“The Prison Therefore Functions Ideologically As An Abstract Site Into Which Undesirables Are Deposited,

by james_films

Lingo by Gaston Dorren

so true and no less valid the other way around. most likely, it was noam chomsky who introduced me, a social scientist, to linguistics.

To live with precarity requires more than railing at those who put us here (although that seems useful too, and I’m not against it). We might look around to notice this strange new world, and we might stretch our imaginations to grasp its contours. This is where mushrooms help. Matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to explore the ruin that has become our collective home.

— Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

The economies of the US, Canada, and the European Union depend on immigrant labor. As Harsha Walia documents, the purpose of the border regime is not to stop immigration but to control and terrorize it. When Germany decided in 2015 to take in over a million refugees from the Syrian civil war, it was only because the largest association of German employers had just declared that the national economy faced a shortfall of millions of skilled laborers. But at no point did the German government allow direct flights from Turkey or Lebanon, where so many of the refugees were warehoused. Instead, they obligated refugees to make the expensive and perilous journey over the Aegean Sea, through the Balkans, under and over razor wire fences, through police truncheons and tear gas, past violent, xenophobic crowds, so that finally they would arrive with almost nothing, willing to accept any labor conditions and bureaucratic controls. It was a journey that cost on average several thousand euros, on top of the steep psychological price, effectively ensuring that primarily only members of the university-educated middle class would be able to make it.

Peter Gelderloos, The Solutions are Already Here

New York Focus

New York Prisons Just Blocked Journalism Behind Bars

A new policy prohibits incarcerated people from publishing writing or art without permission — and from getting paid.

this is insane and wildly unconstitutional and prisons are really really really evil

untitled by irana on Flickr.

that moment when you're talking in a language and you use an idiom but then you can't remember for your own life if the idiom is correct in the language you're speaking or if you just translated it literally from another language-

We expect humans to live on Mars in the near future, yet we haven’t even dared to inhabit Antarctica