom line of the supply chain problems is people. The people are getting sick. The ones who aren’t sick are rightfully deciding that they can’t handle the constant crunch and they’re leaving to take their chances with other jobs. When someone is standing there like Atlas holding the world on their shoulders, and then you add in all the people from customer to corporate yelling that you’re not doing enough, it’s not enough, make it more normal, make it like it was! Then yeah, you’re going to set the world down and say “fine, fuck you too.”
Right now, the best thing you can do to help is be kind, be kind, be kind.
[gestures once more to the notes, because it’s filled with stories]
Right now, the best thing
you can do to help is be
kind, be kind, be kind.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Been thinking about ableist criticism of landlords, capitalists, etc., as “lazy”, “parasites”, and so on.
Thinking about how so much of vampire lore follows from their Byronic/Dracula characterization as predatory aristocrats (e.g. Marx: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”)
The problem being that the conception of “workers” versus “parasites” places many disabled people in the category of “parasite” for the sin of “existing without being able to produce material benefit to others”, irrespective of their ability to coercively exploit others.
If you’re interested in making time for a video essay on this, John The Duncandid
Really, what makes a typical vampire frightening and landlords and capitalists so horrid is the tremendous coercive power they have, thru supernatural means for vampires and thru state violence for the latter.
An interesting corrective of this would be (or is, if someone has an example) the disabled vampire — crippled or even just broke-toothed, kept alive by the generosity of others who merely enjoy the vampire’s company.
Not the vampire as aristocrat, preying on the weak, but vampire as valued community member, storyteller, granary of knowledge and traditions.
You can imagine the horror of someone from the outside seeing a community give up their blood to keep an undead creature alive — assuming all who did so were in its thrall.
Or someone from within the community wanting to profit off of the knowledge of something so old rather than be kind to that “creature” for no material benefit.
But if so, that person would be the villain rather than vampire who is just staying alive.
daily reminder that there is absolutely nothing normal about being expected to waste a majority of your life at a corporation to survive instead of indulging in better life experiences ✨
Burnout is honestly such a mild word for what people use it to mean. I’m not experiencing “burnout”, which sounds so casual and routine that some face masks and a little rest is going to fix it.
My body and mind and even nervous system are stretched to the point that it’s going to take a lot more than just a “break” or a few self care tips to recover, and even then, my recovery is just so that I can reenter the spaces that contributed to me being this way in the first place. I’m a little bit more than just burnt out by this.
Workplaces and educational institutions aggressively overwork us, expose us to all kinds of discrimination, which they overlook and gaslight us out of acknowledging, and then constantly ask us to ignore our mental, emotional, and physical needs so that we don’t inconvenience them.
We’re not burnt out. We’re borderline traumatized. Burnout is always talked about like something transient and mild that a little rest and relaxation will fix.
But we’re exhausted. We need deep rest and healing. We need new systems. We need new ways of being. The language around burnout just seems like a way of upholding these current violent systems and downplaying their impacts.
16-year-old queer Latina Jessie Hernandez killed by Denver police January 29, 2015
Jessie Hernandez’ friends describe her as goofy, lovable, with an infectious smile. On Monday morning, the Denver police officers saw in Jessie — a Latina, queer-presenting young person — a threat. For this reason, Jessie is now dead. Just another person extrajudicially killed by a police officer.
On Monday morning just after 7am, police officers from the Denver Police Department arrived in an alley where Jessie Hernandez and a few friends were parked on a call of suspicious activity. When the officers determined the vehicle had been reported stolen, the officers approached the vehicle. Police said that when they approached, the driver hit one of the officers with the car. Both officers fired several shots, struck, and killed Jessie. It is the third time in seven months that the Denver Police Department has claimed that suspects shot by officers have used cars as weapons. When a young woman who pulled out her phone to film the aftermath, she said an officer yelled at her: “Don’t you dare!”
Run-ins with abusive policing are not unusual for LGBTQ youth of color, and in fact, criminalization plays a huge role in the lives of LGBTQ people of color. LGBTQ people of color experience policing in many of the same ways other people of color do: we are stopped and frisked, we are racially profiled, we are victims of laws that bring together our nation’s draconian and increasingly criminalizing immigration laws with discriminatory policing, like Arizona’s SB1070.
But LGBTQ people of color also experience discriminatory policing that is very particular to the ways officers perceive sexual orientation and/or sexual identity and expression. One of the ways this happens is through the use ofcondoms as evidence: LGBTQ people, especially trans women of color, are profiled as trading sex, and can have condoms confiscated and used as evidence of prostitution-related crimes in jurisdictions across the country. LGBTQ people experience sexual harassment and assault that is very particular to sexual orientation or gender identity and expression, like being asked by police officers for sexual favors. And LGBTQ people, particularly gender non-conforming LGBTQ people of color, are often subject to humiliating strip searches, the purpose of which are to determine a subject’s “real” gender.
LGBTQ people of color, and particularly youth and trans and gender non-conforming people, are often read as “off” or suspicious, and are consistent targets of discriminatory policing.
I’ve written before that women who are targeted by the police, particularly trans and gender non-conforming women, are rarely candidates for “innocence.” They are seen as disposable, far from being moral actors. Jessie Hernandez is already being painted negatively, already being blamed for her own death at the hands of the state. To the police, and surely much of the media that will cover her death, she was a wild, pot-smoking lesbian who used her car as a weapon against the police.
And what if she was? Does that truly justify being killed?
Let’s talk for a moment about what constitutes “justified.” I recall a white man in Aurora, CO — just outside of Denver — getting out unscathed after shooting up a movie theater, killing and injuring dozens. If an armed, dangerous person can be apprehended safely — as surely he should have been — why wasn’t this possible for the unarmed Jessie Hernandez? Why does this seem so impossible for people of color in general? How is it that the bodies of people of color are, on their own, a bigger threat to officers than a white guy with multiple firearms?
White supremacy is how. A system meant by design to exert control over communities can do little else.
Jessie Hernandez did not deserve to die. She did not deserve to have her bleeding, dying, body handcuffed and searched, being flipped lifelessly on the street, before she got any medical attention. Her friends did not deserve the lifetime of trauma this incident will provide them. Even if the car was stolen. Even if Jessie did injure an officer with the car.
“I mean, with everything that’s going on,” a friend said in tears at a vigil, “it wouldn’t be a surprise that she got scared, you know?”
Women’s deaths and abuse at the hands of the police rarely make the news in the same way that the deaths of some men do, but today we speak Jessie Hernandez’s name. Today we remember.
the idea that suffering (usually in silence) is a virtue has wreaked havoc on our culture, and capitalism has been all too happy to co-opt it. fuck the protestant work ethic, being in pain does not make me a better person, fuck you
Love that the second anyone noticed ballooning higher education costs and the interest rates on the student loans needed to pay them the mainstream media flipped a switch and we INSTANTLY transitioned from the world of “go to college or you won’t accomplish anything with your life” to “why would you waste your money on school you idiot?!” And the entire previous centuries consensus on the matter was swept under the rug just like that!
“Is basing your entire society around the investment/profit motive going well son?”
