lunariasilver

[lunariasilver]

Most-used word in each US state.

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Great Mouse Detective version of Dracula happening simultaneously as the events of Dracula, so there’s just five mice in Victorian clothes unnoticed by the human cast desperately trying to kill a bat.

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imagine simping for capitalism this badly

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“IT’S A SWORD, IT’S NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.” My favourite scene from The Hogfather. ___ See how this comic was made here.

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where the FUCK did all the froyo places go...

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My conduct this year landed me on Santa Claus's fabled and controversial "Kill-at-all-Costs" List. Turns out the reason the big man and his people don't exercise that option more often is that they really aren't good at following through on it. Well outside their core competency. He's delegated to the elves, and they've got this ingrained assembly-line mindset that doesn't translate at all to the adaptable and fluid mindset needed for siege breaking. They just haven't adjusted their playbook at all from when they're doing rote deliveries. Armed Elves have been rappelling down my chimney one at a time into the roaring fire I've kept going nonstop for the last week. They haven't even thought to try my front door yet. Whole house smells like peppermint, which it turns out is what burnt elf meat smells like. Thought I was being super clever putting cyanide-laced almond milk out with the cookies as a last line of defense, but none of them have made it even the scant few feet to the side table where that's sitting. At the rate things are going the real danger is that I'm gonna forget what I did with that and accidentally drink it myself while I'm watching the show

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youtube is pulling this bullshit again

praying for the firefox gods to save me once more...

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You come home and find your maid standing very still in the corner. She barely greets you.

You glance into your office and see sharpie scribbled all over the top third of your monitor, which seems to be displaying a web search.

When you scroll down a little you can see the search term entered.

"is it illegal to poison my lady's husband?"

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I'm trying to figure out a good way to say "you really should actually learn the basics of small talk" with sounding like I'm biased against autistic people.

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people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

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there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

Years ago now, I remember seeing the rape prevention advice so frequently given to young women - things like dressing sensibly, not going out late, never being alone, always watching your drink - reframed as meaning, essentially, "make sure he rapes the other girl." This struck a powerful chord with me, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter: that telling someone how to lower their own chances of victimhood doesn't stop perpetrators from existing. Instead, it treats the existence of perpetrators as a foregone conclusion, such that the only thing anyone can do is try, by their own actions, to be a less appealing or more difficult victim.

And the thing is, ever since the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I've kept on thinking about how, in this day and age, CEOs of big companies often have an equal or greater impact on the day to day lives of regular people than our elected officials, and yet we have almost no legal way to redress any grievances against them - even when their actions, as in the case of Thompson's stewardship of UHC, arguably see them perpetrating manslaughter at scale through tactics like claims denial. That this is a real, recurring thing that happens makes the American healthcare insurance industry a particularly pernicious example, but it's far from being the only one. Because the original premise of the free market - the idea that we effectively "vote" for or against businesses with our dollars, thereby causing them to sink or swim on their individual merits - is utterly broken, and has been for decades, assuming it was ever true at all. In this age of megacorporations and global supply chains, the vast majority of people are dependent on corporations for necessities such as gas, electricity, internet access, water, food, housing and medical care, which means the consumer base is, to all intents and purposes, a captive market. We might not have to buy a specific brand, but we have to buy a brand, and as businesses are constantly competing with one another to bring in profits, not just for the company and its workers, but for C-suites and shareholders - profits that increasingly come at the expense of workers and consumers alike - the greediest, most inhumane corporations set the financial yardstick against which all others are then, of necessity, measured. Which means that, while businesses are not obliged to be greedy and inhumane in order to exist, overwhelmingly, they become greedy and humane in order to compete, because capitalism encourages it, and because there are precious few legal restrictions to stop them from doing so. At the same time, a handful of megacorporations own so many market-dominating brands that, without both significant personal wealth and the time and resources to find viable alternatives, it's all but impossible to avoid them, while the ubiquity of the global supply chain means that, even if you can keep track of which company owns which brand, it's much, much harder to establish which suppliers provide the components that are used in the products bearing their labels. Consider, for instance, how many mainstream American brands are functionally run on sweatshop labour in other parts of the world: places where these big corporations have outsourced their workforce to skirt the already minimal labour and wage protections they'd be obliged to adhere to in the US, all to produce (say) electronics whose elevated sticker price passes a profit on to the company, but without resulting in higher wages for either the sweatshop workers overseas or the American employees selling the products in branded US stores.

When basically every major electronics corporation is engaged in similar business practices, there is no "vote" our money can bring that causes the industry itself to be better regulated - and as wealthy, powerful lobbyists from these industries continue to pay exorbitant sums of money to politicians to keep government regulation at a minimum, even our actual votes can do little to effect any sort of change. But even in those rare instances where new regulations are passed, for multinational corporations, laws passed in one country overwhelmingly don't prevent them from acting abusively overseas, exploiting more desperate populations and cash-poor governments to the same greedy, inhumane ends. And where the ultimate legal penalty for proven transgressions is, more often than not, a fine - which is to say, a fee; which is to say, an amount which, while astronomical by the standards of regular people, still frequently costs the company less than the profits earned through their unethical practices, and which is paid from corporate coffers rather than the bank accounts of the CEOs who made the decisions - big corporations are, in essence, free to act as badly as they can afford to; which is to say, very. Contrary to the promise of the free market, therefore, we as consumers cannot meaningfully "vote" with our dollars in a way that causes "good" businesses to rise to the top, because everything is too interconnected. Our choices under global capitalism are meaningless, because there is no other system we can financially support that stands in opposition to it, and while there are still small businesses and companies who try to operate ethically, both their comparative smallness and their interdependent reliance on the global supply chain means that, even if we feel better about our choices, we're not exerting any meaningful pressure on the system we're trying to change. Which means that, under the free market, trying to be an ethical consumer is functionally equivalent to a young woman dressing modestly, not going out alone and minding her drink at parties in order to avoid being raped. We're not preventing corporate predation or sending a message to corporate predators: we're just making sure they screw other worker, the other consumer, the other guy.

All of which is to say: while I'd prefer not to live in a world where shooting someone dead in the street is considered a valid means of redressing grievances, what the murder of Brian Thompson has shown is that, if you provide no meaningful recourse for justice against abusive, exploitative members of the 1%, then violence done to those people will have the feel of justice, because it fills the void left by the lack of consequences for their actions. It's the same reason why people had little sympathy for the jackass OceanGate CEO who killed himself in his imploding sub, or anyone whose yacht has been attacked by orcas - it's just intensified here, because where the OceanGate CEO was felled by hubris and the yachts were random casualties, whoever killed Thomspon did so deliberately, because of what he did. It was direct action against a man whose policies very arguably constituted manslaughter at scale; a crime which ought to be a crime, but which has, to date, been permitted under the law. And if the law wouldn't stop him, can anyone be surprised that someone might act outside the law in retaliation - or that regular people would cheer for them when they did?

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I’ve got my tumblr inbox turned off so I really have to commend the person who actually emailed me to let me know they don’t like the things I’ve posted about the UnitedHealth CEO being murdered on their commitment to their beliefs.

But seen as how you emailed me from a dud email that appears to be bouncing back replies and I really wanted to address something you said to me about violence begetting violence:

My migraine medication, the medication I was given for my debilitating neurological disease that has gotten so bad I spent most of this year actively suicidal, costs $1300 a month.

My insurance covered it. But only because my doctors office went to fucking war for me because I’m a high anaphylaxis risk for the drugs the insurance wanted me to try.

Because that’s the thing.

My doctors knew, based on my documented medical history, I likely wouldn’t be a good fit for the “first line” of preventative migraine drugs, but because of insurance, I had to be given drugs that were contradictory to my other life threatening conditions, because otherwise insurance wouldn’t cover anything else.

I failed them. Spectacularly and with an anaphylactic reaction to one of them. And I was still warned insurance would fight me because I hadn’t tried the remaining drug they wanted me to try.

A drug which I would have to take in an ER waiting room because my mast cell disease is unpredictable but insurance wouldn’t cover in-patient treatment to let me try it safely under medical supervision.

Is that not violence?

Were all the times I was denied coverage for vital and necessary procedures that could have prevented my disabilities from worsening not violence?

Maybe not in the sense you mean. But I assure you it felt very much like violence to me.

Do I condone murder? No, obviously. But I’m also sick and tired of people pretending that what is happening to the American people every day isn’t eugenics through class warfare.

Violence begets violence.

It sure fucking does.

Maybe these insurance companies should have thought of that first.

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You know I only like miscommunication when it's being used for comedic purposes like, for example 14 year old Billy Batson and 15 year old Danny Phantom accidentally get magically Married and both tell the other there identities because why not there stuck married till one of them stops exiting so they might as well make the best of it, and just don't tell anybody cause nobody asks ( nobody would know to ask anyway)

And it's been years since then that Captain Marvel (17 years old now) off hand says he has to go back for dinner with his husband (Danny, 18 years old, they're going on a date), and all of the Justice League league being surprised by this info, and of course they ask if they can meet his husband and Marvels like sure lemme ask him, and Danny agrees to go but only as Phantom (because secret identities) but also Phantom still looks like he's 14 back from when he died. So it's just weird to the Justice League and it's just so funny to me that they don't ask about the obvious age difference while also trying to subtly ask how they met! And then more confusion when Danny mentions stuff he did while he time traveled and then the justice league thinks he's thousands of years old but just looks like how he died (tho the person who asked that most definitely got the cold shoulder)(probably Batman)

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They say judas is in hell because he betrayed jesus but thats actualy a misconception, that was gods plan and so he didnt do anything wrong. Judas however IS in hell because god thinks he made his son gay

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July 25 2020 - A tear gas grenade tossed by a federal agent is caught in mid-air by a protester using a lacrosse stick and returned back over the fence, after which other protesters treat the feds to some fireworks. [video]