Stop watching your people getting jumped by cops

200%

Try.

Bringing this back from the archives.

ICE fucking abandoned the scene in a Minneapolis neighborhood and left their battle plans and designs on the city, fake license plates, and challenge tokens which they reward themselves for arrests. Looney Tunes shit.

"Demonstrators investigating the abandoned ICE vehicles apparently retrieved these “challenge coins” that ICE mercenaries receive when they kidnap people. This “coin” is decorated with a skull wearing a crown. ICE mercenaries serve king death."

hello whta the everloving fuck is this are ICE just cult members who believe themselves to be some kinda assassin creed shit?

It’s Nazi paraphernalia

Challenge coins, my friends, are not new. Police and military in the US have a lengthy history with them. 😒

how terrifying metamorphosis must be for the caterpillar has no concept of what it is doing, or what a butterfly is, or what will happen to it as it spins itself the cocoon. we r more alike than different

there are parts of your future self in you waiting emerge but you have to become unrecognizable slime first

oh damn Tara Knight's writing is crucial. no wonder the FBI is after her. as well as the one linked just a bit ago (I'll rb again), I DEMAND you all read these.

fish nails by nailsby.fresita 🐟🫧

Now would be a good time for everyone to understand how the US dollar hegemony works, and how oil was leveraged to turn the dollar into a weapon. Here, it goes like this:

1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.

2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.

3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.

4. The oil company receives the shoe factory's dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do --cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.

5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.

Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.

To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.

Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.

In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.

The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can't get any you're going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it's why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar's value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.

Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.

Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here's one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.

This is why shifting to renewables has been such a struggle in the west, this is why the planet is warming, this is why the US is engaged in endless wars, this is why most of the world is poor, this is why millions have died. This is imperialism and it must be dismantled.

Chocolate package that says "imported from belgium", does cacao grow in belgium? No? Where does it grow? Congo, Ivory Coast, and Ghana? Brazil, Venezuela, and Peru? So why doesn't the package say imported from those places instead? Oh it's because all the peocessing is done in the imperial core and then they prevent those countries from being able to domestically process and export instead only allowing them to export raw materials and then forcing them to import the very products made from their exports except now it's marked up thousands of times.

i'm reminded of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, where he discusses the price manipulation of chocolate on the international market by colonial countries:

since spotify wrapped is coming today i just want to bring awareness to the fact that around 86% of the songs on spotify are currently demonetized since spotify decided that tracks with under 1,000 cannot be monetized. not only that the ceo of spotify cashed out $35.8 million dollars in spotify shares in the third quarter of the year and it has been reported that he earns more than the top artists on the platform.

for a platform that claims to support artists, this is outrageous and i hope people realize that an artist who is starting out, cannot make a living out of spotify streams simply because daniel ek and his friends made it worse for the artists trying to start a career. if you wanna support musicians and the possibility for them to get a living wage please follow United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) which are trying to make The Living Wage for Musicians Act a reality so musicians can be paid fairly through streaming platforms and get the cut they deserve.

since this post was made, daniel ek has invested in ai weapons, and ICE ads have been played on the platform. various people are starting to boycott the platform this year (2025) so, again, keep that in mind before posting your spotify wrapped!

Friendly reminder that bookshop.org has free shipping this weekend and they give more than 80% of their profit margins to 1,900+ independent bookstores! Also, they have great curated rec lists.

If you need ideas, I have several hyper-specific rec lists! They're not affiliate links or anything; I'm just Like This.

I'm going to shamelessly self-promote. the first run of Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die, with gold foil and printed edges, is included in the Black Friday sale!

British special forces execute Afghan families in their beds while they sleep and then cover it up. Israeli soldiers drone strike hungry children for crossing arbitrary lines. American gunships exterminate people at random in the Caribbean to maintain the spectacle of terror and imperial dominance. Intelligent-sounding people can rationalise this world system and clothe it in the language of liberalism and necessity. But it doesn't change the fact that this is an order of death and extortion, nothing more.

We need to start talking more about Congo (DRC). I literally never see posts about it anymore.

Remember to:

here (and this is only from a cursory search) is what tech overconsumption is fueling:

A Palestinian boy throws a rock during the first intifada

His name is Ramzi Abu Redwan. During the time the picture was taken he was 8 years old. Today he is 36 and has become a world-class solo musician and composer, playing the Oud, Buzuq, Violin and Viola. 

He was discovered by a Palestinian musician who recognized his natural talent at the viola, and later received a scholarship to study at a conservatory in France. He could have stayed there and lived a comfortable life in Paris, but instead, he chose to return home and give back the gift of music by openning music schools in Palestinian towns and refugee camps.

he’s got a spotify btw!! if you’ve never heard a oud, i def encourage listening to his work. it’s a beautiful instrument from a beautiful people ❤🖤🤍💚

here’s my personal fave of what i’ve heard so far from his top 5

I double dog dare you to read this, yes all the way to the end, it's short. What have you got to lose ? You're just scrolling tumblr why not improve your life ? : )

— Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias  

The Hyrule Fantasy, as envisioned by Katsuya Terada

Katsuya Terada is a Japanese artist cut from a different cloth, with an intimidating body of work evoking memories of 1980′s film classics like The Dark Crystal and Conan the Barbarian rather than the typical doe-eyed anime flavors that his contemporaries so often cling to. Some time in the late 80′s, Nintendo discovered his work, and perhaps figuring that his depiction of sword ‘n sorcery was a good sell for Western audiences, commissioned him to create several illustrations for in-house strategy guides and magazines like Nintendo Power.

From what I recall from early Nintendo Power issues, Terada’s work appeared in articles promoting Dragon Warrior, Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy, but his Zelda illustrations were the most prolific, and those are the ones that have made a recent resurgence on the internet. (See a complete high-res collection here.) They’re interesting because they’re so intertwined with “classic Zelda,” AKA the first four games of the series. Those four entries, right up to Link’s Awakening, possessed certain characteristics that would later be shattered by 1998′s Ocarina of Time. Specifically, they all came out at a time when Zelda was still evolving, and was first and foremost a 2D franchise with graphics that were left open to interpretation. Link might have been a pink-haired blob on the television screen when you were playing A Link to the Past, but because those two dimensional collections of pixelated dots were just abstract enough, you could still choose to imagine him as a rugged, strong-jawed adventurer making his way through a twisted, murky fantasy world - rather than the earring-sporting anime kid that Ocarina of Time would fashion him into just a few years later. 

Terada’s artwork clearly plays on this still-open-to-interpretation early version of Link, Zelda, Ganon and the other inhabitants of Hyrule, and it’s clear that he was drawing from the sparse screenshots he was probably presented with to manufacture something elaborate, colorful and very special. I particularly like his gorgeous interpretation of Marin, the biggest female character in Link’s Awakening, and it’s fascinating to see how a few of his designs, like the buxom Great Fairy, eventually became a reality in later Zelda titles over the years. Or maybe he drew that one after Ocarina of Time had already come out? Either way, there’s a raw imaginative edge to his art that you just don’t see much of anymore, and although Terada’s newer works are more refined and techno-laced (not to mention filled with nipples), that energy and sense of unbridled imagination is still present.

I really wouldn’t mind seeing another Zelda game emerge with this sort of look, but it’s unlikely to ever happen. Video games are realistic enough these days to simply not need artists of Terada’s caliber to represent them in strategy guides and magazines, and even if Terada were to take up a job in the modern day world of video game character design, it’s doubtful that Nintendo would hire him for The Legend of Zelda series, which seems to have firmly taken up roots in the land of anime aesthetics. They didn’t even bother to include his work in the Hyrule Historia, though there’s really a lot they left out of that book in favor of gushing about Skyward Sword. 

But one can sure dream of an alternate universe where classic Zelda lived on and morphed into its own unique beast. In that universe, I like to hope that these images, once confined to the pages of Nintendo Power, became pulsating, breathing graphics on digital screens everywhere. One can dream.

PHOTOS: Transgender Elders Show Us The Meaning of Survival

In the many years that Jess T. Dugan, a Boston-based trans photographer, has spent capturing images of gender-variant people, she says she’s consistently noticed a striking absence in both art and social sciences: imagery of older trans folks.

“And,” Dugan explains further on her website, “those [representations] that do exist are often one-dimensional.” So Dugan set out to fill this gap, teaming up with social work researcher Vanessa Fabbre since fall 2013 to develop the evocative photo project, “To Survive on This Shore.” In the recently released collection, diverse trans elders ages 50 to 86 are pictured at home or in meaningful spaces, gazing unapologetically into the camera, as if asking the viewer to look deeper into their unique context and life story.

(Full Article)