you know back then they didn’t use to romanticize the past
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if i look back, i am lost
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

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YOU ARE THE REASON

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@garfielf
you know back then they didn’t use to romanticize the past
what do you mean you havent used mindfulness techniques to accept the state of the torture labyrinth as is yet. its like youre not even trying
03/2025 - for a prison abolitionist, psych abolitionist, pro-drug, communist perspective.
after a few weeks of work, here it is! trying to centralize some answers to the most common questions that people receive about psychiatry and psych abolition, also including a short introductory reading list. i will keep it updated if I think of any important questions or topics to include.
thank you a lot to @transmutationisms for his help, input and work, especially in the disability section!
feel free to share on other websites, print, etc. i might also try to work on a french translation in the future. love and power <3
At a time when many Jewish people of the Diaspora are organizing against the Israeli state and its settler colonial mass murders against Pal
a person who "can't imagine" why anyone would vote for trump (or a third party) is a person who is very deliberately committed to never imagining anything, which is to say a liberal. right-wingers love to imagine - they imagine things all the time, and then get scared by their own imagination, and that's part of why they behave that way. not liberals. liberals post the lyrics to "imagine" by john lennon on facebook and then they simply don't even do it
Researchers look at countries that have prohibited corporal punishment for kids and their rate of youth violence.
Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence. It marks the first systematic assessment of whether an association exists between a ban on corporal punishment and the frequency in which adolescents get into fights.
[F]or both boys and girls, [prof. Elizabeth Gershoff] said, “We found [spanking] linked to more aggression, more delinquent behavior, more mental health problems, worse relationships with parents, and putting the children at higher risk for physical abuse from their parents.”
“People often ask: Why didn’t you look for positive aspects?” she continued. “My answer is: We did, and there were none. We see consistently that the more children are spanked, the more behavioral problems they have in the years ahead.”
Once again worth emphasizing that this is pretty much the exact opposite of what authoritarians said would happen
I know folks have been sharing this link on other posts, but &udm=14 works well:
You can add it as an extension to Firefox now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/udm14/reviews/
“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
— Everyone Into The Grinder
Help me. I am a 8 year old boy living in the illegitimate Yankee Capitalist regime. President Xi, our shelves are empty and we are hungry. I am asking you to liberate my state of Connecticut with your Chengdu J-20 Stealth air superiority fighters and your Dongfeng 41 Missiles.
i made an advanced piracy guide for cool people
this feels like a fucking comedy sketch. i'm lost for words
the ancient and noble art of Hating must remain distinct from the dogmatism of the moral crusade. hating has no greater goal. it is not about engineering change or imposing one's will upon others. to hate is a complete act in and of itself
The long catalogue of intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to stage its brutal surprise attack on October 7 begins at The Venetian, Shel
Key Jewish donors in the United States were secretly approached with a proposal by Psy-Group, an Israeli psychological warfare firm with close connections to Mossad. Code-named “Project Butterfly,” the proposal outlined a clandestine operation within the “theater of action,” as the company referred to the United States. Its purpose was to damage specific Americans and US organizations associated with the [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement. It would develop ways to disrupt their activities, lead them to be falsely investigated by the authorities, and run a hidden media influence campaign against them.
According to its secret internal operations plan, Project Butterfly was aimed at “executing intelligence and influence efforts” against Americans by creating an “infrastructure for narrative warfare— alternative messaging and negative platforms.” In other words, by creating fake news outlets, phony Facebook personas and posts, and other forms of information warfare, Psy Group’s goal was to deliberately deceive the American public about Israel and its actions against the Palestinians...
The importance of the operation and its closeness to Netanyahu can be seen in Project Butterfly’s top officials. Among them was Netanyahu’s former deputy director of Mossad and director general of the Ministry of Intelligence and Strategic Affairs, Ram Ben-Barak, who was the project’s strategic adviser. Comparing the effort against the American boycotters to “a war,” he said, “you don’t kill them but you do have to deal with them in other ways.”
Those “other ways” were outlined in the Project Butterfly operational plan: “The Butterfly initiative uses PSY’s proprietary intelligence-gathering and influence techniques to destabilize and disrupt anti-Israel movements from within,” it said, referring to the United States. In addition to spying on innocent Americans, the group created fake news outlets in an Orwellian effort to brand the nonviolent boycotters and their supporters as “terrorists.” According to Psy-Group’s Project Butterfly operations plan, the covert Israeli organization “achieved high-impact results against targeted individuals” while making sure its own activities are “not connected to Israel.”
The actions included efforts to destroy the reputations of students and faculty, subjecting people to unwarranted investigations, and charges of “persecution,” that is, endless phony accusations of “anti-Semitism,” as well as false and slanderous accounts provided to national cable and broadcast news organizations...
In charge of Netanyahu’s secret war in the United States was Gilad Erdan, then head of the highly secret Ministry of Strategic Affairs and now Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. His deputy was Sima Vaknin-Gil, a reserve brigadier general. In a talk to a group of Israeli-Americans in Washington, Vaknin-Gil outlined another high-tech spying tool Israel was secretly using to target Americans within the US. In her talk, she said that Israel was waging its covert war so that the “narrative in the world won’t be that Israel equals apartheid.” Thus, the ministry needed to quickly silence the growing boycott movement and its messengers, before what happened in apartheid South Africa happened to apartheid Israel.
To those ends, General Vaknin-Gil issued a stark warning. “In order to win,” she said, “we must use tricks and craftiness.” They would include threats, intimidation, harassment, covert influence operations, troll farms, fearmongering, blacklists, and espionage. The key was turning thousands of Americans into clandestine Israeli agents to spy on and carry out the operations against their fellow citizens. Secrecy, emphasized Vaknin-Gil, was therefore critical. “We are a different government working on a foreign soil, and we have to be very, very cautious,” she said.
Then she outlined plans to set up a sophisticated covert intelligence unit to spy on Americans involved in the boycott movement and take action against them. According to Vaknin-Gil: “Ambiguity is part of our guidelines, that’s why I’m not going to say anything too much about each one of the legs. The first one is intel, intelligence, or data, or information. What we’ve done is mapped and analyzed the whole [boycott] phenomena globally. Not just the United States, not just campuses, but…labor unions and churches. We started to establish a project called Israel Cyber Shield. This is actually a civil intelligence unit that collects, analyzes, and acts upon the activists in the BDS movement, of its people, organizations, or events. And we give it everything we collect. We are using the most sophisticated data system, intelligence system in the Israeli market.”...
Around the same time, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs budgeted another $570,000 to create a computer and smartphone application that would turn thousands of Americans into a robotic army of Israeli trolls. Assigned “missions” from troll headquarters near Tel Aviv, they would hide their links to Israel and launch online attacks against their US targets, including critics of Israel, boycott supporters, and human rights activists...
Despite the enormous extent of Israel’s illegal covert operations within the US targeting innocent and unsuspecting Americans, the clandestine agents involved are granted virtual immunity from arrest by pressure on top politicians from wealthy and powerful pro-Israel groups like AIPAC. It is a situation that greatly frustrates many in the FBI. It means bureau personnel are constantly required to close their eyes when it comes to criminal activity by Israel.
According to I.C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence officer, “Dealing with the Israelis was, for those assigned that area, extremely frustrating. The Israelis were supremely confident that they had the clout, especially on the Hill, to basically get [away] with just about anything.” Another former top intelligence official said, “You catch them red-handed, and they shrug and say, ‘Okay now, anything else?’”
At one point, as angry senior US intelligence officials were testifying about Israeli espionage in secret sessions before the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees, that frustration spilled out in public. “US intelligence officials trooped up to Capitol Hill to tell U.S. lawmakers considering visa waivers for Israelis that Jerusalem’s spying here had ‘crossed redlines,’” wrote Newsweek’s Jeff Stein. The extent of the spying was “quite shocking,” one staffer who was there told Stein, adding that he found the testimony “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.” Others called it “unrivaled” and “unseemly,” and noted that “it has been extensive for years.” And a former staffer who attended a similar classified briefing exclaimed, “No other country close to the United States continues to cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do.”
Liberals wincing at the brutality of Hamas’ attack is even more smoothbrain when you consider that the Gaza Strip is objectively the worst concentration camp in the world.
It’s the 2nd most densely populated area in the entire world, 95% of water isn’t safe, they are only given 4 hours of electricity (imagine this with the population density and Mediterranean heat), medicine and basic foodstuffs like juice are embargoed. The average age in Gaza is 19 - the old and weak die quickly as their health care system cannot get supplies and doesn’t have stable electricity. More than half of youths under 18 expressed that they have no real desire to live and contemplate suicide regularly. 45% unemployment. Children get blown up playing soccer on the beach by advanced warships. It’s probably the most surveilled and spied upon place in the world. It’s a tiny strip of land 25 miles wide that is regularly subjected to bombing.
In 2018 mass peaceful demonstrations were organized, thousands and thousands of Palestinians marched along the border wall. Israel shot 2,000 of them with live ammunition, but only killed around 200 because they deliberately aim at legs to place even more strain on the depleted medical infrastructure and make an invalid that can’t contribute as well. 36,000 Palestinians were injured peacefully protesting.
Every year the IDF invades Al-Asqa mosque, gasses the worshippers and cracks heads open, and then they leave because there’s no point aside from violent harassment. And then there’s the constant news from other occupied areas of Palestinians being evicted, homes being bulldozed, the survivors fined and harassed. Palestinian olive trees, generational in their age, bulldozed by the occupiers.
Shooting civilians wantonly might be morally dubious in a situation like Hawaii, some place where an occupation makes you disadvantaged and a second class citizen. But Gaza is just flat out a death camp. Of course the commandos went berserk with rage, of course they brought bodies back to parade in the streets - everyone has been dehumanized for their entire lives. Treat people like animals and they might just act like animals once they get their hands on you.
i dont care about the movies. or the shows. i dont see or look at tem. Can we talk about something else like the trees or concrete mixing methods
So I was told that Human Planet had a segment about pigeons in the Cities episode that I might be interested in and I was honestly so underwhelmed. I haven’t finished the episode so maybe there’s more pigeon stuff but I feel like all I saw was more Birds Of Prey Are The Only Cool And Acceptable Birds and pigeons are Trespassers In Our Urban World Who Shit On Everything And Are Useless On Top Of It. Which isn’t true and I’m so tired of this being framed as some horrible burden that humanity must face. Pigeons are the victims here, not us.
Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs.
Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.
We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen). My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.
It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.
I just have a lot of feelings about how complex and multidimensional hating pigeons actually is
ALL OF THIS
And also pigeon poop was a very valuable fertilizer before we had other options, people would hire guards to stop thieves from stealing their flock’s poop.
#LovePigeonsAgain2016
Late night, reblogging, so bear with me here… Thank you for posting much of my thoughts over the past year and a half! I am known by many as “that guy who keeps the raptors”. Yes this is true, I do keep and handle raptors for educational purposes, but what many fail to realize is, I am fascinated with pigeons. My interest with birds began with the obvious, the raptors, corvids, and parrots. Then I discovered pigeons. These wonderful little birds with big attitudes and the incredible ability to thrive among people. The organization I work with got its first pigeon a little over a year ago. She was a rescue with nowhere else to go. I was quickly drawn to her character and attitude about life. We rarely handled her, but we did spend time with her. She grew attached to our volunteers very quickly because their were no other birds she could socialize with in our facility.
We never intended to train her for educational programs. It was a job reserved for our raptors. It was our pigeon who decided she would be a part of what we were doing. One day, when we entered her enclosure to change water and food, she decided to fly to my hand and perch like our raptors do.
No training, no treats, just the reward of being with us.
What we hadn’t noticed for the couple months prior was her watching us. This brilliant little bird had been watching us every day as we trained and worked with our raptors. Finally she decided she didn’t want to be left out any longer. She made her place on our hands.
This occurred several times before we finally put her on a glove and brought her into the public. Needless to say, she was right at home. She fluffed up and preened the entire evening while people gawked and asked us why we had a pigeon on one glove and a hawk on another.
Since then, we’ve added 5 more rescued pigeons to our growing flock. And our pigeon (Tybalt) has become a mainstay ambassador for our programs. Each of our pigeons are incredibly fun to watch and interact with. Pigeons simply don’t get enough love. They are marvelous creatures incredibly suited to life alongside people both physically and mentally.
Raptors my have been my introduction into birds, but pigeons opened my eyes to a new appreciation for them and the fascinating world of bird cognition.
NOT ONLY are pigeons very amazing, worth our respect, and INTERESTING (did you read any of that stuff above?), but they are beautiful too! Look how lovely:
Photo by .jocelyn.
They have a complex and fascinating social structure, both within a flock and with other individuals:
Photo by Ingrid Taylar
AND THEY ARE JUST SUPER CUTE, HONESTLY:
Photo by Musical Photo Man
Not chickens, but I feel compelled to spread this gospel.
hmmm. this is making me rethink my new york pigeon hate
and, AND, haven’t you ever wondered why city pigeons come in a magnificent rainbow of unusual colors?
Most wild animals all look alike within a species, with TINY, RARE individual variations in terms of rare color morphs, unusually big or small animals, different facial markings and other subtleties. But there is no evolutionary benefit to having species where everyone looks slightly different, and in fact, it’s beneficial for species to be similar and consistent, with a distinctive aesthetic. Especially if you’re trying to blend into the environment - a black wolf is all very well, but it looks positively silly in the summer tundra, where its grey/brown/brindley cousins blend in. A white deer has a great aesthetic - and a very short lifespan in the forest. Distinctive Protagonist looks are rare in the wild, simply because natural selection usually comes down heavily on them.
To humans, most wild animals are visually indistinguishable from each other.
As a result, most wild animals are like
“Oh it’s obvious - you can tell the twins apart because Kara has a big nose.”
Wild animals usually have a pretty consistent aesthetic within their species. It’s important to them!
SO WHAT IS GOING ON WITH PIGEONS?
Look, in one small picture you’ve got a red color morph in the center, several melanistic dark morphs, a few solid black birds, a few variations on the wildtype wing pattern, a PIEBALD, a piebald copper color morph…
Like, there are LAYERS UPON LAYERS of pigeon diversity in most flocks you see. Pure white ones with black wingtips. Solid brown ones with pink iridescent patches. Pale pinkish pigeons.
WHY IS THAT? When other wild animals consider “being slightly fluffier than my brother” to be dangerously distinctive in most circumstances? BECAUSE CITY PIGEONS AREN’T TRULY WILD.
MANY OF THEM (POSSIBLY MOST OR ALL) ARE FERAL MIXES.
THEY WERE ONCE BELOVED PETS, SPECIAL MESSENGERS, EXQUISITE SHOW-WINNERS, AND PRIZED LIVESTOCK.
THEIR PRETTY COLORS WERE DELIBERATELY INTRODUCED BY HUMANS.
AND NOW THEIR HUMANS DON’T LOVE THEM ANY MORE.
See, pigeon fanciers bred (and still breed!) a huge array of pigeons. And the resulting swarms of released/discarded/escaped/phased out “fancy” pigeons stayed around humans. What else were they going to do? They interbred with wildtype pigeons.
Lots of the pigeons you see in public are feral. They’re not wild animals. They’re citizen animals. They’re genetically engineered. And now that’s what “city” pigeons are.
These “wild” horses are all different colors because they’re actually feral. Mustangs in the American West are the descendants of imported European horses - they’re an invasive domestic species that colonized an ecological niche, but they are domestic animals. Their distinctive patterns were deliberately bred by humans. A few generations of running around on the prairie isn’t going to erase that and turn them back into wildtypes. If you catch an adult mustang and train it for a short period, you can ride it and have it do tricks and make it love you. It’s a domestic animal. You can’t really do that with an adult zebra.
No matter how many generations these dogs stay on the street and interbreed with one another, they won’t turn back into wolves. They can’t. They’re deliberately genetically engineered. If you catch one (even after generations of rough living, even as an adult) you can make it stare at your face, care about your body language, and love you.
City pigeons? Well, you don’t have to like them, but they’re in the same boat. They’re tamed animals, bred on purpose, living in a human community. Their very bodies are marked with their former ownership and allegiance; they cannot really return to what they once were; if you caught one, you could make it love you (in a limited pigeon-y way.) They have gone to “the wild,” but not very far from us, and they’d be happy to come back.
So next time you see a flock of city pigeons, spare a moment to note their diversity. The wing patterns. The pied, mottled and brindled. The color types.
All of it was once meant to please you.
anyway blackout poetry not just as an art form, but as an act of violence against other works of art
taking a piece of text that someone probably put their heart and soul into creating and using it as your raw material, cutting out everything that you deem irrelevant to the point you want to make
i mean imagine cutting up a painting and using it to make a collage, or taking a marble sculpture and carving pieces out of it to make a different sculpture
just to be clear: i love blackout poetry, im not criticizing it here. i am just waxing poetic about it. i dont really know where im going with this i just have Thoughts about art being destructive