TiggyMalvern

From United American Indians of New England:

Lots of settlers are talking about whether it's ok or not to add Trump to the presidential heads at 'Mount Rushmore.'

Guess what? It's not your land.

It's part of the sacred Black Hills that the Lakota have never ceded or sold.

In the 1989 Batman movie, the Joker’s big scheme is to draw out the citizens of Gotham to a parade he’s putting on under the pretense that he’s going to be giving out free money. …Despite his previously having publically notified those same people that he’d poisoned random domestic products, leading to the death of one newsreader right on air.

Now, in the movie it’s just kinda assumed that the Joker is giving out ACTUAL money, but in the comic adaptation of the film it turns out that the money he’s giving out is counterfeit, with his own face on it.

One is a murderer and rapist who is batshit insane and dwells in a lunatic asylum populated by the worst kind of sick, depraved animals imaginable

Which sounds bad but

there is something fascinating about the position england* has held historically as both a nation prone to massive state overreactions to even small rebellions and a nation which, relatively speaking, has always been exceptionally tolerant of satire and public complaining about the state

like, going right back to the normans. william the conqueror did not one but two genocides in the north in response to their continued but highly localised rebellion. the first one could be viewed as proportionate given that they (and the scots) were harbouring the anglo-saxon heir to the throne; the second seems to genuinely have been a fit of pique as much as anything. and yet at the same time, when you look at contemporary chronicles, they are remarkably open about how much they don't like William I or William Rufus. some of the later chronicles included in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the 1070s-1090s, go as far as to say that william the conqueror is not a godly man, and those were chronicles replicated openly across william the conqueror's lands.

and to go back to the 19th century: the draconian crackdown on the Swing Riots (252 people sentenced to death!) in 1830 was followed within a decade or two by Punch becoming one of the most popular magazines among the political set.

in the 1650s and 1660s, george fox wrote about having to stand in a queue to preach at speakers' corner in hyde park. this is less than ten years after the nearest thing england has had to a successful revolution (albeit not a popular one), and there was a dedicated space for counter-cultural speakers to speak to anyone who wanted to hear them.

and yet, around the same time, the army was being called on the Diggers for non-violent protests, and prominent radicals in various new church groups were being arrested, imprisoned, and sometimes (usually for Ranters) executed.

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

More on the Degenerate Art of the Smithsonian. I actually reinstalled twitter to read the whole list of things they wanted to complain about. I'm posting them here for you to read the Unhinged Nazi Terror therein.

The full report in its terror here. It is terror, mind you, so mark it as such. It's a PDF, so, ah, there's that.

And then I found this in the comments. I was hoping for some pushback, but there was nothing but cheering. It's Twitter, what should I have expected, really? :

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

I got there and her daughter or granddaughter came out and was like omg her phone died we were worried

And then the older lady said something and the younger lady translated.

"She knew she could trust you because you have pink hair"

I thought it was funny at the time. But when I think back on it I think she was basically saying "you had a visible sign of not vibing with the system I was afraid of"

So there have been a lot of responses like this--the serial killer part. I get it, but it also worries me.

I'm 250 lbs and I've survived enough fights that if someone managed to hurt me I'd just be impressed. What safe looks like for me is going to be different from what it looks like for many people. You should do what is safe for you.

But it's not going to be easy to build community when you legitimately fear an old lady in your own neighborhood might be a serial killer trying to get you, and act on that fear.

There's so much being pushed to make us fear each other. We're afraid of helping, connecting, talking, even sharing public space. We have to be critical of that fear in ourselves. We have to separate fear from actual risk.

We have to look at what that fear is doing and who it benefits. We have to choose how we act in response.