LGBT people, I need you to know that any “pedophile execution bill” passed in the US is meant to put you, personally, to death. When the right says “groomer,” they’re talking about you. When they say “predator,” they’re talking about you. When they say “pedophile,” they’re talking about you. Any actual child sex abusers who are convicted and executed would be, to them, a happy accident, a cherry on top of a law that’s meant to exterminate anyone who deviates from the cisgender, heterosexual norm.
as a lawyer who’s been practicing for six years now I can say with certainty that this 100% applies to lawyers
25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025
- Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality
- Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway
- Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups
- Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay
- Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward
- Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient
- Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative
- Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!
- Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community
- DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!
- Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?
- Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.
- Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability
- Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough
- Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing
- Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work
- Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market
- Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question
- Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them
- Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area
- Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...
- Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable
- Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact
- Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive
- Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people
I'd love to add to this some random resources to pirate. Please feel free to add more as I'm just someone navigating through all this myself.
- Popcorn time. Multi platform, easy to navigate, has tons of shows and movies.
- Library Genesis (libgen). For books, and scientific books and articles.
- Biblioteca Cervantes. For license free books in Spanish. Technically not pirating but still good to have.
- The Pirate Bay. Here is where to find other stuff you couldn't find on, say, Popcorn time. But you can still use Popcorn time to download things from here to your machine.
These are my basic day to day tools. A piece of advice would also be: use online forums to learn more about these. I'm not a big fan of Reddit for some reasons but it is a nice place to start to look for instance "beginner guide Libgen reddit" on your search engine (preferably not Google-based).
Let's all help each other in this to regain this digital literacy that's not being taught anymore and is sort of a lost knowledge.
So I have an opportunity to write an article for The Sick Times, and I need to interview some people from Southern/rural places about their covid caution/long covid experiences where there's little-to-no resources or social support. Drop me a DM if you're interested! If they like what I write, it could be a series. BIPoC and long covid folks go to the front of the line, but the more voices I hear from, the better my article will be.
this is so rogue but does anyone have the poetry template that went semi-viral on twitter a while back? it was designed for kids but someone gave it to their mother who has dementia and she wrote a really moving poem about her experience.
the minute I posted this I remembered enough of the prompt itself to find it and now I’m trying not to cry at work
ALTon a totally different note is this response from a kid, which is also beautiful and imo no less profound. and shows how the prompt can be interpreted so differently.
ALT
Parks patron: hey what are you gonna do about that graffiti?
Me: it's on the side of a business building, so the business owner has to take initiative
Patron: but it's visible from the trails!
Me: it is not on our property, so it falls on the owner of the business.
Patron: don't you have a graffiti task force?
Me: no, sir.
Patron: when I lived in Georgia we had a graffiti task force that would take care of that.
Me: we do not have that here.
Patron: you'd think the parks and rec people would take care of graffiti in their parks.
Me: we do. This is not on a park. It is on a business.
Patron: you see, there is also a sticker.
...
I'm sorry, is the sticker menacing you somehow? Is it scary? Are you being threatened by the vinyl?
Like I'm not saying it's great art
It's fucking ugly.
But also what you want me to do about it? Spend a day scraping it off the side a building whose owner is famously difficult to get ahold of?
Truthfully, the skateboarders that made it have been adding to it every few months and I kind of want to see where they go with it.
I keep drawing penis...
there's something wrong with this tarot deck
message from my 70 year old father who has never drawn a day in his life (except one apparently).
i just love how the emotion is so clearly expressed with so few lines
Please, if you can spare anything, it'll really help. I'm getting so few hours at work, and I still have a big bill to pay off. Anything you can send will help. I make content, which I could definitely send you if in exchange if you wanted. I can also draw a bit. I just really need help with these bills. Thank you 🖤🖤🖤
Cashapp: $THEmilyMortus
Venmo: @THEmilyMortus
Paypal: [email protected]
Richard Savoie (Canadian, born 1959)
There Was A Time, 2015
Oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches
Private collection
The article is under the cut because paywalls suck
“That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.”
This article gave me some hope
Really smart take.
These are people that believe perception and PR are everything, so they're trying to create the perception that they can destroy and remake government without consequences or constraints. And for a while people were stunned and overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all.
But now people are moving. Many, many lawsuits have been filed and the people are starting to claim their power.
Don't despair and don't give up. We're not done yet.
Good bitch, I'm glad none of your people have an ounce of loyalty to you
does that suck, mark? is it not fun to have your privacy violated? do you feel uncomfortable with people knowing things about you that you'd rather they not know? tell me more about how much you value your security and privacy, mark.
horseavoider-deactivated2025020
