A Vodafone store in my country tried firing an employee once she announced her pregnancy. They tried to do it in a sly way claiming that she had signed a contract that ended, I haven't completely understood the details.

The union quickly responded by gathering outside the specific store and demanding her to stay, and they talked to the management afaik.

Today they announced that she is hired again like she was supposed to be

And why?

I like bottlebrush (Callistemon), they've got a funny shape and they attract a lot of nectar eaters so they're fun for critter watching. The yellow ones look like a corn cob too eheheheh.

Look at these eastern pygmy possums having a nibble. Probably weren't expecting to be interrupted mid-snack.

what a cute guy i bet he had 'live laugh love' signs in his house

Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.

Implicit in the banking concept [of education] is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others…In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.

https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf

share some good news, hexbears!

i didn't realize it was locked, hopefully this unlocks it for everyone

Typical looking guy about my age. He looked like 90% of the skater old heads I know: White dude with a buzz cut, but he had a faded and clearly very old soviet hammer sickle and star tattoo behind his left ear. Me being me, I could not help but point to the same spot on my neck, telling him mad respect for having that tattoo displayed on his neck. Otherwise you'd think he was probably some MMA loving possibly reactionary skinhead. Though his head wasn't shaved that closely.

He then told me his dad was a party member and he got the tattoo in his memory, and how he basically fled with his mom after the collapse.

I was training a new cashier at the time so didn't have enough time to talk more in depth, but we did chat a bit about the dire need for a return of the proletarian revolutionary spirit in this country and how tragic it is that all of our past leaders are mostly long dead and buried and bumped fists and thanked each other for keeping the flame kindled if not burning brightly and I could tell he was probably a bit surprised and maybe even a bit moved by the moment, I sure as hell was.

There are comrades out there we just gotta find each other.

My grandmother noticed just how down I was when my family and I took her out for Mother's Day a few weeks back, and she found out I've been having a real rough time lately. She reached out to me to let me know she'd be willing to help me out with my medical expenses. So we met for lunch and worked out an arrangement. Now I'll be able to see my therapist every week, and my physical therapist twice a week, pay down debts, cover some other expenses, and actually have money to save and use to buy the things I need for once.

I feel like I can breathe now. I have some goddamn room to think. And I can work on all the things I've been wanting to work on, like my art and my writing and losing weight again. This is the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me and I'm still processing it. I know for sure I'm going to get some fancy stationery and write my grandma a long-ass thank-you letter with my fancy fountain pen as soon as I get some time to sit down and hash out what I'm going to say.

It struck me that what she's given me is something I haven't really had in a long time: something to look forward to. Some hope. A feeling that maybe things can actually improve, in tangible ways, and not just some nebulous far-off future sense. To that end I've actually bothered making plans for once. Going to hit the gym on Tuesday, then see my therapist, then hit up a coworker who wants to hang out, and grab a Nintendo Switch, TOTK, and Metroid Dread with my tuition reimbursement money from my job benefits. I've got a bit of peace in my heart for once. It feels nice.

TLDR: from :doomer: to :bloomer:

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/ipandacom/status/1659838874666029056#m

老闆，一份鮮竹筍打包，熊家要去最浪漫的“高空餐廳”幹飯了！ （鬧鬧）

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DANCE YOU FOOLS!

:party-blob: :duck-dance: :penguin-dance: :chicken-bop: :cat-vibing: :floppy-parrot: :spongebob-party: :party-cat: :crab-party: :dancing-roach:

Enjoy the baby panda content and do not make the obvious :volcel-judge: comment, I will do it for you as the title is like 1 to 1 :agony-minion:

We're all familiar with those Twitter threads about what job you'd want after the revolution. On the other hand, you may have run into those annoying Marxists that scoff at any discussion about communism and call you an adherent of Lassalle for having any vision for the future. Well thankfully the users on this website are quite a bit more chill, so I'd like to discuss what we can realistically infer about life under communism.

By communism, I mean the following: the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established, private property has been abolished, wage-labor has been done away with, the economy is centrally planned using labor-time, and these developments have occurred all over the world. That is to say, lower-stage communism, or the highest development of socialism that is technically possible in the present or near-future.

Here is what I have considered so far. I can elaborate if the logic doesn't make sense, and obviously criticism is fine as long as you're not a Redditor about it.

• The end of economic depressions - well honestly you can do this and still keep the capitalists :some-controversy:
• The end of unemployment/reserve army of labor
• Higher quality of life - most people will be paid more for their labor, abolition of profit means less appropriation of surplus value (still need to do this for capital investment and taxes), abolition of private property and inheritance will mean more resources for the social commonwealth
• The disappearance of anti-immigrant sentiment - there would be no downward pressure on wages, and the increase of labor to the social pool that results from immigration would be more directly beneficial to the average person than it is now (that said, most causes of immigration would disappear and also there could theoretically be resource constraints)
• Increased productivity - the higher cost of labor will increase automation, drive down prices, and lower the amount of necessary labor
• Automation - capitalism can only exist by extracting surplus value, which you cannot do to machines; thus automation can only be completed under communism
• More big projects - long-term, capital-intensive projects are usually avoided by capitalists although the state sector of some capitalist governments sometimes picks up the slack; we could expect more (1000 nuclear power plants, nuclear fusion, high speed rail, etc)
• The end of many diseases - China kept COVID-19 at bay for 3 years but a communist Earth probably could have eradicated it with quarantines
• Sustainability - capitalism pretty obviously cannot fix the metabolic rift but if we get rid of profit then theoretically it's possible

🐖🔥🥲

:meow-hug:

NGL, collapse is pretty scary and traumatizing. What are some things keeping you going?

For me, it seems like we are seeing the dying tantrums of a corrupt empire falling. The US-controlled West is flailing and lashing out irrationally, meaning it is delusional and its attempts to attack its enemies will probably end about as well as its wars in the Middle East and Vietnam. Except this time they want to pick a fight with China, who they are vastly underestimating. This could be a humiliation that the US won't recover from, a loss against what you could say is a superpower. The US is starting to crumble internally. People are not happy, they are overworked, underpaid, are stuck renting. The infrastructure is old and failing, not being renewed due to constant tax cuts for the rich and whatever taxes are left being funneled to the military and police (who are increasingly unpopular). The people are divided, alienated and angry. The US is constantly under threat of civil war. It's also losing international allies. China is in a far better position to win any conflict the US starts.

Speaking of China, they are making great progress in environmental efforts.

A replacement plastic made out of seaweed is in the works. Pretty cool. Also there is a water plant that is easy to grow that sucks more carbon out of the air than any other plant we know of. If we can get capitalism to fuck off, then maybe we can get our future back. Our planet back. This could be the story of how we destroyed capitalism and saved the world. Crazier things have happened.

The ozone is also almost fixed. Hey people older than 25, remember CFCs? Well we banned those and thats why the ozone layer is almost fully repaired. Looks like even the smallest regulations fucking work! Goes to show just how much the 'free market' has expanded their power since then, good luck trying to get them to regulate anything like that again in 2023. Imagine what we can achieve when they are gone.

However, one thing working against the ruling class in 2023 is their own ego. In the past, there was a certain mystery surrounding the rich. It was easier for people to fill in the gaps and assume that these people were simply rich because they were better than everyone else. Surely the wealthy must be intelligent, elegant, extremely hard-working, wise and in control. They were almost unknowable and god-like. However Twitter, reality TV, and so on have shined an unfiltered spotlight on how these people actually live and think.

Suddenly the rich are making fools of themselves for everyone to see. Suddenly we see what their so-called 'work day' involves. Sure, some people will still defend them, and they still try to hold on to that god-like mystique, but a there are a lot more people thinking "How is this person a billion times richer than me, when they basically don't work, spend their riches on wasteful/boring things that benefit no one, and don't even know things I learned as a child?" They're seeing Elons shit handling of Twitter and are thinking "Hell, even I could do better than that!"

The glamour is fading from the West. Very bad things will happen and are happening as they always have under capitalist imperialism, but this collapse also leaves a vacuum for change. The 2020 BLM protests let us know that people can overwhelm the police state when they want to. As material conditions worsen these protests will happen more frequently and violently and then who knows what might happen.

A better future is possible. Imagine every evil and injustice you see today being held accountable. Hold on to that catharsis.

Puyi was the last emperor of China. He was ripped from his family at a young age to go live in bourgeois hell at the Imperial Palace. He engaged in depravity for the majority of his life, and allowed atrocious war crimes to occur under his reign. Instead of killing him after the war, however, he was spared and was instead sent to a detention center where he began to finally empathize with the victims and actually change his ways.

At this point I am going to extensively quote the Wikipedia article.

Except for a period during the Korean War, when he was moved to Harbin, Puyi spent ten years in the Fushun War Criminals Prison in Liaoning province until he was declared reformed. The prisoners at Fushun were senior Japanese, Manchukuo and Kuomintang officials and officers. Puyi was the weakest and most hapless of the prisoners, and was often bullied by the others, who liked to humiliate the emperor; he might not have survived his imprisonment had the warden Jin Yuan not gone out of his way to protect him.

Puyi had never brushed his teeth or tied his own shoelaces once in his life and had to do these basic tasks in prison, subjecting him to the ridicule of other prisoners. Much of Puyi's "remodeling" consisted of attending Marxist-Leninist-Maoist discussion groups where the prisoners would discuss their lives before being imprisoned. When Puyi protested to Jin that it had been impossible to resist Japan and there was nothing he could have done, Jin confronted him with people who had fought in the resistance and had been tortured, and asked him why ordinary people in Manchukuo resisted while an emperor did nothing. Puyi had to attend lectures where a former Japanese civil servant spoke about the exploitation of Manchukuo while a former officer in the Kenpeitai talked about how he rounded up people for slave labour and ordered mass executions. At one point, Puyi was taken to Harbin and Pingfang to see where the infamous Unit 731, the chemical and biological warfare unit in the Japanese Army, had conducted gruesome experiments on people. Puyi noted in shame and horror: "All the atrocities had been carried out in my name". Puyi by the mid-1950s was overwhelmed with guilt and often told Jin that he felt utterly worthless to the point that he considered suicide. Jin told Puyi to express his guilt in writing. Puyi later recalled he felt "that I was up against an irresistible force that would not rest until it found out everything". Sometimes Puyi was taken out for tours of the countryside of Manchuria. On one, he met a farmer's wife whose family had been evicted to make way for Japanese settlers and had almost starved to death while working as a slave in one of Manchukuo's factories. When Puyi asked for her forgiveness, she told him "It's all over now, let's not talk about it", causing him to break down in tears. At another meeting, a woman described the mass execution of people from her village by the Japanese Army, and then declared that she did not hate the Japanese and those who had served them as she retained her faith in humanity, which greatly moved Puyi. On another occasion, Jin confronted Puyi with his former concubine Li in meetings in his office, where she attacked him for seeing her only as a sex object, and saying she was now pregnant by a man who loved her.

Puyi came to Peking on 9 December 1959 with special permission from Mao and lived for the next six months in an ordinary Peking residence with his sister before being transferred to a government-sponsored hotel. He had the job of sweeping the streets, and got lost on his first day of work, which led him to tell astonished passers-by: "I'm Puyi, the last Emperor of the Qing dynasty. I'm staying with relatives and can't find my way home". One of Puyi's first acts upon returning to Peking was to visit the Forbidden City as a tourist; he pointed out to other tourists that many of the exhibits were the things he had used in his youth. He voiced his support for the Communists and worked as a gardener at the Peking Botanical Gardens. The role brought Puyi a degree of happiness he had never known as an emperor, though he was notably clumsy.

At the age of 56, he married Li Shuxian, a hospital nurse, on 30 April 1962, in a ceremony held at the Banquet Hall of the Consultative Conference. From 1964 until his death, he worked as an editor for the literary department of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, where his monthly salary was around 100 yuan. Li recalled in a 1995 interview that: "I found Pu Yi a honest man, a man who desperately needed my love and was ready to give me as much love as he could. When I was having even a slight case of flu, he was so worried I would die, that he refused to sleep at night and sat by my bedside until dawn so he could attend to my needs". Li also noted like everybody else who knew him that Puyi was an incredibly clumsy man, leading her to say: "Once in a boiling rage at his clumsiness, I threatened to divorce him. On hearing this, he got down on his knees and, with tears in his eyes, he begged me to forgive him. I shall never forget what he said to me: 'I have nothing in this world except you, and you are my life. If you go, I will die'. But apart from him, what did I ever have in the world?". Puyi showed remorse for his past actions, often telling her, ''Yesterday's Puyi is the enemy of today's Puyi.''

Puyi said of his testimony at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal:

I now feel very ashamed of my testimony, as I withheld some of what I knew to protect myself from being punished by my country. I said nothing about my secret collaboration with the Japanese imperialists over a long period, an association to which my open capitulation after 18 September, 1931 was but the conclusion. Instead, I spoke only of the way the Japanese had put pressure on me and forced me to do their will. I maintained that I had not betrayed my country but had been kidnapped; denied all my collaboration with the Japanese; and even claimed that the letter I had written to Jirō Minami was a fake. I covered up my crimes in order to protect myself.

From 1963 onward, Puyi regularly gave press conferences praising life in the People's Republic of China, and foreign diplomats often sought him out, curious to meet the famous "Last Emperor" of China. In an interview with Behr, Li Wenda told him that Puyi was a very clumsy man who "invariably forgot to close doors behind him, forgot to flush the toilet, forgot to turn the tap off after washing his hands, had a genius for creating an instant, disorderly mess around him". Puyi had been so used to having his needs catered to that he never entirely learned how to function on his own. He tried very hard to be modest and humble, always being the last person to board a bus, which meant that on one occasion he missed the ride, mistaking the bus conductor for a passenger. In restaurants he would tell waitresses, "You should not be serving me. I should be serving you." During this period, Puyi was known for his kindness, and once after he accidentally knocked down an elderly lady with his bicycle, he visited her every day in the hospital to bring her flowers to make amends until she was released.