Came for the art, stayed for the politics

mostly reblogs, pictures my own unless they are someone else's - but then I'll say so

[l-ile]

[jayeltontoro]

Makes me think of the Camargue

[socialmaya]

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

[sylestial]

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

[scallioncreamcheesebagel]

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

[tayefeth]

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

[antique-scarecrow]

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

[downtroddendeity]

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

[antiterfbutch]

An alarming amount of people seem to think capitalism = all trade, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

[jayeltontoro]

Could it be to do with things like making it illegal to teach that there are actual existent economic systems other than capitalism? Shout out to England.

[jayeltontoro]

Looking north up our track I can feel midsummer approaching. It's not quite the midnight sun here but this is 11:30 pm and it never stops amazing me.

[mtr-amg]

The End of Trans Rights in the UK Is the Start of Democratic Collapse

It's never just one minority.

In the space of a few years, the UK has moved from a broadly inclusive status quo to being the most aggressively anti-trans developed democracy in the world. Though pushed by a minuscule number of people, the assault has been full-spectrum—government, courts, press, the health system, radicalised internet groups, and violent vigilantes—all working simultaneously towards the same goal. 

Precisely because this has taken place across multiple domains (and often in quite convoluted ways, with poor press coverage) the speed and scale of our transformation is often lost on people. But when considered together, it’s staggering.

[jayeltontoro]

This is utterly horrifying.

It is the pattern of fascism. Pick a disadvantaged outgroup and persecute them, propagandise them as dangerous and violent and simultaneously weak and degenerate (classic mutually exclusive propositions that hallmark nefarious propaganda) and once you succeed move on to the next most vulnerable group as you tell the apparent favoured groups how you are protecting them, purifying their society... Of course eventually it becomes clear there is only one favoured group. Those wielding the power. And the leopards eat everyone's faces. It's the mass murders of Pol pots regime, the endless perfecting of society by murdering everyone out of favour.

The truth is bigotry is bigotry no matter how it is dressed up. Respect for each other is the foundation of healthy society. It is respect for each other we should be striving for. Not ways of denigrating, othering, persecuting.

When the proposition is human rights for all *except* - the proposition is no longer human rights. The proposition is 'its ok to abuse'. And that proposition I will never accept.

[ullathynell]

The Dusk Hour Another new piece for my 2027 wall calendar. This is also available as posters from Inprnt (USA) and Printler (Europe). When shopping on Printler, remember to switch it to your own country version of the site, so that you get shipping options there!

[jayeltontoro]

Ooooh! So lovely

[ayeforscotland]

Every time the government talks about declining birth rates there never seems to be the realisation that if you make becoming a parent completely unaffordable then people will simply not have kids.

Shocking, I know. But do you know how fucking dire a situation has to be for people to simply not want to have children?

Not interested in ‘I don’t want to have kids anyway’ reblogs on this one, I’m obviously not talking about people who actively choose not to.

[ymutate]

Nikolai Astrup (Norwegian, 1880-1928)

Midsummer Eve Bonfire

Before 1916

Oil on canvas, 53 9/16 x 77 3/16 in.

Savings Bank Foundation DNB/ KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Norway.

[mysharona1987]

I did not understand I grew up in a concentration camp until I left Gaza

Growing up in Gaza, I didn’t realize that the siege I was living under was unique or that others didn’t face a constant threat of death. It

[startrek-themed-barmitzvah]

Its a "concentration camp" where people go to school and get married and eat pastries and buy new furniture to furnish their nice homes 🤡

literally every fucking claim out of gaza is so patently and self evidently fake, and the holocaust inverting and coopting language so disgusting

Its honestly just so deeply fucking embarrasing that so many westerners buy all this taqiyya and bullshit

[snarkleharkle]

Those famous concentration camps where you can just...leave and move somewhere else.

[mysharona1987]

Unless you had enough money, education and connections (and most people in Gaza didn’t, they lived in poverty) it was very difficult to leave or get a passport.

This was long before October 7th.

Like, that’s the crazy thing about the situation: Israel wants the land, but then they’re stopping everyone from leaving, even the ones that genuinely want to.

So, they just expect everyone to get depressed and commit mass suicide?

(For the record, That’s maybe what it is.)

[phinarei]

As a Native American who has lived on a reservation, a concentration camp doesn't need walls and fences. It just needs sick fucks with guns who don't want people leaving.

A concentration camp is a restricted area where a group, ususally an ethnic group, are forced to live on threat of torture or death while giving their oppressors plausible deniability to the rest of the world.

"Of course they can leave!" they said about the reservation before shooting my uncle in the back for being off our land. "They have such nice things!" they said, while most of us lived in homes with no floor or electricity and only the lucky had any modern conveniences. "They have schools and get married!" they said, while never showing the rest of the world the decrepit schools or talking about the secret weddings that would be disrupted with white men with guns if they were held in the open.

I've spent the last few years growing angrier and angrier. Watching the lies get thinner and thinner.

You don't like Holocaust comparisons? Okay. Fine. Palestine is a reservation and Israel is the murderous federal government trying to exterminate them and violating every promise of peace they make to them. Yes, there are good people working in good faith. But the majority are currently turning their backs to pretend they don't know about the atrocities happening so they can take land that isn't theirs without guilt. "It doesn't matter. They're not real people, just savages. This is a necessary evil."

Been there, seen that. It's a lie and it always has been.

Signed,

An actual survivor of an ongoing genocide.

[jayeltontoro]

Bird family in our woodstore. Last year we had long tailed tits in another part of it. This year I'm not sure what, I've been staying away not to disturb them but the look like they might be thrushes.

[jayeltontoro]

The rose bay willow herb is coming up fast. I've promised myself to try and make 'Ivan chai' this year. It will have beautiful magenta blossom in high summer, and the roots will be good come September/october.

[thetimelordbatgirl]

You'd think having had the worst results from the recent elections, Labour would be trying to do everything to get people back and trying to actually do the things people voted them in to do... ...But no, they still pushing ahead with what is basically a final nail for their coffin because of how no one fucking wants it: digital ID.

[idratherhavefreedom]

[jayeltontoro]

Because the truth is Starmer is a common purpose insert. Remember he sabotaged his own party to get rid of Corbyn. Threw an election to let the neocons keep running things into the ground, then promising to do left wing things once in government just turned the volume up on neocon class war to 'kill poors'.

The man has been owned by the neocons (like Blair the fascist war criminal complicit in the deaths of half a million people) for a long time. He is the Uriah heep, the backstabbing 'humble lackey' with ambitions of genocidal levels of authoritarianism.

The digital id is his wet dream and the wet dream of his paymasters. All ultra-wealthy. All mad as hatters, riddled with fear of their own mortality and a prediliction for externalising that fear onto anyone with less power and money than them.

[jayeltontoro]

Bluebells

[amnhnyc]

Happy Birthday to Mary Anning, the “Mother of Paleontology!” Born on this day in 1799, she hailed from Lyme Regis on the coast of Dorset, England, and grew up collecting fossils. At age 13, she unearthed a skeleton of a giant marine reptile, one of the first ichthyosaurs. In her late twenties, she discovered Dimorphodon, the first pterosaur found outside continental Europe, on the beach cliffs at Lyme Regis. At the time, headlines celebrated Anning and her “flying dragon.” Her discovery proved that these flying reptiles were varied and had a wide range.

Image: Library of Congress

[bhramarii]

When the sky still felt close enough to touch,

and gods were simply neighbors we carved into stone so we wouldn’t forget them.

(Sun-headed deity, Tamgaly — Kazakhstan)

[jayeltontoro]

I call this the 'kraken' rock, it looks so much like an octopus emerging from the beach.

[jayeltontoro]

The skeleton of a heart urchin on the beach. I love that the word 'urchin' comes from the greek word for hedgehog. Heart urchins have short light brown spines and really do look like little hedgehogs.

[jayeltontoro]

Molehill

I think moles are like beavers who work in the earth, they have such an industrious energy.