Les temps sont durs pour les rêveurs

30+ • california • only happy when it rains • green is serene

[thewaterbirds]

Atlantic Puffin in Acadia National Park

2025, watercolor and white gouache

I think I'll start a whole series of these, but we'll see.

[wutheringheightsfilm]

the way the United States has treated Cuba for the past nearly 3 quarters of a century has been nothing but genocidal. sanctions that have led to the deaths of babies and the disabled and cause scarcity and danger when it comes to medical care. operation peter pan that smuggled cuban children away from their families after CIA backed agents convinced cuban parents that bad things were going to happen to them. 1 in 30 children that were sent never saw their families again. 7000 of those children went into camps and foster homes, not even to relatives. read the lost apple by maria de los angeles torres. keeping guantanamo bay functioning on cuban land and torturing people there. this newest push to cause civil unrest in cuba by starving people out and not allowing any fuel, this newest push to threaten military invasion.... it fucking makes me sick

[sproutlett]

if you’re not paying attention to trees and how they sway in the wind then what are you even doing

[smsomah]

A Crow girl in a traditional moose-tooth dress. Scanned from the book Insight Guides: Native America; 1993; photos by John Running & Monty Roessel

[sawed-on-shotgun]

the human body when you use it and exist in it

[nicky-olives]

the human body when you don't use it but continue to exist in it

[bebsi-cola]

being disabled and unemployed isn't contributing to society but joining the military is? going abroad to brutalise people for imperial interests is?? maybe that society isn't worth anything

[monstrous-femme]

as a regular donor to Gaza Soup Kitchen I get their email updates, and they said today that while they've continued to be able to expand, donations are slowing down as Gaza gets less coverage. If you have a few dollars to spare, I encourage you to send them here to continue the amazing work that Hani and his team are doing.

[h4nifah]

sorry im not giving into the cutting out sweet treats propaganda. life is hard enough

[funkyfeefee]

The thing about American "leftist" comedians is that they aren't actually leftist, they are the Imperial Court Jesters. They stand on a stage, point directly at the blood-soaked gears of the war machine, make a little tee-hee noise, and the crowd erupts. Not because they are critiquing the machine, but because the laughter is a pressure release valve for the people inside it. Take the video of that stand-up asking the defense contractor if she helped Trump bomb those 160 Iranian school girls, and everyone laughing, including the contractor herself. That laughter is ritual absolution. The contractor laughs because she knows she will never face a tribunal. The audience laughs because they get to feel "self-aware" without having to actually stop anything. The joke doesn't condemn the contractor; it humanizes her, turns her into a lovable scamp who just happens to have a job graphing the velocity of shrapnel through children's bodies. By making it a punchline, the comedian sanitizes the atrocity. The blood is scrubbed off the stage. The audience gets to say "wow, we are so edgy for talking about it" while the person who builds the bombs gets to chuckle and order another drink. It is not satire, it is a team-building exercise for the empire.

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

Americans don't hate the machine; they love the output. They hate the mess of it. So they turn it into jokes, into aesthetic, into "whatever." Because if they stopped laughing, if they stopped scrolling, if they actually looked at the 4K drone footage of the aftermath instead of the cool explosion CGI in their movies, they would have to realize that the lithium in their phones, the gas in their tanks, and the comfort of their suburban cul-de-sacs are all greased with the fat of foreign children. And they can't handle that. So they laugh. They turn it into a vibe. They call it "the Iraq war or whatever." You can't deconstruct the master's house with the master's jokes, especially when the punchline is the corpses holding up the floorboards.

[bakwaaas]

I think having small friendly interactions with strangers is so important for humanity

[sandersstudies]

Every time you go in a public place and something ISN’T disgusting it’s because somebody cleaned it. Every time you feel comfortable using a public bathroom or sitting at a restaurant table or setting something on a gas station counter or playing on a playground it’s because somebody cleaned it.

Thank you to everyone who cleans the world, especially those who are underpaid and under appreciated.

[neptunianfairy]

[marxistlesbianist]

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, as author of the Declaration of Independence, accused the king of England of having "excited domestic insurrections amongst us," with reference to the slave revolts occasionally supported by England insofar as they weakened US bourgeois power.

In 1807, Thomas Jefferson, as president of the US, signed into law the Insurrection Act, "authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections."

In 1831, president Andrew Jackson invoked the Insurrection Act to repress the slave revolt led by Nat Turner.

Although liberal historians like to point to the times when the Act was invoked to defend Black reconstruction in the 1870s, and to enforce the desegregation in the 1960s, the majority of invocations have been used to repress slave revolts, ghetto uprisings, and militant labor strikes.

In 1992, the most recent invocation of the Act occurred when president Bush Sr. used it to repress uprisings following Rodney King's murder.

This is the law which Trump is threatening Minneapolis with. A law theorized and established by slaveholders anxious to defend their "property," employed by white-supremacist bourgeois pigs in order to keep down the wretched of the earth.

When we say that the racist violence going on today is fundamental to the existence of the US, this is what we mean. Not simply in a metaphorical or spiritual sense, but in an explicitly traceable one, the violence enacted under Trump is the founding father's system working as intended.

[marxistlesbianist]

Correction: Rodney King wasn't murdered in 1992. He was severely brutalized by the police in 1991, and the riots were in response to the court verdict acquitting the officers responsible.

I don't think this changes the point of the post at all, but I am sorry for spreading misinformation. Everyone please rb this version!

[liberashen]

“The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.”

- Frantz Fanon

[modern-politics111]

From the book What This Cruel War Was Over by Chandra Manning:

During the Civil War, most Union soldiers didn’t care about the issue of slavery and were more focused on preventing the collapse of the United States. This would change as many Union soldiers encountered horrific circumstances of slavery and it’s widespread influence on southern society, with accounts like these: “Pvt. Chauncey Cooke experienced an epiphany when a fair-skinned slave woman whose children had been fathered and sold by her master told the young Wisconsin boy that her children looked like him, and that she missed them dreadfully because she loved them “just likes you mammy loves you.” ” “When an Iowan encountered a young child about to be sold by her own father, who was also her master, he vowed, “By G–d I’ll fight till hell freezes over and then I’ll cut the ice and fight on.”Sgt. Cyrus Boyd.

True horrors wake people up in the past and in the present. I feel like one of the only recourses a lot of people have is to share accounts and footage of ICE atrocities to as many people as possible.

[wafflelovingbatgirl]

This quote leaves out that Boston citizens rioted over Anthony Burns, repeatedly tried to break him out of jail and interrupt the trial, even killing one of the men guarding him. They also protested peacefully, attempted to purchase Burns’s freedom, offered him free legal counsel, and petitioned the mayor not to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. When Burns was finally taken aboard ship, they followed along with a coffin to symbolize his freedom dying.

The president called in the US Marines and the state militia (in addition to the US Marshalls who arrested him and held him in jail) to allow this one man to be dragged back to slavery.

There’s more, which you can see on Burn’s Wikipedia and on the Committee of Vigilance’s page, the abolitionist group founded after the Fugitive Slave Act to protect and aid Boston’s large community of escaped slaves & black citizen.

Anthony Burns - Wikipedia

Anthony Burns - Wikipedia

Boston Vigilance Committee - Wikipedia

Boston Vigilance Committee - Wikipedia

All this to say, civil disobedience to the people coming into your community and stealing and harassing your neighbors is an American tradition.

[voidingintotheshout]

For those who do not have the moral fortitude to click on that Wikipedia link, here is a snapshot of the rest of his life:

“Burns was eventually ransomed from slavery, with his freedom purchased by Boston sympathizers. He was educated at Oberlin Collegiate Institute and became a Baptist preacher. He was called to a position in Upper Canada (Ontario), where an estimated 30,000 refugee African Americans, both enslaved and free, had fled, to gain or retain their freedom. He lived and worked there until his death.”

[cannibalings]

why are all the actual real human jobs like baker and florist and childcare worker barely paying livable wages but the fake jobs like ai specialist boot licker or marketing campaign dick sucker making six figures

[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

"It's easy to say "violence is never the answer" if you've never had to fight for your life"

Poster by Vincentrose Art