Superman: Red & Blue #5 - “De-Escalation” (2021)

I love this. The stories that show supers being HEROES are these: talking, de-escalating, helping, being supportive, kind and convincing. Clark is a hero without ever having to be Superman.

Oh this….. this I like.

On one hand, yes. All of this.

On the other hand. “You got X-Ray vision or something?” Yes. Yes he does.

HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE SINGLE GREATEST SUPERMAN-FOCUSED WORK I HAVE EVER SEEN AND THAT IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION.

We’re winning.

I found his bio on societyofpresidentialdescendants.org and it was so delightful I had to copy paste the whole thing:

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.

“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”

And frankly, the novels sound like they slap:

Desmond was nominated for a Lambda Award.

“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know ... they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.

DONT USE THE PIRATE BAY PLEASEEEE I BEG YOU.

Use 1337x.to rarbg or rutracker, highly moderated public torrent trackers, because Pirate Bay has long been shut down, unmoderated, and cloned by some shady actors AND use Mullvad VPN (or any other vpn but mullvad is the best definitely) to protect your ip address while you torrent, bind it to qbittorrent and do not use utorrent anymore either because it is littered with adware.

OR if you don’t want to pay for a VPN, use direct download or streaming sites. Please y’all just take one pass through on the r/piracy or r/freemediaheckyeah mega threads to find whatever you want for free and also not infect your computer with Trojan viruses.

^^^ yes!!! Thank you sm.

If any of those terms made you go ????? and you think pirating must be So Hard, I wrote a verbose but easy to follow guide a while back for total beginners!

Because I KNOW some of y'all are gonna pirate anyway... Read this and/or hit up Uncle K'allen, spawn

Gravity legally cannot hurt you if you scream “NO GODS NO MASTERS” immediately before impact

I’m so fucking tired of this bicycle helmet discourse. Bike helmets aren’t going to do shit to protect you if you get hit by a car

Most of the time… Bike accidents…. Involve things…. Other than cars…… like the ground….also it’s safety gear….. Wearing it is non negotiable…. You are one accident away from being permanently disabled….. You need to protect your brain

Not towards OP

Is OSHA and other safety regulations also cop behavior?

*sigh* The belief that OSHA and other safety regulations are cop behavior are common opinions that people have, anarchist or not. Wearing PPE is annoying and often uncomfortable, sweaty, and cumbersome. People also generally hate being told to be careful, because they believe that “be careful” is synonymous with “hey, you’re too stupid to do that without hurting yourself”.

But all it takes is one time for you to slip up and suddenly the grinder disk that would have gotten stuck in your safety glasses is in your eye, or you’re getting treated for lung cancer because you didn’t want to wear your respirator while you welded. These are decisions that you were free to make, but might seriously regret later on.

People will scream until they’re blue in the face about how oppressive it is to have to wear a safety vest and hard hat on a construction site, but do you really think that the hammer that slipped out of your buddy’s hand is going to take that into consideration when it collides with your skull?

No political theory will save you from an accident. You can either wear your PPE, or can die, unexpectedly, painfully, and slowly. The choice is yours. Go argue with a lathe if you feel so strongly about it.

@breelandwalker it is criminal to leave this scorching point in the tags

a few points:

• every safety rule is written in blood

• OSHA exists so the boss can’t force you to die for their profits. it was started as a result of union action, as a direct response to the triangle shirtwaist factory fire. OSHA is constantly fighting for worker’s rights and protection. whistleblower laws protect any employee who makes an OSHA complaint against their employer, and anyone who reports is guaranteed anonymity and aggressive legal support against retaliation. there is also a separate health and safety administration for miners in the USA called MSHA.

• the people most likely to get hurt on the job are not apprentices or senior workers approaching retirement. the new hire is careful because they’re green, and still learning, and still unfamiliar with the tools and the work. the old hand is careful because retirement is within sight and they want to make it there. the person who gets hurt is usually the journeyman at the peak of their career—in their 30s-50s, an expert at their trade, their tools feel like an extension of themselves, and they’re so comfortable they forget to be careful. they’ve gotten lucky cutting corners or using something incorrectly or taking off a guard or leaving off some safety equipment 1000 times but one day they’re tired or distracted or too comfortable or too confident and the luck runs out.

• some accidents you cannot just avoid with skill, or you have no personal control over them. sometimes you have to trust your coworkers with your life. the big blue crane collapse killed three ironworkers who were on an observation platform, doing other work, far from the crane, with no ability to prevent or escape the collapse. the crane collapsed as a result of being operated despite adverse conditions, despite the normal crane operator refusing to run the crane due to adverse conditions making it unsafe, and was filmed because a safety inspector was recording the violation and attempting to stop it. the operator of the crane got out safely, but three ironworkers who were hundreds of feet away, who didn’t know the crane would be operating despite unsafe wind speeds, and who were trapped in midair anyways with no way to avoid or escape the collapse, and who above all just had to trust that everyone on the job site would be working safely and doing their jobs correctly, died. that footage has been used in every OSHA training i have ever been in.

• every safety rule is written in blood.

hi my store is open again with a new print <3

get ur gold foil print here! ⬇ :>

half my star disciple prints have been bought!! 👀 sounds like i need to make more foil prints... 😳

Like as an alcoholic I HATE the fatphobia related to any form of treatment. The idea that I should stop drinking cause it'll make me lose weight, the way doctors will point out my "beer belly" before they talk about my liver or my kidneys or the social aspect of my drinking problem, the way people only care about my drinking problem cause it makes me fat. You don't care about me as someone who's struggling with addiction.

I encourage non alcoholics to like and or reblog this because it's a unique experience of fatphobia you don't understand if you've never tried to get help for a drinking problem.

Muriel Fahrion, the creator of Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears, was under a work for hire contract when she created them and as a result has received no residuals over the last 40+ years. If you like either of those properties, consider purchasing something from her website. She has art and cute jewelry!

Solidarity Summer is well and truly ramping up. AS IT FUCKING SHOULD.

And another one! 📢

Barnes and Noble booksellers are working on forming a union as well! 

https://www.reddit.com/r/union/comments/rwczci/barnes_noble_workers_want_union/

Their flagship store and New York has unionized along with 3-4 other stores! This is happening! People are tired of being seen as dollar signs and being made to work just to get to work more, to survive instead of thrive. Keep it UP. 

Shut. It. All. Down.

Good. We all finally figured out they’re happy to pay us less and “replace” (ie not hire anyone, snowing the few that still have a job in) and are doing the thing.

prompt: "murder is good actually" au

danny moves to gotham and is actually shocked by how many ghosts were born there due to violent deaths, still lingering and waiting for their murderers to be put down for good. he starts a "can we have a little murder? as a treat?" campaign to convince batman that nobody in the city would think less of him if he let the joker die. it gets popular real fast

No one knows how the poster known as GhostsOfGotham solves his cases. No one even knows what he looks like. All they know is that every single piece of information that he's posted on a quickly-spread, blog-like website is accurate.

The location of bodies who have been lost for years? Posted.

The wishes of the dead for their families? All names were correct. All desires were in character.

And he kept a death-count.

As the weeks went by and Oracle and Red Robin tried to track down the elusive Ghost in their system, the map filled in.

All the dead of Gotham, given voice.

Honestly, they almost didn't want to find the Ghost. He had given hundreds of families closure.

But he was calling for the Joker's death, and Batman wanted Ghost found.

When Oracle recognized names from cases her father had specifically lost sleep over, individuals whom he had never been able to give answers on, she knew she wasn't going to turn Ghost in, even if she found him.

He was right.

The Joker needed to die.

And Batman should let it happen.

It's nearing two months since the website appeared when Batman learns who Ghost is. Or at least, where to find him.

There's a video on the computer in the mostly-bare apartment that begins playing when Batman opens the door. It starts playing on the website at the same time.

~~

"Oh good, it looks like our guest has arrived," says an individual, looking at the camera, quickly going from looking bored to a look of set purpose. "Batman, please continue to watch this. I want to show you something. To those following my cause, yes, the video is live."

The Ghost is tall and lithe with muscles befitting a gymnast. His skin is green-tinged and ears pointed, and his eyes glow green under a mop of pure white, gently swaying hair.

He wears a black suit of leather armor, trimmed in white, and a sword rests in its scabbard at his hip.

He turns and steps to the side of the video screen, showing a large, empty warehouse.

"Alright, everyone, visibility please."

And the screen is filled with the echoes and images of the dead as hundreds of ghosts become visible. A faint green glow comes off Ghost, siphoning out to the crowd as if he is giving them the energy to become visible.

Several watchers recognize faces amongst the spectral crowd.

"These are all victims of murder within Gotham city," Ghost continues. "If you were killed by the Joker, please remain visible."

Several within the crowd fade to invisibility. Far too many remain seen.

"If you were killed after," and here Ghost states a date. A date Batman recognizes as an opportunity he had to kill the Joker. "Please remain visible."

Too many remain.

"If you were killed after," another date. Another opportunity for the Joker to have been killed.

Too many remain.

This continues for a few more dates.

There were still at least a hundred ghosts visible.

The Ghost of Gotham returns to the center of the camera stream. Batman has the stream pulled up on his display as he searches for the warehouse.

"There is a point where inaction is as loud as any action," the Ghost says.

Perhaps...

The camera turns, and a bound and gagged Joker comes into view, Ghost walking calmly into frame and pulling the sword at his hip. Icy light exudes from it, mist condensing around the blade.

"As King Phantom and voice for the Dead, I sentence the Joker to death. Batman. I am at," he lists an address. "I am ending the stream before acting, as this is not a bid for publicity, but for justice. You have twenty minutes to make your decision. If you arrive within that time, I will turn the Joker over to you and the mortal police, though I can not promise his safety against the shades of Gotham now that I have granted them the energy to physically manifest for a time. If you do not arrive, he will be executed by my decree. The choice is yours."

“You are responsible for the minors in your fandom!!!”

No, I’m fucking not. I’m not your parent. My past-times do not automatically sign me up to act in loco parentis. If you need someone else to monitor your own content consumption online, go get mommy and/or daddy to set up a content blocker on your computer.

Louder for the minors in the back, please.

What I’m responsible for in my fandom:

1. Making a good faith effort to include relevant and informative tags and labels on my creative works.

2. Making a good faith effort to use the “author chose not to warn” rating, a “contains potentially upsetting content” note, cuts or community ratings, or otherwise indicating that there might be untagged, triggering content if I’m not up to or don’t want to tag it.

3. Being a good fandom citizen; not sending death threats or hate, not bullying people, being kind and thoughtful to those I interact with, and leaving alone things that would prompt me to act otherwise.

4. Curating my own experience; not engaging with people or material that I know will be harmful or upsetting to me, disengaging when I realize that something is harmful or upsetting to me, and using tools such as blocklists and tag filters to hide content I don’t want to see.

5. Doing the opposite of whatever the fuck bullshit is going on in tiktok at all times.

Being a good fandom citizen; not sending death threats or hate, not bullying people, being kind and thoughtful to those I interact with, and leaving alone things that would prompt me to act otherwise.

It is simply JUST that easy. All the fandom shit exists because people choose to behave badly and it’s too often younger ones holding fandom spaces as societal influence & activism spaces instead of a HOBBY SPACES.

If you’re old enough to search out fandom content, you are old enough to curate your own experience. We didn’t have algorisms when I was younger and that’s what you had to do

Now you have a much easier time of avoiding what you don’t want to see. It is still up to YOU provided things are tagged properly.

If you walk into a tagged work and don’t like it, it’s on YOU.

I'm a fandom mom. I do not let the "mom" color my experience. I did teach my one and only spawn how to be responsible for his own experience. He turned 18 a month ago, and not once did I have to save him from getting in over his head. Neither did I ever fuss at any of his favorite creators about "must keep safe for the children!"

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

Some people have been wondering about the raccoon. Listen. Listennn. Don't ask about the raccoon.

But does the racoon survive the Uruk-Hai? Does he curl up on Aragorn's head, or does he go straight to Faramir? Does he bite Denethor?

My friend. My colleague. My brother my captain my king. I too have been pondering this question, and in my mind there can be only one ultimate outcome.

A few months later

All hail the High Warden of Gondor.

Epilogue: It ADORES Faramir.

I’m going to wear this on my head like a raccoon and show everyone

so, let's talk about this. because it's not quite true

Barbie was not the only fashion doll on the market (much less the only one to ever exist, a worrying claim from the first Barbie movie trailer). Dolls like Madame Alexander's Cissy, Ideal's Miss Revlon, and Uneeda's Dollikin were all available before Barbie's 1959 release

While Mattel would love for you to believe that Barbie was the first, Cissy- released in 1955 -would like a word.

Ruth Handler might well have SAID that she "noticed the only dolls on the market were babies," but she and her husband ran an existing toy company; Barbie was not Mattel's first project. She 100% would have been aware of the other fashion dolls available. In short: if she said that, she was...almost certainly stretching the truth.

There was indeed pushback against fashion dolls from cultural commentators who thought little girls should only play with baby dolls, to encourage Maternal Instincts(TM)...but that dates at least back to the French fashion dolls of the 1860s-1890s, which were accused of making little girls "worldly" in magazines of the day. It wasn't a new idea developed especially in response to Barbie.

What set Barbie apart from other fashion dolls was twofold:

Still unusual! Just not unique

But I'm not really here to split hairs about which was the actual first 1950s fashion doll. My main thesis is this: Barbie was NOT originally meant to be empowering.

...or disempowering. Or anything but a fashion doll for which a businesswoman trying to make money felt there was a niche.

Yes, she had a career at the beginning- as a fashion model. Hardly a job many men were trying to keep women out of. The first non-modeling careers she had were ballerina, flight attendant, and registered nurse, female-dominated fields that nobody was challenging women's right to pursue.

(Original Barbie box. If you can't read the text, it says "Barbie(T.M.) Teen Age Fashion Model.")

That's not to say that Handler was completely without deeper thoughts on Barbie's place in the world. She was adamant that, while Barbie might model a bridal gown, she would never actually marry Ken to prevent her from being tied down as a wife and mother. And certainly later in her life, she got onboard with the "girls can do anything!" messaging of later Barbie generations.

But to say that Barbie was intended to be #empowering or make a statement from the beginning is just revisionist history that's bound to leave people disappointed. I mean, what's Twitter OP going to think when they discover that an early Barbie babysitting set came with a little book called "How to Lose Weight" that simply said "Don't eat!" on the back? Handler was still president of the company at the time- how does that fit with this starry-eyed vision of her creating an empowering doll for little girls?

Putting Barbie on a pedestal is going to lead to just as rude an awakening as casting her in the "worthless bimbo doll" role.

i’d also like to chime in with some cynicism about the mythologized state of american women’s empowerment in the late 50s. women knew they could do men’s jobs because they had done them during the war. fifteen years previously women had built ships and airplanes! they’d flown cargo planes and drove trucks and worked in mines and and worked farms and fought fires and kept things running while men went off and killed themselves. then the surviving men came back and demanded, as their due, that all the women get back to the kitchen. and some women agreed and some women disagreed and were violently persuaded to agree. and that was the 50s.

women were very much removed, wholesale, by force, from the workplaces they had capably run. they were allowed to substitute for men in a pinch, but never ever compete with them. and the men who enforced this relegation knew very well that women could do men’s jobs, because they had just done them. it was imperative after that to make sure what had just happened was seen as a tragic aberration of the natural order, and best forgotten.

so like. women in the 60′s weren’t inventing women’s empowerment from a state of childish innocence. the older you get the more you realize fifteen, twenty years isn’t all that long. things can change, fast, and for the worse. these girls with their air hostess barbies, their aunts might have been pilots.

every step forward, women clawed back from men by force. feminism wasn’t invented out of a naive ignorance of any alternatives, where women suddenly suggest a bold new idea that just occurred to them and then men realize what big sillies they all were. women can do anything that men can do, and they always have. the fight is over whether or not they get to. 

Toad Words

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up with parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…

Later

Later

Later

Later

Later

So SOMEONE (my dog) is a HORRIBLE CRIMINAL (somehow got a closed cabinet open and ate an entire box of molasses cookies)

This is the third time she has committed Crimes for this particular brand of molasses cookie, which happens to be my favorite. Each time I have escalated the Cookie Security measures, and each time she has figured out how to defeat them to get to the cookies anyway.

Am contemplating child locks and/or the top of the fridge.

Cookie Theft Crime the First;

I had purchased a box of cookies. I set it, foolishly, on the kitchen counter, forgetting that I now had a Tall Dog who can easily put her paws on the counter and reach the top of it. Came home from work to find the cookies gone and the dog unrepentant. Began training her to stay out of the kitchen. This worked, but only when we were there. She won't go in the kitchen if we are around, but if we aren't watching she figures the laws don't apply.

Cookie Theft Crime the Second;

We baby-gated the kitchen off. However, Tyr, being a great Pyr, is most of the time a lazy shag rug of a dog who likes to nap on top of the air conditioning vent for the nice cool breeze. HOWEVER, when motivated by a coyote in her yard or a package of molasses cookies in the kitchen, she transforms into an athletic beast of a dog. She quickly discovered that she could jump over the baby gate with ease. The cookie box was found chewed open and the cookies eaten upon returning home from work. Dog was unrepentant.

Cookie Theft Crime the Third;

After the baby gate plan had failed, I put the cookies in a cabinet. This has worked to ensure cookie safety for several months. HOWEVER, she has somehow figured out that if she paws at the cabinet door exactly right it will open enough for her to shove her nose in, and then it's all over for the cookie box. She ignored the bags of potato chips in the same cabinet. She was only after the coveted Kwik Star Soft Baked Molasses Cookies. Dog was unrepentant.

Am currently investigating magnetic catches for cabinets.

The fact that this is more or less exactly how I act when told to stay out of something is not lost on me, incidentally.

Message AF!!

THE POST OFFICE DOES NOT COST MONEY

IT IS SELF FUNDED

THE. POST. OFFICE. IS. SELF. FUNDED.

THE POST OFFICE IS SELF FUNDED I AM GOING TO KEEP FUCKING SCREAMING THIS UNTIL THE PRIVATIZATION ARGUMENTS CEASE

SOURCE BECAUSE I AM A GOOD SCIENTIST: https://facts.usps.com/top-facts/

exhale

and

prepare coffee

reblogging this again because it SHOULD cost money we SHOULD be pouring tax dollars into it and sending letters should be FREE and packages should be LOW COST and FAST because we SUBSIDIZE with community money.

I swear to God there's a whole swath of people in the US who will not REST until we're all charged by the minute for the water we drink, the air we breathe, and every blink we take.

Stop coming for the USPS. Not only is it self-funded as mentioned above, but "it's not profitable" should NEVER be an argument against services that support basic needs. We should be working toward making things like public transit, healthcare, utilities, etc. entirely free-to-use via government funding, not arguing to whittle things down for not being Amazon-esque-enough.

The Economist can eat my ass.

Hey remember when they found over 200 bodies of native children buried behind a residential school and the world cared for... what, a week?

They've counted about 6,000-7,000 now, for those of you who do still care

It should NOT fall on Indigenous people's shoulders to keep this known still. We’ve been doing that for generations at this point and NO ONE wants to listen to us.

We’re tired, mourning and constantly reopening our trauma and pain to keep people caring about us. It’s terrible.

I should start by noting that I am white, and not Canadian, and that if op wants me to remove this comment for any reason, please let me know.

This is a map of all the residential schools in Canada:

[link to the article it’s attached to, it’s interactable there, so you can get a better look around]

Each dot on this map represents a residential school. Blue dots mean the school is considered completely searched. Yellow dots mean they are either in the process of being searched or there are plans to be searched. Red dots indicate that no search has happened and that no search is currently planned

There were more than 130 residential schools in Canada. This map suggests that only six have been fully searched, and a little more than a dozen partially searched (I counted 15 yellow dots). That leaves at least 109 schools completely untouched.

Let that sink in; if 6,000-7,000 unmarked, indigenous children’s graves were found by searching less than a fifth of all the schools, how many are still undiscovered.

Wikipedia estimates that the body count could be over 50,000, and honestly, that could be a low estimate

[ID: A map of Canada with dozens of dots on it, 6 of which are blue and 7 of which are yellow; the rest are red. Later there is a screenshot from wikipedia reading, “Estimates range from 3,200 to over 50,000 children that were killed. Most of the recorded student deaths at residential schools took place before the 1950s. /end ID]

The residential school system was a calculated, open, and forthrightly declared attempt at the total genocide of all indigenous peoples in this country. It was literally meant to wipe them out entirely, through a combination of attrition and assimilation.

Never forget that this is what Canada is really built upon.

These are the residential schools in the U.S. I've mapped out the ones in California and there are articles about burials on these sites, some marked and some not.

I hope Secretary Haaland's Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigates every single one; their report is Due on April 1, 2022,

reminder that genocide doesn’t just include ending people’s lives, it includes eradicating their culture. forced assimilation of an entire people is an attempt at genocide.

right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters. 

Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.

You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.

I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:

No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.

No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).

Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.

If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).

Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.

As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.

There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.

Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.

Speaking as a Michigan resident:  Look at the laws being passed in Michigan.  Now look at the laws being passed in Florida.  Spot the difference?  That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party.  That’s the difference.  They’re different parties.  It is not the same.

You want what we’ve got?  Vote for it.

(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled?  Keep fucking voting.)

D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy

look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill. 

But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting

Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.

Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.

Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.

Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:

close gender pay gaps raise federal minimum wage make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants protect civil/public water sources from pollution cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change increase gun regulation lower and control prescription drug prices improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions protect net neutrality protect gay marriage rights

these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years. Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights. 

when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources

So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.

Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.

I live in Pennsylvania.

Neither of my children is cisgender.

The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?

That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.

And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.

You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.

Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.