So funny how Blue Cross basically went "You guys make a great point" and rolled back their anesthesia policy after the United CEO was killed
Seems like we might have found a form of protest that works
styofa doing anything
Today's Document

JVL
Game of Thrones Daily
Misplaced Lens Cap
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
No title available

#extradirty

Andulka

if i look back, i am lost
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
One Nice Bug Per Day
wallacepolsom
No title available
Peter Solarz

pixel skylines

Kiana Khansmith

⁂

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Not today Justin
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from Singapore

seen from Singapore
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
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seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia

seen from Germany

seen from Iraq
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@painted-kaleidoscopes
So funny how Blue Cross basically went "You guys make a great point" and rolled back their anesthesia policy after the United CEO was killed
Seems like we might have found a form of protest that works
Tumblr Rules for Redditors
Hello, fellow redditors! Many people are trying to tell you rules about how to Tumblr properly. Many of them are wrong, or assholes, or both. I am also an asshole but I’m going to not be one for a minute to give you some advice:
“Reblog this or you’re a bad person” and any variation on that is a violation of intergalactic law. Don’t do it. Also, refuse to comply if someone else does it.
Generally, people can see what you reblog, but cannot see what you ‘like’. A like may seem like an upvote, but it is much less significant than one, since it doesn’t affect visibility in the slightest. A like will be visible both to the OP of the thread, and to the person whose reblog you put the like on. Like promiscuously! It feels good to get likes and there’s no downside. (Unless you are a space alien AKA influencer.) There’s a setting for like visibility, but it’s still somewhat hard to find even if it’s turned on.
Tumblr nominally has the ability to browse global tags (e.g. seeing the entire site’s posts and reblogs tagged #superwholock or #reddit exodus) and to search the site for things. No one uses them and they don’t really work.
You are probably less surprised by this than denizens of literally any other website on the internet, but there’s mostly no algorithm here. Chronological order only. This now defaults to being on, but you can and should turn it off. (If you’re using the search or global tags, they might have an algorithm, but if they do, it doesn’t work. We don’t know because we don’t use them, because they mostly don’t work either.)
Anyone can have absolutely any conversation in the notes of your post that they like. This is how the website works. You are allowed to complain about it, but don’t expect anyone to humor you. I think it’s possible to make posts unrebloggable and disable replies, but this is essentially refusing to use Tumblr. If you want to do that… go ahead, I guess?
Many people have ‘DNI’ lists in their blog descriptions. This means ‘do not interact’ and indicates that they don’t want you to message them, reblog from them, reblog any posts they are OP of, or even, sometimes, ‘like’ their posts. It is good manners to respect these, if you know they exist, but in normal use you probably won’t look at blog descriptions very often so it is entirely okay to violate them by accident. (When the lists get very long, it becomes impractical to check whether you violate them. Generally, just skip it. You probably don’t want to interact with those people anyway.)
Notes on posts you start will go to you no matter how many intervening hops there are on the reblog chain. If you get a post with an enormous amount of notes, this can get overwhelming. Whatever the current incarnation of Xkit (basically RES for Tumblr except we’ve switched names and maintainers seven times) is, will have a setting to deal with this. If that’s insufficient, the suggested course of action is to reblog your OP to your own blog so that you have a copy for posterity’s sake, and then delete the OP. This silences the notes.
If you and another user both follow each other, you are ‘mutuals’. This makes it much easier to have conversations with each other, which is ordinarily sort of hard since everything is purely chronological. Frequently your mutuals are your friends; if not yet true, they may become your friends.
When you reblog things, you can write words both in the word part and in the tags, Modern tumblr norms are to write long rambling tags in full sentences rather than put words in the main body. Unlike some other norms, violating this one and putting your response in the body of the reblog is not particularly rude. The worst it does is make a reblog chain long. Probably don’t reblog things and just say “This.”, though.
Tags can be subjected to peer review, by which we mean someone copy-pastes your tags and/or screenshots them and adds them to the main body of their reblog. Generally this is a compliment. The alternative is to say “#prev tags”, and this makes everyone hate you because it’s hard to find which tags were ‘prev’. Please just peer review properly if they’re good.
If you want to search your blog, consider Siikr. Don’t overuse it, it’s one guy’s project.
Be verbose! This ain’t Twitter, no character limit. (Not even the really large character limit of a reddit comment.) Write a 3000-word story in a single reblog if you want, that sounds awesome. Use ‘read more’ if you do, though. Posts can be very long, one of our oldest memes is about this.
Infinite scroll is the default, but you can turn it off. Actually, check all the settings, many of them will improve your experience.
On queues: Go nuts. Some people put everything in the queue, some people almost nothing. Some queue specific aestheticposting (personally I do #too smol) and post other things normally. Most people who queue a lot add a queue-specific tag like #the mighty queue or #this queue shall pass, or at least I notice them more than poasters with untagged queues.
You know how Reddit lets you buy Gold and people go ‘thanks for the gold kind stranger’? On tumblr we spend money on Tumblr Blaze, and it is considered the PvP section of Tumblr. Though sometimes people actually use it to spread posts they like, such as people attempting to evangelize Christianity (no, really, that happened a lot) or the, I hope, actually-kind stranger who blazed this OP. You can turn off PvP with one of the many settings.
Everybody be excellent to each other!
TIKTOK HAS DIED!!!! TIKTOK HAS DIED!!!!
There is no magic "abolish the state" button, which is why I'm an anarchist, as "when the state has socialismed enough it will just magically poof away in a cloud of smoke" is the leninist position.
That is not the Leninist position, the Leninist position is and always has been that the state cannot disappear until the material conditions for its disappearance are achieved. The withering away of the state, first outlined by Engels, is not a magic process but one that proceeds from the abolition of class and the dissolution of the bourgeoisie.
How are you going to get rid of the bourgeoisie without a state? Are you going to simply ask them nicely to leave you alone? If you are organized and if your organization is suppressing the bourgeoisie as a class, then you have created a state, you have created an authoritarian imposition on the free organization of some section of the people. If you are not doing any of this, then the bourgeoisie who you have left unmolested will invariably come to dominate you once more.
Anarchists have always played word games to get around these simple facts. There are the practical anarchists who will admit to some amount of authority, but always with the caveat that theirs is *just* authority, *necessary* authority, and that is is the *unjust* authority that they condemn. Just authority is not the State, because the State is unjust, and so if they see an authority as just then it cannot be the State. Fair enough, you can call things by whatever names you like, but if you put these ideas in practice you basically end up with Leninism. You want to create dual power? You want to abolish the bourgeois state and replace it with a democratic organ of the working class? Well so did Lenin, and now you know why the Mensheviks accused him of anarchism.
Then there are the quite impractical capital-A Anarchists, who are adamant that anarchy means anarchy and that even voluntary hierarchy and submission to democratic authority is impermissible. Whether pacifistic or militaristic, they are generally unremarkable and ineffective at their goals because they eschew most effective forms of organization as ideologically impure. Even the most advanced anarchists, the CNT in Spain and the Maknovists in Russia, were plagued by economic confusion and disorganization. Their lack of discipline led to their downfall.
If you want to read more, here are some pertinent links:
Critique of the Gotha Programme
The Marxist theory of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution
If the Makhno Movement (Makhnovshchina) which governed southern Ukraine in the period of 1917-1921 may be accepted as a rare example of “ana
Within two weeks of the total application of Libertarian Communism in Aragón, collectivized businesses became vacuums of empty stores and
in 2004 george w bush won the presidential election and promised in his acceptance speech to codify a federal ban on gay marriage. 30 states passed bans on gay marriage in the wake of his re-election. and then they fell. one by one by one. it has to get worse before it gets better.
queers. trans people especially. our attitude for the next decade has to be “we’re not fucking scared of you”. do you understand? this has always been at the core of who we are and what we do. we fucking move. we take up space or carve out our own with our bare hands. we take care of us.
do you know the other queers in your neighborhood? do you know who you can call at a bad time? do you know whose house you can crash at? do you know where you can go for a free meal? do you know where you can bring meals to the hungry? do you know the LGBT resources available in your area? do you know the informed consent clinics in your area?
do you know how DIY HRT works? do you know and have friends who don’t? do you know our history? have you read the works of james baldwin and leslie feinberg? are you equipped with knowledge about the forces that work against us? do you understand dialectical materialism? do you know what to say if stopped by the police? do you know what good opsec is? are your legal documents in order? do you know how to get them in order?
scream, cry, rot in your bed, do whatever you need to do to process this, then find something to do. do not fall into despair. in the face of extermination say “fuck you.”
In my experience, a big reason that people tend to struggle with the concept of “no good cops” is that they only see police as being violent when they are actively beating or killing us. I think if more folks understood the scope and the breadth of the violence that policing engenders in and inflicts upon our communities, more people would agree that a better world is one without it.
from the Lavender and Red Union, a group of communists who wrote this in 1975.
"GAY LIBERATION IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT SOCIALIST REVOLUTION. SOCIALISM IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT GAY LIBERATION."
for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!
don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!
[Link to tweet]
I fucking hate this "capitalism is when you make money, the more money you make, the more capitalism it is" mindset people have gotten. No, an artist selling their own work is not them engaging in capitalism, it's literally a worker owning their own means of production.
Remember capitalism is someone profiting off of someone else's labor though owning capital. It is not simply the act of profiting at all.
A lack of empathy is not a moral failing.
Some neurodivergent people feel low or no empathy towards other people. This is not an indication of moral bankruptcy or a sign someone is a bad person. You need to stop saying things like "Conservatives are evil because they just lack empathy.", or "The left is the party of empathy."
The word you are looking for is compassion.
Empathy is a feeling in which the suffering of others causes you to suffer to some extent.
Compassion is a conviction to do good for your fellow human beings because you feel their suffering should be alleviated.
The correct statement would be "Right-wing politics lack compassion." And the inverse "Leftist ideals are built on compassion."
We as leftists should not assume those incapable of feeling a certain emotion are incapable of acting with compassion, as that is deeply ableist.
The feeling of empathy can motivate compassion, but it is not required for a person to be compassionate. Those with low or no empathy can and do act with compassion. To care for others even in the absence of an instinctual pack-bonding drive to do so is truly revolutionary, and it should be recognized as such.
I've seen a lot of posts criticizing terminally-online leftists for thinking that not voting will somehow send the Deomcratic party to the left instead of to the center, and while that is true
I haven't seen many pointing out that voting actually works for progressive causes.
Joe Biden moved to the left significantly on climate because the left wing of the party wanted to work with him. The centrists in the party, like Joe Manchin, frustratingly dragged their heels on everything because they weren't that interested in getting things done. But the leftists in the party, like Bernie and AOC, actually engaged in talks and compromises and pulled Biden much, much farther left on climate than where he started. A lot of great green policy came out of the last four years!
There was even a Pod Save America interview a few months ago where one of Biden's cabinet members (very diplomatically) confirmed that the leftwing of the party was so much better to work with than centrists like Joe Manchin. (Probably because leftists actually care about the things they talk about and want to do things besides go to fancy Washington parties and stay in congress for a million years.)
So, I really cannot stress enough that actually showing up and working with people actually does pay off for your cause. You can do more for the things you care about when you are at the table. Your vote actually does create the change you are seeking, even when you are voting for someone who is not 100% aligned with you.
He was born rich for the record. Bill Gates. He was rich and had computer access in the home as a kid in an era where most people hadn't ever seen one. Some of the code he wrote was difficult, but easier than a lot of what is written at his company by other developers.
People forget that computers couldn't always load an image. Or you couldn't click and drag. It's not trivial. It is definitely hard to write a mouse driver and a graphical representation of clicking and dragging something, but it's not as hard as say AI model training across globally distributed servers or quantum computing with a CPU that has to be supercooled at all times.
So just for the record, he got to play tech billionaire on easy mode, rich parents who invested the seed money in his company so he didn't owe like 50% of it to yCombinator, and a free garage to work out of, which most poor people can't even afford now, and difficult but not impossible problems to solve that most companies pay someone about $100k to do because it is so streamlined.
People who are trying to achieve his level of wealth have to much more difficult things because every hardware company just ships their stuff with drivers for free, often own less of their companies because tech investment is more mature, and have less free space to work out of because most major cities are in the middle of a housing crisis.
Just keep in mind that billionaires can toss the equivalent of a penny in the wishing well and a PR firm will gulp it up and make a multi part Netflix documentary that glosses over the Epstein parties, infidelity, domineering and aggressive attitude at work, and anti trust lawsuits, yadda yadda.
Look, he is extremely smart and hard-working, but like Toni Morrison says, that's not any guarantee for wealth. The only thing that really guarantees it is already having it, which he did.
The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.
The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)
The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.
Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.
Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.
The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.
The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.
The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.
So funny how Blue Cross basically went "You guys make a great point" and rolled back their anesthesia policy after the United CEO was killed
Seems like we might have found a form of protest that works
has someone done this yet
The second amendment right was originally proposed by James Madison to allow the creation of civilian forces that can act against a tyrannical federal government, its not just us having guns. It’s specifically us having guns and using them to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government.
We’re just finally using it for its intended purpose.
Do not allow the right to co-opt the second amendment (and gun ownership in general) into being synonymous with right-wing extremist ideals. It's YOUR second amendment too. We cannot allow the most dangerous and hateful portion of the American population to be the only ones armed.
Arm women. Arm black and brown people. Arm queer people. Arm disabled people.
Keep your rifle by your side.
The Socialist Rifle Association's mission is to uphold the right of the working class to keep and bear arms and maintain the skills necessar
https://theliberalgunclub.com/