when I was 11, my (black) neighbor witnessed my house being broken into. she called the police to report the crime. I came home from school and the robber was still inside. I personally watched as a man I didnt know walked out of my home with our stuff.
the police didnt show up for 3 days.
when they did, they told us there was nothing the could do because we “staged the house”. they claimed we hid our tv’s and valuables to make it look like more was actually stolen. they never asked for a description, never visited the neighbor who saw the break-in, anf as they left, they told us that stolen property is almost never recovered and we should “buy more and get on with [our] lives”.
…
when I was 23, I was dog-sitting for a (white) friend. her neighbor called the police and said there was a strange black man in her yard.
the police showed up in 5 minutes.
6 units, 12 officers, stormed the back yard as I was running around with the dog. some came through the house and I know for a fact that the front door was locked. they damaged around $5000 worth of property, took her dog to the pound, and me to jail.
my friend had to cut her trip short and drive 4 hours back to get me from jail and explain to police in person that she knew me. because “that could be anybody on the phone”. the neighbor was with her when she came. we had met several times before. she was neither embarrassed nor apologetic.
moral of the story?
too many of us have lived this. too many of us didn’t survive.
since making this post I’ve started getting targeted ads for bulletproof vests and security equipment. 🤔
So I’m on a trip with my robotics team and there’s only two “girls” (me, an enby, and a cis girl), so we get our own beds in our own room, but the guys are rooming four to a room, but there’s only two beds in each room. Which means that two guys are sleeping on the floor every night.
I’m not joking. They were literally arguing over who’s sleeping on the floor tonight (apparently they plan on rotating).
And I asked them “why don’t you just share a bed?” And they all gave me the same answer:
“No, that’s weird! That’d be gay!”
And I just looked at them and I decided to break the bad news to them
“If lying next to another guy makes you wanna suck dick, you already wanted to suck dick.”
I’ve never seen so many Straight Guys™️ enraged by a single sentence before
Turtles are some of the oldest vertebrate groups on Earth. No one knows for sure where exactly they fit in the reptilian family tree, but their incredible evolution is well known thanks to amazing fossil finds.
*The animals represented here are not to scale and don’t represent a direct line of descent, but rather plausible models for how this amazing transition happened.*
the 80s was such a weird time to like be doing feminism. You might think you see some bad things on tumblr but like people were publishing things like this back then. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess
Love that you can just drop this weird sentence in a footnote at the beginning of a chapter as if that statement on its own doesn’t require like a massive amount of theoretical work behind it that is just handwaved away. Like a ‘realization’ is self authenticating evidence. This is like Berdyaev “this was once revealed to me in a dream” level citation but not even in theology.
Good God, no wonder sex posi became so big.
This is EXACTLY what sex positive feminism was about, and why “it’s just frivolous feminine girls who worship men” was creepy sexist radfem judo.
Oh, and this is also why I misunderstood ace people at first. I’d seen so much “we criticize sex and orgasm as inherently oppressive to women” that I assumed “ace lesbians” were… these people.
I was mistaken and I’m sorry… but I was sympathetic to what I THOUGHT exclusionsits meant because I thought they were saying “we really don’t want those people defining lesbianism for us again”
Yeah, there was this rather hair-raising dynamic where ace exclusionist stealth-radfems leaned really hard into this perception for a while to farm sympathy, then flipped the script once they got people agreeing with them. I’m glad you bailed out of that ideological trap when you recognized what it was.
I think there’s *now* also a second-order dynamic where some number of younger sex-repulsed aces (who don’t have the referents to recognize the dynamic or its toxicity) have been gaslighted by bullies into believing that they can’t possibly really be asexual, because ace means Those Weirdos Over There, and so they’re resurrecting the “extra pure lesbians who must tragically hate sex for political reasons” identity in its entirety.
When I chat with older lesbians about this stuff they’re always like, “Oh fuckssake, this again!?”
someone: so what do you think is the solution to homelessness?
me, socialist:
Let homeless people occupy peopleless homes, build houses for use rather than exchange, 3D print comfortable houses in a day, convert corporate skyscrapers into housing and commercial malls into publicly-accessible community centers with living commons and entertainment
When you say it to people and they break
“But the money? … we can’t just? But, Money? We can’t just… help… people? Can we? The Money. We can’t just help people? Like that? We can’t just? Money?”
There’s more to it than free real estate.
A massive portion of homeless people are mentally ill, and many of those illnesses aren’t being treated. Homeless people who have been on the streets and had their illnesses untreated for most of their lives aren’t going to adjust super well to suddenly having a place to live.
We need to build safety nets. We need social workers and mental health care professionals to help the homeless.
Every person deserves a roof and health care. Those two things need to go hand in hand.
The Housing First model of dealing with homelessness does exactly this. But actually when homeless people with mental illness or drug dependencies get into housing they start to do a lot better. Yes there are safety nets and things to work on after but it starts with housing. Homeless shelters right now aren’t doing enough because they either limit stays or make it so that drug addicts aren’t allowed to stay there at all. Obviously they’re still helping people but the Housing First model would actually help a lot more people long term and even be cheaper for the government in the long run. Unfortunately I don’t have sources but if someone can add them that’d be great.
Honestly the unmitigated gall of saying that homeless people wouldn’t “adjust well” to the safety, comfort, dryness, and stability of the basic need that is reliable shelter because they’re mentally ill, like, could you possibly find a way to insult and step on two marginalized groups at once more?
as if trnmp cares about small businesses and charities in this country
Nooooo, ugh, it probably will happen, but I surely hope it doesn’t.
I HAVE VERY STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT THIS.
The tarriffs part sucks— but the “woe is us, it’s not our fault” tone of the email really pissed me off. JoAnn’s prices have gone up each of the 3 years I’ve worked there, and the employees (of course!) aren’t getting paid more.
The company is actively shutting out their older client base– customers who may not spend much, but who come in regularly for supplies. The VIP discount program has been discontinued (shutting out the older generation of quilters/crafters en masse), and I’ve had many elderly women say that they’re going to have to give up their hobbies because it’s just too expensive.
So, all of this is to say that the way JoAnn has prioritized profits over people has led to this. The wanted reps who would lower taxes and loosen regulations for businesses while pushing their employees to the wayside. They got that. Now that their wish has backfired??? Awww, it’s a MADE IN AMERICA TAX THAT WILL HURT SMALL BUSINESSES.
No, it’s the fact that their customers can’t afford a blanket 25% increase in already ridiculous prices, and the tarriffs will cut into their profits.
I wholeheartedly agree that we should be calling our reps over these tarriffs, but it’s also the culmination of profit over people. Everything is made overseas because those workers are paid so little. Minimum wage workers (hello, all of JoAnn’s retail employees) can’t afford to buy anything, just as most retirees on social security can’t afford anything other than the essentials. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BUSINESSES ARE ALLOWED TO DO WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANT.
Ahem.
On a more personal note, I was at a brand new store when Jill Soltau did a walk-through. The store was full of employees who had put everything together to get ready for the grand opening.
She came through without saying a word to any of us.
So, this email that’s attempting to make us believe that JoAnn and its CEO really care about people?
Ha.
For the love of all that is holy, get out and vote in the midterms. Not to make sure that businesses don’t see a change in profits, but to change the government’s focus back to the people.
Reblogging for commentary, it is such a shame how many American companies are prioritizing profits over people.
Corporate greed is a terrible part of the American Way. From a quick Google search I gathered that JoAnn’s is no longer a public company (it was privatized in 2011) so they can’t even use the excuse of shareholders to blame the rise in prices over the last few years.
Here’s to hoping this doesn’t increase them further, but shame on JoAnn’s for doing it previously.
If the prices on Halloween decor are any indication, they’re already doing it. Yarn and fabric are going up as well.
I definitely noticed it on fabric, I had to double take when ¼ yard of fabric was $3.00!!
This is basically the reason that Hancock Fabrics went out of business (I mean, I know there were a lot of reasons that Hancock Fabrics went out of business, but this is a big one at least). They froze wages, cut hours, had their stores being run by basically a skeleton crew – and tried to claim that they were failing as a business because “nobody would buy anything without using a coupon”, shoving the burden of their business failing onto the customers, when really the company was being run terribly, workers had no loyalty because we were being paid minimum wage with no hope of any kind of raise, managers were extremely overworked…
Unfortunately corporate greed seems to be the downfall of many American companies. That is basically what happened to Toys R Us as well. No one has any loyalty anymore because the basic principles of a living wage and decent benefits no longer exist. As long as the people at the top can maintain a hefty salary and get a yearly increase, the people who work the hardest get the short end of the stick. It is shameful how larger American businesses have become.
Don’t forget how the internet means people have options they didn’t have in the past, but the corporate greedsters aren’t willing to let their companies change, because change = risk, which = potential bad things happening very fast, while ~sticking to the old ways~ means the company death will be slow and able to be milked for years.
And the ones that do change and thrive? Get bought by Amazon or Walmart, so it’s a different kind of death.
(of course I’m being a bit facetious here. a bit.)
This is a common theme, as retail continues to eat itself to death. Ames, Circut City, Radio Shack, JC Penney’s, Sears …
When times are bad and resources are overstretched, customer service is where bad leadership makes the deepest cuts. Fast-forward and the staff is crap (you don’t get good employees by paying them crap and treating them like shit) and your customers are gone and your company is bleeding cash–
Online shopping didn’t kill retail. Retail killed itself and Amazon is feasting on the corpse.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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