boy with a coin

Mathematics, music, politics, old stuff, plants and shit, occasional memes.

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

[pyaasa]

This is a direct result of the dehumanising reporting that the BBC and Sky News were engaged in last week, as they filmed migrants crossing the channel and treated them like zoo animals. This is a direct result of Nigel Farage standing in Dover and Kent and wherever the fuck else, angrily filming migrants arriving on our shores. This is a direct result of Priti Patel saying she wants to enlist the navy to stop refugees crossing the channel.

If you dehumanise refugees, if you use phrases like “invaders” and “illegal” to describe people fleeing war, without giving context on the wars they are fleeing (not even mentioning how it was the UK that dropped the bombs that caused these people to be displaced!), then....it’s inevitable stuff like this will happen. You can’t whip up hatred of refugees and then feign surprise and outrage when racists get emboldened.

[the-busy-ghost]

I really really hate this growing concept that anything other than football, beer, and pop music is ‘posh’ and something only rich people or snobs like. It’s been a notion since at least the 80s and it seems a bit insidious really, especially when applied to the past.

Look, your working class ancestors DID have art and nature and sports other than football (not a bad thing in itself, just all-pervading). Coal mining towns had their amateur dramatic societies, and their champion gardeners. Shoemakers and weavers became painters and poets (often self-taught). There were keen tennis players and highland/ballroom dancers and flower arrangers and amateur scientists. And above all so, so many of them would have played instruments, because you often had to make your own music. Yes life could be fucking miserable but people had lives and thoughts and passions and weren’t just cogs in a machine who could be consoled with bread and circuses. 

And it’s so frustrating to see all of these things painted as weird posh things that ordinary people never did. Mostly because I think it’s being used as an excuse by the rich to put the arts and nature and education beyond the reach of ordinary people, by poshboy politicians who pretend they’re ‘men of the people’ by defunding public theatres, musical initiatives, art galleries, libraries since ‘nobody wants that’ and ‘ordinary people like football and beer we shouldn’t make them pay for things the Upper Class want’- except the upper class are now the only people who can afford these things and hasn’t it all worked out very well for them?

[kymeira]

[newusernamepending]

Weird how when we were asking for significant action on climate change everyone was like… oh no!… the government couldn’t do THAT!… we cannot interfere in the market forces!, but as soon as airlines start going bust (and this includes pre-coronavirus with flybe et.c) the same people are out there like Won’t Someone Please Think Of The Air Travel Industry! and demanding government bailouts.

[newusernamepending]

tbh more important than people going for two walks in a day right now is probably the number of businesses that have chosen to brand themselves as “essential” even though they aren’t and so continue asking their employees to come into work (who can’t do anything about it, because the advice is that employers should have people working at home or furloughed, and employees should just do what their boss wants). But there seems to be relatively little government enforcement on this issue.

Far too much focus on individual people’s actions and not enough on the major employers.

[prole-log]

[quotespile]

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

[alphagodith]

The Vegetarians Who Turned Into Butchers

How several former vegans and vegetarians across the country came to see meat as their calling.

highlight quotes;

“… she returned to eating meat after learning that the soybean and corn monocultures that accounted for much of her vegan diet were wreaking havoc on the environment.“

“When we first opened, people were surprised at the prices,” he said. “But our costs are much higher than what a giant company pays. We are paying to have control over the quality of our animals, what they are being fed, how they are being treated, transported, slaughtered and cut up. Once people understood that, the business took off.”

“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.”

“You can’t be healthy unless the animals you eat are healthy,”

“Rather than being passive and just not supporting an industry I don’t like, I’m taking an active approach by taking thousands of dollars out of it, “ he said. “When people come to me, they aren’t going to Costco for meat.”

[okaydyke-deactivated20230715]

“Referring to themselves as ethical butchers, they have opened shops that offer meat from animals bred on grassland and pasture, with animal well-being, environmental conservation and less wasteful whole-animal butchery as their primary goals.”

Instead of trying to poise this as “haha vegans look even y’all can’t do it” express it for what it truly is.

“It’s a sharp contrast to the industrial-scale factory farming that produces most of the nation’s meat, and that has come under investigation and criticism for its waste, overuse of antibiotics, and inhumane, hazardous conditions for the animals. The outcry has been so strong that some meat producers say they are changing their practices. But these newer butchers contend that the industry is proceeding too slowly, with a lack of transparency that doesn’t inspire trust.”

[korrasera]

I think it’s also worth noting that this highlights the way that it’s not meat-eaters or vegans that are a problem. It’s the way that our food supply has been shaped by the forces of business.

Fixing it means not fighting about who’s identity is better, but fighting against the business practices that allow companies to torture animals and produce unethically grown and unsustainably harvested foods.

And as a reminder of the past, the US meat packing industry and food production industry have often tried to cut corners and serve filth in order to make a profit. That changed after the release of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, which portrayed the conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry in such stark relief that it lead directly to the creation of the FDA and the wide scale adoption of food safety regulations.

He told the US that we might be getting the occasional human finger in our ground beef and it worked. We listened and forced the system to change. I think it’s time for another dose of that same medicine.

[ectobiology-department]

mods are asleep post illegal lego building techniques

[math-memes]

[prole-log]

[ultraviolet-techno-ecology]

Anyway the situation in Bolivia is terrible and a fantastic example of how capitalist solutions to climate change continually end up oppressing indigenous folk and establishing fascism to prop up the otherwise unsustainable economics of late state capitalism. 

While I support technological approaches to handling the climate crisis, the supposed “Solutions” of groups like Tesla are absolute rubbish which seek to bait and switch the working class by offering them new products instead of a radical change to the process of creating and distributing resources. 

[papercoyote]

(via https://open.spotify.com/track/44TyGuyg0xVt5Ngq4CCnxD?si=o4VMssISQn6onHfaHuEVIw)

[wetpinkorthodoxy]

On Remembrance Sunday let's remember that the army deliberately targets recruitment at young people living in poverty and that's how it always been... poor young people sent off to their deaths to achieve the goals of rich assholes who don't give their lives a second thought.

[nowscience-blog]

Demonstration Of Constant Velocity With A Moving Trampoline

[captocie]

witness them

[mousouchuu]

[sevenfactorial]

Topology professor: It’s a good textbook but it’s rather dense

Student #1: ha dense

Student #2: So if you close it, do you learn all of topology?