"What hast thou done to me"

Rattelite dish.

Coca-Cola (and Dixie Cup) pioneered the recycling movement in the 40’s to get people to return valuable glass bottles by charging almost half of the cost of the drink in a returnable fee. Nearly everyone returned their bottles; it was a huge success. When they switched to plastic in the 50’s it became more profitable to just toss bottles away so they used shell organizations to secretly lobby congress and senates to kill recycling bills while simultaneously creating massive ad campaigns to convince the public that recycling was all the consumer’s responsibility. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s public knowledge that gets drowned out in the noise made by their PR firms.

Last year Coca-Cola was still up to the same environmental villainry. More recycling advertising campaigns and killed bottle-fee bills which have been long proven to massively boost recycling rates but also push the cost of recycling from the consumer onto the manufacturer. That’s also detailed in the previous link.

Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that large corporations care about this world or anything in it other than profit. They’ll engage in charity as an investment if the campaign offers good return for their brand value and public image, but don’t think for a second we can get capitalists to behave ethically through any other means than forcing them to do it.

Was going to text a friend when suddenly… kestrel!

(In her defense, this is the glove I wear to feed her.  I put it on then got distracted.  lol)

She looks so perplexed.

human hUMAN HUMAN IS THIS MY DINNER

HUMAN I DO NOT THINK MY FOOD SHOULD BE GLOWING

I AM NOT AMUSED WHERE IS MY NOT-GLOWING FOOD

*tentative peck*

I do think a lot about how fucking awful other leftist settlers have treated J Sakai and his work. I remember first learning about the book Settlers as like a niche meme in online circles prior to learning more about from the groups that he was involved. When I finally read it it was very eye opening but if you do you'll be shocked how much of it you've probably already heard before. At least summaries of its points.

A class and racial analysis of the colonies and the early republic. Overview of the death toll wrought by colonizers on Indigenous people. Analysis of how slavery operated and how slavers and poor settlers created and enforced a racial and economic hierarchy. Discussion of the deep racism in unions and how enthusiasticly genocidal settler workers and organizers were (and still are). Analysis of the rise of US neocolonial global dominance.

And like groundbreaking as the book was, none of his historical research was original. That wasn't the point of it. He wrote the early draft as a research project for his comrades going over the latest in academic writing on race and class in american history. While left-wing analysis was still emerging in academic american history (academic books like Zinn's A Peoples History and Davis' Women, Race, and class were published just 2 and 3 years prior, respectively), the basic facts were already well documented.

But because this book was written by a non academic revolutionary for underground orgs like the Black Liberation Army, because of its very well backed up conclusion drawn not only from historical analysis but from his and his comrades own experience from the 60s-80s that the settler left is primarily reactionary and cannot be relied on, people made a fucking joke out of this book. The settler left at the time either ignored it entirely or reacted with utter contempt and this had only grown since. Nowadays the most the settler left at large engages with it is as a meme or making fun of it for spelling it "amerika". I'm serious go post about it in any leftist reddit and see what kinda reaction you get.

It's a very good book. It's a very serious and well thought out argument on what our strategy as communists must be in order to win. And he demonstrates very well that if a plan relies solely on winning the sympathy of the settler working class then it will fail. Go read it. And while you're at it check out other revolutionary writers from the time like George Jackson or Assata Shakur. You'll be better for it.

readsettlers.org

Adding this to my ebook library. It looks extremely pertinent.

When the sorcerer found the dragon, it was attacking a grape.

This was only possible because the dragon was not much larger than a grape itself, but she still had to do a double take to be sure the object it was fighting with such animosity was in fact inanimate.

She crouched so that her eyes were level with the top of the table and squinted at it. The dragon sank its tiny fangs into the grape’s skin and gave a great tug, succeeding only in throwing it and the grape into a backwards tumble. The tiny green reptile rolled to a stop with its whole body wrapped around the grape and shook its head ferociously, managing to pull its teeth out but also launching the grape across the table. It gave a mighty roar of anger (about as loud as a human clearing their throat) and stalked after it, tail swishing dangerously.

“Do you need help?” she offered.

The dragon froze mid-prowl and whipped its head around to look at her, looking so offended she almost apologized for asking.

“I mean, I could peel it for you, if that’s the problem.” She wasn’t sure it was getting the message. One could never tell how much human language these little creatures picked up by hanging around the magic labs. Some understood only such essentials as “scat!” or “oh fuck, that sure did just explode”, while others could hold entire conversations — if they deigned to interact.

This one looked like it was deciding whether she was worthy. Finally, it sniffed daintily and flicked its tail, scales clacking together. “Little monster is my prey, and you can’t have it. Found it first. Will devour it!”

“Oh, sure,” she agreed. “But you know it’s a grape, right?”

This was the wrong thing to say. It glared at her and then bounded away to the other end of the table, where it slithered up to the grape and pounced on it.

Grape and dragon promptly rolled off the edge of the table.

The sorcerer quickly went around to that side, alarmed that it would be stepped on. The labs were bustling with shoppers stopping by to watch demonstrations this time of day, and a small dragon wouldn’t be easily visible on the blue and green tiled floor.

“Horrible! Dirty!” The tiny dragon was screeching at the top of its lungs, holding onto its prey for dear life. It would have been hard to hear anyway, with all the noise of the labs, but with the sorcerer’s diminished hearing it took several seconds to locate the screaming creature.

She scanned the pattern of the tiles for it and sighed. “Oh, hold on, we mopped this morning.” She cupped her hands around it and deposited it into her skirt pocket, an indignity the dragon endured only with more screaming.

“An outrage! Put me down!”

“Shh,” she advised. Lab workers were strongly discouraged from bringing creatures into the back rooms, which was where she was heading, picking her way through the crowded front lab.

“Fuck pockets!” her pocket responded.

“Oh, you can curse. Wonderful.”

The dragon seemed to take this as an actual compliment. “Am multitalented. Can also compose poetry.”

“Really? Can I hear some?”

“No. For dragon ears only.” It sounded viciously pleased to hold this over her head. The bulge in her pocket rearranged itself, and she thought it might be trying to gnaw on the grape.

She felt herself smiling even as she tried to squash her mouth into a straight line. She liked this little bad-tempered thing, even though its spiky feet were digging into her thigh.

In the much quieter kitchen of the back rooms behind the lab, she transferred the wriggling, scaly handful from her pocket to the table. The dragon hissed out a few more insults as it got up and straightened itself out, but its jaw fell open when it finally took in its surroundings. She’d set it down next to the fruit bowl.

“There you go. Food mountain.”

The dragon’s shock didn’t last long. Abandoning the grape, it scraped and scrabbled its way up the side of the bowl and from there onto an apple, its claws leaving tiny puncture marks as it hiked to the top of the arrangement. “Food mountain!” It repeated, its gleeful crowing much clearer and almost sing-song without having to compete with the noise of the crowd.

She watched it turn in a circle, surveying the feast. “But… cannot eat it all,” it observed after a while, crestfallen. “Human-sized. Big shame.”

“Don’t you have nest-mates who can help you with it?” she asked. She had assumed not, from the way it had apparently been foraging for food on its own, but she needed to be sure she’d found a loner.

“No nest. No mates. No nest-mates. You’re rude.” It flopped down ungracefully, wings spread out flat on the apple like it was trying to hug the entire much-larger fruit.

She gave it a moment to be dramatic, and then offered it the grape, minus the peel. “You seem to have a good grasp on human-speak.”

It grabbed the grape without so much as a thank you. “Yes. Have composed poetry in both Dragonese and Humanese. Not for humans to hear, though.” Bragging cheered it up a little.

“You mentioned. I can’t hear very well, anyway.” She pulled up a stool and sat down. “Actually, I’ve been looking for a helper.”

“An assistant,” it said, apparently showing off its Humanese. “An attendant. An aid.”

She watched it bury its snout in the grape, juice dribbling down onto the apple it sat on. “Yes. A hearing aid. How would you feel about having a job?”

It smiled craftily. “Would feel positively, if job comes with chocolate chips.”

“It could,” she said, grinning. She had some friends who employed bird-sized dragons as messengers, but this was the first time she’d heard of one negotiating its salary for itself. “It certainly could. What’s your name?”

“Peep,” said Peep. “It is self-explanatory.”

“Don’t worry, I got it.”

Peep expressed its doubt that humans ever got anything, but she thought the tiny, prickly creature might be warming up to her.

Fuck pockets! XD

idk if there’s been art drawn for this. I’d be surprised it there isn’t because it deserves some. So here are some doodles for it. Enjoy!!

Holy Shit i love this???

I knew I’d seen a post somewhere that would make a perfect colour illo…

It turned out there were more than one…

These and others were found on @brainwad’s Tumblr here, and the artist is Alexandra Khitrova.

Welp this is the best thing ever

Birders: do you ever wonder if this happens?

Original on my site | Patreon

THEY DO!!! I’VE SEEN IT!!! Those motherfuckers run across those trees head down with no spacial awareness and get so startled and bewildered when they bump into eachother. It’s hilarious

Okay I may have developed a new special interest in nonhuman animals being the exact kind of dumbasses humans also are

Of all a deer’s senses, their eyesight is the worst. 

IT DOESN’T HELP THAT THOSE ARE POSSUMS WHO ALSO HAVE TERRIBLE EYESIGHT. XD SO BOTH CREATURES DIDN’T REALIZE WHAT WAS WHAT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE I’M DYING. 

everyone in this forest is so confused and I love them

get those woodland creatures some spectacles

She suffers from deer-sightedness

I find it strangely helpful to realise other animals do deeply stupid things when doing the equivalent of bumbling round their house at night. It’s not everything else being graceful and efficient and me with my contacts out tripping over my own crutch and talking to a black tshirt on the bed under the impression it’s my cat.

So this meme about “spinster originally being a word for a woman so good at weaving she was financially independent” seems to have made it into pretty much every group I follow, so after the best part of a week biting my hands not correcting it so as not to undercut the broader point, I’ve now been *forced* to correct it (badly) and write a screed of additional context just for my own sanity.

“Spinster” is indeed a word for women who became financially independent through the cloth and garment-making trade, but by SPINNING, ie making thread from fibres, rather than by WEAVING, which is making cloth out of thread. You can tell by the title being SPINster, not WEAVEster!

The “-ster” suffix indicates that the title is feminine; you can see it in other surnames like “sangster” and “brewster”.

This actually points to one of the traditional points about female-dominated practices; while weaving within the household to make cloth for members of the household was traditionally almost entirely done by women in the house, when weaving became a well-paid trade regulated by guilds, men began doing it and rapidly pushed out the women weavesters or websters who had started the profession and originally trained most of the male weavers.

This never happened with spinsters because spinning was never as lucrative as weaving and thus it never became a guild-regulated profession; it remained a trade women in the household practiced to supplement household income.

Single women could habitually manage to support themselves on their earnings from it, including single women living in lodgings in urban centres as well as single women living in their own cottages in rural places, which was incredibly valuable to them.

This points to one of the ways trade unions, the more modern and proletarian-focused version of guilds, are not *simply by their existence* a solution for worker liberation. Trade unions, like guilds, have frequently enforced societal misogyny by favouring male and male-read workers over female and female-read workers, often actively undercutting the needs of female and female-read workers, because of the societal trope that “men were supporting a family” and “women were working for pocket money”. this kept on applying even when many female and female-read workers were primary wage earners.

Men, especially cis men, in trade union spaces have a responsibility to keep your union intersectionally-aware and actively seek female and nonbinary delegates, officers and activists to fill roles.

As everyone who is privileged in any axis - male, white, cishet, abled - has a responsibility to actively seek representation from marginalised folk, and to actively canvas marginalised folk you represent to make sure you are fighting for needs you may not perceive. It’s easily possible for instruments of liberation to end up marginalising and oppressing marginalised folks unless there is an ongoing commitment to inclusive and liberating practice in them.

So the oldest method of spinning used the spindle, most commonly weighted suspended spindles such as drop spindles. Spinning as a craft involves turning individual fibres - of animal hair or vegetable matter such as cotton of flax fibres - into a long thread, piece of yarn or rope. Drop spindles have been found in many Neolithic graves and other archaeological sites.

A suspended spindle hangs from the yarn/thread as it is produced and is weighted so that it hangs downwards, aiding the process via gravity. It is frequently used alongside a distaff, a long stick the spinner wraps the completed yarn/thread around as it is produced to avoid it getting tangled or snarled.

There is increasing evidence that spinning was not a strictly gendered activity in cultures in the Neolithic period, or at least not within the gender binary imposed on the past by 19th and 20th century historians. This joins a growing body of evidence that gender roles were considerably less common in human prehistory, if they existed at all.

Because European and many Asian cultures from at least the early medieval period onwards considered spinning to be a “feminine” craft, bodies from Neolithic graves were assumed to be what the archaeologists who excavated them would consider female simply by the presence of a spindle and distaff in the grave. Modern bioarchaeology has meant genetic testing of more prehistoric human remains has become not only possible, but reasonably affordable, and has found that these remains have a much wider chromosomal variation than those excavators would have expected. Because we don’t have any written records from prehistory, which is what actually *makes* it prehistory, we have no real idea of how various Neolithic cultures conceived of gender, let alone how many genders they had or how, or indeed if, they related them to physical characteristics.

The joy of suspended spindles and distaffs are that they are incredibly portable. In recorded history, in premodern Europe and Asia in particular, there are multiple records of women carrying their distaffs and spindles with them on their backs as they went about their daily chores in rural communities, often alongside infants. It was common for village women to spin communally in the open, as houses often had limited sources of light.

The origin of the spinning wheel is disputed; there are potential origins in China and in India, and it may be been invented independently in more than one place. It seems to have been invented in late antiquity or the very early medieval period, whatever its origins, and seems to have been in common use across at lot of Asia by the 10th-11th century CE.

Textiles do not survive particularly well in the archaeological record outside very specific circumstances; it is difficult to tell if thread woven by a skilled spinster was made using hand spinning or a wheel, and references in documents are often not remotely clear!

Visual art can be more helpful than writing in tracing histories of technology. The two images above here are details from Chinese art from the Song Dynasty, about 1270 CE, and early 14th century European art. Both of them clearly show female spinsters.

Spinning wheels allowed much faster work, but also tied the spinster to one location. One of the reasons drop spindles stayed in use long after spinning wheels became common was their portability. Another was their cheapness; especially for spinsters working to clothe only their own domestic household, it was not always easy to afford a spinning wheel. They were inherited because they were valuable and difficult to replace, made by skilled craftspeople. A drop spindle, on the other hand, could reasonably be whittled by a farmer for domestic use.

Sex isn't real, not in the ways you think.

Sex is a spectrum and a social construct... The sex on peoples birth certificates are simply a bureaucratic formality of civil documentation, and are made by a brief visual sighting of external infant genitalia lasting seconds, and regardless the parent not a medical professional apply for the birth certificate in most jurisdictions.

This glance affects the trajectory of your entire life, one of many facets of social sex.

Then sometimes as an example, an infant assigned female at birth has testicles descend at 3-6 months, oh intersex baby... Out comes the scalpel because mum has already been showing her baby girl to the world, friends and family for half a year... The expense of infant surgery is often considered better than embarrassment.

For me, I had streak gonads, a superficial vagina, and a micropenis... Scalpels again, all to enforce a normative sex/gender binary.

You have never known anything about the sex of the majority of the people you have ever met, yet socially you assume that they and you yourself conform to these sex categories without even understanding the diversity of human sexual development. The number of consciously child free people who will never discover they are XX "male" or XY "female", or they have only one sex chromosome or they have three, or that they do not possess ovaries/testes at all, men who don't realise that their perennial abdominal pain is endometriosis, people with PCOS who have spent their lives since adolescence waxing that hair on their chest.

Humans are one thing, the species homo sapiens sapiens, and male and female are demographic cohorts (within the context of developmental biology) that we arrive at by taking the known sexual developments of our species and isolating the maximum number that do occur in one cohort and not the other... And the more we learn about human sexual development that space between the two of other developmental possibilities grows all the time.

Female and male in the sense it is understood in society is a social construct. Sex? in terms of a statistical representation of the known prevalence of sexual developments in the population as a bimodal histogram? That's real in as much as anything in demographic analysis is real.