he/they/she. queer. 18+. Thoughts and other Info for personal log. please touch grass, think critically, and know your history. disrespect life? fungi is inevitable.
i don’t even know where the draft that was supposed to be my masterpost went so here’s some stuff that i’ll add to later
i do a lot of image descriptions because it’s the internet and there’s a lot of images lol. haven’t really done video transcriptions yet. i always check for alt text and then search for descriptions and transcriptions but if i’m unable to find one i will write my own. i sometimes reblog descriptions and then link them if i wanted to reblog a different thread. alternatively sometimes i’ll reblog a different thread and then reblog the thread with the description with reference to the other thread (copy paste with links and credit). my original posts all have image descriptions. i think i used both #image described and #id in alt or something like that at one point but mostly i just use #image described now. occasionally but rarely i will also post with tags to remind me to check for or write an ID.
have a bunch of other random tags, right now it’s mostly #smacking that reblog so hard for things i am smacking the reblog very hard for, #queer community for anything even tangentially related, #dis/ability, #ehehe for things that made me laugh, #resources for anything with external sources that i might want to read later and/or things i want to fact check, #israel and #palestine, some #news, some #brants (aka my rants), some #anti us centrism or #anti-imperialism. lately have also being using #child/adult about things related to how children and adults interact and how they function as concepts, #digital realm / #physical root, and #digital privacy. i probably have more but don’t quite remember at the moment.
i mostly post in bursts when i’m procrastinating, especially since i do IDs. helps me to actually process stuff too but i don’t always have time, so i simply don’t post. and i have no interest in dealing with the queue.
Depiction of a pastoral landscape with trees and shrubs on grassy banks, a river in the foreground, and a sky with some birds in the background. However, the image is composed not of colored pixels, but with words superimposed to suggest line, depth and shading intensity. Each landscape element is made up of the word that defines it (so the trees are rendered using the word "Tree", the sky with the word "Sky" and so forth).
Hidden somewhere in the overall are two very hard-to-spot words, that also jangle ominously in this otherworldly scene: "Body" and "Eyes".
End ID.]
Also look out for:
Bird
Shrub
The rest are pretty easy to spot (birds are in the sky, fish are in the river), but the locations of "Body" and "Eyes" are shown under the cut
lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.
what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?
pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then
...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.
Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.
I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit.
Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.
A quote from Mary Shelley's Mathilda: '[...] arrived and quite incapable of taking off my wet clothes that clung about me. In the morning, on her return, [highlighted] my servant [end highlight] found me almost lifeless, while possessed by a high fever I was lying on the floor of my room.
A quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: [...] hands for joy and ran down to Clerval. [highlighted] We ascended into my room, and the servant presently brought breakfast; [end highlight] but I was unable to contain myself. It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly.]
i heavily despise a certain video genre that's just "surviving on dollar store/tree/general food for 24 hours" like haha we get it you don't have to eat this poor people's food every day of your life living on a budget because you're a Mr beast homunculus.
it's just?!;! jarring to see poor/middle class people get treated as subhuman for living off a budget And benefits especially if they are marginalized (which is almost always the case)
and with this shit, getting groceries for cheap prices because they can't afford anything more. i wish there was genuinely any amount of compassion extended towards poor people.
to the people who do make these videos that actually show people how to cook and what to buy, ily and I'm sorry there's certain people like this existing.
use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.
use firefox or librewolf (open-source fork of firefox) instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).
use mega instead of google drive
get rid of bloatware
use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite
get free stuff with the help of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH, r/piracy and r/roms
use trakt (for shows and movies), letterboxd (just movies), or TMB instead of IMDB (owned by amazon).
use storygraph instead of goodreads (owned by amazon).
use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions
use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp
make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge
use search for a cause, ecosia, or ocean hero to support the environment instead of google
use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)
use flashpoint to play archived online flash games
find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books
burn your music onto cds
use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe
use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, or tuta instead of gmail
remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X
remove bloatware on samsung X
use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta
use project gutenberg for free public domain books, and librivox for public domain books and audiobooks
use the seal app (android only) to download video and audio
use ellipsus instead of microsoft word or google docs
use mastodon instead of twitter
use peertube to create a network of small video hosting providers (disclaimer: not a 1:1 alternative to youtube)
use threema and signal for encrypted communication, on mobile and desktop
use qwant and startpage for secure internet browsers
use syncthing to securely transfer files between devices
learn how to jailbreak your kindle/ereader if you have one (wiki and video walkthrough)
use riseup’s email and VPN for secure communication (aimed towards activists)
use cryptpad and collabora instead of the microsoft office suite
use google takeout to export the data on your google account
use library extension to look for books on online stores and find them at your library
remove paywalls with removepaywalls
install the open-source adblocker ublock origin
install sponsorblock to skip sponsored segments on youtube videos
use bookfinder to look for the cheapest available listings of books, including textbooks
learn a language through mango (duolingo laid off some of its employees and now relies on AI translations) for free with a library card or through your school
edit photos with photopea
edit pdfs with foxit and sumatrapdf
download music with doubledouble
take notes offline and collaborate securely with obsidian
for android tv, use smarttube and cloudstream (ad-free, open-source)
change your OS to linux
changelog:
removed ground news (uses AI to summarize articles)
removed unroll.me (sells your data)
removed proton mail and drive (AI assistant feature, claims of CEO Andy Yen supporting Trump, please DM if you have proof I can add here)
removed NCH suite (only has very basic free features, puts watermark on anything saved)
notes:
this post blew up while I wasn’t looking (the end of my semester was hellish, and i recently came back from a 3-week family vacation). thanks so much for all the suggestions! <3
i included Ecosia because of their financial transparency. It’s physically impossible that they plant a tree for every search, but their profits still go towards projects including reforestation and solar energy. i view their actions as a net-positive
feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3
ID. Screenshot of a Tumblr comment by @ horrorinthenight 1m ago: Ive already seen memes joking about "clanka" vs "clanker" begin caps yall wanna say nigger so bad end caps!!!!
ID. Screenshot of white text on a rainbow glitch background: Zionism doesn't need to be anti-Palestinian; certainly not in the modern day. It really depends on one's definition of Zionism and their affinity to the concept. I consider the following ideological statements: End ID.
ID. Screenshot of black text on white background:
A Jewish-majority nation is needed to safeguard Jewish people worldwide.
A Jewish-majority nation is desirable to counter the cultural losses of the diaspora.
Jewish people represent a tiny minority of the world population and want to have access to a safe haven should global antisemitism continue to rise.
A Jewish-majority nation finds it necessary to expel or marginalize non-Jewish populations within its borders.
A Jewish-majority nation will seek conflict with non-Jewish neighbors, especially those with Arab Muslim majorities.
I think that a Zionist could hold any of all of these ideas, though the strain I am most familiar with would include 1-3 and reject 4-5. These are people who recognize that both Jews and Arabs have strong claims to the land in and around Israel/Palestine. They support a two- End ID.
ID. Screenshot of a Twitter post by jewdⒶs // ייִדהודה @ jewdas on Nov 3, 2022 at 1:34 PM: There's an actual existing Zionism which practices apartheid and denial of human rights. But there's another Zionism inside my head which is all rainbows and kosher marshmallows, so who can say which is the real Zionism? End ID.
"From my own experience I’m forced to disagree with the theory that there’s something special and inherent in our religion which leads us to social activism, altruism, and the left. My former rabbi, Lynn Gottlieb, was fond of telling us that the Torah enjoins us to “honor the stranger because we were strangers in Egypt” forty-six or one hundred and seventeen times. Whatever the number, it was probably one of those laws that needed to be reiterated continually because nobody was observing it...
My intention here is not to single out Judaism as being worse than other religions. It is just to say that we are no better. As a kid in Maplewood I never heard of tikkun olam, the now well-known commandment to repair the world. For all I know, Michael Lerner—whose parents, incidentally sat near my parents in shul at Beth El—made the whole thing up.
I am so obviously Jewish that no matter how much carne adovada or fry bread I eat, I’m instantly recognizable as a Jew. I proudly acknowledge the drive for education in Jewish culture which made me want to read about the world and to understand it and to become a teacher. I also recognize that in my social activism I am one of thousands working in the grand tradition of Jewish leftists, the Trotskys and the Emma Goldmans and the Goodmans and Schwerners of the twentieth century. I honor this lineage. As Jews our advantage in the past, though, was that we were outsiders critically looking in; today Jews sit at the right hand of the goy in the White House advising him whom to bomb next in order to advance the Empire.
To be outsiders in a nation or an empire is not such a terrible thing. Keeping critical and alert has allowed the Jewish people to survive all sorts of imperial disasters over the millennia—the Greeks, the Romans, Islam in Spain (which went from Golden Age to Inquisition in a few centuries), the Crusades, Reformation Europe, the Russian Czars, Nazism. This particular empire is neither the first nor the last to attempt to seduce us to join up. But we’d better not: it’s our job to be critical outsiders, both for our own survival and for that of the planet...
This year I visited Israel with my family for the first time. I learned that far from being culturally retro, which is the way I used to think of it—a small, socialist, anti-materialist nation—Israel is really an avatar, way ahead even of California. Israel is America’s future: militarized, racist, religio-nationalist, corporate, riven with so many internal splits and hatreds that only the existence of a perpetual enemy keeps the nation from exploding. If we don’t organize to stop the current direction in this country, thirty years from now we will be Israel."
- Mark Rudd, founding member of the Weather Underground and SDS leader, "Why were there so many Jews in SDS, or The Ordeal of Civility," Speech delivered in 2005, read online here.
After decades working the fields in Italy, Balvir Kumar “Birra” was still paid barely five euros an hour. Killed in an accident last month,
For the second summer in a row, I find myself writing about Punjabis in Italy under the urge of a tragedy. In 2024, it was the horrible death of Satnam Singh, the farmworker left to die by his employer in Latina. This year, it is the July 18 road accident that took the life of Balvir Kumar “Birra,” who was run over by a car while cycling to the fields where he harvested the same zucchini that arrive so cheap and fresh on our tables.
The case last summer had triggered widespread outrage, both due to its bloody details (Satnam suffered severe wounds after an accident with an agricultural machine) and to the cruelty of his employer (who dumped Satnam’s body in front of his house instead of taking him to the hospital, which resulted in his death). It attracted international attention, being featured on global news and inspiring waves of protests, demonstrations, and police interventions in the area and beyond. Birra’s death, in contrast, passed almost completely unnoticed — dismissed quickly as yet another fatal accident on the Via Pontina, “the most dangerous road of the Lazio region.”
Like Satnam, Birra met his death in the Latina province, south of Rome, where the death rate in road accidents increased by 47 percent from 2019 to 2023, and where agricultural labor is mostly performed by migrant workers, a large share of them Punjabis. Yet Birra’s death — rather like Satnam’s — should not be ignored as a mere accident: it could have been avoided, if only the employers and the state assumed the responsibility of protecting their most vulnerable and essential workers.
Dying for Work
In 2024, I had moved to the Latina province for a few months to conduct my doctoral research on the Punjabi community in Italy. The scarcity of public transportation in this rural setting forces most residents to travel either by car or bike. The main roads are heavily trafficked, with large trucks and cars driving fast, not enough space for passing and no speed checks.
On both sides of these roads, countless migrants cycle to and from the fields where they work (too many hours, for too little payment), day and night, in all weather conditions; they travel without helmets, on the tiny space between the white lines edging the roadway and the fields, protected only by the bright reflective jackets that the local labor unions distribute among them for free. Driving daily to collect interviews and surveys with Punjabi migrants in the area, I remember feeling a constant terror of getting in a road accident with one of them.
Birra was one of the first Punjabi workers I interviewed in the area, though I only got to know his full name after his death. Just six days before he died, I received prasad (sacramental food) from his hands while attending the Sunday liturgy in the temple where he lived and volunteered, cooking and serving food for the community of devotees. Birra was sixty-one years old, came from the village of Salempur near Hoshiarpur in India’s Punjab state, and was married with two children.
He had arrived in Italy at the age of thirty-three, in 1998, simply “kam karan lei” — to work. He was the first of two brothers and five sisters; his father worked as mason, his mother was a housewife. After marriage, his brother-in-law convinced him to go abroad to earn money and helped him pay for the trip. Like many other Punjabis at the time, Birra arrived in Italy “donkey” style — meaning, from India to Russia by air, and from Russia to Italy by road, after paying some thousands of euros to various agents to take him across borders. He had some friends in the Latina province and headed there, where he ended up staying and working in agriculture for the next twenty-seven years.
“Zucchine, in serra: pianto, lego, quando cresce poi raccolgo,” (“Zucchini, in the greenhouses; I plant them, tie them, then when they grow, I harvest them,”) he explained, in the few Italian words he knew despite his long-term residence in this country. He had lived without documents for the first four years until, in 2002, he managed to get regularized. Employers demand that Punjabi migrants like Birra pay large fees simply to get a job contract and the proof of dwelling needed to obtain a residence permit, and make them pay their tax contributions from their own pockets.
The whole regularization process remains opaque to them: as Birra admitted, “I don’t know the details, I don’t understand these things, they do it all by themselves.” With another Punjabi worker, he shared a room provided by his employer, in exchange for which he looked after the employer’s cattle and fields for €700 per month. Of this, he sent €500 back to Punjab to pay back his debts and sustain left-behind family: his daughter is currently pursuing a law degree in college; his son is also studying but wants to go abroad, too.
Birra said he did not want to reunite his family in Italy since the living conditions there were too harsh. He instead aimed to move back to India as soon as he had saved enough money to live comfortably. One year before our interview, Birra had left his flat in town — where he had lived for ten years — because his flatmate’s wife had moved from Punjab and he was told to search for another place. Facing the same housing shortages that all migrant workers in the area complain of, Birra finally found shelter in the temple, where he prayed and did seva (volunteering) daily, being very close to the Baba-ji (priest).
Birra was in fact deeply religious: he used to wear a turban in Punjab but removed it during the journey to Italy to avoid attracting attention, and since then had stopped wearing it. He described his routine thus: “I wake up at 3:30, I get ready, prepare some food for lunch, drink tea, then Baba-ji wakes up, so I pray with him and then at 5:30 I go to work by bike; we start at 6.”
It was indeed 5:30 a.m. when Birra was hit by a car on his way to work and breathed his last on the road; he was cycling, with three colleagues, on a main street perpendicular to Via Pontina, where so many cyclists before him lost their lives in road accidents (and so many more will, if nobody takes action). He was supposed to start harvesting at 6 a.m. in the field where he worked year-round for €5 or €6 per hour, under short-term contracts that declared far fewer hours than those he actually worked.
His coworkers say that he was worried about arriving late to work because the day before, he had left his e-bike at a repair shop and borrowed a regular bicycle to pedal to the field. Moreover, he had been exposed to toxic pesticides without protective gear in the zucchini field two days earlier, and the fumes had left him with breathing problems and high blood pressure. These two details did not emerge in the report, precisely because they make clear that his job conditions and marginal position in Italy played a big role in what happened — making it almost a workplace death rather than a road accident.
It's Like That
Birra belonged to the Ravidassia-Chamar, a Dalit caste in Punjab, among the most disadvantaged in Indian society. When I asked him about his experience of caste, he replied simply, “I don’t see any difference between people, I believe we all are humans and we live, work, and eat the same.” However, in our wrecked world, it is clear that we do not live, work, and eat the same. When Birra dies on the road, the news mentions only that “a man of Indian nationality, maybe a farmworker, died in an accident.” His story, his character, his life are deemed unworthy of note and ultimately expendable. Nobody will compensate his family for the loss; if anything, his wife will have to pay a large sum to get his lifeless body back to Punjab, where he had hoped to one day return.
He is — according to the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) union active in the area — the one hundred and fifteenth bike-accident fatality in Italy since the beginning of 2025; many of these are migrants on their way to work. Given the conditions in which they work in the primary sector, with exhausting long days, no protective gear, no sick or paid leave, irregular contracts, low salaries, and abusive gangmasters and employers, their chances of getting into accidents due to fatigue and stress are huge. Who will seek justice for them? Who will prevent others from meeting the same end? Why do the — local, regional, national, global — state authorities systematically fail to protect the lives of those who reproduce life in the first place?
This article is my small testimony to Birra; he will live in the memory of everyone who met him and of his family back home, who now mourns his loss. I will never forget his smiling eyes; his clumsy, swaying walk; his contagious laughter and quick way of speaking, as if he was in a rush to end the sentence; his funny bhangra dance moves; and how he gave a €10 banknote to an eight-year-old girl on her birthday, equivalent to two hours of his hard work. One of his friends — who informed me about his death — remembers him by the few words they used to jokingly tell each other whenever they met: “edda hai” (“it’s like that”). It’s like that, Birra, but it shouldn’t be.
The establishment of the National Federation of Dalit Women was the result of more than a decade of emotional, intellectual and political struggle.
I started a women’s rights organisation called Women’s Voice in 1981, Bangalore. I led land struggles for urban poor women across Karnataka. Through mass grassroots mobilising and legal battles in the 1980s, we successfully got a long-term stay order from the Supreme Court against slum evictions in Karnataka. These grassroots victories were transformational in the lives of the urban poor but had little space within larger movements.
As one of the first Dalit activists entering the autonomous women’s movement, I quickly realised that Dalit women’s struggles were completely missing from the feminist discourse. I would attend meetings where women spoke passionately about power, patriarchy and sexuality but caste was invisible.
In those lonely early years, I found courage in the writings of anti-caste visionaries such as BR Ambedkar and Periyar. I read scholar-activist Gail Omvedt and Black feminists Audre Lorde and Angela Davis, who helped me find a language for what I was experiencing within the progressive movements and civil society in India.
Davis’s framework of race, class and gender resonated deeply. I adopted it to our context of caste, class, gender, and framed it as Dalit women are thrice-discriminated or triple-alienated based on their social location. I emphasised that “Dalit women are the Dalits among the Dalits”.
The Black feminist analysis of systemic oppression, of the need for self-determined leadership, moved me. I remember reading Black civil rights activist Vincent Harding saying, “Our ancestors did not wade through rivers of blood so that we might surrender the interpretation of their lives into the hands of others.”
That stayed with me.
Working at the grassroots, I witnessed how caste, gender, labour and inter-generational poverty intersect in the lives of the marginalised. That’s why I found myself equally engaged in the feminist, Dalit, unorganised labour and urban poor movements. I spoke extensively about the inter-connectedness of our struggles.
At the core was a clear conviction: our movements must be self-led, intersectional and political – non-partisan but political. It was this clarity that laid the foundation for several platforms I co-founded, whether it was one of the first registered Domestic Workers Union in India or the Slum Dwellers Federation, the National Center for Labour, or other national women and Dalit networks.
[...]
Building the capacities of historically marginalised women takes time: years, sometimes decades. It requires consistent support, deep trust and the space to make mistakes and grow. Most of our organisations do not have the privilege of hiring graduates from elite institutions. We also intentionally make a political choice to hire from within our own communities: women with limited formal education and little exposure, but rich lived experience. This means we invest time and effort in strengthening capacity with every hire.
Unlike elite-led NGOs, which for decades have hired from top institutions and accessed world-class training, we start with far less. Their caste privilege is a web of advantages: socio-economic-cultural-political capital, with the ability to name-drop and navigate power, from the police station to the panchayat to Parliament.
Dalit women’s organisations are expected to perform miracles with crumbs. We are expected to do the most radical grassroots work, build a second line of leadership and sustain ourselves with no intergenerational investment.
It is time to radically revisit the idea of resource justice from the standpoint of historically marginalised women. Resource justice to us means recognising historical injustices and redistributing resources with urgency, depth and political intent. For us, resource justice is reparative justice. It means long-term, core, flexible support to those who have been kept out of power structures for generations. Without this shift, the promise of transformation will remain unfulfilled.
with all the online pseudo therapy speak AITA type of posting where everyone else is always at fault (and a narcissistic abuser) going on in recent years i actually find it refreshing when people can admit that sometimes they are the assholes. I was definitely the villain in my last relationship and i'm not proud of it but what can I do except try to change and grow as a person. I feel like making excuses and trying to find reasons why actually the other person was at fault would make me more of an asshole
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of _Vogue_
ID. Screenshot of article text: Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain duly of the unfairness, begin italics the undeserved embarrassment end italics, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work--say it is screenwriting--in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did begin italics Anne Frank end italics. End ID.
ID. Screenshot of article text: In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called begin italics character end italics, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs. End ID.
Superman desperately scanning the street during a fight to find the most morally acceptable car to throw at his opponent, knowing that not everybody has insurance, and loss of transportation can ruin a life -
A wave of incredible relief washes over him as he spots the hard geometric lines and silver paintless sheen of a Cybertruck.
Raise your hand if you're also heartbroken you missed the
𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕝 𝕊𝕪𝕞𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕚𝕦𝕞 𝕠𝕟 𝔼𝕕𝕚𝕓𝕝𝕖 𝔸𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕦𝕞𝕤
Papers include:
Production of shallot using a banana-shallot intercropping for effective land use (V. Alveno, M.A. Chozin, A. Maharijaya)
Onion maggot and onion thrips over forty years of integrated pest management (M.R. McDonald, K. Vander Kooi, T. Blauel)
Preparing Flemish leek growers for future challenges (L. Lippens, L. Lauwers, J. Bodyn, A. Waverijn, S. Buysens, L. De Reycke)
Things I have learned doing what is definitely not the work I'm supposed to be doing:
Our domestic onion (Allium cepa L.) originated in the rocky, dry mountains of northern Iran. We know this because there are still wild relatives of our cepa onion growing there. These cousins are separate species from A. cepa, but are similar enough that they can be crossed with our onion.
These wild onions are Allium vavilovii (Popov & Vved.) (first cousin) and Allium asarense (R.M.Fritsch & Matin) (second cousin). Here's a free paper about them!
They look like our onions... kinda. They both share a life stage where they turn into big sticks with a bulb right in the center.
Part of what I love is the name. A. vavilovii literally translates to "Vavilov's onion". If you don't know Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), consider this your introduction! Vavilov was a legendary Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist. He travelled the globe, hunting down these wild relatives of our food crops, partially to build stronger crops, partially to understand the history of domestication and the movement of people. Please lose yourself in one of the coolest, mindblowingest wikipedia pages out there, describing the history and places of domestication largely built by him.
Horrifically, while we now know that Vavilov was a genius, things... didn't go great with Stalin. Stalin's personal favorite agronomist Trofim Lysenko was a monster and a master of jingoistic pseudoscience. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics (the science we use now), focusing instead on Lamarkism (absolutely false horseshit). Lysenko had Vavilov sacked, grabbed by the Soviet secret police, interrogated for 11 months, and died in prison, likely due to starvation and pneumonia. You can decide if that was a better fate than his geneticist peers, who were just outright shot.
Lysenko would go on to set agricultural policy that would result in multiple famines that killed approximately 25-75 million people in USSR and Mao's China.
As we enter a growing era of anti-science, it's valuable to revisit the story of Vavilov. It's a horrifying reminder of the stakes of pseudoscience and what happens when ideology, rather than data, determines what is true.
'I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly because of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to their sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There's an element, it has always seemed to me, a bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society.'
I cannot take "fraud" talk about benefit programs seriously because I know what can get labeled as fraud. Taking a tupperware of leftovers home from a friend's birthday can be argued to be food stamp fraud. Exchanging SNAP for cash is fraud, that makes sense, except in many cases, people will let someone else use their leftover SNAP at the end of the month in exchange for cash they need for shampoo, toilet paper, Tylenol, or other essentials not covered by SNAP. Paying the nurse or attendant for the full shift even though you asked them to leave early because you wanted to go to bed is fraud, even though the alternative is either they get less pay for no fault of their own, or they have to hang around while you sleep. Meanwhile, paying someone for the full shift when the jobsite has to shut down early is policy in many workplaces. Giving your attendant or nurse cash to go pick up your medicine and letting them keep the change is fraud. In some states packing your kid lunch if you are on free lunch is fraud. Because of how strictly benefits programs are defined and regulated, for the recipients, basic human acts and impulses are defined as fraud.
If people want to talk about benefits fraud, they should be talking about third party administrators, nursing homes, and farms. That's where big ticket fraud that is malicious, deliberate, and with the aim of ripping off the government happens. It's the province of large scale service providers and contractors, not people who use benefits or the workers directly assisting them. So unless you're explicitly talking about that, shut the fuck up about "oh I'm sure there *is* fraud."
