Pinned
this is the full video of patti lupone breaking the sound barrier at the 1988 tony awards btw
it's patti lupone's birthday have you listened to her breaking the sound barrier at the 1988 tony awards?
@bloodanna i'm stealing your tags bc it's a good explanation of what's going on!!!
"gender is a social construct": fairly easy for leftists to understand
"race is a social construct": a bit harder to swallow for some but still reasonable
"mental illness is a social construct": this one gets you hate mail in your inbox
Gotta add previous tags on here, because this is gonna live rent free in my head from now on. The stars are real, constellations are not. Damn. Tags by @smoreofbabylon (if you don’t want me to put you on blast like this I’ll delete lol!)
"the stars are real, but the constellations are socially constructed"
literally what the fuck do you mean its still january. how is that remotely possible. its been six months minimum
Today in Flork news.
Two hours later.
Critical update
putting just one of these jokes in the tags instead of main reblog is a bold choice but all three?! get peer reviewed about it!
I want to be very clear on this. You can be out drinking with your friends on Friday night and dead on Sunday because of meningitis. Does that sound a little specific? Guess why I have such a specific scenario in mind.
And getting vaccinated is an easy way to prevent that. There is no medical reason to stop recommending that vaccine. There's no new study that shows that it's unsafe, there's no replacement that's better. This is literally the government making its citizenry less safe for no reason.
sports bra and boxers can be lingerie if you're enlightened and impure of heart
Are you outside of Minnesota, but want to know what’s going on with the ICE occupation? Check out:
National news is not covering everything that’s happening here. (Almost like that’s on purpose.) But these are helpful, local sources to Minnesota to provide an accurate depiction of what’s really happening here.
Are you outside of Minnesota and looking to help?
These links go to those sources’ Instagram profiles. And I will edit this post with more, it’ll remain a living document.
A final note: You may have seen posts on social media about what it’s like here. Believe them. It is that bad. It is that scary. They are kicking doors down. They are demanding to see identity papers if you’re simply walking on the street.
My sister is a teacher, and they were driving around her school yesterday. A middle school.
They are offering people money to out undocumented immigrants or protest organizers. That link is a firsthand account of someone who was detained, and asked those very questions.
They are taking our neighbors.
This is an occupation.
I don’t have a lot of followers, so hoping the tags can help spread this far and wide.
if sex work was legal the workers could unionize
I am fully serious about this btw. not "pro sex work" as in "there are no issues whatsoever within the industry", but "pro sex work" as in "these are jobs and the workers should be a) allowed to work and b) protected from their customers by the law"
people responding to this with stuff like "but that would just put sex workers in the same exploited position as uber drivers, cleaners, migrant workers, etc" and yes! good point! reform all of it! keep going!
uber drivers and cleaners and migrant workers should also be allowed to unionize! and be protected from both their employers and their customers! we all should!
I know I haven't posted regularly on this blog in years but I'm not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what's happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I'm genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I'm making a post about it.
A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:
2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.
2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.
November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.
December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)
Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.
1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)
Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.
The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.
ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.
It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.
Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.
And from today.
They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.
And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.
So that's a brief history.
Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.
It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.
I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.
Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.
"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.
It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.
You! You get it. In my view, if someone is saying "racialised" or "racially marked" without acknowledgement of context, they are doing it in a way that is gramatically incorrect.
Ads and commercials have always been kind of dystopic in an uncanny kind of way but they're really freaking me out these days.
The better health commercials- "you can't escape your crappy job, try talking to us!"
That's not funny. Also isn't it sad that most people don't really seem to have close friendships anymore and that you're selling the friend experience more than a doctor one because you can't actually fix anything?
The progressive commercial- "you should go on vacation; what's a vacation? ... I don't know I've never been on one either"
That's not funny. That's fucking awful. Can't you see that's not a fucking joke??
The e-banking app- "how much did I spend on groceries this month? 500?? -hey dad can the guys stay for dinner? - NO!"
That's not funny! THATS NOT FUNNY! It's not funny that we're not "a village" anymore. That we're not "the land of plenty" any more, that we're not the "open table" of a country we claimed to be for so long! It's not funny it's not funny it's not funny!!!!
And the big reason it's not funny when corporations use this in advertisements is:
Gallows humor ain't fucking funny when it's coming from the guy wearing a black hood with his hand on a lever.
Like fuck you, your CEO makes millions of dollars and your spending more money than I'll ever see in my life to pay other corporations whose CEOs also make millions of dollars to write / produce / display ads fucking gloating about you and your cronies plunging the world into poverty to line the pockets of investors. If I see an ad doing that shit, your company is going straight on the "boycott if at all possible" list.
(and no, "Oh no, we had to lay off 3000 people because the public is too poor to buy our product anymore!" does not count as the poor widdle corpo also suffering from the ruined economy)
in the whole greenland conversation i feel like there's not nearly enough acknowledgement of the fact that greenland is already suffering under imperial rule. seeing wayyyyy too much tacit validation of denmark's possession of greenland on socials today. look into reproductive abuse against greenland inuit women by the danish state. US acquisition of greenland would be bad but the status quo is not good. this is not a matter of sovereignty, i only wish it were a matter of sovereignty, it's just a bunch of imperial powers playing RISK with indigenous people's lives again
