Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺

Legion of hungry raccoons. She/we/us. Chemical engineer, anti-authoritarian socialist.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@edgaralandough My preferred method is to force a mood shift to disrupt an emotional spiral. It's difficult to make a sad or angry person laugh (especially when it's yourself,) but it's an important skill to develop.

[Andrew Hartman @HartmanAndrew]

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@viennalt1979 @KenGardner11 Did Ayn Rand learn all the wrong lessons from her education? Yes. Did she still deserve an education? Also yes.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@viennalt1979 @KenGardner11 Universal education means universal. The moment we start restricting who can get it, assholes with power/platforms like Ayn Rand start restricting who can have access to it. And it's always the underprivileged and least able to advocate for themselves.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@InezFeltscher I dated a software engineer for 9 years. He abandoned me after a mental breakdown after his mom's death.

I'd moved w/ him to Seattle; great for him, but no jobs in my field. My full-time job was caregiving for him. After abandonment, I was FUCKED. Because we were never married.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@MorbidKnowledge You all know I'm right.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@MorbidKnowledge Okay, but where is the criticism of the illegal war which killed millions of Iraqi people?

Y'know, why the resistance to the militarized American presence even existed?

One rapper's career choice--frankly, vanity public display--means nothing relative to the loss of human life.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@annakhachiyan I attended a top university, and it took obsessive dedication to academics to be admitted.

This meant that everyone who got in was fundamentally lacking in socialization. We studied all day to try to succeed, so never attended any social events. We were all maladjusted nerds.

[Elihan091390 @EH_BEYAK9013009]

@caitoz Pointing at the sign.....again

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@IanMalcolm84 @Parodyjeffx This is the most insane, cursed thing I have ever read. And I'm a SomethingAwful girlie, raised by the internet. God forbid anyone actually believes things like this.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The only positive thing about the Iran war heating up again is that Lindsey Graham won’t be around to enjoy it.

The bloodthirsty South Carolina senator breathed his last on Saturday, succumbing to what his office describes as “a brief and sudden illness” after a political career dedicated to promoting wars, airstrikes and proxy conflicts at every possible opportunity.

People have long poked fun at the hypocrisy of Lindsey Graham living as an obvious closeted gay man in a political party with a virulently anti-LGBTQ platform. I personally have always found Graham’s sexual attraction to men a lot less interesting than his sexual attraction to acts of mass military slaughter.

Ever since the death of Graham’s dear friend John McCain, nobody on Capitol Hill has been able to match his gleeful enthusiasm for the shredding of human bodies using high-priced war machinery. Wherever there was any debate about dropping bombs, launching missiles, toppling foreign governments, arming proxy forces, or imposing starvation sanctions, you could always count on Lindsey Graham to be the first and loudest voice arguing in favor of more death and destruction.

Graham has personally taken credit for persuading President Trump to begin the war with Iran. In the months leading up to his unexpected demise, the senator had advocated for direct US military interventionism in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and had just returned from a trip to Kyiv promoting the US proxy war against Russia. He was literally pushing for more war and military expansionism until the very end of his life.

All the world’s worst people are publicly expressing their grief about the loss of their beloved war slut, from Trump to Benjamin Netanyahu to Itamar Ben-Gvir to Tom Cotton to Mike Huckabee. Meanwhile, everyone who’s not a warmongering psychopath is having a splendid day.

Of course we’re seeing imperial narrative managers like Piers Morgan wagging their fingers and chiding their audiences not to speak ill of the dead, but the hell with them. We’re not doing that. Politeness is not more important than Lindsey Graham’s victims. The liberal desire for propriety and nice feelings does not outweigh the importance of naming and shaming Graham’s frenetic scramble to murder as many human beings as he possibly could throughout his evil, miserable life.

Lindsey Graham is dead, and it is good that he is dead. May his omnicidal ideology soon join him in the arms of the cold, cold ground. May the insane, insatiable god he worshipped cease to gain recognition on this planet.

Lindsey Graham is dead. At least that’s one good thing. No matter what else happens today, they can’t take that away from us.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@noahsamsen_ Interesting how the Kleins have responded to any justified criticism.

They can't resist Israeli-style aggression when asked to make any point, nor deflection to an Israeli victim narrative, whenever criticized.

Motte and Bailey.

I wish for peace for all, and a free Palestine.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@asparagoid I spent 9 years with an abusive tech guy. I felt so empty, even though my bills were paid. I was in a golden cage.

If not for rent & cost of living, I would have left. I was so unhappy when I had everything I should ever want. I now realize that my soul wept because capitalism.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They sent anthropologists.

After the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were not going as planned, the U.S. military launched the Human Terrain System, a program that embedded social scientists with combat brigades to help soldiers understand local culture, tribal dynamics, religious practices, and community structures.

The idea was:

If we understand them better, we can manage them better.

Notice what is missing from that sentence.

Not: if we understand them better, we might reconsider what we are doing to them.

Not: if we understand them better, we might recognize that their resistance is a rational response to our presence.

Just:

Understand them better to manage them better.

To make the occupation more efficient.

To reduce friction.

To make the subjugation smoother.

They sent anthropologists to explain why the people they were bombing were upset about being bombed.

And then were puzzled when the bombing continued to produce upset people.

The program was eventually shut down following criticism that it violated research ethics, after several embedded researchers were killed.

The researchers were killed by the people they were sent to understand.

The people were upset because they were being bombed.

The circle is complete.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Comfortably numb is a choice that presents itself as a condition.

"I just don't follow politics."

As if politics were a hobby, like birdwatching, that some people take up and others don't.

"I try not to think about things I can't control."

As if the boundary of what you can control were fixed by nature rather than by the accumulated decisions of people who chose to push it.

"I just focus on my own life."

As if your own life were sealed off from the systems that determine its conditions, as if the mortgage rate and the healthcare cost and the quality of the school and the air and the water were not downstream of exactly the political decisions you have chosen not to think about.

The numbness is not passivity.

It is activity.

It is the daily, effortful practice of not connecting things that are connected.

Of not following thoughts to their conclusions.

Of consuming the information and then releasing it before it can change anything.

This takes work.

People do not understand how much work it takes to stay numb in the presence of what is actually happening.

The anger that breaks through sometimes, the anxiety that surfaces at three in the morning: that is the truth pushing against the maintenance.

The numbness is not the natural state.

The numbness is what you build on top of it.

And you have to keep building every day.

Or the truth gets in.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@PeynsaertBill You're a very good writer. The characters sounded real, very human, and committed to their own worldviews in an incorrect but also understandable way. The dialogue reminds me of people I used to know in college. #FreePalestine

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@MyringNikolia @ori_goldberg You've hit the nail on the head. This is precisely it.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@nxt888 We are *outraged* about the US's historical war crimes. The currently ongoing genocide of Palestinians is funded and thus perpetrated by the US.
Let's direct our focus to stop the current one while people are still being killed,because we can still stop this series of war crimes.

[Raccoon Collective 🌹🇵🇸🇷🇺 @MKTetra]

@Juniper_H4 @Lizayoe This quote really affected me; I had never heard of Osho before, and every bit of his Wikipedia page makes him even more interesting. Thank you!

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

My wife and I finally got an offer accepted on a house and hired a home inspector.

I thought he'd just walk around and make sure the roof wasn't actively caving in.

Instead, a guy named Gary showed up with a tactical utility belt, an infrared camera, and the demeanor of a homicide detective.

Gary spent 6 hours meticulously documenting every structural sin committed in the last 50 years.

He handed me a 90-page PDF report that was color-coded by severity.

The whole document was basically just red.

He noted that the slope of the driveway deviates by two degrees, which could cause pooling during a catastrophic hundred-year flood.

I live in a landlocked state.

He pointed his thermal camera at a window and told me I was losing an unacceptable amount of ambient heat.

I told him the window was open.

He wrote that down as a critical mechanical failure.

He took me to the basement to look at the HVAC unit.

He shined his flashlight on a single speck of dust and asked if I was prepared for the respiratory consequences of poor filtration.

I asked him if the furnace actually worked.

He sighed deeply and said it functions, but it lacks the efficiency of a modern heat pump.

We moved to the electrical panel where Gary put on thick rubber gloves like he was about to defuse a bomb.

He told me the wiring was technically up to code but ethically questionable.

I don't know how electricity can lack morals, but Gary seemed very disappointed in the circuit breaker.

Finally, he found a tiny crack in the garage floor.

He used a digital caliper to measure it and informed me the foundation is undergoing micro-settlement.

Every house on earth is undergoing micro-settlement.

We're on a spinning rock in space, Gary.

I asked him for a bottom-line assessment on whether we should buy the property.

He looked me dead in the eye and said the house is technically habitable but still compromised.

I paid him $600 for this psychological warfare.

We're still going to buy the house.

I'm just going to live in constant fear that maybe Gary was right.