#Migrants workers die

[cruelsister-moved2]

i just honestly just hope those people on the submarine were dead all along like the handwringing is tedious & that amount of money and resources should never have been devoted to going down there & shouldn’t be devoted to saving them either but i just cant think of anything worse than being trapped in there for days & days waiting to die literally horrifying and unthinkable i hope they died instantly

[chaosduckytoast12]

Band is Dark Blue, Art is Light Blue or Light purple, Maths is Green, History is either Brown or Orange, English is very clearly Yellow, PE is orange 100%, Science is Neon Green, Social Studies is that one cat or dog wearing clothes folder you convinced your parents to buy one of at the Staples for your favorite subject, Algebra is Red, and "World Water Studies" is clearly normal blue or whatever folder you had left because it suuuuucked

tag your incorrect answers if you wanna get flamed

[sayruq]

3 thoughts on this:

Economy - Israel's economy took a hit in October that was comparable to the economic tremors caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. It is effectively in a major recession today. The longer they drag out this war, the worse their economic condition will be. Foreign capital will continue leaving the country as it seems incapable of stabilising. While the continued use of reserves means 300,000 Israelis will be unable to work, not to mention the millions of dollars Israel has to spend to mobilise its reserve every day. The longer the war goes on, the more people will end up leaving the country. 470,000 have left in October and November with no intention of returning while over 300,000 settlers are internally displaced. Both of those numbers are bound to go up as the war continues. This means that Israel is missing hundreds of thousands of Israeli workers. A few weeks ago, Israel struck a deal with the Indian government to get 100,000 workers after tens of thousands of worker migrants fled the country. That plan fell through thanks to Indian trade unions. Now Israel is turning to African States in a desperate attempt to replace the Gazan workers it's currently genociding. We will see if that plan works as Africans are by and large pro Palestine. Plus the Yemeni naval blockade is growing more and more intense every week as a direct response to the genocide in Gaza. In short, Israel's economy can't withstand a long war. America cannot help prop up the economy as it will soon be facing its major economy issues in the coming years including a housing crisis and likely a recession.

Military defeats - Israel cannot defeat Hamas. It cannot win a war inside Gaza. It failed to do so in 2014, it's failing right now. It has lost hundreds of military vehicles including the (formerly) vaunted Merkava-4. The estimated number of injured soldiers stands at 10,000+ while the Resistance is still intact and capable of carrying out dozens of military operations against IDF and the surrounding cities and settlements every day. The IDF has never looked more weak than it is right now. Hezbollah has been employing a military strategy dubbed the escalation ladder, in which one end of the ladder is no war and the other end is total war. It has continuously escalated against Israel, attacking deeper and deeper into its territory, and it will continue until there's open war between Israel and Lebanon. The point of the escalation is to give Israel time to leave Gaza but as that's not something the Israeli government is planning on doing, we're looking at a region war in 2024 (so far we have a regional conflict and whilebits serious, it's not yet war). Just like it can't win in Gaza, Israel can't defeat Hezbollah and occupy Southern Lebanon like its leaders have been threatening to. It certainly can't take on the Ansar Allah group in Yemen.

West Bank - every week, there are clashes between Israeli forces and the Resistance in the West Bank and it's growing more and more intense. The best way to describe the region is 'powder keg.' Israel has responded to Oct 7th by detaining thousands of Palestinians and killing hundreds. There's a growing popularity of Al Qassam Brigades and other militant groups in Gaza. There also seems to be coordination between the Gazan and West Bank resistance groups, as in they would carry out operations at the same time. The longer the war on Gaza goes on, the more likely that war will also break out in the West Bank.

Many, many more Palestinians will die. This plan, more than anything, is a call for the continued slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

But the longer this goes on, the closer Israel gets to collapsing.

[the-greatest-fool]

I basically only post and read posts in my bubble aside from occasionally scrolling through Real Tumblr, but people’s takes about US politics on this website are fucking unbelievable. They talk about our government as if it didn’t save us from a pandemic-induced financial collapse, pump trillions of dollars into public works, not to mention substantially invest and rein in pharmaceuticals, and is instead some sort of ultra-neoliberal-corporate kitty shooting machine.

Like let’s be for real. Do they…know what the government does? How it works? Do you know what a conservative is? Do you know what an authoritarian is?

Because a system of government whose citizens are all lucky it has had continuous peaceful transfer of power for centuries could very well have its greatest norm violated—that those who reject its legitimacy must be rejected—and we don’t blink an eye.

Because the first major investment against climate change, coupled with life saving investments into healthcare, cancer research, and drug costs could be shredded by indiscriminate fiscal conservatives who don’t care if we die in forest fires, cancer from pollution, lose insurance because we’re jobless, or, apparently, all die in a fricking plague.

Because a foreign policy establishment that had finally reversed two decades of foreign intervention in favor of a normalization strategy aimed at reducing American foot presence, drone strikes, and indiscriminate killings is about to be replaced by the whims of a man who dropped the “mother of all bombs” on the Middle East, gave American soldiers up to Russian bounty hunters, extorted a foreign leader for political favors and arguably indirectedly resulted in that country being BRUTALLY INVADED BY AN IMPERIAL NEIGHBOR, is in the pockets of CCP-funded billionaires, and WANTS TO “FINISH THE JOB” IN GAZA.

Because a President who is against family separations and promotes a path for DREAMERs and more legal immigration and rights for unodcumented people could be replaced by a man who wants to separate families, PUT UNDOCUMENTED PEOPLE IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS, RESTRICT EVEN LEGAL IMMIGRATION, ESPECIALLY THAT OF MUSLIMS, AND SHOOT MIGRANTS.

Because a President who stopped a repeat of the Great Recession and the painful decade that followed it with strong fiscal stimulus which CUT CHILD POVERTY IN HALF BEFORE CONSERVATIVES MADE IT EXPIRE, then managed to cut deficits and presided over a decline in inflation, resulting in record high real wages (aka taking into account inflation) for workers is going to be replaced by a President who wants to TARIFF ALL FOREIGN GOODS by 15%, CUT TAXES FOR THE FILTHY RICH AND THE TAX ENFORCEMENT TO STOP THEM, INCREASE CHILD POVERTY AND UNINSUREDNESS by cutting gov’t programs, and HURT UNIONS which by every measure will lead to lower wages, higher prices, and more poverty and starvation.

Because a President who has pledged to sign a bill codifying Roe v. Wade (which has yet to be possible in recent memory, whatever these kids say), who enshrined the right to marry someone of the same sex or different race, who supports the Equality Act which would enshrine LGBTQ protections into the law, could be replaced by THE MAN WHO REMOVED AMERICA’S RIGHT TO ABORTION, whose Christian nationalist supporters want to END SEXUAL FREEDOM as we know it including TARGETING IVF AND BIRTH CONTROL, who wants to reverse LGBTQ discrimination law in favor of Christian bigots who hate queer and trans people, and who demonizes that community to win political support.

Ask yourself if you really think there’s no difference between the two. Ask yourself if a reasonable person given these facts would choose the latter. Ask yourself why you see so much propagandizing against the reasonable choice. Ask yourself why so many people seem to have opinions on this when they “don’t even go here”.

Maybe I’m just preaching to the choir here. Maybe people who say this inane stuff wouldn’t vote anyways. Maybe somehow we’re screwed anyways. Maybe people will stupidly vote third party and we’re fucked. Maybe this will get me attacked.

I don’t care anymore. If I have to see one more fucking post acting like we live under the fucking Evil Empire while a SELF PROCLAIMED DICTATOR is about to end the best streak of decent governance I’ve ever seen in a while, I just can’t anymore.

[gatheringbones]

[“Feminism that welcomes police power is called carceral feminism. The sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, one of the first to use this phrase, uses it to describe a feminist approach that prioritises a ‘law-and-order agenda’; a shift ‘from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals’.

Carceral feminism focuses on policing and criminalisation as the key ways to deliver justice to women. Carceral feminism has gained popularity even though the police – and the wider criminal justice system – are key perpetrators of violence against women. In the United States, police officers are disproportionately likely to be violent or abusive to their partners or children. At work, they commit vast numbers of assaults, rapes, or harassment. Sexual assault is the second-most commonly reported form of police violence in the United States (after excessive use of force), and on-duty police commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general US population. Those are just the assaults that make it into the statistics: many will never dare to make a report to an abuser’s colleague.

Meanwhile, the very nature of police work involves perpetrating violence: in arrests or when they collaborate in incarceration, surveillance, or deportation. In 2017, there was outrage in the United Kingdom when it emerged that the Metropolitan Police had arrested a woman on immigration charges after she came to them as a victim of rape. However, it is routine for police to threaten to arrest or deport migrant sex workers, even when the worker in question has come to them as a victim of violence.

Carceral feminism looms large in sex-trade debates. Feminist commentators pronounce that ‘we must strengthen police apparatus’;that criminalisation is ‘the only way’ to end the sex trade; and that some criminalisation can be relatively ‘benign’. Anti-prostitution feminist Catherine MacKinnon even writes with ambivalent approval of ‘brief jail time’ for prostitutes on the basis that jail can be ‘a respite from the pimps and the street’. She quotes like-minded feminists who argue that ‘jail is the closest thing many women in prostitution have to a battered women’s shelter’ and that, ‘considering the absence of any other refuge or shelter, jail provides a temporary safe haven’.

Sex workers do not share this rosy view of arrest and incarceration. One sex worker in Norway told researchers, ‘You only call the police if you think you’re going to die … If you call the police, you risk losing everything’”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[dailyanarchistposts]

Author: Anarchist Communist Group Topics: health care, NHS, United Kingdom

Save our NHS?

Healthcare in the UK is by no means “socialised”, as critics in the US claim. Though healthcare in the UK is undoubtedly better than healthcare in the US – just as other countries have better healthcare than the UK – it is still subject to the pressures and dynamics of capitalism, existing as it does in a capitalist society. It has also been increasingly marketised over recent decades, with attacks on both social provision and NHS workers coming under the cover of “privatisation” – the introduction of payment by results has introduced a market in health services, many non-frontline services have been privatised or contracted to companies like DHL, the introduction of wholly privately owned and operated “NHS treatment centres”, the rollout of Private Finance Initiatives etc all represent part of the same project of “rationalising” social provisions to the benefit of the overall capitalist system. Even the NHS in its classic form, as the centrepiece of the post-war welfare state, came as part of the attempt to stave off prewar-style class conflict and integrate the working class more closely into the state following the end of the war, and to provide a healthy working class that could fight and die for the bosses in their wars (our masters struggled to find enough fit cannon fodder for their First World War) and healthy enough to slave for their profits in paid jobs, and in unpaid childcare and housework, as well as from the needs for capitalism to stabilise itself after the turbulence of the 1920s, in a change of tactic well-known as the post-war settlement.

We need to defend health services, but critically. The NHS was never ‘ours’ and it is far from perfect.

Since the inception of the NHS, consultants were allowed to use NHS time and resources for their private gain, freeloading that the Daily Mail and their mates are happy to ignore. The Health Service treats our illnesses as individual cases, but most of our illness is due to economic and social conditions that we face collectively: unhealthy and dangerous workplaces, overlong hours and night time working, pollution from factories and cars, poor food, unhealthy housing, lack of trees and greenspaces, all exacerbated by racism and sexism for large sectors of the population. In the 1960s and 1970s women highlighted how unequally they were treated, particularly around childbirth. They won some improvements through struggle, but we are still miles from a genuine community health service.

We know that the current Tory government is making massive cuts to health services with closures of hospitals, casualty departments, rationing of services by age, cuts to services for the elderly and people with disabilities, near frozen wages of overworked staff etc. The whole idea of running healthcare as a business is contradictory (treatment based on ability to pay rather than need), and only benefits the well-off who can always pay for treatment, and the drug companies and other corporate vultures who are taking over more and more of the health service. The whole idea of ‘choice’ in this context is similarly a nonsense. We don’t want to choose which doctors or hospital service to use (the one round the corner / or the one 20 miles away?), we need local services, all of which are accessible and good.

Who Is To Blame?

What is causing the ongoing and deepening crisis in the NHS (and) the ‘lack of money’? Is it –

All those old people selfishly ‘bed blocking’ hospital beds rather than going home unwell and dying quickly so that they are no longer ‘a burden’.

The obese smokers and drinkers: no not the rich ones, and as always, blame the consumer, not the producer (the alcohol and tobacco industries have no responsibilities).

Migrant workers and ‘health tourists’ (the first pay taxes too, and the second cost less than the NHS pencil budget, and no, ignore the rich ones)

The rising cost of the NHS – due to an ageing population (as above), all those poor people who are overweight and smoke and drink too much etc.

NONE OF THE ABOVE!

Back in 2005 the now Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, co-wrote a pamphlet calling for the replacement of the NHS with a market insurance system, with the heavy involvement of private enterprise. A fox in charge of the hen coop! The policies pursued are obviously part of a death by a thousand cuts /privatisation by stealth strategy. The idea that the slow death of the NHS is just down to the Tories is delusional however. The PFI (Private Finance Initiative) was a Conservative idea they left on the shelf, with little of it being implemented. It was Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who activated it when in government: schools and hospitals were built with finance from the private sector (banks etc) who then leased them to back to the government, who paid for them over the long term on a mortgage basis at a much higher cost (40% more). Old hospitals were closed, so overall there were fewer beds. Labour also introduced ‘the market’ into the health service, the equivalent of putting leeches into a blood bank, and introduced Foundation Trusts. These Labour policies left the NHS with debts of £81.6 billion, and they together with massive ongoing cuts are the cause of the crisis.

What Do We Want, And How Do We Get There?

We need to stop hospitals, casualty departments etc being closed, attacks on GPs, staff cuts, freezing of the wages of health service staff (which are cuts as rents, food etc go up). We need to stop the increasing marketisation of the NHS. We need to stop the NHS being run as a business concern, with vastly overpaid administrators at the top, with at least 800 of these on six figure salaries. We need to end the rigid hierarchies in hospitals, where decisions cannot be questioned, as witness the recent revelations about Gosport War Memorial Hospital where over 450 patients died after being prescribed dangerous painkillers and with according to a recent report “patients and relatives powerless in their relationship with professional staff”. We need to end the grip of drug companies on the NHS. In 2016 alone, the NHS payed these companies £1 billion for drugs for arthritis, cancer, MS, etc. The research for these drugs was funded by public money. “Big pharmaceutical companies are ripping us off by taking over drugs developed primarily with public money and selling the drugs back to the NHS at extortionate prices”. Heidi Chow, Global Justice Now.

How we do this is crucial however. If we use the same old tired methods of petitions, relying on union bureaucrats, trusting in political parties (whoever they are) not only will we probably lose, but we will remain powerless, divided, and with an illness service that doesn’t meet our needs or tackle the causes of our ill health. We need methods and organisation that empower us: to organise ourselves, control our own struggles, without leaders, and to use direct action methods: occupations, work-ins, strikes, work to rule etc. We need to break down the barriers between staff and patients, carers and service-users, workers and unemployed to link our struggles.

What do we want? – A free health service controlled and run by the staff and users. An emphasis on empowering people through helping them to educating themselves in groups about their bodies and health (e.g. books and pamphlets such as ‘Our Bodies Ourselves’ and the collective work in the last wave of feminism). Communities working together to tackle the causes of ill health: dangerous and unhealthy workplaces, an unhealthy, car-based transport system, poor food, widespread pollution, lack of green spaces for relaxation, and exercise etc. Move away from processed and unhealthy food, and from the current over-reliance on drugs. Again, self-organisation and direct action are key. But surely this is pie-in-the-sky? No, we are drawing on what people have done, and are doing, both here and abroad. In Greece, massive health cuts have resulted in health workers running hospitals and clinics etc for free, with the support of their local communities.

London Anarchist Communist Group londonacg@gmail.com

[taxxpayermoney]

《惊闻90后青工诗人许立志坠楼有感》 "Upon Hearing the News of Xu Lizhi's Suicide" by Zhou Qizao (周启早), a fellow worker at Foxconn

每一个生命的消失 The loss of every life

都是另一个我的离去 Is the passing of another me

又一枚螺丝松动 Another screw comes loose

又一位打工兄弟坠楼 Another migrant worker brother jumps

你替我死去 You die in place of me

我替你继续写诗 And I keep writing in place of you

顺便拧紧螺丝 While I do so, screwing the screws tighter

今天是祖国六十五岁的生日 Today is our nation's sixty-fifth birthday

举国欢庆 We wish the country joyous celebrations

二十四岁的你立在灰色的镜框里微微含笑 A twenty-four-year-old you stands in the grey picture frame, smiling ever so slightly

秋风秋雨 Autumn winds and autumn rain

白发苍苍的父亲捧着你黑色的骨灰盒趔趄还乡 A white-haired father, holding the black urn with your ashes, stumbles home.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Angry White Men:

White nationalist broadcaster Stew Peters has a history of bigoted and violent rhetoric. Among other things, Peters has called for the executions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Hunter Biden, and Justin Trudeau, the violent overthrow of the government, and for shooting migrants and Catholic Charities workers. And on Friday, Peters made his first appearance on Rumble’s Fresh & Fit Podcast — a show hosted by antisemitic manosphere influencers Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes — where he claimed he would rather die in a violent shootout with federal agents than surrender his firearms. Peters told Gaines and Weekes that the U.S. “hasn’t seen a violent insurrection yet,” and told them that “if everybody that was in Washington on January 6 brought guns and really wanted to overthrow the government” they would have succeeded. Peters falsely claimed that the violent, armed mob that stormed the Capitol was “peaceful” until they were “provoked by agent provocateurs.” In response, co-host Walter Weekes said that if the crowd was armed with guns it would have been used as an excuse to confiscate Americans’ firearms.

Violent far-right extremist Stew Peters went on the misogynistic Fresh and Fit podcast, and during his appearance there, Peters suggested that the feds be shot if they come for his guns.

[random-thought-depository]

Idea I got tangential to a discussion on a socialist humanity Mass Effect AU premise on SV, copying and pasting from my relevant posts there:

Point: if you get rid of aging and most disease, the main thing that kills people will be accidents, suicides, and murders, and there's probably a lot that can be done to make accidental death less likely that we don't bother with because old age usually kills us long before an accident can.

One of I'm sure many examples: we have subway stations with rails in open roughly person-height depressions that people can just fall into, our society considers this risk acceptable, but I expect in a society of unaging people there'd be some kind of partition with doors separating the passenger platform and the track (much like our elevators usually have a door on the elevator compartment itself and doors on the access points of the elevator shaft).

Similarly, I expect a society of unaging people would become much more scrupulous than us about removing trip hazards, making vehicles as safe as possible, etc.. I expect they'd also automate dangerous jobs like construction pretty much as much as possible, much more than we do.

Really, if you're going to go with a dystopian angle for the Asari, I think the one I'd go with is having them rely heavily on aliens for dangerous jobs, on the logic that if an Asari construction worker falls off a scaffold and splats like a bug on a windshield on the ground 500 meters below, they've lost centuries or millennia of life and a shot at living to see the stars burn out, but if it happens to a human, oh well, the congenital terminal degenerative disease they were born with (aging/senescence) will probably kill them within 50 years anyway, so they lose much less. A wealthy society with an unaging citizen class surrounded by societies of people who age might look a bit like those Gulf petro-states where much of the actual work-force is a subaltern class of foreign migrant laborers.

----------

Aside following a tangent from the last paragraph of my previous post: "they're unaging and see their own lives as much more valuable than the lives of aliens with limited lifespans because they lose so much more if they die" would make a much more interesting rationale for Batarians being chauvinistic slavers than "they're just kind of generic evil nationalists."

---------

Edit: I think a species like that would probably have a vibe less like canon Batarians and more like stereotypical fantasy Elves at their worst or Skeksis. E.g. they'd be reclusive and hikikomori-ish cause their whole lives are structured around reducing risk to themselves, meeting one face to face would be a special event because they rely heavily on mercenaries and janissaries and robots to do their fighting for them and on Mouth of Sauron type minions and remote communication for diplomacy. And they might contemptuously refer to shorter-lived races as "mortals" like Dracula or some asshole fantasy Elf would.

I really like this as an idea for an "evil empire" faction in a space opera setting! Much more original villain motivation than the millionth variation on generic tyranny or religion of evil or whatever! And it's a rationale for slavery and imperialism that stands up at least a bit better to the "raw materials would probably be super-abundant for a society with interstellar travel" and "a society with interstellar travel would probably have pretty good automation" objections.

More ideas for a faction like this:

So, I'm thinking give them something a little like the canon Batarian kind of pathetic Space North Korea vibe, but different, and also adjust it for a setting that's less heavy on the human-wank, so make them a faction that could credibly get trashed in a conflict that's more like the setting's equivalent of the 1895-96 Italian-Ethiopian War.

So I'm thinking lean heavily on the Skeksis parallel here. As part of that, give them a vibe a little like "what if Panem from The Hunger Games invented warp drive and met advanced aliens?"

These aliens are naturally long-lived and slow-breeding, and their risk-aversion compounds this (reproduction may be risky to them like it is to female humans, and even if it isn't reproduction is risky in that it introduces a new and potentially unpredictable player to the social landscape), so their population is very small. Their territory basically consists of their homeworld plus maybe some asteroid mines and other space infrastructure in their home solar system. Almost all of their population is on their homeworld; they may even have a thing like Known Space Puppeteers where members of their species who take the risk of leaving their homeworld are literally considered insane (but usefully so) by most of the species. Even their homeworld has a very small population, maybe a few hundred million tops, plausibly only tens of millions, and most of those are the "mortal" slaves who make up most of the actual population. It's basically ocean and wasteland, a bunch of giant sprawling estates, a single capital city, and a minimalistic and heavily automated infrastructure to support that.

Obviously, these people have no reason to fight aliens for resources or living room. Rather, what they're short of is labor. To this end, they sometimes send out ships to capture slaves though raiding and piracy. Maybe they also buy slaves from some of the shittier empires they have contacts with too.

Possibly there's some shorter-lived indigenous sapient species on their planet that they co-evolved with or enslaved early in the history of their civilization, and their slave-raiding is just their attempt at folding aliens into that system, mostly an attempt at acquiring captives with valuable knowledge and skills (in which case captives will probably get less chains and whips slavery and more subtler forms of coercion). Or maybe their present social system is a reaction to contact with "mortal" sapient species and the "mortal" slaves on their planet are all captives or the descendants of captives (probably mostly the latter, though I think they'd carefully control reproduction among their slaves and keep their slave population either stable or growing only very slowly - they'd be scared of the possibility of their much faster-breeding slaves becoming too numerous to easily control, and being unaging they'd have very long planning horizons).

The slave-masters have a very small population and are a highly privileged class. Each one lives like a feudal lord, tended and pampered and protected by robots and slaves. They rarely do any physical labor: that's much too dangerous! They live in a floating world of luxury and status games; their society has kind of a Heian court vibe. They often scheme and intrigue against each other, flex and dunk on each other, and seek to sideline and disempower each other, but these struggles are mostly relatively non-violent because they have a sense that the life of one of their own is precious and a solidarity based on that which transcends whether they like each other as people. This obviously fits with their ideology, but it's also instinctive, reflecting an evolutionary history as a long-lived slow-breeding species for whom every viable offspring was precious; quite likely they embraced the ideology because it resonates with their instincts. The idea of killing or even injuring one of their own is viscerally horrifying and repellent to them and they would resort to such measures only in the most extreme circumstances; they've probably executed, like, a single digit number of their own kind in the last few millennia, and each one of those is remembered as an infamous traitor whose depraved betrayals of their own kind are overshadowed only by the mind-searing horror of the punishment meted out to them.

I think one of them would make a good video game antagonist cause they'd lend themselves well to meeting one of them being a boss fight. Like I said, for an outsider meeting one face-to-face would be a rare special event because they'd be very reluctant to expose themselves to the risk of close proximity to an outsider, but 1) if they did, it'd be with the best protection their society could arrange, 2) very long lifespans and slow breeding is only likely to be selected for if there's little risk of dying by accident or predation, so it would be most likely to happen in a species where mature individuals were pretty hard to kill. So an individual of this species would likely be very reclusive and hikikomori-like but very formidable if they actually showed up for a fight. In a Mass Effect context, think maybe a giant being comparable in dimensions to an elephant or T-Rex which also is a very powerful biotic, is packing the best weapons and protected by the best protective suit its society can produce with no expense spared, controls a personal squad of combat robots and elite janissaries (themselves dangerous opponents!), and has thousands of years of experience. If you manage to kill it the others of its kind will spend millennia mourning it and hating you for the unimaginable crime of destroying a mind that was already vast and ancient when the capstone was laid on the Great Pyramid at Giza.

One thing I like about this idea is, like... Somebody said in that discussion that the point of species like Batarians, Dilgar, etc. is to basically be a super-evil version of Spain for a war that is to humans what the Spanish-American War was to the USA, and I think with this idea it'd be obvious that it's really more like the First Italian-Ethiopian War or the time Idi Amin got his ass kicked by Tanzania. Like I said, one of these unaging slaver aliens would be a very formidable opponent at the small scale, but if you zoom out to what sort of threat they'd be on the galactic scale it'd be kind of obvious that humans bragging about beating up on them just shows how pathetic Earth still is compared to the setting's great powers; their tiny population makes the idea that they could be any kind of existential threat to the real big players a joke, they'd be basically the setting's equivalent of, like, if Somali pirates were somehow controlled by North Korea, and really, the idea that they'd be any kind of threat to Earth is kind of seriously embarrassing for anyone pushing a "HUMANS STRONK" line, they probably have less people than Bangladesh and that's doing the equivalent of counting the helots with the Spartans.

[beardedmrbean]

Residents of Mayotte have spoken of "apocalyptic scenes" caused by the worst storm in 90 years to hit the French Indian Ocean territory.

Cyclone Chido brought wind speeds of more than 225km/h (140mph), flattening areas where the poorest lived in sheet-metal roof shacks.

"We've had no water for three days now," said one resident of the capital city Mamoudzou. "Some of my neighbours are hungry and thirsty," another one said.

Rescue workers, including reinforcements from France, are combing through the debris searching for survivors. Twenty people have been confirmed dead, but the local prefect said it could be thousands.

Authorities said they were having difficulty establishing the number of deaths due to the large number of undocumented migrants - over 100,000 - in a population of 320,000.

Widespread damage to infrastructure - with downed power lines and impassable roads - is severely hindering emergency operations.

Supplies have begun to arrive, but there are severe shortages of food, water and shelter in certain areas. Some 85% of the territory remains without power, and about 20% of phones appear to be working. Some areas are beginning to get tap water.

But for Amalia Mazon, a 27-year-old midwife from Brussels who has been working at the island's central hospital, access to drinking water and food continues to be a concern.

"The water here is completely yellow. It's unusable for us," Ms Mazon told the BBC.

"We feel completely abandoned, and we don't even know if help is coming. We have no news, we have no idea," the midwife added.

Acting French health minister Geneviève Darrieussecq said the healthcare system in the archipelago had been "degraded" by the cyclone.

France colonised Mayotte in 1841 - and by the turn of the 20th Century added the three main islands that constitute the Comoros archipelago to its overseas territories.

The Comoros voted to become independent in 1974 but Mayotte decided to remain part of France.

The island's population is heavily dependent on French financial aid and has struggled with poverty, unemployment and political instability.

About 75% of the population live below the national poverty line and unemployment hovers at around one in three.

"The images are apocalyptic. It's a disaster, there's nothing left," a nurse working at the main hospital in Mamoudzou told BFM TV.

Mamoudzou resident, John Balloz, said he was surprised he did not die when the cyclone struck.

"Everything is damaged, nearly everything, the water treatment plant, electric pylons, there's a lot to do."

Mohamed Ishmael, who also lives in the capital,told Reuters news agency: "You feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war… I saw an entire neighbourhood disappear."

"It's the hunger that worries me most," Mayotte Senator Salama Ramia told French media. "There are people who have had nothing to eat or drink" since Saturday, she said.

Francois-Xavier Bieuville, the island's prefect, told local media the death toll could rise significantly once the damage was fully assessed. He warned it would "definitely be several hundred" and could reach the thousands.

Mayotte's impoverished communities, including undocumented migrants who have travelled to the French territory in an effort to claim asylum, are thought to have been particularly hard hit due to the vulnerable nature of their housing.

The Muslim tradition of burying the dead within 24 hours also meant documenting the number of those who have perished was more difficult, the prefect said.

In addition to aid, 110 French soldiers have arrived to help with the rescue, with another 160 on the way. Some 800 others from the ranks of volunteers helping during emergencies were also being sent to join local police units.

After arriving in Mayotte, French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said "days and days" would be needed to ascertain human losses.

The relief operation is being co-ordinated from Reunion - another French overseas territory.

French Red Cross spokesman Eric Sam Vah told the BBC the situation was "chaotic".

He said the organisation had been able to reach only 20 out of 200 Red Cross volunteers in Mayotte and echoed fears about the overall number of deaths.

"The totality of the slums have been totally destroyed, we haven't received any reports of displaced people, so the reality could be terrible in the coming days," the spokesman told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Cyclone Chido also made landfall in Mozambique, where it brought flash flooding, uprooted trees and damaged buildings about 25 miles (40km) south of the northern city of Pemba. Three deaths have been reported.

The cyclone caused structural damage and power outages in the northern coastal provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado on Saturday morning, local authorities reported.

Guy Taylor, a spokesperson for aid agency Unicef in Mozambique, said "we were hit very hard in the early hours of this morning".

"Many houses were destroyed or seriously damaged, and healthcare facilities and schools are out of action," he added.

Mr Taylor said Unicef was concerned about "loss of access to critical services", including medical treatment, clean water and sanitation, and also "the spread of diseases like cholera and malaria".

Chido is the latest deadly storm to form of such high intensity.

It strengthened as a result of its long track over the ocean, says Sarah Keith-Lucas from the BBC Weather Centre. The cyclone would have weakened had it made landfall on Madagascar's rugged terrain.

But it is also the case that climate change has an impact - not necessarily in the frequency of storms but in the strength, Keith-Lucas says.

The storm has been now downgraded to a "depression" and is due to cross southern Malawi, then Mozambique's Tete province, before heading towards Zimbabwe overnight into Tuesday.

It may still bring 150-300mm of rain by the end of Tuesday.

[prettykikimora]

Dignity is fragile. It's been destroyed over the years, post fall of the ussr when the unions and the left-wing movement waned, there was no more threat against the ruling bourgeois. They can pass whatever they want.Now they can put you in a suicide booth and have you cry for your break. You're a migrant worker, they can indenture you to a disgusting steel factory where you have to pay for your ppe and you have paid less than the bare minimum to stand in a hot factory swelter and die with no recourse. Humanity got a taste of what dignity for the working person looks like and we can do that again easily.

[porlovistoeinmasochist]

References to Vlad III in Renfield (2023)

Vlad III Draculea was the voivode (a prince-like military leader) of Walachia—a principality that joined with Moldavia in 1859 to form Romania—on and off between 1448 and 1476. Also known as Vlad III, Vlad Dracula (son of the Dragon), and—most famously—Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepes in Romanian), he was a brutal, sadistic leader famous for torturing his foes. By some estimates he is responsible for the deaths of more than 80,000 people in his lifetime—a large percentage of them by impalement.

Walachia had been ravaged by the ceaseless Ottoman-Hungarian conflict and the internecine strife among feuding boyars. Trade had ceased, fields lay fallow, and the land was overrun by lawlessness. Vlad III began his reign with a strict crackdown on crime, employing a zero-tolerance policy for even minor offences, such as lying.

As for the boyars—the high-ranking figures who had killed his father and older brother— Vlad III had a retributive plan. In 1459 he invited 200 of them to a great Easter banquet, together with their families. There, he had the women and the elderly stabbed to death and impaled; the men he forced into slave labour. Many of these workers would die of exhaustion while building Poenari Castle, one of Vlad III’s favourite residences.

Many of the Germans under Vlad III’s aegis were Saxons. Not to be confused with the Anglo-Saxons of England, these were German migrants who had settled in Transylvania in the 12th century after the region was conquered by Hungary. They were mostly well-to-do merchants, but to Vlad III, they were allies of his enemies.

Over the next few years, Vlad III razed entire Saxon villages and impaled thousands of people. In 1459, when the Transylvanian Saxon city of Kronstadt (today Brasov) supported a rival of Vlad III’s, the voivode’s response was savage. After initially placing trade restrictions on Saxon goods in Walachia, he had 30,000 people impaled—and reportedly dined among them so he could witness their suffering personally. He also had Kronstadt burned to the ground. Back in Walachia, he impaled Saxon merchants who violated his trade laws.

Vlad III dines amid impaled victims following his assault on Brasov (then known as Kronstadt). Printed in Nuremberg in 1499, this engraving, and others like it, helped spread Vlad III’s gruesome reputation across Europe.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARY EVANS, AGE FOTOSTOCK

Vlad III’s tactics, both on and off the battlefield, against the Turks were extraordinarily brutal. In the spring of 1462, Mehmed II assembled an army of 90,000 men and advanced on Walachia. After conducting a series of night raids and guerrilla warfare, Vlad III employed his trademark tactic, impaling more than 23,000 prisoners with their families and putting them on display along the enemy’s route, outside the city of Targoviste.“There were infants affixed to their mothers on the stakes,” writes the French historian Matei Cazacu, “and birds had made their nests in their entrails.”The sight was so horrifying that Mehmed II, after seeing the “forest” of the dead, turned around and marched back to Constantinople. Vlad III wrote to Matthias I explaining that he had “killed peasants, men and women, old and young . . . We killed 23,884 Turks, without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers.” To prove the truth of his words, he produced sacks full of severed noses and ears.

(Text taken from https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2021/11/vlad-the-impalers-thirst-for-blood-was-an-inspiration-for-count-dracula)

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 11 January 1943, Italian-American anarchist union organiser and newspaper editor Carlo Tresca​ was assassinated in New York City. Tresca had been a railway union activist and editor back in Italy, and migrated to the US to avoid a prison term. In his new home, Tresca travelled around the country, helping organise workers with the Industrial Workers of the World union. He was active in organising and supporting strikes of miners in Pennsylvania, textile and hotel workers in New York, silk workers in New Jersey and miners in Minnesota. Tresca also dodged assassination, bombing and lynching attempts, arrests, deportation and bogus criminal charges of offences including murder. With the rise of fascism in Italy, Tresca agitated strongly amongst Italian workers in the US to oppose fascists' attempts to gain a foothold in the migrant community as well. Tresca was surveilled by the Department of Justice, and his anti-fascist newspaper Il Martello was held up in the post. Eventually when the Italian fascist government asked the US to suppress Il Martello, the government happily complied. They prosecuted Tresca for sending "obscene matter" through the post, and sentenced him to a year and a day's imprisonment, until mass outrage forced the president to commute his sentence. The most recent research suggests that Tresca was murdered by contract killer Carmine Galante, on the orders of fascist-sympathising mobsters. After his death, Tresca's friend Max Eastman wrote: "For Poetry’s sake, for the sake of his name and memory, Carlo had to die a violent death. He had to die at the hand of a tyrant’s assassin. He had lived a violent life. He had loved danger. He had loved the fight. His last motion was to swing and confront the long-expected enemy. So let us say farewell to Carlo as we hear him say—as he surely would if the breath came back—‘Well, they got me at last!’" https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2184240811761057/?type=3

[youmightaswell]

Die!

Of Lice and Men

I’ve been wanting to write about two seemingly disparate things. But then I thought about how how they relate and came up with the most genius title that would encompass both topics into one essay.

Hear me out: I want to write about how I’ve been paranoid I have lice. I also have wanted to write about a guy I was chatting with on FB dating named Lasha who turned out, well. to be a louse. See what I did there? OF LICE AND MEN! Genius!

And what’s even MORE genius about this title is the story in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is about migrant workers and Lasha, is in fact, a migrant worker from Georgia (the country.)

I’ll start out with the lesser disgusting of the two topics: head lice.

Of Lice:

For the last month, at night I feel like my scalp is itching. I chalked it up to dry weather, overwashing or menopause. But then a celeb I follow on Instagram, Jenny Mollen (she is married to actor Jason Biggs) found out she had lice while on a plane! For weeks she had said her scalp itches and she kept showing it to her husband, assistants, etc. Nothing! They all chalked it up to her starting menopause. But then when flying home from LA her assistant saw a tiny bug jump from strand to strand! OMG! She got back to NYC and had already scheduled the pricey LicEnders to come to her house, spend painstaking hours treating her hair, her kids’ hair and her husband’s hair long with their staff’s. She also had to have her whole apartment treated.

But it makes sense she got lice - she had two young school-aged children. There is NO reason for me to think I have lice but now I am super paranoid. I can’t really see my whole scalp and live alone. Who could I ask to view my scalp?

So I googled how to kill (imaginary) lice and coated my head in oil and slept like that. I knew this would kill any lice but not their eggs and so if I really did have lice I”d need a nitpicker. Anyway, I washed the oil out and maybe it was a placebo but I felt better.

I had forgotten all about my imaginary lice but then randomly a friend jokingly said he believes a friend of mine he hates – she’s clean but disheveled – had lice. I was like WTF? I”ve been silently obsessing about lice for weeks and he mentioned it. I told him the whole story and he told me I was nuts. I did not have lice. (When he visits I will make him look at my scalp.)

Anyway, I took it as a SIGN maybe I do have lice. I really don’t want to fork over hundreds of dollars just for a LicEnders evaluation. So I bought three lice treatments from the pharmacy and this weekend gave myself one and then used the nit comb to go over ever part of my scalp hair. Nothing came out. There is NOTHING! The verdict is I am insane and paranoid. I have phantom, imaginary lice.

I am trying to put the thought out of my head but have two more treatments I could try… I am also waiting for any friend I can trust to visit to look at my scalp.

Of Men

Well, how do lice and men relate to each other? This man I am about to write about is a louse.

I am not on dating sites per se but have always kept FB Dating because long ago FB set up a profile for me automatically. I keep it open and rarely check in on the daily likes and notes men leave. But this Thanksgiving break I was board so went into it and started swiping. Almost everyone was a no but there was one guy who was super cute. His name is Lasha.

He had sent me a note saying how pretty I was and how I am perfect. He wanted to take me on a date. He said he had no children and had come to the US just to make money. He was living close by.

I toyed with the idea of meeting him the Wed before Thanks because it was a rare night my dog was in boarding and I could go out. So for a few days we chatted back and forth and what kept me going chatting with him even after I found out he had just come here six months ago from Georgia (the country) was that he mentioned one of his many jobs was to tend to bees to sell honey at farmer’s markets.

I just moved to a new apartment, one with two roof decks. The one on my private side had extremely aggressive bees. I suspect there is a huge hive in my gutter. The mgmt co will not have the exterminator do searching and removal. Luckily come fall all the bees died – there were dead bees all over my window sills. But I know they will be coming back to their hive come spring.

Anyway, I talked with Lasha about this as he is fully versed on bees and said he could come look for the hive and it can be safely rehomed in winter when the bees are not there.

I did not want to let a stranger know my address so when he kept pushing for a meeting for coffee it seems fine but I told him I’d need his full name.

Once I got it I quickly found his FB profile. His profile picture had two women - one he was kissing and the other a teen who looked like him.

I scanned down on his posts and even though they were in another language, I translated them and daily he’d say how much he loves and misses his wife and daughter!

So I asked who the women in his picture were and he was shocked I could figure out he was married with a kid!

So I asked why he was on a dating site if he was “happily” married and why he lied about having a kid. He said he is only looking for friends and I misunderstood him.

I keep the receipts always so screenshotted his opening a week before saying how beautiful I was, how he wanted to date me…

He then said, ok, if I am being honest I would be interested in having a serious relationship with you while I am in the US - I will likely be here a year. LOL! I told him I had no interest in being part of his extra-marital activities and that in the future he should be honest about all that up front so NO ONE GETS HURT. I said that very ominously and within seconds he deleted his profile.

I hate when men underestimate me and especially something as simple as the power of Google.

I had taken screenshots just in case, but I like to think I did a mitzvah to all women on the site. he will hopefully think twice about trying to cheat - at least online. And just like that I washed that louse right out of my hair.

[everything-is-crab]

Posts like this are why I don't engage with radblr anymore. Or basically any community dominated by white people.

Look at the notes. It's filled with mostly "sex based oppression is real" as if most misogynists and feminists in India don't already know this. But since some Western feminists or from other countries don't, it's important to them to tokenize our struggles so they gain a point in their political debates. I have said this a hundred times before but it's obvious how they see us as nothing but tokens. They call TRAs racist for preying on the insecurities of woc due to beauty standards imposed on us and for ignoring our oppression as women, but they do the same thing with us. They see some issue unique to a specific community of poc? They try to fit it in their arguments against the libfems. Unlike issues that they face as well, like domestic abuse, prostitution and porn. On which they write very well researched and elaborate posts. But they're completely lazy when it comes to woc especially the ones living in the global south. And that leads to their racist and classist behavior.

As for trans people- they always try to get back at radfems by saying "terfs will look at these women and say they're men" or whatever when they see a woc talk about her own issues or even when she's simply breathing, as if it doesn't cross their own mind how they say the same thing when they go "transphobia is racist" as if woc are some third gender and as if trans poc do not experience any other meaningful oppression that's distinguishable from racism 🙄

Second of all- it's obvious many of them are racist but don't explicitly express it but some on this post did-

It's so obvious that in the second screenshot what that person means by "cultures with such barbaric practices" is "brown savages". This is blatant racism. But when I pointed out on my other post how white radfems are incapable of forming any meaningful solidarity with woc if they only focus on misogyny and not racism (which most of them are guilty of) I received my first racist backlash on here. Even many woc themselves did this. But I already talked about how woc on here are like the kind of woc who take racism seriously but not sexism in order to gain validation by moc, except it's vice verse in this case. You guys can't comprehend and accept that everytime white women try to talk about issues exclusive to any race that's not white, even if it's from a "feminist" pov, then they very likely have a racist mindset behind their words, whether it's intentional or subconscious.

Anyways, nothing about this is "cultural". (And tbh even if it's cultural why do you act like culture is influenced by race itself and not many other economic, political and social factors that white people have and still influence?).

The men who are doing this are not some unique kind of misogynistic relative to white men. Do white men not stigmatize periods? They're doing this (and I clarify I am not ok with this or defending it but I am simply fighting back against the assumption that the cause of this thing is simply cultural) because the women working on those sugarcane fields have to do extremely intensive labor for hours straight. It affects their menstrual health severely. And this is a poor country in the global south affected by economic imperialism, and therefore mostly production based with less mechanization of the agricultural industry, not like the dominant service sector in most Western countries. It's not easy for people this poor to switch to some other job with equal or better pay and better working conditions. And this particular district is especially poor. How is anything about this "cultural" and why do you think we deserve to die out because of it?

Sorry we're not as developed as Spain or some other Western country where the women here could get menstrual leaves or something and it wouldn't affect production (which is already quite low for a population this large involved in agriculture).

Instead of adopting this as a talking point against TRAs or justifying racism why don't you try to criticize both imperialism and capitalism or at least talk about the poverty and lack of resources causing these issues, if you really care for "all" women so much as you claim to. But no, you will pretend the issue is solely intentional misogyny and not involving multiple factors in it.

And btw I don't want any white woman to come in my inbox like they did last time and demand that I apologize for being rude to white women when criticizing their racism. That's never gonna happen. Especially not when most white women and even many woc don't bother with this issue. Get rid of your superiority complex this isn't the colonial era anymore.

As for Indian radfems (most of whom I have come across being bootlickers of white women)- The global south has classes too. And yk this. Just because you're a woc too doesn't mean you don't have any other bias against any other women in this country. Amazing how some of you pretend you give a fuck about the growing nationalist movement just because you're socially liberal. But how nationalists promote imperialism and capitalism in the country doesn't matter to you.

[rivetgoth]

I think one of my least favorite poems I ever read was this one trying to talk about how suffering and death isn’t as poignant or poetic in California as it is in the Midwest, trying to draw comparisons about how the sun always being out makes it less “real” over the cold icy winters of the Midwest, and I just could not get over the level of closed minded self-important ego needed to write an entire piece suggesting such a limited viewpoint of the scope of human suffering. If we’re truly getting into higher level critical analysis I could easily list off absolutely countless, literal millions, of individuals, many many marginalized individuals, who have suffered in California, the migrant workers, the undocumented, those who had their land stolen by imperialists and were tortured and killed by missionaries to the immigrants from both other sides of the globe and Central/South America who make up a massive part of the population to this day, from the historic LGBT and Black neighborhoods, the overwhelming population of the poor and unhoused, etc etc etc… And to draw such a bland comparison as to suggest that sunlight and heat = happiness just blows my mind, to see a comparison like that given any praise at all blows my mind, the lack of both empathy AND creativity required to disregard the sun as a force of unanimous good when it’s very much been a cause of death and suffering across millions of years, when people die every year to extreme heat that only continues to rise, when the heat of the summer is what kills so much of our wildlife and then it comes back as the days become cooler and wetter in the winter and spring, the fact that California often sees more death in July than December, the strange fraught romantic relationship humans have with the sun as a symbol of life and magic and power and a necessity for the existence of every living thing that can also literally blind us and even kill us through too much exposure to it, the symbolism of sun bleached skulls in the desert, of the resilience of our nature, the way wildfires have become a natural part of the ecosystem but also absolutely devastate the state… I just cannot get over it. I can’t get over how deeply narrow-minded and ultimately self-involved in your own misery one has to be to try to suggest that your suffering is simply realer, more visceral, more intense purely because you live in a snowy part of the United States. What a joke. Like I get it’s poetry and we’re dealing in metaphors and symbolism but that does not exist in a vacuum and you can still be capable of some absolute dogshit figurative language.