This #ecocide, the destabilisation of our planet, is not a tragic mistake. It wasn't inevitable.
Fossil fuel companies knew what they were doing decades ago. They've spent billions to lie, cheat and mislead so they could keep making profits.
They chose this for us, for our children, and our children's children.
Remember that.
Never forget that this was a choice made in a board room; where they decided their balance sheet mattered more than all of our lives.
And they're still lying.
It’s not a glitch. It's a feature.
Conservatives do not want to raise kids that possess critical thinking skills.
A diverse array of books gave me a level of empathy and a wider world view than I would not have otherwise gotten. They aim to prevent that from happening in other kids.
There is an all-out attack on education occurring.
HISD's Mike Miles will convert some libraries into discipline areas-
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/hisd-libraries-discipline-areas-mike-miles-reforms-18209051.php
RIP Beatle Bob. #stl
i want a lot of things.
tonight, what i want most is to allow myself hope when i hear or think of this song.
"no matter what we've been, we are the upshot now"
To protest a #PrideMonth display at their local public #library, right-wing activists thought it would be smart to check out all the featured books and threaten to keep them until the library promised to remove them from its collection.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/us/pride-books-library-protest.html
It backfired. Citizens gave $15k and the city gave $30k to replace the books and expand the collection.
this is a point that my good friend Rezeya (over on awoo.space, which won't federate with us for some reason) has made several times and each time far more eloquently than i can, but it's where my head's at tonight, so here's my interpretation.
if i'm angry about anything--and i'm angry about a lot of things, and have been for some time--it's that the Opposition has robbed us of the ability to wield surrealism in an offensive manner. Dada is not currently an effective tool to protest war, oppression, poverty and hatred because *shit just keeps getting weirder* and it's impossible to keep up. the goalposts keep getting moved, and then the goalposts morph sideways into giant spindly giraffes and melting clocks.
notice that i'm not saying that the Opposition has "weaponized surrealism and turned it against us," because they're not fucking smart enough to do that, never have been, never will be. they use Dada with all the subtlety and grace of a chimp with a machete defending a pile of cocaine. there's no art there, just screaming and destruction. but at the moment it's just not effective for us to enter the ring by snorting a line and grabbing a bat with a nail through it. right now that monkey has a depressingly solid kill streak. yes, it's got to end sometime. yes, it will certainly break badly for our buddy the machete monkey. it *is* just a question of when. and yet, here we are, waiting.
anyway. just had a night of wondering about how exactly one is supposed to live in times like these, when we can see things are shifting fast everywhere. does it make sense to keep doing what we're doing? in ten years, what would we have asked our past selves to do without, and what to focus on instead? should we eschew pageantry and frivolous joys, or are those the pointless things that we're going to miss most of all?
is there a way to plan ahead in a post-surrealist world?
"Is there a time for keeping your distance?
A time to turn your eyes away?
Is there a time for keeping your head down
For getting on with your day?
"Here she comes...beauty plays the clown
Here she comes, surreal in her crown"
U2 (Passengers), "Miss Sarajevo"
If you espouse monstrous ideas, and I call you a monster, that is not a refutation of your ideas, it is a refutation of you as a person, which is a separate issue from the ideas themselves, which I can probably also prove are false in addition to being monstrous -- but that assumes that monstrous ideas deserve to be debated, rather than merely discarded without further consideration.
here we reach one of the really shit things about depression; i have a dozen things i could be doing but i don't feel the drive to do any of them, because the whole thing smacks of effort, man. so i'm in bed by 9PM.
plus i beat Breath of the Wild last night so i can't burn a couple of hours looking for those last 30-some-odd shrines.
at least i mostly cleaned off the desk hutch so that Phase Whatever of the new desk setup plan can continue, and i did a solid day's job search. let the Cavalcade Of Rejections begin!
When your home burns, floods, or is destroyed in an extreme climate weather event, when someone in your family dies from heat waves, or when crops fail and people starve—come for these three people: Wael Sawan (Shell CEO), Darren Woods (Exxon CEO), and Patrick Pouyanne (TotalEnergies CEO). They knew what was coming and did it to you anyway. Sue them, shame them, heckle them, despise them. These are choices. They are to blame, not society.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/16/big-oil-climate-pledges-extreme-heat-fossil-fuel
TMKF (THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS) 9000
owner of driveinsaturday.org
head projectionist for Drive-in Saturday, the internet's premier movie-riffing organization ("Joel who?")
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