I learned this lesson the hard way. 🧵

When I was 19, I was homeless. I was with some friends at a grocery store, and was standing in the cashier's line to pay and taking a couple bites from the donut I had in my hand, when an old man grabbed my arm and wouldn't let go.

https://twitter.com/OLAASM/status/1639074940761636864

He insisted I was trying to shoplift the donut that I was literally standing in line to pay for. At first my friends & I were laughing, but he brought me to the office and called the cops.

I was still laughing about the absurdity of it when the police officer showed up.

Local comedian posts "the eye cries for Gaza" on Instagram.

Minutes later, 20 police show up at his house and bring him to a military prison.

This is your "only democracy in the Middle East".

It's an openly fascist state. How does anyone not see this?

https://twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/1720483191486554470

Earlier today I just retweeted a video of Ta Nehisi Coats talking about being stopped by a military cop in occupied Palestine and questioned what religion he was (to decide whether to allow him to continue walking on that particular street). He said "I'm not really religious".

The NYT must have realized they simply couldn't ignore the massive amounts of Nazi imagery used by Ukraine's armed forces, so they finally attempted to address it in an absolutely ridiculous article this morning. Let's break it down. 🧵👇 It starts out this way, but since this morning, they deleted a paragraph immediately following this section. It said something like:

"The prevalence of these symbols used by Ukraine's servicemen has left Western media in a quandary: address their existence and be accused of

Xi Jinping:

"The best way to evaluate whether a country's political system is democratic and effective is to observe whether the succession of its leaders is orderly and law-based, whether the people can manage state and social affairs and economic and cultural undertakings 1/ in accordance with the law, whether the public can express their needs through open channels, whether all sectors of society can effectively participate in the country's political affairs, whether the country's decision-making can be conducted in a rational 2/

Today Ukraine celebrates "UPA Day", commemorating their massacre of 300,000 ethnic Polish Ukrainians between 1943-1945. These numbers come from the Polish "Institute of National Remembrance", which investigated these atrocities. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) resisted the Nazis while they were occupying Ukraine, but then switched to openly collaborating with them when their defeat in Ukraine became more and more apparent. The UPA's ideology is described as "ultranationalist and antisemitic".

I just talked to the vice-president of the Teamsters local about our desire to form a union. He assigned their full-time union organizer to the case. He's calling me in the morning. It's fucking on! We're doing this. Apparently the first step is to form a campaign committee. This will need leadership from both the drivers and the warehouse workers, to keep the movement together in the face of the inevitable backlash by management when we ask for recognition. We're in the unique position to have communists leading both (I'm nominating the new girl).

So my boss sent me out training with a couple other drivers the last few weeks, learning their routes in case they call in sick. It's been a great time. I explained the concept of exploitation of labor to two guys I work with and it's all they can talk about now lmao. Anyway, word got out that I'm a Communist, so my boss has been giving me shit for it, but in a good humored kind of way. When I got back to the warehouse that first day he literally put the Soviet national anthem on the loudspeaker to fuck with me☠️