benefit scrounging scum @benefitscrounger - Tumblr Blog

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el-shab-hussein

Mutual Aid initiatives to donate to:

Ghazzah:

Revive Gaza Farmlands

Dahnoun Aid

Sameer Project

Mona's mutual aid project (X)

MECA

Sudan:

Sudan Solidarity Collective

Khartoum Aid Kitchen

Period Care in Sudan

Al Abbasiya community kitchen (Al-Abbasiya / Umdurman based)

Basmat Wasl (Khartoum-based)

#fundraiser #gaza gofundme #palestine #sudan gofundme #sudan

depsidase

#cuba

perkwunos

The Johnny Appleseed they don’t want you to know about

bigfuckingcrab

jareckiworld

Panos Tsagaris — The Garden within Us (gold leaf, acrylic, colour pencil, ink, and silkscreen, on canvas, 2025)

#art

stay-human

The Final Muslim Apology by Fatima Anwar on Intisaab

This blog seeks to archive the original artwork, music, and writing of progressive students from across Pakistan. We wish to encourage creative action and expression by students in various languages in a way that is socially aware and cognizant of not only the hurdles we face as a society but also of the opportunities for hope present at every turn.

Facebook: Democratic Students’ Alliance

prokopetz

"It doesn't help your credibility to exaggerate, most employers wouldn't literally work you to death" like, I used to work in distribution. If booking a truck driver for back to back shifts until they fall asleep at the wheel, crash, and die counts as being worked to death, I have personally met employers who've worked employees to death and gotten away with a slap on the wrist. It may not be universal, but it's a hell of a lot more common than a lot of us would prefer to think.

simplysnaps

Death by spreadsheet is an acceptable degree of separation for most in middle management. They can sleep at night without guilt for what they've done, because the system charitably setup twelve degrees of separation between their choices and the real-world harm. But do not be fooled, their choices set that harm into motion. Without their reckless disregard for human life, the harm would not be done.

I used to work at a TV station in Ohio. On weekends, we only had an 11pm news broadcast. Not much happened on weekends, ya know? I worked Monday-Friday 9-5, but someone on the weekend shift quit, so I also had to come in at 9pm on Sat/Sun to work the 11pm news. It was brutal. I worked seven days a week, even if two of them were ~3hrs.

This was a particularly bad winter. One Saturday, we had a level 2 snow emergency: That means you should only travel if you absolutely must. Like, it's not uncommon for cops to pull you over in level 2 emergencies to ask where you're going and why. It is genuinely dangerous to drive in that much snow.

I told my boss as much, how I almost crashed on the way home at 12:30am after a news broadcast. I told him I would need to call off if there were a snow emergency again during a night snow.

He told me, point blank, "If you ever call me about the goddamn snow, I will take it as a call of resignation."

And that was that! The very next Saturday, snow fell again. It was a level 2, but would become level 3 by sunup. Level 3 means driving is literally illegal except for ambulances and snow plows. I stared out the window, watching the snow, and I had to make a choice.

"Will I die for this? Will I kill myself to keep this job?" I made $11/hr.

Yes, managers work you to death. That's their job.

aspiringsorceress

Every single labor protection is written in the blood of those who were literally worked to death, and business owners and profiteers would claw those protections back with glee if they could. They will squeeze every red cent from your body if they are allowed, and write off your death for an insurance payout that they'll try to pocket for themselves while hiring your replacement for half the pay they gave to you.

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.

forevergulag-deactivated2026013

If marxist-leninism is scientific, why did the USSR promote Lysenko's idiotic pseudo-sciences (which partially contributed to a very large number of starvation deaths in various countries) and kill several of the real, prominent biologists who opposed him.

the ussr was not perfect

the ideology was, iirc, a sort of antithesis to fascist gene pseudo-science

i would love to see a source to that claim that they just. killed biologists. and that those biologists like nazi pseudoscientists

forevergulag-deactivated2026013

according to this text, lysenkoism was an attempted proletarian response to the science of genetics and biology, to lamarckism, etc.

forevergulag-deactivated2026013

of course it was. wrong. but give them some credit

forevergulag-deactivated2026013

it was supported also as a means to improve agricultural production

plum-soup

Im sorry but acting like the USSR is not responsible for the deaths of any scientists is literally an insane thing to say if you have read the history of the USSR. Like have you never heard of NI Vavilov, one of the most important plant scientists in modern history?

Like Wikipedia etc isn't the best source but this is widely known and agreed on history, even by most communists and USSR supporters

Its very clear that Lysenko was essentially just projecting political ideology and his own mad ambitions onto science, and its very clear that he was largely accepted by the Soviet government due to a) his views on genetics being more explicitly 'proletarian' and ideological and b) his success in convincing Ukrainian farmers to return to collective farms and work on them and finally c)the fact that he was presenting 'radical new ideas' that sound great if you know nothing about plants or biology, and which were materially disastrous but ideologically appealing to the upper echelons of soviet government. Like, if youre going to defend the USSR you should be very clear and honest about its real, actual history, both the bad abd the good. Stalin/the USSR were not perfect scientific materialists and made some very serious errors in numerous cases. This is not a controversial statement among most communists. Like, Lysenko is one of the reasons the 1930s famine as well as the later one in the PRC were so bad, they tried to follow his erroneous strategies for increasing yield and found the opposite effect. Like, any rational materialist wouldve understood that lysenko was essentially a reaction to what were perceived as bourgeois influences in classical genetics. It wasn't based on any actual confirmable science beyond concepts that existed in Lysenko's head, rather, it was based in an ideologically driven political understanding of science, and Lysenko personally headed up a witch hunt against actual geneticists (the USSR was originally one of the world leaders in genetic sciences, especially with regard to plants!) And accused them of practicing bourgeois western science essentially. It was all very stupid and very ideological, it's one of the clearest instances in which Soviet government policy diverted from their materialist ideas. Like no defense of the USSR can be made without first understanding its (very serious) flaws. I don't particularly blame Stalin for this per se, although he really should've known better, but in his defense, he was not a scientist, and the Ukrainian peasant issue was probably more important to him than Soviet academia's formerly prestigious place at the front of the pack when it came to groundbreaking genetic science

Like, there is no such thing as 'proletarian science'. Vavilov et al were all communists, Lysenkoism was a ideologically driven political corruption of genetic science. There is zero point in trying to defend it. You can still support the USSR while acknowledging that they did sone really fucking stupid things. Also Lysenko didnt really present himself originally as a counterpoint to fascist genetic race science, his claim was essentially that Mendelian genetics were bourgeois western pseudoscience brought into the USSR to sabotage Soviet agriculture and science because Vavilov and anybody claiming not to believe in the falsehoods Lysenko was perpetuating were clearly Trotskyist/Bukharinist traitors. He was like, very bitter about the fact the both Soviet and western geneticist had repeatedly called his stupid, false ideas stupid and false. The destruction of the Soviet genetics community at his hands was really a national tragedy for the USSR imo, they lost some of their best scientists to a ridiculous ideological purge

#ussr

enba-and-luka

#literally all of them when he got shot

hagiomoto

British Museum colludes with pro-Israel lobby to erase Palestine from historical exhibits —— An investigation by Middle East Eye has exposed the British Museum for covertly removing the terms “Palestine,” “Palestinian,” and “Israeli occupation” from its historical displays following intensive lobbying by pro-Israel activists. Internal emails obtained via a freedom of information request reveal that the London institution rapidly altered descriptions of artifacts dating back to 7,500 BCE to appease political pressure groups, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews and high-profile figures. While museum director Nick Cullinan publicly claimed the changes were part of a standard curation refresh and backed by audience testing, the newly released disclosures confirm that no visitor research regarding the term "Palestine" was ever conducted. The internal correspondence details a frantic effort by museum staff to pacify complaints lodged between October and December 2024, with one directive explicitly ordering curators to remain hyper-conscious of the anniversary of 7 October. In one instance, a panel describing ancient rulers of “Palestinian descent” was scrubbed and changed to “Canaanite origin” within five hours of receiving a complaint from the Board of Deputies. Middle East Eye cross-referenced the redacted emails to identify key lobbyists, including right-wing commentators and historians who weaponized access to the museum's leadership to argue that historical references to an ancient Israelite occupation would stoke modern antisemitism. The targeted erasure has sparked a severe diplomatic and cultural backlash, with Palestinian Ambassador to the UK Husam Zumlot accusing the public institution of betraying its historical integrity to serve political ends. Cultural figures and human rights defenders have condemned the museum for complicity in what the United Nations classifies as an ongoing genocide in Gaza, noting that the bureaucratic deletion of Palestinian history in London directly mirrors the physical destruction of heritage sites on the ground. Despite photographic evidence showing that references to "modern Palestine" were replaced with "Gaza and the West Bank" at gallery entrances, the British Museum has refused to answer specific inquiries, issuing a blanket denial to Middle East Eye that any erasure took place.

#hope the British museum goes up in flames tbh #or at least is forced to give back all the shit we stole #uk #palestine