Tootfinder

Collateral damage in Abbott’s war on rainbows.
Buddy Holly crosswalk in Texas hometown to be removed following governor’s order on road safety https://ground.news/article/buddy-holly-crosswalk-in-texas-hometown-to-be-removed-following-governors-order-on-road-safety

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Nacirema people is their insistence that they do not participate in practices of which they clearly do. Equally unusual is the fact that, unlike other sacrificial cultures who raid neighboring tribes for victims, both slaves and victims for human sacrifice are only taken from within the society. In fact, there is a very strong cultural taboo against sacrificing or enslaving those from other tribes.
They are aware of the rituals of human sacrifice in other tribes, but claim such rituals to be inconsistent with their society. Yet their human sacrifice rituals are some of the most elaborate in the world. These rituals are so important that there is a whole part of Nacirema society dedicated specifically to arguing about who should and should not be sacrificed, restraining and feeding the potential victims for the years during which these arguments take place, and ultimately preparing and administering the ritual poison.
This is strangely similar to their approach to slavery. Both human sacrifice and slavery were once a much larger part of Nacirema society. Their human sacrifice rituals now take far longer and happen far less often, but at no point have they ever recognized these ritual sacrifices as such. Meanwhile, the Nacirema do acknowledge that slavery was part of their culture once. During the time when they did recognize their practice of slavery, they did raid other tribes for slaves. Now they follow the same complex ritual for slavery as they do for human sacrifice.
It is strange that, by following this ritual and only choosing victims from within their society, they seem to become incapable of seeing their behavior for what it is.

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Urban Spots 🟤
在路上 - 去西安/ 城市的点 🟤
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

When men drink, women and children pay the price #health

When men drink, women and children pay the price
Men’s heavy drinking is fueling a hidden crisis affecting millions of women and children worldwide. The harms, from violence to financial instability, are especially severe where gender inequality is high. Experts warn that alcohol policies must include gender-responsive strategies to protect vulnerable families. They call for reforms combining regulation, prevention, and community action.

CFP: "An International Workshop on Films and Ethnography"
https://ift.tt/KszNei3
updated: Saturday, November 15, 2025 - 6:11pmfull name / name of organization: Cultural Studies…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Made this with Sora yesterday.
I think it has the nice, comforting feeling of a Soviet (or British?) version of the XB-36H (the bomber with the unshielded nuclear reactor) in Charlie Stross's A Colder War. You get the sense that even with a telephoto lens, the camera operator has absorbed enough sieverts that a gruesome death of radiation poisoning in the very near future is going to take place. #airart

“According to our president, there’s only two genders..."
Also according to him experiments with injecting bleach, shining UV lights up your ass, hydroxychloroquine, etc. should be pursued. I hope said student is following that advice too.
https://www.theguardian.c…

New York City sues Meta, Alphabet, Snap, and ByteDance, accusing them of fueling a mental health crisis among children by addicting them to social media (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

CFP: "An International Workshop on Films and Ethnography"
https://ift.tt/KszNei3
updated: Saturday, November 15, 2025 - 6:11pmfull name / name of organization: Cultural Studies…
via Input 4 RELCFP