a little more information regarding the maui wildfires:
medical workers on the ground are describing finding hundreds of bodies. the current death toll in the media is, unfortunately, only a fraction of the reality
hospital workers are describing injuries and trauma as if survivors had come out of a warzone
thousands are still missing
an apartment complex for the elderly was lost. not everyone could get out. people were saying goodbye to loved ones over the phone
people who did get out of lahaina were leaving with ashes covering their faces and nothing but the clothes on their backs. people are losing everything.
hotels are still operating. hotels are still operating. they are not the ones offering shelters or housing or food. even bowling alleys are offering shelter, but hotels have the audacity to build on burial sites but not open their doors to local families who have lost everything.
Hey if you work for a major company that you fucking hate, but they also have a Diversity, Inclusion, Culture Department… check if they offer donation matching.
Your $10 donation can turn into $20
Your $50 donation can turn into $100
I completely forgot until an org put it at the bottom.
if u are in the seattle/everett/federal way area u can dm me if u have any physical items to donate. my halau is organizing and sending disaster relief items such as clothing, blankets, towels, hygiene products, menstrual products, infant care, kids toys, and more.
so yeah that fire in Lahaina, Maui? That was what indigenous activists were trying to prevent. That is why Land Back movements wants indigenous people to be the stewards of the land that was once theirs. Not kick out white people and settlers. But to prevent shit like that where a bunch of tourists/settlers won’t destroy the planet in their ruthless pursuit of productivity and profit. So yeah, think on that.
i think also people who dont understand how “stacking some rocks sometimes” can be harmful have heard of the countless cases where “its just a little thing” has destroyed countless landmarks and parks
elafonisi’s pink sand beaches only retain 10% of the pink hues they used to retain just a few decades ago,
pig beach in the bahamas attracts people for being, well, the bahamas, and native pigs in the area can be found swimming to get around sometimes. people go nuts for the photo opportunity and forget these are wild animals- and youd expect it being the pigs killing people, but actually, people being too friendly caused a ban on feeding the pigs because seven of the poor things died after people figured “how bad could it hurt them if i give them just one?”
and these are just cases of something specific happening or being taken or given. thats not including people ruining and closing down entire tourist attractions, beaches, and parks by completely overcrowding it, disregarding rules, or trashing and littering the places.
like if someone preserving the park tells you not to do something you think is “harmless,” i swear they arent just doing it because they want to ruin your fun. maintaining these places is delicate work- its a privilege to see and visit these areas, not a right. please take care of the world around you whether youre very close or very far from home, okay?
“you can disagree with mitch mcconnell and still wish him well” i wish he would have died right there on camera in front of america that shit would have been fire and i think what the country really needs right now for healing
segregation in the united states still functionally exists. that’s why we’re never getting decent public transportation. the minute it was desegregated, white people with power lost interest.
i think some of y'all really need to learn that you are only entitled to safety, not to feelings of safety. you need to recognize that your feelings are fallible, shaped by your cultural upbringing and intrinsic biases, and that they are not always reflective of reality.
for example, imagine you’ve been raised in a society that violently stigmatizes drug use, mental illness and homelessness. you’re walking down the street, and you see someone who is disheveled, talking to themselves or yelling, pacing, maybe even smoking or injecting drugs. you feel unsafe, even though this person poses no threat to you. you call the police, even though no harm has been done and a reasonable assessment of the situation can tell you that no harm will be done. the police come and arrest that person, and although your right to safety was never violated, you’ve now put someone else in harm’s way. you’ve traded their right to physical safety for your own perception of safety, and that is morally indefensible. that cannot be explained away by saying that you deserve to be safe in public, because you were never unsafe in the first place.
It’s amazing to me just how good the Mormon church has been at hiding just how bad they really are from public view. Even the shit that gets spread around is the relatively harmless bullshit. They had a crazy prophet with magic glasses. They believe in god-mandated polygyny. They think everyone who is good enough will get their very own planet after the world ends. They wear magic underpants. Mormon men are all paladins.
Here’s one of the ones you hear less often:
See, like many other Christian sects, the Mormons really do believe that the existence of Christ obviates the existence of Judaism. Judaism was just a placeholder until the “real” church could be established by Jesus.
And the Mormons in particular believe, dead ass, that the entire inheritance of Israel has been given to them, because the Jews failed to recognize the Messiah when he was on Earth. They really do. They have this whole system where people are given a “divine revelation” about which of the Tribes of Israel they’re a member of (don’t worry, they decided that most people belong to the two tribes that are willing to “adopt” people. Only the most specialest boys and girls are members of the original ten).
Let’s sum up so far. The Mormons believe that they are the people of Israel, chosen and protected by God. If Jews want to get back in on that party, they can always repent and convert to Mormonism, the one true church to which God gave all the rights and blessings that were originally bestowed on Abraham’s house.
But it doesn’t stop there!
The Mormons also believe, in all seriousness, that all Indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from a small group of Jewish people who left just before the fall of Jerusalem (~600 bc iirc). Their entire weird-ass extra bible is a chronicle of those people’s history in [unspecific part of America]. At the very beginning of the book, two brothers in the original family turn away from god, so they and all their descendants are cursed with dark skin, so that the good Nephites (who remain “white and delightsome”) will always be able to tell themselves apart from the wicked Lamanites.
So, you’ve got supposedly Jewish people running around the Americas. And the “good” ones are white, and the “bad” ones are brown. Then, ofc, Jesus comes to visit them (I guess supposedly that’s part of what he was doing during his dirt nap? Or possibly after he left again, it’s not clear), and they all convert to Christianity, which they think is clearly the natural evolution of Judaism. Well, at the end of the book, all of them become wicked, in a kind of weird pseudo-apocalyptic series of events. They are all cursed with dark skin, until such time as they repent for their ancestors sins and return to the gospel.
But of course, Mormons being the good and kind people they are, they want everyone to receive the blessings of God and be brought into the houses of Israel etc etc. And it isn’t the fault of those poor little Indigenous children that their distant ancestors turned away from God and became wicked.
So what’s the natural answer? Well, Mormons are real big on missionary work, as we all know. But apparently that wasn’t enough in this case.
Because the Mormon church has been one of the big players in abducting as many Indigenous children as possible, in order to indoctrinate them into being good Mormons, so that they can turn white again and be blessed. My mother remembers hearing talks about this in the 70s and 80s. The church literally had a “Lamanite Adoption Program,” where families in the church were encouraged to get as many Indigenous children as possible away from their families and not let them be reunited until they were fully assimilated and ready to go back and proselytize about how wonderful the church is.
The church leadership literally talked about how wonderful it was to see these children becoming whiter. Actually whiter. Like, saying that when they finally saw them with their families again, it was beautiful how much paler they were.
I’m pretty sure this program has been officially ended, but it doesn’t take a genius to speculate about who might be behind the curtains on the movement in the western US to gut the ICWA….
So yeah. Next time someone tries to tell you that the Mormons are just harmless weirdos, please remember that they’re an antisemitic cult that advocates for the forced assimilation of Indigenous children to help them escape the cursed brown skin of their ancestors.
