Senators are going to vote on whether or not we should continue to send aid to Israel on Wednesday, November 13th. Call them, bombard their phone lines with calls. Every fucking day. We have a chance of doing something about this.

yall

here is a tool to help you find your representative by zipcode

this is also a great resource

BOMBARD. HOUND. SHOUT IT OUT.

Now is a good time to check if you need to renew your passport or get one for the first time.

Not even as an alarmist thing, but because you want to do it NOW before any requirements change and your get distracted by the world. It's just a good thing to have.

The full passport book is pricey ($130), but the card ($30) has all the same benefits as identification and can be used at land borders.

Just to make it clear, because I've also seen this (good) advice going around on other platforms and being challenged:

The main point of having a Passport in the times to come is NOT to emigrate or have the ID to claim asylum, and I pray we don't need it for that.

The point is that Upcoming Administration wants to deport people. They will almost certainly not have the federal staff for the plans they espoused. The Passport is proof of citizenship in ways that other IDs in the US are not.

Additonally, beyond the travel book - which you should keep in a safe place similar to your Birth certificate when not traveling- you can get a wallet card. Immediate proof, right there.

This may be especially important for POC and Latine people soon.

Be safe, friends.

Project 2025 ain't gonna roll out all at once. So what we're gonna wanna do is make passing each individual part of it as difficult as possible, so there's less to undo once we finally get this country back on the rails.

Resist every step and do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Distracting people with stupid bullshit is one of Trump's favorite political techniques. We saw it all over the place in the first term.

Trump will say something like "You know the Hispanics actually punch kittens, it's what they do."

And the news will be like "TRUMP SAID HISPANIC PEOPLE PUNCH KITTENS" for three weeks.

And while they're doing that the Republicans in Congress have quietly deleted healthcare.

Do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Trump is a dancing monkey whose greatest asset is the ability to yank the spotlight off of everyone else. Keep your eyes on Congress.

the lesson I'm taking away from this election is not that the Democrats need to become more left wing or more right wing but moreso that they need to find a way to cater their rhetoric towards people who genuinly have no idea what is going on. the target audience for every speech and political appearance should be someone who doesn't know what the three branches of government are because they were drawing a Cool S during high school civics

political scientists have failed to consider the possibility that the silent majority is silent because they didn't understand the question and are trying to play it cool

Toxic masculinity is caused by misogyny. You guys know that right? That anything outside of a small box is considered feminine and therefore bad? It's not "let men be healthily masculine!" Its "stop viewing femininity as weakness"

Talk of the "4B" movement on here is a great way to see a lot of people declare "oh, they'll probably be saying it's transphobic soon" before dropping unalloyed transphobia. I mean, the top posts are all posts mocking the idea that it's being used by TERFs posted by people whose bios identify themselves as radfems and whose tags say radfems can interact, and making posts just saying things like "leftists will claim it's transphobic to class trans women with men", so we're not exactly dealing with a savvy covert operation here

But that misses the larger point that in this context going on Strike Against Men is pointless. It's all based on the assumption that it's incels driving Trump's victory, but that's a very online assumption to make, because it was evangelicals, and evangelical men only date evangelical women. They won't even notice any movement, because there's no shortage of women who support the misogynistic culture of evangelical America.

This is a thorny thing to talk about since while they're all victims of patriarchal brainwashing, yeah, there are a substantial amount of women in this country who have embraced it, who are against feminism, who think they should be quiverfull housewives with a dozen kids and no notions, and who think that lifestyle should be forced on other women. Conservative women are often oppressed by the restrictions placed on women by conservative culture, but also many of them enforce those restrictions. The idea of a large group of women enthusiastically co-signing their oppression is haunting. So it's unsurprising that for many, the response to that is to ignore it: to retreat back into a worldview of men who support Trump and women who oppose him

The incel is a descriptor of a certain type of angry, isolated young man, but it's a term that's overused until it's presented as the bulk of the right. I regret to inform you most MAGA men are, in fact, getting laid; they do have wives and girlfriends, who are themselves often MAGA. A majority of white women voted for Trump, after all. Of course presenting women as a united front for liberation against a lonely oppressor class would sound more appealing than that reality, but it's also a useless model for accomplishing anything, since it's, well, not reality

Story is wild

Little girl was part of a county fair agro-educational program where they raise an animal for a few months and at the end it’s slaughtered. Supposed to teach them about the economics of farming and stuff.

But the little girl loved her goat so much she was crying on the day her goat was supposed to be taken away, so her mom sent the county fair people an email saying “I’ll pay for the goat and any expenses. We’ve had several deaths in the family in the past year, I don’t wanna take away one more thing my little girl loves.” Technically the goat had already been sold at auction, so the mom was on the hook for about $1000, only about $70 of which would have been profit for the county fair.

The county fair people were irate and got law enforcement involved, over this “breach of contract”. They literally got a fucking judge to sign a search warrant, authorizing them to go to this little girl’s house and search every room and every cabinet or box “large enough to contain a small goat”. The sheriff’s deputies seized the goat, and whoever they gave it to immediately slaughtered it, though they were supposed to wait until some kind of agreement had been worked out.

In the county fair’s initial email correspondence with the girl’s mother, they made it clear that they were pissed off because the story of the little girl who loved her goat was circulating on social media making them look bad, and they felt the girl needed to be taught a lesson about keeping your promises or whatever. So they refused the mother’s offer to pay for it, and insisted they get the goat. Even if it meant sending the fucking cops into her house lmao.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair

the congressman who bought the goat didn’t have any objections to the family saving the goat from slaughter either! it’s fucking insane that the cops were so eager to play act their swat commando fantasies that they played stooge to the benefit of no one except some self important local organizers!

Alternate link, LAtimes locks their stuff behind paywalls sometimes

Don’t forget the part where the goat wasn’t where they had a warrant to search, so they drove 500 miles, leaving the area they have legal jurisdiction in, then searched a farm they didn’t have a warrant for ans seized the goat. The fair then had the goat slaughtered, even though a court had ordered them to keep it alive until ownership was resolved and despite the fact that both potential owners of the goat had decided to keep it alive.

They broke multiple laws in order to “teach” a little girl the “lesson” that “everybody has to follow the rules”.

I sure hope all of the complaints sent to Shasta District Fair CEO Melanie Silva, whose decisions these were and continues to defend her actions, are polite and don’t waste too much ink. I’m certain nobody would take advantage of the fact that the Sasha District Fair and Event Center’s contact page lists their phone and fax numbers, not to mention the email form below that.

Would be a shame if that information was to circulate far an wide, and ruin that despicable woman's easter holidays

I found the lawsuit filing. It is a work of art, brief and to the point. If you read nothing else, check out page 2, the section headed Nature of the Action. Magnificent.

One of the things that bugs me in the notes is a bunch of people being like 'it's a livestock animal, it's her fault for getting attached' and.

My dudes, I cannot emphasize enough that the little girl's emotional attachment to the goat is in fact the least of the issues with this story. The main issue in this story is the fact that a bunch of cops broke multiple laws, including the unlawful entry to the property the goat was being held, the unlawful seizure and destruction of said goat, and the unlawful use of a criminal search warrant in a civil dispute case, just to start with.

The little girl owned the goat. At no point in the proceedings - and indeed at no point in the proceedings in the course of the normal auction-purchase-slaughter of a livestock animal in this program - did the fair own the goat. At no point in the proceedings did the person who successfully bid on the goat actually own it - he had made the winning bid to purchase rights to the meat. He hadn't even done that yet! The goat legally and incontrovertibly belonged to the little girl. The very worst that should have happened in this story is a brief property ownership dispute in a civil court.

The fair CEO decided to unlawfully force the auction of the goat, and, when the girl's mother began to dispute her actions, to make a false claim of theft, with precisely ZERO legal basis, calling the cops on an already emotionally fragile child, and then had the temerity to be angry with the child's mother because the story was making them look bad on social media.

Regardless of your opinion on the meat industry, livestock slaughter, or 4H, 'cops drive 500 miles, perform an illegal search, seizure and destruction of an American citizen's property, on the word of a biased 3rd party with zero legal rights to the property in question' should make you angry. Because it is a violation of civil rights, and also had no motive besides needless cruelty to an already grieving child.

News to know: The next court update on this is sometime in October 2024. I'm watching this case because it covers a lot of different facets of how contracts work, minors rights, property rights in the face of law enforcement seizures and searches, and how does one county fair have so much brutality to wield against a then-nine-year-old. I would not be surprised if this gets bogged down again with more counter-suits. It's absolutely ghoulish that they're doing all this over less than 1000$ of goat and one little girls grief. I hope that the judge who sees this case knows just how dangerous it is to dismiss, since this is a matter of third-party property rights infringement using law enforcement agents as bludgeons. The Sheriffs *cannot* be allowed to maintain extrajudicial authority.

UPDATE:

GIRL WINS $300,000

I need people to understand that "radqueer", "transid", "pro para", and other wild offshoots of the LGBTQ+ community are majority made up of trolls. There is no benefit to acknowledging them, discoursing with or about them, or especially making whole blogs devoted to being against them. In fact, that's exactly what they want and will only rile them up further. The people who do genuinely identify as these things thrive off of feeling oppressed, it's validating to their identity that people don't want them to exist. I get it, I'm disabled both mentally and physically and suffer from a variety of intrusive thoughts including sexual ones and it fucking pains me to see people misunderstanding and quirky-ifying my conditions. But if you keep respecting their existence with genuine discourse instead of a hearty "fuck off" whenever you're forced to interact with them you're going to end up making things worse.

So I'm realizing a lot of people don't know a ton about RFK Jr who very well may be our new secretary of health. In July of this year he proposed creating "wellness farms." He wants to force anyone on antidepressants, opioid medications, or those who are neurodivergent into farms to forcibly work with no contact with the outside world until they're "cured." I am not kidding. Please see this article with a clip from a podcast where he says it directly. It's not taken out of context. This is his plan.

We can also talk about how RFK Jr is directly responsible for the deaths of 83 children in American Samoa through antivax policies and how that will only get worse if he introduces his ideas to the American population.

We've all rightfully been talking about the dangers of the next president but we also need to pay attention to who he will be appointing to key government positions.

Here is an article about the wellness camps with a video clip of him discussing it.

I have sources about how he directly caused the death of almost one hundred kids in American Samoa too if anyone needs too.

please think of the disabled people of gaza. please think of the diabetic people of gaza. please think of the neurodivergent people of gaza. please think of those whose lives are relying on medicine that has either stopped coming in due to the blockade, or is available in such scarcity that its price has skyrocketed.

we're approaching winter. on top of the challenge of securing waterproof tents and sufficiently warm clothing, some diabetic people in gaza have stopped taking their insulin as they can no longer afford it. those who are able to acquire it for now know every shot may be their last.

mohammed @ahmed0khalil, only 19, has been injured with shrapnel in his leg.

his father is diabetic.

one of his younger siblings is blind, and another is autistic.

imagine that kind of pressure during a genocide.

the least we can do is shoulder some of the financial burden. don't forget about the disabled people of gaza.

vetted here

For people who think boycotts /BDS doesn’t working —

My last job was at an ad agency and Burger King and Hershey’s were one of our clients. We’ve received several briefs on how to combat and address boycott sentiments because it was affecting their market shares.

And our other clients frequently check to make sure they’re not being boycotted

It’s working. It’s working. It’s working.