bogleech:

castiel-knight-of-hell:

queeranarchism:

transexualizer:

slashmarks:

there’s a big difference between “food waste” as in “farmers destroy tons of food to avoid exceeding quotas” or “supermarkets throw away this much edible food because it doesn’t sell”

and “food waste” as in “it is not actually within the capacity of humans to perfectly predict and track household food consumption, so a certain amount of food per household inevitably goes bad and has to be thrown out every year”

the idea that food waste is the product of thoughtless consumers rather than corporate greed is really insidious

Truuuuuuuueeeeeee, other large sources of food waste:

– Restaurants. The fact that the rich expect restaurants to have every article on their menu available at all times means every restaurant has far more food than they need and throws a lot of that shit out. 

– Big inhuman organisations with intense bureaucracy. Think hospitals, schools, prisons, refugee camps and the army. Organisations that provide food for a very large group of people but are not allowed (and/or can’t be bothered) to give that food away if there is too much of it. 

Some of the most spectacular food waste I’vepersonally witnessed was an army training camp that threw away 250 sealed lunchboxes because the training ended one day early, and a refugee center than threw away over 100 loaves of bread while people in the center where hungry because regulations stated that every refugee got two slices of bread for breakfast.

And I’m supposed to feel guilty about half a tomato rotting in the garbage? Nah, that’s not food waste. That’s just life. 

Shifting the guilt to the consumer is an intentional marketing ploy. The same was done when soda companies switched from bottles to cans

Originally soda machines had a place for you to return your bottle which the company would collect, sanitize, and re-use. Consumers paid a deposit when they bought the soda, then got it back when they dropped the empty bottle in the slot. Bars and restaurants also had to pay the deposit and redeem the bottles for a refund

Then companies decided it’d be cheaper to use disposable aluminum cans. Soda is something people often consumed in public places like parks and in front of stores. Increased public trash led to a litter problem. Environmentalists pressured the soda companies to fix the problem by bringing back the deposit and recycling programs. Instead, the companies started anti-liter campaigns that placed the guilt wholly on the consumer

This was decades before curb-side recycling existed. Recycling plants were few and far between, and consumers would have to save up cans then cart them to one of these facilities to recycle them, which few individuals had the time and transpiration to do. The ad campaigns led to people demanding more public garbage cans, which did reduce liter, but those were purchased and maintained at city expense and the contents went to landfills. It also led to the general public believing littering and landfill problems rested squarely on the shoulders of consumers even though the corporations had a perfectly good recycling system that they could have continued

Big business wants you to blame yourself and each other for problems they caused, and they’d rather spend money on guilt shifting ad campaigns than use that money for something good

I was actually never told any of the stuff in that last addition.

eatingcroutons:

Yeah, I got one of Tumblr’s you-may-have-unwittingly-interacted-with-propaganda-blogs emails too. And like everyone else, I kind of shrugged because really, what am I supposed to do about that now? I have search disabled on my blog, and my tags are a mess; there’s no way I could go through and actually find any of the propaganda I may have inadvertently boosted over the seven years I’ve been on this site.

But out of curiosity I looked over Tumblr’s list of IRA-linked blogs. And one username stood out to me. I recognised it because for several months last year it had been showing up constantly in my notifications after I reblogged one of their posts with a response.

That username was black-to-the-bones, and this is the post I reblogged from them:

When I first saw the post by black-to-the-bones, I wanted to know more about these women. I dug up the original Tweet, ran a reverse Google image search and… well, as you can see from my reblog, there turned out to be quite a lot of information about them on the internet, which I spent the next hour or two collating into my post.

Now, don’t get me wrong here: I am one hundred percent aware that history regularly erases the contributions of women, and especially women of colour. But as you can see from my reply, in this particular case the history of these three women absolutely is not “hidden from us”. The person attempting to hide these women’s history was black-to-the-bones themself.

The original post – which we now know was posted by a state-sponsored propaganda blog – took a legitimate issue, but misrepresented facts to stir up emotion about that issue. The issue was perfectly tailored to resonate with Tumblr’s culture of social justice, and it worked. The vast majority of reblogs of the original post do not include any correction or further information.

Again, don’t get me wrong: anger is important. It’s a necessary part of social justice. But we have clear evidence that bad-faith actors are intentionally fomenting false anger to keep us reacting emotionally rather than thinking rationally. And they are smart about it. They will mix in their attempts to divide and enrage us with innocuous cute videos to gain followers, and legitimate posts about issues. So that when they do post actual misinformation, it slips under our radar.

When propaganda blogs do something like try to smear a Jewish woman as a white supremacist, it’s obvious who their target is, and what their goal is. But I wanted to highlight the black-to-the-bones post above because it’s a subtler, more insidious kind of propaganda. It’s part of a continuum of tactics designed to keep up a constant background noise of outrage. 

Because while anger is important, constant anger makes it harder for us to empathise with each other. It makes it harder for us to be constructive, rather than destructive. And ultimately, it just exhausts us and leaves us too apathetic to care.

So getting back to my original question: What are we supposed to do about that now?

Fact. Check. Everything.

Your racist grandparents aren’t the only ones being targeted by fake news. We are being targeted with posts that are specifically designed to appeal to Tumblr’s social justice culture. So if you see a post about an issue that makes you angry, stop before you reblog. Check the source. Google the details. Make sure your anger about legitimate issues isn’t being exploited by malicious actors.

Propaganda like this relies on us reacting to outrage before we stop to think. Be smarter than that. Don’t let yourself be manipulated.

a-spoon-is-born:

one of the ways i know this culture has a massive issue with consent

is the sheer amount of people I’ve known that just lie & tell people they’re deathly allergic to foods they dislike

because otherwise people will hound them, mock them, coax them, harass them, try to force them to eat it, or even trick them into eating it, and they will never hear the end of it

your coworkers will bake it into a fucking pie, call it something else, and wait til your birthday, gather everyone and their first cousins to sit around in a circle waiting for you to put a forkful into your mouth and then point rhythmically at you in a chanting, glaring, sweating, unholy circle like SWISS CHARD SWISS CHARD YOU JUST ATE SWISS CHARD HA HA HA SWISS CHARD NOW YOU LIKE SWISS CHARD

Because forcing someone into a situation where they don’t feel safe declining putting something into their body they’d rather not be there is totes 100% wholesome American fun

And this is something so known that it’s infinitely easier to just lie and tell people that you’ll die if you eat that food…which actually doesn’t always stop it from happening