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somehow the poor cops who we were told are simply too understaffed and underpaid because of Woke to deal with 'rampant rising crime' have found the strength to beat the shit out of college students across the whole country for peacefully saying "divest from the country killing innocent palestinians in the tens of thousands"

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Bit telling that for years and years evangelical religious extremists have been allowed on university campuses with their bullhorns and horrific imagery where they harass students into physical altercations and when students complain to the university’s administration they just shrug their shoulders citing freedom of speech but when those same tuition-paying students start protesting against war and genocide they call SWAT

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Packed my husband a slice of cake with his work lunch and he sent me this

I am losing my mind over this.

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Tough grizzled guy at the biker bar: "How I got these scars? Heh... that's a long story, kid" (scene fades into a montage of mundane household accidents: touching a hot pan, running into a door, slipping in the shower, cutting a bagel wrong, etc.)

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My friend Mona has asked me to share her story with you all.

Here's the link to the evacuation gofundme. They're very close to their goal. They legitimately only have less than 10k USD left to go before all 9 of them can evacuate.

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[SOURCE]

Maternity kits, medical threads and scissors, water testing kits, anesthetics, mobile desalination units, etc do you see the pattern? Israel is not only starving the people of Gaza but it also wants to ensure the spread of disease through contaminated water and surgical tools, as well as ensuring injured Palestinians suffer through horrendous pain.

It's beyond sickening.

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Here's something that a lot of thin people don't know about being fat: you have to be very careful, these days, what the weight limit on your furniture is. So much is made of particleboard or even cardboard or flimsy plastic, and it may be great for the environment for things to be made of recycled materials, but it can easily leave fat people in the incredibly humiliating situation of breaking a chair by sitting on it, or a table by leaning on it. It also creates an effective "fat tax" on furniture, since the more solid materials tend to cost more.

When I was looking for loft beds to make my apartment effectively larger, the majority of them had a weight limit of 200 pounds, including the weight of the mattress. That puts a weight limit on the person of roughly 150 pounds, and that presumes a light mattress. That's not taking into account blankets, pillows, and stuffies, which can easily rack up a weight of around ten to twenty pounds without much trouble, bringing the safe weight for a person down to roughly 140 to 130 pounds. The ones that held more than that had a steep increase in price, with ones that held 300 pounds costing roughly 600$ more than the 200 pound ones, and the 400 pound ones, which I wanted for tolerances, ran a good 800$ more on average than the ones for 200 pounds.

More generally, solid wood, metal, tempered glass, and thick, durable plastic cost more than particleboard, cardboard, and flimsy plastic. They are also far more likely to be safe for fat people to use.

If you are a thin person and want fat people to be comfortable when visiting you, invest in furniture that is clearly made with sturdy materials. Having to brush off standing the whole visit is embarrassing both for us and, if you are a host who cares about the comfort of guests, for you.

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When the rest of the world looks at the united states right now, we see a government who sends billions to support genocide but cannot help their own people starving on the streets.

We see a police force who won't go in to save children from school shootings, but deploy at a rapid rate to arrest peaceful protestors using their right to free speech to protest a genocide

America, you are a war mongering snake eating your own tail. You will protect and support war criminals in another country but let your own people starve and die

To the students bravely protesting now, we see your strength. We see what we saw when students protested the Vietnam War. We have faith you will prevail

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The fact that homelessness is controversial tells you everything you need to know about conservatives.

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No one is discrediting the student protests. I myself am a student who is partaking in largely student-coordinated protests, drives, campaigns… but I also understand that we are largely missing the point if coverage of these protests overshadows what they are actually protesting for—the atrocities committed on Palestinians every single day. As the western buzz around this genocide gets more and more coverage, the coverage of the genocide itself sharply declines. It’s true and I see it every single day. Things are not being reported with the precision and diligence with which they should be.

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Just checking.... We all pronounce Miette like My-TAY in our heads, right?

#it’s pronounced mee-ett. what????

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if you're wondering why THIS tiktok ban bill made it through the senate unlike last time...

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The US military emitted 640 times as much CO2 as Taylor Swift last year

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This is what the fight is like

Sooo, apparently the extremely tenuous and recent nature of the LGBTQ+ community's legal right to exist was not actually super widely known to a lot of people on Tumblr?

Which clarifies some stuff in retrospect. I have so often wanted to grab people by their lapels and shout, "Stop picking on someone for not meeting your entry requirements! We need everyone we can get, you asshole! DON'T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THEY HATE US OUT THERE?"

Aaaapparently... no, they did not know. Or they knew and were a conservative psyop preparing the ground for our loss of legal rights. Fun times!

So: Look, it is bad. Shit is scary. They really do hate us out there. You're not wrong.

But: This is what we've always fought. This boat we're in with its antique fittings and strange markings on the floor is a battleship. Work has always been going on in the basements, and when shit gets tough, we clear away clutter and roll out the cannons.

I found this chart a couple weeks ago and hung onto it because it felt like the map to my first 25 years on this earth:

[Image description: A graph titled "Same Sex Marriage: Public Polls since 1988." It is from FiveThirtyEight's NYT column. It records the percentage of US Americans polled who would say yes or no to legalizing same-sex marriage, from 1988 to 2011.

The two lines begin with roughly 10% saying yes in 1988, and 70% saying no; the two lines gradually draw closer over the years, until by 2011, the percent saying finally dips under 50%, and the group saying yes makes a tentative reach for the majority. End of image description.]

After some great social change has happened, when everyone has admitted that gay marriage is very cute and Pride is a colourful parade, hooray, people like to pretend that it was just natural and inevitable and happened on its own. People just became less prejudiced! Courts just decided on a case! Governments just passed a law!

In reality, it was a vicious fucking fight, every fucking time. Every fucking where. There are a lot of people who deeply, sincerely believe that a hundred years ago, society had good rules about sex and gender and intercourse and marriage, and that changing those rules has made the world worse. They don't always agree on the specifics, but they can work together far enough to fight anyone with new ideas.

This is why we are a community. Even when we don't have the same experiences of attraction or identity, even when we don't do the same things, even when we have wildly different ideas of a good time. Because when these groups take aim, we're all under fire, and none of us is responsible for why they hate us.

In some ways I think it's a miracle that there seems to be a generation that did not grow up, as I grew up, constantly glued to news reports about What Percentage of Society Hates Us this month. I can't imagine who I'd be if my brain and heart and soul hadn't been tied up, that whole time, in the political question of whether I'd get to dream of a decent future.

I think that it will give us strength to have people who can imagine a world where no one hates us. Who believe in it so strongly they can taste it. That's my prediction: If you didn't know this was coming, you'll be a boon to us, because we have always needed joy so fiercely, in this fight, to keep us going on. We have needed drag queens and punk bands and "her wife" and safe space stickers. Parade floats and wedding days and little dogs with rainbow collars, badges and banners and meetups, because more than anything else we need to fight our own despair, and our fear that the world will never get any better than this.

It will. We know it will. We can taste it.

Look up to the history, organizations, and people who've got us this far for information on what forms of activism will actually advance our political goals. Look to the side to make sure the comrades within reach are keeping their heads above water, and that you're keeping enough joy going to stay alive. Look back to see who's more vulnerable than you are that you might have forgotten or been tempted to leave behind. Look after each other. Look after yourself.

We can do this.

To your battle stations.