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1. Evil hearts are experts at creating confusion and contention.

They twist the facts, mislead, lie, avoid taking responsibility, deny reality, make up stories, and withhold information. 

2. Evil hearts are experts at fooling others with their smooth speech and flattering words.

But if you look at the fruit of their lives or the follow through of their words, you will find no real evidence of godly growth or change. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

3. Evil hearts crave command and control, and their highest authority is their own self-reverence.

They reject feedback, real accountability, and make up their own rules to live by. 

4. Evil hearts play on the sympathies of good-willed people, often trumping the grace card.

They demand mercy but give none themselves.

5. Evil hearts have no conscience, no remorse.

They do not struggle against sin or evil—they delight in it—all the while masquerading as someone of noble character. 

American Terrorism… Lynching Postcards

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Western media likes to paint terrorists with a brown face, but one of the most horrific campaigns of terror happened in the past century on American soil – the estimated 3,436 lynchings of black American men and women between 1882 and 1950, intended to control and intimidate the recently freed black population. There is nothing more disturbing than being confronted with visual evidence of humanity’s dark heart, especially when it is evidence of a widespread, mainstream hatred for and violence towards one another. Hatred that stems from fear, and is driven by religion and a belief that murder is morality made distorted flesh; violence that aims to cow and suppress any aspirations a community might have for equality and a brighter future.

When I came across this collection of American postcards from James Allen and John Littlefield, published in a book entitled Without Sanctuary, I saw how important it is to look at these images, today more than ever. These postcards were made to commemorate events that made many American white people feel proud – of their race, of their superiority, of their civilization and their intelligence. They took photos of their disgusting, cowardly accomplishments and memorialized them for future generations, to be found and collected and remembered by their descendents. On the backs, they wrote to friends and family in sociopathic excitement about the mob the participated in. These postcards capture the mobs witnessing with glee the murder of young men and women, whose most serious crime was the color of their skin. The corpses hanging and charred in these postcards lived in a world that counted down the days until their murder from the second they drew air into their infant lungs. This history is potent, stomach-churning and of essential importance to the America of today, and to the world of today. And the most striking thing about these photographs is that they don’t erase the perpetrators like many histories and memorials do today, preferring to focus on who was victimized rather than on those who proudly – and with government backing – tortured, raped and murdered people. The murderers in these photos stand proud, grown men looking at the camera with the smiling conviction that the teenage boy they just killed, one against a hundred, was deserving of their hatred, fear and frustration. No grand jury needed; the law was in the hands of the murderers.

History is not linear; history is happening all around us, all the time. These photos are context, they are reality, they are pictures of American terrorism. Read James Allen’s commentary below and be aware that these photos are sickening, and all too real.

Africans in America mounted resistance to white people lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and journalists encouraged public education, actively protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and government complicity in that violence. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as numerous other organizations, organized support from white and black Americans alike and conducted a national campaign to get a federal anti-lynching law passed. African American women’s clubs raised funds to support the work of public campaigns, including anti-lynching plays. Their petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings and demonstrations helped to highlight the issues and combat lynching.[4] In the Great Migration, extending in two waves from 1910 to 1970, 6.5 million African Americans left the South, primarily for destinations in northern and mid-western cities, both to gain better jobs and education and to escape the high rate of violence.

Please be vigilant about your vote, especially so in battleground states like Florida and Georgia with Republican governors who have explicitly shown that they have no compunction about suppressing the vote.

Elexus Jionde faces barrage of harassment after tweeting about 9/11 and black history

Jionde’s tweetstorm on black history prompted a largely positive response. However, it also triggered an onslaught of harassment, including racist comments and death threats.

“I’ve received death threats, racist jokes, and a lot of tweets regarding my future children having cancer. That [first] tweet has since gone viral, and without the 40+ tweets accompanying it, there are people in my mentions telling me that I’m a disgrace to my race and country for saying 9/11 only killed white people, when that isn’t what I said at all.”

Jionde believes that her thread being disabled was “no accident,” and she has accused Twitter of deliberately removing the thread.

“I believe Twitter deliberately unconnected the thread to deprive people of context. Some will say that it was some sort of system glitch or whatever, but I personally believe they disabled my thread because someone in the office was offended over the first tweet.”

Twitter outrightly denies this, suggesting that the problem could be the result of a bug. 

There are two reasons that no one ever reads terms of service.

The first is obvious: they’re garbage. Performatively dull, deliberately obfuscated, impossible to read and understand (literally - they are comparable to academic journal articles).

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3313837

The second reason is also important: if you somehow manage to figure out what you’re “agreeing” to, you’ll quickly realize that you don’t agree to any of it. ToS all boil down to “By being stupid enough to be my customer, you agree that I get to abuse you any way I see fit.”

In a just world, “adhesion contracts” (agreements you don’t get to negotiate) would have limitations on them - anything that no person would ever freely agree to would be judged “unconscionable” and thus unenforceable.

We don’t live in that world, alas. But things are changing. There’s an anti-monopoly mood in the air, and lawmakers and regulators are getting the sense that the public will have their back if they challenge corporate giants and force them to pay for their bad deeds.

Which explains why the AGCM (Italy’s antitrust regulator) is probing Google, Apple and Dropbox over the manifest unfairness of their terms of service.

https://www.agcm.it/media/comunicati-stampa/2020/9/CV194-CV195-CV196-PS11147-PS11149-PS11150

The probe addresses half a dozen abusive elements of these “contracts”:

Collecting user data for commercial purposes without valid consent

Forcing arbitration and making users surrender their right to sue in a real court

Reserving the right to shut down or suspend the service without giving users notice and the ability to extract their files

Limiting liability for loss of user data due to negligence or indifference

Reserving the right to unilaterally alter the contract without negotiation or notice

Defaulting to English, making it hard to access the Italian version of the terms

https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/07/apple-icloud-google-drive-and-dropbox-probed-over-unfair-tcs-in-italy/

All of this is self-evidently unfair, and it does great violence to the very idea of an “agreement” - the cornerstone of civilization.

There’s a classic Lenny Bruce bit about this: civilization begins with an agreement about where to shit, sleep and eat: “We’ll sleep in Area A, is that cool? OK good. We’ll eat in Area B, good? Good. We’ll throw our crap in Area C.”

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/08/25/lenny-bruce-berkeley-concert-1965-full-transcript/

The transformation of freely agreed-upon terms into adhesion contracts undermines the very basis for our civilization, by equating actual contracts with “By standing there shouting ‘hell no I don’t agree,’ you agree that…”

Marital dissolution of interracial marriage serves as an important indicator of the salience and persistence of racial and ethnic boundaries in the United States. Yet, the majority of the current studies on interracial marriage have focused on the prevalence of such unions instead of their dissolution, while those that have assessed the instability of interracial marriages tend to be dated and have focused solely on Black-White marriages or on interracial marriage in a particular region. The contribution of this study is that it examines the instability of interracial marriage among Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in contemporary American society, an era marked by increasing diversity and increasing prevalence of interracial marriage. Overall, although marital dissolution was found to be strongly associated with race/ethnicity, the results failed to provide evidence that interracial marriage per se is associated with an elevated risk of marital dissolution. Some have argued that the increasing prevalence of interracial marriage may be associated with the reduction of social distance across groups. The findings described here showing little difference between interracial and endogamous marriages in the risk of divorce or separation lends further credence to this (albeit cautiously) optimistic point of view.

Our first hypothesis (consistent with the “homogamy” perspective) predicts that when couples are dissimilar in racial/ethnic background, their risk of divorce/separation is higher. Our results do show that, on the whole, interracial marriages are less stable than endogamous marriages, even after controlling for couple characteristics. Nonetheless, the analysis compared all interracial marriages with all endogamous marriages and did not take into account group variations in the tendency to divorce or separate. When we divided the results by race/ethnicity, the results were only partially consistent with the homogamy perspective. As we expected, racial/ethnic differences appeared in the risk of divorce or separation. Mixed marriages involving Blacks were the least stable followed by Hispanics, whereas mixed marriages involving Asians were even more stable than endogamous White marriages. In addition, Black husband-White wife pairings were found to be the least stable of all marriage types. One plausible interpretation of these results is that they reflect persistent racism and distrust directed toward Blacks, particularly Black men in the United States. The qualitative findings from Yancey (2007) indicated that Whites who married Blacks experienced more first-hand racism as compared to Whites who married other non-Black minorities. Specifically, White women reported encountering more racial incidents with their Black husbands (e.g. inferior service, racial profiling, and racism against their children) and more hostilities from families and cohorts as compared to other interracial pairings (Yancey 2007). Research in communication and cultural studies echoed Yancey’s findings and found that the above-mentioned social pressures tend to increase social isolation of Black-White unions, especially from the White community, and consequently negatively impact the survival of these marriages (Hibbler & Shinew, 2002; Porterfield, 1982).

it’s what i figured. i think i posted something on here years ago about a conversation i had with both tim wise and cornel west about interracial couples and marriages. both essentially said the same thing. interracial couples, but especially black and white couples, fail because the white partner experiences white racism and hostility for the first time ever and most overwhelmingly can not handle it. generally white people experience what’s like to not be privileged for the first time ever when they are with a black person but mostly when they are with black men. there is still an acceptable taboo related to being a white man with a black woman. an acceptable fetish that goes all the way back to slavery. bell hooks spoke about this however i don’t recall the book at the moment. 

nevertheless, a white woman suddenly having to face first-hand white racism because she’s with a black man (stares, whispers, being name called, separation from family, denial of services, being profiled and worse) clearly can not handle it. seeing it happen to their children must be (and understandably) especially distressing. while a black man can understand, he’s nevertheless been living with this his whole life. to the point it has become background noise for us but for her it’s a whole new experience, and unlike us, she can escape through divorce. kinda speaks to the intestinal fortitude of white people and white women in particular right? smfh. also doesn’t this speak to misplaced anger? i mean your black husband is facing racism because of white people and their ignorance NOT him. hmm. 

i know a hispanic woman and white male couple where the guy had to cut ties with all his friends after he met her. they left him no choice and he had to protect his kids from their racism. white people man, smfh. 

i’d like to see more research that takes into consideration education levels, parts of the country and income levels. that would really really be interesting.

anyway, all you brothas desperate for a white trophy wife, i hope you enjoy giving her half your shit and only seeing your kids on the weekend too hahaha.

This would explain why the divorce rate for Black husband/white wife is so high while the divorce rate for white husband/black wife is so low comparatively. A black woman adopts her white husband’s social standing and goes from experiencing no privilege to experiencing privilege (to varying degrees) through/by her association and proximity to whiteness while the reverse happens to a white wife of a Black man. In that situation one can understand how a black wife may sooner do what’s necessary to make the marriage work with her white husband because she doesn’t want to return to a life with no privilege while a white wife may not put in as much work because she wants/gets to escape back to a life of privilege. Of course children complicates everything but since often the children go where the mother goes in divorces, it would be logical to assume that the wives in these scenarios are making these same decisions because it benefits their children as much (if not more so) as it benefits them.

High tech, low life

instagram.com/led.noir.manila

Dear friends, I come to you in a time of great need. This picture went viral on r/all for a while, but one of the mods decided to remove it because apparently “it doesn’t belong in r/Cyberpunk”.

To make up for it, I’d like to ask everyone to please reblog and share this picture as much as you can. If you’re going to post outside of Tumblr, do credit me as the artist. Let’s just hope it gets around another time.

our momentum is slowing down. we can’t let our dashes go back to normal when the world is not normal. so, if you are reading this, you are ~legally~ obligated to choose 2 numbers below; you must complete the task of those two numbers today. don’t pretend you didn’t see this. either do them right now or set a reminder to get it done before the sun goes down. the timer starts now. choose two. 

sign some petitions. LINK HERE. if change.org hasn’t accused you of being a bot yet, you haven’t signed enough. 

watch these youtube videos. LINK HERE. do not skip the ads. this is a way to help raise money without having to donate any.

sign up to get daily actions. LINK HERE. after filling out the form, you will receive texts Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays telling you what action to take. 

text or call for any of these victims. LINK HERE. this website is extremely helpful, well organized, and practically does all of the work for you.

donate some money. LINK HERE. if you have any more money to spare, please donate it to one of these funds.

follow every single one of these organizations on social media: blcklivesmatter, colorofchange, reclaimtheblock, showingupforracialjustice, and civilrightsorg

post these important sources to your social media. LINK HERE. you have no idea who it might help. 

read this article and forward it to at least one person. LINK HERE. 

watch this video explaining the racial wealth gap. LINK HERE. it’s really informative and only about 15 minutes long. 

"When any white man in the world picks up a gun and says; give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. But when a Black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he's judged as a criminal, (by whites) and treated as one. And everything possible is done to make an example of him to ensure there wouldn't be anymore like him."

James Baldwin ~💖~

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."

I’m a tattoo artist, and I’ve had a bunch of clients come in saying they were told dark skin can’t take any color whatsoever, which is bullshit. The long and short of it is dark skin can take plenty of color, provided it isn’t too light.

Tattoos look best when they’re fresh because the ink is still on the top layer of open skin. As the skin heals over the tattoo, the color gets less vibrant and defined. This is true of anybody of any skin tone. Tattoo pigments tend to act a lot like watercolor; they’re not terribly opaque in the skin, meaning that as that tattoo ages, the white will fade into patches of slightly lighter skin, and may disappear altogether, as will lighter colors like yellows and pinks. Many artists consider doing tattoos entirely or mostly in white ink to be irresponsible for that reason, and use white ink very sparingly to create small highlights, in places where even faded ink will add contrast.

Notice how the yellow is all but gone on even the lightest skin, while the deeper reds have stayed. And that isn’t even factoring in sun exposure, how often the skin is submerged in water, friction, or how the skin in the area bends and flexes. I know extremely pale people who lost all the color in their tattoos in 5 years due to a variety of those factors; I’m pale as they come, and the yellow in my oldest tattoo is only 2 years old and already super faded. 

Color that lasts a long time is darker and more saturated than the skin it’s in.

See how the butterfly is still noticeably purple, and stands out in all the skin tones?

Teals, yellows, pinks and whites photograph beautifully in dark skin, but ultimately don’t have longevity as tattoos. Dark skin, however, can still take reds, blues, greens, purples, and browns beautifully! The best way to make color vivid in any skin is to put it in a strong black outline; tattoos like the one below will look like bruises as they age, and the fading color doesn’t have structured black to contrast and frame it.

Here’s some color on dark skin that will age well!

The yellows in this tattoo are very saturated and framed in lots of solid black; even if they fade, the fish will stay nice and vibrant.

Similarly, the white in this tattoo will definitely lighten, but the dark reds and blacks will hold the tattoo together very well.

EMERGENCY HOTLINE NUMBERS If you see this please RE-BLOG Each RE-BLOG can save a life!

If you are experiencing a medical emergency, are in danger, or are feeling suicidal, call 911 immediately.

Suicide Hotline: 800-784-2433 Immediate Medical Assistance: 911 Crisis Call Center: 800-273-8255 or text ANSWER to 839863 Crisis Text Line (U.S. only): Text HELLO to 741741 Youthspace Text Line (across Canada): Text 778-783-0177 from 6 p.m. to midnight daily.

Suicide

National Suicide Hotline 800-SUICIDE (784-2433) 800-442-HOPE (4673) Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week http://www.hopeline.com

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 800-273-TALK (8255) Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org