My classmate was raped on her way back home from university and got pregnant, but couldn’t get an abortion due to the laws. She had to drop out of university where she was studying medicine. Because of pregnancy and childbirth expenses, she couldn’t continue her studies, left college, started working at a coffee shop, lost the fun of her early twenties, and lost the chance to attend international medical conferences she once dreamt of… all just to give birth to a child she never wanted.
People say, “What if the baby you abort grows up and cures cancer?”
Okay — but what if the 19-year-old you deny an abortion to grows up and cures cancer?
Now she can’t afford to get an education. Instead, she has to take care of a baby. What about her? An actual living human being???
“Abortion ends potential life”… So do property disputes, war, and genocide. You only seem to care about lives when women don’t give birth to them.
I feel sick being alive in this moment.
We have been watching children in Gaza be blown to pieces for over two years. I just watched a video of a father in the West Bank falling to the ground when he heard his child was beat to death with hammers in Israeli prison. We are watching immigrant children in the U.S. hunted, detained, and caged. We are watching Lebanese, and Iranian children killed by Israel and then erased by the news cycle. Disabled Palestinians in the U.S. like Wael Tarabashi effectively sentenced to death because the state abducted his father. Children imprisoned, at Dilly protesting just to be free.
And it keeps going. Sudan. Congo. Haiti. Yemen. Children starved, bombed, disappeared, trafficked. Some of it livestreamed. Most of it buried.
What’s breaking my brain is not just the violence. It’s that we are seeing it.
We watched Alex Pretti take ten shots to the face. We watched Epstein run a child trafficking operation for years with full elite protection. That alone should have collapsed this entire system. It didn’t. The abduction of Nicolás Maduro barely lasted a couple of news cycles. Children being slaughtered doesn’t get a second glance.
They’re buying platforms to censor us. They’re throttling reach. They’re criminalizing speech. But even when people do know, even when it’s undeniable, even when it’s right in front of us, what happens?
Nothing.
The world keeps functioning like this is background noise. Like mass death is just content. Like awareness without consequence is supposed to be enough.
I don’t know how people are pretending this is normal. I don’t know how we’re supposed to metabolize this much horror and still be okay. I don’t know what it means to survive in a world that keeps proving, over and over, that children are disposable as long as power is protected.
It feels like we’re being trained to tolerate the intolerable. To treat mass death as content. To live inside a feed where the truth is constantly visible and constantly consequence-free.
What the hell is going on?
Gestapo this, IDF that. Not everything authoritarian has to be perceived through a foreign lens. Not all evil is derived from a Nazi Germany or Israel alone. Fascism is inherently American too. Hitler was inspired by America's institutionalized racism and indigenous holocausts. America wrote the playbook they all use(d).
This violence is as American as Apple Pie. Yes, ICE and countless police departments and law enforcement officials across the US hold extensive joint-training and exchange programs with Israel, but this is what the American *security* and state apparatus was always designed to do— to repress and murder those who resisted their mandate.
The earliest police in America, from marshalls to border patrol, would recruit klansmen, slave catchers and rangers who hunted indigenous people. To *protect* and to *serve* has always meant the maintenance of the white supremacist settler state.
In order for their to even be the concept of a United States, white supremacist violence was enveloped into the fabric of the settler colonial project as a necessary backbone of the expansionism which took place.
If anything, Israeli settler colonialism and its state sanctioned systematic erasure of Palestinian life draws inspiration from the American model.
TODAY: Hundreds of thousands in Minnesota braved -10°F weather to march through downtown Minneapolis as part of the statewide general strike demanding ICE out of the Twin Cities.
again i say, bringing up a persons citizenship status when they are murdered only serves to say that you believe that the made-up colonial system of citizenship and borders means someone else should be kidnapped murdered beaten and tortured. decolonize your thoughts and language
i also think too many of you are still hung up on catching republicans in lies and defensively arguing with their framings of the situation rather than rejecting those framings outright. end up adopting their framings even as you think you're arguing with them
America may be in some shit as usual but I don’t like how other countries who have their own shit in the closet are trying to act all mighty and perfect themselves. Some of you are some bigoted bitches too.
yes, asian and african rivers produce 95% of ocean plastic but nobody asks where the plastic comes from.
plastic recycling is a scam. always has been.
the industry knew since 1974 it “cant be justified economically”
they funded the recycling campaigns anyway because the alternative was banning plastic.
only 5-6% of US plastic actually gets recycled and europe isnt better.
the EU exports 1.1 million tonnes of plastic waste per year, 3 million kg leaving every single day.
31% goes to turkey, 16% to malaysia, 13% to indonesia, all labeled “recyclable”
most plastics cant even be recycled to begin with (thousands of types, different chemical properties). and for the few that can, the output is lower quality and more toxic than virgin plastic.
you literally degrade the material each cycle until its worthless.
so what happens to the other 95%?
western countries ship it to southeast asia and africa under the label “recycling exports” with the receiving countries promising to recycle it in their stead for a price, but those countries dont have facilities either. so they burn it or dump it in rivers.
every 20 minutes, a 10-tonne truckload of plastic enters the ocean in indonesia alone.
it may look like indonesians pollute more but that’s because we ship them our garbage and they have no infrastructure to handle it.
china used to absorb it all. when they banned imports in 2018, the west just redirected to countries with weaker regulations. malaysia, vietnam, philippines. the map below shows the result.
you sort your trash so you feel like youre helping, the plastic goes on a boat, gets burned in a village without emissions controls, poisons their air and water, flows into their rivers, enters the ocean, and in your food and water.
you feel good about the plastic you recycled and never think about it again but you end up eating it anyway.
then we ban straws and plastic bags and call it environmentalism
“AI isn’t going away.” “We need guns no matter how many shootings there are.” “Covid is here to stay.” None of you want better, do you? Do you realize none of this has to happen? All of this is preventable. We can all demand better and do better. None of this is inevitable.