annie--odair

[annie--odair]

[annie--odair]

Elon Musk really is just a b movie sci fi bad guy these days.

#spacer's choice

[annie--odair]

also with all due respect the main reason the left loses so much is that y’all refuse to compromise on the language and messaging you use to speak to voters. i swear if you rebranded “defund the police” as “invest in community safety from the ground up” most white suburban moderates would be like “that sounds great” and i know that because that’s how i’ve literally reframed it to white suburban moderates who think “defund the police” means we’re going to live in a scary lawless mad max world

[annie--odair]

Google's unionizing

Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of CWA Local 1440. The union is called The Alphabet Workers Union (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called “Alphabet”).

Speaking of legal fictions, the union is opening membership to “TVCs” - temps, vendors and contractors - employees who have deliberately misclassified so as to avoid paying them benefits or extending normal workplace protections to them.

It’s a bold move, a countermeasure to thwart the other commercial advantage from worker misclassification: by creating multiple categories of workers, bosses can pit employees against one another, by dangling privileges in front of one group but not the other.

But it comes at a high price: to gain official legal recognition, more than 50% of eligible workers must join the union. By including more workers, the union is setting a higher bar for official status.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an5q9/google-workers-publicly-launch-union

But the union has momentum: a series of high-profile googler uprisings - driven by official tolerance for sexual misconduct, complicity in US military drone programs, secret collaboration with Chinese surveillance and censorship, and more - show how radicalized googlers are.

Google’s management - who cultivated an air of participatory, cuddly collaboration - have arrived at a point where the contradictions between their “values” and the company’s profits can no longer be reconciled.

In Dec 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru, an eminent Black AI scientist who refused to retract a paper critical of its profitable Big Data research. Management compounded their sins by making false claims about Gebru’s dismissal.

The unionization drive is under the CWA’s #CODE (Coalition to Organize Digital Employees) project. Though CODE is no stranger to conflict, Google represents a serious challenge, thanks to its partnership with notorious union-busters IRI Consultants.

(IWI’s tactics pale in comparison to the mercenaries that Amazon has hired to bust its unions: the Pinkerton company, who have spilled rivers of workers’ blood in their murderous history):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

For important context on the drive, check out Collective Action in Tech’s article on the announcement, which explains why googlers have formed a “non-contract union” that does not yet have official recognition.

https://collectiveaction.tech/2021/the-abcs-of-googles-new-union/

“Non-contract unions embody the idea that worker power does not come from legal processes, but rather through building power through solidarity.”

#FUCK yeah #get it

[annie--odair]

Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa? Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now? 

[annie--odair]

This is something we as radicals don’t talk about much but which has come up a lot in my experience:

You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else

I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free

You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them

There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it

But that doesn’t happen if the resources aren’t used! Get out of the capitalist scarcity mindset - give freely and take freely, because by being lifted up you help us all

[annie--odair]

ah, i’m so bad at posting here. acknowledging this Day of Mourning from the lands of Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Potawatomi, Myaamia & Ochethi Sakowin people, aka Chicago, derived from a native word for garlic (mmm…) which is really suitable for me because I live here now 🌱🧄✨

whose.land are you on? talk about it over dinner this weekend with your fam & what it means to give the #landback. considering everything, listening & learning from indigenous people is the least you can do.

[annie--odair]

Link to textbooks - https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/textbooks

Original tweet - https://twitter.com/MiShee54/status/1239960873982144512

#WHAT

[annie--odair]

The bad news is that none of us as an individual is as powerful over our health or our well being as ruling class propaganda has taught us to believe, but the good news is that we are more powerful collectively than we were ever allowed to imagine! We absolutely can influence our well being, and the well being of future generations, just not through isolated individual means. Time to radicalize our understandings of health and health-promoting behavior... it’s so much better and more hopeful than the decoy scraps of hope we’ve been thrown that are diet & exercise

[annie--odair]

[annie--odair]

Hoover Dam site, May 21, 1932

#sins of mankind

[annie--odair]

Incidentally, this is a great example of why it is absolutely vital to defend human rights in all cases; the instant people work out which categories are publicly viewed as indefensible, they start figuring out how to fold other types of undesirables into those category.

Eg. Pornography criminalized? Great, information about birth control, sexual education, and writing by feminists and LGBTQ people are all pornography now.

Terrorism? Literally all activists are terrorists if you put a good enough spin on it! Easy.

And, of course, “sex offenders” includes teenagers who take nude selfies, sex workers of basically all kinds, LGB people in jurisdictions that criminalize gay sex, often trans people in ones that criminalize crossdressing…

[annie--odair]

“If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed. People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder. Maybe you weren’t always able to look at human behavior this way. That’s okay. Now you are. Give it a try.”

—

— “Laziness Does Not Exist” by E Price on Medium

(And a footnote I didn’t see explicitly covered in the article: laziness still doesn’t exist when it is you yourself making no progress and not knowing why. You deserve that respect and consideration, too, even from yourself.)

[annie--odair]

“don’t support nestle!” shouts the liberal on the computer made from parts manufactured at foxconn

consumer activism is a lie, see you in hell or in communism

[annie--odair]

FUCK aliens ! we got these crazy shits under da sea and we’re not payin any attention!!!

[annie--odair]

[annie--odair]

its been said over and over by lots of people but it still boggles my mind that people think people will just stop working if theres a UBI like

if you tell someone is on minimum wage “hey you make $58/day at your job, and im gonna give you an extra $115/day regardless of how much you work” there will probably be some who are now living on $115/day but most people are gonna look at that and go “fuck yeah! i make $173/day now!”

meanwhile if you tell someone making $40k “hey you can make $30k without working” there might be a few people who take a $10,000 pay cut and take an extended staycation, but just about everyone is gonna go “holy shit i make $70k now!”

and of course everyone who does walk away from their shitty jobs ends up forcing their bosses to make the job either less shitty or better paying so that they can get people who are willing to do it. which means that option of $115/day for no work or $173/day with a full time job suddenly becomes $300/day with a full time job

opposition to UBI really just boils down to a belief in the capitalist propaganda that if your boss treats you like a person the world you know will crumble