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what a deal.

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Mothra Appreciation Time

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this sort of kind of reminds me of this class i had a few years ago where we talked about boundaries, how to keep them, and how to make sure people near you are safe too. probably because i think about it most of the time lol

the instructor was this big tall kind of imposing man who commented on how this exercise was one of the only times he thought that was a good thing. he asked for a volunteer and had them stand a few feet away from the wall on one end of the classroom while he walked over to the one opposite them. it was a big room so he was pretty far away

“i’m going to walk towards you and talk to you about my son,” he explained, in a totally friendly and disarming way. “im just going to talk and maybe gesture a little and walk towards you, just talking! and when i get too close, all you have to do is tell me to stop and i��ll stop. its ok! really! i wont be upset at all and this is just a class, i’ll stop on a dime!”

and then he did exactly what he said he was going to, but very loud and walking kind of fast. the room echoed and everyone was watching. he hadn’t lied at all, but it was just kind of a lot. the volunteer immediately took a step back and looked more guarded but didn’t say anything until he was basically on top of her. 

he stopped, and then he asked her “when did you WANT me to stop?”

she admitted that she was a little uncomfortable about how fast he was moving from the start, but halfway across the room is when she really didnt want him closer.

“yeah, i know! i was paying attention. i saw your nonverbal cues right away, but a lot of people who preface their actions with a speech like mine won’t. by constantly reassuring someone they can tell you to stop, the responsibility falls on YOU instead, in their eyes, and also makes you second guess using that to begin with! because you knew i didnt want to hurt you, or thought you knew that, the idea of telling me to stop, of suggesting i wasn’t safe, made you second guess your gut and worry about my feelings. it’s good to check in like i did, but it doesn’t mean you can stop being perceptive, and you have to keep in mind that just because you give them this tool doesn’t mean they’ll feel comfortable using it. once you understand that, there will be a lot fewer cases of people “blowing up” at you”

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PSA

You know what bothers me the most about how little coverage the Australian fires are getting?

I could mention that 18 people are now dead, several are missing and over 1000 homes are lost. All at the start of a new year. +3 million hectares of land is gone. People feel a little bit of empathy, maybe they'll reblog this or give it a like, but they'll give it no second thought.

But if I were to make a post just solely about the fact that 500 million animals have been killed in these fires, including 30% of all koalas meaning they're close to being functionally extinct, people would share the fuck out of it. They would start GoFundMe pages, they would guilt people into reblogging shit with the classic, "if you don't reblog this you don't have a heart." You know that trope yeah?

You all fucking shoved posts about the Amazon fires down our throats. "Oh but they were deliberately lit on Native land." You don't think we understand that? Do you know that is exactly what's happened here? As a woman of Aboriginal descent, do you get how upsetting it is for me to watch my country burn? To watch my friends houses burn to the grown whilst they're left to flee to the beach in hope's of not being burnt? Do you know how upsetting it is to think that the house that I grew up in probably won't be standing in a couple days? All because the RFS are not allowed to backburn because of politics. Politics who don't understand a single fuck about anything that is happening.

Every night I have to try my hardest not to break down in front of my family because I am so upset and so angry about this whole situation. Men and women are out there fighting this fire, missing out on time with their family, time at work meaning they can't afford to feed their family either, they miss out on holidays too.

My brother was sent on a strike team up to Sydney for Christmas. He almost didn't make it back for New Years, even when he got home, he was so tired to go out so him and I stayed at home and played the PS4. And what makes me angry is that some families out there don't see their brothers come home, their sons, their fathers, their sisters, mothers, daughters.

Because people are dying.

And no one other than Australians give a single fuck!

Canberra currently ranks at number 8 for worst air quality in the world right now. The elderly in nursing homes are being evacuated and have nowhere to go. People were jumping in lakes, were swimming out into the ocean to get away from the fire as it started to burn the beach.

And what does our Prime Minister do?

He arrives at fire impacted towns, in a nice and expensive 100k BMW, to give his thoughts and prayers. Not aid, not water and food, not money. But thoughts and prayers.

"I'm sure he's just tired."

"No, no. He lost a house."

"Oh."

How more insensitive can the fucker get? This isn't a Prime Minister. This is a disgrace. May I also mention we are in our worst drought yet but "we" just sold 409 million dollars worth of drinking water overseas.

I am begging all of you by this point. Please, help out our victims of fire and drought. Donate to whatever causes you can, search the internet, I'm sure there are plenty out there. Donate packs of water, toiletries, food that doesn't spoil, socks, sleeping bags, anything.

Every small gesture you do makes a big impact on somebody who lost everything.

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is it just me or do the golden globes/award shows as a whole feel like a celebrity circle jerk??? they’re sitting around in expensive clothing drinking expensive alcohol while giving each other awards and lecturing the general public about donating to causes that they themselves could easily allocate resources to???

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god the bush fire situation is so fucking devastating as an indigenous person because not only is my home being fucking ravaged by fires and has been for months, but people only seem to care about the animals.

and don't get me wrong, care about the animals! i care about the animals! they're MY native animals, they're part of my culture and home and they're living breathing creatures.

but there's so so so many things in place already to help animals, shelters and charities and sanctuaries, and by all means help them more, but the government does not care about aboriginal australians. shit, scomo doesn't give a flying fuck about anyone who isn't a white cishet able bodied christian.

aboriginal australians are losing our homes, you say people aren't endangered but WE ARE. we make up a tiny percentage of our country, and a vast majority of us live in poverty and unsafe areas. not only are we losing our homes, we're losing our identity, our lives, our families. this land means more to us than it ever will to people crying over the koalas. the koalas mean more to us than they ever will to you.

remember who lived alongside those animals for thousands of years.

there's a million things i could say about why we need help more than the animals, but in the end white people will care more about what's small and fluffy than people of colour, especially people whose land they're living on, right?

(id: a picture of the sky clouded with smoke from the bushfires, the top half is black and the bottom half is red and orange, with the sun in the middle. it looks very similar to the aboriginal australian flag, and was taken minutes after sunrise on january 1st.)

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So I saw a post last night that terrified me but then my app crashed before I could reblog it.

Smart appliances are completely, 100% reliant on wifi? Like if there's an outage or you couldn't pay your internet bill in time and your wifi isn't working, your stove/fridge/door locks etc are rendered completely and totally unusable? The oven doesn't revert back to a basic oven/stove that you just have to operate manually? It's competely inoperable? Is that what you're telling me because that's fucking terrifying. So you're either completely locked in or out of your home if wifi goes down? Who the fuck signs up for this shit?

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“One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, “I like the pictures in this magazine.”A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn’t see it anymore.”

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Wallace Shawn, The Fever

(To understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.)

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"oh homeless people are just gonna use your money to buy drugs" and? and?? the government uses my tax money to buy bombs and cops, you think I care if someone in a shitty situation uses money I gave them to feel marginally less shitty? fuck off!

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being lex luthor kinda sorta requires being a genius, elon musk got start up cash because his family stole an emerald mine from zambian miners 🤷🏾 nothing but wealth and privilege

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Cat NO likey!

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On Hunger

Not too long ago I was having a discussion about Sweeney Todd, and particularly the character of Mrs. Lovett. I commented that I rather preferred the original musical characterization of her to the movie version with Johnny Depp and Helena Bohnam-Carter wherein Mrs. Lovett is primarily motivated by love for Sweeney and the desire to keep him in her life and bind him to her by any means necessary. By contrast the original motivation for Mrs. Lovett and the way it shapes her character is… rather different.

Original flavor Mrs. Lovett is first and foremost an opportunist. She doesn’t do what she does for Sweeny’s sake alone, nor for some grand goal of revenge, nor to strike a blow against the bourgeoisie. She sees an opportunity to make money and elevate her position and she takes it, and is absolutely unconcerned by any kind of moral or ethical standards that might stand in her way. She’s a monster, pure and simple: a less scowly and bloody-razor one than Sweeney, but absolutely a monster.

She’s simple, but she’s also complicated. Because Mrs. Lovett is also a product of her surroundings and experiences, no less so than the brutality of the prison system that transformed gentle Benjamin Barker into monstrous Sweeney Todd. Sweeney Todd is fundamentally a story about hunger, and Mrs. Lovett comes from hunger. Her intro song The Worst Pies In London is funny and self-deprecating but also brutally honest about the fact that she is living in the most abject poverty, surrounded by people in equal poverty, and that no one among them has the time or space to spare for scruples. Mrs. Lovett is a monster but she is a monster of economy; a monster of thrift, of practicality, of making do with what is available.

I don’t think that Sweeney Todd was trying to argue that all poor people are flesh-eating monsters. But Mrs. Lovett wouldn’t have had her grand entrepreneurial idea if she wasn’t so desperate, and more than that I think that she never would have got as far as she did if her neighbors weren’t equally desperate. When you are starving in abject poverty and a source of bountiful food becomes available to you, at prices you can afford for the first time in years, it behooves you not to look too closely. Not to ask too many questions. The beggar woman cannot have been the only person on the block to notice the smoke coming from Mrs. Lovett’s basement, or to wonder where she had suddenly come into the source of all this rich food – but everyone else turned their face away, and was careful not to ask questions to which might yield answers they could not live with.

So.

There’s a pretty predictable pattern in Capitalism Discourse wherein any time a criticism is levied the business practices of a product or service, any time an alternative is pushed or rigorous standard proposes, there comes a certain amount of backlash about how this will affect the people in the margins. “Not everyone has the luxury/privilege of making essential purchasing decisions based on ethics” is the contention, and that’s quite accurate! There are a lot of people who are already living at the very edge of what will let them survive, for whom a 10 cent bump in gas prices or 50 cent bump in food prices could quite realistically spell disaster. People still shop at wal-mart despite their despicable treatment of workers because only wal-mart has what they need, at the prices they need it. People oppose pushes for humane treatment of animals, for sustainable farming, for ethically sourced chocolate and coffee and sugar, because they live in the margins and have little margin to spare for abstract and intangible scruples. We don’t want to think about the welfare of workers, of crop harvesters and senior caretakers, because the cost might be more than we can afford, because it’s all we can do to manage the welfare of ourselves and our families.

I don’t blame any individual for feeling the pinch, for being in a desperate situation, for choosing the cheaper clothes they can afford even if they were made in sweatshops to the pricey ones sourced with ethical labor. We each can only do what we can. But for the love of god, please understand that the ultimate momentum of our movements must be a rising tide that lifts all peoples out of the pit, not one that has them climb on each other’s heads to try to reach the edge. Pay the burger workers less so that the food prices don’t hike, and the burger workers buy cheap clothes because they can’t afford more expensive ones, and the sweatshop workers buy cheap groceries that can only be sustained by underpaying the harvesters, and it all goes round and round in an ever sinking circle.

Monsters like Sweeney Todd, brooding vengeance-obsessed serial killers, are overall pretty rare in our society. But monsters like Mrs. Lovett – the ones who sell us back the flesh of our neighbors cooked in a pretty crust for their own profit – abound, and even more abundant are the neighbors who are careful not to ask questions that they don’t want to hear the answers to. If you want to shut down the pie shop? Feed the fucking tenants.

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THE COUP IN BOLIVIA HAPPENED BECAUSE WE’D RATHER BUILD ELON MUSK’S STUPID “FUTURISTIC” CARS THAN SOME FUCKING BUSES & TRAINS!!!

BECAUSE CARS MAKE MORE MONEY AND ARE SOLD BY THE FUCKING P   R   I   V   A   T   E        S   E   C   T   O   R

GOD I HATE THE ROMANCE BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND IMPERIALISM SO FUCKING MUCH

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