The thing that fucks me up about North American city planning is not just that it’s ugly or that it sucks, but the knowledge of what it took to seize the land and seize the money to build it in the first place. The US enslaved millions, committed genocide against an entire continent to take the land from people who had lived there for millennia, committed coups and invaded nations on every other continent, destabilizing governments and fanning the flames of war and destruction worldwide, threatened to engulf the globe and nuclear hellfire and boil the oceans, all in the name of profit. And after all of that, it was for this?
All of that blood spilled for strip malls and cookie cutter suburbs, entire belts of the country of which are now empty and rotting because everybody left? So much unspeakable violence to halt anyone from challenging the shape of society and the hierarchy of domination, and of all things it was done in the name of, it was this? A way of living that people aren’t even happy with? So many cultures and languages, thousands of years of history passed from one generation to another, were uprooted and tried to extinguish, for shopping malls that didn’t last even a single lifetime? There is nothing that would have been worth what imperialism has done to the world, but it’s spaces like these which, to me, are even more emblematic of the structural myopic selfishness of capitalism that spurred on all of that violence than the tacky opulence of any billionaire.
Even at home, that these endless suburbs were built for white Americans fleeing from having to share cities with non-white neighbors. All the billions of tax dollars spent to employ white supremacist cops to surveil, harass, kill, cram into overcrowded prisons and immigrant concentration camps, so many countless people of color, spurred on by racist fear that they might somehow threaten this.
All of that to create and maintain a society of alienated and isolated would-be monarchs living in flimsy little plywood and plaster castles filled with an endless stream of toys that will be shortly forgotten and thrown away, surrounded by miles and miles of empty featureless places which only exist to give them warehouse sized concrete boxes full of collections of shelves from which to select from ten dozen nearly identical types of bland home goods to spend their money on.
Make no mistake, no individual or even large group of individuals in the suburbs caused this on their own. It is not the vague specter of consumerism or personal spending habits that created this. It is the product of the way our whole society was built and shaped by capitalist white supremacy. The same fundamental logic is true of Europe and every other imperialist project, too, even if it hides it better behind a prettier facade or a better set of social welfare options. This is just the naked face of it laid stark and bare.
NEW: Minnesota police are using brutal physical violence and “pain compliance” against water protectors and Line 3 pipeline protestors. The torture tactics have left some activists with partial facial paralysis.
Enbridge Energy, the multinational corporation building the tar sands oil pipeline, is funding the police who torture, harass, and surveil protestors opposing Line 3. Enbridge has now paid police & sheriffs in Minnesota $2 million to protect the pipeline.
Police have also used tear gas and rubber bullets against the unarmed protestors. Tara Houska (@zhaabowekwe) with the @giniwcollective spoke to Vice about the extreme force law enforcement have used to squash Line 3 protests.
Last week, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources fined Enbridge $3.3 million for breaching an aquifer during Line 3 construction, releasing over 24 million gallons of groundwater.
I think the hardest part about addressing child abuse is getting people to acknowledge, not just intellectually but actually responding accordingly, is that the biggest threat to children, the biggest risk of abuse, is family and parents.
it is of course most often parents who are crowing about needing to protect children (often against far smaller threats than family), and pointing out that they are, statistically, the biggest threat to their kids is not gonna be received well.
tbh I feel like most of society’s rhetoric around “protecting children” comes from the same place as deep-patriarchy rhetoric on “protecting women”, where the idea is that they’re sacred and valuable but also treated essentially as property, and the the desire to protect them is largely experienced as a desire to ensure that those property rights are sacrosanct
I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.
#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)
Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.
This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).
But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.
Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.
Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.
Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.
RIPMedicalDebt was created by John Oliver to do that giveaway. They’re amazingly effective and efficient with donations
Can confirm! This is what happened to a lot of my college debt, I suspect. I don’t pay it, haven’t paid any of it, no one has called or asked me about it, and it has seemingly disappeared!
Just wanted to clarify that RIPMEDICALDEBT was not created by John Oliver, but it was the organization he partnered with to buy up medical debt! They have region specific campaigns or you can donate to the nationwide fund.
Teachers have tried this and are amazed when their classes don’t go feral like in the book. It’s almost as if the book was supposed to be satire and not a treaty on the nature of humanity.
there’s a timeskip
THERE’S A TIMESKIP
THERE’S A TIMESKIP
THERE’S A TIMESKIP
after losing control of the signal fire there’s a FUCKING TIMESKIP and when the next chapter starts everyone’s hair is several inches longer and their clothes have rotted to shreds and they’re still just kind of chilling!!!!
IT TAKES THE TERRIBLE IMPERIALISM MIND-POISONED EXCESSIVELY BRITISH BOYS IN THE ACTUAL BOOK SEVERAL MONTHS TO COMMIT A SINGLE ACT OF INTENTIONAL VIOLENCE, EVEN THE ONE (1) CHILD WRITTEN AS AN ACTUAL SOCIOPATH
AND then when they DO turn on each other it is because
THERE’S AN UNSPECIFIED WORLD WAR HAPPENING
AND A PILOT’S CORPSE CRASH LANDS ON THE ISLAND POST-DOGFIGHT AND THE CHILDREN MISTAKE THE PARACHUTE FOR A MONSTER AND SPIRAL INTO PARANOIA
BECAUSE CHILDREN INHERIT THE LEGACY AND TRAUMA OF VIOLENCE FROM THE ADULTS WAGING WAR AROUND THEM
HURR DURR IN THE REAL WORLD IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN LIKE IN LORD OF THE FLIES -
IT DIDN’T HAPPEN THAT WAY IN LORD OF THE FLIES EITHER YOU JUST HAVEN’T READ IT SINCE HIGH SCHOOL IF EVER AND DON’T REMEMBER WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN THE GODDAMN BOOK
yes. yes he did. i’m also gonna direct you to the real life ‘lord of the flies’ which occured in the 1960s, when six tongan schoolboys got stranded on a desert island for over a year before being rescued by an australian fisherman (who, it should be noted, later took on all six as crewmembers because the reason they were out in the first place was because they wanted to see the world, and named his ship the Ata after the island they were stranded on). nobody died. the only injuries that occurred were accidental, and when one of the boys broke his leg falling down a cliff, the others braced it and looked after him so well that it healed perfectly. if they argued, then they would literally go to opposite sides of the island until they’d cooled off. after leaving the island, they remained friends for the rest of their lives. here’s a photo of them as adults, with their rescuer (who is third from the left) and other members of his crew.
i read about this in rutger bregman’s human kind, a book i cannot recommend highly enough, but if you don’t want to go and read a whole book about the inherent goodness of humanity (which again, you really should) then the relevant excerpt can be found here.
