When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.
There was a big push to eliminate “degrading jobs” but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn’t have dishwashers, but we’d have people who washed dishes that weren’t eligible to be in the union.
I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn’t “degrading”, it’s fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?
There were enough of us to be like “Absolutely the fuck not,” and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.
I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor… and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.
The first time someone told me that busing tables was “degrading”, I was like “Oh, uhh, yeah, like it’s very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?” and they responded “No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting.”
But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.
Those people sound like a guy I’d make up to be mad at.
I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn’t been in-person interactions, I’d think I was getting trolled.
Just to put a bow on it:
In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn’t like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn’t in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I’ve talked about how said that “as a prison abolitionist” we just needed to execute most criminals.)
When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied “wasn’t in the spirit of the union”. When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn’t be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we’d just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)
I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that “after the revolution” we wouldn’t have cleaners.
It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?
Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.
I’ve talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.
I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren’t.
Yeah, that really sums it up. There’s stuff that needs to get done, so I’ll never be of the opinion that it’s degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be “above” washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.
And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you’re like “Holy shit, you’re good at this.”
People doing a job most people don’t want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That’s how it would work if we weren’t mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who “can’t do better” and “deserve” poverty because they have less value as people.
There’s so much about this. The tumble itself is so irredeemably funny. The child stops asking for food and just stares in silence as the adult completely beefs it. The adult, absolutely ashamed, wandering off screen, refusing to make eye contact with the baby.
Perfect 10s all round.
Also, the adult trying to get the dirt/sand out of its mouth from it’s epic faceplant. I mean, this is basically me every morning.
Counter point, those machines can make me a peach sprite.
guys did you know the tech in that nefangled machine revolutionized preemie healthcare
yeah the guy who invented them made incredibly precise infusion pumps (as opposed to gravity fed ivs) which not only meant they could give medications to teeny tiny babies safely, it’s also used for insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines. the key element is that it’s a peristaltic pump so the liquid stays in sterile tubing for safety
(unholy drink cloaca uses it to dispense precise amounts of flavored sugar syrup)
The crux of the anti trans movement is a war on bodily autonomy. They don’t want you to have any agency over what you look like, how you dress, who you date, whether to have kids, etc.
They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.
Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone’s self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.
Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Our rights are your rights. Our destruction is your destruction.
Fred Hampton Jr visiting his father on Father’s Day…his grave is annually shot by local police
.Some context for this:
-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago – an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP.
-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.
-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics. He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.
-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.
-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening. If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why. It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)
-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner. One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.
-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times. The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun. He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling. This was the only shot fired by the Panthers.
-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken. He was shot in his bed. Twice, in the head, at point-blank range. He was 21.
-Four weeks after witnessing Hampton’s death, his finance Deborah Johnson gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr. That’s him in the photograph, visiting the grave of a father who died before he was born. A resting place riddled with bullets.
21 years old. Look at him. Passion and intelligence and idealism and hope. That’s what scared them so bad.
This is unrelated to anything else with the silly “Dire Wolf” controversy but them putting these images in all the articles give me the weirdest uncanny valley discomfort. Like it is hard for me to take these photos seriously. Do you know why?
Wolf pups just do not look like that. Because wolves typically have their pups in underground dens, it is an evolutionary advantage for the vulnerable pups to blend in with the dark earth of the den. If they were born white, they’d be sharply contrasted and easier for predators to spot. Even arctic wolves are born dark and gain their typical white coat a little later (though not all arctic wolves are white either).
Fun fact in Game of Thrones they used domestic dogs to play the dire wolf pups; puppy Ghost is cute but he’s clearly no wolf!
Giving birth to pups that are darkly colored is a pretty basic adaptation in a lot of canids that litter underground. Red foxes and arctic foxes are also born a very nondescript shade of dirt. Exceptions exist, but this is just a thing that a lot of wild canines do. Here are various canids (red fox, Ethiopian wolf, maned wolf, and African wild dog) that do this
I don’t know if we have any proof that dire wolves had their pups in dens but it would be kind of weird if they didn’t. So even if the dire wolf had a light coat as an adult they would likely still be born with a darker color to act as camouflage.
So when I keep getting this image
blasted on all my feeds you can understand why my brain has trouble registering it even as a gray wolf pup. It’s just weird. It looks like what chat gpt would spit out if you requested an arctic wolf pup. That thing would stand out like crazy in an underground den. You can make something look like something else all you want but the evolutionary history of a species is too complicated for us to ever faithfully recreate from scratch.
sobbing and crying at the woman who stole a meth addicted kitten from her dealer and then she and the kitten got clean together
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thats love baby!!
TUMBLR STORY TIME.
I volunteer for my local shelter and when the weather’s good, we do a free vaccine clinic every Friday. Free distemper, free rabies, cats and dogs. We hand out free food from the pet pantry, we give people leashes and collars, we do whatever we can to keep people’s animals at home and healthy. Every animal that can stay home and be fed and be vaccinated is an animal that we can keep out of the shelter.
We get all kinds of folks, sometimes we even get backyard breeders but we don’t do any judgment, because we want people to come and get their dogs vaccinated, because one parvo case costs $7000+ and the whole year of Parvo vaccines for hundreds of dogs costs less. It’s just harm reduction, everything we do is harm reduction.
So anyway, this one day this woman comes up to the vax clinic and she is high as fuckin’ hell, just obliterated fucked up, smoking a joint in line, and she has this TINY pibble puppy with her, maaaaybe four weeks old. This thing is so fuckin tiny and wormy and lethargic, and she’s like, “Hey I heard I can get her shots.” and we’re like, oh fuck this puppy is gonna die. Like straight up, we were all like, fuck that dog is gonna die. So we gave her wormer, we gave the first distemper shot, and I put together a whole care package: wormer to take home, puppy milk replacer, puppy wet food, a leash, a harness, some blankets, toys, we gave her instructions on how to get the puppy eating food, and we told her to come back in 3 weeks for the follow up vaccine. And we were all like, well fuck, that puppy’s gonna die, goddamnit, that’s so fucked up. But you know, we did our best, and we hoped we’d see her again.
And in three weeks, you guys, she showed up. And she was still high, but like, half-high this time. Smoking a cigartte in line but like, could focus, could ask and answer questions. And she’d taught that tiny puppy how to SIT and had her walking on a leash. We found out that it took her three buses to get to the clinic, and she told us all about how she got the puppy eating right, got her stool solid, she was taking her on walks… The puppy looked so good, you guys. I almost cried, it was so big. Really happy puppy. At the end of the visit, we were like, ok, see you in three more weeks for the next distemper.
So three weeks later, she shows up, and she’s sober, and she told us, “You know, I was really fucked up the day I bought that puppy, I wasn’t sure I was going to live, and I bought that puppy and she was too young, and I didn’t know what I was doing but y'all were so nice to me, and you helped me so much, and I knew that I had to give this puppy the best life I could, so I moved back in with my grandma, and I’m getting clean, and I’m on methadone, and I’m going to rehab next week, and when I get back, I’ll come back and visit you guys again.”
So I just wanna say. Sometimes it’s hard to find a reason to get clean for yourself. Sometimes you gotta do it for a little critter that depends on you.
If your goals basically amount to “after The Revolution everything will be great because people will all have the Good Ethics and work together in my Perfect System and the Evil People with Bad Morals and Bad Behaviour who are making this world bad will be gone (killed/imprisoned/exiled/all converted to agree with us when they see our Perfect System)” then that’s just fascism. I hate to say it but you’ve put a gay socialist hat on fascism.
The MAGA people are still gonna be around in your Perfect System and a very large proportion of them are still gonna be Like That. We can discourage antisocial behaviour through laws and education and changing cultural norms, but if plans for future society involve [group I’m opposed to] magically not being part of it so the Good People can Do Things Right, well.
✨No Bad Guys Here✨ - how do you want to enforce that.
Honestly, I think this concept of The Revolution is to some leftists what Armageddon is to some Christians: an easy excuse to not try and grapple with difficult problems like hunger or poverty or injustice or climate, because any day now the Great Reckoning will come and wipe the slate clean.
If athletes are allowed to compete, they should also be allowed to win.
Every single time I see a story where a trans athlete “blows out” the competition, their performance usually ends up not being quite as dominent as claimed.
When you look at the fastest 400m times in high school competition, it greatly adjusts the context.
In running, a second can be an eternity. Most world records are only a few tenths of a second apart. And this trans athlete is a full 7 seconds away from a record set by a cisgender high school runner.
According to the New York Post, 7 seconds is a blowout.
College runners are getting times under 50 seconds. And the world record is 47.60—a full 10 seconds faster.
This trans athlete can’t help it if she is in a league with a bunch of slowpokes. She won a race. She is pretty fast in relation to her direct competition. But she is not some spectacular speed demon who will dominate women’s running.
Her time wasn’t even at scholarship level.
And the second place finisher wasn’t even close to a “decent” time.
Also…
The vast majority of the world’s top sprinters are of West African descent. Just to give you an idea of the statistics, every world record holder in the men’s 100m dash since 1968 has been Black.
So they are basically cherry picking ideal circumstances to make a trans athlete look overpowered—as Portland only has a 5% Black population.
If this race happened in Atlanta instead of Portland, the trans runner probably would have won 10th place and this wouldn’t be a news story.
How to create a moral panic 101.
We’ve got another “dominant” trans athlete going viral.
While it is true that Redmond Sullivan has had two first place finishes in tournaments since transitioning, if you look at her record, you might notice this isn’t as dominant as claimed.
First I have to explain fencing ratings.
You have individual ratings A through E. The As are top fencers and Es (or unrated) fencers are the worst. The number after the rating is the year.
So a rating of A25 means you are a top level fencer in 2025.
Then you have event classes. They are also A through E but have an additional 1 through 4 difficulty variant.
The easiest tournament is E1.
It has 6 competitors and none of them have to be rated. So you are competing against poorly ranked people and have a much higher statistical chance of winning.
This is like playing basketball with all of your nerdiest friends and “accidentally” forgetting to invite Steve who is 6'4".
The hardest tournaments are A4.
This requires at least 64 competitors and must have at least 12 A-rated, 12 B-rated, and 12 C-rated fencers.
This is like being a 40 year old playing Halo against a hundred 12-year-olds all saying rude things about your mom while repeatedly headshotting you with ease.
If you look at Redmond’s two first place finishes, they were in E1 and D1 competitions. (A D1 requires 15 people with four of them E-rated.)
She had a decent statistical chance of winning because the competitors were few and poorly rated.
If you look at her only A4 tournament, she placed 172nd.
I’m not sure I would call someone who placed 172nd particularly dominant.
She currently has a “D” rating overall.
When fencing in men’s competitions, she was rated E. And she slightly improved to a D in women’s competitions—though this is only with 3 months of data. She ended 2024 with an E rating in women’s events. So maybe she improved to a D and a half.
No offense to Redmond, but she is not anywhere close to a top level fencer no matter which league she competes in.
Stephanie Turner, the kneeling transphobe, currently has an E rating and has never finished a year better than a D. By all accounts, she is evenly matched against Redmond and had a legit chance at winning the match. But it was an A2 tournament and she really had no chance of placing highly so I guess she figured this was a good opportunity to be a dipshit.
She is a coward who only took a stand when the stakes were lowest.
I’d also like to point out that Colin Rugg was quick to mention Redmond’s first place finishes, but failed to mention that in the very tournament with this kneeling protest, she got 24th place.
It really seems like these trans athletes aren’t trying to become dominant athletes by transitioning and they are just competing because they love it.
I mean, if I ever got 172nd place I’d probably hang up my rapier and just watch Zorro movies instead.
Payton McNabb had a genuinely tragic injury from a volleyball spike to the face. There is no denying that. When you watch the video of it, it’s clear this was a brutal shot to the face.
But this tragedy was quickly capitalized on by the anti-trans propaganda machine. The context was significantly altered and an insidious narrative was constructed. Payton and her parents then jumped at the chance to monetize the incident.
You can hire Payton to dramatize her incident and repeat all of the common anti-trans talking points.
If you can’t afford to hire her as a speaker, you can request to feature her documentary, “Kill Shot: How Payton McNabb Turned Tragedy into Triumph.”
Possibly one of the most emotionally manipulative things I’ve seen in a while. After they discuss the injury you can just sense the coaching involved as they parrot every talking point.
Let’s deconstruct exactly how Payton’s injury was turned into propaganda.
First, all of the conservative news outlets reported on the incident. And they were sure to include details to give the impression this injury was severe, uncommon, and something only a trans girl could inflict.
The ball was going a blistering 70mph.
The trans girl was a towering 5'11".
Payton suffered a concussion.
The evil trans girl cackled in delight.
Of course, none of these details can be verified. The trans girl cannot tell her side of the story because if she identifies herself, it will put her in grave danger.
Let’s investigate the claims a little deeper, shall we?
First, the ball going 70mph.
Not even remotely possible.
Elite level high school girl volleyball players can spike a ball between 40 and 50mph. Boys can manage between 50 and 60mph. So that is already debunked with a simple google search.
But I went a step further and analyzed the footage using a technique I learned from Adam Savage on Mythbusters. You take a known measurement (the width of the volleyball) and count how long it takes to travel a certain distance using the framerate. The ball went roughly 426 cm in 200 milliseconds.
I did a high and low estimate and the ball was going between 43 and 47mph, as best as I can tell.
Which is in the range of what a typical elite high school girl can achieve.
In fact, the world record for any woman volleyball player is around 70 mph. This was accomplished by professional player, Paola Egonu. She is 26 years old and 6'4".
The men’s record is around 80 mph.
So they are saying this trans girl hit a volleyball as fast as the world record set by an adult professional athlete. And it was only 10mph slower than the fastest spike ever hit by anyone.
Okay, what about the trans girl being 5'11". That’s pretty tall for a girl, right?
Not for volleyball players. In fact, it is not uncommon for high school volleyball teams to have players 6 feet and above. Many college and professional teams regularly have cis women that are 6'5".
Well, there is still the fact that the girl got a concussion.
You might be thinking… “That never happens. I mean, they are just high school kids playing a game. And a kid’s game isn’t dangerous. The *only* reason Payton was injured (as her parents imply) was because a trans girl was playing.”
Did you know that women’s volleyball has become so notorious for injuries that the NIH did an entire study documenting them?
Here are some highlights…
“In total, an estimated 214,302 female athletes aged 14 to 23 years were evaluated in EDs across the United States with volleyball-related injuries between 2012 and 2021. The ankle, head, and knee were most frequently injured, often involving strains/sprains, contusions, fractures, and concussions.
While sprains and strains were the most frequent injuries, head injuries accounted for the second most common diagnosis in both groups, suggesting that clinicians should maintain a high index of suspicion for concussion when evaluating players.”
It would seem that head injuries are extremely common and there are literally thousands of cases of concussions.
Volleyball is fucking dangerous, yo.
This has to be a known danger that parents and players are aware of. They choose to take this risk despite the danger. They don’t advocate for any kind of head protection or protective gear.
The reason Payton was so seriously injured was not because of a trans girl. It’s because she was hit point blank in the face with a volleyball—just like thousands of others.
An event so common that when I was researching spike speeds and looking at highlight reels of Paola Egonu’s world record spiking, one of the clips was of her bonking another player in the head.
The only reason this woman wasn’t injured was because the ball had a chance to decelerate. In the first 400 cm of this spike, the ball is going so fast that the camera could not even see it. It just evaporated into a blur until it slowed down from air resistance. Just imagine if that woman was as close as Payton was.
Cis women are fully capable of causing these types of injuries.
To review…
They villainized a high school trans girl for hitting a ball only as fast as her cis counterparts.
They said she was a giant even though she is kinda short compared to other players.
They inferred only a trans girl could cause this type of injury even though it happens all the time.
They said she cackled like the Wicked Witch with no way to dispute the claim.
And then they gave her a bunch of money to repeat the narrative that they manufactured.
She even got to meet the president for selling her soul.
This is where anti-trans talking points come from. It is bad faith all the way down. Every claim is a lie or so twisted and out of context it might as well be a lie.
Is this really the side you want to be on?
Are these the bedfellows you want to align with?
I do want to jump in here and point out that Redmond is fencing foil (as opposed to epee or saber). Foil concentrates on a small area of the torso. If your torso is smaller, and you’re shorter, this is actually… better. The same is true of epee, but kinda more so, because you can target more of the body, so it’s just… the bigger you are, the more of you there is to target.
My wife, who is 6'8", used to fence and ran the fencing booth at the MN Renaissance Faire for several years; she fenced competitively. (A late friend of hers – Guppy Dibble z’‘l – is the reason there is a rule on the books at least locally that you cannot use an offhand fish in tournament matches.) The amount of bitching that streamed forth from her when I casually asked, “Isn’t being smaller and slimmer an advantage in fencing?” was pretty fucking epic.
All of this is really fucking ridiculous.
Oh. Has anyone pointed out yet that the woman who took a knee in this fencing bullshit is thirty-one years old, and this is her hobby? There’s nothing wrong with having a hobby or competing in beer-level tournaments, but there is something wrong with turning them into national fucking issues and ruining someone’s fucking life over them.
I hope she can’t ever show her face at a fencing competition ever again.
Sullivan and Turner have both achieved D ratings, because ratings last three years before decaying. They both achieved these ratings at women’s events, but both have participated in coed events recently. So, on paper, they seem to be pretty closely rated.
And to repeat, Turner has no issues fencing men, she only has an issue fencing trans people.
But that’s all for the specific people, I also want to comment on the general comments:
“it’s unsafe for trans woman to fence against cis woman”
Even if we ignore that fencing events are regularly coed, this is still patently false. Fencing is considered a medium contact sport, so it’s not without danger. But the rules and equipment regulation thoroughly protect all fencers. Your weapon must have a specific tensile strength and you cannot make contact between your body and your opponents’ in a way that jostles them. The rules are established to be safe when someone older than 30 (such as Turner) fences a 14-17 year old (which Turner did several times at the tournament where she earned her D rating in 2024) and we do not see a high incidence rate of injuries because the sport is designed to be safe, with the same safety equipment for men and women events.
“trans woman have an unfair advantage in fencing”
As has already been pointed out, there are advantages to being tall (longer arms, more leverage) and to being small (less target, and IMO they tend to have faster arms). Fencing is often referred to as physical chess, the game is half mental. If your opponent is stronger and bigger, there is a long list of strategies that you can use against them. I am not saying that strength isn’t an advantage, it is, but it’s one that a fencer can predict and counter. That’s the whole sport. Lee Kiefer, the woman who just won her second Olympic gold medal for individual women’s foil, is 5'4" and slight, and beat people substantially larger than her.
“any trans woman that wins or competes is taking the place of a cis woman”
This was a recreational event. There’s no money on the line and frankly, if there were, that’s not really that relevant. Do you claim “any dutch woman that competes takes the place of another woman” just because the Netherlands’ women are on average 10cm taller than the global average? There are differences between people and, as we saw in Olympic boxing, any attempt to thoroughly police the sex of athletes will just result in misogyny.
If you really think this is super dangerous or that there’s some huge advantage being taken, then please start advocating for performance-related classes like weight classes in wrestling. Because advocating against trans women just really doesn’t make sense.
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