communistkenobi:

I think it’s good to highlight that the amount of money the US is spending to conduct a genocide in Palestine could instead easily be used to house every homeless person in america or socialize healthcare or cancel student debt, because this helps demonstrate to people how little the US government gives a shit about you, but even if the US cancelled its billions of dollars in aid to Israel right now and diverted all that money into creating a massive welfare state for every american, it would still be a horrifically evil imperial country. the mountain of wealth it rests on top of was produced by the process of settler colonialism and genocide and slavery - the US is a big reason why “the global south” exists as a geopolitical category at all - and hoarding these resources domestically would not suddenly make it a just state. I think it’s important when making these arguments that our ultimate conclusion isn’t that the US should just become a western european welfare state while leaving the current system of imperial inequality enact. that is not the road that will lead to a decolonized Palestine because decolonialism is not merely the absence of imperial aid, it is the destruction of the system that allows a country to extract, hoard, and then spend billions of dollars on missiles and tanks and guns to conduct genocide in the first place

penrosesun:

futureevilscientist:

stagegore:

stagegore:

can i be real? i think ao3 should die for doing a donation pool for themselves with everything going on

and let me say this if it isn’t obvious. if youre donating, i think youre a bad person

#i was literally thinking about this today#they have a MASSIVE amount of users and… they decide they need donations. ignore the palestine thing happening theyre more important#apparently#reblog

I understand that you’re 22 and corporate internet is all you’ve ever known, but you need to know that users COST sites money.

The sole case when users do not cost sites money is when 1) users are constantly shown ads, 2) users’ private data is being harvested and sold to advertisers.

AO3 does not do either of those things. It was its mission upon being founded to not do either of those things. And thus, we have twice-yearly donation drives. Every year. Yes, every year. Even that year. Even the April and October of the pandemic, even the Aprils and the Octobers of mass BLM movements, even the April after Ukraine was invaded, and yes, even this October. It’s not “failing to read the room”. It’s called maintenance costs and being an ad-free NGO that doesn’t monetise its users.

I genuinely hops this helps.

I need young people to realize that when you say “AO3 should just make money like social media sites do rather than running donation drives” what you are actually suggesting is “AO3 should sell detailed and privacy-violating data on the porn consumption habits of its users to ad companies in order to make a quick and easy buck.” That’s what you’re suggesting when you push for that.

This is like if you looked at Wikipedia and said “Why are they asking for donations? They could just charge people and companies money to be able to rewrite their Wikipedia pages to say whatever they want about their brands!”

I mean, yeah? They could sell out their fundamental mission and all of their core userbase in order to squeeze some money out of advertising and general enshittification. They could do that. Do you really want them to? Really? Is the little donation banner (which I assume you never bother to click on anyway) really so annoying to you that you’d rather the site just sucks forever (but without needing donations, I guess)? Call me out of touch, but somehow I doubt that any of you advocating for that sort of thing would actually want the inevitable results.

palestinianliberator:

palestinianliberator:

Over the weekend, Israeli settlers, backed by Israeli Occupation Forces, confiscated about 6 acres of my family’s land. Land that has been with my family for generations & used for agriculture, seizing about 30 acres in total from our village over the weekend.

Israeli settlers, armed by the Israeli government, simply walked onto the land, set up tents, & now claim it as their own - and as Palestinians with the land ownership documents, there is absolutely nothing we can do.

This isn’t the first time, either - just a couple years back, Israeli settlers seized about 3 acres from us & dozens more from others in our village.

& now, as Palestinians, we are no longer allowed to set foot on our own land, while Israeli settlers with citizenships from around the world [primarily the US] get “free” land, & will go on to establish an outpost & eventually a new settlement community, which will be funded & provided utilities by the Israeli government, who will then build discriminatory roads connecting it to the network of Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land throughout the West Bank.

It’s utterly surreal to be living under a settler colony that continues to grow through the use of ethnic cleansing - because that is precisely what this is.

Those same settlers have been raiding our town for YEARS, but have dramatically stepped up their attacks this year - prior to anything that’s happened in October. They’ve set fire to the homes & vehicles of friends, they’ve uprooted hundreds of olive trees, & spray paint “gas the Arabs” on our homes. People who resist by throwing stones at these invading groups have been shot at [and in several cases, killed].

This is why we resist.

Say this happens to your family - but they take the last slivers of your land. Land that has been in your family, in use, for generations. A group of armed Israeli “civilians” take over your land & home. You can’t do /anything/ to contest it. A few years later, they build a house on your land, all the while spreading out more & more, like a tumor, swallowing up the surrounding area & destroying your community that’s existed for centuries.

Tell me - are these people civilians to you? Does the fact that they carry out this violence in jeans & t-shirts keep them as perpetual civilians? What about after they’ve built their houses on our land & moved in their family - are they still civilians?

When Palestinians finally organize & fight to reclaim their land & homes, attacking the same settlers who stole it in the first place, they’re labeled as “terrorists” attacking “innocent Jewish civilians”.

The struggle to reclaim what was stolen would be labeled “unprovoked anti-semitic violence”.

My family’s situation isn’t unique - it is, put simply, the Palestinian experience. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been, & continue to go through this. Israel frames these settlements as “peaceful communities just trying to live life with their families”, and neglect to mention that these communities exist ONLY through theft, appropriation of Palestinian land, & subjugation of Palestinian life & ability to resist.

Israel is a settler-colony, & Palestinian must, & will, be liberated within our lifetimes.

fuckyeahchinesefashion:

halloween on douyin part 1

callmebliss:

snazzy-hats-and-adhd:

spirited-away-to-mandalore:

💀🐴SKELTON PAINTED HORSES🐴💀

Oh fuck, are those friesians?

GLOW IN THE DARK????

alex51324:

politijohn:

Source

Interesting to call this “confiscating” when it’s just making the rich pay their fair share, especially considering all the stolen wealth from the bottom 99% and historic tax evasion.

Besides the obvious, the hidden benefit of this is that it provides an endpoint to runaway growth.

The biggest problem with capitalism, the reason it’s so destructive to the planet and to the workers and even, ultimately, to the capitalists, is that, after a certain point, the money’s just a way of keeping score. The number at the bottom of the column has no bearing on what you can buy or do; as a result, there’s no such thing as enough. The number can always be bigger.

Under this proposal, once you hit $1 billion, you’ve won capitalism. You beat the game, achieved the maximum score; you’re finished. There’s nothing more you can accumulate. You now have to find a purpose in life other that the relentless pursuit of profit. (And if we’re really lucky, it might be something that actually benefits other people, but even if not, it’s unlikely to be as damaging as whatever it is you were doing to get that $1 billion.)

Instead of companies expanding endlessly, like tumors, there’s a point where, when all the major stakeholders are maxing out on profit, it makes sense to just hold steady. Keep doing/making/selling whatever it is you do/sell/make, but stop trying to do/sell/make more of it every year.

The problem with a tumor–what makes it cancer–is that it keeps growing and growing, until eventually it’s taking up so much space and consuming so many resources that the surrounding tissues can’t function. The tumor doesn’t have to do anything better than the other tissues in order to crowd them out; it just does it faster. Stop the uncontrolled growth, and it’s something you can live with.

Stopping the uncontrolled growth of capital means more opportunities for multiple businesses–big and small–operating in the same sector, since it doesn’t make sense for any one company to gobble up too much of the market share. That, in turn, means more choices for customers–and workers, since they can take their skills to another employer doing similar things. It means less waste, as there’s no longer an economic upside to spewing cheap goods out of a fire-hose before you even know whether anyone wants to buy them. That could mean slower, more thoughtful use of resources in the first place, but at minimum, it’s going to mean not manufacturing products only to immediately throw them away.

juno-infernal:

juno-infernal:

juno-infernal:

my little brother & i are having a scholarly debate about mornings

he’s like if an enlightened sage was a 22 year old metalhead who likes to rollerblade in the house

zoidbergs-muse:

khanuckle:

typhlonectes:

marinella-ela:

Baby meerkats

Illegally small

Pobblers

hyperchaotix:

memewhore:

I saw someone reblog this dismissing it as AI despite the fact they’re 1 click away from a search engine.

“Rosetta Nebula” is all you’d have to type.

Perhaps the biggest travesty with ai images is going to be robbing people of their wonder for what’s actually possible in the universe and continuing to shrink their bubble of understanding based on whether they believe it at a glance.

The image has been colorized differently above but the Rosetta Nebula is real and actually looks like that.

les8ean:

blinkinink:

rongzhi:

Translation request by @unbridled. English added by me :)

:3

dr-otter:

animatedamerican:

impling:

curliestofcrowns:

smartgrrrl:

I’ve been thinking about this daily since it crossed my dash

little mans is 100% correct.

I’m gonna put I AM BRAVE OF THIS MEETING on my cubicle wall at work and never explain it.

Think about the donuts of your day!

starberry-skies:

sokkalore:

This could be my last report from Gaza by Tareq S. Hajjaj. Please read.

[ID: Screenshots from an article, titled: “This could be my last report from Gaza”, with the subheader: “Keep my stories alive, so that you keep me alive. Remember that the world that pretended to be the savior of humanity
participated in killing it.” The article was written by Tareq S. Hajjaj, and the attached photo is described as “Tareo Hajjaj during one of his field visits reporting for Mondoweiss.” The screenshots read as follows:

Today I’m telling you the news. Tomorrow, I may be the news. I’m not sure that I will be able to write another story in the upcoming days. I’m not sure that I will survive. Israel decided, along with the U.S. and European countries, to wipe out the entire Gaza Strip. They plan on turning us into refugees one more time, and now they’re putting pressure on Egypt to host us. But the majority of people in Gaza have decided to stay in their homes, even if it meant being exterminated.

Keep my stories alive so that you keep me alive. Remember that I wanted a normal life, a small home full of my children’s laughter and the smell of my wife’s cooking. Remember that the world that pretended to be the savior of humanity participated in killing such a small dream.

End ID]

susiephone:

some of the plot resolutions in house were so fucking funny. like one episode a guy had seen 10000 different doctors to try and figure out why he was sick and when he came to house, house’s first question was “ok i think i recognize this, there’s this tropical disease that’s preeeeeetty common, have you ever been to the tropics?” and the guy said no and house was like “hm ok guess it’s not that, it must be something mysterious and obscure because this is the Mysterious And Obscure Ailment Show, i will keep digging” then 35 minutes later in the episode house is like “this really REALLY feels like it’s that relatively common disease i mentioned earlier, are you SURE you’ve never been to the tropics” and the patient is like omg NO why do doctors always harp on that I TOLD YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN TO THE TROPICS I HAVE NEVER BEEN SOUTH OF FLORIDA and house just stares at him before being like “FLORIDA IS IN THE FUCKING TROPICS” and the patient is like. oh.

this all happens while the patient is holding house and like some other people hostage and forcing house to treat him at gunpoint btw.

komsomolka:

Israel is one of the most racist countries in the world.