There's 7 steps to Genocide. The last one is Denial which ensures it will work and kill anything left. The fact that there is literally people in Canada who genuinely believe natives are lying and creating conspiracies about residential schools to somehow hurt white people is insane. I don't even have words.
This is the slippery slope that people go down with bigotry and ignorance. Not speaking up for indigenous people and our issues allows these people to fester and feel safe in their disgusting views.
Our children are not even allowed peace in death. I have no words for how revolted and enraged I am. Share and always remind your friends and family that indigenous issues are EVERYONES issues even when its uncomfortable. We cannot allow people like this to think this is EVER acceptable to do. Use your privilege to shut them down
With so many real threats to women’s safety, it is confounding that this much time and attention is being lavished on a largely hypothetical risk. Every single case of someone being attacked is unacceptable, and everything must be done to protect women’s safety. Many cisgender women who support trans rights, myself included, have personal experience of sexual assault and take the topic extremely seriously. But the main threat to women comes overwhelmingly from men, not from trans women, who should not be penalised for the actions of predatory men. As a result, trans women and non-binary people are being excluded from single-sex spaces, putting them at a greatly increased risk of violence. Transgender people are far more likely to be survivors of sexual assault than perpetrators. The US Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime reports that 50% of transgender individuals are sexually abused or assaulted at one point in their lives, with some reports estimating the figure at 66% and even higher for groups such as transgender people of colour or with disabilities. Office for National Statistics data shows that trans people are twice as likely as cisgender people to be victims of crime; and, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, they are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime, including rape and sexual assault. Home Office statistics reveal that hate crimes against transgender people in England and Wales increased by 56% last year. But if transgender people are excluded from safe spaces, where exactly are they supposed to go? As history has shown us, “separate but equal” facilities are not a viable option. Of course, some trans people commit crimes, as do individuals from all demographics, including cisgender women. This should not invalidate the claims of everyone else from that group. If a handful of individuals take advantage of a system they should be held accountable, but it does not mean the service ought to be dismantled altogether, or rights stripped away from a whole community.
Source: archive.ph
Watch "I Explored The City of Tombs" on YouTube
darringtonshorthalt
King
ohgodhesloose
Worth noting that he protested loudly against the WWE doing a show in Saudi Arabia after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, and the company retaliated by making sure he hasn’t been on TV or PPV since. Not fired, of course, so they can keep selling merchandise with his face on it (and keep him from joining the competition), just out of the public eye so he and his protests gets forgotten by the fans.
Picture that: an ubiquitous celeb and household name like John Cena basically got black bagged and vanished for speaking up for human rights. That’s the power of capitalism, kids
Source: mic.com
Yale Environment 360: The deep sea is viewed by many as a kind of watery desert. There may be a few creatures floating around down there, but people don’t think of it as a thriving ecosystem. Is that just wrong? Lisa Levin: There are actually surprisingly diverse and rich ecosystems, but sometimes the organisms are small, only a few millimeters in size. For example, in the nodule zone that they’re interested in mining, most of the animals are very, very small. We may think it is unpopulated, because we don’t see many big charismatic organisms there. e360: People may say, “This is a marginal area, why do we have to worry about it?” Levin: You could go to a very remote section of the Amazon rainforest that nobody has explored and say, “Why is it important?” There are actually many parallels with the rainforest. One is that the animals in the deep sea can live for a very long time. Some fish can live for hundreds of years. Some of the invertebrates, like corals or sponges, live for thousands of years. Like the rainforest, the deep sea is also extremely vulnerable to physical disturbance. Once the ocean bottom is hit by a trawl [fishing] net, you’ve lost four or five thousand years of life for many corals and sponges. Around 15 percent of our continental margins have already been trawled, leaving vast piles of rubble where deep sea corals once thrived.
Source: e360.yale.edu
Schiff denounces brawl at California school over Pride Month resolution: ‘We will not go back’
“But it was quickly recognized in the 1920s that what they called "on-job control" could be extended to "off-job control." That is, controlling every other aspect of life in the same way. So why should people not be robots in their entire life? And to be a robot means to focus your attention on what were called the superficial things of life. Like fashionable consumption, not on care for one another, not on working together to create a decent environment, not on what the world will be like for your children. To turn you into a passive consumer, a person who pushes buttons every couple years and is taught that that is democracy. Follow orders, don't think. Identify your own value as a human being in the amount of useless consumption that you can carry out. That's "off-job control." It runs through all the institutions and it's a huge industry. And, yes, to overcome off-job control you have to make people realize that your value as a human being is not how deeply you can go in debt and how many credit cards you can max out to get commodities you want. That is not your value as a human being.”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism
New York would create a commission to consider reparations to address the lingering, negative effects of slavery under a bill passed by the state Legislature on Thursday.
"We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies," said state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages before the floor debate. "This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward."
The state Assembly passed the bill about three hours after spirited debate on Thursday. The state Senate passed the measure hours later, and the bill will be sent to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for consideration.
New York would be following the lead of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020. That group recommended a formal apology from the state on its legacy of racism and discriminatory policies and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents. They did not recommend specific payments amounts for reparations.[1]
The New York legislation would create a commission that would examine the extent to which the federal and state governments supported the institution of slavery.[2] It would also address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by Black people in the state today.
According to the New York bill, the first enslaved Africans arrived at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, around the 1620s and helped build the infrastructure of New York City. While the state Legislature enacted a statute that gave freedom to enslaved Africans in New York in 1817, it wasn't implemented until 10 years later.[3]
"I'm concerned we're opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago,"[4] said Republican state Assemblymember Andy Gooddell during floor debates on the bill. Gooddell, who voted against the measure, said he supports existing efforts to bring equal opportunity to all and would like to "continue on that path rather than focus on reparations."[5]
In California, the reparations task force said in their report that the state is estimated to be responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from receiving loans and living in certain neighborhoods. California's state budget last year was $308 billion.[6] Reparations in New York could also come with a hefty price tag.
The commission would be required to deliver a report one year after its first meeting. The panel's recommendations, which could potentially include monetary compensation for Black people,[7] would be non-binding. The legislature would not be required to take the recommendations up for a vote.
New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who is the first Black person to hold the position, called the legislation "historic."[8]
Heastie, the governor and the legislative leader in the state Senate would each appoint three members to the commission.[9]
Other state legislatures that have considered studying reparations include New Jersey and Vermont, but none have passed legislation yet.[10] The Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.[11]
On the federal level, a decades-old proposal to create a commission studying reparations has stalled in Congress.[12]
Some critics of reparations by states say that while the idea is well-intentioned, it can be misguided.[13]
William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University said even calling them reparations is "presumptuous," since it's virtually impossible for states to meet the potentially hefty payouts.[14]
He said the federal government has the financial capacity to pay true reparations and that it should be the party that is responsible.[15]
"My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say there's no need for a federal program," Darity said. "If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed."[16] K, Blog Admin notes: [1] This is useful because it's attempting institutionalization of the divestment in needing money to solve the issue of slavery reparations and instead aims to provide a means to account for such a system by way of adhering to necessities. This seems like a legislative path to that. A formal apology is well overdue so the creation of these institutions, paired with divestment in money (which are literal enslavement notes) makes for said apology more effective and honest.
[2] Correct, slavery is handled and supported to this day at a state and federal level. Any strategies aimed at changing this enslavement system requires changes at both state and federal levels, otherwise what's the point? [3] Legislature like the one in 1817 what it did was make enslavement go covert while continuing to operate with the same engine. Which is why we need to correct any semblance of it existing by abolishing institutions that were created from slavery and repurpose ones sabotaged by past and existing pro slavery legislature. Reparations fixes itself to do just that.
[4] Read [3] because slavery's door was never shut. There's never been enough evidence, something I hope this legislature corrects, with regards to presenting when this "end of slavery" ever occurred. As far as everyone experiencing this god awful system is concerned slavery continued just fine.
[5] Slavery as a system created such a historical inequivalence for all involved that a path has never honestly been formed to claim we're all equal. How can we "continue" on something we've never even established?
[6] Translation: The enslavers who own this system over us and invested so much in slavery can't put their money where their labor is. This is our issue how? Legislature like this will help correct that.
[7] I would hope that this conversation around monetary compensation and reparations from enslavement systems involves a divestment plan from a currency note that has factual connections to and will continue to be looked at as an enslaver note to those who study slavery historically. So this might look like an institution that can help communities divest from ever even needing to use money due to their systemic connections to slavery.
[8] This legislature is needed and overdue, I wouldn't call it historic yet. People within government tend to have a low bar for what's historic and epic.
[9] Not enough people. 3 is not enough. This is a ridiculously low amount considering how easy it can be to sabotage this work as they have in the past, this increases that chance. They need more community input. Otherwise, what's the point?
[10] Further implicating these states with systemic slavery.
[11] Not enough for similar reasons that a slaver creating their own paper and telling you to live off of it is not enough to stop slavery.
[12] So the one thing that did have a semblance of working, you let it rock there, doing nothing? Seems like an institutional trend.
[13] How? Explain using evidence in the same way we abolitionists use evidence to prove slavery is not needed.
[14] Agreed, and they don't have the capacity to make their enslaver dollars mean much into the future. Money temporarily becomes pay outs which are like the apology letter you include system changes with otherwise its just enslavers recycling their image.. AGAIN.
[15] Agreed, but I hope this doesn't mean shift in focus from what needs to structurally change at a state level and what these types of legislature can do. I think federal changes should come with state strategizing as well.
[16] see [14] and [15]
Nothing is on the horizon to block Iowa’s steady march to the right and off a cliff.
Gov. Kim Reynolds came off a historic legislative session that has Ron DeSantis calling the Tall Corn State the “Florida of the North.” There’s book banning, gay bashing, welfare demeaning, private school vouchers and more from solid majorities in both the House and Senate for her to celebrate.
The public appears to be rolling with the agenda, while holding reservations about the vouchers.
The state’s congressional delegation is entirely Republican.
It’s going to take a seismic event, or series of them, and a messianic messenger for Democrats to even get back in the conversation.
There are no statewide races on the 2024 ballot. Iowa will be flooded with conservative propaganda — it’s already started — with the Republican presidential nominating process. Being anti-woke, whatever that is, will be the thing. The environment will heighten Reynolds’s visibility and burnish her image as a politician of national prominence. Democrats will ignore Iowa because there’s nothing at play here.
Iowa needs a two-party system but doesn’t have one. That’s been a long time coming. The GOP has played the long game in rural states since 1980 by investing in media, messaging and organization. It’s paying off in flyover country.
If the election were held today, you would want to bet on Trump winning Iowa bigly.
The next legislative session will be just as harsh as Republicans try to fire up their base heading into the general elections. Reynolds wants to eliminate the state income tax, for starters, and again the public appears to agree with her. The loyal opposition can barely get a message through.
It will take something seismic and someone messianic for the Democrats to even get into the conversation.
Abortion? Perhaps. The Iowa Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a bill that could ban abortion. Historically, abortion politics have not played well for Democrats in Iowa. It is not clear they can turn the issue to their advantage in statehouse races.
Education? Huge tax cuts are popular, but the bite will be felt in public schools as we dole out vouchers for private education. It won’t be an immediate disruption, more like a slow erosion that increases class sizes and closes rural schools with declining enrollment.
Gay rights? Eighty-three congregations, in places like Pocahontas and Marcus, just pulled out of the Iowa Methodist Conference over allowing gay pastors and marriage.
Economic issues? Voters are going with tax cuts in the absence of a strong Democratic message.
As for a messenger, the minority party has State Auditor Rob Sand, the only statewide Democratic officeholder whose authority was eviscerated by the legislature. Not many people seem too worked up about him being stripped of investigative authority. He is a Decorah native who has worked assiduously to develop a reputation as a moderate turkey hunter who eschews party politics.
Harold Hughes broke through in 1962 under somewhat similar circumstances with a campaign built around liquor by the drink. Hughes had a fire in his belly. Does Sand?
The only other elected Democrat of prominence who understands rural areas is Rep. JD Scholten of Sioux City. He has the fire in his belly but does not appear to be in the inner circle of Des Moines. He continues to make appearances around the state and is not afraid of being associated with labor unions. Democrats fail to appreciate how important western Iowa is to winning statewide elections, and how their abandonment of rural voters has led to their demise.
They have until 2026 to figure something out. Sure, a lot can happen to change things. Who knows what happens with Sen. Chuck Grassley, age 89? Or abortion politics. For now, the Republicans are having a ball while on a roll, and there isn’t a whole lot the other side is doing about it. They need someone to fly the flag and lead the charge out of the weeds, with a message that can be heard out here. Starting with: Whatever happened to the family farm, an open market and the good union jobs? Somebody needs to change the conversation.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
Damn I REBLOGGED This so FAST… and will keep doing it…
So real! And the public and media ignored this fact for the longest!
AI increases what historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt called “institutional thoughtlessness” – the inability to critique instructions or reflect on consequences. Its objective devaluations interface all too readily with existing bureaucratic cruelties, scaling administrative violence in ways that intensify structures of inequality, such as when AI is used to aid decisions about which patients are prioritised in healthcare or which prisoners are at risk of reoffending. AI also relies on extractive violence because the demand for low-paid workers to label data or massage outputs maps onto colonial relations of power, while its calculations demand eye-watering levels of computation and the consequent carbon emissions, with a minimum baseline for training that is equivalent to planeloads of transatlantic air passengers. The compulsion to show balance by always referring to AI’s alleged potential for good should be dropped; we must acknowledge that the social benefits are still speculative, but the harms have been empirically demonstrated. We must recognise that this algorithmic violence is legitimised by AI’s claims to reveal a statistical order in the world that is superior in scale and insight to our direct experience. This also constitutes – among other things – a logical fallacy and a misuse of statistics. Statistics, even Bayesian, does not extrapolate to individuals or future situations in a linear-causal fashion, and completely leaves out outliers. Ported to the sociological settings of everyday life, this results in epistemic injustice, where the subject’s own voice and experience is devalued in relation to the algorithm’s predictive judgements. While on the face of it AI may seem to produce predictions or emulations, I would argue that its real product is precaritisation and the erosion of social security; that is, AI introduces vulnerability and uncertainty for the rest of us, whether because our job is under threat of being replaced or our benefits application depends on an automated decision. Instead of sci-fi futures, what we get is the return of 19th-century industrial relations and the dissolution of post-war social contracts.
Source: thesociologicalreview.org
I’m not anti-technology, I just think there’s something deeply sick about a society where robots make art and children work in factories.
Apparently my favorite picture books as a child were written by queer authors. This brings me joy.
Independent bookstores around the country have a particularly clever lifeline, one perfectly suited to the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. The strange part? It came into being just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and before the bookstores started closing up shop wondering if they’d reopen at all.
The lifeline in question is called Bookshop.
In simple terms, it’s a super clean, user-friendly online bookstore whose raison d’être is supporting independent bookstores — not simply with exposure or resources (though that’s certainly a factor), but with cold hard cash…
:0
From their Choose a Bookstore tab