#extradirty
tannertan36
Cosimo Galluzzi
JVL
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
macklin celebrini has autism
blake kathryn
Sade Olutola
Kaledo Art
Jules of Nature
Love Begins
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
noise dept.
Today's Document
almost home
todays bird
🪼
Keni
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
roma★
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia
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seen from Brazil
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seen from France
seen from Australia
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@christinareading
so metropolitan museum of art has a register of books they’ve published that are out of print and that you can download for free! they’re mostly books on art, archeology, architecture, fashion and history and i just think that’s super useful and interesting so i wanted to share! you can find all of the books available here!
A rule change pushed by White House officials would slash benefits or end support for as many as 400,000 Supplemental Security Income recipi
The Trump administration wants to make a rule change that would decrease or end benefits for SSI recipients who live with their family. As many as 400,000 disabled people may have their benefits cut if this rule change occurs.
It's worth noting as always that as things currently stand, the MAXIMUM benefit a person can receive from SSI is $994 a month.
If two people on SSI are married, the MAXIMUM they can receive is $1,491 a month, total, for both of them. (Meaning marriage to another SSI recipient reduces your maximum income possible to $745 a person each month.)
Could you live on that?
Could you live on that without living with family?
The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — about $330 a month in Burton’s case — or ending their support altogether. The SSI rule change is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, a process that involves editing the draft regulation and considering where it falls on the list of the president’s priorities. Once it’s returned to the Social Security Administration for initial publication, there will be an opportunity for public comment; it could take until next year to be finalized, depending on the amount of opposition it faces. (quote from article above)
AND IT NEEDS TO FACE A LOT OF OPPOSITION, SO CALL AGAIN!!
im gonna look up contact info for the office of management and budget staff, White House Budget Director Russell Vought, and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano. Bombard them. no peace for em.
‘Despite the U.S.’s ongoing war with Iran, the administration seems more committed to mass deportation than protecting human lives,’ said an
Books similar to The invention of the Americas / Enrique Dussel?
The American Discovery of Europe by Jack D. Forbes
Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith
The Colonizer’s Model of the World by James Morris Blaut
The Darker Side of Western Modernity by Walter Mignolo
Orientalism by Edward Said
The Invention of Africa by V.Y. Mudimbe
The Question Concerning Technology in China by Yuk Hui
one of the fundamental mistakes serano and a lot of others make involves the following line of reasoning:
1. some people have dysphoric other-gender embodiment-desires (e.g. for different genitals) before they acquire an understanding of gender-sex associations or even that there are genitals other than their own
2. if gender is totally socially constructed, as the social constructionists say, then these embodiment-desires would not be possible in such a state of ignorance
3. modus tollens the social constructionists are wrong and there must be some innate gender-desire
this is often accompanied by the following:
1. if social constructionism is right, then the abolition of gender would mean the elimination of dysphoric embodiment-desires
2. the state of knowledge prior to acquiring gender-sex knowledge is analogous to the state of affairs under gender abolition
3. in that state some people still have dysphoric embodiment-desires
4. modus tollens the social constructionists are wrong
these arguments are often defensive, to be fair—the first premise of the latter argument is unfortunately made by certain social constructionists too, steamrolling those early childhood experiences. but in both cases there is a circular mistake happening. the dysphoric embodiment-desires can precede gender-sex knowledge specifically because they are separable from it. penis-dysphoria in young childhood can only be called gender dysphoria if we assume the very gender-sex epistemic constructions we have agreed not to take for granted! and the former dysphoria may well persist in the absence of the latter constructions. this is what people say when they talk about a (utopian, perhaps, but nonetheless coherent and logically possible) gender abolitionist future where people can have whatever procedures they desire done. the embodiment-desires are still there! they are just freed from gender-sex associations.
Positive climate change news — just gonna share some recent and recent-ish news stories about climate change that are mostly not doom and gloom. i pay a lot of attention to this stuff for work so i am inundated with these stories. i would like to post this stuff more often so if you’re into this, let me know and i will try to do so.
most of these stories are positive, some of them kinda straddle the middle, and towards the bottom i have some stories that are not as positive but i still think people should know about. balance is needed. we can’t become doomers leading us to apathy or being paralyzed by anxiety. but we also can’t become complacent as if this isn’t something we still need to care about. it's all hands on deck!
Renewable energy
In a First, Renewables Beat Natural Gas on U.S. Grid Last Month
Solar to overtake coal on Texas grid for the first time ever this year
Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy
Trillions Of Dollars Committed To Fossil Fuel Divestment
Clean energy saved EU €51 billion in 2025 by cutting fossil fuel imports - as solar leads the way
US renewables boom despite Trump attacks
Blowin’ in the Wind: How Nordic Countries Made Electricity Free
How Pakistan’s people-led solar boom is easing impact of Middle East energy crisis
Clean power scale-up moves the global electricity sector past fossil growth
Spain just became one of Europe's cheapest power markets. Here is how.
Solar energy is taking off across Africa
Asia Races Ahead on Clean Growth While the West Idles: Polman
A new economic superpower could spark a global retreat from fossil fuels
The case for co-locating offshore wind parks and nature reserves
Spotlight On Texas As Trump Makes Solar Power Great Again
Solar, Wind Emerge as Canada’s Cheapest New Power as Prices Fall by Half
California’s Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants. Here’s What’s on the Horizon.
Global Energy Transition Investment Grew in 2025 Despite Major Obstacles; Here Are the Numbers
Inside the world’s largest renewable energy park – proof the green transition isn’t dead
Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World
Solar keeps the lights on in Jamaica
Bhutan PM on leading the first carbon-negative nation: ‘The wellbeing of our people is at the centre of our agenda’
Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity
4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment
International cooperation
Countries pledge €3.4bn for climate adaptation, biodiversity protection and water security
UN votes to support strong action on climate change despite US efforts to thwart the effort
International treaty protecting world's oceans to take effect
Electric vehicles — i know, EVs are not the solution. disclosure: i don't drive and have never owned a car. i do think we should be working towards cities that don’t require vehicles at all—focusing on active transit, public transit, and cities designed to be walkable. we should focus the transport of goods to trains and not big clumsy dirty loud diesel smoke spewing trucks. and the suburbs—which were developed around the automobile—really shouldn’t exist at all and we do have to find a way to transition out of that way of doing things over time. of course, outside of cities, people are still very much going to need vehicles still. but the transition is going to require both.
and we have to stop burning gasoline and diesel fuel yesterday. it's bad for the climate. it's bad for our health. it's bad for our wallets. there's literally nothing good that comes from it. it's just bad things all the way down.
Close to 30% of cars sold this year are set to be electric as countries and consumers respond to energy crisis
EVs Offset 70% of Iran Oil Exports as Crisis Speeds Up Energy Transition
Most EV batteries outlast their cars, real-world data shows
Used EV sales jump in Europe as Iran war drives up petrol prices
The first country to BAN the sale of new gas cars is doing just fine, actually
Soaring electric truck sales deal new blow to diesel use in China
EV sales are up everywhere in the world — except North America
Consumption, etc
EU ban on the destruction of unsold clothes marks a turning point for fashion waste
South Koreans shift from plastic to aluminium as recycling awareness grows: survey
Repair Manifesto
Scientists Create Biodegradable Packaging Film That Matches Plastic Performance
Toronto slashes single-use waste by third, plans to expand bylaw
Not-so-positive climate stories that you should still absolutely be paying attention to cuz c’mon it’s your world too
‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds
Extreme heat threatens global food systems, UN agencies warn
Paths carved into boreal peatlands for oil and gas exploration could be speeding up climate change: study
Experts Failing to Account for Ripple Effects from Extreme Weather, Paper Warns
US data shows Arctic winter sea ice could break last year's record low
Pace of Global Warming Nearly Double Since 2015 While Heat and Drought Combine More Often
Western Canada glaciers suffered 2nd-greatest ice loss on record in 2025 — i don't think people in north america realize how critical this is, that these glaciers supply water to major rivers that go to three separate oceans, they literally supply freshwater to the continent and they are projected to be gone by the end of the century. that's water necessary for ecosystems, agriculture, drinking water, everything.
How microplastics are chipping away at Earth’s ‘natural shield’ against climate change
Other stuff — assorted stuff, mostly good news
‘Stop Creating Climate Risk,’ Survey of Global Business Execs Urges Governments — even shithead capitalists want climate action as its actually better for business. imagine that! a habitable planet is better for business! also, and maybe this is more of a thing in countries dying of terminal neoliberalism, but can we just take a moment to laugh at the idea of business execs urging governments to do something about climate change when they've been the ones fighting tooth and nail to not pay taxes or strengthen environmental regulations or tax carbon emissions?
London, San Francisco and Beijing achieve ‘remarkable reductions’ in air pollution
Mangroves are making a comeback. It’s a rare climate success story.
Climate Change Responsible for Half of Insurance Premium Increases Since 2008
U.S.-Owned Oil Sands Giants Send Profits Out of Canada Despite Public Support for Resource Sovereignty
60 Orgs Reject Public Subsidies for LNG
New national law will turn large parking lots into solar power farms — cool idea coming out of south korea. we should be doing this everywhere along with green roofs on buildings.
‘We’ve done it before’: how not to lose hope in the fight against ecological disaster
Climate action can feel slow – but the fastest energy leap in history has begun
I don’t think people realize what keeping the internet running and producing most tech they use entails like. Physically, labor-wise, energy-wise.
Purposefully included some older articles here so people can see how baked in this is:
Labor Conditions of Content Moderators (2021)
Inside AOL's "Cyber-Sweatshop" (1999)
Digital Labor and Imperialism (2016)
Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Digital Sweatshop (2012)
Gig Economy, Algorithmic Control, and Migrant Labor (2022)
The Rise of Cyber-Coolies (2003)
Ecological Impact of Computation and the Cloud (2022)
The Environmental Sustainability of Digital Content Consumption (2024)
Carbon Footprint of the Internet (2010)
I think a lot of times I see people talk about this stuff in relation to AI. It's right to talk about it, but I hate when people act like AI is the only tech that has these problems. What you see with AI now is a reflection of the broader tech and internet industry that has grown for the past 20-30 years.
There’s a really good book all about this.
Last seen by Judith Giesberg
Actually I wanted to take this out of the tags, because I was doing a lot of research on this earlier this year, and I have several book recs.
In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World Edited by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene Black Southerners 1619-1869 by John B. Boles Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 (Available for free online) South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and to the Civil War by Alice L Baumgartner (did you know that Mexico was staunchly anti-slavery and most enslaved peoples who fled Texas fled to Mexico?) An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas by Randolph B. Campbell (Feels especially appropriate for this holiday in particular)
Where consciousness of the special role of Negro women exists, successful struggle can be initiated which will win the support of white workers. A recent example was the initiative taken by white Communist garment workers in a shop employing 25 Negro women where three machines were idle. The issue of upgrading Negro women workers became a vital one. A boycott movement has been initiated and the machines stand unused as of this writing, the white workers refusing to adhere to strict seniority at the expense of Negro workers. Meanwhile, negotiations are continuing on this issue. Similarly, in a Packard U.A.W. local in Detroit, a fight for the maintenance of women in industry and for the upgrading of 750 women, the large majority of whom were Negro, was recently won.
Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!
Anyways, your homework for this week is to read An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! by Claudia Jones. It's fairly short and literally good!!
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
A Reference Guide For Recognizing Far Right Groups, Symbols, and Dog Whistles
Governments urged to act to prevent potentially disastrous impacts on human resistance to medicines
Animal husbandry accounts for close to three-quarters of global use of antimicrobial medications and in many countries their use is poorly monitored. Some herds are routinely dosed and in many countries antimicrobials are used to increase the growth of animals bred for meat.
This is one of the leading causes of the rise of superbugs, which are threatening to render antibiotics useless against increasingly resistant diseases. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) already costs an estimated €11bn (£9.5bn) a year within Europe alone and is predicted to cost $1tn globally by 2050. AMR is forecast to kill tens of millions of people unless there is concerted action, and to make what are currently routine surgeries such as hip replacements life-threatening.
TW: slavery and the slave trade
The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.
The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.
Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)
It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!
It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.
In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.
And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.
For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).
As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.
The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.
The contrast between that and white institutions like the British Museum is really stark. Do you treat the slave trade with the gravity it deserves, which is to say that you mention it at every opportunity and do not shy away from saying, "The slave trade is why this museum, this city, this country, this continent, why all of it is the way it is"? Or do you move one statue to a new location, put a little sign up about how one man's wife's family owned slaves a long time ago, and say "That's enough, we've dealt with the slavery issue now"?
From the beginning of 2025 through early 2026, posted wages for salaried roles grew 2.9% while their hourly counterparts rose only 1.7%.
Salaried workers’ pay growth has outpaced gains among hourly earners in the past year, with advertised wages declining outright among hourly workers in IT, software development, and other STEM fields, according to a new analysis from the Indeed Hiring Lab.
The analysis drew on pay information across millions of job postings from the beginning of 2025 through early 2026, finding that posted wages for salaried roles grew 2.9% while advertised pay for their hourly counterparts rose only 1.7%.
The wage growth gap between hourly earners and salaried workers, who already tend to be in higher-income positions and receive workplace benefits, is all the more important as rising consumer prices climb past workers’ pay gains. Prices in April surged by 3.8% compared to a year earlier — largely thanks to rising energy costs — while average hourly earnings rose just 3.6%.
Some workers will feel that pinch more than others.
The analysis noted that since early-career workers, freelancers, and contractors are more likely to be hired on an hourly basis, they may be especially squeezed right now. What’s more, “almost all STEM sectors — including industrial engineering, software development, IT systems & solutions, and data & analytics — saw negative wage growth in hourly job postings, as did white-collar sectors of marketing and sales,” Indeed Hiring Lab economist Sneha Puri wrote.
The pay divergence underscores how workers performing similar jobs might face vastly different economic circumstances depending on whether they’re hourly or salaried.
“These trends suggest that wage growth is increasingly bifurcated not just across industries, but within them,” Puri wrote. ”If the gap persists, salary structure may become an increasingly important factor in how workers build — or lose — purchasing power over time.”
Sophie Lewis looks back on Scapegoat to reassess the Andrea Dworkin's legacy, concluding that the current Dworkin revival is a "terrible ide
Scapegoat now states that women have no history but, if we did, it would be “a history of rape: the pogrom against the female body. The constant juxtaposition cuts short the breath that one would normally use to assess each claim, as it comes, before moving onto what follows. It turns my stomach in a way I suspect was not intended. A sudden comment on Chinese footbinding caps off, for instance, many paragraphs on the patriarchal oppression of women in Gaza. An abrupt swerve into Jew-on-Jew pimping follows many paragraphs on the pornographic core of National Socialism. A patronizing assessment of Palestinian women’s role in the resistance melts into yet another survey of state-sanctioned prostitution across the centuries. Dworkin has set herself the task to prove, inexorably—through a widening gyre of montage-based equivalences—that the “woman-hate” in men’s hearts really is everywhere, left and right. This hate will remain until women rise up across borders and draw new borders for themselves by seizing a homeland—an “Israel”—away from men. Her mission is carried out quite well. I just consider it fascistic, not least in its insistence on female innocence. Dworkin’s account of history is dazzlingly erudite and stunningly stupid at once: men have wrought it all. Even if your definition of “history” is strictly military, this is unpardonable stuff: armed struggles have always featured women leaders, such as, in the case of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abla Taha, Latifa Howari, Sarah Joudeh and Leila Khaled. Dworkin doesn’t mention these or any other Palestinian women militants and reckons that feminism is not currently possible in the Arab world: “in the sensibility of contemporary Arab women, the Palestinian male is the romantic figure,” not the Palestinian woman. Tellingly, the whole question of Palestinian women’s anti-Zionist struggle is dealt with only indirectly, merged with a discussion of “the heroism of Algerian women fighters” between 1954 and ’62 whose purpose is to ram home the lesson that national liberation movements always betray their women. Besides, when women participate in struggle, it’s “because they can be used and useful” and “get a temporary pass from complete servility.” Also, “the subsuming of the individual in the nationalist struggle is an easy process for women, who have little experience with a social reification of a singular identity.” These women are fodder for revolutionary movements, Dworkin misogynistically opines, because they have no self. All the litanies of rape-related facts in previous Dworkin books like Intercourse have palpably been dress-rehearsals for the remix in chapter three. “Rape,” she raps here mid-infodump, “is murder’s heartbeat.” It’s an undeniably dope line. What’s odd is how, while the wretched of the earth are always women, “Pogrom/Rape” rests on the leftfield assertion that “Israeli men get raped.” Dworkin alleges that “the rape of a defeated foe, soldier, male” is “part of the Arab code, coexisting with the obligation of the father or brother to kill the sister for sexual impurity.” She extrapolates further, on the strength of the book Arab and Jew (1987) by former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau chief David Shipler, that Palestinian men are engaged in a “revenge vendetta through male-male rape.” It is in fact purely on this basis—that is, unevidenced testimony cited by Shipler from a former Haganah paramilitary veteran (and, later, IDF/IOF colonel) Rafi Horowitz, recalling the Arab Legion systematically gouging eyes and mutilating genitals—that Dworkin delivers her chilling verdict: “the revenge rape of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of annihilation.” It’s her concluding point, and given that rape, for Dworkin, is the supreme justifier of bloody preemptive defense, there can be no mistaking what is being justified here.
as new grifters relentlessly dedicate themselves to digging up radical feminism and attempting to toss the exhumed corpse onto the kitchen table for attention, i think it's worth reading sophie lewis' scathing takedown of dworkin's zionism and how it's inextricable from the rest of her politics
bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”
I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:
something needs to change here
this is urgent
I don’t know how to do it
death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.
you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.
this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.
