Contrarian Anarchist Dipshit

The problem with efforts to eliminate government waste is that everyone wants to use them as an opportunity to get rid of government programs that they dislike, because they consider anything they dislike to be wasteful. A lot of people approach it as an ideological project. When, in reality, a serious attempt at cutting back on waste means doing thousands of small, boring things like “eliminate the USDA’s Catfish Inspection Program and return its inspection authority to the FDA in order to cut the government budget by like 0.0000001%”

The demonization of actual charities/orgs in favor of individual GFMs has done nothing but stripped marginalized people of their privacy + dignity by forcing them to become internet celebrities in order to get their needs met as opposed to an org that could privately help them if said org had the funding!!!! Also it’s why people feel the need to go as far as to fake their own kidnappings just to get traction! Not to mention it’s just made the lives of grifters so much easier

To circle back, who benefits more from this? The 65 year old drug addicted woman on skid row who can’t read or the young hot gen z college kid with 10k tiktok followers? This bastardization of “mutual aid” combined the constant like mining dopamine cycle social media has done almost irreparable damage to young wokey people especially young people of color.

Making every poor person dance for the internet in order to get their snazzy twitter begging flyer traction will only set people up for long term failure.

Imagine: I’m a young person down on her luck so I beg on twitter with my real name and face along with every personal detail, I get my coin, I am actually able to put myself through schooling but now whenever an employer googles me they can find this incredibly personal information about me!

I have nothing but sympathy for people who are in a position where they urgently need money and need it fast but we should instead put that money towards orgs whose whole job is to PRIVATELY help people

My guy you have entirely missed the point of my post and there are multiple ways to vet a charity

if you are worried about charities spending your money they do actually have to share their accounts publicly in most jurisdictions.

Alex Jones is livestreaming rn and for the first and only time in my life it's appointment viewing. He got evicted from his studio mid-stream and they had to cover for him when he popped up in his "satellite studio" (a room in his house I assume) devoid of the Infowars branding. He's talking about how "tens of millions" of people have watched his final broadcast & you can literally see he has far less than a million viewers in the bottom corner (and this is on Twitter, which inflates views of videos ever since Elon had to convince people anyway gives a shit about Tucker Carlson's livestreams). He's currently whining that they chose not to sell his site back to him at auction, so he could keep doing the crimes that are why he was selling his website.

I didn't see this personally but he's apparently read out the Onion's announcement, which is a fake article by a fake corporation, out loud several times as if it was real. Anyway it should be noted how screwed he is, bc...

...while he can livestream under his own name, they own his warehouses of dubious supplements. He has nothing to sell but t-shirts protesting that his show is going down. Since Infowars was, first and foremost, a lifestyle brand, this leaves him, scientifically speaking, "totally fucked". He doesn't have ads, that's the only way he makes money

He just promised that he will "win the information war" which. You were sued into oblivion for lying about the parents of murdered children & lost your platform so hard you don't even have a studio anymore & your brand was seized by a rival to make fun of you. I didn't think the Infowar was a real thing you could lose, but I'm not sure there's a more definitive way to lose the information war. Anyway he's now ranting about fluoride

remember, it's imperative to turn your aesthetic preferences into moral ones. you can't just dislike neutral colors, or glass-and-steel skyscrapers, or flat design, they have to be symbols of neoliberal capitalism in decay. it's incredibly important that you make sure everybody knows that the only reason anyone could like the things you don't like is that they're an empty shell of a person.

House drugged that coffee btw

It’s even better than that. He didn’t drug that coffee, but the other one, the one he isn’t offering to Wilson. He did this because he (rightfully) assumed Wilson would not trust him and ask for House’s coffee instead.

Also noteworthy is that when Wilson drugs House through coffee this very same episode, he does it by drugging the offered cup, because he knows House would never even think to suspect him.

They are insane.

House was sort of like Death Note if there was no death note and Light and L were just coworkers and best friends with sexual tension

Elon is recruiting randos from Twitter to compete for the chance to work themselves to death figuring out how to take away your welfare.

Nothing says efficiency like creating a whole ass new department with two co-chairs.

I'm about to be born. Just give me another dayish.

one day until your crashlanding

huber0203

Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi

Goes insanely hard

To provide further context from what I understand the bill wanted to take the rights guaranteed to the Maori in said treaty and expand them to all New Zealand citizens. The issue with that is that it sort of defeats the point of the protections of the treaty.

The Treaty of Waitangi is not even that good of a treaty. But it is better than any treaty the Crown signed with indigenous peoples

And it absolutely was not meant to be

The treaty as written screws over Māori, and was written in Te Reo Māori and English with deliberately misleading translations to Te Reo Māori. I'm not an expert by any means, but basically the Te Reo Māori version has clauses that promise much more independence and sovereignty, while the English version does not

However

The English version promises them rights as Citizens

From what I remember from University 10+ years ago, this clause, this sentence, was added last minute by the writer of the treaty. Like, right before the big signing at Waitangi.

And the Crown was PISSED

Because now they had a legally binding document that promised, in their own language, to treat Māori with the same rights as they would English. Which was absolutely not the goal. The goal was to trick Māori into signing away their lands and that honestly still did happen. The treaty was not a good faith proposal by the Engliah.

But its still better than anyone else got, and it's better than no treaty. And because nowadays we can't just ignore the Te Reo Māori side of the treaty, the government's of the past few decades have been honouring Māori sovereignty, honouring their stewardship of the land, and undoing a lot of the bad faith "sales" or straight up stolen land.

Except our current fuck nuggets, who want to make Te Reo Māori an endangered language again, and steal back that land because they want to mine on it and sell it and they hate that Māori stewardship is so environmentally focused and not profit driven.

So, in a way, the current government is more true to the intentions of the Crown who initially came up with the treaty.

But since those guys were colonising bastards, I don't see "honouring" them as anything good.

Even with criticism of the treaty, without it, Māori would lose a lot of protections to their lands, their culture, their language, and as a country we would go backwards to a time when they were even more discriminated against

Toitū te tiriti

Uphold the treaty

The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.

I’d just like to point out that every single thing that has happened in the 6 years since I created this post has only reinscribed its absolute moral correctness in my mind.

this can’t be real

He put them together at the kids table that doesn’t exist I’m fucking crying

its easy to make fun of this (and i think we should) but its also important to note the description of this new department that trump has given

[transcript: "together, these two wonderful americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies - essential to the 'save america' movement," trump wrote. "i look forward to elon and vivek making changes to the federal bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all americans."]

to be clear: trump is planning to create a new department whose purpose is literally to deregulate and defund government oversight. this will lead to corporations having greater freedom to fuck over consumers while making more money, and he is putting two billionaires in charge of it.

sure, maybe this is just a ploy to keep them quiet. giving them the illusion of power in exchange for backing him. but lets not forget all the regulations trump cut during his last term

which has directly led to the constant recalls of consumer goods and foodstuffs over the past several years. the recent e coli outbreak at mcdonalds? the boars head listeria recall? these are the products of deregulation. getting rid of laws and standards that protect consumers by making sure money hungry corporations dont cut corners.

the funny name is a smokescreen. keep your eye on these fuckers.

something has gone deeply wrong when "focusing pragmatically on issues you can influence and working to make life better for yourself and your community" is considered an unserious distraction while "endlessly exposing yourself to media about distressing situations you can't control" is considered political engagement

tumblr please stop telling me to wd40 a mouse

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

I remember my mom explaining the Carter administration to me once, and said that it was her opinion that Reagan won because he was able to say “I’m not gonna let an energy crisis prevent me from driving my car!”

Like Carter may have been “right,” and pragmatic in the way he handled that, but Reagan made people feel like they could do what they wanted, which seems to be the average American’s concept of “freedom.”

It turns out people really really like the protections and support they get from the Affordable Care Act but don’t like “Obamacare” which anyone who is even mildly informed knows they’re one in the same.

What republicans have mastered is controlling a narrative, and democrats like being “right,” more than they like winning elections, so idk what to do about the fact that what almost everyone is saying is “I don’t make enough money to live the kind of life I want,” and republicans have used that to turbocharge the spiral into fascism by saying that’s because of immigrants and trans people.

SO!

I haven't been sharing much about the election, for my general mental health, but I think this one hit the nail on the head for a lot of it.

The average voter is incredibly ignorant of how the government works, the separations and limitations of the powers of any individual actor, basic facts like how much of high prices is actual economics vs corporate greed, or that most changes and improvements take time and aren't anything close to immediate quick fixes. Nor do they understand how complicated just about any issue is.

I'm not gonna lie this is like the most inspiring tattoo I've ever seen I keep coming back to it and admiring it everything about it