If you find a way to write off or dismiss what happened in Minnesota today, you've basically lost all rights to me ever taking your opinions seriously ever again.

A masked government thug shot a defenseless woman at point blank range. No two ways about it.

Being this upset and sick of things all the time is exhausting, but we have to make it through to the other side, friends. We owe the dead that much, at least.

hello everyone, this is josie.

i just want to announce that my very good trans friend Meera (also known as Queen Amalov on stage) is an Indian origin person living in Estonia and she needs to renew her citizenship permits with her municipality and she is expected to pay upwards of 300 Euros to pull this off. (they have increased the amount thrice over).

her finances are tight rn and she needs 150 Euros to pull this off, she has only one more week left.

id be very grateful if you can spare some for her.

https://ko-fi.com/meerasharma51105

help my friend @msmosa01 pls, check her insta to see her work

https://www.instagram.com/queen_amalov

A school in Texas has banned a Plato reading because it "has gender ideology." This sort of thing may seem kind of small potatoes to many of you (I assume most of you aren't philosophy majors studying in Texas), but I think it's demonstrative of a wider point.

The far right, despite all their retvrn rhetoric and claims to tradition is largely built on ahistorical ideas. The history, philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology of the right, so far as it exists, is not based on any true understanding of how society is or was in the days of yore, but rather an aesthetic projection about what those periods were like, based on narratives long-since challenged.

The project of fascism, on a fundamental level, is not based on any concrete analysis or reflection of the world-as-is/was, but rather seeks to create a mythos about the world in order to retroactively justify its own imposition.

Also, reminder that we as a society should work toward making this tenable for the majority of people, if not everyone.

As I get older, the more and more convinced I am that the only metric of prosperity that really matters to me personally is how much leisure time people have.

There is a history here. Radical puppeteers also tend to be keenly aware that their art harkens back to the wickerwork giants and dragons, Gargantuas and Pantagruels, typical of medieval festivals. Even those who have not themselves
read Rabelais or Bakhtin are certainly familiar with the notion of the carnivalesque. Massive convergences are almost always framed as "carnivals against capitalism" or "festivals of resistance." The base-line reference seems to be the late Medieval world immediately before the emergence of capitalism, particularly the period after the Black Death when the sudden decline in population had the effect of putting unprecedented amounts of money into the hands of the laboring classes (see, e.g., Federici 2004). Most of it ended up being poured into popular festivals of one sort or another, which themselves began to multiply until they took up large parts of the calendar year. These were what nowadays might be called events of "collective consumption," celebrations of carnality and rowdy pleasures and - if Bakhtin (1984) is to be believed - tacit attacks on the principle of hierarchy itself. One might say that the first wave of capitalism, the Puritan moment as it's sometimes called, had to begin with a concerted assault on this world, which was condemned by improving landlords and nascent capitalists as pagan, immoral, and utterly unconducive to the maintenance of labor discipline. Of course, the movement to ban all moments of public festivity could not last forever; Cromwell's reign in England is reviled to this day on the grounds that he banned Christmas; more importantly, once moments of festive, collective consumption were eliminated, the nascent capitalism would be left with the obvious problem of how to sell its products, particularly in light of the need to constantly expand production. The result was what one might call a process of the privatiza­tion of desire: the creation of endless individual, familial, or semi-furtive forms of consumption, none of which, as we are so often reminded, could really be fully satisfying or else the whole logic of endless expansion wouldn't work. While one should hardly imagine that police strategists are fully aware of all this, the very existence of police is tied to a political cosmology which sees such forms of col­lective consumption as inherently disorderly, and (much like a medieval carnival) always brimming with the possibility of violent insurrection. Order means that citizens should go home and watch TV.

David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography

Someone remind me to drop my armchair analysis of holidays at some point, it kind of touches on this idea