Gary 🔻

All cats are beautiful and all cops are bastards.
He/Him

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

When we’re kids we play cops and robbers, and watch cartoons about evil criminals being stopped by virtuous crime fighters. Then when we mature we learn that all the most evil people are operating within the laws of our nation, and nobody ever sends them to jail.

Ask a child to draw a Bad Guy and they’ll probably draw a bank robber, a thief, a supervillain, or somebody breaking the law in some way, because that’s what young people are trained to believe wickedness looks like in their world.

They won’t usually draw a politician, a billionaire, a media mogul, a tech plutocrat, a warmonger, or any of the rich and powerful people who are causing the real suffering in our world. The ones who impose laws upon our society ensuring the continuation of poverty, inequality, war, oppression and tyranny. The ones destroying our ecosystem and poisoning our minds with empire propaganda.

We give kids an infantile view of the world where the villains look like bandits and the heroes look like superpowered crimefighters and GI Joe. Which in a sense is understandable — no parent wants their young child exposed to the real horrors which exist in this civilization. You wouldn’t tell a six year-old that we are ruled by psychopaths who make the most sadistic serial killers look like cuddly little Pikachus.

The problem is that far too many adults never grow out of this worldview. Post a video of police brutality online and they’ll come crawling out of the woodwork frantically defending whatever monstrous act it reveals, no matter how self-evidently damning the footage might be. Oppose the latest war propaganda narrative and they’ll come falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell you the government would never lie to us and the Evil Regime of the Day definitely needs to be overthrown via US airstrikes.

They never unlearned the cartoons they ingested as children. They still think the struggle of good versus evil is a struggle of lawbreakers versus law-upholders. They never learned that there are many kind and decent people in prison, and that all the most horrific abuses in history have been perfectly legal under the law of the land.

Genocides are legal under the governments who authorize them. Wars are legal under the governments who wage them. Capitalist exploitation, imperialist extraction, oligarchic corruption and ecocide for profit are all legal under the governments who pass laws making them possible.

The police never show up to arrest the men who do these things. The police show up to arrest anyone who tries to stop them.

The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the most malignant members of our society, the law exists to protect the most malignant members of society from ordinary people.

A mature understanding of the world clearly recognizes this. And it’s the exact inverse of the understanding of the world we are indoctrinated into as children.

The real villains of our world look like the powerful plutocrats and empire managers who are inflicting unfathomable suffering upon the innocent. The real heroes look like the brave revolutionaries and truth-tellers who work to dismantle the power structure that those tyrants wield against the rest of us.

Becoming a real grown up means recognizing that the monsters were never under your bed. They were standing in broad daylight wearing expensive suits and ruling the world.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I thought I was being satirical.

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

Fourteen former members of the CIA calculated that the Agency alone was responsible for the death of over six million people between 1947 and 1987.

David Michael Smith put the total number of deaths for which the US is responsible at 54 million between 1945 and 2020.

[Abubaker Abed @AbubakerAbedW]

No words. Complete failure of humanity.

[Mike Recine @mikerecine]

I used to watch Charlie Kirk say stuff like this and wonder why nothing bad ever happened to him. But then he got shot and everyone fucked his wife.

[tara al-alami @taraalami]

I turn 27 in 3 weeks & as I’ve been doing for a few years now, I only ask that you donate $27 or more to @GazaMutualAid, which is a a group that has been working every day since early 2021. I love GMAC & believe so much in their work.
p@yp@l: asmaa1948
vnmo: purplebubble02

[Eyup Lovely @eyuplovely]

Every single day @ProjectMuhmmed posts video proof of them feeding children. Look at the extent they go to to authenticate what they are doing. Why haven’t you donated yet?

[☆.｡.:* t0m0ko .｡.:*☆ @mootsheep]

David Graeber said it perfectly,

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

You ALWAYS have a choice.

[Casual Geopolitics @Adamemedia]

“America has been invaded by criminals and predators.”

[Yanis Hamad 𓂆 @yanis_hamadGaza]

Today, I saw a bar of “Dubai chocolate” shamelessly gleaming on a market stall shelf, surrounded by snacks, nuts, and coffee — in a city where you can’t even find a single pill of medicine. I felt the rage choke my heart.

Just four days ago, I went through every pharmacy in Khan Younis looking for medicine for my son Mahdi — and only managed to find it through connections. No medicine, no meat, no chicken, no fuel, and nothing to sustain our lives even for one day. Everything that nourishes the body and soul is forbidden to us.

This is what they call famine engineering: they open the crossings for candy, coffee, and nuts to fool the world into thinking we’re okay — while denying us what keeps people alive. They want us to look like actors, not the starving. Like corpses, not the living.
How can a person live on snacks?
What filthy theater is this world — and the occupation forces — playing with us?
What the hell is this?

It’s a famine meticulously designed, controlled by buttons from afar — deciding when we eat, when we survive, when we live, and when we die.
What kind of cruelty is this?
And what kind of world chooses chocolate over medicine?

This pain has gone beyond hunger — the sorrow lives more in the heart than the stomach.

[حيدر | Haydar @chronicalihere]

The American military produces more CO2 than 140 countries combined and consumes more hydrocarbons and liquid fuels than the majority of countries globally. Confronting imperialist violence is part of confronting climate catastrophe.

The American Empire has only ever sown death and destruction wherever it has gone. It is incapable of anything else.

[tara al-alami @taraalami]

We have ruined the world

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Attempted murder of an elderly woman, now in critical condition, and nobody on either side expects Israel to prosecute this terrorist and nobody expects the U.S. to complain, even as American citizens were targeted by this mob

[Gary 🔻 @ApothegarySnail]

You can see the hole where the bullet ripped right through.

[Breaking911 @Breaking911]

Ave Maria University in Florida commissions sculpture of Jesus Christ embracing Charlie Kirk.

The school expects to receive the first bronze casting in January of 2026.

[Annia Ciezadlo @annia.bsky.social @annia]

does this remind you. of anything.

[sofie ☭ @darlingube]

you can go vegan, boycott AI, fast fashion, and plastic and only take the bus for the rest of your life and the US military will undo it all in like 30 minutes because they want Venezuela's oil

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

The United States nationalized a social media platform to hand it over to a country committing genocide in order to whitewash its crimes. Read that again.

[Eyup Lovely @eyuplovely]

When the facts are established about what is transpiring in Gaza there is not a doubt in my mind that it will be considered the gravest horror in human history. If you, like me, have spent all week prattling on about Politics, you are in moral arrears. Pay up. Links in replies.

[yul @juliabracadabra]

after ben & jerry’s refused to sell product in isr*el due to the g*nocide, unilever sold their formula to an isra*li manufacturer without permission. disgusting