elle 🐱

americans who travel to hawaii, nonstate territories...idk how to explain, it just feels like the destruction of nations to turn them into a hilton branch

americans who travel to Bali are the worst

* Black america too, either ignored or swiftly forgotten

me when I look at trains and transit in the US

is it getting better than it was a decade ago? sure! but it's still woefully behind most of what's present in europe or asia and I get sad again.

tangential but related: how "foreign policy" is shoved in its own little box especially during election season and how it's socially acceptable to be like "I'm voting for [candidate] because they have a good domestic policy so I'm going to forgive their blasé attitude to the rest of the world"

if you're a woman with exposed hair, does Saudi Arabia have the right to kidnap you and convict you in one of their courts? Of course not.

ugh I hate it when people simplify their arguments to the detriments of their position

give people no reason to improve beyond a 6th grade literacy level and that's where their understanding will remain

lets say a couple walks into a car dealership to buy an SUV. If one person says "I want a car today at any price" and the other says "If the price is more than 40k I'm leaving", who do you think has more leverage?

yeah and I'm manipulating you to shut the fuck up

remember the next time The Guardian pleads for your money,

the less talked about (but very much memed about) problem is the lack of cars with more than 5 seats that isn't jacked up so high as to be a predator of kindergarteners walking home from school

meanwhile his protege pundits think that centrist triangulation makes them "trans allies" rather than a discount version of Kier Starmer's tenure of humiliation

ctrl+F Jerusalem Demsas that's you

we all know MattY (who doesn't wash his mugs in the workplace!) is a craven bigot. He just hides his opinions under tortured definitions of common words (e.g., groups), and uses push polling to assert that actually the majority of the sample population is bigoted so we have no choice but to follow 🙃

I think (one of the) worst parts about this brand of centrism is that it has no vision for the future. I mean, beyond "electing moderates" and "having no spine". The right wants to deport 100 million americans, the left wants that to not happen, while the substack center? crickets.

* they actually believe it (sad!)
* they're getting paid for it
* they are ignorant of the fact that they see dem "elder statesmen" as not electeds accountable to voters, but as hereditary aristocrats who are entitled to their position and privilege (you see this with Kennedy's too)

public prisons are just as awful

Even discounting the atrocity that is ICE, there's nothing about public prisons that are more "humane" than private, especially when they use the same contractors for literal slop food

In a flawed world where both "bullies" and "the bullied" get equal time in school detention, make sure sure it's an outcome where a racist is bruised, rather than your mates deported

yay for funded healthcare! that's huge

bonus points for sticking it to the tech/charter ghouls

I wish there was a new version without the rooftop Koreans... 😔

I also feel like it's the filter of history that's distorting it, kind of like how current perception of "the 80's" is diverging from a lived experience of the decade (e.g. Stranger Things, and how errors in set design turn into anachronisms)

My 0.02 for starting transition in 2015:

I loathed the implication that just because I was transitioning, that I had an implicit affinity for drag culture and media. Not bashing it, but rather it felt like I was against another uphill current placed there by cis perspectives.

A graphic with two vertical halves. The left half, with green background and check marks, says: "A safer internet IS MADE BY Encryption, Privacy, and Open Source"; the right half, with red background and crosses, says "A safer internet is NOT MADE BY Age verification, Scanning communication, or Tracking & data collection." #saferinternetday

Reposting this with alt text.

I suppose the unwritten rule of bsky is "if someone loudly vouches a racist liberal is 'rehabilitated', they're probably not"

fiancé: forgettable guy
fiancée: she's very beautiful
finance: GET ME OUT OF THE EXCEL MINES

(yes)

All I can hear is that woman going "twenty fourh carat labewbew~"

it's like when people claim "Elon has autism!" Like 1) it's ethically dubious to diagnose someone you haven't met and 2) that doesn't mean he isn't a billionaire loser who is terminally unfunny and can't make a good car to save his life

petit imaginary trot sitting on my shoulder: "fuck donald trump" (and ergo, fuck "ICE") are dems preferred slogans because they're not actionable demands that can be measured, as opposed to-

imaginary abolitionist on my other shoulder: abolition

trot: no I meant democratic c-
abolitionist: shut up

Yay! 🥰

Will these be available at a different date/time? 😭

You're like my fourth oomf to get hijacked in the past two months 😭😭😭😭😭

In adopting this method of gradual emancipation, there is no reason to doubt that the British Government acted on the honest conviction that a modified system of coerced labor for a limited period, substituted for unmitigated Slavery, would, on the whole, be safer and better for the negroes than immediate and unqualified liberty from the yoke of their owners, and would prepare them gradually for the boon of freedom. Two of the colonial Legislatures -- those of Antigua and the Bermudas -- availed themselves of the alternative which the British act gave them, of dispensing with the apprenticeship altogether, and giving, unrestricted freedom to their slaves.

NYT letter to the editor, April 28 1862