friends don’t let friends succumb to peer pressure
Like everyone growing up, I was vaguely warned about peer pressure. But what I expected was a bunch of friends standing around in a circle chanting “do it! do it!”. What I got was just vague looks of disappointment and people assuming I didn’t want an invitation next time, which was far harder to push back against
“resist peer pressure!” sounds so much more compelling than “disappoint your friends”, or “be a lame dork”, or “listen to your parents instead of that hot guy you like”.
People always tell you that standing up for yourself is a good thing, but they never mean that you should stand up to them.
All the UK Trump protests are really depressing to me. Like, so much angry creative & rebellious energy has gone into something that effectively functions as state propaganda – the implication of this scathing attitude towards Trump’s policies is that ours are noticeably better and I feel like honestly half the reason why people have showed up for this stuff is like, a weird sense of nationalism.
There is a weird UK nationalist tradition – supported by education, media, and everything else – of pointing fingers abroad to laugh and mock.
Like, Britain is known for mocking itself but on the small things. Most Brits, in my experience, can tell you a lot more about the issues with say the US or Australia’s immigration detention centres, but the ones here in the UK – with indefinite detention and really high rates of reported sexual assault and rapes…if just 10% or even 5% of the energy and creativity and emotion was put into protesting Trump was put into protesting UK issues, maybe not as much shite would happen.
I mean, people came out in droves about biometric ID cards for citizens – that it was inhumane, against people’s human right to privacy, that we can’t trust the government with that information, the whole thing was scrapped…for citizens…when biometric ID requirements were applied to non-EU immigrants (after the government bragged it ran the immigration services in the UK as for-profit)…there were crickets. People just say ‘those migrants know what they’re getting into’ (ignoring how much immigration law has changed over the years, I came pre-ID cards when we were just supposed to carry our visas and no obligation to update them even when we update our passports, just carry the old ones) which echoes a lot of sentiments I here elsewhere that many Brits are happy to condemn.
It’s just so much easier to point fingers elsewhere. And it seems like way too many people would rather smugly run with scapegoating distractions than confront (abundant) problems closer to home.
And Trump is such low-hanging fruit.
Meanwhile, the evil gits running things here are all too happy to use this. While the exact same players are responsible for a great deal of the current political mess in both countries. That makes it extra frustrating to me.
(The little changed immigration law tangent I started off on got its own post, not to distract from the excellent points other people have made here.)
Just have to add, with changes to British immigration law? See also: how too many of the Windrush families have been done.
Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but I came when there was literally no way to update an EEA family member visa after the initial 5 years. After that 5 years, it was automatic indefinite leave to remain with no further need for a visa at all. They were simply not issuing any documentation beyond the initial 5 year leave to remain.
(Coming from outside the EU as an EEA family member did simplify things a lot, but that was also before the ID cards were instituted at all.)
It made me uncomfortable at the time, being unable to get some sort of valid documentation to wave around if necessary.
Having your immigration status totally dependent on your partner’s felt precarious enough already, but I had my own reasons not to apply for UK citizenship after the 5 years were up. (Also before the Tories instituted their ludicrous testing, and hiked the fees so much. And the DVLA lost my valid passport with travel documentation, to complicate things more even before the system got the current overload.)
So, of course, come back almost 10 years later–and what a bloody “hostile environment” mess. With loads of people on the way to becoming undocumented because of changes to the system, if they’re not already getting treated accordingly. With trying to access already austerity-gutted services, if not directly by the Home Office.
And of course the system totally overloaded by the push to cause problems for existing immigrants who have done everything they were supposed to do.
I had more to say, not too surprisingly, but started out pretty low on wording spoons even before getting worked up.
Anyway, there are plenty of human rights issues to stay busy with right here. People certainly can care about multiple things at once, and hopefully do. I just get frustrated at the number who apparently would rather put energy into more scapegoating and finger-pointing to bolster that sense of superiority, as a substitute for doing anything productive to help much of anybody else anywhere.
“But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something
truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved
and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for
the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I
saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends
meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above
all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the
government’s job to make sure that those things were provided.”
You guys, the Daily Caller just published the funniest thing I have ever read in my entire life. It is literally an article where a conservative is just terrified to death that they nearly felt empathy and love.
This article is like the biggest proof I have ever read that conservatives are just pathologically afraid of kindness.
There’s… not even a punchline. Like, the article concludes just a few lines after the quoted section, with no suggestion for why anyone SHOULDN’T support things like universal healthcare. Not even a token “but, you know, the money,” or “but you have to EARN it.” It just ends.
I guess the audience is expected to fill in the blanks? Like “gosh, I almost cared about an unrelated human being, but CLEARLY the very concept is absurd.” Which is… pretty sad, honestly.
I’m telling you, at least according to this article, it is literally just terrifying to think that your kids deserve healthcare and education.
That’s literally it. There isn’t anything else.
“I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education“ is one fucking hell of a sentence, really.
hey, archive that shit. don’t give the Daily Caller clicks. what the fuck
I don’t think people should be executed for ‘producing propaganda for al-Qaeda’ but the most striking thing to me about the debate over whether Kareem should be executed is the number of people who – like me – don’t speak or read any Arabic – and are just taking the word of random other people who also don’t speak Arabic that his journalism constitutes ‘propaganda for al-Qaeda’. Kareem says he just reports on atrocities committed by American forces. I haven’t seen anyone counter that by saying ‘no, here’s a translation of a broadcast in which he says something false’.
I haven’t actually seen anyone clarify whether they consider ‘reporting on American atrocities’ to be ‘al-Qaeda propaganda’ all by itself, even if every word is true.
If you were concerned about learning that the summary execution of a U.S. citizen never charged with any crime was ordered by the U.S. government, and then you learned that the government says he’s producing ‘al-Qaeda propaganda’, and then you went ‘oh okay’, and you didn’t even ask to see any of the propaganda, then I think you have some very scary information about yourself.
I know that this is a trivial nitpick of a very serious issue (which I have previously linked to coverage of), but this seems like a misuse of the word “executed”.
It seems to me that execution implies that the party doing the executing has physical control over the person being executed. That is, that the person is a prisoner.
I would call this an “assassination” or just a “killing”.
I think this is a worthwhile nitpick, because it’s also central to the lack of a trial. The failure to prosecute Kareem is not necessarily “because there’s no evidence”, but rather “because prosecution wouldn’t give us any legal right to take this action”.
Assuming that someone managed to convict Kareem (in absentia, presumably) of treason, it almost certainly wouldn’t legalize drone strikes against him. The Eighth Amendment suit over a cruel and unusual method would probably be an easy win, and no one would want to open the door to drone striking convicts already in prison.
So: the failure to try Kareem boils down to having no reason to try Kareem – he’s not being executed regardless. What’s happening is either a killing in war, a killing of an enemy combatant, or an extrajudicial assassination, depending on who you ask.
All the UK Trump protests are really depressing to me. Like, so much angry creative & rebellious energy has gone into something that effectively functions as state propaganda – the implication of this scathing attitude towards Trump’s policies is that ours are noticeably better and I feel like honestly half the reason why people have showed up for this stuff is like, a weird sense of nationalism.
Can we figure out a way to do this to student loan debt.
I would read Ayn Rand to pay down my student loans
Our library ran the expenses and realized we spent about 3,000$ MORE than what we got back in trying to collect late fees. So? We dropped them completely. No late fees. Period.
If you keep a book, it auto renews two times. Then it comes up as overdue. If your overdue items exceed a certain amount, your account freezes. You can’t use any of the local libraries anymore until you return the items or claim them lost and pay for them. If someone else is waiting for the book, you can’t renew. Its that simple.
And guess what. Not only did we save money, but we /got more materials back/. More materials were turned in than declared lost as compared to before. There was no stigma to it. If you had already paid for the item, the money was credited back to you.
Because the people late fees actually affected were children and elderly adults – people unable to regularly get to the library. And the stigma of late items was dropped. Attitude and mindset are important.
we still have no late fees. And we are considered to be one of the top public systems in our state. People from out of state PAY to get library cards for a year because our online Overdrive system is amazing, and we have a ton of partnerships and interlibrary loan systems in place. AND we suffer less losses of both materials and patrons due to our “no late fee” policy.
92-Year-Old Grandmother Makes Stunningly Intricate Temari Balls
A ninety-two-year-old-grandmother from Japan creates stunning embroidered balls known as “temari,” (meaning “hand ball” in Japanese) which showcase a skill she learned in her sixties. A traditional folk art, which was conceived in Japan in the 7th century, the craft is tedious and highly demanding craft. The unknown woman has constructed 500 unique designs, which are photographed by her granddaughter NanaAkua. Overall these beautiful trinkets are a symbol of happy life and good fortune, which originate from friendship and loyalty.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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