A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
When I started playing the Sims, this aggressive need to micromanage the lives of poor people suddenly made sense; to them, poor people aren’t really human with human needs and frailty, they are just mindless avatars designed to follow orders. When you don’t think of poor people as having souls, suddenly it makes perfect sense to tell them to sell their few pleasures for the benefit of the wealthy landlords.
people shouldn’t have to pimp themselves off to the military to afford college wtf
They don’t…lol
actually almost every teacher i’ve ever had has suggested joining the military because they’ll pay for college and almost half of my class is either doing it or considering it but i hope that rock you live under has air conditioning
Hi @dishwasher-in-a-suit, I grew up in a small, poverty-stricken, rural, mostly white town. Things have improved in my hometown a lot over my lifetime, but even today the poverty rate is 30%. There was no upward mobility; our high school had multiple leaks in the ceiling, we definitely didn’t have any preparation for the SATs or scholarships or anything of that nature.
If I see one more fucking guilt tripping ‘why are you sleeping on X’ posts about net neutrality, the tax bill, healthcare, the judiciary, Sinclair broadcasting or ANYTHING ELSE I’m gonna walk off a pier
Because honestly, what are you doing? What is your goal? People are angry, and scared, and feel hopeless, and your plan to get them to protest is to make them feel guilty for being angry and scared and feeling hopeless. That’s not fucking motivating, it’s crushing.
‘but I put in good info in that post too!’ Yah, but you made everyone reading it feel like shit first so now instead of feeling like ‘wow this is fucked up and it’s hard but here’s a tool I can use to do my part’ ppl think ‘everything is useless and I’m a bad person god I can’t believe how fucked we are there’s no hope anyway’ and then! Not only do some of us fall into the spiral of self loathing so hard we can’t protest, the content we do send out is flat, it doesn’t provide any sort of reinforcement, but it sets up activism in the same purity culture that’s debilitating to long-term engagement. It builds up our apathy, it makes protesting *that much harder* because no one is perfect and no one can protest 24/7, no one can corner every single issue, we will quite simply die if we do.
You gotta build people up. Shit is fucked, we all know that! We don’t need the reminders! Just give us the tools and point the direction and Build. People. Up.
This statement is taken so lightly. For one women don’t believe they can be abusive and the view of society on men prohibits the fact that a woman could successfully mentally, physically and emotionally abuse a man.
I went through all the notes. And a lot of y’all faves don’t even like or reblog things like this
^^^ because they’re the women that this post is about.
This is very important
A lot of men are emotionally and mentally abused by women under the guise of “if you love me then you’ll accept me as I am” and “you’re not man enough to handle a strong woman like me”. A lot of men put up with emotional and mental abuse from women simply because they believe it’s a measurement of their manhood how much they can endure and there are women who know that. They manipulate the emotional and mental playing fields to entice conflict so they can be the victim and cause the man to break down and be easily used and treated how she sees fit….
It’s a very dangerous thing, mental and emotional abuse because it’s so easily masked behind other things
Faaacts 🗣
I was literally just talking with a dude today, a professional who came out to inspect for termites, who let me know he’s going through a divorce. He chose to leave. He said his wife pressured him into quitting his job, controlled the finances and tried to prevent him from taking any of the money he earned when he left, hated his family and friends and tried to cut him off from seeing them, and pulled a bunch of manipulative shit to try and stop him from leaving and keep him home, without a social life.
He was the type of person who’d say ‘fuck this’ and get out of that relationship. But not everybody is that time. Some are more vulnerable than others. Men can be manipulated, bullied, coerced, and abused.
I’ve been manipulated and abused by women and I am a woman. I know what those kinda people are capable of. Women can be toxic as well, know the signs and check that bihh before you dip
…you know if we lose earth and start sending people to another planet, we’re not ALL going, right?
Like, I want to explore the Galaxy as much as anyone, but like…. If it comes down to it, you know the multibillionaire CEOs and detached, old-money heirs and heiresses are going first, right?
It’s not gonna be a ‘bright new world’s where the average Joe can go out and farm and live in a cozy little apartment cube.
First to arrive will be the scientists, then the architects, then the rich, the popular, the influential… Politicians, dictators, royalty, billionaires and select members of their family. Then maybe the multibillionaires, and the highbrows, and the catty kardashian-esque empires.
It’ll be a status symbol, and you Know that once they get there, they’re not going to have the rest of us common folk around, bringing down the property value.
Earth will be delegated to the third-world country of the solar system; the factory that makes towels and air conditioners for five-star hotels.
Except, once the wealthy and influential are free of our clogged atmosphere and poison water, none of them will have anything at risk anymore.
Our purpose will once and for all be reduced to, most literally, cogs in a slot machine.
I dunno, that just seems fucking terrifying to me.
When you’re on a sinking boat, you want the people in command to be with you on that boat. You don’t want them on dry land, telling you you’ll be fine, cashing in the insurance money
Fun messed-up fact about the Age of Exploration: Many exploration missions were headed by the nobility and were spectacular failures. Because they were arrogant enough to believe they wouldn’t need more supplies than they brought or that the natives would simply provide them with what they needed. If they weren’t killed by disease or natives, they would end up eating each other when they ran out of supplies.
Or we could do what Europe did and send out criminals out to colonized planets to get the groundwork done. But then, when the nobility that sent them there went over to boss them around, the penal colonies would tell them to sod off. We even may wind up with pirates that troll the Earth’s orbit for ships full of rich people to rob of supplies.
So we’d either get the rich eating each other to survive or cool space pirates. I’d say we win as a society either way.
Killmonger: How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a full price for it? Or did they take them like they took everything else?
I work in a museum- an old one- and during this scene I was nudging my brother the whole time. I clapped a little at that line. Museums need to rethink the way we curate things. If we aren’t elevating the heritage of those objects’ creators, if we aren’t telling their story, if we aren’t making those narratives accessible to the descendants and letting them lead, then what is even the point? Decolonize collections. Practice co-curation. Hire scholars of color, and make the collections accessible to visiting scholars. Involve the descendant community and elevate their voices, not the white colonial narrative.
And for goodness’ sakes, don’t run your museum like a jewellery shop. Have context. Honor the objects for their beauty, but remember that no object is as important as the people who created it.
Ummmm,, and like straight up, give things back? Indigenous communities in North America have campaigned for decades to have body parts, ceremonial items and sacred parts of our history returned to their communities.
Ofcourse, Hurd scholars of colour and think critically about your role. But like sometimes, you just have to give things back.
That’s repatriation (what I meant by “decolonize collections”) and it’s actually been federal law in America for almost thirty years. It’s been happening and will continue to happen, but it’s a LOT more complicated than just “give the stuff back.” Obviously you’re totally right- giving the stuff back is absolutely necessary.
But at the same time, giving ALL the old stuff back to Native groups doesn’t really work, either- for us OR for them. What happens to the stuff when it goes back? Do the modern Alaskan Athabascans really want the 1000+ baskets the museum I work at holds? (No, they don’t. We asked them. They definitely do not want those baskets back.) What about Native groups who don’t want remains back- the Navajo, for instance, believe that the remains of the dead are taboo objects, unclean and best left buried. And there are some Native groups who actually WANT their objects in museums. Not every object has a ritual context- sometimes a pot is just a pot. Even some ritual objects aren’t as spiritually important, and we’ve actually had people from different tribes come in and help rewrite language surrounding an object, or give instructions as to how it should be stored. Some groups really want us to display their cultural artifacts, because it reminds people that Native American cultures are alive and real.
One thing that works really well in a lot of cases is co-curation, which is when we commission and work with Native artists, leaders, and scholars to reframe the way we display objects. Like, recently, we asked Chris Pappan, who’s a Kanza artist, to come in and draw on the displays from the ‘30s. The juxtaposition of his art with the colonialist view of Native Americans has had a huge impact in visitor impressions- people go to that gallery now to learn and see what’s ACTUALLY happening today with Native Americans. This I think is how these institutions can use their power for good- elevating creator voices and letting them present their own past and own history. The Field does that a lot- we’ve had exhibitions from Rhonda Holy Bear, Bunky Echo-Hawk, and are continuing to work with Native Americans from many tribes to redesign and reframe the objects on display. We’re not doing this for social justice points- we’re doing this because the Field Museum gets something like 1.5+million visitors a year, and we owe it to the Native tribes we stole from to a.) tell their story b.) how they want it.
If you take all evidence of Native Americans out of the big natural history museums, you’re taking away representation- and education- and a lot of tribes actually don’t want that. What many groups want is the old colonial narratives to go away and be replaced with their own messaging and history. Native Americans are mythologized and what we did to them is sanitized in the US education system. I know that the person who responded is in Canada- and from what I hear, they’re even worse about destroying Native history and sanitizing what the colonists did (and continue to do) to them and their cultures. And this is where I think museums can actually HELP. People only care about things they’re familiar with. If the only image you have of a Native American is a racist football mascot, you’re not going to care about them as a culture- you’re not even going to see them as people. There’s a lot of white people who don’t believe in Native Americans. Like, they legit don’t think that there’s ANY Native groups left, and I know this because I’ve talked to these people at work. It’s baffling, how little Americans know about their own country’s behavior. And it’s totally a global problem- I could go on for days about what the British Museum Needs To Do With Those Fucking Marbles, Give Them Back You Cowards, You Have Enough Money To Ensure Their Care In Greece You’re Just Being Assholes- but I wanted to respond with a Native American context because of the person I’m replying to AND because… well, most Americans don’t know this, and they need to, because knowing about repatriation and why we do it is important.
Repatriation is so very vital, but it’s even more vital to listen to the Native American groups and ask them what they want to happen- as well as treat each tribe individually. We don’t hold onto Tlingit remains because the Navajo don’t want their remains back. Treating all tribes as identical is wrong- not as wrong as withholding their precious cultural traditions, relics, and remains- but if we’re even going to (as a museum industry) attempt to apologize for the atrocities we’ve sanctioned, the first thing we gotta do is ask people what they want.
And the next thing we gotta do is listen.
Skeptical. Very much so.
Skeptical? What’s skeptical? I am confused
About repatriation until the countries can show they can take care of the objects. I don’t like retroactively looting museums for the sake of correctness. Something doesn’t sit right with me.
Further, Palmyra and the Iraqi national museum comes to mind.
I don’t know. My opinions are developing on the issue.
Ahh, gotcha. Yeah, that’s certainly another issue! With Native American repatriation, the objects and remains repatriated often aren’t conserved at all- they go back into use, or in the case of remains, they’re given a burial.
But sometimes it isn’t safe! Sometimes it’s dangerous for artifacts to go back- they might get damaged (see: Iraq) or they’re so fragile that they can’t travel, or the home country can’t support them. In these cases, you can still make these objects available to the descendants- through outreach, digital resources, reproductions, and on-site work. This is super important for African art in particular- in a lot of cases, sending it back isn’t helpful, because of the way Africa got split up- if an artifact is from a group that straddles a country line, who gets it? And what if sending it back means that now diasporic descendants (who never got the chance to know exactly from who they came from) don’t get to access it? Africa is so salient for this because of the slave trade- for a lot of people of African descent, western museums are the main way they get to see the actual things their ancestors made. They live in these countries, like the US, where their history and contributions are so frequently ignored, and don’t they have the right to connect to their heritage through artifacts, too? Giving everything back would be hugely detrimental- and again, people only care about what they see.
Which is where consulting these communities comes into play. In black panther, the artifacts have no context. They say nothing about African life! They say nothing about what it means to be African, or from a specific African nation/tribe! They’re treated like trophies, and that’s bad display. I think that one of the most important goals of modern museums is education- what can these objects tell us the public, along with the cultural descendants of the creators? In many cases, repatriation isn’t the right answer- but that can’t be decided without a conversation between museums and descent groups. A good-faith convo, not one where the museum flexes its financial/cultural power, but a conversation where the desires of the people and the reality of conservation are both discussed.
And even in cases where repatriation isn’t a feasible option, co curation is almost always a possibility. You’d be surprised how many groups will happily enter into dialogue with museums who hold their cultural heritage, so long as there’s a real effort to include their voices and opinions.
It’s not a question with a simple answer. Museums have to live with the legacy of their creation as a product of colonialism, and they have to use that responsibility in a way that provides actual benefits to the people affected.
as a parent it is your god damn fucking job to look after your children stop treating your children like they are burdens
you signed up to have a child, the child did not sign up to have you as a parent
keep this in mind. do not expect your children to immediately give you back all the things you give them. they are children. love them. cherish them. treat them well.
I think about this a lot, because this is exactly what it’s like to be a parent. It’s not their job to take care of me (it is wonderful when they show compassion and care, but it’s not their job to provide for me) it’s mine.
Okay, so this is why it geniunely bugs me when parents of young children joke about being excited to drop their kids off for their first day of school. Not because it’s a momentous event, a point where your kid is making this change in their little lives and starting their education.
Parents joke about being excited because now the house is quiet.
Like, my mom and I talked about this recently. She said she actually cried and felt a little lost when I started going to school. She doesn’t understand it either.
For the most part, parents decide when they want to have kids, bring this new life into the world…and then make jokes about how much of a burden they are? If you as a parent have this mindset, then maybe you shouldn’t have kids?
I don’t know. This mindset seems super toxic to me and I don’t understand this has become a standing joke.
I know folks mean well, but arguing that Article 13 will deprive media corporations of the free advertising furnished by Internet memes and fan media isn’t going to get you anywhere because that’s the entire point.
The whole idea of Article 13 – and the push toward copyright overreach more generally – is to make self-publishing (of all kinds, not just fan media) so onerous that only folks who operate under the auspices of corporate backers can afford to do it.
i.e., they’re trying to roll back to the pre-Internet status quo when a tiny handful of publishing corporations had absolute control over all non-local media distribution channels, and – unless the author was independently wealthy – media was permitted to reach a wide audience only with their explicit approval.
The mechanism is pretty straightforward: Article 13 and legislation like it would establish a presumption in law that the corporate claimant in any copyright dispute is correct, and place the onus upon the author as a private individual to prove otherwise. At the time of this writing, the average cost of bringing a copyright dispute to court is in the neighborhood of $200 000. What private individual has that kind of money?
It’s not just about fan media. This type of legislation would allow publishing corporations to claim that they own anything they please, and hosting providers would be obliged to block distribution of that content purely on the claimant’s say-so, unless and until the dispute is resolved in court – and unless you’ve got two hundred grand to burn, that resolution will never happen.
Of course, there’d be remedies short of going to court – like, say, signing on with a publishing company yourself, so that they can “protect” your intellectual property on your behalf. See where this is going?
Pointing out the potential for short-term harm to publishing corporations’ bottom line is a non-starter because no amount of loss of exposure could possibly outweigh the benefits to the publishing corps if the long game pays off.
adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.
children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.
couple things here:
multiple things can actually be bad at the same time
I’m 32
couple more things:
Little kids really aren’t equipped to work full time without damaging their physical, mental, and emotional development and health, and when you play the “but adults work all day!” card you sound like a nineteenth century textile baron.
Highschoolers can easily be “working” 40+ hours a week, between school, homework, and extracurriculars and/or part-time work, and still hear this smug “:/ wait til you get to the real world sweaty” rhetoric all the time.
The original claim here wasn’t even “school is too hard,” it was “school is failing to perform its most basic function,” which is different.
Capitalism is hell and even adults shouldn’t be doing as much work as they are
Has anyone else noticed how, when you have a chronic condition of some kind, that there’s always the basic assumption from people around you that you’re not already doing everything you can?
It’s all about the illusion of control. People who are healthy like to believe they can always keep being healthy if they do the right things. They don’t want to think about how good people get struck with terrible circumstances for no reason.
So they keep assuming that if they got sick, they could do something to make it better.
And if you’re still sick, that must mean you’ve done something wrong or not done enough.
Nail. Head. The same attitude can be seen in how a lot of people talk about poverty.
And sexual assault. All they have to do is not go there not drink that not wear that not date them and they’ll be fine, right?
The Just World theory – that as long as I do everything right, I’m safe, and everybody who isn’t safe is at fault for not doing everything right – is perhaps the most harmful and widespread mindset today
if you ever see a conservative and wonder just how in the world they have so little compassion? they are genuinely convinced that most – not all, but most – bad things that happen are the fault of the person affected, because then they don’t have to feel bad
somebody explaining this to me as a young adult was, quite literally, the start of me seeing the world in a new way and moving considerably to the left politically. by letting go of the just world mindset my conception of reality shifted considerably
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