First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.
For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.
But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.
The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.
The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.
The evidence shows otherwise.
— Alec Karakatsanis, “Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”” | Jacobin, July 2022
very fun review of my panel with buckaroo TJ KLUNE today at EMERALD CITY COMIC CON what a great trot
being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five
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Hematoma
Hemorrhage
Concussion
Edema
Skull Fracture
Diffuse Axonal Injury
General Information
Neck sprain
Herniated Disk
Pinched Nerve
Cervical Fracture
Broken Neck
General Information
Aortic disruption
Blunt cardiac injury
Cardiac tamponade
Flail chest
Hemothorax
Pneumothorax (traumatic pneumothorax, open pneumothorax, and tension pneumothorax)
Pulmonary contusion
Broken Ribs
Broken Collarbone
Keep reading
I hate when I say things like "oh I want an ipod classic but with bluetooth so I can use wireless headphones" and some peanut comes in and replies with "so a smartphone with spotify?" No. I want a 160GB+ rectangular monstrosity where I can download every version of every song I want to it and it does nothing except play music and I don't need a data connection and don't have to pay a subscription to not have ads and don't have popups suggesting terrible AI playlists all over the menus.
Gimme the clicky wheel and song titles like "My Chemical Romance- The Black Parade- Blood (Bonus Track)- secret track- album rip- high quality"
So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history.
Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service.
Beware!
random emoji-based questions to sate your curiosity
personal
👁 eye colour
🇪🇺 nationality
🏳️🌈 sexuality
🏳️⚧️ gender identity
🛐 religion
faves
☕️ hot drink
🧃 cold drink
🍜 dish
🍉 fruit
🥦 veggie
🎉 holiday
🎲 game
🏐 sport
🐈⬛ animal
🌻 flower
🌦 weather
🌍 place
🚙 means of transport
fandom faves
😇 blorbo
😈 meow meow
👥️ otp
📺 tv show
🎬 movie
📚 book
🎶 musical artist
Page 77 of Making Stuff and Doing Things by Kyle Bravo
How to Wheatpaste by Anonymous
apparently we r doing this again
Selective Mutism: an anxiety disorder. The inability to talk is caused by social anxiety due to the people and/or situation around the selectively mute individual. Often starts in childhood.
Speech Loss: a term for being unable to speak for a certain period of time, usually due to autism-related reasons (e.g. being overwhelmed or burnt out). Can overlap with Selective Mutism, the disorder, but it is not the same thing. (For one, SL is a trait; SM is a whole disorder.)
Nonverbal/Nonspeaking: a term for people who are always or almost always unable to talk. If you're unable to talk for an hour/day/week, you're not "going nonverbal"; you're "losing speech". If you've never been able to talk more than a few utterances, that's nonverbal.
Semiverbal/Semispeaking: a term for people who struggle greatly to speak to communicate. This might include taking awhile to form sentences, speaking with very few words, relying on echolalia, using gestures to communicate, and not always making sense to others.
Hyperverbal: people who speak more than what's typical, though we can still experience speech loss. This can include things like having a large vocabulary, using more words than necessary/usual to say something, talking to ourselves, talking for the sake of talking, using a lot of non-communicative echolalia, not realizing we're talking, or rambling often.
A Note: over time, your place on the verbalizing spectrum (nonverbal, semiverbal, average, hyperverbal) CAN change, but that's not, like, "oh i was hyperverbal this week and nonverbal last week"; it's about overarching patterns. Additionally, Selective Mutism does not inherently put someone at a certain spot on the verbalizing spectrum.
As a history student going into library science, people way under hype how crazy book banning is
A follow up post I beg you to also read.
Multiple lists of books already banned in schools/libraries or ones that likely will be:
Banned Books Week 2024: 100 of the Most Challenged Books
Banned Books: Top 100
Banned Book List
Colorado Banned Book List
The Complete List of Banned & Challenged Books by State
Banned Books from the University of Pennsylvia Online Books Page
Top 10 Most Challenged Books in 2023
PEN America Index Of School Book Bans – 2023-2024
Challenged and Banned Books
Places to order books other than Amazon:
Internet Archive (free)
Libby (free with library card)
Thrift Books
Book Outlet
BookBub
Abe Books (owned by Amazon)
Half Price Books
Barnes & Noble
Better World Books
PangoBooks
Book Finder
Goodwillbooks
Alibris
Places to support that fight against book banning:
American Library Association
Unite Against Banned Books
National Coalition Against Censorship
PEN America
There’s a reason politicians fight so hard to limit knowledge and it should scare you.
Some recs below based on reviews I’ve seen
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
George by Alex Gino
Looking for Alaska by John Green
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
All Boys Aren't Blue by George Matthew Johnson
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
All American Boys by Jason Reynolds
And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Flamer by Mike Curato
Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan
Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
This Day in June by Gayle E. Pitman
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Drama by Raina Telgemeier
This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sanchez
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Beloved by Toni Morrison