My name is AHR, and you will never learn what that stands for I am a fan of writing, drawing, and weeping at my lack of owning a drawing tablet OR AT LEAST I DID UNTIL I ACQUIRED ONE MWAHAHAHA. I enjoy LARPing, and am currently a member of the LARP club at my college. I like to reblog and post things that I have opinions about, because that is what you do with opinions.I also have a penchant for reading bad webcomics to the point where I become visibly angry.
I have a family friend who worked at our local Salvation Army headquarters as a a secretary. This particular office took all the Christmas donations for children in need, put them in a warehouse, and on a designated day the staff and their friends picked through them all, taking whatever they wanted. She saw people hauling away bikes donated for specific families. Some local children had hundreds of dollars of gifts donated in their name, and on Christmas they received three cheap things, items likely not even from the person who sponsored them.
My friend quit, and I’ve not given them a dime of my money since then.
Do not give to the Salvation Army.
Do Not. Give. To. Salvation. Army
My turn.
I’m a wildfire and disaster logistics specialist.
I deal with a lot of agencies who provide disaster relief.
I used to say the Salvation Army’s disaster services were the one (literally the ONE) good thing they did.
They would come in, set up a canteen trailer, make and pass out hot coffee and donated food in a disaster, usually being one of the first agencies to get there and the last to leave.
Then I found out.
Every time they did this, regardless of if they were actually invited or deployed by the agency in charge (usually FEMA, sometimes others) they would SELF-DEPLOY. Meanjng they would just show up. Ok. That’s not TOO bad, sometimes agencies have to take initiative and get there before the red tape is sorted out. BUT. They, after they left at the end of the incident, they would send FEMA or the host agency a BILL. They used one or two paid employees (usually the driver of the truck and a supervisor); and many VOLUNTEERS, but they would bill for EVERYONE’s Labor at standard federal rates. They would bill for the food they distributed even though it was all donated by another agency or private parties. They would bill for the coffee they made and the supplies. Except they would use electricity from the shelter location, water from donations or from the shelter, and in many cases, they would get the coffee and industrial filters DONATED, but bill for them at retail prices.
Don’t FUCKING give to the Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army is also ass to the workers. A good number of people join it, naively thinking that it’s doing good, and end up leaving cynical and beaten down. The management is hostile, if not outright abusive, and demand some ridiculous hours of it lower to mid-level staff. Don’t support these people.
Unsettling update
Find better local charities and shelters and give to them instead!
Also just for even more horrific context on the original twitter thread?
Salvation Army reached out to Milknmuffins and asked what shelter she’s at with the promise to address the abuse in it. She…ended up saying where she was. She was thrown out onto the street. It’s also all on Twitter.
They invited her to a personal talk so she could explain the situation in person.
And then they threatened her with a screenshot of a rape-threat made supposedly by her:
And then threw her out into the street while claiming she broke house rules that
So yeah, the Salvation Army is a bunch of entitled assholes that will treat the most vulnerable like shit if they dare try to do anything that makes them look bad
The “Fuck Salvation Army” posts are making the rounds again, so conisder this your reminder:
Do. Not. Give. These. Assholes. A. Single. Fucking. Penny.
this is sort of vague because I’m not sure if I can make it make sense but I wish more 101 nonbinary activist materials focused less on just “gender isn’t binary” and more on “the fact that gender is a social construct means it is constructed differently in different cultures and is in a constant state of change like everything else about a culture”
like…it’s not just about updating the gender system to recognize non-binary genders but also about recognizing that the social construction of gender is extremely responsive to time/place and this is true even for “man” and “woman” which means that there’s no reason to invalidate anyone’s expression or feelings about their gender, no matter what gender it is or how familiar it is to you
a further thought: this is also why I don’t think gender abolition is a useful goal, because, as Rikki Anne Wilchins put it, gender is primarily a system for creating meanings, and if you actually tried to totally erase the concept of any gender at all from the world, that would involve erasing a huge amount of cultural meaning, probably without actually fixing inequality tbh
on the other hand, if you acknowledge that there are as many gender systems as there are cultures, and that there are probably as many variations on even the normative genders as there are people in that culture who belong to them, then gender essentialism loses the vast majority of its power because if the meaning of gender changes across cultures (even across relatively small cultural shifts), then that means they’re not inherent moral truths of the universe, they’re ways of performing particular cultural meanings
and this makes non-binary genders, and nonnormative gender expressions, no less concrete than binary genders with normative expressions, not by saying “actually a non-binary gender is a concrete object with xyz characteristics” but by saying “all genders are arbitrary”, which creates room for essentially infinite space and self-determination
I have no idea if any of this makes sense, I just visualize, like, a garden
If your wandering thoughts ever conjured a purely hypothetical person in a purely hypothetical situation to be mad about, you have to realize, out of billions of people there’s statistically at least one who would behave precisely that way in precisely that situation. There are no fake guys to be mad at. They’re all out there somewhere going totally unpunished for that thing they didn’t but would have done. How dare they.
Every mobile game ad girl is really going through it, all of them catching their husbands cheating 24/7 and if they’re not doing that then they’re shivering in a rundown house.
Also the experiences she had (which had nothing to do with the whistleblower thing) in the months before she was fired are deplorable and are perfect examples of why they need a fucking union.
Seeing mundane photos of somewhere completely different is fun, because you never stop to consider that your mundane is unusual to someone else, and vice versa.
I once had this indian online friend, we used to send photos of things in our lives to each other, mostly food and things around the house. He was sceptical that a human being could survive -35 C cold, and I still have a hard time believing someone can survive +40. Almost every time we showed each other something, the other’s was different, the only real limit was our imagination. This one time we sent each other photos of our beds.
The beds were the same, but what was interesting was the floor! He had never seen wooden floors in a normal home, and I’d never seen marble. He admitted it wasn’t really marble, just linoleum printed to look like stone. And my home floor wasn’t really wood, it was linoleum printed to look like wood!
Finland is cold and wood floors are warm, so finnish people prefer wood, even if it’s fake, and India is hot, and stone floors are cool, so indian people prefer stone, even if it’s fake. And little differences like this will never stop being fun and interesting to me.
the fun thing about english/literature class is that no matter your feelings towards english/literature as a subject, there is always That One Fucking Short Story that you remember decades later because holy hotdogs that was a fucked up thing to make a 10th grader read
