“The call for civility always comes from positions of privilege. It comes from people who would be inconvenienced by a disruption of the status quo. It never comes from those who are fighting for their right to exist. They don’t have the luxury of civility, and neither should we.”
man i don’t wanna hear about harm reduction anymore. we cast our ballots and we voted our harm reduction candidates in and the harm increasing party is still getting their way. like i cannot stress enough this is all happening under the harm reduction guy. harm reduction was basically his main campaign promise but the harm is still very much going strong and not being reduced
Electoralists desperately holding onto & defending their decrepit, crumbling, oppressive system: “Um actually everyone getting mad about how pointless their ‘harm reduction’ vote turned out to be are wrong because we’re paying for not voting hard enough back in 2016. So this is actually still our fault for not having been good enough Patriotic American Citizens and thus we deserve to be oppressed. Vote!”
Shockingly you, nor millions of people, deserve to be oppressed just because they didn’t say “no” loud enough! Or in unison! Or “”“”“"correctly”“”“”“ by filling in a fucking ballot! Which still does not, did not, and will not prevent state oppression! Just like it already hasn’t! Someone shooting you in the face isn’t in the right just because you didn’t fill in the proper forms demanding you not have your autonomy or life taken away!
And what you refuse to get through your thick skulls is that if the people in power want to destroy something of yours, of ours, they will! Because they can! No fucking ballot can stop this! "It’s because of 2016” it’s because Evangelicals, politicians, lobbyists, and capitalism benefits from constraining the modes of life and liberty (which, no, we do not have) to what is deemed most beneficial for them and obtaining/retaining said power, you fucking troglodytes. They are not beholden to some magical force imbued by checkmarked boxes, ffs
[I.D.: three tweets by Mary Annaïse Heglar, twitter handle “MaryHeglar”. the first reads, “We can have a livable future or billionaires. Not both.” end tweet. the second tweet reads, “So sick of hearing that government "inaction” brought about climate change. They acted: they subsidized fossil fuel companies, gave them leases, spouted their misinformation, criminalized protest. Nothing about that is passive.“ end tweet. the third and final tweet reads, "The climate crisis is the result of government collusion, not government inaction.” end tweet. end i.d.]
Anti-gun leftists are fuckin loser nerds and genuinely fucking awful at observing history
Restricting weapons has always come from a landed, rich, powerful ruling class attempting to pacify populations and squash any possible chance at resistance or even self-defense, affording weapons as a privilege to only the martial ruling class. Gun control is the same story. Even modern gun control comes directly from the mouth of billionaires like Bloomberg, who pours hundreds of millions into campaigns to push this idea. All of the proposals presented and laws enacted simply serve to make guns inaccessible to working-class populations. It also relies on means of production being controlled and consolidated in the hands of those loyal to the ruling class to control the flow of weapons and make them inaccessible to the working class. Ignoring all that, say it works perfectly, it’s an ideal that can only possibly work in metropolitan areas and hangs rural people out to dry.
On every level, anti-gun politics are disastrous and victimizing. They only serve the interests of the bourgeois.
It is propaganda.
What do you plan on doing with the guns exactly?
what is this pithy fucking gotcha supposed to prove?
oh no, you found us out! we actually wish to, yes, shoot our guns (!!!) if need be at people who attempt to do us harm with their own guns! that means we must be as bad as they are. smh if only we’d wished harder that guns weren’t a central reality living in this country we could’ve avoided this whole situation, with the power of thought and ideals. smdh
Very tone deaf to publish this as chinese people in Shanghai are locked up in severe mass quarantine for weeks and it’s almost uniformly viewed negatively by cn netizens
Restrictions in Shanghai are already being lifted. That’s a *lockdown*, buddy. The thing almost no western government did. It’s not meant to be a pleasant thing, it’s meant to stop the spread of the virus.
Also, i would rather be “locked up in severe mass quarantine” for a few weeks than, you know, dead or permanently disabled due to covid side effects.
The government was (and still is) distributing food for people who are locked down, just like they did in Wuhan and just like the Vietnamese government did.
And if you have to measure between “face some difficulties providing food while keeping the virus from spreading” and “letting er rip and letting millions of people die like in the US”, then yeah, you gotta use “sheer arithmetic”.
You have no idea what a colossal amount of bodies a million is.
‘should a million people die, or should far less than a million people die - like 200 times less people?’
‘you can’t measure human life by arithmetic… if I were in control of the trolley problem i would simply choose to Do Better’
I gotta say, my favorite part about this post has got to be westerners in the notes harping on about how “the gubirmint bolted people in their homes!!! They are eating their dogs and grandma!!! Everyone would literally rather die than endure a lockdown like Shanghai’s!!!”, meanwhile people from Shanghai/China are just going “what… are you even talking about…”
This is all propaganda, China can’t be trusted with this. I’ve seen videos of people bored in to there houses. Trapped in them while the place burned around them. You don’t hear the bad stuff because they are so censored and can’t post about stuff like that without fear of retaliation from the government. I’ll actually look for proof as soon as I can
The duality on the notes from westerners and from actual Chinese people is something else. You know, you can’t really achieve DPRK levels of “we lie so much about this country that people will believe anything negative we say about it on the internet” propaganda when 1 in 5 internet users IS Chinese lol
“But I don’t have the experience or credentials to …”
Neither do the people that are there!!!
[Image description: Tweet from Jennifer Iacopelli (@jennifercarolyn), time stamped 12:58 AM Jan 30, 2022: “School libraries don’t need you to donate copies of Maus and other banned books. They need you to step up and run for the school board so the books don’t get banned in the first place.” Description ends]
You literally could not do worse than the people who already have these positions.
The biggest qualification for local elected officials is the ability to work and not get paid for it. School board salaries vary a whole bunch by state and by district within the state. Most of them are very low.
City council, school board, county commissioners… these people have a lot of power over the local area, and they get little attention. It’s often not difficult to get elected to them, because those are cases where a few dozen votes from friends really do make a difference.
Pick a key local issue (like library books) and start campaigning. And when people seem dubious about voting for you, ask them what the person currently in the office has done for schools and students.
Odds are, they don’t know. Tell them your plan - three bullet-point items designed to appeal to parents, employers, and the general public.
(“Reduce censorship so our students get a good understanding of the diversity in the world today; make sure there are after school programs that let them learn to be good team players; have better health practices in schools so they’re not disease factories.” Or whatever.)
Very few people actually campaign for small local elections.
oh god that’s SUCH a good point. positions like this pay dick-all. my experience is that at a local government level, all elected officials are either retired or have a day job because the elected positions don’t actually pay enough for full time. and every time there’s a public utility rate increase, or a vote on a millage to help pay for the rec center, there’s people who raise absolute hell about elected officials secretly giving themselves raises with the money. and that’s, like. the opposite of the problem. the optics of voting for their own raises are too shitty. so the job pays crap and no one wants it. most of the time only one person even runs and it’s the person the last guy talked into running so she could quit without feeling bad. people with shitty agendas have NO problem getting these jobs despite a complete lack of qualifications and there’s no incentive to make them pay better because ‘pay elected officials more’ is a deeply unpopular opinion.
No longer is this about the rights of students to access books. It’s now about the rights of private businesses to sell books. Anderson suggests this is a new avenue for parents to fight.
“We are in a major fight. Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools,” he said.
Holy shit this is a BIG FUCKING WARNING SIGN. Challenges to school and public libraries aren’t cool obviously, but they’re not unusual and we have a framework for handling them. This is something new and alarming in a whole new way
Republican “free speech” y'all and don’t you forget it.
This is a direct challenge to the freedom of the press and if it isn’t struck down at the first hurdle we need to make sure it never sees the second one.
On the miniscule off-chance that anyone who sees my reblog might be thinking “oh, it’s just queer books that they’re trying to ban” - A Court of Mist and Fury is a het romance. It is a het romance containing het sex scenes, written by a straight white woman.
People have been warning all along that the right-wing thought police were never going to stop with queer lit or ‘woke’ lit, and that every time they got an inch they were going to take a mile until they’d banned absolutely everything that didn’t conform to their strict right wing fundamentalist Christian views. If you were waiting for proof of that, here it is.
You people realize the body positivity movement is literally a political movement right. Like it’s a movement that was started to improve the rights of fat people and stop discrimination against fat people. You realize that. It’s not a tea party where everyone just compliments everyone else on their looks.
One time I was teaching undergrads and we were talking about how you can even define what is “fair” in employment. And I was explaining how there have been court cases about employers forcing their employees to wear makeup or do their hair/nails, etc, so of course we end up talking about flight attendants. And my students, predictably, are like, “Well ok but in the case of flight attendants, being good looking is literally just part of the job description.” So I point out how applying this principle universally would basically make it so that any employer could refuse to hire someone who was fat or ugly. And That One Kid was like, “Well if it affects the business’s ability to make money, I mean, that’s just smart.” And so I say, “Yes, that is certainly what a capitalist would say. But don’t you think that allowing that capitalist interest to take precedence would lead to a world in which it’s legally permissible to refuse to hire someone just because they’re fat or ugly? Basically legalizing discrimination and blocking access to work and livelihood?” And this motherfucker is like, “Well, yeah. ”
When I tell you I almost had to leave…I was full-body shaking and afterward, my queer students came up and were like, “omg are you okay?”
So yeah, it’s fucking political. What you think is about personal aesthetic preference is actually oppressing huge groups of people, so.
This is a fascinating example because I actually am a flight attendant, and no the fuck it isn’t a part of my job description to “be good looking.” It hasn’t been since the 60s. We’re literally first responders. Should your ER nurse have to wear makeup in order to save your life?
Gordon Tootoosis, Aboriginal Canadian actor, activist, and band chief of Cree and Iyarhe Nakoda descent, as Cecil Delaronde in Canadian TV series Blackstone.
[image description: two stills of Gordon Tootoosis, captioned, “Leadership is about submission to duty, not elevation to power.” end description.]
This is one of the most profound statements on leadership I’ve encountered in a long time, and it really landed a hit on me. It’s difficult to discuss without getting a little weird about it, but for a long time I’ve been of the mind that the privilege of having a large readership implies the duty of giving back in specific ways – I just never thought of it in terms of leadership as submission to duty.
Especially after Mr. Shmusk’s firm anti-union, stop working remotely or stop working for us, *pro-free speech unless I’m paying a data collection company to monitor my employees for potential union leader activity, stance.
The court is due to hand down a ruling by the end of June, but many legal experts say the verdict is already clear, and the only question at this point is if the court’s conservatives will be giving a large gift to gun nuts or a colossal one. During oral arguments last November, the court’s conservative goon squad peppered attorneys with…hypotheticals, arguing that letting people carry a gun on, for instance, a crowded R train is not a public safety threat but an essential constitutional right. Brett Kavanaugh who, like Amy Coney Barrett, was nominated to the Supreme Court in part due to his firearms-friendly record as a judge—which the Giffords Law Center describes as “troubling” and “ideologically aligned with the gun lobby”—wanted to know why someone’s “proper cause” can’t just be “I want to be able to defend myself.” When plaintiff attorney Paul Clement charitably offered that the law could be struck down while still banning guns in “sensitive places,” but couldn’t answer Justice Elena Kagan’s question re: what, exactly, would constitute a sensitive place, Barrett, doing Clement’s job for him, asked, “Can’t we just say Times Square on New Year’s Eve is a sensitive place? Because now we’ve seen people are on top of each other, we’ve had experience with violence, so we’re making a judgment, it’s a sensitive place.” As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern wrote at the time, “it’s pretty cold comfort if New York can only ban guns in one of the most crowded places in the world on its single busiest night.”
25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.
It’s actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred. The picture above, famously referred to as “The Tank Man” was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre. (Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)
So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:
April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.
Many people, including workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.
Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.
Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.
Keep in mind, the people wanted nottheend of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.
Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…
June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.
June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.
June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.
Content Warning for video: blood
“Tell the world…”
I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.
Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)
The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.
After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.
Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.
I have never seen this video before.
What the fucking hell.
What the hell.
Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and let’s just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.
I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.
The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”
And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.
It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.
To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.
And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.
Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.
And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.
When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.
Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dad’s part. I don’t even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.
I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.
That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.
Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how it’d treat dissent, how it’d treat people who’re used to the idea and practice of freedom.
What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.
The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didn’t use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played — I know every word of China’s national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.
China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly — if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, I’d say this — the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you can’t find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You can’t talk about it in a roundabout away. You can’t change some elements of time/place/person and pretend it’s fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a “discussion”; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.
The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.
The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And there’s nothing more a government like China’s fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils can’t continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, I’m already in violation of its Article 38. It doesn’t matter I’m writing it in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter I’m a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.
Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.
Please help remember 8964 Tiananmen Square Massacre. That summer day, Beijing citizens asked Hong Kongers to please remember this event for them because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford to remember it themselves. Now that Hong Kongers can’t afford to remember it anymore, I’m hoping that everyone who reads this to please remember it, for the students who perished only because they wanted their government to be better, for the Tank Man who, on his way home with his groceries, decided to stand in front of a tank all by himself because it was the right thing to do.
33rd anniversary
Violate article 38. Please help the world remember June 4, 1989 (8964) as the day of Tiananmen Square Massacre. They cannot afford to remember, the world cannot afford to forget.
Make art, dialogue, change. Maintain a healthy skepticism and criticism of your government wherever you are.
Conservative gun rhetoric and abdication to the NRA has created a ‘warzone’ for children/students/teachers exponentially worse than actual military battle grounds.
Conservatives accuse progressives of “false framing” the conversation when they’re the ones actually creating the false narrative.
So to all progressives, keeping calling it like you see it.
A monster is a monster,
A war zone is a war zone,
and if your hair is on fire, act like your hair is on fire!
