xtec:

thothoward:

the funniest thing we do to alligators is duct tape their mouths shut when we need to handle them. imagine being a creature so ancient and undefeatable that you haven’t changed in thousands of years being rendered basically defenseless by a piece of plastic

SHUT

sahania:

ilovemusicalyy:

lines-and-edges:

venomanti:

venomanti:

weird how I became a much more compassionate and accepting person when I realised that drug addiction is the symptom of a problem and not the problem in itself

you also start to realise just how much the War On Drugs was actually a war against the poor, against survivors, against trans people, against sex workers, against the mentally ill and the disabled, against PoC, against queers, against the homeless. how much of it was a government manufactured ploy to sell violence against the marginalized as violence against addiction, as if addiction was not a symptom of systemic abuse.

It’s true and you should say it.

solarpunkcast:

third-nature:

left-reminders:

left-reminders:

abcoconut:

third-nature:

Ok, but yeah. I want to work more than 15 hours a week. I genuinely love the challenge with what I do. 15 seems, oddly tiny? Where did this number come from?

This is a good response to that question, in case anyone wanted the q&a paired together. 15 would be the social average — some people might work more, some less, but that would be up to them. This is also presupposing a change in the way the economy effectively functions, in the sense that 15 hours would be the social average for necessary labor, and after that point you’d probably see tons of people participating in “unnecessary” labor out of interest. There’s an idea in socialist theory that basically says once you reach a point far enough along after capitalism you’d just start seeing a blurring of the lines between what’s defined as “work” (or as “a job”) and what’s defined as “a collective activity”, especially with regard to the arts, science, etc.

At the very least, a transition towards (eco)socialism will require a vast shortening of the workweek and a reduction in overall advertising/consumption, whether that mean a 15-hour week or a 20-hour week. The main point is that people are overworked, we can meet everyone’s needs feasibly with less hours anyway, and the over-emphasis on extraction and accumulation (which is in part fueled by a tediously long workweek) is having disastrous effects on the planet. We can both accomodate the needs of the planet AND expand the political horizons for the great majority of the population, but it will require the fundamental defeat of capitalism and the establishment of a new ecological workers’ democracy. It’s a big project, but so worth it in the long run.

The 15-hour week presupposes a change in the economy first. Obviously capitalism requires long hours for people to survive, but in terms of pure stats it’s not necessary for society to be working that much. There’s enough resources for everyone, and so much work is pointless bullshit that only exists to line the pockets of the rich. The ecosocialist project demands a new way of looking at and distributing work. Get rid of the bullshit jobs, divvy up the necessary jobs, and we’d free up people’s time immensely to engage in pursuits they actually want to do to contribute to society.

Also, food and housing and such would be guaranteed in an ecosocialist society anyway, so it goes beyond simply reorganizing work. People have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and those will never be achieved for the great majority in a capitalist society.

These were really good additions so I wanted t add them onto the cumulative post

the 40 hour workweek is not as productive as corporate/management wants us to think, and it also leave most people exhausted. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is an absurd amount of time to be working. And judging from statistics, there’s about 50% of Americans who work more than 40 hours a week…

This does not even include time spent commuting or getting ready for work.

Even though our productivity is leagues better than it has ever been, we now have less leisure time than feudal peasants! There is absolutely no reason for people to need to work 40+ hours a week just to support themselves or family.

justsomeantifas:

twryst:

twryst:

justsomeantifas:

justsomeantifas:

I just want yall to know that the fact that the unemployment rate in the united states being super low is actually a very very bad thing. Do you know what this means? 

It means less people are looking for jobs they actually like, or they actually fit in … this means folks are so desperate to pay for their lives they’ll take anything. 

Unemployment rate down being touted as a good thing is absolutely fucking disgusting how they’re manipulating language to make a terrible thing sound good.

this is championing people with degrees in engineering getting jobs at starbucks. 

this is celebrating people with ph.ds in english working at walmart.

this is claiming it’s good that the majority of minimum wage workers are all adults 30+ and haven’t had a fucking raise in years.

thats what this is fucking doing.

don’t be fooled by their misleading language. this is NOT a good thing.

^^^

The “unemployment rate” is deliberate obfuscation, and a great example of papering over complexity by defining a metric with a stunningly dubious definition and giving it a name that makes it SOUND like it measures something it doesn’t.

- All of what @justsomeantifas expressed is true; that gets re-labeled “underemployment” and thus ascribed out of this metric. People in those positions can even still be actively interviewing for new jobs in their field and not be called unemployed cause they push carts at Walmart.

- Also, note that it’s not “jobs which pay well enough to live on”, it’s just strictly “employment”. If you sign a contract where I will schedule you for 1hr a week and pay you $3 “”“ + tips”“” for it; YOU ARE NOW EMPLOYED. The fact you’re bound to starve and die if that’s your only income is irrelevant.

- in addition, they create a whole new category, “discouraged”, into which they put anybody who had been ‘unemployed’ for ‘too long’. So even if you don’t ever take a 1hr/week, nominally-nonzero-pay, short term contract gig, after a while you’re magically no longer “unemployed”.

- there’s many additional missing aspects. If you are self-employed, you are “unemployed”, regardless of income as long as you aren’t reporting payroll numbers (roughly, as long as you aren’t paying others with a salary). If you are legally recognized as disabled, you Don’t ever count as unemployed, but can count as not-unemployed. If your place of work is informal or not legally condoned, no matter the size of the organization, you’re unemployed. Whether you’re constantly interviewing/applying to jobs, i.e. DOING THE ACTUAL BEHAVIOR OF LOOKING FOR A JOB, is irrelevant to whether you’re considered unemployed. If you’re a “full-time student”, you Don’t count as unemployed- but again, you can count as not-unemployed if you’re, say, working a part time job with a company.

So they have this metric that has no meaningful connection to a) whether people do not have a suitable job that meets their needs and b) whether people are actively attempting to secure a new job, and what do they claim is the “short” definition of the ‘unemployment rate’?

“Unemployed people are without work and are actively seeking employment.”

This is not the behavior of a field remotely concerned with accurately understanding reality. This is perfectly characteristic of an example I’d see in a book titled “How to Lie with Statistics”. It is actively misinforming with word selection that delicately dances around actual, perfectly reasonable expectations.

It’s a lie, fabricated in service of the richs’ attempts to justify the horrors taking place, expressed as a number to appear scientific.

Note, by the way, that this is one of the FUNDAMENTAL metrics used, similar to GDP/capita, upon which THE ENTIRETY OF MACROECONOMICS is built.

They analyze and correlate and rationalize about the behavior of a fundamentally useless & malconstructed metric. They draw conclusions and make prescriptive claims (i.e. we should do X not Y, the result of Z policy would be a change in unemployment of A %, etc) based off this metric and other, similarly useless metrics. They say worker-owned endeavors don’t work because [argument based on this garbage], capitalism “works” because [graph depicting the behavior of this garbage], the “free market” encourages competition because [claim based in the expected movement of this garbage].

Astrology, at least, doesn’t drive decisions of life or death on the multimillion-person scale. The movement of tea leaves and the crackling of bones in fire aren’t used to justify condemning us all to meaningless toil for the enrichment of the already-rich in exchange for the right to continue to live. No rich asshat is donating millions of dollars to force-inject a “Center for the Analysis and Forecasting via Tarot” into engineering colleges in order to propogate the idea that it follows the scientific method. I have no issue with such practices; we are all welcome to find guidance and assurance however we need or wish.

But economics, as a “field of study”, does drive those decisions, force that result, make that claim. And it’s based entirely on this shoddy, shifty, misinformative quicksand of metrics like “unemployment rate’” and ludicrously fantastical abstractions like “supply and demand”.

damn … tell em.

sufficientlylargen:

wayhaughtt:

Why is no one talking about how the Good Place Youtube Chanel uploaded a FIVE HOUR video about what it’s like to be in Janet’s void and it’s JUST Janet standing there silently in different positions for FIVE HOURS

https://youtu.be/o0z-Lf7EkfU

At 1:15:11, and 4:19:22 she boops out of the void for about 20 minutes.

lordhellebore:

tinsnip:

froborr:

tinsnip:

Don’t assume malice. Assume ignorance. Life is easier, the world is kinder, and you can educate. Actual malice is pretty rare, I find. 

Always remember Hanlon’s Razor–”Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice as an explanation.”

That’s said, never forget Fred Clark’s Law, either: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” There’s a certain point at which ignorance becomes malice–at which there is simply no way to become that ignorant except deliberately and maliciously.

Time to cross-stitch!

This seems pretty relevant right now…

heartbeatemoji:

catastrophic-success:

terpsikeraunos:

on the one hand there are many aspects of academia that should be criticized but on the other hand i’m concerned about the rise of anti-intellectualism as a tool of fascism

Hey yo what the fuck does this say in English? Because if you can’t explain in layman’s terms you’re not doing a good job of getting your point across to everyone.

otherwindow:

otherwindow:

otherwindow:

A magical girl series where the girls transform into their DnD characters. 

Imagine being a typical shojo super villain and seeing an anime girl transform into a fucking Orc.

Not even a cute anime Orc, just a realistically drawn Warcraft Orc named Mo’Gar Skullcrush or something. 

None of the girls in the group transform into cute Elves. It’s just Lady Stormbeard the Dwarf ranger. Skeletal Lich Bellinde Bloodless. GrhhuHghh the Goblin cleric. Every villain they meet is fucking terrified.

fagfrog:

fagfrog:

fagfrog:

when someone is a christian they are not constantly asked their position on the holocaust the transatlantic slave trade the extermination of native americans or any of the thousands of atrocities committed by christians so why do muslims get asked about terrorism and jewish people about israel and are grouped in with specific bad people while christians are not required to explain themselves??

goyim and non muslims can and should reblog

[christians and all sectors of christianity that means you]

largishcat:

gutterband:

largishcat:

Me, trying to explain my obsession with southern gothic and weird alt country: look I don’t know why, but if a song is acoustic, in a minor key, and about murder, god, or america, i just go absolutely batshit

Here’s my song “God’s going to murder America” in G minor

I’d listen to that on repeat for five weeks