The Mistake Is Thinking That No Men Would Be Into This. Au Contraire, I Can Direct You To Whole Forums

Hey tumblr.

I want to share a post from The Guardian that was published today.

“Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.

“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”

People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.

“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.””

Everyone should read this article about “DOGE” tearing apart USAID (and then read more reporting about how they are being allowed to do the same to other US federal entities). Elon Musk and his minions are violating our highest laws and destroying lives and livelihoods in the US and abroad. USAID is less than 1% of the federal budget— this isn’t about cost-cutting or “investigating fraud”. It’s about cruelty and seeing how much unlawful devastation and psychological warfare they can get away with, with the intention to repeat this process at one federal agency after another. They already have access to IT systems at the Treasury, NOAA, and other agencies, and have taken over OPM (essentially HR for the federal government), using the latter to send demeaning and threatening e-mail blasts to civil servants.

I’m urging everyone who reads this to recognize what’s happening here and how abhorrent and frightening it is. I wager that even most people who wanted Trump back didn’t want a centibillionaire technocrat making unilateral decisions on which parts of the federal government to “feed into the wood chipper” (as he has described his team’s actions at USAID in a recent post on X, The Everything App).

Please call your elected representatives and urge them to act against Musk now— before his actions make our legislative branch totally irrelevant.

I’ve been seeing posts about Musk’s coup-in-progress going around on here, but I feel like a lot of people still aren’t aware of the extent of it, and I really want to help get the word out. I’m heartsick for all the civil servants at USAID and beyond. Some of them, their unions, and some Democratic congresspeople and others are speaking out, but these workers need us everyday Americans to speak out for them, too.

Thank you for reading. And anyone who isn’t American, please keep us in your thoughts.

Does anyone want to start a school based on a minority faith? Which would expose their Christian-normative hypocrisy. Watch them get up in arms about anything Muslim (even though that’s Abrahamic and conservative), Neopagan, or other ones. How would they feel about a Buddhist school made by Asian-Americans?

Mother Jones

The Supreme Court is about to let religion ruin public education

Two recent cases suggest that the era of secular schools is coming to an end.

In modern America, religious education is offered in private schools or in a homeschooling setting. Public education, by contrast, is secular, because the government is not in the business of sponsoring religious indoctrination. But in two cases the Supreme Court heard over roughly the last week, the justices appear ready to throw out public education as we know it and usher in a new era where tax dollars flow to religious schools and religion can dictate what is taught in public classrooms. When the decisions come down, public education may change forever. On Tuesday, the justices heard arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case over whether Oklahoma must fund a religious charter school that carries out religious instruction and hosts religious activities, including mass. Rather than consider this an affront to the separation of church and state, four Republican-appointed justices appeared outraged at the idea that a state would fund a charter school focused on language immersion or the arts but not one focused on religious instruction. Without ever acknowledging that the the First Amendment’s establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) prohibits government-sponsored religion, several expressed palpable anger that allowing only secular charter schools was a form of anti-religious discrimination. “All the religious school is saying is ‘Don’t exclude us on account of our religion,’” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. “If you go and apply to be a charter school and you’re an environmental studies school, or you’re a science-based school, or you’re a Chinese immersion school, or you’re a English grammar-focused school, you can get in. And then you come in and you say, ‘Oh, we’re a religious school.’ It’s like, ‘Oh, no, can’t do that, that’s too much.’ That’s scary.” He continued: “You can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second-class in the United States… And when you have a program that’s open to all comers except religion… that seems like rank discrimination against religion.” [ ... ] This case alone will be a bombshell if the court mandates that states begin funding religious schools through their charter school programs. But this term, the Supreme Court is poised to deliver a one-two punch. Last week, the court heard arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which it considered whether religious parents could opt their kids out of lessons that did not conform with their beliefs. Again, the GOP-appointed majority appeared ready to side with the plaintiffs and allow religious parents to pull kids from the classroom when material they object to is taught—a policy that threatens to create a backdoor through which religious parents have veto power over elements of the curriculum and classroom discussion.  In any school that cannot accommodate children leaving the classroom and being provided alternate materials, the religious preferences of a minority seem destined to dictate the curriculum for all. The likely result is the wide elimination of LGBTQ content. Teachers may fear answering a question about a gay politician, for example, or even displaying a picture of their same-sex partner on their desk. If the justices decide in the next few months to allow religious opt-outs in public schools and the creation of religious charter schools, it’s hard to see how public education will not change profoundly. In many districts, together the decisions would likely mean the only publicly-funded school options would be either explicitly religious or circumscribed by the religious preferences of certain parents.

So what if some people use the same stimulants for a high? It’s conservatives who think that only caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are ok and everything else should be illegal. Who would rather throw people in jail than give them treatment for addiction. Don’t judge someone else’s drug use, judge conservatives who are so draconian about it.

Hey jerks that use prescription ADHD meds to party, fuck you guys for all the hoops I had to jump through today to end up NOT getting my meds filled. I hope your shitty party high is worth the panic and upset of people who NEED THIS SHIT TO FUNCTION.

Crows are scavengers, they get a bad rap similar to vultures. But scavengers perform an ecological function similar to dung beetles, cleaning up waste. Corvids also are very smart birds, they have been observed using tools and even inventing new ones for a specific task. (Reaching inaccessible seeds, they’re omnivorous). As scavengers they have learned what situations are likely to generate dead bodies, following predators and even soldiers on the way to battle.

So maybe the crows follow around a villain character because they figured out he is likely to unalive someone. Nothing personal, they just are waiting for him to prepare their dinner.

logically I understand that crows have lots of folklore about them where they’re tricky and backstabbing and evil and that’s why they’re usually associated with characters who do at least one of those things but it always makes me :( because I am first and foremost a huge crow defender

yes they’re suspicious little shits. but they also have incredible communication abilities and strong social bonds. they’re intelligent opportunistic creatures just like humans, what do you expect?

Why conservatives and adjacent combine Chaos worship with the worst aspects of the Imperium

—————————————

Nurgle: infectious diseases are left to rampage unchecked, anyone more susceptible is left to die, food safety doesn’t matter, allergies don’t matter, infrastructure left to fall apart

Khorne: war for any reason or no reason, piss off everyone and break all treaties, no care for civilian casualties, commit atrocities because we can

Slaneesh: rape culture, sexualization of women and little girls

Tzeentch: lies, manipulation, gaslighting, psychological projection, cheating elections, plots within plots, think they can just magically make what they want happen

And

Imperial cult: xenophobia, intolerance of anyone and anything different, superstition and ~one single religion~ over science no matter the consequences

Also people forget to warn, the software itself should scan moving images for rapid changes of brightness and hide the video or gif behind a “do you want to see this” dialogue. TikTok did that, idk if it still does.

Please stop trigger tagging with #epilepsy tw/cw/warning/etc.

I need every single person to understand how horrible tumblr’s tagging system is

I go into the tag for epilepsy and its all flashing lights. We can’t use our own tag because people without epilepsy fill it up with improper warnings.

Use ‘flashing’ in place of ‘epilepsy’ in your tags. You aren’t warning people of epileptics, you’re warning us of flashing lights. Please please tag properly. Epileptics say this endlessly and constantly and it’s ignored. You are risking lives by doing this.

Here’s proof of what I mean:

THIS POST IS 100% OKAY TO REBLOG, I ENCOURAGE PEOPLE WITHOUT EPILEPSY TO ESPECIALLY DO SO!

Buses are a public health nightmare. Poor ventilation, people coughing, people vaping, one time I caught some jerk huffing inhalants. It’s like they’re trying to get you sick.

I know I sound like your mom but you kids need to stop fucking vaping

I don’t really have a choice since I can’t drive or afford a car. It’s bike or bus for me, ride shares are too expensive. But honestly I like bike riding anyway.

Bike propaganda by me

Those numbers are (360) 902-4111 for the governor and (360) 753-6200 for the attorney general

ICE and labor and Immigrant organizers

Between the (so called left-wing) people who hate technology and right wingers hating science and social progress, we might go back to the dark ages while calling it good. 🤦

Meanwhile I grew up on Star Trek and I desperately want a future like that. I believe in social and technological progress together. Technology can improve society if we use it that way, such as home labor saving devices helping women’s liberation. It is not however sufficient, we need the political will to make a more fair and equal world.

The recent surge of reactionary sentiment makes me wonder if there really is hope. But maybe this is just the “gets worse before it gets better” stage. I can hope.

In one of my posts the other day about how expensive smartphones are there were people saying that "the luddites had great ideas" like they were proto-socialists and all. And well. That isn't really the case, as some others explained their reaction to industrialization did not have any lasting change as a goal. I'm not really introduced to the historical specifics.

But anyways, what the luddites were like in 1800s England doesn't really matter as what identifying yourself as a luddite means in modern times: being anti-technology. And no, not skeptical of technology, not being in favor of a better use of technology, not hating on AI while liking other stuff. It's being anti-technology. Luddite is a word used for exaggerated positions like breaking machines. It's not a nuanced ideology or a thing you would like to be called.

And being anti-technology not only is as nonsensical as being anti-art or anti-philosophy, technology is one of the things that define humans since the Oldowan rock tools. But it also means being against progress. It is technology that has enabled social progress. It is technology that allow us to understand the world and also to build a fairer society. Material conditions and all that.

I will try to say this without getting into much theory or philosophy of science, but your focus should not be on calling certain technologies "good" or "bad" by nature, much less rejecting the advance of technology, as if that is possible or desirable at all. You should instead see how society uses technology and how the structures of society use it. And how to change society so that technology serves to the benefit of people instead of capital.

Anyways. Don't be a luddite.