I believe that art is seeing the world that doesn’t exist. A lot of people excel at creativity—making TV, movies, painting, writing books—but you can be an artist in your own life. Civil rights activists are artists. Athletes are artists. People who imagine something that is not there.
Amazon’s big deals event is being timed to coincide with the multinational strike action against them, so don’t get tempted when those start up
It’s on July 10th
The strikes were actually timed for the big deals event so when the high demand comes Amazon will realise how much it needs it workers.
I clarified my meaning in another post but I want to say here that the intent of the strike is not to show Amazon how much it needs its workers; Amazon knows full well that it needs its workers like any company does. The intent of strike action is to disrupt and damage Amazon’s ability to carry out its functions and force the bosses to make concessions.
“In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California on a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” which he described as “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants.” Reagan got the school’s president fired, attempted to cut the educational budget, and, in 1969, ordered an armed confrontation with student demonstrators who were protesting the war. Officers opened fire with shotguns and tear gas. One student, a bystander, was killed. Another was permanently blinded, and 32 were hospitalized with severe injuries.
On May 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon told an audience at the Pentagon: “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about [the Vietnam War].” Three days later, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University, leaving four students dead and nine wounded. On May 15, local police killed two black students and left twelve more wounded during a demonstration at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi.
Somehow, despite decades’ worth of counterexamples, the American mainstream remains convinced that campus activists represent a unique threat to public safety and civil discourse.”
“In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.
The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”
—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
love galore 