racism runs so deeply in people that if you call it out you are calling out them, and instead of sitting down and examining their own racism they lash out at you for being sooo meansies to them. you don't even have to be talking about anyone's racist behavior in particular because it makes racists so uncomfortable they will come forward themselves and act like you're targeting them specifically. it's okay when they do it because they're doing it in the correct way, in the nice way! they don't mean it like that. in fact they're actually being progressive. you're the cruel one for acting like their racist behavior is racist. you're the problem if you're bothered by their comfort racism. you're the bitchy colored person who makes eeeverything about racism when it so clearly isn't. i'm fucking sick of this.
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Here was a write up of direct results five years later (2021): Five years later, Panama Papers still having a big impact - ICIJ
ICIJ’s massive cross-border investigation remains an influence — and a catchphrase — in politics, business, academia and pop culture, half a
And a similar 10 year update from April 2026: Ten years after the Panama Papers, enablers and tax cheats are still being brought to justice - ICIJ
A look back at a decade of changes after the Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation sent a shock through the offshore world.
And here is an article on the specific ramifications on U.S. tax law and enforcement: Panama Papers 10th Anniversary: U.S. Tax Implications, IRS Results & Compliance Lessons For American Taxpayers - Tax Authorities - United States
April 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers, one of the largest data leaks in history. The leak exposed how wealthy individua
And a BREAKING UPDATE: The trial of Yorgen Fenech, the man accused of masterminding the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia (put respect on her name) began on July 1, 2026 and is ongoing - you can go watch coverage of it.
The Degiorgio brothers pleaded guilty to carrying out the bombing and are serving 40-year prison sentences. The two suppliers of the bomb also received life sentences.
Others involved (middlemen, etc) have received a variety of reduced aentences and pardons based on their participation and testimony to take down Yorgen Fenech.
The former prime minister of Malta, Vincent Muscat, resigned and trials are ongoing.
Not to minimize how bad the world currently is, because shits not great, but don't ignore the wins when they actually exist. There ARE steps towards justice, there is still good in the world and people working to correct course. Don't let the gloom of it all jade you from seeing the action and effort that IS happening.
When you try to talk about enshittification, it sounds like conspiracy theories. (I'm not crazy)
Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.
Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)
I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)
YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)
The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)
The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)
The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)
It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)
Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???
To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)
So I talk about enshittification (it sounds crazy), so people don't forget that things have been made worse on purpose (it's true), even though I sound crazy. (maybe I am)
It's called planned obsolescence and it was invented when lightbulbs could still run for 1000 years. Enshittification is the web-specific (and more specifically social media) version of that.
Eh, they're related concepts, but a lot of people clearly haven't read the original article that defined it, and it shows.
Enshittification isn't planned obsolescence, which is just making things shitter by putting a time limit on how long they function. It's a feature that serves the seller and the stock holders, not the customer. Enshittification is a process, not a feature.
The beginning part of enshittification is deliberately making a better product than the nearest competitors, and giving it to people for free.
An essential part of enshittification is not merely drawing you in with something good, but making you depend on it as a key underpinning of your life. The only way you communicate with many of your friends and family (Facebook). The only way to order most items you need, when you need them (Amazon). The only way to process online payments (PayPal). The only way to get up-to-the-minute news and send out emergency messages (Twitter).
The first version of the platform (and it is specifically a platform thing - a platform being something you use to accomplish your other projects) has to be so good that virtually no one goes anywhere else anymore.
That step is like the old Starbucks thing of opening a million locations, offering a quality product, undercutting the local competition until they go out of business and you can't go anywhere else, at which point the prices rise and the quality goes down. The standard monopoly playbook.
But enshittification is more insidious than that. It's about creating a (virtual) place that you need to use not simply to get one product, but to accomplish the important things in your life.
People don't stay on Facebook because it's the only way to socially interact online - it's not! People are trapped using Facebook even though they hate it because their elderly parents and high school friends use it and won't use anything else.
People don't leave Amazon because when you rely on deliveries (eg you are disabled, you live somewhere rural, you need a package your next day or your boss will kill you), with a Prime account, it's the only way to accomplish what you need. AND it's the only way to watch a lot of your favourite TV shows, or access Kindle Unlimited books etc. When I choose between, say, Disney+ and Prime, I reflect that both companies suck, but Prime gets me free and fast deliveries that include everything from groceries to medicines to compost. I am disabled. When I can I order from somewhere else. But relatively frequently I can't. So right now I have Prime and not Disney+.
Enshittification isn't just about eliminating the competition, it's about *trapping* you into using something that gets worse and worse while being the only way for you to get things that are genuinely important. They make you live your life through them by taking indirect ownership of intangible things, like vital pathways to maintain your friendships, and then once they have you, they count on the combination of inertia and the value you place on those intangible things to keep you there no matter how bad it gets.
So I, who have never liked Facebook, even right at the start when I had to sign up to accept a party invitation, am still there, despite everything, because a whole bunch of my friends, my publishing network contacts, and my family, will not go anywhere else. They just won't leave. So leaving Facebook, for me, means severing contact with hundreds of people, some of whom are extremely important to me.
That's enshittification. It's the process by which they make sure you don't leave when it gets shit.
And yeah, the only way to tackle this is to regulate the fucking tech companies. Tell your MP.
Johnny’s probably gonna get some sort of similar nickname in the paranatural side of town like “The Dragon of East Island” or somethin and he’s gonna hate it just as much
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and to the children in the notes saying we need this fucking baby talk to get around censorship online; there's been no credible evidence that any site other that YouTube (which will only demonetize your video, ftr) will actually censor or hide content that include words like rape, pedophile, gun, terrorist, etc. etc. and even if we take as a given they were (which, again, they are not), do not fucking comply in advance, you absolute fucking coward. and ESPECIALLY do not comply by altering your real life fucking vocabulary. don't let the technocrats dictate what words you say holy fucking shit dude!!!!!!!!!!!!
i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.
Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.
Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.
However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.
The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.
The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.
B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.
Inside one empty shell is a written note: it's all we can do for you now.
The most important part of all this is that these small acts of bravery and noncompliance cannot be known as long as the enemy still stands, and might never be known. Just because it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything doesn’t mean it’s true. The best malicious compliance or subtle sabotage is the one that’s never detected, but makes ravages nonetheless.
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He didn't steal 10 million dollars. They made that number up as a loss, they never fucking had it. Rockstar has spent more than a billion fucking dollars on GTA VI and will likely make billions more when it gets released.
Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.
Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.
And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?
What with GTA VI going up for pre-order i'd just like to remind everyone that rockstar conspired with the UK government to lock an 18-year-old away for life for hacking them.
it’s actually wild how terrified of the general public most usamericans are. like you don’t realize it if you’re someone who mostly walks and takes transit and spends a lot of time in populous public spaces but then you talk to one of the thousands of people that seemingly never set foot in any public space besides a parking garage or a starbucks and you suddenly understand why it’s so easy for fascist rhetoric about the dangerous alien to take root. this country’s median voter pretty much never interacts with strangers who aren’t their coworkers or people they met on dating apps
saw a post on instagram that was literally someone citing statistics saying public transit is one of the safest travel options out there and the comments were literally just “ummmmm op this is so ableist and misogynistic of you :) don’t you know the average public transit user is a dangerous violent criminal who wants to set you on fire :)))”
it must be so terrifying and sad to go through life convinced if you set foot outside your car in public or interact with people outside your nuclear family you’ll instantly be raped and robbed by the Evil Poors no wonder so many of these people are reactionary tar pits
Eternally relevant read is True Crime is Rotting Our Brains by Emma Berquist, a woman who actually experienced a (rare!) stranger-attack while just walking outside, and thinks that people who panic about this shit need to chill the fuck ouuuuuutt and also recognize how much they're using it to launder their bigotries
Edit: I've attempted to add this link at least three times and Tumblr is being stubborn, so let me try posting it on its own:
There's this really cool thing that a handful of diaspora Palestinians have committed a lot of time and effort to called vetting (maybe you've heard of it?) in which they speak directly with a fundraiser holder face-to-face or over phone/video call to verify all portions of a fundraiser. There are so many posts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] that talk about the details of this process to verify that a fundraiser organizer, recipient, and the details are correct by verifying legal documents like proof of residence, photo ID, fluency in Palestinian-Dialect Arabic, family tree constructions, etc.
These vetters have been posting about Palestinian/Gaza/Arab culture/Islam/etc. for a really long time, [1] [2] [3] (these are Wayback machine links to the tumblr accounts of 90-ghost, el-shab-hussein, & nabulsi before you start crying "but, you can post backdate on tumblr!") [4] (moayesh's Instagram because his tumblr is fairly new) meaning that they didn't just pop up after Oct 2023 to start posing as a qualified individual. They are real diaspora Palestinians with stories to tell and culture to share.
GFM also has strict requirements for withdrawing money, needing evidence of a bank account from a country they service and a solid way to transfer funds from that bank account to the recipient's bank account. If the funds are withheld from the intended recipient, that can be reported to and resolved by GFM.
If you're too overwhelmed by trying to distinguish between scams and real fundraisers, then whatever. That's your problem, not everyone else's. You don't need to publicly announce to everyone that you're too busy/tired/incompetent/ignorant to properly investigate fundraisers, so everyone else should stop supporting them as well. There are plenty of vetters and scam-busting blogs dedicated to helping people distinguish between real and fake.
Donating to established nonprofit aid organizations is absolutely a good deed and is much more straightforward, but it's not the only way to help. Especially with the repeated aid blockages, sometimes Ghazan families need a more direct flow of money to pay for the ridiculously inflated cost necessities (I recently received a video from Farah wherein she states that a bottle of dish soap cost $50. $50!!!!) as well as save up for evacuation costs once the Egyptian border crossing opens. (Thousands of dollars!)
With a few minor parts removed, here is a copy/pasted text that was originally in a reblog but now in its own post since the original account is gone. Links that didn’t work anymore have been left out. I figured it’d be useful for anyone who needs it.
White people, when it comes to religion you have to come to the realization that a lot of non-white cultures have a strong connection to religion. Religion isn’t just the thing that your parents used to be homophobic towards you. There’s millions of religions in the world and religion plays a big part in other cultures.
Also, Christianity and Catholicism aren’t the only religions in the world. Just grouping all of religions around the world and just watering it down to these two is not constructive.
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the idea that every summer will be as hot if not hotter than this for the rest of my life is unbearable i need to (remembers suicide jokes are bad for my mental health) murder an oil executive
“We are descended from the Witches you couldn’t burn!”
It’s a nice sentiment, I like the energy, I do. That said, I am actually descended from a “Salem Witch,” and my Ancestor, Mary Isham Towne, was not burnt at the stake, she was hanged by the neck until dead. We’re not savages y’know.
Furthermore, Mary Isham Towne was a churchgoing, god-fearing woman, who just so happened to be a widow who owned a piece of land that the local judge wanted to purchase, but which she refused to sell, and which he set out to acquire pretty much immediately after he sentenced her execution.
