I love that this is a phenomenon, and this is the name we've come up with for it...
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"Apparently they were triggered by an extremely tepid acknowledgment that the world might be a bit harder for black people than it is for them. The articulation of racism is racism. And not just racism, but racism-racism. That real, uncut and raw racism. Not that stepped-on shit with baking soda and milk." The Root
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It's worth remembering that the far rights plays on people's fantasies of being powerful and in control. Public acts of intimidation are a major way in which they project and affirm this dominant self-identity. Publicly confronting fascists is thus a vital tactic - we need to do everything we can to make them look weak, out of control and, if possible, ridiculous.
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Anyone want to have a crack at building a home levitation setup?
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This story just keeps getting weirder and weirder...
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[CN: Article and quote contains some pretty upsetting descriptions of violence]
A pretty good summary of a few reasons why someone might want to consider going vegan...
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"You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around in the blood pit with you and think, ‘God, that really isn’t a bad looking animal.’ You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them"
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The future is definitely here...
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Know your far right memes.
In the online debate about the 'slave market' at Borderland, I saw a white person (with dreadlocks, no less) defend the event on the grounds that "my people were slaves for longer than yours" (or something to that effect, can't find the comment right now).
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I appreciate this is something serious people do actually worry about slightly, but I prefer to interpret this as "Daily Mail temporarily runs out of foreigners to demonise, tries to whip up hysteria about literal space aliens instead" :D
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"You can’t hide on the internet anymore. Your sentence structure and word use is MORE unique than your own fingerprint. If an organization, like the NSA, wants to find you they will." Medium
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"Two-thirds of 18 to 25-year-olds polled... believed "filibustering" was a slang term to describe a sex act."
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A big step towards the clinical use of MDMA
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"Mark was interested in reviving the idea of ‘consciousness-raising’, and in theorising the effects of capitalist ideology in terms of ‘depletion of consciousness’. This is a way of thinking about the techniques used by various apparatuses of power – from school league tables to the tabloid press.
As many previous writers have noted, such institutions operate not just by feeding us false information, but also by affecting us emotionally in order to make us feel less able to act in the world, less able to think creatively or dynamically. From this perspective, ‘raising’ consciousness isn’t just a matter of giving people information about the sources of their oppression. It is also about enabling them to feel connected and alive, personally and collectively powerful enough to challenge their oppression." Red Pepper
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LOL, poorly-written legislation will save us :D
"The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 says that for a substance to be a “psychoactive substance” it has to not only have a psychoactive effect but also that it can’t fall into one of the exempted categories that the Act sets out... One of these categories is medicine, because of course some medicines may have a pyschoactive effect but also are legitimately used to help people. The argument was that nitrous oxide falls into this category because it can be used for various medical purposes, and so, the argument went, it is exempt from the criminal offences set out in the Act. The Psychoactive Substances Act doesn’t specify that the substance is only exempt while it is being used for medicinal purposes, either."
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If you live in the UK, get a VPN
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What's YOUR favourite colour?
"Their study, published in 2010, posits that a person’s preference for a given color can be determined by averaging out how much that person likes all of the objects they associate with that color. Your inclination for orange, for example, depends on how you feel about pumpkins and traffic cones and Cheetos, among other things; for green, it varies according to your thoughts on grass and American dollar bills and broccoli... we associate blue largely with the sky and water (as well as more mundane, but neutral-to-positive, items such as ballpoint pens and blue jeans), raising the average preference for blue higher than the remainder of the rainbow."
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The mystery of silphium - possibly the first effective birth control medicine, sadly harvested to extinction (?) during the Roman period.
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Incredible details of the effects of alcoholism in Native American communities, and the prophetic movement that arose to oppose against it
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Wow, so good. [CN: for descriptions of sexual assault]
"...if you only think about how complicated the issue of sexual assault is once a news story gets horrifically unequivocal, you are far too late. This is not about trying celebrities in the “court of public opinion” everyone’s so scared of—it’s just about giving a shit about things that might bother other people, even if they do not really bother you. If you only think really hard about the pervasiveness and complexity of sexual assault when it’s time to do triage on your tastes or perform some easy outrage on the Internet, then you will not be adequately prepared to understand how our culture’s myriad lies about it affect you and the people around you on a day-to-day basis when they come up in smaller, less straightforward ways, which is how they almost always do. You will absolutely not be ready to create any meaningful change in your own thoughts, attitudes or actions. And most of all, you will not be of any practical use to the people around you who have no choice but to carry this discomfort around with them all the time, the people whose lives these lies facet and fuck up daily. It’s a privilege to be untroubled, to stay that way."
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Some people describe their experience of being black at Burning Man, both ups and downs
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Fascinating article, and implicitly makes a point I bang on about frequently. I don't think that focusing on 'organic' farming practices that try to replicate natural environments is a good way to protect the environment. Far better, I think to *intensify* and concentrate farming (and all other human activities) into ever smaller parcels of land, leaving more land to return to actual natural states. Much of the European countryside, which looks 'natural' to us, is actually profoundly shaped by large scale, relatively inefficient farming and herding.
Bring on the greenhouses, hydroponics, artificial fertiliser (delivered by computerised systems), specialised crop varieties, biological control and all the other methods of intensifying agriculture that science can dream up.
