rabbitsquirrel

I think it's insane that even in the most leftist and "progressive" spaces the idea of equating morality with looks is alive and present and no one fucking bats an eye at it. like racists and mysoginysts are always portrayed as fat and hairy and generally unkept, as a contrast to the morally good and attractive leftists of course; people will have no problem being genuinely fucking awful about someone's appearance if they're deemed to be a "bad person". and the worst part is you point all of this out and people act like you're reading too much into things like no dude you gotta start using your brain more

#“this is how unproblematic people age” have you considered that ageing is morally neutral

Invasive plants need to be understood as part of a much larger cycle of incredible violence against the land.

For context: erosion on that scale occurred as a result of our clear-cutting entire states. The land east of the Mississippi used to be covered in old-growth forest to an extent that we literally can’t imagine anymore, because most of us have never seen a forest over 100 years old. It turns out if you remove all vegetation from a landscape, you end up with a bunch of loose soil ready to move downstream. A fast-growing plant that covers everything in dense vegetation sounds like salvation when you’re surrounded by 40-foot deep gullies that get wider with every rainstorm.

A lot of the south too was covered in Canebreaks, basically bamboo forests like a lot of South Asia, I don't know the specifics of the ecology, but bamboo being a grass I assume is rhizomatic like other grasses and forms a big net of roots that prevent erosion. *I assume* (pleez ecologists weigh in)

This is a case study in how violence against ecosystems goes so closely hand in hand with violence against people. The violence against the indigenous caretakers of the land, and the violence against the enslaved captives that were forced to clear the Rivercane and work the cotton fields that would degrade the soil into nothing.

This painting was added in another reblog chain, it's good to have it on this thread

I hope they name a new law after mitch about what constitutes alive and able to serve

The senate floor is remodeled to include med-gas and other medical hookups to the seats, often called the Mitch Hitch. Not just the bill is on life support!

movie rec!!!

from what i've observed, i do think there is some pressure for women in not explicitly feminist leftist circles to affect a kind of "cool girl" posture for the benefit of the men in the movement

in any just world where international sports were run by bodies with any concerns or purpose other than corruption and self-enrichment, the USA would be banned from hosting international sporting events after the wretchedly racist treatment of the iranian, senegalese, uruguayan, uzbek, and iraqi teams this world cup--not to mention of game officials and fans--as well as the absurdly corrupt direct intervention on balogun's red card

Coffee is the second most valuable primary commodity in the world, only below oil. The industry generates 60 billion dollars annually, but of that, only 10% ends up in the hands of the peasants who grow the coffee. Also in the cocoa market, producers in Ivory Coast and Ghana, who supply nearly half of world output, habitually obtain less than 10% and even less than 5% of the final sale price. In fact, while the proportion of total income received by producers has been declining for decades, the European countries that re-export this same cocoa enjoy, by contrast, growing profits: between 1965 and 1989, African producers earned 34% less per kilogram exported than European re-exporters; between 2000 and 2010, this gap had already grown to 76%. Likewise, between the 1970s and the 2000s, the markup on African coffee re-exported from Europe rises from 50% to 300%, allowing European firms to re-export each kilo of coffee with an average markup of 4.11 dollars over its import price. According to a report issued by the International Coffee Organization (ICO), this commodity contributed, in 2009, some 31 billion dollars to the economy of the nine principal importers, a figure that doubles the total export earnings obtained by the 40 producing countries registered with the ICO.

This disparity affects not only primary commodities, but also the industrial exports of dependent countries. The 30GB iPod Video, launched by Apple in 2005, constitutes a classic example. The final sale price of this iPod model reaches 299 dollars. A large part of the value added, around 140 dollars, is captured by producers of parts and components, among which Japan, the United States and South Korea stand out. Distribution and retail sectors in the United States add another 75 dollars, while Apple captures a gross margin of 80 dollars per unit. By contrast, the share of value captured by China, where the assembly of components takes place through the exploitation of tens of thousands of workers, amounts to only about 4 dollars of the final sale price. Studies on the value chain of the iPhone 4, launched in 2010, offer the same results. South Korea produces around 50% of the components; American, German and French firms produce the rest of the parts. Despite China's manufacturing contribution, assembly costs, around 6.54 dollars, represent about 1% of the final sale price and less than 3.5% of the factory price. Apple, for its part, captures a margin of 270 dollars per unit. The same holds in the Nokia N95 chain, where assembly represents only 2% of the retail price. These cases confirm that the country of final assembly captures a small portion of the commercial value of the product, while component manufacturing, distribution and the lead firm, Apple or Nokia, concentrate the greatest part of the value added along the chain.