This is tragic.

Language is really important, to a degree that most mono-lingual people just do not fathom. I am mono-lingual, when I was younger I thought language was just a way to communicate. That language diversity is a bad thing, because it creates barriers between people groups. I thought that in a globally connected world not knowing the most popular language puts people at a disadvantage, so we ought to all learn the same language, and obviously that should be the one I grew up with.

That is a deeply colonial mindset. English, French, and Spanish are only as popular as they are because of Colonialism. The world is globally connected today because certain groups of people worked very hard to conquer, exploit, and repress everyone they could. This process continues today, in different forms. The unmitigated disaster that is the Climate Crisis has been a direct result of colonization and the economic system it created. Nearly every component of this situation, climate emergency, language extinction, globalized planet, is the result of horrible systems and acts. So the idea that people should try to fit into this world, that easier communication on the terms of the conquerers is good, is wrong. I was wrong, and you might be too.

The other part of this that’s important is the value of language. I will focus on one aspect of that value. More than simple communication, the languages we know structure the ways we can think. The relationships between concepts in a language, as well as the concepts themselves, set the stage for the sorts of thoughts a speaker (or signer or writer) can have. Language diversity matters in part because diversity in language means diversity in thought.

There are whole sets of concepts you and I cannot fathom, because we lack the linguistic framework to explore them. This touches everything we experience, from emotions to gender to philosophy to law to the common experiences we have every day. Look around you, and I’m sure you can find something you lack the words for. The particular way that a tree’s branches connect and sway, the vast variety of sounds that machines make, the particular feeling of knowing something you can never hope to fully convey. And I’m just an English speaker, think of all the possible ideas that these peoples who are losing their languages do have, and imagine the infinite possibility of what they could concieve. Such a tiny sliver of life thinking is, but even it’s consideration overwhelms me. What endless beauty there is in the possibilities our lives contain, yet all of it is being systematically destroyed. There is a feeling I get when thinking about this, maybe you get it too, “tragic” feels inadequate for such a thing.

It feels so weird to see her character compared to cartoonishly evil ones like Darth Vader and the Joker. When watching the movie she is clearly a very damaged person, her character is tragic. The way she treats Gump makes sense, her culture is intensely ableist which combined with her trauma provides context to her actions. The idea that she is somehow a bigger asshole than a domestic terrorist with no concrete backstory, a serial killer, or even evil space jesus, is ridiculous. Frankly it reeks of casual sexism whenever I see people smear her, it feels like folks are either parrotting the opinions they found online, or never tried to understand her character while watching the movie.

I hate to bring it up, but this is ableist. Mental asylums are bad, there is nothing lucky about people being forced into them. There is a long history of abolitionist that led to their mass closure in the 20th century in the United States. From that continuing history we have numerous stories of how awful these places were/are, and an idea of the harms that ableism causes.

God doesn’t exist, hell isn’t real, but the way we spread that idea matters.

Wow, wrong from the first sentence of the subtitle. I’ll concede that a democrat will do less damage than a republican in the white house, but beyond that I take issue with this opinion piece.

The Willow project. The Biden administration approved this expansion of oil production, against the outcry of millions of people, most notably the Native Village of Nuiqsut and City of Nuiqsut. This opinion piece focusses on the fact that this project will directly release hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels. What is not mentioned is the habitat destruction, poisoning of fish, harm to caribou, air and water pollution, and blatant disrespect to the Native people who are directly affected (I’m not even going to get into how resource extraction causes much of the crisis of MMIWG2S).

As the author concedes in the article’s conclusion, the specifics do matter. So how, specifically, does his opinion piece counter the fact the Biden administration took deliberate action to increase fossil fuel production? With a proposal they made to increase water heater efficiency, backed by a statistic that looks at the cumulative effect nearly 40 years from now. Unstated are the assumptions that this will pass, not get repealed in the future, and that industrial civilization will exist in 2060. There is a similar statistic involving automobiles and fuel efficiency, again involving a future date (2050 this time) and many assumptions, like that people will be using cars for their daily transportation 30 years from now.

These things are not comparable to the immediate harm of the Willow project, taken together they paint a grim picture, one in which fossil fuel production continues to expand while politicians push the problem down the road with reforms that assume society does not need to fundamentally change. We need action now, and the Biden administration is actively making things worse in the present while selling us an unrealistic future.

Electing Joe Biden to be President of the United States of America for a second term in 2024 will not limit global warming to 1.5⁰C. If we actually want any chance of limiting the warming of Earth to 1.5⁰C, we need nothing short of global revolution. Fossil fuel production has to stop, agriculture has to drastically change to regenerate the land, ecosystems must be healed. None of this is workable under global Capitalism, and States will never be an effective method for organizing the kind of human labor necessary to save ourselves and our home. This is a scary idea, it requires us taking personal and collective responsibility for the fate of humanity, going out of our comfort zones, and genuinely caring for one another.

Go ahead and vote for Joe, but don’t kid yourself, he isn’t a solution.

Philanthropy is a pr scam for billionaires.

It let’s them doge taxes while feeling like they are doing good in the world, while using their money to cause more problems. That article is about Gates screwing up education systems while trying to ‘fix’ them, because he has billions of dollars while the people who actually have a clue on how to fix things do not. Look into the other actions his foundation takes and you will see similar patterns, from funding destructive agriculture to sourcing their funds from private prisons.

For the claim that Buffett is doing any good to the world, in his own words:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s good to see this division inside the French State’s forces. Clearly the pressure from recent protests is having an effect. Let’s hope these cops, judges, and politicians ruin their collective ability to maintain this perverse ‘order’.

Fuck that.

The fight is not over, there is a lot that needs to be done, but this situation is far from hopeless.

We gotta organize, not to push governments into dealing with the disasters they caused, but to solve them ourselves. Neighbors, coworkers, friends, if you have any of these you can do something. Unions, of workers and tenants both, are gaining ground. We can win when we work together, and increasingly we are.

To save Earth we need to stop using fossil fuels, rapidly work to rebuild local ecosystems, and engage in intensive regenerative agriculture to feed everyone. It will be necessary to draw down hundreds of billions of tons of carbon, that is possible to do but it will take our whole species working to make it happen. That includes you, who are reading this now. You have a part to play in this, no matter how hopeless you might now feel.

To start, look towards those currently resisting. Find a way to join them, or learn from what they are doing and make it happen where you live. Maybe this means a tenant’s union, or Food not Bombs, perhaps there are local gardeners near you, or the seeds of a library economy (tool, toy, or other libraries). Try to do something, even if it feels small. Do it with other people, and don’t get discouraged.

The problem is vast in scope, but there are a lot of us, don’t give up before it’s over.

Wow, this is sick! Thanks for posting your art, it’s great to see even if I’ve never played the game.

“Food we eat” is half the size of “livestock feed”. Plus look at how small wetlands/deserts are, wetlands especially are essential to climate resillience. What egregiously bad land use, wow. Thanks for this post, it’s great.

I get that the EFF has to say this bill has “laudable goals” for political reasons, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Protecting children is a typical excuse for broad expansion of State power, and this is no different. Don’t be fooled, and remember it’s the democrats who are trying to push this through. Both major political parties in the US are enemies to personal autonomy, one is just more subtle about it. Liberation will never come from within the ruling power structure.

Oh hell no, not this ableist bs. Though it’s little surprise coming from this rag.

Asylums were really bad, and the narratives surrounding their closures are fraught with lies. Worse, it isn’t all in the past: the Judge Rotenburg Center has been condemned by the UN for torture, yet continues to operate in Massachussetts, for example.

The only way this idea makes any sense is if you can’t imagine addressing the root issues of this problem. Namely, poverty, access to housing, lack of medical care. You know, the problems that never get fixed under Capitalism because they are the direct result of it. The logic of the asylum is to round people up and lock them away from the rest of society, “for their own good”, regardless of their feelings on the matter. To those currently in power, this is preferrable to any attempt at systemic change because it does not require the end of their most profitable investments.

“Apolitical” is a political position.

If you claim to support trans rights, and with them the broader struggle for gender self determination, then you ought to support the people putting their bodies on the line to defend it. Specifically the antifacists and anarchists (many of them queer themselves) who fight facism on the streets. Supporting a group targetted for genocide requires supporting the kinds of tactics that can fight the facists working to exterminate that group.

Very true, it is not required to have a solution, I myself only gave a couple of broad frameworks as alternatives, alongside a call for abolition.

But consider for a moment the people you’re accusing of “vigilantism” here. These are people who very often did go through the so-called justice system, for example Aubuchon reported her case, completed a rape kit, then waited a year for nothing to happen. It was only after being utterly failed by the system that she posted on social media, with the intent of warning others about this creep. He does not deny having sex with her, on the job while he is in a position of power over her no less, but says it was consensual. Remember, she was only 18 at the time, and has no wealth to speak of. What else was she supposed to do in this situation?

Or take Longhorn’s case, she followed all the appropriate channels, and got nothing but grief for it. An official complaint to her work led to harrassment, and her case was dropped by the prosecutor because he thinks she should have fought him off. Here we have a member of the justice system itself advocating what could reasonably be interpreted as “vigilantism” in favor of the official legal channels. According to Wikipedia: “Vigilantism refers to the act of preventing, investigating, and punishing perceived offenses and crimes without legal authority.” Fighting off one’s rapist would count as prevention, and she did not possess legal authority to assault him while in his home. Then he sued her, forcing her to pay legal fees before dropping the case. What should Longhorn have done differently in this situation? At what point did she ever engage in “vigilantism”? His defamation suit against her is not due to a social media post, but rather her talking to coworkers and contacting authorities.

I’m not gonna straw-man you here, but you might want to think about the implications of calling what these women did “vigilantism” in light of the actual actions that they took. Namely, contacting the authories.

But let’s leave the survivor’s personal experiences aside for a minute and talk about systemic change. How should people who have been systematically abused by a system try to change it? Would revealing it’s failures on social media for all to see perhaps be a step in that direction? It’s not as if the levers of power that can make the changes you suggest are terribly accessible to the general population. If fact, they are far more accessible to the very people doing the raping, powerful men. Posting about rapists on social media is a tactic to change the justice system, it’s just one that those currently priviledged by the system are threatened by.

Insisting that we must change the system, while decrying the powerless’ efforts to do so, doen’t that seem a bit contradictory?

To address your last sentence, we should give up on the so-called justice system. It does not create justice, but rather perpetuates inequality. Please understand, this does not come from a place of rejecting the concept of justice. On the contrary, I wish to see a more just world, and I am unwilling to compromise that ideal. The “justice system” is unjust. There are promising, proven alternatives. Why don’t we try those instead of the promise of reforms that have never once materialized?

I suppose it’s a slightly more accurate term. The messages here are not truly private since they are not encrypted, but since they are sent directly no one should read them in the normal course of using the platform. Calling them private might imply to people that other people cannot read them, rather than the reality that it is just very unlikely anyone will. I would also argue that if something is released to an authority it is not “private” even if it is not publicly available.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter which you use. People will generally understand either way, so you can go ahead and keep saying PM and others will say DM and we can all just understand that they mean the same thing.

How would you propose fixing the justice system? What changes are necessary to make survivors of sexual assault feel safe coming forward with their stories? What does “justice” look like to you?

How infuriating, and sad. The stories in this article are awful to read, like the woman whose case passed a grand jury, got dropped by a misogynistic prosecutor, then was retaliated against with no real recourse. There are a number of good points made, such as what SLAPP means, and the fact that these cases enforce the very power dynamics that lead to sexual assault in the first place. But there is one big point the author misses:

These cases are a result of the so-called justice system functioning exactly as intended.

The legal system in the US is designed to preserve existing power differentials. The laws are paid for, the proceedings opaque, and if you want any chance of success you must have money for lawyers (or find a lawyer with enough in the bank to take it pro-bono). A legal system like this is ‘capitalist’ in the sense that it discriminates based on access to wealth, which in a patriarchal society like the one we live under makes it especially bad for women. As we can see here. And it forces survivors to relive their trauma, over and over again as the proceedings stretch on.

“But what about false accusations?” The tired argument of trolls, chuds, and those who’ve bought these rapists’ PR pitches everywhere, it unfortunately bears addressing here. False accusations are rare, far rarer than legitimate ones, which are themselves pretty uncommon due to all the barriers and retraumatization involved. Since they are so rare, and sexual assault so common, it makes little sense to focus on this one possibility when doing so is likely to spread further harm by hurting the percieved legitimacy of those who accuse their rapists.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s think about how accusations might work (false or not), in the context of a stratified society and legal system. I see four basic situations we can start with, based on the relative wealth of the two parties in question:

Poor accuser vs rich accused. The accused can just hit the accuser with defamation lawsuit, kind of like we see here. It honestly doesn’t make any sense for someone to falsely accuse someone richer than them, as it doesn’t take much thought to know how it will turn out. This is also the most common scenario covered on the news, and therefore the most common place to find false accusation FUD.

Poor accuser vs poor accused. No great options for either party here, since you need money to access most the legal system. This kind of thing basically never gets beyond local news so we don’t really talk about it online much. It’s hard to go through a trial like this for either party, and the system is going to make it hard on both parties.

Rich accuser vs rich accused. Since both parties have money, they can drag things out into a real shit-show, similar to what we saw in Depp v. Heard. It would be hard to call the sort of process we see in a case like this “justice”, especially when it is broadcast on television for everyone to gawk at. In the high-profile case we saw, both parties ended up looking like shitty people to a polarized audience.

Rich accuser vs poor accused. Now we get a situation where the worry about false accusations makes a lot more sense, since the accused has no good recourse to the legal action against them. Again, the legal system is shit. We also don’t see much of this, rape relies on power dynamics, and rich people are more likely to ignore us poors than go out of their way to personally ruin us. Plus, if they wanted to there are usually better ways to ruin someone’s life that don’t involve the risk of hours spent in boring legal proceedings.

There are endless confounding factors in these situations, and they could end up all sorts of ways, but thinking through the dynamics gives us a bit of a picture of just how flawed the legal system is, and how little sense false accusations make. The most common place to see the idea is under stories where the accuser has less power than the accused, which is also the situation in which it doing so carries the highest risk and lowest reward. Additionally, this is one of the most common abuses of power in our society. So no more of that, this talking point hurts many people and protects rapist. If you somehow read this far and engage in this sort of behavior, know that your actions cause real harm to real people.

Okay, so the justice system is bad, what do we do about it? We abolish it, that’s what, and replace it with various alternatives that don’t presupose punishment as the end-all-be-all of justice. For that we have two broad frameworks to look at, restorative justice and transformative justice.

Restorative justice understands that everyone who is affected by a harmful act, victim, offender, and broader community members, is a human being worthy of dignity and respect. In the best cases the process asks what people need to be as okay as doable, and does it’s best to make that happen. This involves active community engagement, and does not necessarily entail the offender ever coming face to face with their victim, as while everyone has needs in this situation the person who was hurt comes first. Restorative justice programs exist today, but often in forms tacked onto the existing legal system.

Transformative justice understands that no action occurs in isolation, that people do not simply choose to harm others out of nowhere. As a process it seeks to understand why a harmful act occurred, what about the community in which it occurred could be changed to prevent future acts, and how such a change can be made. At it’s best, transformative justice prevents harm from ever happenning by preventing the conditions that cause it in the first place.

Both of these forms of justice require significant time and energy to work. It is entirely valid not to seek justice sometimes, as it is a lot of work, amd these processes might not offer any outcome that’s worth that work. Though in the case of sexual assault in particular we desparately need some transformation. As long as we continue to try fixing a fundamentally broken system instead of building something better, we will see sexual assault and SLAPP suits continue.

It’s going to take a lot more than legal challenges to hold the people profitting off of this to account. The system is designed so that those with money can drag things out, something oil companies in particular are expert about. Plus the rich write the laws, and love fossil fuels’ effect on their wallets, I doubt they’ll take this seriously until we’re well over the brink.

But there is another way. Fossil fuel infrastructure exists physically, it can be destroyed with a few dedicated people, a good plan, and high risk tolerance. Executives and billionairres also exist in the physical world, as bodies that require food, shelter, and medical care. I’m honestly surprised there hasn’t been more focus on making change where they are weak, instead of this focus on institutions and policy where they have already stacked the deck.

They are further along their trajectory now. They were always heading this direction, that much should have been obvious to a lot of people all along. I believe it was, but that the endless propaganda of the US media machine kept most of its population from realizing it. There are all sorts of (arguably) respectable political issues conservatives of the past focussed their words on, while their actions spoke different.

Some of them might even have believed they wanted ‘small government’ or ‘fiscal responsibility’. But their actions were clear in intent, from racial segregation, to the Red Scare, to suppressing social movements, to implementing a politic of austerity. I only fail to mention war because their liberal ‘opposition’ carries roughly equal blame for the US war machine.

The people today may be different in body, action, word, but this is a continuation of a long political project that ended up in facism.

I have one of those too! Glad yours is blooming. Mine flowers sometimes, but sadly it got infected with thrips a couple years ago and I haven’t been able to kill them. It flowers less often, but does okay with regular maintenance on my end (rubbing all the surfaces with a little neem oil and soap in water).

For real, this is sobering information. I already try to avoid microwaving plastics, but I’m gonna be even more careful now, and try to spread this study. Billions of nanoplastics per square centimeter, it’s scary to think about the size of containers, number that would likely be used in a day, and the fact that infants are so small with that information in context.