sharp objects edit
song: get drunk - lana del rey
will byers stan first human second

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cherry valley forever

oozey mess
KIROKAZE

Andulka
Mike Driver
trying on a metaphor

Kaledo Art

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Game of Thrones Daily

★
Misplaced Lens Cap

Love Begins
dirt enthusiast
Acquired Stardust
Today's Document
Cosmic Funnies
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Stranger Things
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@s-quashed
sharp objects edit
song: get drunk - lana del rey
Nursing and other healthcare jobs are becoming gig work — like driving or delivering food for Uber — making the jobs more miserable and low-paying, writes Cory Doctorow.
The platforms collude with lawmakers and regulators who are in the pockets of investors.
It’s part of a larger economic trend: “From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that ‘it’s not a crime if we do it with an app.‘”
Cory: “Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as ‘go meta,’ in his 2022 book _Survival of the Richest_:
pluralistic.net/2022/09/1…
“The ‘go meta’ ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always _away_ from productive labor. Don’t drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don’t own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and _invest_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy _options_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.”
I’ve been saying this for years: It often seems that the only way to succeed is not to do work that produces value, like a nurse. It’s not even to own property, like a 19th Century robber-baron that owned factories and railroads that produced value. The only way to succeed is to move money around. That’s a bad way to run a society, and it results in riots and blood in the streets when the workers get desperate enough.
i’ve read some literature that points out two major evils of the system: 1) the gig nurses actually get paid a little bit MORE than regular nurses for having more flexibility, which demoralizes nurses who stay put; 2) the fact that there’s incentive to become a vagrant nurse means nurses can’t get used to a single hospital’s way of doing things, including their emergency operations plans or even just “hey what do we do if we run out of amoxicillin?” this is insanely dangerous on all fronts. we are walking back not just worker protections but public health safeguards developed over decades of crisis management research. it’s all coming unraveled because of corporate greed.
Also the more actual work is abstracted and pushed into the realm of ephemeral gig companies and beyond, the harder it is for workers to unionise, because they’re bouncing between endless companies, platforms, pseudo-employers that are like hydra heads. You can’t target them because one goes away and two more sprout in its place, the people who we need to leverage power against can just hide behind constantly changing legal entities and abstract away the fact that employees are to even have a specific employer.
conscious observer
it can be hard sometimes not to get sucked into constructing a political framing for why i’m fundamentally different than someone i really dislike as opposed to just disliking them and moving on. it’s hard to avoid the allure of that righteous reassurance when i have to live/work with the person all the time, it’s difficult to move on cause it’s a de-facto family i have to have constant contact with…
the cope then becomes creating that desired distance ideologically, in my brain. which is kinda pointless and feeds into the need to be “better” than.
and not to immediately undermine my own point and get meta but part of what makes me dislike this person is how they politicize their interpersonal grievances to the point where it’s kinda deranged, and i don’t want to do that. so there’s that to thank them for teaching me.
Considering introducing a controlled burn to the prairies of my mind
genuinely one of the most interesting things about the various movements to name/describe/prevent domestic and sexual abuse is that the resistance to it takes so many different forms, including the form of appearing to want to end domestic and sexual abuse while putting so much energy into increasing it, like the violence against women act, all the efforts to prevent sex trafficking, sex offender registries, hate crimes legislation, etc. it’s almost as if when you don’t put survivors and the most vulnerable at the center of your politics you end up making things worse and harder for everyone.
you can watch the push/pull between priorities with each one: for the VAWA, the priority wasn’t all battered women, but the subset of women mostly likely to be seen as employable and contributing to society after being deemed deserving of rescue. for sex offender registries, the priority isn’t survivors and the support they need to adapt to the harm they experience, but to punish and constrain perpetrators.
want help but aren’t good at appearing like an employable white cis woman? tough shit. make sure you proofread your resume and cover letter before you try to leave your husband.
want help but to get it you need to put someone you care about on a list that makes a safe dignified life impossible? tough shit. just don’t report them if you don’t want their life ruined.
i remember the first time i opened up to a counsellor about the things my dad did to me in order to ask for some kind of help, not only did i not get help but she was shocked that i hadn’t reported him to the police and encouraged me to do so. and i remember thinking they just don’t get that that would make my life worse. even without considering the impact on him, the amount of upheaval that would’ve caused for my family and myself, especially since i was dependent on him financially. but as soon as you bring anything even as tame as universal basic income into the conversation, or idk the wild concept of everyone being allowed to live in homes without having to pay rent to a bank or a landlord, suddenly that’s crazy political talk, radical and unrealistic.
there has to be a wider reckoning of the fact that so many big ideas about helping certain groups of oppressed people or preventing violence are completely dead in the water if we are willing to keep compromising and accepting anything but the complete overthrow of the capitalist order, the end of the management and restriction of our collective resources by authorities.
truly!
I feel like fantasies often become the priority in these circumstances— fantasies about order and control, fantasies about the family and society, fantasies of justice and forgiveness, you name it
if everyone got better at smashing these fantasies and replacing them with real actionable priorities think of where we’d be
genuinely one of the most interesting things about the various movements to name/describe/prevent domestic and sexual abuse is that the resistance to it takes so many different forms, including the form of appearing to want to end domestic and sexual abuse while putting so much energy into increasing it, like the violence against women act, all the efforts to prevent sex trafficking, sex offender registries, hate crimes legislation, etc. it’s almost as if when you don’t put survivors and the most vulnerable at the center of your politics you end up making things worse and harder for everyone.
you can watch the push/pull between priorities with each one: for the VAWA, the priority wasn’t all battered women, but the subset of women mostly likely to be seen as employable and contributing to society after being deemed deserving of rescue. for sex offender registries, the priority isn’t survivors and the support they need to adapt to the harm they experience, but to punish and constrain perpetrators.
want help but aren’t good at appearing like an employable white cis woman? tough shit. make sure you proofread your resume and cover letter before you try to leave your husband.
want help but to get it you need to put someone you care about on a list that makes a safe dignified life impossible? tough shit. just don’t report them if you don’t want their life ruined.
i remember the first time i opened up to a counsellor about the things my dad did to me in order to ask for some kind of help, not only did i not get help but she was shocked that i hadn’t reported him to the police and encouraged me to do so. and i remember thinking they just don’t get that that would make my life worse. even without considering the impact on him, the amount of upheaval that would’ve caused for my family and myself, especially since i was dependent on him financially. but as soon as you bring anything even as tame as universal basic income into the conversation, or idk the wild concept of everyone being allowed to live in homes without having to pay rent to a bank or a landlord, suddenly that’s crazy political talk, radical and unrealistic.
there has to be a wider reckoning of the fact that so many big ideas about helping certain groups of oppressed people or preventing violence are completely dead in the water if we are willing to keep compromising and accepting anything but the complete overthrow of the capitalist order, the end of the management and restriction of our collective resources by authorities.
Emil Robinson aka Emil Joseph Robinson (American, b. 1981, Madison, WI, USA, based Cincinnati, OH, USA) - Rachel St Morning, 2025, Paintings: Oil on Board
THE HISTORY OF SOUND official trailer.
Oliver Hermanus "The History of Sound" 2025.
the cruel thing about the matryoshka doll system of oppressive hierarchies that we live in is that if you’re raised to completely internalize the idea that you’re not good enough because you can’t/don’t do x thing, and the fact that you’re not good enough means that the authority denies you care as a result — the process of trying to deconstruct this and not have your brain believe that this is an actual model that is still a constant threat to you is near impossible… when you leave your abusive home and you’re still in an abusive system that exploits, fires, evicts, denies people care on the basis that they haven’t earned it enough, when your job makes you feel like shit but you can’t leave, how do you tell yourself you’re ok now?
just because it’s not literally impossible for me to leave and improve my situation, doesn’t mean it’s not extremely difficult or that it can’t equally get worse. i look at my trajectory so far and my options and just feel trapped in a cycle of jobs that are either super exploitative, abusive, or just not stable and subject to layoffs. like it’s just so demoralizing to make it out of an abusive employment situation — and i don’t throw that word around, my manager sent me home without pay and threatened to beat me (he’s one of those unhinged victims of violence that’s super macho and violent about it) because i asked to be allowed to sit down — just to find myself struggling not to sink again at my new job, this time because i’m not skilled or experienced enough, and I’m constantly stressed cause i’m behind on my goals and don’t want to get sacked and my boss is not understanding of my situation even though i was hired at entry level, i feel fucking stupid and i’m trying but i still won’t meet my probation… like yeah i’m not being threatened with direct violence anymore but i just don’t get to feel safe, comfortable and confident. ever. i’m fucking tired man.
Nick Waplington Rock Pool No. 1, 2004 Chromogenic print, flush-mounted
Gustaf Adolf Fjaestad, 1868-1948) Winter Brook, after 1908
domink podlipniak
For your future information, here are medical innovations younger than both the basics of HRT for trans ppl & the first gender-reassignment/gender-confirmation surgery. I put together this incomplete list earlier today bc I was bored:
all organ transplants
most modern vaccines, including the polio vaccine
the gluten-free diet as a treatment for celiac disease
synthetic insulin
oral contraceptives
MRIs
the concept of a "blood bank"
pacemakers
hydrocortisone
ibuprofen
diazepam
artificial hearts
sumatriptan
naproxen (Aleve)
tramodol
dialysis
ECT
ondansetron (Zofran)
chemotherapy
IVF
CPR
CT scans
transdermal patches
liposuction
intravascular stents
penicillin
In case you run into someone talking about how 'experimental' HRT is.
[“We come to gender as supplicants, all of us. And many of us fail the litmus test of decency because our modes of gender presentation are too vulgar, too louche, or genderfucked in such a way that we disrupt the “natural attitude” because we fail to enact and achieve a certain verisimilitude of normative, White maleness or femaleness. Failing this litmus test means we are repeatedly refused, turned away in moments of our imploring recognition.
I’d wager that all trans people carry within them the memory of such refusals, even if they no longer actively shape our everyday engagements. This means that we all recognize gender as a morally loaded laborious process. It is work. And our labor is alienated, insofar as we don’t own what we produce and we rely on someone else to determine its value and worth. This means that we labor under conditions we don’t choose, conditions that many of us actively want to destroy. But we also understand, intimately, that the concept of autonomy that underwrites romantic myths of the insurrectionary subject can’t hold.
Gender recognition is sustained by a web of forces that we don’t control. Because we rely on others for recognition, we understand how selfhood is given through such forms of recognition. Because, when such recognition is withheld, we intimately sense that we are being relegated to the position of the monstrous, simultaneously both more and less than human. Because we exert agency in determining our forms of life and flesh, but that agency is always only one part of a much broader assembly into which our flesh—and its possibilities—are grafted.”]
hil malatino, trans care, 2020