#Locally

[maddaddamwasright]

The post is a great joke, but less jokey: another problem of Internet discourse is how separated it is from the actual (material) realities of people's lives. My neighbors and I share the same landlord, we are working under a single legal framework when it comes to employment, our neighborhood is shaped by the same companies. My (queer) partners and I live in the same city and face the same homophobes, and live in a culture where we experience the same gay bashers.

My online experience provides other things, but a huge proportion of online discourse is shaped by US-american discourse - I live on a different continent, but every day I interact with online discourse I am faced with knowing yet another yankee politician/law/absurd state repression/what-have-you. Largely these things are entirely disconnected from the reality outside of my computer, and largely I am entirely powerless to affect these horrors, but I am still faced with knowing them daily.

A pet peeve of mine is then how this yankee discourse gets adapted into settings where the conditions look entirely different: a generation of Swedish online activists were raised on a discourse regarding whiteness that was largely based on US-american conditions. Racism is alive and well in Sweden: we have oppressed Sámi and Roma people for hundreds of years, we had one of the earliest biological race "science" institutes globally, and there has been a ton of racism directed at most immigrant communities, be they Finns, Poles, Chileans, Greeks, Iraqi, Thai or Somali. The Swedish conception of race is very different to a US-american conception of race, and using Whiteness as a concept when discussing the e.g. the oppression of Sámi people has led to confusion and frustration.

Anyway, this is getting long, but what I'm trying to say is:

Please get organized locally - understand the conditions in which you live. Your neighbors/colleagues/local queers/anarchists are going to have a ton of things in common with you that you won't share with people that live on another continent.

More people should abandon Internet discourse and get into observing/engaging with local politics. I say this not because local politics often offers more meaningful opportunities for effective praxis (although it does), but because local politics often offers just as much highly toxic and entertaining petty drama.

I highly recommend city council meetings. You might make yourself an informed voter and active community member or something. You also might get to watch an ongoing soap opera of old men ready to murder one another over trash collection ordinances, and unlike the Internet, none of them can effectually tell one another to kill themselves no matter how hard and how clearly they are thinking it.

[3liza]

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/theyre-not-human-how-19th-century-inuit-coped-with-a-real-life-invasion-of-the-walking-dead

Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.

“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.

And it���s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.

Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.

“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.

Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.

“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”

Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.

By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.

“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.

The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.

The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.

But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.

The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.

When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.

Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.

Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.

“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.

But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.

The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.

The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

[icedhotcocoa]

okay guys but in all seriousness the trump attempted assassination is going to rally the right like crazy. voter turnout will be going up. it is more crucial than ever that you SHOW UP AND VOTE IN THIS YEARS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

[theblob1958]

people are saying do it scared, but you also gotta do it alone. you'll miss out on so much you want to do if you wait til someone will do it with you. do it scared and do it alone.

[thoughtportal]

the things that are reported matters. the language used matters. what is left out of the story matters.

[laughroditee]

"She's so beautiful! I bet she goes to the library."

- my 7 year old daughter

[fleuvien]

[coffinwoodx]

ok so for those of you who don’t know, there’s this twitter account of a japanese local hero mascot named dentman who went viral recently due to this tweet

but yeah he saw the tweet. and his response went viral as well (which is how i found his account)

and he just has like. hourly posts reminding you to brush your teeth

oh and his rival? his name is mr. mutans. whenever dentman posts he makes a post of his own, ofc

but THAT’S NOT ALL. literally while making this post i found a THIRD ACCOUNT that’s all about taking your meds

safe to say i’m losing my mind

anyway the point of all this was that people are ALREADY beginning to draw them ship art 😭

and the reactions are everything

I CANT ADD ANY MORE IMAGES BUT TRUST ME THIS IS SO FUNNY

toxic one-sided dentman yaoi wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card but it DEFINITELY IS NOW!

[saulwexler]

how to explain to non-americans that the better call saul ads aren’t exaggerated for comedic effect they are super normie

[ameliakeli]

Why Do Enterprises Migrate From Box to Google Drive Locally?

[pinklavenderdoll]

[hobgobknowsbest]

[livelylambs]

he’s soooooo close

[a2zsportsnews]

Locally Sourced Arizona Fall League Notes: Tre’ Morgan’s Skills, Caleb Durbin Branches Out

Gary Cosby Jr.-Tuscaloosa News-USA TODAY NETWORK Travis Ice and I have begun early work on the Los Angeles Angels and Sacramento Athletics prospect lists, and because both franchises’ prospects are on the Mesa Solar Sox roster, I spent most of last week seeing whatever game they were playing. At this point in the Fall League, the leaders in games played have laced up their spikes only eight or…

[shitbl0gger]