I think about this post every time I wash my sheets

Please Reblog. Our LGBTQ communities need our help.

please stop writing "viscous" when you mean "vicious", it produces the weirdest mental images ever

"a viscous murder" yeah i don't want to know what that could look like

it looks like the Boston Molassacre of 1919

The history of corporate propaganda.

I vividly remember attending a training session with a scan from an 1880-something newspaper that said "unions used to be something we needed, but we're past that now." The corporate propaganda hasn't changed in 130+ years.

I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.

I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."

Feel free to repost, no need for credit

Happy May Day, y’all.

MISS CONGENIALITY | 2000 

I want to be very clear: I did not schedule this to post on Easter weekend.

I want to be very clear: I did schedule this to post on Easter weekend

i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake

fabulous 

i mean they did also kill jesus. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did kill jesus.

#HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY

The system is rigged. The advantages for the wealthy are immediate and endless.

If your vote didn’t matter THEY WOULDN’T BREAK LAWS LEFT AND RIGHT TO KEEP YOU FROM VOTING

Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.

I WOULD LIVE AT THAT PLACE. I love my library.

Killing women of color has NEVER bothered a Republican politician. You could show Republicans this maternal mortality data a thousand times and they would not care.

BARBARA HOWARD & MELISSA SCHEMMENTI ABBOTT ELEMENTARY | S02E19, Festival

I’m so god damn tired of not just leftists, but even left-leaning people holding absolutely unrealistic, all-but-impossible positions which have no acknowledgement of any nuance whatsoever and then calling anyone who tries to give a dose of reality a shill or a bootlicker. Honestly, it’s not even enlightened to hold some of these positions because you just reveal yourself to have no grasp of incredibly complex issues. If this sounds vague, it’s because it can apply to how people online react to many different issues.

It’s always like, “X system is evil and it shouldn’t exist!”

Ok but it does. Do you have any suggestions for what people are supposed to do right here, right now? It’s really easy to sit back and make internet posts about how a system shouldn’t exist but it’s harder to do just about anything else.

God. This. Fuck. Like…leftists/left-leaning people who spout this shit exhaust me because like, I work in social services? And like…I’m on the ground in the system as it is? I work in homeless services? I worked in mental health? And, uh, okay? You can absolutely say the system as it is is broken and shouldnt exist and I will fucking agree with you but it’s never followed up with “but the system is flawed but here’s some practical things to do right now” and when ever practical things are proposed - things like “maybe change this one thing - like make more mental health services available for free? maybe change that one thing - make more ebt available?” its always jumping onto “this feeds into the oppressive system! this is perpetuation of poverty! mental health systems as they exist are colonizers!” and I’m just like…okay Friere fucking get out there in your community and practice some true fucking generosity because the false charity you’re criticizing isn’t going to dismantle itself. Fuck.

Besides, “Revolution” “Trash the system” rarely if ever brings lasting change … Usully it brings a period of instability and unrest where things are even worse and then everyone goes back to the way things where becasue no one has a better idea …

Speaking of better ideas, may I introduce you to Housing First

Housing First is a policy that offers permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. Begun in 1988 to address the needs of homeless families with children in Los Angeles, California, Housing First was popularized in the following decades and became government policy in the United States and various other countries.

Housing First is an alternative to a system of emergency shelter/transitional housing progressions. Rather than moving homeless individuals through different “levels” of housing, whereby each level moves them closer to “independent housing” (for example: from the streets to a public shelter, and from a public shelter to a transitional housing program, and from there to their own apartment in the community), Housing First moves the homeless individual or household immediately from the streets or homeless shelters into their own accommodation.

Housing First approaches are based on the concept that a homeless individual or household’s first and primary need is to obtain stable housing, and that other issues that may affect the household can and should be addressed once housing is obtained. In contrast, many other programs operate from a model of “housing readiness” — that is, that an individual or household must address other issues that may have led to the episode of homelessness prior to entering housing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First

I havent commented on most of these but - again - social worker. And literally no one who actually works with the homeless and knows it exists believes that any system but Housing First is going to make any fucking impact. I’m posting this from my last ever shift at a homeless shelter that did its best to work by the Housing First model. And it WORKS. Okay? I’ve seen it work. I’ve been at a non-congregate shelter for the whole fucking pandemic and instead of putting people in bunkbeds in an open room, we gave them hotel rooms with doors that lock and their own showers and tv and 3 meals a day. And the number of people I watched - in person, first hand - get employed, ease up on their substance use, find permanent housing? MASSIVE. More than I’ve ever seen in any other social services site I’ve worked. And that was JUST giving people a room of their own to go and be safe for the night and food that was THEIRS. People’s entire appearances changed when they knew - KNEW - they’d be safe for the night, when they had an address they could get their mail delivered to, when they could access wifi on their phones instead of using what little pay-as-you-go data they had. But the amount of fights I personally had with clients railing against curfew rules, mask protocol, social distancing, and drug policies? Tremendous. Some of them written, some physical, mostly verbal and often so loud and so angry - which the clients have every right to be cuz the situation does suck for them. BUT. To some degree it always boiled back down to that “why isn’t this perfect NOW?” element - although again, living in the situation gives them a lot more excuse to ask those questions and raise those complaints than anyone on the outside looking in. Doesn’t change the fact that the reason’s the same.

It’s not perfect or even better than what we are doing NOW because this is what we were allowed to fucking do. “This” is what we were ABLE to accomplish with the money and staff and medical emergency and policy available. And people are gonna throw “institution” at it, and be right, but we also got literal hundreds of people into housing and gave them a safe place to be while we did so. Why isn’t that progress good enough for RIGHT NOW some leftists? I’m not saying stop pushing. Never ever ever EVER stop pushing. Utah utilizes Housing First and - fucking shocker - has the lost homelessness rate of any state in the union. Finland is the only country that is utilizing Housing First on a national scale and - guess what - it’s also the only country where Homelessness is falling. In the last 20 years they’ve cut the number of people dealing with homelessnes IN HALF. Probably because Housing First reports a 80% retention rate - meaning only 20% of people who use the Housing First model become homeless again. Basically if 10 people are homeless and all of them are given Housing First apartments? Only 2 of them become homeless again. Substance use and mental health issues are reduced by FOURTY FUCKING PERCENT. My point here is that there are, actually, practical things that work and I know because I HAVE LITERALLY SEEN THEM WORK. Housing First? Works. Needle exchanges? Work. Food pantries? Work. Municipal community resource building of arts and recreation? Work. Restorative and pretrial-intervention justice systems? Work. THEY ALL FUCKING WORK. LESS PEOPLE SUFFER WHEN THESE ARE AVAILABLE. And if we leftists could stop - for a fucking second - dreaming glorious dreams of revolution and start fighting even half as hard for the in-system solutions that PRODUCE RESULTS NOW then maybe, just maybe, we could have enough people with their feet underneath them to actually, you know, make some of those radical fucking changes we want so badly. Anyway yeah - tonights my last night at this position and after a pandemic year in social(homeless specific) service? I needed to go off on this topicthread - just one last time.

I find the idea that we shouldn’t accept improvement and should instead hold out for a perfect system to be… almost more infuriating that conservativism.

Because it ends up hurting the same people- and those who already have it hardest get hurt the worst- but it’s harder to stomach coming from people who espouse the same values I do, but are willing to quite literally watch our friends die in the name of principle.

I’ve stopped speaking to 5 of my closest “leftist” friends in the past year and a half because they each each reached the point of advocating that people just die instead of exist in an imperfect system. The issues? Healthcare. Student Loans. LGBTQ+ protections. Healthcare again. The American Electoral system.

Yes. There are massive issues at hand. Working our entire lives, we will probably not see them all solved, and the improvements we might see will break or need improving again.

But if at any point you find yourself thinking “it would be better for people I care about to be oppressed to the point of death than for me to tolerate an improvement to the existing circumstance that isn’t everything I want to see”… well, it turns out We don’t share the same values after all.

“the glorious revolution,” were it to actually take place, would also, almost inevitably, end up doing the most harm to the already-marginalized and already-vulnerable.  you can say all you want that you’ll only target the real enemies but history has shown again and again and again that really, when it comes down to it, people who have decided to solve their problems by “finding and killing the right people” will eventually find that they are out of “right people” and are no closer to solving their problems, and when that happens their answer is always to broaden the definition of the “right people to kill.”

it turns out that people for whom supposedly leftist praxis is really all about “who do i get to hurt and feel good about it?” are pretty much functionally identical to fascists!  who knew!

Now THIS is allyship.