If you're feeling like this, I have some practical advice for you in the following thread. 🧵⬇️

1) Start thinking about your phone as a drug. Not in a stigmatizing way, but in a "this is a powerful tool I should be careful about using" way. If you're spending your whole day on your phone, start observing how it makes you feel. Without shame or judgement, start learning about trauma, and try harm reduction techniques to reduce screen time.

2) Walk around near trees, away from cars, as much as you possibly can.

Always good to remember this page of the CIA handbook on disrupting the left whenever certain kinds of discourse are happening Stay focused. Organize and fight for a better world, from a place of love. Free our siblings in Palestine. hilaryagro.com/2023/11/08/rad…

You can't understand what's happening in Palestine without these three frameworks:

1) Colonialism: land theft for resource extraction

2) Capitalism: corporate & state powers colluding

3) White supremacy: dehumanize brown people so their deaths for the above don't register 1) Europeans, used to using colonialism to "solve" their domestic troubles, collaborated with the Nazis to send European Jews to colonize Palestine so they wouldn't have to stop being anti-Semitic.

aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/…

"Cautionary stories of the consequences of taking too much are ubiquitous in Native cultures, but it's hard to recall a single one in English... We [are] caught in a trap of overconsumption, which is as destructive to ourselves as to those we consume."

Braiding Sweetgrass, p179 Full text:

Braiding Sweetgrass, p179

Anishinaabe elder Basil Johnston tells of the time our teacher Nanabozho was fishing in the lake for supper, as he often did, with hook and line. Heron came striding along through the reeds on his long, bent legs, his beak like a spear. +

Are you struggling to know what to do about Palestine right now?

As an organizer, I have some advice for you in the following thread. Please share widely 🧵⬇️ THINGS THAT EVERYONE SHOULD DO:

1) First, stay calm. Stop doomscrolling when you feel like dying. You know it's bad right now and action is needed, that's enough. You don't need more news if it's going to make you ill. Keep informed, but conserve your energy for action. +

This passage from Debt by David Graeber sums up the complex evils of capitalism & colonialism better than anything else I've read. A thread, read the whole thing:

One of the first things that the French general Gallieni, conqueror of Madagascar, did when the conquest of 1/ the island was complete in 1901 was to impose a head tax. Not only was this tax high, it was also only payable in newly issued Malagasy francs. In other words, Gallieni did indeed print money and then demand that everyone in the country give some of that money back to him. 2/

As an anthropologist, I can't believe how the well-established fact that trans people have been around for our species' entire known history doesn't blow all the anti-trans arguments out of the water.

Trans people's existence is not new. It's not a fad, it's not "growing" Trans people have always been around, all over the world, thriving and minding their own damn business and just trying to live their lives like anyone else and in better societies than ours they are supported and loved as they should be

I wanted to write a follow-up to my viral TikTok thread from yesterday. A few things:

1) No, it's not "THE" singular reason they want to ban it. The primary reason seems to be to maintain American (Facebook/Meta) corporate dominance. It's capitalism, ofc washingtonpost.com/technology/202… Competition under capitalism creates monopolies. It happens every time. And because we live under this bullshit system that's entwined with our political system, corporations can get politicians to do whatever they want. Hear Dr. Richard Wolff explain it: tiktok.com/t/ZMYpfQVt3/

This is the real reason why the US wants to ban TikTok.

A thread of videos that young people are watching and sharing by the millions: Young people on Tiktok are not fucking around. These videos get literally millions of views. Political awakening is happening at a speed I've never seen before.

CW: police brutality, anti-Black violence & death

Full video: tiktok.com/t/ZMYgsuAAy/

If a teenage boy wants to date girls, I'd start by asking him what he thinks girls his age want in a guy.

I'd then ask where he got that information, and if he heard it from other guys, or from women themselves.

Then I'd ask a few more questions 🧵⬇️

https://twitter.com/klomanader/status/1609613490175500292

I'd ask what kind of girl he finds interesting to talk to. Does he talk to any girls he's not interested in dating? If not, why not?

I'd ask why he wants to have lots of sex. What is he hoping that will bring to his life? What makes him think that?

I'd listen honestly, too

We all know that Marvel movies are military propaganda but I think it's under-discussed how they're also neoliberal propaganda for making people believe that powerful people will save us if we just let them do whatever they want I know many people have indeed discussed this (feel free to share links) but since many people still believe Elon Musk and Bill Gates are gonna solve climate change and poverty, clearly it's still not discussed enough

Hi I'm an anthropologist and it's horrifying that I even need to say this but throughout most of human history, menarche (age of first period) didn't happen til around age 16-17, with first birth around 19.

A 10 year old giving birth is not normal or okay and it never has been My sources are two (soon to be three) anthropology degrees studying human evolution and society for the last 200,000 years. Humans in industrial societies, of which you are one, are the first people to ever see early menarche.

Here is one of many sources:

https://twitter.com/JESilverstein/status/1548895789123981312?t=ZCabZ2UVV675LEQjZpFzyw&s=19

We know something must be done. But there isn't consensus about exactly what & how.

Just like experts on drug policy whose solutions to the overdose crisis are ignored by politicians, I suspect there are people who have good answers to mass shootings who are being ignored And much like with the overdose crisis, I suspect that the reason the research- and empathy-based solutions aren't being implemented is because it would require fundamental alterations to the capitalist system.

And that many more people will die before enough becomes enough

Dan Muessig went to prison today.

He sold cannabis in a state where it's legal. But it's still illegal federally, and now he's spending the next 5 years of his life in a cage, torn from his family.

He left me this letter to share with you. This thread is his parting words. 🧵 "By the time you read this I'll be inside a federal prison for the first day of my five year sentence for cannabis trafficking.

The last few weeks have been a dystopic and sickening blur as I sought to wind down what was left of my life as a nominally free man. 2/

Just thinking about how many liberals have ignored the fight to give current & formerly incarcerated Americans the right to vote, and now the "mass incarceration as disenfranchisement" technique is gonna be used to strip women of the right to vote

Do you see now? Do you get it? Is abolitionism making sense yet? What is it going to take? You've called us radicals for years and now the thing standing in between life and death by septic miscarriage for millions of people with uteruses is the cops we keep telling you are NOT ON YOUR SIDE.

Today, a friend of mine is being sentenced to federal prison in the US for selling cannabis. 5 years minimum.

I read the sentencing memo written by the prosecutors in his case, and I cannot emphasize enough what a hateful, fraudulent disaster the "justice" system is. The glee the prosecutors take in this, the way they relish in the fact that they're bringing the hammer down on someone who has publicly criticized the hammer—Dan was a defense attorney who helped people avoid the violence of the state—is sick.

The idea of deciding whether or not someone "deserves" medical treatment is not conducive to an ethical society, full stop "Everyone deserves medical treatment" applies to all people, including whether or not it makes you want to say "yeah, but."

It applies to drug users
It applies to fat people
It applies to incarcerated people
And yes, it applies to anti-vaxxers

Because they are all people.