I can’t believe this needs to be said, but the rich are not doing you a service by employing you. They require you. Everything they have is contingent on the fact that you work for them and do what they say. Without you, the rich have literally nothing. Workers have power over the entire economy.
It is actually workers doing a major service to their employers by not unionizing and not starting a revolution, since literally the only thing workers need to do to grind the entire economy to a halt is put their hands behind their back and stop working. That is it. Workers could crash the entire machine in one moment if they wanted.
Stop calling them “job creators.” They aren’t. They literally require you. But you dont require them. You are wealth creators. And you have the power to take it back whenever you want. You just have to organize.
i *can* believe it needs to be said, but it should still be said with a lot of venom + indignance
I grew up hearing the phrase “you never stick with anything, what’s the point” a lot. I’ve always been attracted towards seemingly disconnected interests, and gone through phases of being really into something. But eventually my interest would fade and I would move onto something else.
Or at least that’s always how it’s been phrased for me, by others. Now I realize that my interest for the old thing didn’t fade so much as my interest for something new outshined it, and that’s vastly different.
I was always made to feel bad about it, with every abandoned endeavour I was told I needed to stop starting things if I wasn’t going to stick with them. I was told I was wasting time and money picking up these random interests and abandoning them after a year.
So eventually, I stopped picking things up. I told myself “what’s the point, I’m going to give up in a year anyway”. Even worse, I started dismissing every new interest, because I had no way of knowing if my interest was “real” enough or just another passing phase. I stopped trying new things, I stopped looking up stuff that piqued my curiosity, and having chronic depression made it really easy to leave everything on the dirty floor of neglected ideas. The more they piled up, the more depressing it was. All these things that could be nice, but I just can’t take care of them.
I realize now how bullshit that kind of thinking is. So what if I stopped doing karate after a year? That’s one more year of karate than most people I know. And in that year I learned discipline, I learned to listen to a teacher, something I had never done before in all my years of private education. I learned the true meaning of respect, that it’s something you do out of faith at first and maintain as it’s reciprocated, not something you do blindly and regardless of how you’re treated.
It gave me the foundation for the determination and grounding I needed to practice yoga. Another year. Not enough to be good at it maybe, but again a year more than most people I know and a year that is not lost, but gained. I learned balance, I learned to listen to my body, I learned how to let go of emotional tightness through physical stretching.
And then iaido, only a few weeks because I couldn’t afford to keep going. The year of yoga I had done a couple years previous had given me a better starting point than the other newcomers to the class. I already had balance, I had strength in my legs and I had better posture. In those months I learned the importance of precision, the true definition of efficacy, the zen state that is incessant repetition.
Did I practice long enough to get good at iaido, and yoga, and karate? No. Of course not. It takes years to become proficient and decades to master any of those things, but I learned other skills and those skills were an invaluable part of my growth both spiritually and emotionally. Likewise for my forays into painting, sewing, graphic design, film. I’m a photography student now heading into my second year of school, and every single second of practice I have in those other disciplines has given me more experience in those areas and made learning easier.
Skills carry over. They intersect and connect in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Nothing is ever lost, experience is never a waste of time or worthless or stupid. Allow your focus to wander, reflect on what you learn, and consider how you can keep using it in other aspects of your life. Stop telling people their interests aren’t worth their time.
One last hot take and then I’ll shut up: the reason adhd is framed first and foremost as a learning disability when it is in fact more apt to call it an emotional processing disorder is bc our society is only concerned w the ways neurological disorders impede a person’s ability to “function” aka get a job and contribute positively to capitalist society. How adhd affects interpersonal behaviors and emotional health is only relevant insofar as it relates to a person’s level of societal functioning PERIOD. There is no interest in improving our actual livelihoods
This is why girls are often not diagnosed w adhd until they are much older, bc they are forced to develop certain social awareness and self-surveillance capacities at an extremely young age and thus don’t perform “poorly” in the areas usually looked at to signify the disorder. But that doesn’t mean girls don’t take that distress out thru other avenues, just that the many alternative iterations of the disorder are ignored by professionals bc they don’t matter as far as society is concerned, as long as a girl is performing “well enough”
I am like 75% YES THIS about this post.
The last 25% is like, it’s not NO interest. People who study and treat ADHD do care about emotional suffering. On the other hand–the money, the research dollars, the operating budgets, the reports, the ways we talk to parents, the way we make people care, all have to speak the language of intellectual capacity and capitalist productivity.
Even now, if we say, “This disorder means the child will have no or few friends during elementary school,” the people responsible for funding assessment and therapy are like, yawn, make an eight-week after-school social skills group if it really matters. But if we say “this child might not get into college because of this” then HOT DAMN, suddenly people give a shit and will shell out money about it.
Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.
Free music that you can KEEP on FREEGAL
You are PAYING for all this with your tax money – USE THEM. Most likely systems will have all 3 or 2 out of 3, so if you aren’t sure call your local library’s reference/information desk and how you can get set-up or started.
I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day.
Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
Makes me happy to see people learn about the culture of my country 😀
Also, please remember that the idea of a nomadic or semi-nomadic culture being “less intelligent”, “less civilized” (and please unpack that word) was invented by people who wanted to make a graph where they were on the top.
Societies that functioned without 1) staying exclusively in one location or 2) having to make complicated, difficult-to-construct tools to go about their daily lives… were not somehow less valid than others.
Especially the first one! I have a really hard time knowing if somebody actually wants me to do something unless they are specific about the task and direct it towards me completely.
I don’t read that stuff. I haven’t read any of the novels. I don’t know anything about that world. That’s a different world than my world.
George Lucas
Genuinely friendly reminder: your fic is not any more or less legitimate for expanded universe content/adherence.
If the EU is your thing: cool, bring in whatever you want!
If you don’t have time for it/don’t care but like checking Wookieepedia: nice! Enjoy yourself!
If you just feel obligated: you aren’t! Do like George and imagine what you like!
SW fandom: seriously, create whatever world makes you happy.
What a splendid example of safe gun handling to set before impressionable youth.
Some of whom may not even have noticed that there are guns in the photo…
@korblborp said: I think most people would be fine with being accidentally shot by Milla Jovovich, tbh
😛
I say: Milla Jovovich is sexy and attractive, 9mm short rounds are neither.
Guns have one function. They turn living things into dead things.
Once you’ve accidentally shot someone (I did – my kid sister, many years ago, fortunately a low-damage ricochet – more here if you want) you’ll not regard shooting, or being shot by, even the prettiest, handsomest, whateverest person as anything but something you would rather please god not have happened.
@seriously-mike said: Those are inert lumps of plastic. Not even cheap toys.
I say: They look enough like guns that they should be treated like guns. Where does gun safety rules have an exception for Not Real Guns?
IF IT LOOKS LIKE A FUCKING* GUN, TREAT IT LIKE A FUCKING* GUN, BECAUSE GUNS ARE NOT FUCKING* TOYS.
* First time eff-word ever on my Tumblr, and I don’t even live in Merika, but please, people, if ranting like this can save just one life, I’ll fucking rant.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 