treat me mean, I need the reputation

(Source: phyllis36)

stfuconservatives:

A conservative wrote one of those shitty “20 truths that will SHOCK liberals” posts, and here someone responds to each and every one of them with the factual equivalent of “you’re wrong and fuck you.” -Jess

I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but I’m currently writing a YA novel whose main characters are, in order of plot primacy:  a young lady of Irish descent whose motivation and place in the story has nothing to do with being a “chosen one” or having a “special destiny” but whose main character status is mostly dependent on her actions and decisions; a male POC who relies on his intelligence and negotiation skills but does not shy away from carefully-metered action as a last resort; a gay caucasian male who is a pacifist but endlessly loyal to his friends, and a female POC who is strongly independent and acts as a guide for the other three.

I hope to have it ready sometime next year, maybe?

stfuconservatives:

feminerdism:

I tutor reading and phonics at an inner-city middle school in Denver. Most of the students are Latino, from low-income households, English Language Learners, and immigrants. Some of them are undocumented immigrants, or their parents are undocumented. Some of their parents work two or three minimum…

I know lots of you are bookworms and librarians. Signal boost!

stfuconservatives:

jasencomstock:

Also revealed: Ron Paul has held meetings with A3P and Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party — the notorious UK fascist group with neo-Nazi roots.

Members of the nationalist American Third Position Party (A3P), whose website was defaced by Anonymous, organised Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s meetings and campaigns, according emails hacked by the collective.

Chairman of the British National Party (BNP) Nick Griffin also took part in meetings with Paul and other representatives of A3P.

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors,” read a statement from Anonymous.

Today in unsurprising news. If you pick up a white supremacist rock, there’s a 95% chance Ron Paul is hiding under it.

-Jess

THIS IS WHY, okay, guys?  THIS IS WHY.

HOLY TOLEDO!

Adamant Entertainment, in association with the Banzai Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Strategic Information, has entered into a license agreement by which Adamant will be producing the Buckaroo Banzai Adventure Game — a training manual for Blue Blaze Irregulars which uses the format of a tabletop role-playing game in order to prepare BBI recruits for the sorts of situations in which they may find themselves while aiding Buckaroo. The training manual will feature guidelines for taking on the roles of either your own Blue Blaze Irregular Strike Team, or the roles of Dr. Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers themselves. Familiarize yourselves with global threats ranging from Red Lectroids from Planet 10 to Hanoi Xan and the World Crime League; Learn about the specialized equipment available from the Banzai Institute, such as the Oscillation Overthruster and the Jet Car; And begin to embrace the motto of the Blue Blaze Irregulars: “Helping him to help us.”

I always knew you’d come back, Buckaroo. 

“Starry Night with TARDIS and Pac-Moon, h_m, 2012”

So I’ve given the manner some thought.

I want a new cell phone.  I feel that, this, I cannot be completely blamed for.  I live in a capitalist consumer society in which New Cheap Shiny Technology is a thing to be had; and to a certain degree I have been conditioned to want New Cheap Shiny Technology by advertising, peer experiences, prior expectations, et cetera.  What I DO with this want is my own lookout, and I’d like to think I manage my OO OO ME WANTEE SHINY THING TAKE ALL MY MONEYS PLZ urges reasonably well.  Not as well as I could, certainly; but I am proving to be a work in progress.

On the other hand, knowing what people on the other side of the world go through every single day just to provide this technology has burned a hole in my heart.  It’s left me questioning quite a lot in my world.  It’s something I knew about before, but perhaps didn’t quite understand the scope—or there was a synaptic twitch somewhere that cut off the line of logical inquiry that would have led me to research further, keeping me in a state of ignorance, and thus, bliss relative to this moral quandary; at least until now.

I cannot shrug and casually accept the suffering of others as the price that the First World pays for its toys.  I hate knowing that, likely, a vast majority of the manufactured goods I own were made by people who make less than fifty cents a day.  I feel like I’ve been lied to by people who have pocketed my money with a smile—I feel that way because that’s precisely what has happened, and there’s nothing practical I can do about it.

I do not want to live in Omelas.  On the other hand, I don’t think I have it in me to walk away.  Renouncing technology in this society isn’t just giving up your toys, it’s giving up your voice and your ability to communicate with others.  It would be giving up my entire inner life.

We know that the situation with Foxconn and the major cell phone, tablet, console, etc. manufacturers isn’t going to change, at least not for a while.  No amount of not buying new cell phones—unless it reaches something like 25% fewer sales worldwide, which isn’t going to happen—is going to impact their bottom line severely enough to get them to change their ways.  Hopefully, someday the Foxconn workers and the factory workers across China will rise up and unionize and receive decent wages and humane treatment—I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this happening anytime soon, though history would seem to suggest that it may just be a matter of time.  This leaves us without a decent solution in the meantime.

So I’m suggesting a compromise.  Hear me out.

I plan on spending about $100 to get my new phone.  I had a little under that saved up in a mad money account that I was planning on spending on something frivolous.  Instead of blowing that cash on hookers and blow (okay, okay, video games) I have invested in three Kiva loans.  No, this does not lessen the burden of imperiled Chinese factory workers.  But it does help someone else out—particularly shopkeepers in Kenya and Paraguay, and a farmer in the Ukraine.  These are people who need and deserve help, and the money I have loaned to help finance their livelihoods represents the extra money I would be willing to pay for a piece of technology I knew was assembled in safe factory conditions by someone who was treated and compensated like a human being.

If you’re going to buy a $500 iPad, save up an extra $150 or $200—restrain your impulse-purchasing urges and take a few extra weeks or months to squirrel away the extra cash, and spend it on a Kiva loan or some other worthwhile charity.  Ideally, it would be a charity focusing on developing countries, helping people to help themselves—but of course, that choice is up to you.  And once you’ve done this, write the company.  Tell them that, as their customer, you are deeply unhappy with the conditions in the factories they use to create their products.  Tell them you would be willing to spend the extra money on a gadget made with humane standards, and that in the future you expect to hear that their factory conditions have improved; or you will no longer be their customer, and that you will convince others to do as you have.

If enough people start doing this, not only will a hell of a lot of deserving people get the funds they need to thrive and survive (which should be reason enough to do a Kiva loan anyway!) but the tech manufacturers WILL take notice.  The Times article I linked to in my last post has stirred up a big fuss, and right now I’m willing to bet you any amount of money that there are some very powerful tech magnates who are sweating bullets right now over all this negative publicity.  This could be the start of some big reforms, if we’re lucky.

I’m not asking you to do this to absolve your guilt, though I’m guessing it may help a little.  I’m not doing this out of some privilege-ignorant white-knight urge to “save the Chinese from themselves.”  And I know that some people will view this as a hippy-dippy, lasseiz-faire, hipstery, have-your-cell-phone-and-eat-it-too non-solution that doesn’t directly affect the situation.  Well, thanks to the vast imbalance of the world’s power bases, we currently live on a planet where direct solutions to problems are largely left out of the hands of the proletariat.  Practically the only power available to us is to wield our collective outrage together and forge ourselves into a mighty electronic FIST and POUND the problem into a fine pink paste; like what happened with SOPA and PIPA. 

And frankly?  We did it before.  And we can do it again.

NOW WHO’S WITH ME

I am not “back.”  I never left.  I never “leave” anywhere, ever; because that would involve me having been “somewhere” in the first place.

Every time I read about the horrible working conditions in Foxconn, I bite my tongue and curse my technology requirements.  We’re all at least a little implicit in this, everybody who owns a smartphone or a laptop or a tablet or a gaming console.  It’s true that most people probably don’t know about the human suffering and misery baked into the gadgets they use every day, but it’s also likely true that the majority of those who do know don’t care.

Being in the market for a new cell phone at the moment (amazingly enough I’m only on my second Palm Pre after two years when most die-hard Palm users go through them like kleenex), I’ve been researching the various handset manufacturers and of course none of them are innocent in this manufacturing scheme.  If you ever want to get a little depressed (and you’re an American) google “cell phones made in USA” sometime.

It seems like the only way not to be implicit in this human cruelty is to disavow all technology, down to mass-manufactured products.  This is an idea that seems less than helpful—technology and modern society are fused irreversably, have been since the Industrial Revolution.  You can walk away from Omelas, but you won’t get any cell reception outside the city limits.

So if, by association, all of our hands are on the whip of the technological massa’s who ensure cruel and torturous wage-slavery in China, and we KNOW this, what do we do with this knowledge?  One might start by buying less.  I may not be 100% able to justify to myself spending for a new phone when my old Pre still works, but on the other hand, I’m not an early adopter or gadget-head who upgrades their phone every time a new version comes out, and it’s this kind of wastefulness that drives the high revision rate of high-end consumer tech.  I’m specifically not buying an Apple product.  I know that pretty much all cell phone manufacturers use the same kind of scheme of building in China, but in reading about the situation it occurs to me (and others) that Apple are in the position of improving workers’ conditions in China through their actions, but refuse to make major changes in the name of keeping consumer costs low; and then lie about what they have or haven’t done. 

I also feel that it’s important not to blame the tech or call the products themselves “evil” as if they were forged in the fires of Mount Doom.  I may not buy an iPhone but I don’t assume that using one makes anyone a bad person.  It’s what you do with it that counts, and as we’ve seen over the past year, technology can be used to spectacular effect in informing individuals and spreading knowledge to others outside the normal influence sphere of the power elite.  Witness the Arab Spring uprisings and the #OWS movements, both of which relied on the mass distribution of information at the personal level.  A hammer built in a prison can be used to break down its walls.  The technology is in our hands, and it’s up to us as responsible users to call for greater change and humane treatment of workers from the corporations whose coffers are filled with our hard-earned money.

That having been said, I don’t feel that this is a situation that can, or will, last forever.  RepRap tech is getting better and better.  “Pirates” are determined to turn that old “You Wouldn’t Download A Car” thing on its ear.  How long will it be before the first 3D printer hobbyist makes their own working cell phone?  How long after that will it take for the first iPad replicas to be assembled from scratch in somebody’s suburban basement?  Soon Foxconn’s biggest competitor will be the box sitting where your old beat-up printer used to be, that can crank out all the parts for a new gadget in an afternoon.

What I’m getting at, here, is that Transmetropolitan is inevitably becoming the most accurate vision of what our future is probably going to be like.  Post-scarcity, pre-Singularity, ruled by corporations and slathered in eye-blistering advertising, information-based diseases, biological and ecological nightmares, political contests that make the coming elections look quaint and polite—absolutely and unequivocally fucked-up from top to bottom.  Praise Be to Internet Jesus and pass the Long Pig, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

godspeed you, black emperor