Joan's Political Posts

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.

Like imagine if all Americans residing or visiting outside of the U.S suddenly had to condemn Trump before being allowed to attend Pride, to host a panel or lecture in their field of expertise, to check in to a hotel room, to just exist in public or online. And even if you condemn Trump, people still refuse to exist near you because of where you were born.

Its just an exhaustion of always being immediately assumed to be a bad person before I get to even share my actual opinions and beliefs.

Whilst the NZ government is nowhere near as bad as the Israeli Government, I, a jew who has never stepped foot in Israel, am always expected to condemn the Israeli government but never at any point has anyone asked me to condemn the NZ government, not online and not irl.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

“If the narcs think I’m gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS, they can go fuck themselves in Macy’s window!”

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my friends have always gendered me correctly and stick to it even when it confuses other people and my friend's little sibling calls me older brother in Kannada yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my dog learned my new name quicker than the humans and she runs to give me a kiss when she's told to without being confused about who's being referred to

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but I can feel the Adam's apple growing in my throat and my muscles getting stronger, and my smile more real and I'm growing a beard, and I talk more freely

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

Immigration has been declining year after year after a temporary post-COVID spike so there is no "mass-migration" happening at all. It's a normal amount.

Australia's population growth is slowing down to a record low of 1.3% - in part thanks to a decrease in migrant arrivals and increase in migrant departures.

Yeah, migrants aren't causing a population crisis. Even if we disregard all the economic benefits of migrants, how they make up a significant proportion of vital industries like healthcare and construction, then the bare basic maths just demonstrates migrants are not causing a strain on our population.

So why do right wing parties dislike migrants? Simple: they need someone to throw under the bus to distract from how their own policies don't benefit regular Australians and migrants can't vote so they can attack them as much as they like.

I dare you to try to tell me antizionism is anything other than hate.

yeah our covid safe hour. for the first hour of our event we're asking everyone to wear masks. obviously everyone who needs protection from pathogens can arrive exactly on time and won't take longer than an hour to go through our whole event. not like they've got anything else to do, or any sort of time restrictions.

It wasn't that long ago that banks and companies would refuse to serve gay people. People are going all the way up to the Supreme Court to enshrine the right not to serve LGBTQ people in their business. Rainbow capitalism showed which companies were safe to do business with and it pressured other companies to do the same.

Likewise, companies did and do try to discrominate against LGBTQ employees. Rainbow capitalism let employees be open about their identities and feel safe. The 50 year old gay man marching with Bank of America may have hidden his sexuality for decades because it wasn't safe to come out at work.

It helped set top down societal values and norms that LGBTQ people are a welcome part of society.

It pressured companies to adopt nondiscrimination policies and DEI policies.

It made companies donate to pride celebrations and LGBTQ causes.

with mixed success, it provided powerful and visible allies for political change, like the Respect for Marriage Act. Businesses pulled out of North Carolina and forced it to go back on a bathroom bill.

The drawdown of rainbow capitalism has real consequences. Pride celebrations losing corporate sponsorships means they are not able to hold those celebrations. DEI programs are being rolled back. Companies are buying less from queer owned businesses. Support for gay marriage is actually decreasing in polls.

Are these all cause and effect? No. Is it sometimes just a lagging indicator? Yeah. Are fair weather allies like big corps really not great? Yeah.

"Vancouver has long been nicknamed the “city of glass” for its shimmering high-rise skyline. Over the next few years, that skyline will get a very large new addition: Sen̓áḵw, an 11-tower development that will Tetrize 6,000 apartments onto just over 10 acres of land in the heart of the city. Once complete, this will be the densest neighbourhood in Canada, providing thousands of homes for Vancouverites who have long been squeezed between the country’s priciest real estate and some of its lowest vacancy rates. 

Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank. Because the project is on First Nations land, not city land, it’s under Squamish authority, free of Vancouver’s zoning rules. And the Nation has chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than any development on city property would be allowed."

NIMBYs are VERY CONCERNED about "Indidgenous/Native Ways of Being" or some bullshit

In 2022, Gordon Price, a prominent Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, told Gitxsan reporter Angela Sterritt, “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.” 

With a little planning you can do this with any native plant seeds, to any lawn. Either they pay for the landscaping service to "weed" or they allow at least a smattering of native flowers to bloom for a little while.