Tootfinder

Have you heard the story of the Hell Cats?
In WWI, “Hell Cats” was a name for the first women who joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
They were trailblazers who served with determination and broke barriers before they even had the right to vote.
Now, I’m part of a group of Democratic women veterans who are running to flip red seats blue and win back the House together.
We’re calling ourselves “The Hell Cats” and Politico says we
“could be the answer to Democrats’ tr…

Become a Founding Donor to Mendoza for Congress today!
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bobsday 85! this tuesday 5/19 on @…, 9pm-12am ET, the frow show's annual cornucopia of live tapes, covers, outtakes, novelties, answer songs, & other dylanological pleasures, filling in for @…. get your tape decks ready.

Willem challenged us to ask ourselves what we would do if we were living under Nazi occupation. Before all of this, I doubt anyone thought they would be complicit. I doubt anyone said to themselves, "nothing. I would cower in fear and do nothing."
But for 4 years or so we all answered that question again and again with our lives. Now here we are, answering it again... Every day. But it's no longer "what would you do during the rise of Hitler?" It's now, "what would you do after the invasion of Poland," and "what would you do after you knew about the concentration camps?"
For some people, the answer is still, "nothing."
But a lot of people have been brave in the face of it all. A lot of people have died, and a lot more will die. He will die, perhaps after a ruling by some court or other but, honestly, probably not. That's just how these things work out. Lots of people die, some for no reason, some because they stood up against injustice. A whole lot of people do nothing, until it's safe to claim victory... Until it's no longer safe to be on the other side.
That's just how these things go. Fascism is self-defeating, but it causes incredible harm on it's path of self-destruction. The more people who stand up, who risk themselves, the faster it collapses and the fewer it can hurt. That's also just how these things go. It's incredibly dangerous for everyone until enough people take some extra risk and make it safe for everyone again.
But that question still stands... Which one of those groups are you in? Are you proud of what you are doing, or will you look back with shame? Some of y'all have a lot to be proud of, but, if you're not, it's never too late to earn your way into that proud group.

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Within an hour after a horrific knife attack took place in Belfast on Monday night,
far-right UK activist Tommy Robinson had shared a video of the incident on X,
a post that racked up 6 million views.
Within hours Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, weighed in,
agreeing with a post calling for “consequences” for politicians.
By Tuesday morning, supercharged by X, the video was everywhere,
and groups on Facebook were organizing protests across Northern I…

A White Supremacist Youth Group Helped Orchestrate the Belfast Riots
After Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson stoked anger over a horrific knife attack in Belfast, a youth group linked to a global neo-Nazi movement quietly orchestrated anti-immigrant riots.

Stock Up, Down For Dallas Cowboys Rookies After Second Week of OTAs https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/stock-up-down-dallas-cowboys-rookies-after-second-week-otas

PSA: When was the last time you checked your smoke alarms?
If the answer isn't "earlier this year" you're probably overdue. Do it today.

"everything is brittle and at the mercy of anyone angry enough to poke it"
As a magnet, sticker, mug or more.
Get yours: https://davidaugust.threadless.com/designs/warehouse-fire/accessories/sticker
h/t @…

I wonder if tall walls outside the zoo serve any zoological function. These next to green terrains. Or if they're just a matter of angry greed: "either you pay for a ticket for our whole huge facility, or you won't even see a single sparrow that flew inside."

Is Dee Winters the answer at LB for the Dallas Cowboys? https://insidethestar.com/is-dee-winters-the-answer-at-lb-for-the-dallas-cowboys