He/Him, 29, queer/bisexual/relationship anarchist This blog, as a commentary on my life, has either no theme or 9,000 themes and it's unclear which way we're leaning.
On this day, 28 July 1985, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) was officially launched at a meeting in Conway Hall, London, attended by 250 people with representatives from Red Action, Class War, Jewish Socialists Group, Newham Monitoring Project, Workers’ Power, Searchlight and various local anti-racist bodies from across the country. Its dedication to ‘physical and ideological opposition’ to the fascism would see it drive numerous far-right groups off the streets.
For example, the fascist British National Party (BNP) had been growing in confidence in Liverpool, launching violent attacks on left-wingers, including trying to burn down a bookshop run by feminist collective. Within a year the BNP had been beaten from the streets, and later admitted they "were driven underground" by anti-fascists. And in London, after the neo-Nazi record label Blood and Honour tried to organise public events in the city, they too were smashed off the streets by AFA members who took over their redirection points for shows in Marble Arch in 1989 and Waterloo in 1992.
AFA mostly wound down in the mid-1990s after the BNP had been forced to change its strategy from trying to control the streets to running in local elections.
We have a large selection of anti-fascist books and merchandise available in our online store with global shipping, proceeds help fund our work: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/anti-fascist
Citations could be so awesome without copyright. Imagine just being able to click on a footnote and it takes you to the exact section of another book being quoted. Imagine how much that would do for stemming misinformation.
closing statement from an article about being intersex & the possible connection of gender expression and sexuality in intersex individuals, published in The Gay Liberator, 1970s
if you read about any biology you can quickly lose touch with what is astonishing and miraculous vs what is mundane, from animals that steal chloroplasts to become photosynthetic, to cloning technology being old hat, to trees that didn’t biodegrade for tens of millions of years, to naturally occurring lateral gene transfer between vastly different species, to the creation of gametes from adult cells, to the ability of some cancers to induce blood vessel growth, to desert shrimp that lie dormant for years, to the sensitivity of human touch receptors, to the fact that human hardware has a latent ability to see UV but their corneas block those wavelengths, to birds that echolocate and live in caves, to human skin being covered in enzymes that destroy RNA, to individual trees becoming genetic tapestries branch by branch, to life forms that gain energy from the electron potential of metals in their environments, to plants that recognize their siblings and adjust their behavior accordingly when growing next to them, to metamorphosis
which is to say. All of it is miraculous. and all of it is mundane. biology is Chaos vs. Order locking horns forever
That was Andrew Jackson. It was is inauguration party. Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, all died after their presidencies.
However, William Henry Harrison, the president with the shortest time in office, died two months after his inauguration because he gave a two hour speech in pouring rain and got pneumonia. And Zachary Taylor died about 16 months into office, possibly because he drank milk that had spoiled in a heatwave.
Because these are not quite accurate and I can't leave it alone. Mostly because they're both a lovely look at those idyllic "simpler times" a certain kind of person longs for.
TL;DR William Henry Harrison didn't die because of his inaugural address, and Zachary Taylor didn't die from spoiled milk, they were likely both taken out by contaminated water. The past was not glorious or "more simple", it was gross.
William Henry Harrison was sixty-eight [68] years old at the time of his death. He did indeed give a two hour inaugural address in the rain, but it was in March, because that's when the United States used to do that. However, Harrison seems to have been one of those people who wasn't particularly bothered by cold. He actually took morning walks every day both back home in Ohio, and through the DC markets, rain or shine, summer or winter. Also, cold doesn't make you sick. Viruses and bacteria make you sick. And again, Harrison was sixty-eight. He was also constantly interviewing people looking for positions in his government, and having to do a lot of entertaining.
His initial illness was likely just the common cold. He probably picked it up from someone in the markets, or someone who came to interview. But because it was 1841 and Western medicine was less a science and more stupidity at this point, the man was subjected to blood-letting and a few other things that did more harm than good. Not only that, the water source the White House was downstream of public sewage. The symptoms described means it is more likely he died of septic shock via typhoid, through no fault of his own.
Typhoid symptoms can appear over a few weeks. They include:
Fever that gradually gets worse over several days
Headache
Chills
Loss of appetite
Stomach (abdominal) pain
“Rose spots” rash, or faint pink spots, usually on your chest or stomach — these can be hard to see on dark skin tones
Cough
Muscle aches
Nausea, vomiting
Diarrhea or constipation
[...]
Complications include:
Bronchitis, pneumonia or other respiratory issues
Bone inflammation (osteomyelitis)
Heart inflammation
Hole (perforation) in your intestines
Inflammation in and around your brain (encephalitis or meningitis), which can cause confusion, delirium and seizures
Internal bleeding
Kidney failure
Swollen or burst gallbladder
Fun Fact: Harrison dying in office is how we ended up with the laws of succession in the United States government, that is, the Vice-President becoming President. That was not a thing prior. We'd never had one die in office before, so there wasn't a rule about it yet!
But it was a good thing we'd gotten that down, because nine years later, Zachary Taylor was the 12th president, and died in 1850, seventeen months into his four-year term, almost to the day. There were rumors he was assassinated that persisted until the 1980s, when Taylor's closest living relative consented to have him dug up and tested, probably so people would shut the fuck up about it, finally. There was no evidence of any poison in the samples taken. The likeliest answer, from the accounts of the day, descriptions of his symptoms and the symptoms of the several other people who got sick, is that he caught cholera from the same contaminated water that probably took out Harrison. Because the White House water source was still downstream of the public sewage.
The bacteria Vibrio cholerae (V. cholerae) causes cholera. V. cholerae live in warm, mildly salty (brackish) water. When you drink water or eat food contaminated with V. cholerae, the bacteria stick to the walls of your small intestine. There, they release toxins that cause diarrhea.
It was July in Washington D.C., which is swampland. It was all warm, brackish water, and the water in the White House was also full of fecal matter from horses and people and god knows what else.
Thomas Jefferson died of a combo hit, but it wasn't helped by the various urinary and intestinal diseases he'd had that had wreaked havoc on his guts. And many of those were likely caused by contaminated water. John Adams died of a heart attack, granted. But his wife, Abigail, died of typhoid. Madison died of congestive heart failure. McKinley died of infection [gangrene], not the bullet, not helped by the doctors sticking their filthy hands in his insides trying to find the damn bullet to remove it.
Do you know how many people died of cholera or typhoid over the course of human civilization? It's a lot. It's still happening, every day. Infection and disease from contaminated food and water are our main enemy.
Implicit in these discussions is that it is not individuals, but peoples, who are the actors. Thus the discussion not of Holocaust survivors, but "populations"
"there is nothing morally cleansing about hardship" -- Okay, sure, true, but the more salient point is that nations, cultures, and populations cannot be morally cleansed! Groups are not moral agents; that is the exclusive province of individuals! Groups do not suffer, feel, or choose, only the human beings situated within them do.
To engage under the opposite framework, to write and speak under the silent assumption that it is peoples, not people, who function as the living base of society, is to give critical ground to not only Zionism but also to nationalism and racism as a whole. The assertion of tribe-as-moral-agent is the underpinning of a whole suite of chauvinisms and you need to consciously reject it.
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Seeing people I know and like using AI is making me understand the protagonists of those old time sci fi dystopia's.
"Oh I don't normally use AI, I just wanted it to plan my trip"
You lived on this planet for decades, you know what you like, there are hundreds of websites where you can type into any search engine " things to do in [area]" and have at least a hundred different options.
"Oh I only use it so I can figure out what to make during the week with what I have"
The most popular website as you type in "recipes" into google have sections where you click dinner- quick and easy and those usually rely on staples + 1 or 2 items. I found 30 recipes on chicken alone.
"I had a writing idea, so I typed a few sentences into Chat GPT and I was able to write 20 pages with it."
Goths aren't "true to seed" in the sense that the biological offspring of two goths do not necessarily grow up to be goth, though inheriting the inclination for it from both parents increases the odds significantly. That is not how goths naturally reproduce.
The process is actually quite sophisticated, and requires the presence of a full-grown goth to trigger it. A pupal-stage proto-goth, at this point completely indistinguishable from any other small human child, only needs to encounter a mature specimen once - and while the initial imprinting that ensues will only take seconds, the incubation period often takes more than a decade, even several.
The first visible step of the transformation is triggered when the dormant goth suddenly gains awareness that they have free will and can do whatever they want with their appearance. While the progress may be gradual, or seem like the transformation happened all at once overnight, the initial seed was planted years ago. And now, in full bloom, a fully-fledged mature adult goth may finally be happy.
And that's why it's important to sometimes look goth as fuck in the grocery store. You might be seen by small child who had previously hoped to die before adulthood because everything they've heard about becoming a grownup is just pure misery, who will then consequently think to themselves "actually nevermind, that's what I want to be when I grow up."
my dad is very intensely involved a battle with his city’s public administration over a playground they have tried to forcibly remove like five times in the past 20 years and DID remove once in like 2005 but then had to rebuild because my dad was such a pain in their asses and came through with undeniable receipts of the zoning plan from the 60s/the historic/cultural value of the urban planning…. like there’s a woman in the city office who is his arch nemesis. he is literally the daredevil of urban planning
gracieabrams
blakekathryn
