#NO MORE PENSIOn!!!!!!!!!

[temeyes]

Little chopper for little team and their pilot)

thank u for your generous donation!!!!!

[manchesterau]

theyre so married

[alighterwithlove]

if you talk to the average conservative voter, they'll always talk about their conservative representative with unabashed enthusiasm. "this guy is supporting my rights!!!!!" even when the representative is very much not supporting their voting constituents' rights in some cases (ie. poor white ppl not realizing they're getting poorer because of their representative)

and I bet that's why conservative candidates are so good at winning. any person listening to their voters only gets a great impression of the candidate.

and if you talk to the average liberal/leftist voter, they all hem and haw. "oh yeah, I voted for them but they're Okay, they're Disappointing. they haven't done this. they haven't done that." and I bet if you fucking pressed them to state some Good Beneficial Legislation they've passed, either the voter 1. can't name any, or 2. has to attach caveats. ("yeah biden passed student loan forgiveness BUT not ALL loans were forgiven")

why aren't we ever excited about incremental progress. why aren't we cheering to the sky about every win. maybe more people would vote if there was genuine excitement, the same type of excitement that conservative voters seem to have about anything labeled "conservative".

I'm just so fucking tired of hearing ppl be like "I'm just disillusioned with my leftist representative" EVERY TIME but are DEAD SILENT on the small victories, the progress. conservatives know how to do this, and that's why they build momentum into the next election. why does this seem impossible for the other side.

[mummer]

lied a few times in a job interview but it ended up going super well and ive already been moved to the final round

[semisomnosres]

I'm sure this cat person would have said something less romantic than it was in the original, but I don't know what, so without the text

[thoughtportal]

BlackRock offices in Paris

[stanestreet]

A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn.

Now is not the place to rehash the many examples of Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7.

The first was how little people across the Left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86% of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic; and still the Left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election. Would they — good Lefties one and all — have done this if the vast majority of another minority said they believed Corbyn was bigoted against them? Would the Left have supported an Islamophobic leader in 2018? A homophobic one? A racist one? It’s hard to imagine. “What are Jews so scared of? It’s not like Corbyn’s going to bring back pogroms,” a prominent figure on the Left asked me. I briefly amused myself by imagining a response: “Why are black people so against the Tories? It’s not like they’ll bring back lynching.” But I stayed schtum. The Left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was — it turned out — a good lesson to learn.

Hadley Freeman, an excerpt from her essay Blindness: October 7 and the Left, published by Jewish Quarterly

[ahaura]

from @/JoshuaPHilll, via More Perfect Union

[redbean-nom]

Rebel Admirals Rex & Kalani from an au where the clone and droid rebellions were a bit more successful

Rex's fleet (rebel fleet Remembrance) - the whole 'ahsoka's not actually a jedi' thing worked and most of the 332nd got dechipped. (maul still escaped, but they managed to patch up the maul-damage before he got to the hyperdrive, so the Tribunal is mostly okay). the extra resources & manpower allowed the clone rebellion to operate on a much larger scale, and they eventually allied with pantora as a whole with the backing of senator chuchi. cody and later wolffe brought their imperial fleets to join the rebellion about a year later (after the chips started wearing off).

the fleet (one venator (the Tribunal), four star destroyers, associated clones, gunships, fighters, and tanks, plus a handful of stolen imperial walkers and shuttles) formally joined the rebel alliance around 10bby.

(rex got put in charge of the fleet because he's the least traumatized out of all the surviving officers. cody ran off to live with obi wan on tattooine.)

Kalani's fleet (rebel fleet Independence) - something happened and he and kraken managed to steal a chunk of dooku's ships (and later a good chunk of whatever was left of grievous' fleet on utapau) after his death. they essentially got lost in the chaos of o66, since the rest of the separatists thought they were deactivated after the shutdown order, and escaped with essentially a full separatist fleet. since they were active instead of stuck on agamar, kalani noticed that the leader of the empire happened to be the republic's supreme chancellor, and decided the empire was the new target of the CIS army. he later encountered the clone rebellion and decided that since the clones had effectively deserted the republic and were now fighting the empire, they were therefore allies.

the fleet (one dreadnought, three cruisers, one stolen imperial carrier, associated droids, fighters, transports, and tanks) formally allied with the rebel alliance around 10bby, with the backing of serenno and raxus secundus.

[b1cr1ptic]

GENTE TOMBLOCKERA DE LA INTERNET DE HABLA HISPANA, CORRAN A LEER ESTE HERMOSO FIC QUE ME REGALO MI AMIGO DIO PARA MI CUMPLE. ES UNA OBRA DE ARTE. GRACIAS.

[us-the-voices-and-more-voices-2]

Boys, I’m going to start learning how to make houses accessible.

Also because a lot of accessible buildings make you feel like shit bc wheelchairs and other stuff aren’t really thought about.

I shall be the change I wanna see in the world.

also buildings are so cool!

I wanna make cute and practical accessible houses, also houses are so cool!!!

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

Is it true that in germany, people who dont have kids have to pay a specific tax, and people who have kids are exempt from It?

If its true is the tax applied for single people or just couples who live together?

its not really my topic of expertise but from my understanding we have six tax classes, if you are not married and dont have kids you get put in the class with the highest taxes. so its not a special tax its just a higher percentage. if you have kids and are not married i think you are in a different class with lower taxes than unmarried childless persons. married people do in fact have tax advantages but dont ask me how that works exactly… overall german social politics are very conservative, they are clearly aiming at fostering traditional families where the parents are married and the mother does not work or only parttime. this is a bit off topic but related, single mothers are among the groups most at risk of poverty, and even though fathers can take paid time off after the birth of a child, on average women leave the workforce for around eight years while men do so for two or three months on average. so overall i would say its mostly married men who profit…

[little-mouse-adventures]

So I got a new job :3

i start on the 6th

[helshades]

Could you please explain why people are so opposed to the pension reform? I'm trying to understand, but living in a country where you can retire at 67 but keep working until 70 if you wish, and everyone is fine with that, I feel I must have missed something.

(Happy to be sent resources if you don't want to make a writeup!)

Same anon as before, forgot to mention I read french so no trouble if you send me french articles or posts. (That is, if you answer the ask, if so thanks in advance!)

It's really not on you, but your Ask did depress me a tad. It aligned with many comments I've spotted across the media coverage of the current French crisis in foreign countries, and most public reactions to it. The worst ones are definitely racist, along the lines of mocking them French that never want to work, but I know the most benign to be genuine: how come the French get to retire so early in life still, and why are they protesting an apparently necessary, surely inevitable, evidently inexorable raise of the legal age for a full pension, when everybody else must retire later in life, which they deem to be entirely natural and normal?

I was about to ask you how did you think the French got to retire as early as 55–60 years of age not that long ago (62 today) if not because of their infamous propensity to go on strike and protest a lot in the first place—in truth I was debating with myself on the tone I should adopt to say it—when it struck me suddenly: the crucial part of your comment was not the age for legal retirement in your country... Rather, it was whether or not the people in your country really happen to be ‘fine with that’.

In late January, the man who modified the Swedish pension system twenty years ago, raising the retirement age to 65, was interviewed by French news outlet. Karl Gustaf-Scherman, who used to administer the Swedish social securty, had a recommendation for President Macron: ‘Don't you imitate us and apply our model.’ In reality, most Swedish people can't physically afford to wait till 65 to retire, and have to leave their careers without a full pension: according to a 2019 study ordered by the national retirement fund, 92% of female and 72% of male retirees saw their pensions diminish (and, consequently, their purchasing power) after Sweden opted for this new pension system based on capitalisation and an increase of the retirement age. ‘Mr. President, the only reform you should pass would be a reform à la française’, Gustaf-Scherman concluded.

Again: are you completely certain that in your country, everyone is fine with working till 67, even 70 years of age? How many factory workers do you know, in your entourage, people who spend all day on an assembly line? How many sewage workers do you know? How many nurses and orderlies still lifting patients at 65, how many masons and tilers dreaming of working past their 70th birthday? Do you think it fair to ask a person to retire five years after everyone else because they've known several periods of unemployment in their career, because of some economic recession or because they've had to give birth to the next generation of humans? Do you find it fine to die before you've reached the legal age of retirement with a full pension, never getting to spend quality time with your grandchildren or your friends or helping out at local associations?

Do you find it normal never to get a rest from work before you die?

It's not only that everyone ought to be allowed some respite after serving their country well by participating in producing the national wealth for forty odd years; it is also that all those neoliberal reforms aim to destroy the remnants of old socialised systems across Europe to replace them with a fully capitalised economy. In other words, the point is for the tenants of a globalised market economy to take control of the gross domestic products of each country, open them to speculative funds and get to play with all that wealth—with the systematic privatisation of national markets allowing for unlimited concurrence and speculation.

France's pension system is still partly based on non-wage labour costs that have allowed its nationalised portion to remain afloat and stable since the creation of the Social Security in 1946. Back then, la Sécurité sociale was actually intended to cover all risks of life, but even then the class war was raging on. The entire history of the Social Security centres on the boss class' attempt to snatch the fund's control from the hands of the workers themselves. The move has definitely accelerated within the last four decades (the Eighties have seen the rise of Neoliberalism, as per the Chicago School's teachings, for further illustration, look up Augusto Pinochet's Chile), somewhat exponentially since 2016's Labour Law, implemented when Emmanuel Macron was a youthful minister of Economy who really began tearing the country apart proper, notably to finance his upcoming presidential campaign. The merciless destruction of our once-protective Labour code truly was the point of entry of his Thatchering enterprise...

I reckon no president of the Republic has been as universally detested as most of the French people have come to loathe Emmanuel Macron. The basis of his electorate is a contingent of very wealthy people, most of whom elderly, who share economic interests in the destruction of national sovereignty in favour of privatisation, since they've got, precisely, shares in the big companies that are to profit from the change; and people who simply don't care about the future generations of pensioners.

Trouble is, if Macron got re-elected a year ago, it was only because votes were extremely divided between many parties and because of a successful campaign to hold far-right candidate Marine Le Pen as a compliant scarecrow , presented in all media as the only one opposition to Macron—which meant that all people had to do to oppose Macron would be to vote for her, as it was sure to scandalise the rich and the Woke... Then, all Macron would have to do, which he did, was to present himself as the only one true credible defence in front of the Fascist Menace. The recipe, which was actually brought to perfection in the early 1980s by to-be-president François Mitterrand (using Marine Le Pen's more sinister father, and founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen), is well and truly tried. Still, one of these days, she's going to get to presidency, and Macron will have been her best supporter.

[terrorbirb]

I'm now doing a perfect job at work :) senior engineers found no problems with my work :) I know this was only two projects, but this has been my goal for 3-4 months and I'm finally there.

[rigormortisangel]

now is not the time for my dad to come in here and start saying shit like "what if you werent actually born in the states and we lied to you and when you apply to colleges in a few months youll get deported" like it used to give me panic attacks as a little kid to lose most of my friends and have to start over but at this point i dont fucking care. like whatever if hes fucking with me hes fucking with me if hes not then okay ill move in with my grandpa and keep him out of a nursing home for the last few years of his life and make sure people dont exploit him