I went to a food bank today for the first time in my life. I didn’t expect much, it’s charity after-all.
They gave me 2 big carrier bags - I couldn’t stop thanking them and carted them home.
When I opened them at home I noticed chocolate. I cried…cos I hadn’t even thought of buying myself chocolate in months cos it seemed so frivolous. But they put some chocolate in. It was so kind. 🥲
There’s so much suffering out there. It can happen to anyone. I founded and ran two companies in my 20s. High flying career and was making £50 at my last job in tech.
All fell apart 2 years ago. Been struggling to piece my life together ever since.
@Fudoshin@DessertStorms I'm involved with a local food bank, and when we have little extras like that or flowers to give out, it really makes our day too!
@Fudoshin@DessertStorms@Tooden this reflects my experience of needing a food bank for a while last year. They even did their best to accommodate dietary needs.
@Fudoshin@DessertStorms
I volunteer with a London charity that provides food to Foodbanks. We get food from farmers, high end restaurants, supermarkets etc. It very good quality and we are mindful when we pick orders from foodbanks, schools, play centres and hubs that we are picking for individuals, children and families . Of course we add in sweet treats xxx
@Fudoshin@DessertStorms My roommate and I will be visiting a food bank for the first time in our lives, this week, too. I was fired right before Xmas, and my UI hasn't kicked in yet, so I suggested we go and try to get some frozen veggies and some chicken or something. I'm celiac so I doubt they'll have much in the way of dedicated gluten-free, but if they have something we'll be grateful.
@Fudoshin every few months we are usually back at ours. We try to go as little as possible. Sweetest people, when I was younger and a dependent I volunteered there. It sucks but I am glad they have the same mission and have stuck to it so well all these years.
I had to go to a food bank once. Because I have dietary issues they gave me a Tesco voucher, everyone was so kind. It was a really humbling experience but not an awful one.
I’m doing much better these days and you will be soon too.
I'm sorry to hear you've been having a hard time but glad you were able to get some support and compassion locally.
We shouldn't need food banks, but their existence is proof that communities will look out for each other with or without central government telling them to or even funding them, and while they represent a failure of our current system, I also see them as representing hope for what a future could look like without outside of a for-profit existence.
But even (or especially) when you feel like it won't happen to you, you should be kind to others and help them. Helping each other doesn't have to be reciprocating.
@Fudoshin@DessertStorms
I understand the way you feel about the chocolate. I’ve been using commodities program all year; I too once had money, was ‘middle class’ & how delighted I was they included a cake in Dec. commodities. This month it’s mostly potatoes and nuts. I did get 2 dz eggs a and 8 grapefruits too. And a sack of 60 lbs of potatoes, 11 lbs. of walnuts, 6 lbs of almonds & 4 lbs of raisins.if I didn’t have dried beans left over from before I’d be living on trail mix .
@Fudoshin@DessertStorms May brighter days be timely. So many of us have needed that core generosity at one time or another, we were gifted shoes and wardrobes and a pantry from the Salvation Army after Hurricane Irene in Vermont USA, I kept walking around trying not to show I was crying by hiding in the clothes racks. Best of luck.
@Fudoshin
When I drove a "food rescue van" for a local food pantry collecting birthday cakes from the grocery stores' bakeries was the height of my day. People who shopped at the pantry were registered; when they checked in volunteers checked for kids with birthdays coming soon & notified the volunteers assisting shoppers to give them a cake.
I sometimes hung around to watch the faces as folks left with them. There was almost at least one every day. I sometimes got 4 or 5 cakes on a trip.
They want you to emphasize more on name and word calling so people don't headline actual things they did.
In the US politicians embrace the name calling, helps you get away with anything else. Trump makes orange jokes at his rallies and supporters love it as a more recent example.
Fascism is right wing social policies, left wing economic policies (National Syndicalism, economic interventionism, etc.).
More accurately the Tories going further right is social-authoritarianism with libertarian economics. Like if Truss and Braverman had a bastard child they emotionally abused into a psychopath ultra-capitalist.
Possibly faster. The COVID enquiry has absolutely more than enough information to haul Boris in front of itself. Of course they’re still gathering additional evidence and they have to identify how much Rishi knew.
So we may be able to get our Trump wannabe squared away faster than the Americans can get rid of classic Trump.
That is because the Tories take their lead directly from Republicans. National conservative group AKA the NAT C’s.
Despite the pro-UK stance, National Conservatism was actually the offshoot of a Right-wing US think tank, which sees the movement as having the potential to reshape the narrative for the Conservative Party in the same way the Tea Party did once for the Republicans.
Peasants could match the medieval Kings of Europe in a lot of ways. The force Kings could apply without using peasants was limited to knights that were dispersed across the country and a small number of professional guards/soldiers. The weapons these forces used were more powerful than the peasants but could be overcome through sheer numbers. If the peasants withheld their labour, the Kings would starve and the kingdom would fall apart.
Most states now have a large professional police force and military that is extremely well equipped with weapons and intelligence that modern peasantry cannot come close to matching. These forces are mobile enough to deploy rapidly throughout the jurisdiction. And the labour of the peasants has largely been offshored or supplanted with temporary foreign work.
Kings were right to fear peasants in the past because the peasants represented a credible threat. This is no longer the case in the modern world. We are entirely at the mercy of those in power to play by our imaginary rules for democracy. If those in power choose to ignore those rules, the rest of us peasants have very little effective recourse.
The pandemic showed we just have to stop going to work in great enough numbers. I know it’s a pipe dream, we’re too divided, there’s too many that would betray their class, etc etc., but theoretically we do have recourse. Even mass unionization would help.
I was making my own post about this, but I’ll just post what I was going to write here instead of having two posts about the same thing.
Labour deselects left-wing candidates
Two Corbynist have been barred from standing by Labour party, with a third suspected to be also soon be barred.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle, MP for Brighton Kemptown, has had what he described as a ‘politically motivated’ complaint made about his behaviour eight years ago. He notes that the complaint being made so close to the election that there isn’t time for him to clear his name before then.
Meanwhile, Faiza Shaheen, candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, announced on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-69075181 that she had been deselected over a collection posts and likes she made on Twitter. She says one of the tweets brought up is one describing her experiences of Islamophobia within the Labour Party.
One that she apologised directly for is this tweet of a John Steward sketch captioned with “every time you say something even mildly critical of Israel, you’re immediately assailed by scores of hysterical people”.
Leaked Whatsapp messages have revealed that Poplar and Limehouse MP Apsana Begum has had a complaint made to the NEC about her by her CLP calling for a selection vote, supposedly from friends of her abusive ex-husband.
These announcements come on that back of Starmer allies being parachuted into seats, including director of think tank Labour Together Josh Simons, and NEC member and director of Labour First and We Believe in Israel Luke Akehurst.
I can’t believe anyone had to apologise for that jon steward tweet, completely ridiculous. I hope they all run as independants & split Kier’s paratroopers’ votes
From the outside looking in, it would appear that Labour is yet another pseudo-progressive party that got addicted to corporate cash during the late 1990s flowering of neoliberalism ans aren’t willing to let go.
It’s the same thing in most western Nations, and it has the awful side effect of making what were previously “reasonable” right wing parties into proto-fascists put of self defense.
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