I know Republican voters want us to stop calling them stupid but I’m sorry what am I supposed to call this?? It is stupid to think a TV personality should be in charge of the military. Or that they should be the president. Hope this helps 🫡

Like Kamala campaigned with Oprah Winfrey but we weren’t going to put her in charge of the Department of Defense 😭

Not disagreeing that anyone who voted for Trump is either stupid or gullible, but… the picking Fox hosts and such is less about the Trump voters being stupid and more about the idea that fascism is very often kakistocracy (rule by the worst people.)

All that matters to the fascist is “loyalty.” Who here will say I’m right when I tell them everyone should eat shit? That person gets a high position because I don’t think they’ll turn on me or make me look bad.

This is the part that we hoped people would see coming but that they didn’t, because their idea of fascism is, like, Star Wars: sexy smart men who are mean.

They’re neither sexy nor smart, they’re just willing to pretend their Dear Leader is (and very likely believing he isn’t in private.)

I don't know why anyone is surprised by this.

He spent his first campaign burning out all the far-right old-school conservatives and his two presidential campaigns since pissing off everyone who had a shred of ethics.

What's left is sycophants and people who get off by causing panic.

The loyalty aspect is also seen with his nomination of Matt Gaetz. He wants to see how far the now republican dominated senate will go in terms of loyalty to him. Gaetz may also be a sort of sacrificial pawn: if the Senate rejects him, Trump is likely hoping that they'll feel obligated to support all of his other selections to make up for it and show loyalty.

Normalize this response

Please fucking lie to your employer. Like they don’t need to know your mental health issues or what drugs you do. Ffs

its not lying if its to employers or cops

and look up ur rights on what they can and cannot ask u many places ban asking about ur record and transportation status and things like that resources will also tell u how they reword sketchy questions so ur prepared

Hey. Take it from a former HR person… this goes double right now. I just spent some time putting in some job applications myself (not for HR, lol) and got about 15 interviews. And idk if it’s because of COVID uncertainty or if places just don’t fucking care anymore because they know people are desperate for work, but the amount of straight up illegal shit my interviewers asked me was appalling. (That’s not even counting the questions that were technically legal but clearly fishing for information they’re not legally allowed to ask.)

A tame example? Two questions into a phone interview, the guy on the other end of the line asked: “How old are you?” I said “Excuse me?” - giving him a chance to rethink that. He didn’t. “How old are you?” “Sir, you are not allowed to ask me that question.” “Well, I want to know. I’m asking.” “And you’re legally not allowed to ask me that. I’m not required to tell you my age.” At that point, I guess he managed to remember an old HR bulletin or something (I hope to god he wasn’t actually HR himself), and he said, “Well, I need to know if you’re over the age of 18.” (Which is what he should have asked in the first place… or not, since that was in the application that he could have read.) “Yes. I’m over the age of 18.”  And we moved on. Two questions later, he tried another illegal question. I called him on it again and ended the interview, citing that a workplace with such a clear disregard for the law, especially upon first contact with a potential employee, was not going to be a good fit. (They offered me the job anyway, lol. I didn’t send a thank-you or a response.)

At a different interview, the majority of questions were “fishing” questions - just looking for that info they’re not actually allowed to ask. (This person was also either not really HR or an HR person who was exceptionally bad at their job.)

I could tell they were getting frustrated when I dodged answering the personal stuff, and they actually got extremely upset when I mentioned later in the interview (re: less relevant work experience) I had worked in HR. They were super flustered for the remainder of our time, and I watched them skip over questions on their sheet they had clearly planned on asking. They KNEW they were being sketchy and were counting on me not knowing anything about HR - or my rights - and so they got upset when I did. These were super tame examples. I’m begging you, if you’re job searching right now, PLEASE know your rights. Please know what interviewers are allowed to ask. Please don’t volunteer information or elaborate more than you’re required to about personal things. Save your words (and everyone’s time) by elaborating why you’re good for the position/what you can do. I may create a resource list on this shit later but PLEASE PLEASE KNOW THIS STUFF BEFORE YOU TALK TO AN EMPLOYER. This goes for anywhere you’re interviewing as well as your current employer. This also goes for HR. HR may be the person you go to when shitty stuff happens, but that doesn’t mean they’re your friend (or competent). They don’t need to know your age (beyond 16+, 18+, or 21+, depending on the job). They don’t need to know your medical history. (For the love of god, do NOT answer the “have you been diagnosed with depression?” question.) They don’t need to know if you have kids or whatever. They don’t need to know a LOT of those things that may appear on an application, including your veteran status, whether you’re on/have been on unemployment, etc. They’re not entitled to know specifics about your transportation (unless you’re using that transportation for the job, like Uber/delivery drivers). Look this up for your state/the job’s state. Beware questions like “What year did you graduate?” if you’re like me and don’t put dates on your resume (I just put amount of time spent at employers, not dates of employment). They’re fishing for your age. It’s “Oh, you know, 100 years ago,” if you feel comfortable making a joke, or “About [generic number, like 5 or 10] years ago” if not. Also beware things like the “What do you do in your free time?” question, even if you already work there. This is not a friendly getting-to-know-you question. This is a basis for judgement. Not up to an invisible standard? They’re going to be biased against you for pay raises, promotions, etc. Mention kids/lots of family/social engagements? That’s a tick against you for not being the kind of person who lives to work (yes, it’s gross and stupid). Mention lots of solitary things? Cool, that’s their mental note to ask more from you because you’re “not doing anything anyway.” By all means, be friendly with your coworkers/talk about shared interests if you want, but it is none of your boss’s business, and be aware what could get back to them.  Don’t. Tell. Employers. Shit.

We wrote up a handy list of those illegal questions here:

10 Questions You Should Never Be Asked in a Job Interview 

Hopefully people already know this by now, but I saw way too often back when I worked in retail. Don’t add your coworkers or boss on social media. Yes, your coworkers too. You don’t want to accidentally say something to them or have them see a post and mention it to your boss. I’ve seen it happen.

why do i end up sitting straight up in my sleep. ignore how many blankets I use.

Bestie it is impossible to ignore the amount of blankets you use at first I assumed this was a meme and those were the layers of the crust of the earth

I actually have 4 more blankets I sometimes add but I didn't want to make my blanket number look excessive

Are you okay

The results are inconclusive on that.

Bestie. the reason you end up sitting up is your lungs think you are being crushed.

OP making the bed

is it not normal to sleep with like 7 blankets

Maybe if it's cold out and you don't have heating but otherwise, no I wouldn't say that that's typical

these two are gwiazdka and słoneczko

say hi

On an artistic level, Guillermo Del Toro is basically making cakes for himself and anyone else who's into the flavor of cakes he's making, while Zack Snyder is making statues of himself, do you understand what I'm saying here?

Guillermo Del Toro: I'm saturating the color in my movie so it feels more like anime and/or a fairy tale! :)

Zack Snyder: I'm desaturating my movie and fucking up the aspect ratio because uhhhhhh take me seriously I'm an artist.

my day's been okay. my shift began late so i managed to do three loads of laundry (my least favorite chore), some ironing, and painted my nails.

and since we're here, i kinda wanna just make this quick:

💻 @balsamibrahim 💻 gfm 💻 paypal 💻

you can also find updates in her gfm link.

please donate to her if you can!! whatever you can spare is more than enough. and please, do reblog this post! if you've voted in the poll, reblog. please.

You truly brought me to tears 😭❤️🙏… I never knew there were still people standing me, trying to make my voice and my family’s voice heard by the world. 400 days of this suffering have passed, and I am still searching for a compassionate hand to reach out to me, still asking for help amidst all this pain 😢😢

Finally, a worthy competitor to this site's hate mail game.

if you're feeling powerless right now—and god knows I am—here's a reminder you can donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, the Trans Law Center, Gaza Soup Kitchen, the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, and hundreds of other charities that will work to mitigate the damage that has been and will continue to be inflicted

life continues. we still have the capacity to do good, important work. that matters

confuses me that "radical feminists actually have no problem with men, only trans women" is becoming more and more of a popular take, how does one read the SCUM manifesto and come away with the idea that this political movement has no particular ideology regarding men/manhood

From the book Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD:

Reblog and say what project you currently have spread on your dinner table in the tags

oh btw archive.org has the first edition of this book available to borrow.

you know what else fucks me up about the US election? one of the things that has left me reeling in bewilderment and grief this month?

I'm a scientist, y'all.

That means that I am, like most American research scientists, a federal contractor. (Possibly employee. It's confusing, and it fucks with my taxes being a postdoctoral researcher.) I get paid because someone, in the long run ideally me, makes a really, really detailed pitch to one of several federal grant agencies that the nation would really be missing out if I couldn't follow up on these thoughts and find concrete evidence about whether or not I'm right.

Currently, my personal salary is dependent on a whole department of scientists convincing one of the largest and most powerful granting agencies that they have a program that is really good at training scientists that can think deeply about the priorities of the agency. Those priorities are defined by the guy who runs the agency, and he gets to hire whatever qualified people he wants. That guy? The Presidential Administration picks that one. That's how federal agencies get staffed: the President's administration nominates them.

All of the heads of these agencies are personally nominated by the president and their administration. They are people of enormous power whose job is to administer million-dollar grants to the scientists competing urgently for limited funds. A million dollars often doesn't go farther than a couple of years when it's intended to pay for absolutely everything to do with a particular pitch, including salaries of your trainees, all materials, travel expenses, promoting the work among other researchers, all of it—so most smart American researchers are working fervently on grants all the time.

The next director of the NIH will be a Trump appointee, if he notices and thinks to appoint one. NSF, too; that's the group that funds your ecology and your astroscience and your experimental mathematics and physics and chemistry, the stuff that doesn't have industry funding and industry priorities. USDA. DOE, that's who does a lot of the climate change mitigation and renewable energy source research, they'll just be lucky if they can do anything again because Trump nigh gutted them last time.

Right now, I am working on the very tail end of a grant's funding and I am scurrying to make sure I stay employed. So I'm thinking very closely about federal agency priorities, okay? And I'm thinking that the funding climate for science is going to get a lot fucking leaner. I'm seeing what the American people think of scientists, and about whether my job is worth doing. It's been a lean twelve years in this gig, okay? Every time the federal government gets fucked up, that impacts my job, it means that I have to hustle even harder to get grants in that let me support myself—and, if I have any trainees, their budding careers as well!—to patch over the lean times as much as we can.

So I've been reeling this week thinking about how funding agency priorities are going to change. I work on sex differences in motivation, so let me tell you, the politics reading this one for my next pitch are going to be fun. I'm working on a submission for an explicitly DEI-oriented five year grant with a cycle ending in February, so that's going to be an exercise in hoping that the agency employees at the middle levels (the ones that know how to get things done which can't be replaced immediately with yes men) can buffer the decisions of those big bosses long enough to let that program continue to exist a little while longer.

Ah, Christ, he promised Health & Human Services (which houses the NIH) to RFK, didn't he? We'll see how that pans out.

I keep seeing people calling for more governmental shutdowns on the left now, and it makes me want to scream. The government being gridlocked means the funding that researchers like me need doesn't come, okay? When the DOE can't say fucking "climate change," when the USDA hemorrhages its workers when the agency is dragged halfway across the country, when I watch a major Texan House rep stake his career on trying to destroy the NSF, I think: this is what you people think of us. I think: how little scientists are valued as public workers. I think: how little

This is why I described voting as harm reduction. Even if two candidates are "the same" on one thing you care about, they probably aren't the same level of bad on everything. Your job is to figure out what that person would do in this job. It's not about a fucking tribalist horse race. A vote is your opinion on a job interview, you fucks. We have to work with this person.

Anyway, I'm probably going to go back to shaking quietly in despair for a little longer and then pick myself up and hit the grind again. If I'm fast, I might still get the grant in this miserable climate if I run, and I might get to actually keep on what I'm trying to do, which is bring research on sex differences, neurodivergence and energy balance as informed by non-binary gender perspectives and disability theory to neuroscience.

Fuck.

omg

this shit rules

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.

For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.

This is really funny on dark mode

On dark mode this is like a clown trying to hide behind a light pole.

My quatr