progressive-oregonian

[progressive-oregonian]

Starbucks is shutting down Kismet, a local Turkish cafe under the claim they serve espresso

Spoilers: they don't. It's Turkish coffee.

In the center of Alderwood Mall in Washington, there's two kiosks.

One is a creation built from the ground up (Literally. They had to install the plumbing and electric themselves.) by a married couple from Turkey. They had a restaurant before immigrating here, and chose to set up shop in a region with a huge middle eastern population. Achma, simit, baklava, Nutella Bomb (Bomb of Izmir remix), börek, and whatever baked goods they're giving a whip up are worked on as they chat with you. Turkish coffee is brewed and served in beautiful little cups, Italian sodas prepped, and with a baked good of choice enjoyed at the wrap around counter. The place has become a tiny cultural island of familiarity, where friends and families gather to chat, eat and drink.

The other is a duplicate stamp fast food kiosk by a bloated multi-billion dollar corporation that's already shut down one of its three (3) locations within the mall, leaving yet another unoccupied dead space.

For years, it's ignored Kismet's presence while it made the usual hard climb from startup. But it's gotten popular. And they don't like it.

And so they walk up to Brookfield Properties who own the mall, and whip out the contract of no one else on the property serving espresso (yes. they have that. insidious isn't it?) demanding that the Turkish coffee shop close. Here's the screamer though: They. Don't. Serve. Espresso. But Brookfield won't squirm under the thumb of the megacorp unless it's made loud and clear what a big mistake that is.

They've put up a petition to try and rally enough support and noise to get this bullshit on the news.

If you would like to help, even signing the petition will carry this forward. Reblog and share it too, and let's see if we can't give Starbucks a well-earned kick in the groin.

[progressive-oregonian]

Another low-hanging fruit thrown away…

#politics #us politics #government #the left #bernie sanders #progressive #unions #unionize #democrats #current events #working class #solidarity #twitter post #capitalism #news

[progressive-oregonian]

Heads up. Its a good idea to scrap copper and brass because then it can be reused and you can make money on it depending on the state. In construction and blue collar shops brass and copper are used a lot and scrapped.

[progressive-oregonian]

"... “I’m taking action because I feel desperate,” said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.

“It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity,” Kalmus continued. “World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don’t get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point.” ..."

#climate change #science #earth #environment #protests

[progressive-oregonian]

[progressive-oregonian]

Y'all are advocating for stripping Oregon of any political power at all in Congress. Oregon has strong say because we can as a bloc can vote with parity to anyone else on the West Coast. In population we got 4 million people. Its 1/2 the population of New York, Washington, Virginia and many other blue states and its dwarfed by states like California and Texas. Oregon is a state that is heavily leftist and liberal and our policies reflect such. That however does not mean we are the same to the laws and culture of California. Our neighbor south of us. And I for one do not want California to use its population to pass laws for Oregon that are not beneficial for Oregon or culturally right to Oregon (Example strong plumbing unions in Oregon protecting highly paid journeyman plumbing work). And from my experience most Oregonians don't want that either. We do not have the population to sway the other states in the US and a coalition isnt possible when most other states your size believe in GOP values. So when you say abolish the Senate you're essentially saying that as Oregon a state in the US we will not have any say in the way federal laws affect our state and it's policies. I understand if you want to reform the Senate. Things like including Puerto Rico and DC if they choose to be a state, making the filibuster a talking one or abolishing it, and changing the House of Representatives so there is parity on a national level instead of smaller states having more value per person but abolishing the senate disregards not only people in the red states that people love to hate on (where actually a large portion of black people reside different story for another day) but you are throwing the states who are actually leftist and liberal under the bus. So when I hear that people want to abolish the Senate I'm hearing as a leftist and an Oregonian that you want to take away any say Oregon has in Congress and eliminate any sway we might have in making the laws favorable to Oregon. Please for the love of all that is good please think about this.

#oregon #senate #us govt

[progressive-oregonian]

Very honest, good faith source, Goldman Sachs CEO, who makes over $27.5 million per year

#tax the rich #capitalism #working class #big banks #eat the rich #wall street

[progressive-oregonian]

Source

Source

Something beautiful is happening

#unionize #unions #save unions #solidarity #working class #workers rights #capitalism #current events #important #news

[progressive-oregonian]

[progressive-oregonian]

[progressive-oregonian]

[progressive-oregonian]

I am sorry. I’m bashing Apple here. And for good reason.

This is a plea to my followers.

Stop buying Apple products. I know you’ve used them for most of your life, and I know it’s inconvenient to move to a new brand because in most cases, you cannot take your contacts with you on various chat apps.

I know this is inconvenient. I truly do.

But Apple is not the company it was before. There is now no difference between an Apple computer and a Windows computer in terms of graphic design. I know this for a fact. I had to use both in college 20 years ago, and non-apple computers are now generally better for design work than Apple computers.

Most non-apple companies encourage self-repair of your own devices, while Apple refuses it. I also know this for a fact, as I watched Apple computers become slowly less reparable through the late 90s and early 2000s. Where I was once able to do the repairs on our office computers, we had to start sending out our Apple devices because they started gluing things down on their logic boards. Notably the glue they used was not heat-resistant and led to device damage should the heat sink system fail. But they did this because they wanted to dig more money out of their customers.

Apple software is also designed to fail. I cannot believe people are still buying new devices after the scandal where Apple was slowing their phones in order to force people to purchase new versions.

Apple hardware is designed to become obsolete. Motherboards and logic boards are designed to hold exactly what comes attached to them and will fail if upgrade attempts are made.

Apple refuses to work with software developers despite promises of cross-compatibility. One of the very first coding problems I discovered was to discover a gigantic hole in a software program that made a plotter (giant printer) compatible with iOS. This caused a memory leak, leading to necessary resets of the computer after every 2 feet of printing.

I know that it’s not possible for most of you to just throw your devices away and buy a new one. I wouldn’t be able to do that, either. But eventually there will come a time when you have to upgrade, and I encourage you to take the plunge and purchase a non-apple device. I don’t even have a recommendation for you because literally anything is better than Apple. A rock that you write on is better than an Apple phone.

Unfortunately I expect to be shadow-banned on Apple devices because of this, and I’ll try to report on decreased activity as much as I can.

It’s time to stop trying to beg Apple to change. They won’t. It’s time now to just stop supporting Apple.

[progressive-oregonian]

BAD TIMELINE. BAD TIMELINE. BAD TIMELINE.

[progressive-oregonian]

Wait for it…

Wait for it…

Wait for it…

Missed it by………..ONE POINT FOUR PERCENT (1.4%)

#ayeforscotland #scotland #scottish politics #british politics #uk politics

[progressive-oregonian]

[progressive-oregonian]

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

[progressive-oregonian]