#squatters

[kropotkindersurprise]

July 27, 2023 - A tripwire takes out a full squad of riot police who were on their way to evict a squat in Brest, France. [video]

[sea-critter]

found in a squat in an abandoned housing development, 2023

[389]

apartment squatted by a group of punks in East Berlin. 1982 by Ilse Ruppert

[godisarepublican]

They’re illegal aliens. Say it right: Illegal aliens!

[reality-detective]

A Beverly Hills mansion seized by the State of California and controlled by the LA Superior Court has been taken over by a “very sophisticated criminal ring of squatters” who are earning upwards of $30,000 a month renting out rooms and throwing parties with $100 entry fees.

Taxpayers are currently paying for the utilities. When neighbors begged Gascón’s office to turn off the utilities, Gascon’s office said: “squatters have rights.” 🤔

[bitchesgetriches]

This is a fascinating read.

... but what do we think of this in our current madly expensive housing market?

[nando161mando]

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Radford, VA c.1920

[teleclub]

A mansion in the Hollywood Hills that was covered with graffiti by squatters who occupied and trashed the expensive house, on September 23, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. © David McNew / Getty

[ivanfesco]

So funny how there's a big moral panic over squatters in Spain and every time I go to a news article about it I either have to accept cookies or straight up pay. With money

[kropotkindersurprise]

April 30, 1980 - Squatters battled riot police in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with the goal of disrupting the Coronation ceremony of Queen Beatrix. Empty buildings were squatted, and squatters even set up a radio-transmitter that they used to jam police communications. The squatters used the slogan “Geen Woning, Geen Kroning“ (No Housing, No Coronation), to show their anger at the huge amount of money spent on the anachronistic ceremony instead of on social housing and other social needs. [video]

[briry18]

**EFFECTS OF CHAPTER 5** Yuuki: That's it, I'm changing the locks. :T

Grim: None of you better have eaten my Tuna!

Ace: Who would want to? -_-

[all-socialism-is-democratic]

This guy is a "hero." (Seriously, check out the scare quotes in this article. This site purports to be politically neutral—which is always code for right-wing.)

[mumblelard]

the lodger and i have unreconcilable issues with one another, and the best part of my day is every morning when i look in their room hoping they are finally gone for good, but they have helped me in one meaningful way. if i meet someone new, and they say a room whose sole occupant is a cursed painting with an attitude problem is the weirdest thing they have ever seen, then i know we are probably starting too far apart to ever find a meaningful middle

happy first day in four months that i used my oven and didn't sweat through a tshirt imaginary constructs

[kemetic-dreams]

In 1830 a newspaper in North Carolina, the Newbern Sentinel, ran an article about an unpublished dictionary, titled The Cracker Dictionary. The work appears to have remained unpublished (perhaps the title had something to do with this), but in reporting on the words contained in the book’s nascent form the article provides early written evidence of a number of 19th century Americanisms. Among these is absquatulate, which is spelled with an initial O, rather than A, and defined as “to mosey, or to abscond.”

In addition to absquatulate, the reader is informed of the meaning of a number of other similar terms, many of which have retained some degree of currency in our language; flustrated (“frustrated and prostrated, greatly agitated”), rip-roarious, (“ripping and tearing”), and fitified (“subject to fits”) have seen enough continued use that we define them in our Unabridged Dictionary. Other words contained in this never-realized dictionary, such as ramsquaddled (“rowed up salt river”) and spontinaceously (“of one’s own accord”) appear to have been lost with the passage of time.

Two of the loafers, we understand, were yesterday taken and committed to prison; the other has absquatulated. — The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), 13 June 1837

Cracker, sometimes cracka or white cracker, is a racial epithet directed towards white people, used especially with regard to poor rural whites in the Southern United States. Although commonly a pejorative, it is also used in a neutral context, particularly in reference to a native of Florida or Georgia (see Florida cracker and Georgia cracker)

The exact history and etymology of the word is debated.

The term is "probably an agent noun  from the word crack. The word crack was later adopted into Gaelic as the word craic meaning a "loud conversation, bragging talk" where this interpretation of the word is still in use in Ireland, Scotland, and Northern England today.

The historical derivative of the word craic and its meaning can be seen as far back as the Elizabethan era (1558–1603) where the term crack could be used to refer to "entertaining conversation" (one may be said to "crack" a joke or to be "cracking wise") The word cracker could be used to describe loud braggarts; An example of this can be seen in William Shakespeare's King John (c. 1595) "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"

The word was later documented describing a group of "Celtic immigrants, Scotch-Irish people who came to America running from political circumstances in the old world". This usage is illustrated in a 1766 letter to the Earl of Dartmouth which reads:

I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.

The label followed the Scotch-Irish American immigrants, who were often seen by officials as "unruly and ill-mannered" The use of the word is further demonstrated in official documents, where the Governor of Florida said,

'We don't know what to do with these crackers—we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do'

By the early 1800s, those immigrants "started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor" as is the case with other events of linguistical reappropriation.

The compound corn-cracker was used of poor white farmers (by 1808), especially from Georgia, but also extended to residents of northern Florida, from the cracked kernels of corn which formed a staple food of this class of people. This possibility is given in the 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, but the Oxford English Dictionary says a derivation of the 18th-century simplex cracker from the 19th-century compound corn-cracker is doubtful. A "cracker cowboy" with his Florida Cracker Horse and dog by Frederic Remington, 1895

It has been suggested that white slave foremen in the antebellum South were called "crackers" owing to their practice of "cracking the whip" to drive and punish slaves. Whips were also cracked over pack animals, so "cracker" may have referred to whip-cracking more generally. According to An American Glossary (1912):

The whips used by some of these people are called 'crackers', from their having a piece of buckskin at the end. Hence the people who cracked the whips came to be thus named.

Another possibility, which may be a modern folk etymology, supposes that the term derives from "soda cracker", a type of light wheat biscuit which dates in the Southern US to at least the Civil War. The idea has possibly been influenced by "whitebread", a similar term for white people. "Soda cracker" and even "white soda cracker" have become extended versions of "cracker" as an epithet

A 1783 pejorative use of crackers specified men who "descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times, and inherit so much profligacy from their ancestors, that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth".

Benjamin Franklin, in his memoirs (1790), referred to "a race of runnagates and crackers, equally wild and savage as the Indians" who inhabit the "desert[ed] woods and mountains".

In his 1964 speech "The Ballot or the Bullet", Malcolm X used the term "cracker" in reference to white people in a pejorative context. In one passage, he remarked, "It's time for you and me to stop sitting in this country, letting some cracker senators, Northern crackers and Southern crackers, sit there in Washington, D.C., and come to a conclusion in their mind that you and I are supposed to have civil rights. There's no white man going to tell me anything about my rights."