The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn’t care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won’t be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don’t vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.
So here’s another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you’re not compromising your morals on one issue?
Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.
Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don’t have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don’t have.
Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life?Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it’s maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it’s not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.
Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I’m sure it’s going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.
Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won’t have to vote again? If you can’t see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don’t know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.
Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.
Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It’s estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump’s statements about masks. We’re highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?
Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That’s a blueprint for genocide right there and it’s a core tenet of both Trump’s personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn’t be going after white people. They most likely wouldn’t even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.
Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.
Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can’t think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That’s reassuring. I’m not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he’s running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we’ll all just have to hope that he doesn’t do the worst thing imaginable.
“But I don’t want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don’t support!” Yes, of course you don’t want those things. None of us does. No one’s saying that you actively support them. No one’s accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).
But if you’re advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you’re making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it’s not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he’s said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you’ll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)
And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren’t, but let’s just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn’t some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It’s going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we’re callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)
If we’re suggesting people vote for her, it’s not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don’t care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It’s that we’re simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We’re not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn’t win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?
And one more point to address: I’ve seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I’m not willing to accept these things; that’s why I’ll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you’re not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you’re so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don’t 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you’d be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you’re sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won’t. Most people aren’t willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it’s called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don’t sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we’ll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won’t.
U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.
Daily reminder that the US, who love to scaremonger about “communist labour camps,” have legal slave labour if you’re in prison
okay so as much as this post punches above weight on its own i need people to know exactly how many industries in the us are using prison labor, because it is many more than you think:
there are basically three forms of prison labor. the first is labor inside of prisons to keep the prisons running. which means that if they let people out? their admin goes down. which is a reason to not let people out. the second is work release, providing inmate labor to private companies at offsite locations, like poultry plants, cattle and dairy farms, and other agricultural services. (this includes firefighting. incarcerated people are saving your fucking lives for less than five bucks a day.) the third is production of goods for external sale, including farm work, manufacturing, call center, distribution services, and others. and yes, before you ask, this includes immigration detention, which may i remind everyone is made up of civil detainees; immigration violations are not crimes but civil violations and people are trapped and exploited in private prisons and then utilized for profit.
this is legal because of the thirteenth amendment to to the US constitution, which states (and this is a direct quote), that “neither "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the united states[.]”
colorado banned prison labor five years ago but prisoners say it’s still going on as of november 2023. there are other state initiatives trying to get prison labor banned, but when the government literally relies on incarcerated people to keep running, it’s an uphill fuckin road.
companies which use prison labor or sell products made by prison labor include:
walmart
kroeger
target
aldi
whole foods
mcdonald’s
wendy’s
starbucks
sprint
verizon
victoria’s secret
the dairy farmers of america
dickinson frozen foods
badlands quilting
pizza hut
hickman’s egg ranch
fidelity investments
jc penny
american airlines
avis rental cars
the oregon department of motor vehicles
3M
allstate insurance
american apparel
american express
costco
enterprize
fedex
frito lay
hertz
HP
little caesars
kfc
office max
sara lee
xerox
and so many others.
The problem and practice is so pervasive it is honestly really difficult to boycott and divest from products produced by prison labor. Sometimes we can search and find out if a company uses prison labor, sometimes it just feels unknowable. Sometimes those companies are your only option for internet service.
Companies also love to market a product as “made in America” without clarifying it was made by prison labor. If something says it was made in America but gives zero further details, be very wary of it. Shit that is marketed towards a conservative audience absolutely loves to do this especially.
To be clear, abolishing prison labor in conjunction with reducing incarceration rates would probably result in no net difference in the number of employed people, just the improvement of the people’s lives, welfare, safety, mental and physical health, and power to contribute positively to society.
But that’s cool because “job creators” are a myth anyway.
The point there is that prison labor is not “counted” as a job. You do not get counted as employed on a w-2. If someone did the exact same work not as a prisoner—even if that person is you the prisoner—as an employee, it “creates” a job. No, it doesn’t create what the job entails—that already exists, but it does create a “job.” There are countless people in prison, in immigration detention, or those that are undocumented or in hiding who are toiling but they are not “employed”. They don’t have “a job.” Creating jobs subjects employees and employers to labor laws (such as they are).
So yes of course it improves everyone’s lives, but it also lets people “count” under a system that bars you from so much if you are not “employed.” Firefighter prisoners trained extensively are not allowed to become firefighters as a job when they get out.
Jobs, yes, are a made up concept but the technicality counts. And in so many places!
Where it also makes a difference is that many laborious activities done by one person would legally have to be done by more, or paid the person more to do that work through OT or risk losing that employee.
Laborers are already doing the work—the work will not be invented. The title of job provides some minor protections and access to other services in the country.
Politicians bragging about employment numbers means nothing. People being counted as employed where they weren’t means everything.
[ID] Video. A tabby cat runs into a room carrying a hand-painted sign in its mouth and lays it on the ground. Clunk. The sign reads: “Feed me you dumb bitch.” [\text] Human laughs and says “It’s only 3 o'clock, you have to wait ‘til dinner time!”
The cat maintains eye contact and bats the sign with its paw. [end ID]
The cat maintains eye
contact and bats the sign with
its paw. [end ID]
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
does anybody else remember that reality show where they gaslit a bunch of americans into thinking they were competing to marry prince harry but it was really just some guy
We’ve had a family/murder of crows visiting our garden for years now, and this season the chicks are soooo helpless! They just stand around expectantly with their mouths open as the mom crow eats. Which is what inspired this comic! :)
The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn’t care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won’t be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don’t vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.
So here’s another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you’re not compromising your morals on one issue?
Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.
Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don’t have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don’t have.
Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life?Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it’s maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it’s not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.
Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I’m sure it’s going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.
Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won’t have to vote again? If you can’t see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don’t know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.
Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.
Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It’s estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump’s statements about masks. We’re highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?
Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That’s a blueprint for genocide right there and it’s a core tenet of both Trump’s personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn’t be going after white people. They most likely wouldn’t even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.
Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.
Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can’t think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That’s reassuring. I’m not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he’s running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we’ll all just have to hope that he doesn’t do the worst thing imaginable.
“But I don’t want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don’t support!” Yes, of course you don’t want those things. None of us does. No one’s saying that you actively support them. No one’s accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).
But if you’re advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you’re making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it’s not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he’s said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you’ll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)
And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren’t, but let’s just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn’t some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It’s going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we’re callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)
If we’re suggesting people vote for her, it’s not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don’t care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It’s that we’re simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We’re not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn’t win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?
And one more point to address: I’ve seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I’m not willing to accept these things; that’s why I’ll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you’re not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you’re so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don’t 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you’d be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you’re sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won’t. Most people aren’t willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it’s called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don’t sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we’ll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won’t.
We’ve had a family/murder of crows visiting our garden for years now, and this season the chicks are soooo helpless! They just stand around expectantly with their mouths open as the mom crow eats. Which is what inspired this comic! :)
Here’s what you tell someone who wants to commit suicide: The moment that gunshot goes through your head, you’ll wish you hadn’t done it. When the chair leaves your feet you’ll struggle to get on solid ground again. You tell them they’ve been burning bridges for so long and maybe now it’s time to just find their way across. They can use a cane or a walker or a goddamn police escort, but they’ve got to get over that bridge.
But don’t force them to get over that bridge if they don’t want to. Never push them any further than they want to go. Be gentle, be patient, be kind. Love them. Stay with them and spend time with them and let them cry. And don’t you dare tell them to dry up those tears. Let them fall, and then you give them a list of one-hundred-fifty goddamn reasons why they’re too beautiful for tears. Try to make them believe it; show them how much you care.
Tell them you’ll light one candle for every night they keep themselves alive. Tell them you hope by the end of the year you’ll have a house burning brighter than the molten core of the sun. Take their sadness and give it a good talking-to. Sit it down on the sofa and look it in the eyes, say I want you to give this person their life back. Make it comply. Bind it up with duct tape and tie its hands to the back of the sofa with rope if you have to. Get a confession out of it; play the good cop-bad cop routine if necessary. And you’d better make damn sure that at the end of the day that sadness will be bruised and bloody, broken beyond repair, and not the other way around.
Throw all the plates in the cupboard against the wall. Make this person listen to the sound of them shattering. Tell them you don’t want that to happen to them; make them pick up all the splintered pieces with their bare hands until they get the idea. Even if it takes all night. Then invite this person to dinner at your apartment, and serve them a four-course meal on your best dishes. Let that metaphor, that analogy, rest in their body till it burns their bones. Say, if you don’t kill yourself, then all these plates will be yours. I promise you that.
Take them out to the rooftop of your apartment, and stand as close to the edge as both of you can. Make them close their eyes. Ask them what they feel. And if they feel fear, or loathing at you for making them do this, tighten your grip around their waist and lead them back inside. Look in their eyes and hold their gaze, and tell them this: you were afraid because you still had something left to live for.
Allow them to sleep in. But when they’re just waking up, bleary-eyed and tender, and they want to stay in bed under the warm covers, rip all those covers off. Strip the bed til it’s as naked as their soul, and then say If you kill yourself you’ll sleep forever. Then open all the blinds and let the light in; take their hand and lead them to the window. Look at the beauty out there, you’ll say. Look at the wind and the earth and the flowers in the garden! If you sleep forever you’ll miss all that.
But above all put your ear to their chest and listen to their heartbeat. Then listen to their words, and listen to every single one that pours out of them. I don’t care if it takes hours, or days or weeks or even years. You need to be there and hear what they have to say. And when all those words are gone and they’re left empty and bone-dry, I want you to fill them back up with your love and your willingness to help them heal. Let them know you would walk through fire and swim through floods and journey across barren landscapes for them.
Now here’s what you tell someone who wants to commit suicide, and this will be the simplest word of all, but the most difficult to say: Stay.
Looks like it’s also mostly a fight between “Family Game Night” and Super Smashing Fighters" over on twitter too
Edit: The scripts for all of these are also already done, btw. I can’t combine Family game night with Super Smashing Fighters since the jokes are gonna be lost (also, they feature different characters)
U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.
Daily reminder that the US, who love to scaremonger about “communist labour camps,” have legal slave labour if you’re in prison
okay so as much as this post punches above weight on its own i need people to know exactly how many industries in the us are using prison labor, because it is many more than you think:
there are basically three forms of prison labor. the first is labor inside of prisons to keep the prisons running. which means that if they let people out? their admin goes down. which is a reason to not let people out. the second is work release, providing inmate labor to private companies at offsite locations, like poultry plants, cattle and dairy farms, and other agricultural services. (this includes firefighting. incarcerated people are saving your fucking lives for less than five bucks a day.) the third is production of goods for external sale, including farm work, manufacturing, call center, distribution services, and others. and yes, before you ask, this includes immigration detention, which may i remind everyone is made up of civil detainees; immigration violations are not crimes but civil violations and people are trapped and exploited in private prisons and then utilized for profit.
this is legal because of the thirteenth amendment to to the US constitution, which states (and this is a direct quote), that “neither "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the united states[.]”
colorado banned prison labor five years ago but prisoners say it’s still going on as of november 2023. there are other state initiatives trying to get prison labor banned, but when the government literally relies on incarcerated people to keep running, it’s an uphill fuckin road.
companies which use prison labor or sell products made by prison labor include:
walmart
kroeger
target
aldi
whole foods
mcdonald’s
wendy’s
starbucks
sprint
verizon
victoria’s secret
the dairy farmers of america
dickinson frozen foods
badlands quilting
pizza hut
hickman’s egg ranch
fidelity investments
jc penny
american airlines
avis rental cars
the oregon department of motor vehicles
3M
allstate insurance
american apparel
american express
costco
enterprize
fedex
frito lay
hertz
HP
little caesars
kfc
office max
sara lee
xerox
and so many others.
The problem and practice is so pervasive it is honestly really difficult to boycott and divest from products produced by prison labor. Sometimes we can search and find out if a company uses prison labor, sometimes it just feels unknowable. Sometimes those companies are your only option for internet service.
Companies also love to market a product as “made in America” without clarifying it was made by prison labor. If something says it was made in America but gives zero further details, be very wary of it. Shit that is marketed towards a conservative audience absolutely loves to do this especially.
To be clear, abolishing prison labor in conjunction with reducing incarceration rates would probably result in no net difference in the number of employed people, just the improvement of the people’s lives, welfare, safety, mental and physical health, and power to contribute positively to society.
But that’s cool because “job creators” are a myth anyway.
The point there is that prison labor is not “counted” as a job. You do not get counted as employed on a w-2. If someone did the exact same work not as a prisoner—even if that person is you the prisoner—as an employee, it “creates” a job. No, it doesn’t create what the job entails—that already exists, but it does create a “job.” There are countless people in prison, in immigration detention, or those that are undocumented or in hiding who are toiling but they are not “employed”. They don’t have “a job.” Creating jobs subjects employees and employers to labor laws (such as they are).
So yes of course it improves everyone’s lives, but it also lets people “count” under a system that bars you from so much if you are not “employed.” Firefighter prisoners trained extensively are not allowed to become firefighters as a job when they get out.
Jobs, yes, are a made up concept but the technicality counts. And in so many places!
Where it also makes a difference is that many laborious activities done by one person would legally have to be done by more, or paid the person more to do that work through OT or risk losing that employee.
Laborers are already doing the work—the work will not be invented. The title of job provides some minor protections and access to other services in the country.
Politicians bragging about employment numbers means nothing. People being counted as employed where they weren’t means everything.
While travelling through Queen’s domain, the Fun Gang encounter a forest of Addisons! Fortunately, Ralsei is willing to step in before Kris gets lured into some dangerous offers.
I’m working away on a much longer scene currently too, but wanted to get out something nice and short before then!
Hello dears I hope you are all well please help me!!!
I am Ahmed Halas from the besieged North Gaza, I have created my campaign to help my family and save them from the suffering they are living. Our lives, hopes and ambitions have been destroyed, our livelihood has been destroyed, we have lost dear friends and many relatives, our house has been completely destroyed, we live in a plastic tent in the middle of an UNRWA school and we suffer from the heat of the sun which causes headaches, migraines, body allergies and many diseases. There is no food, water, medicine or basic life requirements and the prices are terribly high, we cannot afford to buy anything.
In the meantime, this fundraising campaign has been started so that people can donate so that we can regain momentum in case the unfortunate circumstances cannot be fixed. Ahmed Halas and his family have already registered and are likely to be called to leave soon. This money is for their evacuation. Let’s aim to evacuate them all together!!!
Hello, I am Ahmed from the Gaza Strip, I am still alive after ten months of war. This is my fifth war too. But this war is unlike any other. I am trying to raise money for me and my family, as we are determined to leave to safety while this disaster continues. We want to leave the Gaza Strip towards Egypt through the Rafah crossing and Hala Company.
This was a very difficult decision for me, but this is my fate and the fate of my family. I feel ashamed to ask you to donate enough to save me and my family of 20, most of whom are young children, by raising enough money to reach safety. “Hala Company details are at the bottom of the article.” Please participate, even if it is a small part. Donate any small amount, share my photos, share your story, anything that makes a difference. I have complete hope in you and your generosity.
Father Fathi suffers from heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, and son Mahmoud suffers from back and cartilage pain, which is why he does not have a medical mattress due to sleeping on the floor, which makes him feel severe pain.
Oh my God, what happened to us, I lost my memories and dreams that I have dreamed of for a long time, my house where I lived my childhood, nothing remained inside it, it was a pile of fire, and I lost my source of livelihood and my baby clothes store was completely destroyed, which led to the accumulation of debts that I was committed to from merchants that I obtained a few days before the current wave of war.
Note: Ahmed will try, when the circumstances are complete and I collect a sufficient amount and I am able to reunite the entire family here in Gaza, by moving my family to a safe place and regaining some comfort or trying to go to Egypt, knowing that the cost per person now is $ 5,000 for an adult and $ 2,500 for a child. The price may fluctuate. Please help us by donating even the simplest things or by participating in our campaign, and I will be grateful to you
I searched my uni’s online archive for anything related to the ‘Simularcum’ movie (unfinished? lost? bootlegs?). Jackpot. This is why it was never properly released.
When you say a fandom is dead, it’s a bit of a blow to people who are still producing and enjoying work for that fandom. You’re basically saying what they’re doing doesn’t matter, doesn’t count, which might discourage them from continuing to participate.
If one person is creating content, the fandom isn’t dead.
If one person is consuming content, the fandom isn’t dead.
If two friends are chatting on skype about their OTPs, that’s fandom.
If someone doodles drawings of their favorite characters on a napkin, that’s fandom.
Just because someone is producing content for one fandom doesn’t mean they have to leave another.
Not every fandom can be the big, new, shiny and popular thing.
Not every fandom *should* be the big, new, shiny, and popular thing.
It’s okay to have small, tight-knit fandoms. They can be just as fulfilling and entertaining as the big ones.
Not every fandom
can be the big, new, shiny
and popular thing.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
western cat twitters are like “HoOman” and japanese cat twitters are like “Today I will consider the state of things.”
you forgot russian cat tumblr
Russian cats are right in the middle of the two
actually japanese cat twitters sound verbose to us because the translation loses a detail: it’s all written in katakana, which is considered childish or illiterate!
so japanese cats are really saying “today i wiww conshidah the state of fings ^owo^”
Also the only reason the Russian sounds semi childish is because of the lack of definite or indefinite articles (the, a/an), which Russian just doesn’t have in its language anyway
The corrected translation with English grammar would be “I am a wave” which is neither childish or verbose its just factual and simple
Love the language specific additions
Philosophy in this thread:
Silly little potatoes can be found in every language and culture
Artists and poets can be found in every language and culture
Artists and poets
can be found in every
language and culture
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
making fun of americans is pretty much always ok if youre not doing it in an edgelord “you guys have so many school shootings” way or acting like we’re the only country that has racism. but like posts about americans and hamburger get me every time
This is a real photo of a real business that I, an American, took myself.
“the average person is made out of 10 jelly beans” factoid is actually just a statistical error. jelly bean georg, who is made entirely out of jelly beans, is an outlier adn should not be counted
If you have bodily autonomy, then there is always a chance that you will do something to your body that you will regret. This is not an argument for taking that autonomy away.
There is a much, much higher chance that someone who is not you will do something to your body that you regret.
every time i think of leshy in his early days in the cult of the lamb i think of the very likely nightmares he would have after returning from purgatory, and also how he would come back to reality upon awakening, having to concentrate his senses to differentiate nightmare from reality.
although he is also an ancient god of chaos so annoying a certain cat also works.
the yellow cat on the other hand needs a vacation, since the worm appeared in his garden it has taken everything that was his and now he doesn’t know how to get it out of his house without having to bother the lamb or another follower.
He also has to find an excuse for the scratch on his face.
I too thought of the same nightmare theme but in reverse and it was funny to me:
