i have this short book called “the cia’s greatest hits” and its like a compilation of a bunch of evil shit the cia has done, 2 pages each per operation and i cant find a pdf anywhere but its worth reading and i wish i could link it bc the cia is fucking vile and they should be more widely hated and more americans should know about all of the disgusting and horrific stuff theyve been responsible for
i still cant find the whole pdf but here is the text version of a lot of the chapters in the book if youre interested. and heres a timeline of atrocities committed by the cia too
So I was notified via email that in order to vote in the 2018 primaries, I had to register my party affiliation, in my home state….by OCY 13TH
Holy shit guys. Please find out ur state’s voting rules and OH MY GOD PLEASE DO IT BEFORE TIME RUNS OUT. WE HAVE TO BEAT THE CONSERVATIVES IF WE WANT TO HAVE ANY MEANS OF OPPOSING TRUMP.
Voting abroad should still be similar to ur state’s rules, please….google is ur friend.
Holy shit please take ten min to google what to do and register.
To vote in the 2017 Virginia elections, you have to register and have your info up-to-date by October 16, 2017.
You want to make a difference? You vote in off years. Non-presidential elections. And you vote on all of the elections. It will take you a few minutes on your state board of elections website to figure out the issues, candidates, and where to get the info.
VOTE. Please.
And this year in Virginia, it’s a big election. Our governor cannot run again for reelection, and we’re up against a scary ‘I was Trump before Trump was Trump’ republican and a more insidious, Pence-style republican. You want people to stand up to Trump and create laws that support the local population? This is it. This is when it matters.
Tag it with “voting reference” and you’ll always be able to find it again.
Most white people, especially rural white people (I grew up in a town of 2000 in Ohio) don’t have any concrete culture, they don’t have a unique form of pottery, special wedding dresses, a musical style going back 500 years, special rituals and dances to celebrate things. They are completely reliant on corporate culture to provide them with a sense of identity and purpose, they don’t have Hanbok dresses or special flutes native to their peoples, they have Taco Bell, the Steelers, Applebees, deals on make-up at the dollar store, deal on shirts at TJ Maxx. They have thrown away culture for corporate capitalism, they are empty inside, a vacuity of soul, an emptiness that leads to narcissism and extreme justification in the face of all facts. They don’t want to admit, they are ‘hollow’ inside.
I don’t necessarily think this is untrue but I don’t know why the target has to be poor people in rural towns. At the very least it is definitely not “especially rural white people”
something really bothers me about this reduction of the notion of ‘culture’ to, like, specific artifacts that supposedly express the essence of some monolithic ethnos. ‘this pottery and these dances give me identity and purpose’ sounds more like the words of people clinging to a dying culture as it’s subsumed into the capitalist world-system than the way that culture works outside of that
like, it’s primarily in the retrospective view that these things take on the sort of meaning that i think is being attributed to them here. when you’re an archaeologist digging through successive layers of dirt, you say ‘each one of the cultures that lived here had its own distinct style of pottery’. but for all you know a person actually alive making one of those pots would have just said ‘this is a pot i made and it looks like all the other pots everyone else makes’. nothing distinct about it
there is a point to be made that white americans are primarily passive consumers of their own ‘culture’ rather than active participants in its reproduction, and that that’s probably a problem, but that would require acknowledging that (1) this is true of people in every capitalist country, even in those dark and mystical corners of the world where people still supposedly ‘have culture’, and (2) what’s represented as ‘real culture’ here, bitingly juxtaposed with a list of consumer goods, is in fact nothing more than a different list of consumer goods. hanbok dresses and special flutes can be mediated by capitalist commodity relations in the exact same way the steelers or dollar-store make-up are
Yeah this shit is a perfect example of an incredibly orientalist framework being masked as resistance to it. Non-white cultures spring from some primordial a historic “spirit” while white culture is grounded in a material history and power relations. If the person that wrote this were to attempt some sort of consistency they would be saying that no culture exists because all culture articles is embedded in history and societal relations (which make something “not-culture” because….?)
If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.
But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
[…]
People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…]
That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
That lots of fascists and other reactionaries appear “dumb,” in that their views and positions have no relationship with historical/biological/sociological reality, doesn’t mean they have no political savvy. If anything that’s what makes them a danger, not having to remain grounded in the rules of the game that is rational public discourse. They’ve cottoned to the fact that liberal society will let them play that game without fuss anyway, even if their contribution is “there is a race war between white people and the Jews and we’ll stop at nothing to see our side win.”
I was talking with a group a few weeks ago about how fascist ideology (and right-wing ideology more broadly) is deliberately anti-rational – it appeals to cults of action and war, mythical depictions of a glorious past, and emotional manipulation through patriarchal affirmations and racial scapegoating. And then someone replied by saying “well, I agree that fascism is a dumb ideology,” which is precisely the opposite of what I was saying. Some of its adherents might be dumb but as a political strategy, it is very, very clever.
That’s the threat they pose. There are some who will actually be dumb saps and some who will just be playing the part to sneak their way into the mainstream, as they have already done; either way it’s to our detriment not to take them seriously, or to not take the steps to dismantle even the potential for them to gain any more ground than they have.
Why don’t you Google average wait times to receive a medical procedure. There are Canadians that come to the U.S. to get medical care rather than wait over a month to get it done in Canada.
I had cancer and im canadian dumbass i know full well what the wait times are like and its only long if its shit that can wait. Im sorry but im ok with waiting with a non life threatening injury if no one gets turned away from healthcare because they’re poor. The only canadians that go to the united states are rich enough that they are willing to spend the money to save a few hours waiting
Except people with life threatening injuries have to wait as well. My father had to go to the ER because the screws in his knee busted making his stitches rip open and my parents waited for hours before finally leaving when they noticed an elderly woman with a head injury and broken leg waiting at least four hours BEFORE my parents arrived.
Brian Sinclair’s death was completely preventable, yet he waited 34 HOURS in the ER for treatment that would have taken 30 minutes to an hour at most.
There are pros and cons to Canada’s healthcare, and if people want to spend extra money for arguably better treatment and shorter wait lines, I’m personally going to support them any way I can.
Yeah, that happens in the US too though. Literally every single day. Go into any ER in the country at like 9:30 pm and you will see dozens of people with painful injuries waiting hours to see a doctor. People die in the US waiting to see a doctor. The only difference is that it costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.
I had to wait six months to see an endocrinologist in the US and when I wanted to switch doctors I had to wait another six months to see somebody else, who are these people in the US who don’t have wait times?
(Brian Sinclair’s death, by the way? It’s a terrible tragedy… but the problem there was not that health care resources are spread too thin. It was racism. They saw a native man and assumed he was homeless and drunk, not in distress. As the study I cited above shows, racism is also a factor in US health care.)
So basically, you’re paying a lot more, at both the end-user and governmental levels… but you’re not actually getting a lot more.
Finally: You know what else Canada has that the US doesn’t? Wait time guarantees that require offering a faster alternative if they’re blown.
All those stories of Canadians coming to the US? Yeah, they’re basically made up. Even the highly shady right-wing think tank that Fuckface von Clownstick got the story from, trying to make the best possible case for privatization, only found that 1% of Canadian patients received health care abroad. One. percent. And that’s not “went to the US for health care,” that’s “received health care literally anywhere else for any reason, including just happening to be in another country when we got sick or injured.”
The actual numbers? Well, this study is old, but… out of a pool of 18 000 respondents, they found twenty who went to the US specifically for care.
Twenty. 0.11%.
They found that this data was consistent with Canadian payment records and US border region hospital data, so… yeah. It basically doesn’t happen. And when it does? Frequently that’s because there is an issue with the normal procedures in Canada… so the provincial government covers the cost of getting the patient to the US and treating them there.
I’ll take that over “you must be this rich to live” any day of the week.
It was also found Canadians who are treated in the States are far morely to be there because they became sick or injured while on vacation or are snow birds rather than they purposefully crossed the border.
‘Cause let me tell ya, as someone with a few chronic issues, if my choice is a 20 minute trip to the local hospital in bad traffic, where I’ll at least get coping treatment while I wait or an hour trip, plus border wait, to the States? Yeah, I’ll go local every time. The whole not having to shell out money thing is nice.
I also live near the second busiest hospital in BC. (Possibly Western Canada) Longest I have EVER waited is two hours.. and that was for a shot of toradol for pain treatment.
Another thing the liars above leave out is the huge number of working people in the US who just… don’t go to the doctor when they get injured. Because they know they can’t afford either the cost or the time away from work to get treatment and let it do its work. The US is filled with manual laborers -from roofers to bartenders to painters to stockers- with chronic pain conditions, un- or poorly healed injuries. How do they live with it? Every advil/tylenol/aspirin commericial tells you how. The importance of pain-meds to Pharma profits and easy availability of blackmarket opiates suggests an alternate answer.
The US is 300million people largely self-medicating their pain-management because they don’t want to lose their jobs, can’t afford to see a doctor for it, and don’t trust doctors because of previous bad past experiences caused by the private healthcare system. These people are, effectively, stuck in life-long wait-times, yet conservative defenders of our broken system always seem to forget to mention them when the subject of public healthcare arises.
Forever ago, I ran across an article on privilege and the inability to “sit with fear” that has really stuck with me. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, trying to put something into words that has been bugging me and I think it’s starting to crystallize.
The idea is that we live in a society where privileged people rarely have to deal with being afraid or uncomfortable and so they learn to think they have a right to always feel that way and that right trumps other people’s needs. So we see “being around [x race/ethnicity/class] makes me feel unsafe; feeling this way harms me; I have a right to feel comfortable in my environment”
We see this expressed most strongly in the more privileged groups: white people unaccustomed to being a minority or being around minorities, straight men unaccustomed to feeling sexually or physically vulnerable or to receiving unwanted sexual attention from men, etc. These are people that primarily feel safe–people that have rarely hought twice about wearing what they want onto the streets, raising their voice in ways that might be perceived as threatening, or calling the cops for assistance and assuming the cops will be their allies.
This leads to the harmful conclusion that people have the right not just to BE safe, but to FEEL safe.
On the other hand, most members of less privileged groups have at least some, if not lots, of experience “sitting with fear.” We will be in environments where we do not feel comfortable or safe. We will experience vulnerability. Not all the time, not everywhere, but often enough. Some of these times we will actually be in danger, some we will just feel less than safe, but regardless, by the time we are adults we have extensive experience and a well developed toolkit for how to process fear.
Sometimes, when situations are genuinely and unnecessarily unsafe, we will work to change them. Other times, when our feelings of discomfort have to be balanced against the competing needs and feelings of other groups we will work to find compromises or build a variety of spaces. And when multiple needs really can’t be reconciled or when our feelings of vulnerability exist only as feelings not based in reality we know how to sit with our fear.
Here’s the interesting bit :
I see, increasingly, people buying into the privileged fallacy that a state where one never needs to know how to sit with fear is not only achievable but an entitlement.
I mean it’s not unidentifiable, to look at that sense of security and think “I want that. I deserve that.” I think it’s normal. Hell, I think people do deserve that. I just don’t think it’s achievable, not on some kind of black-and-white, universal scale. There will always be people who need different things, and even people who need things whose presence is potentially threatening to other people. (A neutral example: addictive painkillers.)
But I see a lot of people who are hurting, in spaces that are practically designed to hurt them, trying to fix it by turning the broken rules around backwards to make a society designed so they’ll never feel hurt or unsafe or uncomfortable.
And I think that’s harmful.
I think that’s drinking the privileged kool-aid.
This post is, by the way, NOT an argument against safe spaces. Safe spaces are necessary and important parts of any community. What this is is an argument against the idea of universal safe spaces in a world with diverse, competing, sometimes irreconcilable needs. This is a reminder that not every space can serve every person, and that when it comes down to the line we need to be very aware of this fact, and also aware of the difference between entitlement to BE safe and to FEEL safe.
The privileged approach to safe spaces is thinking that your needs are either universal or the priority and that your feelings outweigh someone else’s needs. The privileged approach to safe spaces is “this thing hurt me, so it’s bad.“ It’s thinking “my feelings are unbiased and objective and the most important feelings to have.” The privileged approach to safe spaces is “my internal reality is the one true reality.”
We know different. And when we have to, we know how to deal. Let’s not give that up.
I feel like a lot of attempts at convincing conservatives that larger social safety nets and state-funded healthcare are good things are like… fundamentally failing to engage with their basic concerns.
Like, guys, I have literally been asked questions along the lines of “what are your plans for when the economy collapses and all of our currency becomes worthless” by multiple family members in the past month. If people keep yelling WHY DO YOU HATE THE POORS at them, then I think they’re going to feel roughly the same as a conservationist who keeps hearing WHY DO YOU HATE POOR PEOPLE IN THE CONGO WHO CUT DOWN THE RAIN FOREST FOR AGRICULTURAL PURPOSES
like, you don’t. you don’t hate those people. maybe you hate people much more powerful than them who cut down many more trees, but the people who clear four acres so they have some land to grow crops to feed their families? nah, you don’t hate those people. if you object to their actions, it’s because you’re afraid that those people might accidentally be hastening the end of the world as we know it. And if you think the debate is Person In The Congo Would Like To Clear Some Rain Forest To Feed His Family, Please vs This Will Bring About The End Of The World, you might reasonably conclude that we are just not gonna be able to compromise on the end of the world thing.
There are a lot of conservatives who seem to be every bit as concerned about government spending as liberals are about climate change and extinction rates. And like–you might think that’s dumb. You might think they’re tilting at windmills while ignoring the hurricane right behind the windmills. But as long as they think that the windmills are an imminent threat to everything they know and love and hold dear–as long as they turn to me and say “bard, I’m so sorry we couldn’t defeat those windmills for you, I’m so sorry that you’re the one who’s going to have to live in a world where their reign of terror seems impossible to escape”–like, at that point, you gotta engage with their concern about the windmills. You gotta try to convince them that your proposed policies are not going to destroy everything they care about.
Yelling at them to have compassion doesn’t solve that problem. They have compassion. That’s why they’re so worried about the killer windmills.
Huh, neat point.
this is pretty insightful. it lacks only one thing: the information that some people without compassion are deliberately creating a killer windmill scare to neutralize the compassion of those who might otherwise notice them vacuuming billions of dollars out of the economy to be sequestered in overseas accounts.
i have not yet found a way to convince don quixote that the guy who warned him about the killer windmills was lying, on purpose, for real, with intent to decieve you, yes really, you have been fooled, he fooled you.
folks are just not willing to consider they might’ve been played. it tends to upset them.
In some ways it was easier for my generation. Racism was blatant and obvious. The “Whites Only” signs let us know clearly, what we were up against. Not much has changed, but the system of lies and trickology is much more sophisticated. Today young people have to be highly informed and acutely analytical, or they will be swept up into a whirlpool of lies and deception.
Assata Shakur, Honey Magazine debut issue (1998)
My friend shared this quote with me today and I instantly remembered another great quote from Assata Shakur that I feel is crucial to be absorbed when reading the quote above “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free”.
See this goes out to people who constantly think those of us in this generation are too sensitive or are always looking for racism when it’s just that we realize how tactics have changed…racism has never gone away they’ve just tried to change the face of the game…
just moving along like everyone else 