Season of the Witch

I’m a little tired of the notion that being non-Christian but spiritual makes you, like… morally more noble or something. I grew up in a country which had its inherent faith (polytheistic and animistic) nearly fully wiped out when Christianity came, and before that was heavily damaged by the conquering nomad civilizations. My grandma was Orthodox to her grave and beyond. She raised an atheist son who was the kindest person in my life. 

"every time I accuse someone of something":

they will instantly shut up,

not ask what they did wrong,

never attempt to explain themselves,

apologize perfectly in a way that completely satisfies me without me needing to explain how to apologize nor exactly what they need to apologize for,

and then we "move on" but I'm still allowed to shun them and

I expect everyone else to be on my side and hate this person

Sometimes, conflict resolution means you learn that your accusation was unfounded and you were in the wrong. You misunderstood something, you overreacted, and YOU caused harm.

Almost everybody doing the work to restore ecosystems, grow native plants, and preserve rare species is 50 or older

The people I work with IRL have told me that my presence is encouraging because it means "the younger generation is getting involved with this stuff too." There's really not very many people my age

Social media and the internet have really decimated my generation's ability to network and organize with people IRL

Not in the sense that That Damn Phone causes your skills to atrophy, but rather, Gen Z has no idea how people organized before social media, and no idea what anyone over 40 is doing for good in the world

The vast majority of local native plant, wildlife, and gardening organizations have NO social media presence

It can link you to a few resources, but it is ultimately a complicated device to make you Buy Product

Google will not even show you the best websites out there for learning about the ecosystem. At all. Google recognizes few possible interpretations of your query other than "Google, show me a bunch of advertisements for [thing] so I can Buy Product." If your research doesn't end in Buy Product, Google has no interest in helping you.

Many people think that the way of finding things out before Google was books

But that's more wrong than right.

The way of finding things out before Google was community.

In reality, it's "opportunities" and "deserve" that indicates something deeply wrong and dysfunctional with our society. Outside of the numerous artificial competitive scenarios we are placed in where we strive against others to perform the ideal persona of worthiness as a human being, "having connections" is just how things get done.

This isn’t something that gets talked about a lot, and I have no idea how far the problem extends geographically, but if you care about poor people, if you care about sex workers, if you care about activists, if you care about privacy,

you should consider resisting the transition from cash to card-only payments that is happening in shops in some bigger cities. Including shops where only one register in a long row still accepts cash payments so anyone paying with cash needs to wait in line and sticks out.

Cash is how poor people help keep each other alive without immediately worrying about their benefit cuts, cash is what people get when they do a bit of work or sell some old stuff to feed their kids that week. Cash is how most sex workers get paid. A lot of people need to be able to make cash payments to feed their kids, pay their rent and basically to live.

Cash is also what activists use whenever they need protest supplies and don’t want their full name and address attached to the protest. Cash is how we buy any item we want to keep out of our digital footprint. But whether you’re buying a megaphone or  a dildo, you can’t do so privately if you can’t spend cash.

Doctors are to black women what police officers are to black men. That may seem controversial but I believe it to be true and I speak from personal experience.

If you’ve seen this TikTok you know that a 2016 study showed that 50% of medical students and residents thought that black people couldn’t feel pain the same as white people.

And we learned from this video that because of a 1999 study, to this day, there’s a black correction factor for the creatinin levels in black people’s kidneys, meaning we’re less likely to recieve a kidney transplant if needed.

So if you go to a doctor, feel you aren’t getting proper treatment or they refuse the treatment you’ve requested, say to them the following:

If you weren’t already going to spread this advice because black women are at risk, then spread it because it’s applicable to everyone else as well, including you reading this.

He added, after a pause: “Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”