whenever someone is like ‘why do burger-flippers deserve to make the same amount as x?’ and i just ask ‘have you considered that maybe x deserves to be paid more?’ because it never occurs to people that if these people are being underpaid, then there is a chance that so are they.
I see this all the time with people bringing up paramedics. “You want 15$ an hour as a burger flipper! I made less than that as an EMT!”
Yeah and it was wrong to pay YOU that little too. You got overworked and underpaid and the amount of money the McDonalds employee in the drive through gets has no bearing what so ever on what an EMT makes. Pay the EMT more too.
it distresses me that anyone whose job it is to save my fucking life is making less now than i was in an office job in 2007.
No nation need have any special feelings towards Pakistan, but the horrors faced by the country today are a clear warning of the consequences of universal and rapacious climate breakdown. Human beings have destroyed our one and only planet; what is happening in Pakistan today is proof of that.
Our voracious burning of fossil fuels, obnoxious disregard for the wild and natural world we inherited, and criminal consumption means that no country, no matter its wealth, will be immune from the consequences of global heating. Today it is Pakistan, tomorrow it will be California, France, Australia, the world.
While it has been touching to see how ordinary people from far away countries have shown solidarity with Pakistan, donating what they can to flood relief efforts, the silence from major international figures and western media at large has been dispiriting, if not unsurprising. The week the flood hit, there were more newspaper column inches devoted to a Finnish prime minister who likes to party than to the fact that a third of Pakistan was submerged.
This is not a question of disaster fatigue. In Europe, the same countries that pushed Syrian refugees out in rubber dinghies to die at sea have free Airbnb housing and welcome booths for Ukrainians at their airports. And it’s not that Pakistan is too dangerous to visit or deal with. Only recently, Bernard Henri Levy, the French pop intellectual, was strutting around Odessa and President Zelensky publicly thanked Ben Stiller and Angelina Jolie, “who, despite the danger, have visited us”. (To be fair to Jolie, she did visit Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake.)
[…]
Forget solidarity: the global south will not survive this century without climate justice. You in the west are talking about paper straws, we in the global south are talking about reparations.
Our countries and our lives are dispensable for the world at large. We have always known this, but we are simmering with rage now. What else can you feel when $880m was raised in a day and a half after the cathedral of Notre Dame suffered a fire in 2021 but an entire country of drowning poor must beg for climate aid and assistance?
We recently had a similar situation in my area…some ignorant ‘Christian Mom’ and her posse went to a local school board meeting and did the exact same thing, but she included any member or supporter of the LGBTQ+ community in her defamatory rant. Thankfully, the board members took the time to carefully evaluate her comments and asked the right questions:
How did you find out about these books?
Have you read these books?
Why should we remove these books from the school library?
The answers are always ‘online’, ‘no’, and, if it’s more than just a blank stare, a word salad of bad and grooming etc.
The board pointed out that parents had the ability to restrict what books their children were allowed to read within the school library system, and that was that. No banning allowed.
But they keep trying, and the next step is to get someone with similar ‘values’ on the school board. And THAT is why it’s so important to pay attention to your local elections and VOTE.
These fucks are the weeds and you, friends, need to make sure you they have no place to grow.
