Okay now this is epic. Wholesome levels 9000. 100 upkeanus.

Sorry but if you honestly think the Tree Law is going to do anything to NBC Universal, 40 billion dollar media conglomerate, even as a joke, you're being fucking stupid

real

[“The charity model we live with today has origins in Christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to buy their own way into heaven. It is based on a moral hierarchy of wealth—the idea that rich people are inherently better and more moral than poor people, which is why they deserve to be on top. Not surprisingly, the charity model promotes the idea that most poverty is a result of laziness or immorality and that only the poor people who can prove their moral worth deserve help.

Contemporary charity comes with eligibility requirements such as sobriety, piety, curfews, participation in job training or parenting courses, cooperation with the police, a lawful immigration status, or identifying the paternity of children. In charity programs, social workers, health care providers, teachers, clergy, lawyers, and government workers determine which poor people deserve help. Their methods of deciding who is deserving, and even the rules they enforce, usually promote racist and sexist tropes, such as the idea that poor women of color and immigrant women have too many children, or that Black families are dysfunctional, or that Indigenous children are better off separated from their families and communities, or that people are poor because of drug use.

We can see examples in government policy, like the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programs (TANF), which impose “family caps” in fourteen states. These laws restrict poor families from receiving additional benefits when they have a new child. For example, in Massachusetts, a single parent with two children receives a measly $578 in TANF benefits each month. But if a second child is born while the family is already receiving TANF, that child is ineligible, and the family receives $100 less per month, for a grant of $478. This policy emerges from the racist, sexist idea that poor women, especially women of color and immigrant women, should be discouraged from having children, and the faulty assumption that their poverty is somehow a result of being overly reproductive. We can also see harmful, moralizing eligibility requirements when people have to prove they are sober or under psychiatric care to qualify for housing programs.

Charity programs, both those run by the government and those run by nonprofits, are also set up in ways that make it stigmatizing and miserable to receive help. The humiliation and degradation of doing required work assignments to get benefits too small to live off of, or answering endless personal questions that treat the recipient like a fraud and a crook, are designed to make sure that people will accept any work at any exploitative wage or condition to avoid relying on public benefits. Charity makes rich people and corporations look generous while upholding and legitimizing the systems that concentrate wealth.”]

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid

[“Even though mutual aid projects often emerge because of an awareness of how relief programs exclude people marked “undeserving” or “ineligible,” mutual aid groups still sometimes set up their own problematic deservingness hierarchies. For example, mutual aid projects replicate moralizing eligibility frameworks when they require sobriety, exclude people with certain types of convictions, only include families with children, or stigmatize and exclude people with psychiatric disabilities for not fitting behavioral norms.

In his book Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics, Myrl Beam tells the story of a Minneapolis group founded by queer and trans youth to support their community. As the group formalized and got funding, it diverged from its initial mission and commitment to youth governance and became dominated by adults. The group began to work with the local police to check warrants for youth who came to the drop-in space. This functionally excluded criminalized youth—disproportionately youth of color—from the space and endangered people who came seeking help, turning what had been a mutual aid group into an extension of the local police department.

When mutual aid projects make more stigmatized people ineligible for what they are offering, they replicate the charity model. The charity model often ties aid and criminalization together, determining who gets help and who gets put away, as we can see in this account from a Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) participant: After Hurricane Irma, a local sheriff announced that, “If you go to a shelter for Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail.”]

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid

Can I have help making next month’s rent? I work full time but have had to take 2 weeks off while my bosses were on vacation (I am 1 of 2 employees for a small business). I need $400.

Cashapp & Venmo or Shop My Business 🫂

Lol

There's something so amusing to me about David Bowie's career cause like he just released flop after flop until out of nowhere he just exploded into stardom by roleplaying as a bisexual alien and he did that until he was coked out of his mind and had the most jarring transformation from being a walking pile of glitter into a depressed skeleton. And he just like. Went to Berlin with Iggy Pop and became a normal guy again. And that was just the 70s, he started the 80s by releasing an album where he was a sad clown but then he just got sucked into being a regular ass musician who made generic 80s music, tzen the 90s rolled around and he just proceeded to go absolutely apeshit again. Then he had like two albums in the 2000s before he dissapeared off the face of the earth for almost ten years. And then he came back, released an album then later another one on his 69th birthday and fucking died two days later

"Think of the two major possibilities here: Either the studios owe untold millions to their talents and paying it out will decimate their stock prices, or they owe so little because there really is no money in streaming and the bubble of their entire 21st century business model will burst in spectacular fashion. And make no mistake: this is a bubble. This is the inevitable climax of a stockholder-driven hunger for infinite growth, despite the fact that, by design, such a thing cannot and should not exist. The infection of Wall Street has overwhelmed the entertainment industry beyond repair, leading to cultural vandals like David Zaslav to be appointed with the callous duty of strip-mining decades’ of artistic beauty for pennies of tax write-offs. The past and future are frivolous in comparison to the short-term demands that the line keep going up."