actual criticisms of academia:

cost of education acting as class barrier

exploitation of graduate workers

colonialist past and present

ties to military industrial complex

danger of power structure entrenching and justifying orthodox views on social issues

criticisms of academia that get made:

those damn ivory tower academics are wasting money learning about things

The older you get the funnier anon hate gets. Like I do not have time for this I have to figure out what a 1099-K form is.

So, there's a lot of USians around who are very clearly fucking fed up with their political choices this election cycle, and planning to sit it out.

And I get it! What's the point of voting if there's no one to vote for?

The thing is, I'm Australian. In Australia, voting is compulsory. We don't get to sit out our elections, and I'll be real honest with you - we don't exactly get better choices than you lot. So how do you vote if there's no one to vote for? You find someone to vote against. And there's always someone to vote against.

Now, we have the pleasure of preferential voting in Australia - We get to rank every candidate from 1 to X, and I'll tell you, there's something so cathartic about putting the biggest bastard of the lot at the very bottom of your preferences. I understand that USians don't get that option - you get to mark one person, and that's it.

That means that you get one shot, so aim it at the biggest bastard of the lot. The candidate you most utterly detest. Put your vote in the worst possible place for them. Don't even think about who that vote's going towards, that's not the point. Remember, every vote is a vote against someone. Make sure you fuck up that someone's election day!

bail funds for pro-palestine activists

a15 bail and legal defense fund (supporting community members criminalized in the us for solidarity with palestine)

university of texas at austin students bail fund venmo @ psc_atx (livestream)

columbia students bail fund venmo @ bcabolitioncollective

as of april 15 ct dissenters (new york and connecticut) need bail funs for arrested activists: zelle: [email protected] cashapp: $BristolAntiRacism (use "april gift" in your memo so contributions can be tracked)

the palestine legal defense fund supports acitvists across the united states

palestine legal defence also supplies free legal support for activists

the national bail fund network may update with local bail fund efforts as events continue to unfold

this list is updated as of 24 april 10pm EST. i'll try to update as i find further bail funds and legal supports: if you know of other funds or if information shared here is incorrect, please reblog with updated info (+ a timestamp) so people can give and access support.

palestine will be free, solidarity forever 🍉 🇵🇸

first law of assumption community says "you didn't manifested your abuse because you didn't know about the law" then they say "everything is manifested by you" i mean pick a side 😭

Right?????????????? The Law of Assumption is a mess of conflicting claims that allows people to just hop over to whichever one is the most convenient at the time. Very "heads I win, tails you lose."

For anyone reading this: If you are leaving or questioning the Law of Assumption and need help, please see this post.

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

somehow the poor cops who we were told are simply too understaffed and underpaid because of Woke to deal with 'rampant rising crime' have found the strength to beat the shit out of college students across the whole country for peacefully saying "divest from the country killing innocent palestinians in the tens of thousands"

DONT STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE! DONT STOP TAKING ABOUT GAZA!

DONT LET THEM MAKE YOU FORGET!!

The other day I was watching some videos on the Love Has Won cult, and the creator speculated that Amy Carlson was actually faking her illness for attention.

Sure, I can see where Amy Carlson being absolutely full of shit with her "Mother God" nonsense could put somebody in a cynical frame of mind, but honestly? This was ableism. You don't get to decide that somebody is probably faking their illness because you don't like them as a person, ever. Yes, even if they're an absolutely terrible person. It doesn't fucking matter, it's still ableism. Even if we grant that Amy Carlson deserved it because she was so terrible (which, to be clear, she did not, because freedom from ableism should be a basic human right), thinking that you can decide who is or isn't faking their illness hurts countless ordinary people each day.

The fact that she died the way she did is evidence enough that something was very wrong and she was not okay, whether physically, mentally, or both. Speculating that she was faking her illness is honestly just ghoulish behavior.

Imagine calling Palestinians documenting their own genocide on their iPhones powered by a MacGyvered car battery "misinformation" because it hasn't been backed up and approved of by 40 peer-reviewed data analysts from the West that you personally approve of. I can't imagine being that ghoulish and heartless

"This Law of Assumption practitioner posted photos, doesn't that prove something?"

There's people out there claiming they've seen proof that the Law of Assumption works by way of photos posted by people who've claimed they've supposedly manifested their dreams.

So I'm going to talk about some of the ways that photographs can be misleading.

First of all, there are a lot of tricks people can use to make their bodies look different. If you watch how-to videos on contouring, you can see how people use makeup to give the appearance of drastic changes to their facial structure. Or heck, just search DuckDuckGo for "contouring before and after" to see what a difference makeup can make.

It's also very easy to fake before/after weight loss/muscle gain photos, even without Photoshop. Simply changing one's clothes, changing the lighting, and posing differently can make people's bodies look very different. People faking photos like this to promote weight loss and fitness products is actually pretty common. Go check out how Danae Mercer and Andrew Dixon demonstrated how easy it is. Go search up "how to look thinner in photos" to see just how many little tricks there are for this.

Photos can be misleading in other ways, too. One Instagram influencer - just as a prank, mind you - was able to pass off photos taken in an Ikea as a trip to Bali. Meanwhile, other Instagram users employ numerous tricks to make themselves seem more affluent than they really are, from using green screens to Photoshop to renting expensive goods to just posing with unbought merchandise at stores. One YouTuber, Byron Denton, spent a week manipulating his photos to make himself appear wealthy, and he was shocked at just how easy it was.

And of course, people can just steal photos or find them on stock photo sites. If you run a reverse image search, you'll sometimes find that the photos somebody posted came from somewhere else.

So yeah, photos don't necessarily prove that a Law of Assumption blogger has actually been manifesting. Photos can be misleading. (And this is why I challenge people who claim they can manifest anything to manifest and post photos of something that would be truly difficult to fake - like an ancient psychic tandem war elephant.)

For anyone reading this: If you are leaving or questioning the Law of Assumption and need help, please see this post.

To every angry LOA blogger who wants me to "stay out of our tags":

No. 🖤

For those of you who are questioning or on the fence about the Law of Assumption, here's some posts I recommend:

Was Neville Goddard really trustworthy?

"If the Law of Assumption is fake, what about the success stories?"

"I'm in a bad place and need to get out, what can I do?"

So did the "fuck content warnings! You HAVE to see this if you CARE!" crowd just forget that content warnings exist, y'know, for people personally tied to it. If they put a "discretion advised" disclaimer before a news story about a shooting, that's to avoid triggering people who have trauma from similar shootings. That's. That's why it's called a trigger warning

They imagine that they're righteously screaming at some fiend refusing to engage out of self-interest, but really they're just retraumatizing people who were directly impacted by the violence, or who have family or a community who were, over an entirely imaginary crusade

How a New Age conspiracy theorist dishonestly cited a CIA file as "evidence" of starseeds and alien contact

So I recently came upon a video claiming that the CIA knows all about starseeds. The creator of this video cited a document found in the Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room.

The document this man cited was titled "Star People Visit Earth To Spread Peace Message." So I went to the website and looked it up. (You can read it for yourself here.)

Opening up the document, we can see what it is for ourselves: a newspaper article clipped from the May 2, 1983 issue of Arizona Daily Wildcat. The article is reporting on claims made by a couple of New Agers, Michael and Aurora El-Legion. Literally everything this article says about aliens and star people came from these two people who gave a presentation at the University of Arizona. Everything they're quoted as claiming in this article was all pretty standard fare among New Agers at the time.

For anyone who isn't aware, the CIA collects information on all kinds of things that might be of interest. It doesn't mean that these things are necessarily real, just that they think it's worth looking into. The only thing this document proves is that someone working for the CIA cut an article out of a newspaper and filed it away.

Everyone who's like, "Yeah! Stop calling people [r-slur]! Use [other term referring to some form of disability] instead!" is completely missing the fucking point.

No form of disability should be used as an insult, period.