Yes all cops. Do Piracy. Trans rights.

The second time I heard about it and realized that it was serious, I just stared at the screen for a good minute.

Why?

Because the "You can wager on anything and everything--wars, death tolls, conflicts, anything, there's no subject too taboo to put money on" concept was not new to me.

Where I'd run into it before, however, was in fiction.

Specifically, the Star Wars Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy written in the late 1990s.

Where it was deliberately done as a plot and setting point showing the corruption and inhumanity of the seedy underbelly of Imperial society--the sort of environment that the Star Wars bounty hunters moved in. It was deliberately shown as corrupt, rife with insider trading, betting manipulation, and cruelty.

And now it's real.

@thewolvesrunwild, the money comes from the people who lose their bets.

In one case, there have already been death threats against one reporter, because his (accurate) reporting would have made a bunch of gamblers lose a LOT of money.

But I wish more people would grasp that this isn't a function of being RIGHT-wing, it's a function of being any-fucking-WING. The idea that you don't have to understand how something works in order to judge whether it's Good or Bad, and in fact trying to understand something Bad is going to contaminate you spiritually, is very much in evidence on the left as well.

TL;DR version: Stalin’s favorite scientist decided that evolution wasn’t communist enough so therefore genetics and natural selection were fake. This led to thousands of scientists being fired or imprisoned and entire fields of agricultural research being thrown out.

there's been a housing showdown in my city recently where popular rent freezes didn't pass because lawmakers recognized that it actually exacerbated housing issues in practice, based off of observations of trials elsewhere. But people freaked out because it sounds good and was struck down.

They don't want to know about its ineffectiveness, and don't care to listen, and it's likely to shake up the local government significantly.

The left wing will ignore Platner's nazi tattoo, ignore Galindo's internment camps, ignore Piker's bigotry, ignore the holodomor, ignore antisemitism when it comes from the left, all because they don't want to understand something that isn't convenient for their worldview.

(The fact that these people never have a cute nickname for trump or hold him and the GOP responsible for ANYTHING let alone blaming them for the Gaza War to the degree they do Dems, and Biden and Harris specifically is an indicator that they and the people who buy their framing are deliberately attempting to suppress dem votes and get Dems to turn on Jews in the meantime. They have no smoke for the GOP, they don't care about black democratic voting rights, and they sure as shit don't care about Palestinians either. It's about their view count and reward for blaming 'Mommy' while the world burns around them like we fucking told them it would)

like.

the labor people are sexist. the queer people are fatphobic. the trans people are ageist. the disabled people are transphobic. the antiracists are homophobic. and on and on

on top of which, everyone is racist and ableist and antisemitic and islamophobic and misogynistic. and on and on

I know facing your own prejudices and internalized biases isn't fun. It was a lot of hard work digging through my own bullshit and discovering all the hidden grossness I never asked to own. It's still some amount of work doing the necessary regular maintenance to make sure it doesn't slip in and begin to accumulate once more.

I did and do that work because it's important and worthwhile. The only true control I have over the environment outside of myself is what I personally put into it.

So if I want a world with less prejudice and discrimination against marginalized peoples, I must also try to not add more prejudice and discrimination into the world. I may not always succeed, but I do always try.

It is not up to me, the individual, to end a structural problem. But it is up to me, the individual, to determine my own actions.

Saying you want a world with more kindness in it, but personally choosing to add anger or vitriol to the world, is working against your stated interest. Either you think it's up to other people to do that work for you, or you don't actually desire a more kind world.

Nobody was behind me in line, which seemed to be a good reason for her to treat me to a five minute retelling of the identification, rescue, and argument over initial custody of Kit Kat, who was so small they thought when they first heard him crying for help that he was a bird and not a kitten in a tree, and is now fifteen pounds of "pure, sculpted lardass".

And I didn't mind, precisely, I wasn't bored or anything, but around the time she was bringing me up to speed on Kit Kat's current status it occurred to me that this woman is a cashier in a store that primarily sells candy bars and beverages. People must buy Kit Kat bars from her multiple times a day. Does she do this every time there's nobody in line behind the purchaser? Did I just have that I Own Several Cats And Will Enjoy Your Cat Stories look about me? Was it the first time it occurred to her that she sold the brand of candy bar she named her cat after? Was she new to the job of selling Kit Kat bars?

I was in the same snack shop, which I'm in, like, once a month, recently. I only recognized her because I spent five minutes listening to this monologue in sincere wonder. But I did recognize her, so as I was buying a soda and a Milky Way bar (this time) I said, without thinking about how this would come across, "Hey, how's Kit Kat?"

She looked genuinely horrified and said, "What...how?"

"Oh fuck!" I blurted. "Sorry! You told me about him last time!"

This is still quite cryptic as responses go but she gave me a frankly frantic look of sudden recognition and said, "He's fine! You bought a Kit Kat! I was unmedicated!"

I did not inform her she is small town famous on Tumblr and instead just said, "Glad you're both doing well!" and we parted as confused and mortified friends.

A white supremacist group faces a federal discrimination lawsuit filed by a real estate broker who says she was barred from purchasing property in their rural Arkansas community because of her Jewish ancestry, Black husband and biracial children.

Michelle Walker, who is also white and Christian, alleges in her complaint that the Return to the Land organization rejected her application because it “is explicitly attempting to establish an all-white community.”

“Its founders believe that white people are genetically superior to other races, advance the view that Jewish people are engaged in a plot to eliminate the white race, and advocate for segregated white communities for the purpose of creating a separate all-white nation state that will help avoid ‘white genocide,’” her complaint says.

Return to the Land did not immediately respond to the lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in the Eastern District of Arkansas, Northern Division.

In an interview with NBC News in July, group co-founder Eric Orwoll made it clear that only white people are welcome in their 40-member community in Ravenden, Arkansas.

“What we’ve done here is establish a place where we have control over who our neighbors are,” Orwoll said. “And that is just for the sake of preserving, you know, our culture ... white American culture.”

Orwoll characterized the policy as “free association,” not segregation. On its website, Return to the Land describes itself a “private membership association (PMA) for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry.”

Walker’s attorney, Reed Colfax, argued Return to the Land is a racist organization in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws dating to 1866.

“Return to the Land’s actions constitute blatant and brazen violations of long-standing federal and state fair housing laws,” Reed Colfax said in a statement posted on the Legal Defense Fund website. “Ms. Walker has been deprived of her housing and civil rights, including the right to purchase land and build housing.”

Walker, a real estate broker in and around St. Louis, Missouri, said in the complaint that she learned last summer that the group was selling land in the Ozarks, “an area where she occasionally vacationed.” She was drawn to the listing partly because the asking price was unusually low, and she decided to apply, citing both the investment potential and other possibilities the land offered.

During the application process, Walker said, she encountered “a series of questions about her ancestry and religion.” She disclosed that her father’s family had arrived in the U.S. in the 1600s and that her mother’s family were Russian Jewish immigrants. She noted that her husband is of Irish and African descent and that her children shared their parents’ mixed racial heritage.

In response to a question about her religion, Walker stated flatly: “I am a Christian. I believe Jesus died for my sins and through believing in him, I will have a heavenly eternal life.”

In the complaint, Walker said she “was surprised to see the ancestry and religion questions on the application, which she understood as clearly violating federal and state fair housing laws prohibiting consideration of race and religion in a land-sale decision.”

Walker said she recognized the ancestry and religion questions as apparent violations of federal and state fair housing laws, but completed the application anyway, hoping the organization would ultimately comply with the law. She was later interviewed by a Return to the Land member who asked whether she belonged to “any other white nationalist organizations.”

After a month passed without word, Walker called the Return to the Land and was told “she should not expect her application to be approved.”

I grew up about 2 hours from here. Not shocked there's an attempt to create a whites' only enclave. Also not shocked a fellow Arkansan went, "Oh, I can fuck this up real good."

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

I remember trying to look up clover references, so I searched clover. Prior to the update it would have given me photography and stock images in abundance, interspersed with art, and I could further limit my field to be ONLY photography or stock images. This time around: it gave me Clover, the character from Totally Spies, specifically involved in inflation art, because that's what the algorithm decided to push at me since it wasn't massively popular and it clearly needed more attention. I couldn't narrow my search, because the references I wanted were old and thus had no keywords. Mass-uploaded photos by amateurs and professionals alike often just had numbers for a title. There was no way out. It was just me against the Clover inflation art.