Janelle's current events/social justice blog. Well, it used to be anyways.
Warning for occasional language, violence, gore, & mentions of death, murder, abuse, & sexual assault/rape
Tags: police brutality, ferguson, cops, language, sexual assault, imperialism, classism, capitalism, feminism, ableism, sexism, racism
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#racism #ferguson #Twitter #stl #hypocrisy
any white at a protest who tries to go against police and deliberately provoke a response from them is not to be trusted and does not have the safety of black and brown people in mind.
there is a good chance that they are police too. if anyone, especially a white dude, ever randomly gets your attention and conspiratorially tries to convince you to jump a police officer, then dude is a cop. They have been using this technique and script for at least 30 years.
Check their fucking shoes. They’re always too afraid that their little toesies will be hurt so they’ll usually still be rocking the exact same boots as the guys on the other side. This was what gave the cops away when they provoked riots in Toronto a while back.
@talesofalamia, remember when I pointed out the shoes of the two well-dressed informants near us?
Similar note: IME, unmarked cruisers have five distinguishing traits:
1. They’re one of the department-issue models.
2. They’re always white, black, or dark blue.
3. They always look like they just rolled out of a car wash.
4. Usually rocking restricted plates.
5. Most reliable if present but hardest to spot: Their mirrors are bulkier, to fit the light rigs in.
In Austin the under cover officer that tried to convince me to set a cop car on fire had a convincing fake beard.
Be careful out there and read up on common tactics used against protestors before going.
You can usually see the stealth lights if you look into the grill.
Besides the old obvious as fuck Crown Victoria, be suspicious of 2013+ Ford Taurus and Explorer, 2006+ Dodge Charger and Dakota, 06-13 Chevy Impala, 11+ Chevy Caprice and both the Tahoe and Suburban.
Look for oversize mirrors, plugs on the roof and/or A pillar, lights inside the grill, extraneous lights inside the headlight assembly, lights tucked up behind the rear view mirror, steel wheels with or without wheel covers, and plugs or short antennas on the trunk lid.
Reblogging this for two reasons: 1. So people who have reason to be afraid of the police (which is pretty much anyone with significant melanin) see it. 2. Uh, good writer reference for describing undercover cop cars…
read-play-sing asked:
seananmcguire answered:
Aw, howdy, puddin’!
I am…
…reasonably middle class, which is a miracle for a full-time author.
…equipped of a fridge, a pantry, a chest freezer, and a working kitchen.
…capable of cooking for myself and others.
I am also…
…the daughter of a woman who raised three daughters on welfare.
…formerly homeless.
…a fat woman who has to fight not to slip back into disordered eating habits because of items #1 and #2.
…someone who goes to the grocery store multiple times a week.
…regularly furious about food waste in my own home when people refuse to eat their leftovers/help eat communal leftovers.
So let’s go.
The specific post I reblogged worked from the base premise that it is easier to eat, where “eat” is defined as “get sufficient calories to not feel hungry,” when you are not making a concerted effort to “eat healthy.” It cited things like “a package of extremely filling oatmeal cookies for a dollar,” and “behold, ramen.” Interestingly, it did not cite anything to support the “false dichotomy” you’re accusing me of supporting: for reference, here’s the link http://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/164447064675/heyatleastitsnotcancer-candygirl1997
(There is a cranky comment about non-GMO unicorn poop, but as hipsters don’t actually eat shit, that seems less “dichotomy,” and more “angry.”)
But hey, that seems suspiciously like people wanting other people to stop dictating their food choices and assuming they’re eating that way out of necessity, and not because they’re lazy. That can’t be right! We need someone who’s seen both sides!
And that’s why now, as someone who used to eat out of dumpsters, as someone who was lucky enough to be poor in farming country and hence have access to produce seconds (IE, bruised and ugly fruit that no one else wanted), as someone who is emotionally incapable of looking at meat before checking the discount meat bin at the grocery store, I am going to answer the question of whether it’s cheaper to eat healthy once and for all:
No.
No, it is not.
No, it is fucking not.
I live near an independently owned fruit market. They have, regularly, red and gold potatoes for $.99 a pound. They have big Idaho bakers for $.59 a pound. These are some of the best potato prices I have ever seen. Had we lived here when I was a kid, I would have eaten potatoes until I wept. Assuming that potatoes are now the bulk of our diet, and that we’re only eating the cheap ones, that’s a pound of potatoes per person, per day, for a total of $2.40. Call it $2.50, after tax. We are now spending $75 a month on potatoes. No butter or sour cream, because potatoes are already starchy as hell, and fuck taste, but we have potatoes!
Great. Do we have a kitchen? We didn’t, always. For approximately 1/3rd of my childhood, this plan has us eating raw potatoes. But let’s say sure. We can cook our plain potatoes. Say we cook them every night, and have hot potato for dinner, and then cold potato for breakfast. Can’t eat the school lunch–pretty sure that’s not healthy enough. So I guess we’ll buy and boil eggs. You can boil eggs and potatoes in the same pot.
How many eggs do you give the starving, miserable eight-year-old to fill her up? Ballpark figure? Is it the same number you give her fourteen-year-old sister? Is it the same number you take to your back-breaking physical labor job? We’re ignoring the emotional and social impacts here, and just focusing on the cost. So say three eggs each. Maybe everyone’s hungry, but hey, it’s health food.
A dozen eggs is $2.00. We are now spending $60 a month on eggs. That’s $135 a month for a diet that is probably not making anyone happy, but hey, at least it’s all easy on the digestion, right? And if you’re eating three eggs a day, even if you’re soloing this You Should Be Punished For Poverty diet, your eggs aren’t spoiling. Assuming you have a fridge.
Hope you have a fridge.
Your children have now started going home with friends in hopes of being fed, but that’s okay, because it means you have fewer mouths to feed, and if you don’t want them to be taken away, you need to make sure they don’t get scurvy. So we’re going to add milk ($3.50 a gallon, hope no one’s lactose intolerant, if you water it down and watch them like a hawk, you can survive on two gallons a week, which adds $28 to your grocery costs, good job) and apples. Red delicious, of course, which taste like shame, but they’re cheap when the store has them…assuming you’re not in a food desert, where the only apples are coming from the 7-11 at a dollar apiece.
There are so many things we could be buying to make this feel less like a Dickens novel. There’s baloney, and peanut butter, and generic mac and cheese. But they’re not healthy.
Eating healthy is a privilege. When I made a dedicated effort to change my eating habits, my grocery bills increased by 60%. I have the receipts. Not because I was buying “brand names”: because I was buying chicken breasts instead of whole chickens, because I was buying fresh instead of frozen, because I was learning to fill up on things other than chips. That’s just the way we’ve allowed this country to structure our food.
Yes: allowed. In England–which has its own problems, please don’t take this as me going YAY ENGLAND LAND OF PERFECTION–they have laws setting the prices that can be charged for “staples,” like chicken, and potatoes, and bread, and butter, and eggs, and milk. It’s much easier to eat healthy there than it is here.
But here, it is a privilege.
And it ought to be a right.
This is why I want to make it part of my life’s work to use research to transform the food system. It’s not as widely advertised but a lot of farm families can’t make ends meet just farming - an off-farm job is required to pay the bills, provide insurance, etc. Rising land and equipment prices means that it’s hard for people to break into farming, and so the average age of farmers keeps rising. During drought, many producers lose money. But this is the 2% of American workers that feed everyone else, documented or no. Don’t they deserve fair wages for their labor? I have known people who only make their business make profit on paper by not paying themselves a salary out of their costs, and these are the people making your hamburgers and lamb chops and chicken. And people my age don’t want to or can’t afford to farm because margins are so thin and the work is so hard, and the cost barriers to entry are so high. And these are people who love these animals, who love the land, who want to do this.
At the same time, food, especially healthy food, is super expensive, as described above. And if you have food allergies, or health conditions, or are disabled, it’s even worse. I have celiac - I can’t get fast food. I can’t get a lot of the cheap convenience stuff. And because gluten-free is the fad of the week, people jack up the prices on items I need to live because they don’t associate gluten-free with ‘gluten sends this person to the ER or makes them miss work’, they associate it with bored hipsters trying to avoid “toxins”. And then half the time it isn’t even safe for people with celiac anyways. What are people like me supposed to do when our disability is considered a punchline at best or to be ignored in larger food discussions?
So if farmers can barely break even in good years, and people have a hard time affording food, where is that money going? How can we ensure that the people producing our food get paid a fair shake for their labor without pricing people out of being able to buy food? Grass-fed beef is great for forage management and we need to graze these pastures to keep ecosystems healthy, but I admit, my family had it pretty good when I was a kid and even so my mom was STILL buying those ice-glazed chicken breasts at Sam’s Club in bulk because it was the best option for us, especially given our family’s medical food needs.
Unlike some companies that have outright admitted their business model is built on gentrification, I think we need to radically change how we look at food and how it is available to people. We cannot make a sustainable system unless everyone is able to benefit from it. We can’t feed everyone if my generation doesn’t farm because they can’t make ends meet doing it. We can’t feed everyone if food prices exclude most people from buying what they need. We can’t feed everyone if people with food-related disabilities are perpetually excluded from policy, support networks, and the national conversation. For food to be ACTUALLY SUSTAINABLE it needs to be accessible to EVERYONE. It needs to be inclusive and value the labor and effort of people involved.
I’m not sure how we will get there. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to do my best to make it happen.
I stand by all of this 100%. We are headed toward a crisis. I will not stand idly by.
YES YES YES YES. So one of the big things I like to teach people is about time economy.
I will say, you can eat healthy with a moderate to low budget, but it takes a VERY specialized skill set and low time economy. That is, more expendable time that can be spent learning skills necessary to sustaining this diet, such as food preparation, planning, preservation and enacting it. People literally do not have time for this. It’s a huge privilege to be able to do this. MASSIVE PRIVILEGE.
Also one of the biggest barriers that people have to food accessibility (outside of food deserts and access issues) is their time economy. What people who complain about so-called “handouts” people receive in the form of federal food assistance don’t fucking understand is that if you think federal food assistance is a hand out, you have no concept of time economy.
Every minute of a low-income individual’s time is worth a greater percentage of their overall income and net worth. If you don’t get paid a living wage you make less income, you have to work longer to make up for it. You don’t have the time to prep bulk foods such as whole vegetables, or cooking and freezing foods, learning how to cook inexpensively and healthily. That is loss of net time. It’s a horrendous system that literally keeps people in poverty.
There is also a huge gaping void of knowledge gap. This is where my program comes in. We teach these skills, and try to help our participate leverage the most of the resources available to them. A lot of people who are living this life have had a sustained lack of access to education that is more readily available to non-low income folks.
If people complain about people getting federal food assistance around me I want to punch them in the face. People do not receive any where near enough to actually survive. They get a MEAGER AMOUNT. It damn fucking helps, but it’s not enough.
Also bonus bonus let us not discuss how EVERY DOLLAR OF FEDERAL FOOD ASSISTANCE SPENT GENERATES MORE MARKET REVENUE THAN IT’S ACTUAL VALUE. IT’S GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY GUYS.
Our food system is so fucked up. MAN.
Something my middlest brother pointed out yesterday:
The wealthiest people on Earth do literally nothing with their wealth. They do an awful lot with their power, but not the hoarded wealth itself. Any spending or reinvestment is minuscule in proportion to the sheer amount that exists just to sit there and accrue. The wealth grows far faster than it can be spent, so any argument that spending is itself an efficient form of redistribution falls apart.
Under capitalism, capital races to become inert wealth. It is not a self-perpetuating dynamic system, it’s a system degrading toward a kind of heat death.
Of course. If they spent their money. They wouldn’t have money anymore. The rich suck money out of circulation in the economy and it stagnates indefinitely with them. Any amount they spend, no matter how ridiculous to us will never be a significant fraction because that’s what makes them rich and that’s how they stay rich.
The more rich people there are, and the richer they are, the weaker any economy becomes. There’s no way around it.
Their class warfare propaganda castes themselves as economic saints who “create jobs” as if they’re paying all their wealth out to their employees. If that were the case they’d be losing money the more they expand their business. But that’s not how business works so. Duh. That is a lie. They expand their business only to expand their profits and they always make far more than they pau back, so, literally the more jobs they create the more they suck out of the economy.
They also cast the poor as a burden, in order to pit those with a little to lose (middle/working class) against those with nearly nothing to lose (working poor), keep them squabbling with each other over the scraps of their salaries and tax funded benefits and nobody thinks about the tiny minority that has EVERYTHING and leaves everyone else squabbling over scraps.
But the truth is, the poor can’t afford to save money, sequestering it from the economy. They spend every penny they make and still go hungry. But all that cash flow strengthens the economy. Every penny of every benefit they collect doesn’t stay with them, it gets paid by the government to private interests, like grocery stores and land lords. Benefits for the poor don’t go to the poor they go through the poor right back to the rich anyway.
The poor are the opposite of a burden, no matter how much benefits they receive, everything they get they pay out immediately.
The rich are the ones taking more and more away and never pay back in as much as they take out. The rich are by definition the only real burden on the taxpayer and the economy. If they are allowed to keep getting richer without limit, eventually our economy, society, and political system will collapse under the weight of the money they amass.
people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.
i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)
at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)
i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.
this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.
to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.
now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?
the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?
the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.
the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.
what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.
what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.
that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.
the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.
the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money.
when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”
every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.
Being poor is just a series of emergencies.
Emergencies really do crop up more often for poor people. Necessities, like vacuum cleaners or phones or bedding or shoes, need replacement or repair more often when you only buy the cheapest possible option.
Poor people’s health tends to be compromised by cheap, unhealthy food; stress; being around lots of similarly-poor contagious sick people who can’t afford to stay home or get treatment; inadequate healthcare; and often, hazardous and/or demanding work conditions.
So we get sick more. On top of that, many people are poor specifically because of disability. All of that is expensive - even if you just allow your health to deteriorate, eventually you can’t work, which is - say it with me - expensive.
When you’re poor, even the cheapest (most temporary) solution for an emergency often breaks the bank. Unexpected expenses can be devastating. People who aren’t poor don’t realize that an urgent expense of thirty dollars can mean not eating for a week. Poor people who try to save find our savings slipping away as emergency after emergency happens.
I don’t think people who’ve never been poor realise what it’s like. It’s not that we’re terrible at budgeting, it’s that even the most perfect budget breaks under the weight of the basic maths: we do not have enough resources.
Cos we’re fucking poor.
People who aren’t poor also have different ideas of what an emergency constitutes. The AC breaking in the middle of summer isn’t an emergency when it’s in the budget to just go buy a new one the same afternoon without worrying about how it’ll affect your grocery money; having to take two days off from work because you’re running a bad fever isn’t an emergency when you have paid sick leave.
So it’s no wonder the well off people of the world don’t get it when a low income person is stressed over something breaking or a minor illness. I know people for whom a crashed car - as long as no one was hurt - would just be ‘damn it I liked that car and now I gotta borrow my wife’s’ and I know people for whom it would be ‘I can’t afford to have this fixed but I can’t get to work if I don’t get it fixed and I can’t get it fixed if I don’t go to work hahhaha time to indebt myself to family members who I desperately wish I didn’t even have to interact with because they’re the only ones who can give me rides or loan me money.’
Two very different worlds.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory.
I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school.
Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s.
This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
REBLOG FOREVER.
It should be added that, for some women in other parts of the world, this is still a reality.
