Ambiguous Title

Do not worry Auckland, I am on my way...

ANYWAY. He donated it to the local city when he died and now a local historical reenactment society runs it. IDK why I didn't know about this because I got married there. The only recent revelation is that the reenactment society will accept, say, any local madwoman who messages them out of the blue going 'hey u need someone who can spin on a period wheel?'

Long story short, yes. The previous lady who could hand spin was 87 and died recently. Peacefully, of being 87, and they've been going mad trying to find someone else who knows how the fuck to refurbish and work a spinning wheel. I'm eyeballing Frigga rn hardcore for that 'hey I should google that place' thought.

HOWEVER. I encountered a reality check.

Namely, Liz, the lady who runs the group, texted me 'omg do you know how to work a loom?'

Me, who has been marinating in a bubble of fiber artists online for years; I mean not like super well? I've dabbled but I've not attempted anything more adventurous than a regular plain weave, fair warning.

Liz; what's a plain weave

Me; .....

Me; Okay so like what kind of loom is it.

Liz; it's a big one (sends a picture of an antique floor loom)

Me; oh shit six pedals, nice, well, the heddles look in good shape so...

Liz; what's a heddle

Me;

Me; Yes I can clean it, set it up properly, and warp it. What do you want to weave.

Liz, after sending about 48 delighted emojis; rag rugs to sell in the gift shop omg omg thank you so much it's so complicated looking all of us have been afraid to touch it

I KNOWWWWWW THIS THING IS A BEAST AND THEY WANT RAG RUGS

In their chairman Felipe Luciano's words, “So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’" Luciano says. "And they said, ‘Muchacho, déjate de todo eso—LA BASURA!” [Listen kid, fuggedaboutit! It’s THE GARBAGE!] And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage?”

And so the young lords responded to their communities needs and they picked up the trash. This was at a time (1969) when there were literal tons of garbage lining the streets, trash collectors would pick up some garbage every now and then but would leave most of it behind, they also refused to sweep the streets, and only allotted 6 big dumpsters in that entire 40 block area. This was due to racist/classist stances held by the almost exclusively italian american trash collector union.

The young lords stepped up in this situation, they go and ask for brooms and bags from the trash collectors union and get refused and insulted. They go back later and steal the brooms and bags, and get started cleaning their neighborhoods. This is a band aid and it doesn't fix things but it does show their community these people care, these people will listen and put in the work, these people are our people, it was the basis of community organizing, building trust and responding to people's actual needs.

While this did help and build trust the problem persisted and so the young lords came up with a program they called the garbage offensive (or maybe the trash offensive i forgot). They started sweeping all of the trash onto the side of the street and waited for the trash collectors to come by, when they refused to pick it up, the young lord would pile that all into trucks and haul it off to 3rd avenue in Manhattan(a much richer whiter area that gets high traffic). They dumped the trash into the middle of the street (not just bags of trash, we are also talking furniture, broken sinks, etc.) and then hauled off and they did this almost daily. They forced people to pay attention. The whole community started to get involved in this, kids, young men and women, and older community members too. They all started to join in on dumping the trash in the richer parts of the city to make people care and pay attention.

These protests got larger and bolder, they would sometimes pile up the trash high and then light it on fire, over turn cars and make a party out of it sometimes too. Police were called and showed up and attacked as they do but the protests persisted.

The Young lords published their demands and sent them out in a press release and their demands were listened too. In that years mayoral race every single candidate had to address the trash problem and promise solutions.

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This is an important lesson that direct action often pushes reforms, if we want reforms the best way to get them is to act and make the state react to us and catch up with our demands.

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Their demands included increased sanitation workers, hiring black and puerto rican sanitation workers, increased dumpsters, increase in pay to sanitation workers, end having to pay off your sanitation workers to ensure your trash gets picked up etc. Many of these demands were met and in the coming years the trash does end up getting picked up regularly and the problem does get dealt with.

cheesebagger!

cheeseboigeh...

My (29F) husband (36M) and I have been together for almost ten years now and like any couple we occasionally get into arguments. Over the years I've noticed a pattern where the day after an argument he'd either give me an eloquently-phrased apology or, more often, a perfectly logically sound counterargument that completely proves that I was in the wrong. My hubby is an intellectual hunk so I've never thought this was suspicious, but the other day he brought up a counterargument that was so logically airtight that my only response was to laugh and say "Did you get that from Reddit or something?", because even though I don't use Reddit I know the reputation it has for being a center for wit and intellectual debate.

Well, turns out I was right. Every time we've ever gotten into a fight, he's always posted about what happened on r/AmItheAsshole and used the comments he gets to decide what to say the following day. When he told me this, I demanded to see some of these posts and he obliged.

To my surprise, not only has he been posting our arguments on this subreddit, he's been posting them from my perspective, writing them as though I'm the one posting these stories on Reddit from over a hundred different throwaway accounts. He'd always "anonymize" the posts too, apparently changing our relationship, genders, and ages with a random number generator, which is honestly really clever because it preserves our privacy without changing any important details for the purpose of deciding who was right in the argument.

Anyway, I really didn't like that he was basically impersonating me on the internet, but of course I didn't want to admit this to him so I made something up about him "misrepresenting" my side of the argument, even though I know he's a perfectly rational man and that it's impossible for him to be biased when describing things from my perspective. So I told him that he needs to stop putting our interpersonal conflicts on Reddit and "think for himself" (and of course I know that he really is thinking for himself but sometimes my womanly emotions cause me to say things I don't really mean. Fortunately he's always able to see through that and understand exactly what I meant to say every time.) but he refused, saying he doesn't think he did anything wrong. And then like always he got really quiet for the rest of the night and we haven't really talked since.

It’s just