The taxes are very unfairthey’ve done a very bad job we’ve been very unfair. We’ll have taxes that are very very fair The taxes know they’re unfair Sad! These taxes are failing really failing badly I call it the failing taxes Like seriously failing It’s a crrooked system It’s a rigged system Please be sure to bring this matter up at our next press briefing so we can discuss.
been seeing a lot of variations on this take recently – it’s one of the most common pro-immigrant sentiments and also one of the worst – the line that says we should welcome migrant workers because working class Australian/British/US etc citizens are too spoilt or lazy or consider themselves too good to do those jobs.
Like it comes from a (sort of) well meaning place, they’re often trying to say that migrants aren’t criminals or lazy or whatever… but aside from valuing people according to their productive ‘worth’, valourising menial, difficult work as some kind of moral virtue and attacking working class people for not being exploited enough, the most important thing missing from that take is the reasons why working class citizens don’t do these jobs.
But somehow it always gets framed in terms of working class people’s choices – what the migrant is “willing to do” and what the American won’t. Poor migrants can’t choose more attractive work, and the working class citizens can’t “choose” to work for less than minimum wage. It’s the bosses who make the choice, it’s about what they are “willing to do”. This is how they want it.
“wage theft” is a phrase that really needs to get used more often.
Smash that mf reblog button if you stoically ignore all labelled washing instructions and everything your mama ever told you about laundry and just send those bastards hurgling around in an overfilled tub to meet either death or glory
becoming vegan because factory farming is unethical is like deciding that since walmart and amazon mistreat their employees you are now going to get everything you need out of dumpsters
in a nutshell, instead of reforming the bad parts of your society, you
try to opt out of it in a way that has really no effect, and wouldn’t
work at all if the majority of people weren’t still part of the industry
you dislike.
there was, for a while, a real movement of people who tried to get everything out of dumpsters, as a way of opting out of capitalism. but the problem was that you couldn’t get what you need when you need it, leading to you being kind of a drain on your community, and someone had to buy that stuff in the first place for it to end up in that dumpster anyway. it was Fundamentally Silly.
going vegan to opt out of farming practices has similar problems. for instance: you (hypothetical vegan you) won’t buy honey, but the bees are being used to fertilize the vegetables and fruit you eat, they’re making the honey anyway, all you’ve done is – well, nothing, because you’re not a big enough demographic to make an impact, but even if you were, honey sales are a much smaller part of beekeepers’ income than crop pollination. and beekeeping is not a big faceless corporate interest. it’s not monsanto. it’s a bunch of single-family or partnership business with a truck or two and a couple hundred hives. the bees make honey after a pollinating run, and the beekeepers sell it for a little extra income. if you made a dent in that, you’d be achieving nothing but making joe beekeeper buy his kids’ t-shirts at k-mart instead of target.
animal farming and plant farming are deeply interconnected. plant farmers grow animal feed; animal farmers sell manure for fertilizer. most non-corporate farmers raise both plants and animals. it’s more economic and gives them more resilience.
if you were a big enough demographic to hit ‘the farming industry’ in its wallet. you would be making things MUCH harder for small farmers than for factory farms. you would be making it easier and easier for factory farms to crowd family farmers out of business. so that’s pretty much achieving the opposite of what you want, right there.
and then there’s the fact that plant farming is just as rife with gruesome factory farm conditions as animal farming, but it’s humans who are exploited in those. i’m not going to level accusations of racism here, but it really is unfortunate how little the vocal internet vegan contingent seems to know or care about the exploitation of the mostly nonwhite workers in the industry. it makes y’all look racist, whether you are or not.
look, i keep saying this, even though folks never seem to hear me: i don’t hate vegans, i’m not trying to stop you being vegan, i do not care what you eat.
my problem is with defensive internet vegans trying to promote their dietary restriction lifestyle as a solution to problems in the real world. it is not. it may create more problems than it solves, or maybe it breaks even, i don’t know. it certainly doesn’t solve anything that can’t be solved just as well without it. it can only look reasonable from a perspective of deep ignorance about where food comes from and how the farm economy works. you basically have to be young, urban, and somewhat privileged to embrace it. and it is, fundamentally, very silly.
Furthermore I’d like you to look at a sheep farm. Actually look at it.
You CANNOT grow crops there. That’s WHY there are sheep on it.
You refuse to use wool, well aside from.the fact that it’s a fantastic fiber and how polluting polyester and other plastic fibers are, it doesn’t harm the animal to remove and in fact is done for their benefit.
Above – a sheep farm (note steep and craggy hills), an uncompressed bale of freshly shorn wool and some sheep being shorn.
It’s not stressful for the sheep. Sheep are dumb. Be confident, dont hurt them and they’re good. Wool is a good fiber – strong, warm – even when wet – renewable and biodegradable.
My issue with Veganism-As-A-Cult is the lack of critical thinking. By all means eat what you want, wear what you want to wear but a blanket ban on all animal products because they’re HARMFUL is in itself an extremely harmful philosophy.
Do you refuse to eat plants that were pollinated by bees or fertilized by manure since they’re a product of animal labour?
Honey doesn’t hurt bees. Wool doesn’t hurt sheep.
What about animals that are going to die anyway? We are currently in the process of exterminating possums in our country as they are a pest and destroyer of our native species. We kill them humanely but they’re still going to die because its them (introduced pest) or our endemic endangered species. We use the meat for pet food and the fur for a lot of things now – in making yarns or fur items – because the alternative is to let it rot. Which is just bloody wasteful tbh.
What would (generic) you prefer we do here? Let sheep die of over heating or the weight of wet wool? Force bees into swarming (90% casualty rate) so we can avoid taking their honey? Leave pest animals to rot and encourage the use of set-and-forget traps since there’s no incentive to check them?
What’s the humane option?
see: why I hate militant veganism
Veganism, as I have encountered it, tends to be a thing that morally smug white people try to spring on others as a quick fix solution for the world, and I resent it more every day.
It’s a new month, and Meltwater is flying on its own now. It’s time to move on to the next project. And if you’re expecting a thematic followup to my dreary antiwar apocalypse simulator, well…you might be a little confused?
FUJOSHI! Dirty Rotten Shippers! (aka SENPAI! Please Notice Me!) is a romance and matchmaking card game for 2-4 players. You take on the role of a group of fujoshi (or himejoshi, or fudanshi, or w/e) and conspire to make seven attractive anime boys (or even…g…girls???) kiss each other!
At the start of the game, players pick the ships they want to bet on, then spend their turns scouting, convincing, and cajoling the NPC protagonists to fall for the right parter. Successful ships score points, and rare pairs score a bonus!
(Placeholder art, not final. Characters are used without permission solely for noncommerical testing, and should not be construed to imply any license, agreement, or tie-in. I just like the anime, ok?)
Despite the theme, this isn’t a light little nothing game. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from middle and heavyweight games like Argent: the Consortium and Pax Pamir, to create a meaty and involved shipping experience that respects the subject matter and the fangirls who inspired it. After all, why should romance games have to be joke games? (Please look for an essay with that exact title in the near future.)
Of course, the game doesn’t have a publisher lined up yet. And I still adamantly refuse to self-publish. I want to be a designer, not a businesswoman, and I’ve seen more than a few “successful” game Kickstarters crash and burn. But I hope that I’ll be ready to shop the game out to publishers by next year’s convention season.
In the meantime, if you wanna get involved in playtesting, the current beta version of the rules can be found here, and prototype cardsheets and scoresheets should be up soon as well. Contact me and I will get you sorted!
projects ending means time for new characters! this fellow is my tiefling rogue named Leniency. he picked his name himself and he’s a bit too proud of it. however he is not as proud of his horns, which grew in just a bit asymmetrically and it’s certifiably the Worst Thing™ that’s ever happened to him
One of the reasons I feel so comfortable using Tumblr over other social media is because this site is clearly too incompetent to be evil.
The basic business model of a social network is to harvest commercially valuable personal data and sell it, most famously via targeted ads. Anyone visiting my blog can clearly see that I am a queer furry who’s into video games and art. And yet I am only served ads for funeral homes, Bible story DVDs, and the current president’s reelection campaign (in 2018 for some reason)
Needless to say my click through rate has not been very good
callanswall 