dontfightyourwaralone

[dontfightyourwaralone]

2016: Fuck you hysterical libs!!!! You can’t hold my vote hostage with the Supreme Court!!!!

2023: Meet the women who had to flee their Republican states to get an abortion

#december 2023 #2023 #articles #abc #Nadine El-Bawab #Tess Scott #Christina Ng #Acacia Nunes #abortion #reproductive rights

[dontfightyourwaralone]

This is actually vile. “Unsubstantiated tales” … for the life of me I’ll never understand why anyone has to resort to this level of bemused, callous denialism. There is absolutely a way to point out how real violence is ideologically weaponized to justify further, also real violence— and that’s worth talking about during this war for many reasons. What isn’t worth doing, or necessary by any metric whatsoever, is to be glib about mass rape, which has now been verified and documented by independent medical human rights orgs, to raise alarm about ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I’m so upset I can’t write anymore.

#december 2023 #2023 #original tumblr posts #commentary #twitter #the center for peace communications #haaretz #hilo glazer #israel palestine #sexual assault #antisemitism #outside of the whole 'this is definitely the only war where no female civilians got raped' thing people are insisting on #it's like...hamas taped themselves doing all those things #do people just...forget that? #do people think admitting to this means that they 'lose' the argument of human rights of palestinians?

[dontfightyourwaralone]

Look, the reason why people get pissed off when you say shit like '"mental illness" doesn't exist, it's all a product of the capitalist social structures we're forced to live under' is because we have to live inside our fucking brains, and lemme tell you, no amount of the natural world not being destroyed and me not having to work for a living is going to make me magically be able to choose what I want to do and just do it without any pre-planning or effort, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to magically make anyone no longer experience paranoia or delusions, or make the sucking existential despair that needs no actual justification for itself vanish, or or or or or.

'well but in a better political system those would be considered neutral or even positive traits/you'd be cared for by a community that -' bro I literally do not know how to tell you that you are completely disregarding the experiences of people with mental illnesses and considering them only based on how their mental illness affects the people around them, which is the exact same capitalistic model that you're blaming for 'causing' mental illnesses in the first place.

[Obligatory disclaimer because how dare you say we piss on the poor: of course there are social determinants of what gets categorised as a 'mental illness', it's not neat, it's not simple. Which is part of why it's so fucking frustrating when people go all the way in the other direction and say that it's entirely socially determined and doesn't exist inside your brain at all.]

#september 2023 #2023 #original tumblr posts #commentary #mental illness #ableism #politics #i've said this before but like #there's this tendency to treat capitalism like it's some kind of sapient demon #that just marched up one day and started running things #rather than a system that human beings created and control #it is not an ancient or inevitable system either! #it is unkind to the mentally ill and neurodivergent because we are!

[dontfightyourwaralone]

So you definitely don't want to read the comments on this one, but there's a new study out showing just how bad weight discrimination in the work force can be.

I like how they examine how the impact intersects with class and gender (just men and women, with 23000 ppl in their sample, I'm 100% sure there were trans ppl, unless they were deliberately excluded)

tw: o word, lots of fatphobia in the comments.

These results suggest that the aggregate costs of wage discrimination borne by overweight workers in America are hefty. Suppose you assume that obese women, but not men, face a wage penalty of 7% (the average across all such women in our sample) and that this is the same regardless of their level of education. Then a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that they bear a total cost of some $30bn a year. But if you account for both the discrimination faced by men, and for the higher wage penalty experienced by the more educated (who also tend to earn more), the total cost to this enlarged group more than doubles, to $70bn per year.

-Mod Siarl

#november 2023 #2023 #articles #yahoo #the economist #workers rights #discrimination #body image

[dontfightyourwaralone]

Lonely men exist. Male Loneliness(TM) does not. A look at the evidence for the year's most annoying discourse.

#september 2023 #2023 #articles #medium #jude ellison s doyle #gender #misogyny #mental health #log post

[dontfightyourwaralone]

"The Biden Administration last week [early December, 2023] announced it would be seizing patents for drugs and drug manufacturing procedures developed using government money.

A draft of the new law, seen by Reuters, said that the government will consider various factors including whether a medical situation is leading to increased prices of the drug at any given time, or whether only a small section of Americans can afford it.

The new executive order is the first exercise in what is called “march-in-rights” which allows relevant government agencies to redistribute patents if they were generated under government funding. The NIH has long maintained march-in-rights, but previous directors have been unwilling to use them, fearing consequences.

“We’ll make it clear that when drug companies won’t sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.

But just how much taxpayer money is going toward funding drugs? A research paper from the Insitute for New Economic Thought showed that “NIH funding contributed to research associated with every new drug approved from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion.”

The authors of the paper continue, writing “NIH funding also produced 22 thousand patents, which provided marketing exclusivity for 27 (8.6%) of the drugs approved [between] 2010-2019.”

How we do drug discovery and production in America has a number of fundamental flaws that have created problems in the health service industry.

It costs billions of dollars and sometimes as many as 5 to 10 years to bring a drug to market in the US, which means that only companies with massive financial muscle can do so with any regularity, and that smaller, more innovative companies can’t compete with these pharma giants.

This also means that if a company can’t recoup that loss, a single failed drug can result in massive disruptions to business. To protect themselves, pharmaceutical companies establish piles of patents on drugs and drug manufacturing procedures. Especially if the drug in question treats a rare or obscure disease, these patents essentially ensure the company has monoselective pricing regimes.

However, if a company can convince the NIH that a particular drug should be considered a public health priority, they can be almost entirely funded by the government, as the research paper showed.

Some market participants, in this case the famous billionaire investor Mark Cuban, have attempted to remedy the issue of drug costs in America by manufacturing generic versions of patented drugs sold for common diseases."

-via Good News Network, December 11, 2023

#december 2023 #2023 #articles #good news network #andy corbley #medicine #patents

[dontfightyourwaralone]

Y'ALL THAILAND APPROVED SAME SEX MARRIAGE AS OF 7 HOURS AGO!!!!!!!

#december 2023 #2023 #articles #lgbtq nation #bil browning #thailand #gay marriage #lgbtq

[dontfightyourwaralone]

Oh word? 👀

#december 2023 #2023 #articles #cnbc #Annika Kim Constantino #medicine #vaccines #cancer

[dontfightyourwaralone]

#december 2023 #2023 #original tumblr posts #twitter #articles #the new yorker #rachel monroe #lgbtq #drag #law #transphobia #homophobia #gender

[dontfightyourwaralone]

there aren't tens of millions of Jews in the world, Alex.

*looks into the camera like I'm on The Office*

goyim please stop erasing Mizrahim challenge, goyim please stop calling Azhkenazim "European" as code for "all white" challenge, goyim please learn Jewish history challenge (j/k, I know you won't)

#december 2023 #2023 #original tumblr posts #twitter #israel palestine #antisemitism #oh my god brianha joy gray is so social media addled that she probably shits tweets

[dontfightyourwaralone]

This is so horrifying. Other news sources picked up on this, but this is the source that did the investigating. +972mag and Local Call are a publication run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists.

From the article:

Several of the sources confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

In the majority of cases, the sources added, military activity is not conducted from these targeted homes. “I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled.

In addition, there are apparently four kinds of targets. The first are "military targets such as armed militant cells, weapon warehouses, rocket launchers" etc. The second are underground targets, the tunnels, which harms whatever structure exists over them. The third are "power targets," and the fourth are the homes of suspected Hamas operatives, which can include their families.

The paragraph about "power targets":

The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices. The idea behind hitting such targets, say three intelligence sources who were involved in planning or conducting strikes on power targets in the past, is that a deliberate attack on Palestinian society will exert “civil pressure” on Hamas.

And:

In the early stages of the current war, the Israeli army appears to have given particular attention to the third and fourth categories of targets. According to statements on Oct. 11 by the IDF Spokesperson, during the first five days of fighting, half of the targets bombed — 1,329 out of a total 2,687 — were deemed power targets.

“We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us.

“If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.

A thing that I see all the time is people saying "how can you trust the number of casualties, they're coming from Hamas" but:

The figures provided by the Health Ministry and the Government Media Office — both of which fall under the auspices of the Hamas government — do not deviate significantly from Israeli estimates.

And apparently the estimates of Hamas operatives killed are between 1000 and 3000. According to the guardian, "the estimate from Israel’s military that it has killed between 1,000 and 2,000 Hamas fighters, relates only to the assault on Gaza, and not to any Hamas fighters killed during the initial attacks on Israel." According to these numbers, around 80-93% of the deaths were civilians. So these are the numbers if we trust the Israeli military as a source.

And I made this point before, so it's validating to see here:

“Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,” said one former intelligence official.

#november 2023 #2023 #articles #972 magazine #Yuval Abraham #israel palestine #war crimes

[dontfightyourwaralone]

ohhhhh I get it now. the "gifted kid" discourse exists because people see it fundamentally as a sign of Privilege and not as a largely meaningless category that puffs up weird children before setting them up for the same unremarkable lives as everyone else; thus they interpret people going "the educational system gave me false expectations before ultimately abandoning me to the same heartless world as everyone else" as "why am I, The Main Character, not getting everything I ever wanted."

#november 2023 #2023 #original tumblr posts #commentary #education #The Discourse(tm) #i mean i think privilege is grounded in pretty material realities #like just because people on the internet want to turn everything to a privilege-oppressed dichotomy it doesn't mean it's useless #but i agree with this for the most part #mostly this seems like the kind of discourse where people tried to make it about them when it wasn't #like people on here were like 'i a neurodivergent person was put into gifted classes #but this didn't actually help me prepare for anything and being 'gifted' was used against me when i needed help' #and people who couldn't relate to this were just like #'hmmm. have you considered that this doesn't conform to my experiences so you must be Objectively Wrong?' #wild

[dontfightyourwaralone]

#november 2023 #2023 #original tumblr posts #twitter #articles #washington post #Jeff Stein #Taylor Lorenz #economics #food #social media #fact checking #long post #this is why it's important to not just read/reblog headlines

[dontfightyourwaralone]

(Nov. 29) Indigenous Group Wins Fight to Reclaim Ancestral Land After Being Forced Out 8 Decades Ago

In a major victory for Indigenous rights, an Ecuadorian appeals court has sided with the Siekopai Nation to regain ownership of their ancestral homeland in the Amazon rainforest. The Siekopai people were forced out of their territory, called Pë’këya, over 80 years ago during the Peru-Ecuador War in the 1940s. This ruling will mark the first time the Ecuadorian government grants a land title to an Indigenous community whose ancestral land is now a protected area. The Siekopai are on the brink of extinction with a population of only 800 people in Ecuador and 1,200 in Peru. In a statement, Siekopai Nation President Elias Piyahuaje said, “We are fighting for the preservation of our culture on this planet. Without this territory, we cannot exist as Siekopai people. Today is a great day for our nation. Until the end of time, this land will be ours.”

#november 2023 #2023 #articles #democracy now #ecuador #native americans #land back

[dontfightyourwaralone]

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, that electricity is sent to the grid to power homes with clean energy.

To make renewable energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind available when it is most needed, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it later. But one thing about the Cuyama facility, which began operations this month, is less common: The batteries sending energy to the grid once powered electric vehicles.

The SEPV Cuyama facility, located about two hours northeast of Santa Barbara, is the second hybrid storage facility opened by B2U Storage Solutions. Its first facility, just outside Los Angeles, uses 1,300 retired batteries from Honda Clarity and Nissan Leaf EVs to store 28 megawatt-hours of power, enough to power about 9,500 homes.

The facilities are meant to prove the feasibility of giving EV batteries a second life as stationary storage before they are recycled. Doing so could increase the sustainability of the technology’s supply chain and reduce the need to mine critical minerals, while providing a cheaper way of building out grid-scale storage.

“This is what’s needed at massive scale,” said Freeman Hall, CEO of the Los Angeles-based large-scale storage system company.

Electric vehicle batteries are typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs.

Before they are disassembled, however, studies show that around three-quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage. (Some packs may not have enough life left in them, are too damaged from a collision, or are otherwise faulty.)

“We were seeing the first generation of EVs end their time on the road, and 70 percent or more of those batteries have very strong residual value,” said Hall. “That should be utilized before all those batteries are recycled, and we’re just deferring recycling by three, four, or five years.”

Extending the useful life of EV batteries mitigates the impact of manufacturing them, said Maria Chavez, energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“The whole point of trying to deploy electric vehicles is to reduce emissions and reduce the negative impacts of things like manufacturing and extractive processes on our environment and our communities,” Chavez told Grist. “By extending the life of a battery, we reduce the need for further exploitation of our natural resources, we reduce the demand for raw materials, and we generally encourage a more sustainable process.”

Just as batteries have become crucial to reducing emissions from transportation, they’re also needed to fully realize the benefits of clean energy. Without stationary storage, wind and solar power can only feed the grid when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

“Being able to store it and use it when it’s most needed is a really important way to meet our energy needs,” Chavez said.

The use of utility-scale battery storage is expected to skyrocket, from 1.5 gigawatts of capacity in 2020 to 30 gigawatts by 2025. EV packs could provide a stockpile for that buildout. Hall said there are already at least 3 gigawatt-hours of decommissioned EV packs sitting around in the United States that could be deployed, and that the volume of them being removed from cars is doubling every two years.

“We’re going from a trickle when we started four years ago to a flood of batteries that are coming,” he said.

B2U says its technology allows batteries to be repurposed in a nearly “plug-and-play fashion.” They do not need to be disassembled, and units from multiple manufacturers—B2U has tested batteries from Honda, Nissan, Tesla, GM, and Ford—can be used in one system.

The packs are stored in large cabinets and managed with proprietary software, which monitors their safety and discharges and charges each battery based on its capacity. The batteries charge during the day from both the solar panels and the grid. Then B2U sells that power to utilities at night, when demand and prices are much higher.

Hall said using second-life batteries earns the same financial return as new grid-scale batteries at half the initial cost, and that for now, repurposing the packs is more lucrative for automakers than sending them straight to recyclers. Until the recycling industry grows, it’s still quite expensive to recycle them. By selling or leasing retired packs to a grid storage company, said Hall, manufacturers can squeeze more value out of them.

That could even help drive down the cost of electric vehicles, he added. “The actual cost of leasing a battery on wheels should go down if the full value of the battery is enhanced and reused,” he said. “Everybody wins when we do reuse in a smart fashion.”

B2U expects to add storage to a third solar facility near Palmdale next year. The facilities are meant to prove that the idea works, after which B2U plans to sell its hardware and software to other storage-project developers.

At the moment, though, planned deployment of the technology is limited. B2U predicts only about 6 percent of decommissioned EV batteries in the US will be used for grid-scale storage by 2027.

“People are skeptical, and they should be, because it’s hard to do reuse of batteries,” said Hall. “But we’ve got a robust data set that does prove reliability, performance, and profitability. We’re at a point where we really can scale this.”

#november 2023 #2023 #articles #wired #Gabriela Aoun Angueira #transportation #environmentalism #recycling #clean energy #electricity #california

[dontfightyourwaralone]

With the new structure, customers traveling from Philadelphia to New York can buy tickets starting at $19 if they choose the low-cost Value option or $21 if they want more flexibility. Previously a flexible ticket for the same trip would cost at least $128.A ticket to Boston from Philadelphia in coach could cost customers as low as $35 with thenew flexible option, whereas it used to cost $223.

FUCK YEAH TRAINS

TRAINS

TRAINS

#october 2023 #2023 #articles #the philadelphia inquirer #Ariana Perez Castells #transportation #trains #amtrak

[dontfightyourwaralone]

I'm trying to come up with something clever to say here but I feel like I've been hit by a truck. In a good way. I never thought anything like this would pass in the Midwest, not even in a blue state like IL, because it's simply not the kind of thing anybody campaigns on or even talks about at the gubernatorial level.

This is honestly the perfect legal addendum to NAGPRA, and I'm thrilled it's at the state level. This type of legislation would be way too complex at the federal level, but the individual state responsibilities are manageable, and more importantly, doable.

Here's some of the highlights of what the law does:

It is now the state's responsibility to help return ancestral remains, funerary objects and other important cultural items to tribal nations

The state must follow the lead of tribal nations throughout the repatriation process.

Money must be allocated as part of the state Repatriation and Reinterment Fund to help with the costs of reburial, tribal consultation and the repair of any damage to burial sites, remains or sacred items.

Criminal penalties for the looting and desecration of gravesites are increased, and the law adds a ban on profiteering from human remains and funerary objects through their sale, purchase or exhibition.

Tribal nations must be consulted as soon as possible when Indigenous gravesites are unintentionally disturbed or unearthed — such as during construction projects. (We already had kind of a version of this, but it wasn't strong enough.)

IDNR must set aside and maintain land solely for the reburial of repatriated Native American ancestors and their belongings, as tribal nations have pointed to the lack of protected places for reburial in Illinois as among the highest barriers to repatriation.

Institutions that display human remains that are Native American and any items that were originally buried with those individuals (funerary items) cannot charge admission. You want to display looted grave goods? No money for you. (This is specifically targeting the Dickinson Mounds Museum, which is... well, it started as a guy's private display of Native American skeletons he personally looted. The state took it over in the 90s, but they didn't rebury any of the 230~ human skeletons.)

My favorite comment is this: When asked about what he would say to museums that may push back against the law, Illinois State Rep. Mark L. Walker said: “Too bad.”

#august 2023 #2023 #articles #pro publica #logan jaffe #native americans #illinois #repatriation