Microposts
Saturday, July 5
Milan Kundera: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
“Imagine how strong our country could be if Congress spent their days working for the people who elected them, not the people who bought them.”
“I’m starting to realise that one of the purest forms of love is consideration. When someone thinks about how things would make you feel. In any situation how much they care about you is found in how much they consider you.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA, and others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.
Bayard Rustin: “Let us be enraged about injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.”
m1masroom: did ya’ll grow up terrified to share your most basic interests, hobbies and tastes with family/friends out of fear of getting ridiculed and mocked or are you normal
Thursday, July 3
Trump Won Over Republican Budget Rebels With Some Lousy Free Merch
Supreme Court to decide whether states can ban transgender women from sports
Wednesday, July 2
The Onion Reviews ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ - YouTube
“I release myself from the versions of me created just to survive.”
Governor JB Pritzker: “Here’s the problem with the do-nothing crowd now telling us what to do: while they spent their years watching Republicans illegitimately pack the Supreme Court, take away voting rights from people of color, and systematically chip away at the constitutional order, all the while they offered only a simple defense of norms and decorum — in a blind hope that one day soon Republicans would wake up to find their better angels. That got us exactly where we are today. The reckoning is here. And now that this culture of timidity is on full display, these same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on the defense of Black people, trans kids, and immigrants, instead of on their own lack of guts and gumption.”
Marwan Makhoul: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds - and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.”
“Relationships are meant to be your safe haven and happy place, not another battle you have to fight.”
“In my dream world, books are free and reading makes you thin.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal: “It is BATSHIT CRAZY that I had to introduce an amendment to prohibit ICE from detaining and deporting U.S. citizens. It’s even more insane that Republicans VOTED AGAINST MY AMENDMENT. They’re betraying their own constituents.”
lloydrang: I’m GenX. We grew up in an all-print world. We read really fast. So, my Millennial and GenZ peeps, I beg you for the love of Bananarama, please just send me the article and not the TikTok of the dude talking about the article. In Prince’s funky name, amen.
“When you’re not used to being confident, confidence feels like arrogance. When you’re used to being passive, assertiveness feels like aggression. When you’re not used to getting your needs met, prioritizing yourself feels selfish. Your comfort zone is not a good benchmark.”
“I would rather adjust my life to your absence, than adjust my boundaries to accommodate your disrespect.”
Paul F. Haacker, Canadian public radio journalist: “Here in Canada, many of us believe we are witnessing the fall of the U.S. empire. Would a civilized country limit health care or food assistance for the poor; leave crops rotting in the fields; destroy the educational system; target women and attempt to eliminate their reproductive rights while refusing to help resulting babies; abuse desperate immigrants; pretend to believe in Christianity while perverting and debasing its tenets; and refuse to protect the Earth from destruction? The world is watching.”
Bill Moyers: The NRA is the enabler of death — paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel and deadly hoax.
andthepeople:
Luke Skywalker in the context of Andor is sooooo. Smiley, insane, overpowered teenager from the middle of fucking nowhere shows up at the eleventh hour. No credentials, no connections, no resumé. Just happened to somehow rescue Alderaanian Senator Leia Organa from the Death Star with an absolutely braindead gambit in which he just… pretended to be a stormtrooper, with a Wookiee in tow.
Then he gets in an X-wing for the first time ever, turns off the targeting computer, and blows up the greatest weapon the Empire has ever created with one fuckoff impossible shot.
Meanwhile, all these rebels who have spent years, their entire lives, existing in fear and deprivation and exile, painstakingly building this movement with their bare hands, paying in blood and sweat and tears, so far removed from the world of the Jedi that the knights and the Force are just stories now, to most of them – these brave, exhausted souls who know that no one person can stand against the Empire, that it takes community, it takes trust, it takes you and the guy standing next to you – find themselves watching essentially the rebirth of a mythological protector, in the form of a guy who’s probably not legally old enough to drink, who sulks like a teenager whenever notorious smuggler Han Solo doesn’t pay attention to him, who follows Biggs around like a puppy, who falls for literally every prank anyone ever plays on him.
And this idiot kid is the first person in a generation who can stand up to the Empire, all alone, and make a difference. How much must they hate him, and how much must they love him, and how much must they fear losing him.
geekandmisandry: “I was thinking about how I have grown to value mandatory voting over a system that allows allegedly more freedom. Because in country, mandatory voting means I just have to send in a ballot. It can be empty or filled with the write in ballot “pickle farts” if I want.
“If I go to the voting station all I have to do is get my name checked off. I don’t have to vote if I don’t want to.
“But it means it is much more difficult for the government to try and suppress voters. Because voters have a legal obligation to go to the polls, so you can’t restrict them or try tactics to dissuade them.
“Voting polls are open long hours with access to food and water being a fairly standard staple. You don’t need any form of ID, you have to be given time to go vote in work hours without penalty if you cannot do it after work hours.
“Every now and then a politician tries some small way of voter suppression but it isn’t as easy. And so I have learned to appreciate it.
“But when I googled, out of curiosity, if the USA had ever had anything like that I was met with a barrage of websites talking about freedom and justice and the absolute liberty of Americans. I thought an eagle was going to bust out of the screen.
“Going through some of these I noticed they were think tanks connected to billionaires, one of them was funded and created by the Koch brothers.
“Gotta love how often the American ‘freedom’ is actually used as a way to further deny actual freedoms, both linguistically and politically.”
“Some of these sex changers can flip with astonishing frequency. The chalk bass (Serranus torugarum), a neon-blue Caribbean fish that’s about the size of your thumb, has been known to switch sex up to twenty times a day. Chalk bass don’t do this in order to play the field; quite the opposite - switching sex is their recipe for relationship success. Chalk bass are known to display unusual levels of sexual fidelity and are considered more or less monogamous. Their sex change habits are a coordinated response with their long-term partner. Researchers believe that taking turns laying eggs, which are bigger and more energy-consuming to produce than sperm, keeps the reproductive investment fair. Each fish fertilizes as many eggs as it produces. Proving that even with fish you get what you give in a relationship.”
Tuesday, July 1
US Supreme Court limits federal judges’ power to block Trump orders | Hacker NewsUS Supreme Court limits federal judges’ power to block Trump orders | Hacker News
The Mirror: Budapest-Pride: Tens of thousands of people defy ban at Pride parade in Budapest