TL;DR: Most in-kind donations are kind of worthless and everyone would be better off if you just donated cash
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"Political movements come and go, but institutional authority is forever. Partisans have given their leaders political cover while they quietly built up the conditions for turnkey fascism. Now we are one click away from totalitarianism." Boing Boing
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Funny because it hurts so very, very much
"I have no doubt that a real racist sexist chauvinist white supremacist will be easy to spot. “I am coming for minorities now,” he will say. “I am an actual racist. I am, literally, Hitler, or at the very least Goebbels.” In fact, I recently read an article that pointed out, quite astutely, that we are not talking about LITERAL JOSEPH GOEBBELS here, and it reassured me a great deal."
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Admittedly this is only one voice in the conflict, but tbh I wasn't even aware that the conflict existed :/
“There is aerial bombardment every day. The government refuses humanitarian access, which is a war crime under international humanitarian law. The situation in the Nuba Mountain [in South Kordofan] is as bad as Syria, Iraq, Libya and other places. But there is a complete silence there."
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"This epitomizes the key ideological gesture in all the films named here: the replacement of actual categories of social struggle and oppression with the concept of the jock-nerd struggle. The jock is forever cool, the nerd perennially oppressed. And revenge is always on the table and always justified. In the nerd’s very DNA is a mystification of black, queer, and feminist struggle: As a social character, the nerd exists to deny the significance (if not the existence) of race, class, and gender oppression." Real Life
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This is great - consent should be an integral part of how we educate children, right from the get-go.
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[CN: racism]
The term "alt-right" is a pretty interesting piece of framing, since it's not really that clear what's very "alternative" about them. Yes, they mainly communicate in online message boards, use cute memes and so on. But that's just, you know, how people communicate these days. The underlying ideas are essentially the same as those behind the fascist movements of the 1930s, and they're clearly aware of this themselves, however they brand things to outsiders.
"Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment. But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.” As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute." NY Times
Also: Guardian
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Huh, this is pretty fascinating
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[CN: racism, Nazism]
Here are some video extracts from the "alt-right" conference. Notice that Spencer doesn't *quite* do a Nazi salute himself (he's holding a glass in his hand, obviously to make it look more like a toast), but he says hail/heil, and he's clearly encouraging members of the audience to go that tiny step further. Sickening.
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A wide-ranging summary of the history of colonial and racial ideology in Europe and its offshoots up until the present day. Useful for understanding the predicament we collectively find ourselves in.
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Some very good tips in here for avoiding ugly and counterproductive online "debates" (I particularly like the idea of screenshotting unpleasant material then discussing it in a new post)
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Would be interested to hear thoughts on this. It essentially defines a "neo-liberal/populist" axis defined not by attitudes towards the market per se, but by attitudes towards economic concentration and monopoly power.
"The essence of populist politics is that political and economic freedom are deeply intertwined—that real democracy requires not just an opportunity to vote but an opportunity to compete in an open marketplace."
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God, re-testing of old urine samples reveals that there was a LOT of doping in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics that wasn't caught at the time...
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Well, this is just weird
"If the vacuum is indeed mutable and degradable as was explored, then it might be possible to do/extract work on/from the vacuum, and thereby be possible to push off of the quantum vacuum and preserve the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum."
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The government is at it again, vigilantly policing what people wank to...
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More evidence that climate change is proceeding even faster than expected :(
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I'm always a bit sceptical of claims that the "nature of the self" has changed in such radical ways. Thoughts?
"Previously the parameters of individual identity had been limited to an individual’s interaction with the people around him and the religious insights he had over the course of his life. Thus individuality as we understand it today did not exist: people only understood their identity in relation to groups—their household, their manor, their town or parish—and in relation to God. Occasionally individuals stood out from the crowd in the way they wrote about themselves... but the average person saw himself only as part of a community."
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Absolutely unbelievable that the NYPD (and many other police departments around the world) have been able to arrest so many people over the course of decades for the offence of "loitering for the purpose of prostitution". All that is required to be convicted of this offence is to be present in a public place, and for some police officer to form the (entirely subjective) belief that your "purpose" in that place is to sell sex. I hope with every fibre of my being that this law is judged unconstitutional and all the plaintiffs awarded damages.
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“People who are good at self-control … seem to be structuring their lives in a way to avoid having to make a self-control decision in the first place,” Vox
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Essentially, if things keep on going the way they are, we are totally screwed. I really try hard not to despair, but it's difficult these days!
