intherainyseason

[intherainyseason]

Issued by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), this poster shows a phrase that read "Unitary, Democratic, and Non-Sectarian Palestine" and a design by Ali Kazak that shows a combination of the symbols of the three Abrahamic religions (the menorah, cross, and crescent).

[intherainyseason]

Omar Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, who has been for a while saying "it could be genocide and there's genocidal intent" but has been holding off on outright calling it a genocide like raz segal has. seems to be changing his mind.

[intherainyseason]

Imagine being the person who changes is to was on the Wikipedia entry for the US

yeah yeah he died wealthy and old and at peace but he still died and we get to live the rest of our lives in a world without kissinger in it

[intherainyseason]

it is literally crazymaking that germany basically makes the argument that since it did the worlds most antisemitic act that it somehow has the authority to be the moral arbiter of antisemitism and genocide generally. like absolutely zero self awareness

[intherainyseason]

wonderful little website for getting around paywalls. I've tried it on FT and it works great

[intherainyseason]

Piracy is a “victimless crime”? Idk i was kinda hoping there would be a victim. I want the mouse dead

[intherainyseason]

“They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin (via nightkitchentarot)

[intherainyseason]

Yesterday, our mail-order space was destroyed in a catastrophic fire in downtown Olympia, Washington. Thousands of our books, posters, and stickers were entirely consumed along with computers and equipment.

Read our full announcement and how to help:

https://crimethinc.com/burnt

This represents a tremendous setback to us. To resume operations, we will need to replace the books, posters, stickers, computers, printers, packing materials, furniture, and many other things, and to secure a new space.

It's especially rough that this occurs when we are on the cusp of completing a Kickstarter campaign to reprint two of our books. Fortunately, those books are still in the printing queue at the factory, so they will go out as promised.

We are determined to get back on our feet, but we're going to need help. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped us make it this far. If we can get through this, we promise to keep doing this work for decades to come.

[intherainyseason]

genuinely friendly reminder to never EVER share someone’s location/information without their explicit permission. you do not know why that person is asking, what they plan to do with that information, or even if the asker has that person’s best interest in mind at all.

OP is also not exaggerating how common this is. my abusive parents successfully kidnapped me from work once because a coworker who didn’t know my situation told them when my next shift was. my parents didn’t even know where I lived at that point in time, which was very much on purpose. it took me days to get away again. ALWAYS tell the person that is being looked for that someone is looking. never share personal information or even how to get in contact them. you can take information in and pass it along, but you absolutely cannot give any out.

[intherainyseason]

we need to give this tweet more credit for im pretty sure coining "die mad about it"

[intherainyseason]

Kate Livingston: I am one of those people that grew up in the pro-life community and did a lot of pro-life activism. You would find me working for Ohio Right to Life as an elementary-school student, packing literature orders for the satellite chapters with really graphic photos in them. I knew how abortion was performed before I knew about sex. And I could tell you different types of abortions, the mechanics of that, when I was in elementary school and middle school. It wasn’t until I did an adoption at the age of 19 that I started rethinking some of those things.

Adoption was the only thing that I could consider because I had sinned by having sex outside of marriage as a teenager, and it was a redemptive practice. It was only after losing my child to adoption — and I used the word losing purposefully — that I started to think about how I was trapped in between these positive and negative messages: Wait a minute. You’ve been telling me that I am a hero and that I am a good person. So I don’t understand why I’m also someone that wouldn’t have been a good parent to my child. [...]

Barrett implies that with the termination of parental rights, that experience is over. But I know that the termination of parental rights in adoption is only the beginning of a very complicated and ongoing, changing, lifelong experience that impacts not only me — the decision maker — but my relatives, my family, not to mention my child who was placed for adoption, and so on. One pro-life communication strategy is to push the idea that abortion has long-term impacts. That abortion can produce grief and loss and regret, and it can have a health impact. But you don’t see that kind of language when they talk about adoption. [...]

I can’t tell you how many times that I was told I was a hero for considering adoption. That kind of language: hero, champion for life, loving, selfless. But at the same time, this narrative — the one promoted by Amy Coney Barrett — positions pregnant women and birth mothers as people who are inherently deficient. They’re people who are inevitably going to be bad parents. They’re people who are so either morally, intellectually, or financially flawed that they need somebody to set parameters for them in terms of law and policy to help guide their decision. [...]

Gretchen Sisson: [...] What we do see is that when you deny women access to abortion, most of them choose to parent. In research I did that drew on the Turnaway Study — 956 women seeking abortion, including 231 who were denied abortion because of gestational age — among women who were turned away from accessing abortions that they wanted, over 90 percent of them chose to parent. My colleagues see those numbers and say, “This is a minuscule number of people who are relinquishing for adoption. One hundred percent of these women wanted to have an abortion. Why are so many of them parenting?” From my perspective, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, 9 percent of them place for adoption compared to less than 1 percent of all women. This is a huge number.” So what we know is when you take away abortion, there will be more adoptions. But that’s a constrained choice, which is to say there’s no choice. When you take away an option, women do what they can with what’s left.

For most of those who continue their pregnancies and ultimately choose to relinquish parental rights, it is because they had intended to parent. They had been either planning on or hoping to have a certain amount of financial support, emotional support, partner support that either falls through or does not materialize by a certain point in their pregnancy. And then they turn to adoption when parenting does not seem tenable to them.

It is nine times out of ten a function of lack of financial resources that leads to the adoption. And for those people, when I ask how much money would you have needed to parent, if you intended to parent, it is usually a very small amount of money, under $5,000. And that is a reflection of our overall lack of social investment in families and parents. [...]

Kathryn Joyce: Back about 15 years ago, in response to the fact that not enough women, by their assessment, were relinquishing children for adoptions, a national adoption-lobbying organization got together with a Christian right anti-abortion group to put out a couple of pamphlets. The intention was helping train crisis-pregnancy centers talk more pregnant people into relinquishing children for adoption.

One of them had the title “Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption.” The way for you — person who is pregnant out of wedlock, person who we do not consider worthy of considering keeping her own child — to be a good mother is to become a birth mother, which means to relinquish your parental rights. And, as the subtitle underscores, that this is the way you can redeem yourself, that you have something to redeem yourself for, that you have sinned, whether or not they’re going to use that word. [...]

I remember when I was reporting my book, and I was reading a lot of adoption blogs, I would come across posts describing, “My orphan is out there. Someday there is going to be this mother and she’s going to die, or she’s going to otherwise not be able to keep her child. And this is the child that God is placing there for me.” It turned out they were not describing a child that has been born. They were describing a hypothetical child that God had placed in somebody else’s womb. This was meant to be, this was ordained. And when you have that sort of idea, you can’t really be thinking about the mother, or the parents as real people, with their own rights and agency.

[intherainyseason]

What a fucking tool.

Megadeth Launch Their Own Cryptocurrency, $MEGMA $MEGA

Megadeth Launch Their Own Cryptocurrency, $MEGMA $MEGA

Rattleheads shall forever remember 2021 as the year Dave Mustaine discovered the Internet. Having already achieved great success with NFTs and Cameo, Megadeth have now become the first metal band to launch their own cryptocurrency, $MEGMA $MEGA. Utilizing $MEGMA $MEGA will enable the band to make actual cold hard cash fans to “gain access to exclusives and premium benefits,” according to a…

[intherainyseason]

haven't posted much about police in portland, but it's because i'm too incensed to write about it, ever since city council voted unanimously to give back half the defunding from last year ($15m was cut from the ~$230m police budget in the form of empty positions last year, $7m was given back to the police budget this year)

now business owners are just resetting their alarms to ping a private investigator instead of 911. so, the police are cleaning up $230m of the civic budget... to do what, exactly? during the protests they were shipping literal tons of munitions by plane from idaho

[intherainyseason]

:(

wastelanders in the commonwealth

[intherainyseason]

The once and future mass-resignation and what it means for working people

Once upon a time, a terrible disease swept the lands, prompting a great wave of resignations as low-waged workers walked off the job, rejecting offers of pay raises that would have been unthinkably lavish just a few years earlier. Their bosses went nuts.

The former employers of these workers slammed them as lazy and greedy, and called upon their fellow bougies to take up “unskilled” labor and scab those proles back into the workplace. When that didn’t work, they passed laws that banned desperate bosses from bidding up wages. That didn’t work either, so new crimes were put on the books that made it easier to slam unemployed people in notoriously cruel prisons. That failed, too, prompting cuts to the already grossly inadequate welfare system, trying to starve workers back into their jobs.

That also failed. In the end, the situation led to a mass redistribution of wealth and a period of unheralded pluralism and opportunity for workers whose families had been stuck in low-waged, dead-end work for generations.

This isn’t a covid story. It’s the story of the post-Black Death labor markets in England, where desperate noblemen passed the country’s first labor law, the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers. Chroniclers of the day urged “knights and churchmen” to get into the fields and shame their social inferiors back into harness.

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/seth/ordinance-labourers.asp

This threat didn’t get the peasants back into the fields, so the law threatened out-of-work people with prison, capped wages at pre-Black Death levels, and banned begging at funerals (“practically the only form of social welfare available”).

The failure to force workers back into the fields left landholders unable to profit from their lands, prompting sell-offs that created the middle class. Real incomes doubled. This is a pattern that follows every pandemic, according to an NBER paper that found that after every pandemic, wages shoot up and the return on capital tanks:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26934/w26934.pdf

I learned about all this from David Dayen’s brilliant longread for The American Prospect, “The Great Escape,” featuring the voices of workers who have — or are thinking of — walking off the job.

https://prospect.org/labor/great-escape-why-workers-quitting-pandemic-trauma/

As Dayen points out, the great resignation includes workers in all kinds of jobs, not just low-waged ones, but resignations are concentrated at the bottom of the wage-scale. It’s not hard to see why: Dayen recounts the stories of workers in national chains that were bought out by private equity looters whose much-vaunted “efficiencies” boil down to slashing wages and imposing cruel and dangerous conditions on workers.

There’s Caroline Potts of Murfreesboro, TN, who loves dogs and was excited to get at job as a groomer at Petsmart. It seemed like a dream-job, but Potts learned she was expected to meet impossible quotas, working at a rate made the experience traumatic for dogs. She also learned that Petsmart management was only paying lip-service to its policy of excluding dogs with seizure disorders or problems with stressful environments. She worried that she was going to preside over the death of one of these dogs. To make things worse, her customers were routinely abusive to her and her employer did nothing to shield her from their bad conduct.

Potts was locked into a two-year noncompete contract and was only able to quit for a rival company by begging her manager to release her from it. Needless to say, many workers in noncompetes won’t be so lucky — and fast-food restaurants lead the nation in the use of noncompete agreements.

Zella Roberts worked in fast food — she was a Sonic carhop in Asheville, NC. When Sonic got scooped up by Roark Capital, the new owners switched to exclusive app- and credit-card-based ordering, with no facility to tip employees. But Roberts was being paid $5/hr, a “tipped minimum wage” premised on the worker being able to make up the difference from tips. It’s illegal to pay tipped minimum wage to workers who can’t collect tips, but that didn’t stop Sonic.

It’s not just fast-food and pets. Ed Gadomski was a 32-year veteran of the IT department in CT’s Waterbury Hospital. When Leonard Green & Partners bought the hospital, they laid him off and then offered him his old job at $13.46/h, a third of his former wage, with no pension or health-care (at a hospital!).

Predictably, regular large-business abuses are sinking to the level of private equity. Reina Abrahamson of Salem, OR was a Wells Fargo customer rep working from home. She was put on minimum salary for six months while Wells processed a request to supply her with a 100 foot Ethernet cable that would reach from her home router to her computer (she supplemented her wages driving for Doordash).

Amazon is a leader in labor abuses. At Stephanie Haynes’s job at an Amazon warehouse in Joliet, IL, she was given tasks that were literally impossible to perform while maintaining six feet of social distance — like lifting a pallet with a co-worker. Haynes lost her fiance to covid and decided it wasn’t worth risking her own life to help Jeff Bezos grow his fortune, so she walked off the job from March to July 2020.

We know only a fraction of what goes on at Amazon warehouses, and that’s by design. Monica Moody was fired from her Amazon warehouse in Charlotte, NC for talking to the press about her labor conditions.

The “essential workers” of the pandemic died in droves — a study found that the highest covid mortality among working-aged people was among cooks, warehouse workers, construction workers, bakers, etc:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.21.21250266v1.full.pdf

Dayen writes that as intolerable and dangerous as these workers’ jobs were during lockdown, they got worse afterward, when stir-crazy, traumatized, short-tempered customers showed up to scream at them and even assault them as they tried to enforce masking rules and vaccine requirements for entry.

No wonder workers are quitting. But they’re not just quitting — they’re also striking, with or without a union. America has experienced a vast, wildly under-reported wave of wildcat strikes. Take the Jack in the Box franchise in Sacramento where un-unionized workers struck twice. As Leticia Reyes — a worker who took part in both strikes — tells it, the first strike was prompted by management’s refusal to fix the AC during a 109’ heat wave. “The first time, she wouldn’t listen to us, she ignored us. The second time, she told us it wasn’t high temperatures, it was us workers going through menopause.”

The workers got the AC fixed…and their manager got fired. And then the workers struck again, in protest of wage theft (they weren’t getting their mandatory paid breaks and overtime). The owner and his cronies crossed the picket line and tried to do the workers’ jobs…and couldn’t. After three days, management caved.

Says Reyes: “I am no longer scared to speak up. Big companies need us as workers and we should not be afraid to speak up.”

Practically the only place you’ll learn about stories like this one is in Payday Report (“Covering Labor in News Deserts”), a crowdfunded site that has chronicled 1,600 walkouts throughout the pandemic:

https://paydayreport.com/

Viral phenomena like #QuitMyJob and photos of handwritten “We all quit” signs hint at the true scale of the great resignation, and they inspire others to do the same. There’s good indications that employers are finally responding with better pay, benefits and conditions, but there’s no reason to think they’ve had a true change of heart. If the labor market changes, they’ll claw back those gains in a heartbeat.

But as with the 14th century post-plague labor markets, our workforce’s unwillingness to go back has proved remarkably sturdy. For example, red states that canceled covid relief early in a bid to starve workers back into dangerous, degrading, underpaid jobs are experiencing the same shortages of low-waged workers as blue states where benefits continued without interruption. Part of that might be due to a genuine worker shortage — 2m workers took early retirement during the pandemic, and a legacy of Trump’s ethnic cleansing policy has starved many sectors of precarious and desperate workers.

Cementing these gains over the long term will require institutional shifts: the threshold for a wildcat strike is very high, but labor action gets easier as labor gets organized. New unions are popping up across the country, and existing unions are finding unsuspected reserves of militancy. 1.3m Teamsters have new leaders who are committed to organizing grocery stores and Amazon warehouses:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hoffa-jr-defeated/#teamsters-for-a-democratic-union

And striking nurses and Teamsters, and workers at factories from Kellogg’s to John Deere, are pushing to eliminate the disastrous “two-tier” contracts that destroy union solidarity, rendering unions toothless:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

Companies that seemed immune to unionization, from Amazon to Dollar General to Starbucks, are now fighting pitched battles against their workers using tactics that grow thinner and less credible by the day, as John Oliver documents with characteristic scathing hilarity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8

Provisions in the Build Back Better bill don’t go as far as the PRO Act, but they will still add to the union movement’s tailwind.

But it’s workers, not law, who ultimately control the outcome. I’ll give the last word to Christine Johnson, a historian at Washington U in St Louis, whose work on the Ordinance of Labourers is cited by Dayen:

“If you don’t actually change the structures of power, and you don’t actually enact some changes in the labor and social hierarchies, it’s not going to produce lasting improvement in conditions of labor.”

[intherainyseason]

When capitalism divides the modern world into the masculine public sphere of work and politics and the feminine private sphere of home, family and religion, white women are offered the promise of power and significance if they take on the role of social reproduction, passing on norms of right behaviour and morality. When middle class white feminists enter the public sphere they do so by promising to carry their role of moral enforcers from the domestic to the public sphere, promising (like Wollstonecraft) to ensure that children are educated into their proper roles as citizens or (like Josephine Butler) to hold the British Empire to the moral standards it professes. A world built on property is a world built on propriety and the capitalist work ethic, a world built on self-denial and self-discipline. The ethics of propriety are the ethics of ressentiment – I am not allowed to do the things I want to do, and nor should you be. I work hard at my awful job so why should you get to swan around on unemployment benefits. I put up with my awful husband so why should you get to enjoy the freedom of single motherhood. I was shamed for being gay so why should you be able to dye your hair blue and play around with the signifiers of queerness.

If there’s one thing that Britain does better than America, it’s the politics of joylessness and resentment. For years I’ve been telling people that the best account of why Brexit happened is the story that Žižek likes to tell about a Slovenian peasant who, encountering a witch, is offered a choice, ‘I will give you whatever you want, but whatever you ask for I will give twice as much to your neighbour.’ After thinking for a moment, the peasant says, ‘Take one of my eyes!’ When ‘gender critical’ feminists persist in stoking the fires of a right wing moral panic around trans people despite being warned that feeding fears of bathroom invasion and too-easy access to hormones will harm cis women too, this same logic is at work. I have suffered because of my gender and sexuality, and so should you. Take one of my eyes!

Marika Rose, “What does a ‘gender critical’ feminist want?,” An und für sich (x)

[intherainyseason]

queer community gets easier once you accept that society at large is simply not trying to turn us from one kind of queer into another. it will only accept us not being queer at all.

society does not want you to be ace instead of gay or gay instead of bi or nonbinary instead of a trans guy or a trans guy instead of nonbinary. society does not want trans people to medically transition but it also doesn’t want us to be trans without medically transitioning. society does not want nb people to be nb and masc or nb and fem but that does not mean it wants them to be androgynous. society does not want queer people to have kids but it also does not want queer ppl to be happily childless. society does not want marriage (ie monogamy) available to queer people but that does not mean it want us to be polyamorous or non-partnering.

they’re trying to force full conformity. not partial. a gay trans person is not more or less acceptable than a straight trans person. we can shout at each other about “blending in with cishets” or “still having relationships with the ~opposite sex~” as much as we want, but transphobes still hate us both. they do not want either of us to be the other. they only want us to be cishet.