socialist-revolution

This isn’t adding ice just for the sake of denial, it’s adding to the Earth’s albedo. This in turn actually makes the Earth’s climate cooler, and then more ice will be produced naturally because of this.

It isn’t a process we need to continue forever, in fact it’s one that needs to be calculated so that we don’t do it TOO MUCH. The only worry would be cooling down too much.

Ice caps are melting? Guess what! We know how to make ice. It’s not that hard. Designing mostly-automated robot ships to go to the poles and rebuild the ice caps is well within our current technical capabilities. We just need to fund it.

Deforestation on a massive scale? Destruction of other biomes? Guess what! We know how to plant trees. We know how to plant grasslands. We know how to take barren, lifeless land and turn it back into a viable biome. It’s not that hard. In a lot of cases, if there’s neighboring areas where that biome still exists, all you have to do is dump a few tons of biomass (plant clippings, food waste, etc.) on the barren land and stand back and wait. The biomass will provide nutrients and keep the topsoil from blowing away, and the plants and animals from the neighboring biome will move in. In two decades, even if you don’t do anything besides dumping the biomass on it, you won’t be able to tell what was the barren area and what was the still-existing biome.

Coral reefs dying? Now, coral reefs are a bit more fragile than most biomes, but guess what! We still know how to replant/rebuild them, and in fact are working on that in places affected by coral reef die-off! And we’re learning how to do it better every day.

Desertification? Guess what! We know how to turn desert back into green space. They’re doing it on a large scale in China and sub-Saharan Africa. There are several different techniques, none of which are even very technology-intensive. It takes money and time and labor, but it’s perfectly doable. We know this because we’ve done it.

Plastic in the ecosystem, particularly in the ocean? Guess what! There’s a lot of people working on this, both on “how to remove plastic from the ocean” and “how to reuse/recycle it more efficiently.” And the techniques are improving by leaps and bounds every year. This is a solvable problem. These are all solvable problems.

So if you’re crushed by the weight of the coming environmental catastrophe … don’t be. These are all solvable problems! We can stop things from getting worse, and we can fix the things we’ve broken. The issue is political, not practical.

On the political side, of course, is the need to tighten up environmental regulations across the globe. (What’s the statistic, that 90% of pollution is caused by 100 corporations?) And then of course, we need to fund these programs on a large enough scale.

In some ways the political aspect is the hardest, but consider this: we are at a tipping point. Things are changing about the way politicians talk about climate change and ecological degradation. More ordinary people are concerned about this, which means more pressure on politicians. One of the ways that things are changing is that people–even conservatives–are starting to talk about “job opportunities in new green fields” and switching the conversation so that it’s not “rainforest vs. jobs” makes political action a lot more possible. And no, it’s not going to happen on its own, but it can happen.

The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide

The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!

Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”

BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!

Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.

OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”

Well Scott Morrison decided once to tell the Senate that he could release a few kids from detention centres but only if they voted for a bill that increased his powers to send refugees back to where they would suffer persecution and basically told them if they don’t vote for it the kids will continue to suffer. He held children as ransom for his own political power. Our Human Rights Commissioner slammed it as terrible to use kids as bargaining chips. You know what the government did? Personally attack her and ask her to resign over his bias. Our Prime Minister at the time complained that Australia was “sick of being lectured” by the UN over how we keep torturing refugees.

The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!

Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?

Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.

Oh and the government super doesn’t them to come here. The Abbott government spent $4.1 million on a propaganda movie to be shown overseas to deter refugees.

We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.

(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).

Papa New Guinea (Manus Island isn’t Australian, we just have a deal to pay another government to let us keep a torture prison on their land… hmm I feel like there’s a US equivalent somewhere too…) decided a while back “hang on, this is unconstitutional and horrible. You need to close down the detention centre on Manus.” So we “did.” And then made a new building on the same island to keep them in and forced them to go into it despite it not being finished. This was after guards physically beat the refugees to make them go to this new prison.

I could go on but you get the idea.

So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

Let that sink in.

And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.

I honestly tune out a lot of the coverage because, at this point, I don’t know what to do. Both major parties support these policies, so I vote for the Greens. I contacted my representatives. I walked in protest marches. I donate to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and other charities. 

Part of the reason is because the government keeps passing legislation to silence whistleblowers and journalists (they currently have a bill to make possession of any information that might “damage Australia’s reputation” illegal), and the other part is that most of the media won’t or can’t report on it.

What you can do to help the Human Rights crisis in Australia:

If you are Australian:

Keep up to date and informed. The only major media outlets that routinely reports on this issue is The Guardian Australia. They are free online but consider donating if you can to keep it free access.

The Saturday Paper is another independent online news source that reports on this.

Follow or sign up to GetUp!. GetUp! is Australia’s largest progressive grassroots activist group and has lots of campaigns and information about this issue and many others, such as climate change, economic justice, and democratic and civil rights. Donate if you can, sign their peritions, follow their campaigns.

CONTACT YOUR MPs AND SENATORS. This is really important, especially if they are supporters of the policy. Keep public pressure on then, make them feel it. Letter templates are good, but personally written letters/emails are better. Call them if you can. And respond to them with your displeasure if they send you a cookie cutter response of their party’s policy on “stopping the boats”.

SHOW UP TO PROTESTS. Another really important one. Even if you just show up and march, your physical presence counts. They’re not as scary as it might seem.

DONATE. I really cannot stress this enough, if you can afford it, donate.

WHO SHOULD I DONATE TO?

Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) provides financial and legal support, as well as counseling and community services, to refugees already in Australia.

Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) are a group of state-based advocacy groups that support refugees in Australia and advocate for those trapped in Australia’s offshore detention regime (link is for the Sydney group but contains links to other states).

GetUp! is one of the best to donate to for political action. They have options to donate to the organisation as a whole, or to specific campaigns.

If you are a member of the Australian Labor Party, please do what you can to bring up this issue and pressure the party leadership to change its policy.

If you are NOT Australian

Do what you can to contact your government and representatives to bring up this issue and pressure Australia to change their policy.

SPREAD THIS POST AND OTHERS LIKE IT. Australians do not have the numbers and influence on his site that Americans and British have. Please spread this information and resources so that other Australians might see it and feel like they have some power to change it or even know about it.

If you are a New Zealander: please continue to keep the pressure on your government to call out Australia and offer to take refugees.

When I was like 15-16, I used to identify as a demigirl which is feeling mostly like a woman at times but also feeling like a nonwoman at other times. I thought it fit very nicely because how I had always interacted with my own gender. But upon closer introspection, I wasn’t really that. Because I am and always have been a fat Black Woman, throughout my life my womanhood/girlhood was denied to me. I wasn’t allowed to be feminine and I had been so far removed from my own womanhood that I thought it was an appropriate label.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with anyone indentifyibg as demigirl/demiboy (its “valid” so to speak) but that kind of microlabels can be harmful because it blindly applies validity to every corner of an unhealthy/personally harmful conception of gender or sexuality. If I hadn’t dig deeper, I would have thought I was something I’m not because the label allowed me to hide from interrogating something that was actually really important for me to learn about myself.

I think mogai hell stops people from developing healthy understandings of themselves because everything is “valid” and nothing can be questioned. This obviously doesn’t mean no good cancome from them. Sure people can feel less alone, get on the right path to finding out their real identity (maybe that word is great for them and always will be maybe it was a stepping stone to something better maybe it will change as the grow) but some of the created sexualities are pointedly bad things that pathologizes shit that should be challenged and worked through, probably with a therapist.

I lay in bed and I hear my sister crying in the bathroom and it breaks my heart. I failed to help her. She has no money to pay for bills, she has no money to take her son to the dentist or buy him new shoes. She sleep on the floor in my bedroom for five months now because she just doesn’t have any place to go. She told me today that she keep thinking about killing herself.

I saw signal boosts where people asked for money because they wanted to go to Disneyland or they wanted to visit their friend in another state. And they got tons of donations. I’m not saying that you can’t raise money for less serious things. But I see my sister who has nothing at all right now and wonder why everyone ignore my asks for help. No one owns me money of course. That’s not what I’m saying. It just would be nice if some nice person or two send a few dollars. You would make a single mother and her son happy.

So please please if you can spare something, send via paypal:  [email protected]

If you want to know more about the situation click here

AND PLEASE PLEASE REBLOG THIS POST, SPREAD IT SO MORE PEOPLE WOULD SEE IT. WE NEED AT LEAST $500.

THANK YOU

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear food fruit is cut down and thrown in the fire…..”

Op, the fruit you bear turns people away from God and causes them to hate Christianity. Your homophobia is despicable, and brings no one to Christianity. Your hatred will cause you to be thrown in the fire.

Galatians 3:28

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

You may believe as you wish but someone with true homophobia would send you death threats and slurs and wish for you to die in the burning fires of hell.

I want the opposite of that.

Don’t feel bad if you giggled. There’s definitely something funny about that juxtaposition. However, it is the actual state of our lives, which is decidedly less funny.

Hey, I’m Nik. I’m a 20 year old Jewish lesbian with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which, if you’re not well-versed, basically means that my tendons and joints just absolutely hate staying in place. It’s caused severe chronic pain since I was thirteen, and has ruined my ability to do any kind of physical work. Regardless, I’ve been working retail jobs on and off; as you may know, minimum wage is not enough to live off of. My story is, in short, my body is all fucked up, my father’s dead and my mother is basically a teenager, and my fiancee & I are all alone in this wild world.

My fiancee, @meanexwife, is also here with me. We are both disabled, we are both doing literally all we can. In our rush to find somewhere to live, and at my mother’s pressuring to stay close to home, we’ve made a pretty grave mistake. 

Our apartment complex is having us pay an exorbitant amount for a roach-infested, barely functioning home.

You can see the more detailed receipts on what’s wrong with the apartment here. 

All of our plumbing is prone to breaking at the slightest provocation, we’ve got G-d knows how many roaches in our bathroom and kitchen, and their so-called pest control has done literally nothing. We’re also two disabled women living directly adjacent to known sexual predators. The apartment complex has acknowledged they know the people across from us, who have gone after us both before, are predatory. They have also done nothing about it. As an added fuck-you, they initially tried to give us a (somehow) worse unit; when we complained and tried to get it fixed, they gave us a second floor unit. Both of us have declining mobility. The stairs are not going to be doable for very much longer. 

Management here is unavailable almost all the time and has no interest in the quality of life of their tenants. We’re poor anyway, and they are currently doing the wonderful work of exploiting us while keeping us in abysmal living conditions. If we can pay rent, we can’t eat. So. Help us out if you can. We’re not going to be able to do this much longer, and we have no outside help.

Donate at:

paypal.me/alexandriarain for paypal $runefire on cashapp @niarkos on venmo

Detailed video about the fascist aesthetics of Star Wars and the FO that starts by questioning Disney’s commodification of Stormtrooper and FO imagery, especially for kids.

The 501st Legion (at its core a charity organization that purposefully uses Stormtrooper imagery for good) aside, Stormtroopers do symbolize a tyrannical regime, even more so now that the FO steals babies to fill its ranks instead of the Empire’s use of conscripts and volunteers (as the Solo movie highlights). Phasma is a cool design, and, in the films, that’s about it. Which is actually a good description of the FO – it looks cool, but there’s nothing much there beyond a love of power and mass annihilation.

Which is why it’s such a waste that the Stormtrooper image that’s plastered on t-shirts, hats and keychains is rarely this one:

(Image: Etsy)

It’s a powerful image that says no to fascism while keeping the aesthetic – it improves on it, even. It says “I rebel” and “we’re not gonna take it” and “fuck the status quo.”

Which, ok, maybe isn’t what Disney wants to project when they’re still making money in middle America. But it’s a missed opportunity to benefit from the strong level of discontentment with the current state of the U.S. that could translate to other parts of the world easily. 

I imagine this image was meant to be on more merchandise, but we all know Disney merchandising didn’t know what the fuck they were doing with TFA and made bad decisions (most famously, producing a ton of Kylo toys no one wanted and disappointing fans by actively keeping Rey off the shelves).