it's only hubris if i fail

“Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.”

“…when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice.”

Lust is not wanting to have sex with other people. Lust is using sex to hurt other people or hurting another person in a sexual way.

Gluttony is not eating lots of food (your own stomach will tell you when enough is enough). Gluttony is when you have enough resources to yourself that you could house and feed the rest of the population of your city but you keep it to yourself because you do not want to give up the power associated with it.

Greed is not wanting to improve the state of your material life because it would improve your quality of life. Greed is taking opportunities and resources away from already marginalized people. (And if someone tells you that a service you benefited from and it actively improved your life was not meant for you specifically, then there needs to be more of that resource).

Envy is not looking at someone who has a higher quality of life and wanting to improve it. Envy is when you are looking to take away from someone who is in the same situation as you. The example the Bible (or catholic school) uses is a man looking at another man’s wife when his own wife loves him very much and is equal to the other woman in every way that is important.

Sloth (aka laziness) isn’t when you’re exhausted or hurting and being too tired to do anything else. Sloth is when one contributed nothing to the work and yet reaps the rewards of the work.

He asked us one hot summer day how to measure an evil. How do you measure the Holocaust? the genocide of the Native Americans? American slavery? a massacre? We, a bunch of kids whose brains hadn’t finished growing in yet, were mildly stumped. It wasn’t the number of the dead, we were told. Instead, we were told to imagine the following:

You’re standing on a street corner. There is a line of people in front of you. One by one, they introduce themselves to you. One by one, you learn names and what they did, maybe a hobby, maybe how many siblings or kids or nephews they had. One by one, you heard about talents or hobbies, what they did on their last holiday. One by one, you meet those who were lost.

This is how you measure an evil, my professor taught us. You measure not the number, but the individuals lost. Not just the names, but who they were, their connections to others. What is lost is an irreplaceable human being. The evil is measured not in the number, but in the who was lost. All of those whos matter. Every life listed above and listed on other pages mattered. Losing them hurts all of us. We lost nearly 100,000 irreplaceable human beings. This did not have to happen. That is the measure of the evil of “it’ll all just go away”.

May their memories be a blessing to those who knew them and mourn them. May they Rest In Peace. May we never forget they were living, breathing human beings whose lives were important and mattered. May we never allow negligence, nepotism, greed, racism, ageism, ableism, and incompetence to do this to us again.

I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.

For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.

Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.

Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.

So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.

A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.

TL;DR

She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’.

And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult.

When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it.

This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.

TL;DR: It’s usually a white kid because their privilege incacipated their ability to learn how to handle stress/ denial/ whatever without acting out. The less privileged are done used to the bs and thus typically dont turn to extreme measures as coping mechanisms.

EDIT: I had reblogged this and added a link to the paper (which I should’ve done to begin with,) but it’s probably best I just edit my original reblog and add the link (which I also should’ve just done already.)

“Why don’t you just say no?” 

Apparently this is roughly what we’d look like, if our eyes could see in a different spectrum:

Dunno about you, but I want to use this in a story someday.  Aliens can see our stripes and we can’t!  Magical transformations follow Blaschko’s Lines!  A subtle sign of lycanthropy is darker hair there!  Wizards are bald with that cool spiral on their heads!

Operation LAC

Stateville Penitentiary malaria experiment

Operation Big Itch

Project SHAD

San Quentin prison experiments

Operation Sea-Spray

Operation ARTICHOKE and Operation MKUltra

Operation Drop Kick

1966 NY Subway bacteria release