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@lukewarm-mop-water

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lukewarm-mop-water
cathkaesque
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cathkaesque

When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

lukewarm-mop-water
the-haiku-bot
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sigynpenniman

A short list of things I think everyone should try or do at least once in their life that will make you feel more alive. Not all of these are applicable to every person, but it’s a summary:

  • Take a dance class of any style with a semi-serious instructor for at least 4 classes worth
  • Write a work of fiction, of *any* length and *any* quality
  • Learn a least a bit of a language that isn’t your native one. You don’t need to become anywhere near fluent, but try and get a bit beyond yes, no, and where’s the bathroom. If you’re from a country where most people are bilingual already, that doesn’t count! Get bits of a language with which you are truly unfamiliar.
  • In the same vein, make peace with subtitles and start consuming music, TV and movies from cultures that aren’t your own. If your country imports large amounts of media from a specific other culture or cultures (American movies in foreign markets, for example) that also doesn’t count! Get some feelers out to begin to take in content from a culture that you don’t already have a lot of knowledge of.
  • Try at least one less common/less “exercisey” and more fun type of physical exercise such as roller blading or roller or ice skating, gymnastics, trampoline, rock climbing, aerial silks, pole dancing, surfing, etc
  • Learn a hobby or craft that produces a physical finished product and produce a single, complete object - regardless of quality - that you can hold in your hands and say that you made.
  • Look up a how it’s made video or YouTube video on how an item that’s interesting or relevant to you is made
  • Give one type of thing - media, hobby, sport, whatever - that you’ve never been interested in or never tried because of some preconceived perception an honest shot and see if your perception was correct. Sometimes it won’t be, sometimes it will be, but it’s valuable to know.
  • Rearrange the furniture in a room in your home

It’s about NOVELTY, babey! Get some enrichment into your enclosure!

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penmaries

I've been doing all of these things and my brain and body feel so nice

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the-haiku-bot

I’ve been doing all

of these things and my brain and

body feel so nice

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

lukewarm-mop-water
manywinged
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curseworm

bitches r like "i can suture the wound that drains you of life. i can close the gash through which your days leak away hour by hour" uhm the wound is endlessly extending 😂 like the tracks of a snake through desert sand

lukewarm-mop-water
sweatermuppet
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sweatermuppet
lukewarm-mop-water
politicsofcanada
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politicsofcanada
Anonymous asked:

The oil companies want us to think we are doomed to keep us from action or maybe keep us from collective action and solidary with our fellow humans

politicsofcanada answered:

absolutely! there are three main narratives that oil companies push, and they are as follows:

  1. Climate denial. That the climate crisis is a myth and oil extraction and use cause no harm to the environment.
  2. Individual accountability. That we should each focus on reducing our personal carbon footprints and that will be enough to end climate change, without corporations or governments having to make a change.
  3. Inevitable doom. That nothing can be done to effectively combat the climate crisis, so we might as well just give up and not even try.

None of these are even remotely true, and we can't let these narratives stop us from collectively fighting for change.

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lukewarm-mop-water
wanlittlehusk
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ecrituria

Ever since I took a class on material culture and the significance of things and objects in our lives, I’ve started taking note of relevant readings I come across. For those interested, below is a partial list:

The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard

My master thesis on The Bed

lukewarm-mop-water
headspace-hotel
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headspace-hotel

ecological wisdom. understanding of humans as part of the natural world instead of separate from it. uggghhggh this is the great crisis facing us. I don't even know where to start.

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headspace-hotel

We are not going back to some sort of Edenic pre-colonialism pre-industrial revolution primeval wilderness. We are not going to extirpate Kudzu from the United States. We are definitely not going to herd everyone into cities and leave "nature" untouched.

I think people growing their own food is a great idea but doing so sustainably is not easy or intuitive.

Do y'all know about soil? Everything goes back to soil. The average person does not know what topsoil is. Some people have never touched it.

Nature isn't just in an old growth forest where no hikers ever visit or a national park where people can't hunt or fish. Nature is on the side of the road, in a disused pasture, along the drain pipe, in the sidewalk cracks. What is happening here is infinite and cannot be stopped, but will never be repeated. This convergence of plants, fungi, insects, birds, it is strange and disturbing, but all the others before it were also strange in some way.

Our world has been changed irreparably, it will be changed again, but we have to observe it, learn about it, and participate in it.

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headspace-hotel
  • the concept of "natural" areas uninfluenced by humans is false
  • Are forests and prairies better, ecosystem-wise, than lawns, roadsides, drainage ditches, gravel lots, and pastures? Yes. Does this mean that those "disturbed" environments are not "nature" or that they cannot be observed, learned about, and cared for in a way that increases their value for biodiversity? No, it does not.
  • the enemy is the total ignorance most people have about nature. People know facts about nature, as something that is Out There Somewhere In The Woods, and can be very passionate about it but can they identify the plants growing on a roadside? do they know if a nursery is selling an invasive tree
  • Land stewardship is largely carried out by people whose only tools as caretakers are lawnmowers, weed whackers and RoundUp.
  • But this is nonsense because the idea of "land stewardship" doesn't exist. A developer that purchases 250 acres of land has zero responsibility toward that land and faces zero consequences for destroying it. This is normal and everyone thinks it's fine
  • We have no social or cultural role whose job it is to maintain and teach practical, applied ecological wisdom??????? None???????????
  • It's not even seen as a legitimate science. Gardening and landscaping in our society have no ethical responsibilities or guidelines for "best practice" and do not need to be based on facts. Culturally, we have no standards or expectations for acceptable land stewardship practices, except in a few designated ""natural"" areas. The people that manage most land used by humans are not required to know anything outside of how to operate machines and apply pesticides. The only "experts" in the realm of everyday maintenance of human-used spaces are companies interested in profiting no matter the cost.
  • The websites and books that teach the extremely basic fundamentals of growing plants and close-to-home environmental caretaking are full of misinformation, errors, lies, and total misunderstandings of basic principles, and no one thinks this is weird or concerning
lukewarm-mop-water
dingdongyouarewrong
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molsno
What I believe is happening in the case of coming across a public expression of sexuality, or a trans woman in a dress, or someone wearing a BDSM collar, or a woman in a short skirt is that these things will strike some people as inherently "sexual" in ways that other things (such as topless men and wedding rings) do not. And things that strike us as "sexual" may evoke sexual stigma in our minds. And this experience of sexual stigma - which can act indirectly and from a distance, as we've all seen with fears of "contagiousness" - can make us feel as if we are being "nonconsensually" implicated in a "sexual" activity, even though no boundaries have actually been breached, and the supposed act may not even be sexual for the other party. Such overreaches are worrisome, not only because they further marginalize those who are already unfairly "marked by sex" in our culture, but also because they can dilute or weaken legitimate claims of nonconsent in cases where actual sexual violence has been perpetrated.

- Julia Serano, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back