Just casually suggesting privatising the arrest, processing and deportation of human beings like that's a normal, not-evil thing to say.

I'm dying.

This is like the study where they added the comedically oversized tail feathers to (I think) male birds of paradise? Some bird species that sexually selects for tail length in males.

And despite the tail extensions being so enormous that the birds in question would have been hard pressed to fly or do much at all, they still got laid a ton.

TIL that cowboys are actually a species of bird

Trump is going to lift those tariffs btw. Like we're gonna feel it and it'll suck, and then he will lift them, and things will improve, and people won't realize that things were still better before he put them in place at all, and he will claim credit for making everything better even though things are still worse than when he started. Because of him. Because he made them worse.

So you gotta pinky promise me you're not gonna let yourself or anyone you know fall for that shit.

lmao no he won't

never doubt me again.

depiction isn't endorsement but not all depictions have the same merit

the more sensitive a subject is the harsher the criticism will be if you fuck it up. that's how this works

The entitlement of US Vietnam vets is so fucking wild because, like, on top of everything else they lost the war! These people will stand tall and demand you recognize the “sacrifices” they made for your “freedom,” as though they didn’t suffer a humiliating military defeat. Talk about participation trophies!

The nature of service work in the US is that someone will frequently walk up to you and say “Hello, I shot every Vietnamese child I could see and still lost the war. Please give me everything for free now? 🥺” and if you do the decent thing and tell them to kill themselves you get fired

My father is a Vietnam veteran… I’m not sure how this makes me feel. 🥲

my father was in the army my whole life and worked for the white house in the last few years of service and i still think every american soldier is a criminal responsible for their contributions for the crimes against humanity the US military carried out. your family members are humans capable of evil & knowing that as an american is essential to interrogating your own place in the empire

wmata you may want to rethink your phrasing

Two vastly different experiences

@eastgermanhattrick booyeah

Please call this recession the Trump Slump.

We need to put Trump's name on this.

if ever anything I wrote were to ever go viral, let it be this. Let everyone talk about the Trump Slump. I want to hear this term in the news.

When I was in track and field as a kid I came in last for 100 yard dash but there were only four competitors so I told people I came in fourth and they were still p impressed so my advice is that if you have no skills or ambitions at the very least don’t go advertising it

I just want to say, if you've ever worked a low-level office job and thought 'wow this is piss-easy', that's not a sign that the work you were doing is objectively easier than other types of work, it's a sign that you were good at it.

by which I don't mean 'stop de-valuing office work' bcos that's not a real problem, no-one is doing that, I just feel like a lot of young people aren't aware that e.g. being able to type fast and accurately, open up a computer program you've never used before and figure it out unaided, are marketable skills, not things that 'everyone' knows how to do.

I've worked in 'easy' office jobs for 6 years now and believe me, some people are bad at them & do not find them easy.

yes this!! thank u!

In a job-hunting group I was in once, one woman talked about how, when the power had gone out, she and some other staff members carried all the vital paperwork and some chairs and tables down several flights of stairs to the sidewalk out front (where there was daylight to work by) and processed a bunch of clients’ needs, at least temporarily, and rescheduled appointments and stuff so that when the power came back up everything was still fairly organized and no clients were just turned away. And we all said “That’s the kind of thing you need to include in your resume.” And she said, “But anyone can do that; that’s not anything special.” And we’re all staring at her, going, “No, they can’t. Yes, it is.”

That thing you know you did/do really well? It’s probably special.

No job is an unskilled job.

Being good at an office job takes skills. Real skills. It's just that, especially if you're of a certain age, you learned some of these skills at school already.

Figuring out software, maintaining complex directories, customer service, balancing multiple tasks, interpreting policies, and so on are all skills.

And some people are Very Bad at these skills. There's a trainee right now at my office who might not make it through her training period because she doesn't have these skills.

I find my job super easy. Every person I've ever tried to explain large parts of it to just glazes over when I explain certain processes that I can do in my sleep (and that's not a me being bad at explaining stuff -- one of the many things I'm responsible for is literally explaining THEIR processes to them, and I'm told I'm very good at that bit).

I've spent a lot of my career getting dragged in to meetings to fix problems that I thought had easy solutions... but, like, no one else saw the solution.

And I also know what my boss has to do, and I do not want his job.

Don't devalue things you think of as easy at work, because chances are they ain't.

when I first got my current admin job I explained to my boss that I need things written down, I need hardcopies of stuff because I have an awful memory and I find it easier to keep track of things by noting it all down, otherwise I just get confused and overwhelmed

and he told me 'I'm the opposite, I keep everything in my head, I've always had a good memory so I'm not good at writing stuff down which is a problem when I have to communicate things to other people, that's why I need you, you rely on doing things that way so you're better at it than I am, I can't do what you do'

sometimes your greatest weakness can be your greatest strength, you just need to find an environment where it can flourish, nobody would have guessed I could be a stellar administration officer keeping a whole small company organised based on how fucking abysmal I was at waiting tables

this is crazy bc I remember when i was in school, if a guy had spare tampons in his backpack he was deemed the most universally popular guy by every single woman in school. The rizz you get from having tampons on you as a man is immeasurable.

Most of my friends since i was like 14 have had periods and they mostly stick to two brands, the day i started carrying them on my backpacks i unlocked a level of loyalty and care i could not articulate if i had a poetry degree. I met my soon to be wife because that day i was the only person around her who carried pads and she has never stopped telling people about it, i'm getting married because of the immeasurable rizz given to me by openly carrying pads as a dude

This is one of those true, declassified government things that always sounds made up but one of the things Henry Kissinger did with his career was use the CIA to help turn small, prosperous socialist nations into fascist dictatorships just to keep those nations powerless and possibly to keep socialist systems *looking* doomed and futile to the American public, like maybe just to scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income. Yes it sounds like an insane conspiracy theory a maniac would invent. It also happened multiple times and several generations of people around the world are still living in misery because of it.

Remember folks, the two types of conspiracy theory are "Things the CIA or FBI has admitted to doing" and "Antisemitism"

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. 

This is really great??

W h a t the fuck why did I not know about this until now hello…

i had a thought of "do people not know what AUs are anymore?" and then i remembered nobody explains fandom stuff to new people anymore so it is entirely plausible people genuinely don't know what AUs are and nobody has explained it to them, so for today's lucky 10,000:

"AU" stands for "Alternate Universe" or "Alternative Universe" (same difference) and is basically any thought scenario for a fandom that isn't canon and can't fit within the canon universe. If it takes place in the canon universe but something is notably different, that is typically what's known as a "Canon divergent AU," because it diverges from canon.

an AU can be absolutely anything. There's a couple of widespread pan-fandom au scenarios that often get thrown around, like coffee shop aus, genderbend aus, hanahaki aus (hanahaki is a whole thing in itself i'd recommend researching on your own), etc. One you might hear sometimes is "crossover AU" which is when you have characters from one fandom interacting with characters from another.

You can have as many aus as you want. They can be whatever you want and you can do whatever you want in them. It's a sandbox for you to play around in and explore how things would be different or how the characters would act in those circumstances or environments. Maybe they have different relationships with each other. Maybe they behave slightly differently. Or you can just say "Okay, [x] is true. How did they get here? How would things have to be different for this to occur?" which can also be fun.

If you are ever confused about why people ship something that seems completely out of the blue or doesn't make sense to you in the canon setting, there's a good chance they like it in an AU setting! Not everything everybody is interacting with is necessarily the canon! Not everybody wants things to exist in canon and just want to explore playing dolls in a different sandbox and that's okay. And their sandbox might look a lot different than yours, and that's also okay. You have the freedom to make your sandbox whatever you please. Do whatever you want forever. Get funky with it. AUs are fun.

Okay that's my schpeal. everybody go have fun and play nice now.