Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?
My sister, who I live with, thought she couldn’t get the vaccine because she doesn’t have insurance.
We’re not really used to “free”…. spread the word.
It depends where you go too. I tried to sign up at CVS and it said “free with insurance”
In the US they are not allowed to charge an individual for this vaccine. They are allowed to bill your insurance. Whether you have insurance or not, you will not pay anything.
THERE WILL BE A QUESTION ON THE REGISTRATION ABOUT INSURANCE YOU DO NOT NEED TO FILL IT OUT.
When I registered there was a page for insurance information. We were instructed just to put “no insurance” and keep going.
You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is? I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.
See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done.
BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back.
And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels.
There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.)
They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed.
So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem.
And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable.
And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer.
But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off. Woopie.
Fourth in a series I of comics about protesting safety tips I made with @this.is.ysabel . This one is about the dangers of police surveillance and how to avoid it if possible. Keep being safe when you go out. Don’t get snatched!
FBI is really just straight up developing Trojan horse apps now
The people in the comments are amazing, like, half of them are saying “aren’t these the normal permissions for an fitness app?” And the answer is yes. Of course they are. Your regular fitness app is a takes a ton of data on you in order to function, and that data may or may not be stored with the company for a period of time.
But here’s the thing, when the FBI needs location data on someone, they need a WARRANT to get that information from that company, or that company’s cooperation. Back in the early 2000s, there were a number of companies that simply handed over data to letter agencies like the NSA or FBI, and they got roasted for it by their customers. Don’t fool yourself, the only reason why backdoors weren’t coded into your phones by companies like Apple is because they did the math and realized that the cost of cooperating and alienating their customer base was too high, not because these companies have ethics.
So we live in a climate where companies are promising users security and privacy, and when they don’t it’s a scandal that loses them customers and money. They aren’t playing nice with the FBI, so what is the FBI to do? Easy. Circumvent silicon valley.
There is exactly zero reason for the FBI, as an organization, to make entertainment apps. Educational is maybe in line with past practices, but even when they did stuff like that in the 90s, we called it out for the propaganda it was. This app is absolutely a trojan horse. This is so they can get the data you would normally give to a 3rd party company without a warrant.
Please, ffs, learn internet history. Go take a look at the EFF website and archives. Look up the patriot act and the AT&T scandal with the NSA from around 2004. Lots of people on here were barely children pre 9/11, but you can’t possibly understand surveillance and internet policing until you understand what happened to society and privacy from 2001-2010
i think its very sexy how millennials are very anti-ad. like. ads were invented to encourage us to buy stuff. but me and all my friends? if we see an ad for something it fills us with rage. a pure hatred. if you interrupt my twitch stream or my stupid TV show for you stupid product i will hate you product for the end of time. i will spit on it whenever i see it. your ad doesn’t work on me. it doesn’t make me want to buy your shitty thing. it makes me want to piss on your shitty thing. fuck you ad companies.
ad companies: i know what we’ll do. we’ll make short video segments that show our product is a positive way so we live an invisible, subconscious imprint on the viewers mind that our product is Good, so that when they see it when they are out they’re more inclined to buy it
millennials: i dont drink monster, no. i was trying to watch an esports twitch stream and every 10 seconds monster got advertised to me. now everytime i see or think about monster, i am filled with a vile rage. i will never drink monster as long as i lie. i fucking hate monster so much
Don’t be fooled, we’re just as much of a sucker for ads as the older generations. They just need to be delivered in the right way. We’re way pickier.
An ad that interrupts a video? Fuck that noise. A sponsored post that has nothing to do with anything? God, I hate those, please hide them.
Someone we follow talking about squarespace in the middle of a podcast, without actually reading a script, just saying stuff about it? Decent, fair
Denny’s spending years posting stuff to an actually well-constructed shitpost blog on Tumblr?
We eat that shit up.
(Preferably at Denny’s.)
An actually good viral video that is an ad for something? But like, the ad is secondary to the funniness or cleverness or virality of the video? Like. Superbowl ads continue to be popular to this day.
this is a good chance to make this abundantly clear to everyone reading this:
every corporate account on tumblr, twitter, facebook, etc– ANY social media, is not your friend.
they are copying our memes because they want to seem like your friend. because if you see dennys making a funny meme post that you share with your friends and you all laugh, what are you gonna do when you’re hungry tomorrow? that’s right. you’ll go hey, lets go to dennys!
ad companies are smart. you have to be smarter. no business, company, or corporate account is your friend. all they want is your money. they will do anything to obtain your money. they will lie, trick, dance, laugh, party, and meme with you if it means that you look fondly at them and give them your money.
it’s not enough for us to just sneer at old-school ads. stop interacting with tumblr accounts made by brands. don’t reblog their posts. block them. tell your friends to do the same. blacklist their brand name. do the same on twitter. as soon as you see them, turn you back. give them NO attention.
social media is a place for us, individual people, to gather. do not allow these monstrous corporate entities into OUR place. you wouldn’t let a dude dressed as a monster can come into your home and try to sell your their shitty energy piss drink, so why are you letting them do it on your social media?
no ads are good ads. no corporate business is a good one. no brand is your friend. no brand cares about you. they only want your money.
I have blocked 700 corperate twitters and am proud of it
