#U.S. imports

[pakistanviews]

Canadian Prime Minister Announces No Retreat in Tariff Battle

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that Canada will not back down in the tariff battle.

In his statement, Trudeau said that if U.S. tariffs remain in place, Canada will take retaliatory action and impose an additional 25% tariff. He stated that Canada will impose taxes on goods worth $155 billion and will also apply tariffs on U.S. imports.

Trudeau further added that Canada will challenge U.S. tariffs at the World Trade Organization, and criticized the Trump administration for putting American jobs at risk.

[onlytiktoks]

[cubbihue]

So.... why'd Peri get assigned Dev as his first godchild?

Jorgen’s usually not the one in charge of assigning godchildren. There’s an entire department that weighs and classifies potentail Godkids to the right Fairy. Although it’s on strike at the moment.

So Jorgen has to do it by hand, until the union negotiations are resolved. Turns out trying to use paperclips is very hard. Itty bitty paperclips. Big muscular biceps. Not a good combo.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

Peri's Assignment: [Previous] > [Next]

[phantomrose96]

Have you considered some of the responses ur getting may not be containment breaches but people kinda rightfully annoyed someone who owns works for a company actively complicit in genocide, who's uniquely privileged to own a home suddenly has an opinion when it could finally affect you? you can tout it like it's for others and ppl shouldn't need to advertise the shit they do off-site to prove they care—but in the same way you know someone's about to be racist or a pain in the ass b/c of the language they use the way you talk abt this shit is a dog whistle for some of us who are already in the trenches.

it's ur blog but if asks are open and u force me to see that bullshit i ain't keepin quiet

Goodness. I need you to know this is deeply not normal.

It is just so deeply not normal to look at someone's blog, which contains a fraction of a fraction of their life, and come to the conclusion that I have too many good things happening, and I haven't sufficiently proven to you that the depth of my moral character also includes caring about other important causes, and therefore me asking people not to elect a fascist dictator is a "dog whistle" for me being a bad person.

Like I cannot reiterate enough how supremely not normal it is to look at someone's anime-icon blog and conclude you know me, like this is somehow the first thing I've ever cared about, and you can patch over the gaping holes in this conclusion by hand-waveishly calling it a "dog whistle" for--again--me saying please don't elect the fascist billionaire.

I'm asking you to hear yourself. This is not normal.

[freaky-fan-official]

good morning everybody

[pettytiredandjewish]

IMPORTANT

Hey- To those who works in museums and libraries:

Trump just signed an executive order to dismantle the institute of museum and library services

(and six other federal agencies: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency.)

Please spread the word

[sockatoothewafflebird]

i found this extremely motivational video randomly and it really made me happy so:

yeah! basically the message is, "No One is coming to save us, so We must save us." and then they give examples of people protesting and organizing and it's honestly absolutely made my week to see. so here, go watch and then go organize with your community.

[actual-lea]

Only just noticed that the address portion of the New Patient Intake Form in Chikhai Bardo has a line for "Prov" instead of "State".

[tabbytrout]

Hello Tumblr!

In arkansas they are attempting to pass HB 1668, the Anti-social transitioning bill, It was previously most noted in Florida and now it has spread to Arkansas. I am asking you to call, text or email Arkansas representatives. I made a Google doc to explain how and will update it as much as possible on how you can help! I may change the format as needed to make it more accessible but I urge you to contact them and request them to Oppose the bill.

If you're unsure how here is my Google doc, feel free to spread around! Anyone can contact representatives, Including minors! Thank you for any help you give!!

[shipperwolf1]

HEADS-UP FLORIDA!!!!

[local-limebug]

btw it is important to me that all of you know i'm not one of those weird incels who thinks john walker's like... morally good. yes i'm an mcu walker stan. yes he's a terrible person who should definitely not be captain america. those statements coexist.

[sailor-alt]

Screw it here comes my rant. The Pledge of Allegiance is actually awful and too few people know why. My ramble/informal essay is below the cut. If you have the time and the mental energy then I would really like it if you read it, because more people should know about this, especially Americans.

(All my sources for this will be at the end.)

Starting off with the obvious: the pledge is creepy. A lot of people I’ve spoken to agree that overall it’s weird that every single day children need to pledge their allegiance to the country. It’s very totalitarian. What’s worse is that no school I’ve come across actually teaches about why we do that or what the pledge’s history actually is. You might know a bit about the “under god” addition, but that’s generally where common knowledge ends. There’s a reason for that. The history of the Pledge of Allegiance is bad. Really bad.

The pledge’s history starts with how much America loves capitalism. I’d argue it’s a little too much. The Pledge of Allegiance was originally published not as some historic call to rally patriotism, but as an advertisement. It was written by Francis Bellamy for a magazine called The Youth’s Companion. It was a part of a promotion to sell flags to their subscribers. In addition, any school that recited the pledge on October 21, 1892 would receive a free flag.

Now you may or may not know that October 21st 1892 is the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus “discovering” America. In celebration of this anniversary, The Youth’s Companion partnered with patriotic groups to celebrate. This was when Bellamy was tasked with writing the pledge. It was written in celebration of Christopher Columbus. You know, just the guy who raped, murdered, tortured, and committed mass genocide on tremendous amounts of indigenous peoples, and then bragged about it. And the terrifying thing? Celebrating a genocidal rapist isn’t even the worst part. We’ll get to the worst part later. For now, let’s look at how the pledge became wide spread.

After The Youth’s Companion published the pledge, its popularity boomed. New York was the first state that made it mandatory for all students to recite it each morning. The legislation for that was made the day after the U.S. declared war on Spain. Many states followed in its footsteps when the U.S. joined World War 1. From that day on, students have been reciting an ad each morning while staring at an American Flag. It is important to note that there was never a federal law requiring students to recite the pledge. However, that doesn’t mean the federal government wasn’t involved.

Most people are familiar with the “under god” revision, but that’s not the only revision made to the Pledge of Allegiance. The original version went as follows:

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

This is obviously, quite different from the version we know today. “Under god” was added in the Cold War era, around 1954, when various Catholic groups lobbied for it. Their reasoning was it would protect the children from corruption by “godless communists” even though communism actually has nothing to do with religion at all. In reality, this change was just made to spread Christianity through the U.S. and blur the lines between church and state, overlooking the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees individuals the right to practice their religion (or lack thereof) freely without government interference. However, there was another change made around 30 years prior, and unsurprisingly it has to do with Americans hating immigrants.

In 1923 the National Flag Conference decided that the phrase “my Flag” was too vague and that it could result in immigrants interpreting it as meaning the flag of their country of origin. So, they changed the line to “the flag of the United States”. In 1924 they added “of America” to the phrase to prevent any and all alternate interpretations. This change was very blatantly made with the idea of making immigrants more patriotic in mind. They did not hide it. While this was not in Bellamy’s original version, when he wrote it he hoped that it could “Americanize” the new waves of immigrants coming into the country at that time. To make things worse, the Pledge of Allegiance being taught to young children is a very deliberate move to advance this goal. It is significantly easier to get someone to believe something when they’re young. The pledge very clearly intends to manipulate young Americans into being more patriotic, much of which is targeted towards immigrants.

It worked on me for a while; when I first learned the pledge I was so proud of myself and I felt like such a good American, even though I actually had no idea what the words meant. I hated people who didn’t like the pledge. Since I was only in elementary school and lived in a predominantly white area where we didn’t get many immigrant's, most of that was targeted at people who wore hats. Only in my sophomore year of high school did I think “Hey the pledge is kind of weird. I wonder that that’s about.” And then I did research and learned all this. I wasn’t prompted to do any of that research, I just did it because I was curious. This isn’t on other people for not getting curious, it’s on the system. If you don’t know that the pledge might have a complicated history, then you won’t know to research it. On top of that, a lot of the reliable resources that I accessed I only knew about because my school pays for subscriptions to them. I got lucky enough to live in a wealthy school system, a lot of people didn’t. The widespread ignorance about the pledge can’t be blamed on individuals, the blame falls on the school systems for not teaching it.

I’m going to be explicit about this now, this part that I’m about to talk about is the worst part. This is the really really bad thing that is worse than all the others. Changes to the phrasing of the Pledge of Allegiance weren’t the only changes made. There was a particular very significant– and very necessary– change made to the original salute of the pledge. The original version involved what was called the Bellamy Salute, which looked like this:

Look familiar? Yeah, that’s because it was nearly identical to the Nazi salute. American schoolchildren would salute their flag every morning by holding up their right arm with their palm face down, nearly identical to the way Nazis would hail Hitler. America didn’t stop doing this until 1942, three whole years into WWII, but only one year after the U.S. got involved. However, the Nazis didn’t start doing their salute at the beginning of WWII, the Nazi salute became widespread in around 1931. That means there were 11 years when American schoolchildren were doing the same salute as Nazis. The American government didn’t think to change the salute until America got involved in the war.

Yeah. I told you it was bad. But if the pledge is so bad, then why don’t people just not do it? It is true that now there is federal law that says no person can be forced to recite the pledge. Part of the reason why some students still do it is because they have not been taught how bad it is, and part of the reason is because they still feel like they have to. There are social standards that are enforced in schools, both by students and teachers. A student who doesn’t recite the pledge can be risking more than just being seen as weird. There have been case after case of students being verbally or physically harassed be teachers for not reciting the pledge.

1997, in Connecticut, a student was refused admission to the Honors Society.

2006, in Florida a student was ridiculed by their teacher.

2009, in Maryland a teacher berated a child and forced her to leave the class.

2023, in South Carolina a teacher yelled at a student and pushed her against a wall.

2023, in Texas a teacher tried to force a student to translate the pledge and retaliated against her when she refused.

That’s just to name a few. In most of these cases (maybe all, I’m not certain) the teachers did not receive repercussions unless the victim and their family really pushed for it. And even then the punishment was never severe enough. On top of that, school is a really hard social environment to be in. Your peers expect things from you, and being different is hard. Even if you don’t live in an area where your safety could be in danger from not reciting the pledge, you’re still risking your social life.

To recap, the Pledge of Allegiance was originally written as a part of a marketing campaign which celebrated Christopher Columbus, one of the purposes for reciting it daily is to “Americanize” immigrant children, the original salute was almost identical to the Nazi salute and wasn’t changed until the U.S. joined the war effort, and students who don’t recite it are often punished. It’s almost terrifying how fitting this is for the current state of the U.S. government. There are a lot of problems here, but I’m not about to point out problems and then provide no solution.

It’s simple: stop having children recite the pledge each morning. It should certainly still be taught as it is an important part of American history and culture, but the tradition of saying it each day needs to be broken. In addition to this, students will be educated on its history. The pledge can be initially taught to young children, as it always has been. Show them the words and make sure they know what they mean. Later on, when kids have grown up a little and are able to understand the complexities of the pledge’s history, they’ll learn about how it came to be, the issues with it, and why it would no longer be recited. This can fit well into an immigration unit, because of the relationship between the pledge and attempts to “Americanize” immigrants. Immigration is typically taught to older elementary schoolers, usually 4-5th grade, which is just old enough to start understanding this complex history. It can also fit nicely into units like the Spanish American War, World War I, the Cold War, and separation between church and state as it has relation to all of those. Educating American children and having them learn about the more negative sides of this country’s history will help them grow into introspective and thoughtful adults. On the contrary, if they continue to be taught to simply obey authority and love their country blindly, they will become compliant and easy to manipulate, which opens the door for dangers to democracy itself. 

Now we’ve reached the obligatory counter argument, because this is the internet and people are probably going to try to disagree with me. I’d hope that after reading this you wouldn’t argue that in reciting the pledge each morning, we encourage patriotism, but it’s always possible someone will. To which I would argue patriotism is very different from what is actually being encouraged: blind compliance. Patriotism isn’t just doing whatever your country tells you without question, patriotism is “... loving our country so much that we do not tolerate its mistakes.” That quote came from a letter that a woman named Alice Alexander wrote to the New York Times after reading an article about a girl who refused to recite the pledge. Ultimately, if we really want what’s best for the country, then we will teach our children what true patriotism is, we will encourage them to question and critique everything until they make it the best that it can be, and we will praise them for working to create a more perfect union. In making just a small change with the Pledge of Allegiance, we can create a butterfly effect-like impact that will better the country for years to come.

Thank you for listening to my rant. If you want to debate me on this then you’re welcome to, I love discussion on this topic. I just ask that you be respectful and don’t “debate” as in hurtle insults at me without making a point. If you want to do more research, or are curious where I got this information, all of my sources are below. I think a few articles may have been deleted by now, unfortunately. Maybe someone more tech savvy than me can find a way to recover them. I also highly encourage you to reblog this (but of course I won’t tell you that you have to) because I think a lot more people need to know about this issue.

Works Cited

Alexander, Alice. “Pledge of Allegiance, Another View.” Gale In Context: Global Issues, New York Times, 20 April 1997, http://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A150346809/GIC?u=nhais_htb7&sid=bookmark-GIC&xid=46e74698. Accessed 3 April 2024.

EB Editors. “Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.” Britannica School, Encyclopædia Britannica, 1 August 2018, http://school.eb.com/levels/high/article/Pledge-of-Allegiance-to-the-Flag-of-the-United-States-of-America/60389. Accessed 3 April 2024.

Grant, Teddy. “Lawyer calls for criminal investigation after student allegedly assaulted over Pledge of Allegiance.” ABC News, 15 March 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/US/9th-grader-sues-school-district-after-staffer-allegedly/story?id=97803847. Accessed 13 May 2024.

Howard, David. “Student Gains in Temporary Ruling.” Gale In Context: Global Issues, New York Times, 22 June 1997, https://go.gale.com/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=News&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResultsType=MultiTab&retrievalId=2fb084a2-4de1-4bc7-80df-8a71567c76d8&hitCount=2&searchType=BasicSearchForm¤tPosition=2&docId=GALE%7CA150318705&docType=Article&sort=Releva. Accessed 13 May 2024.

Post, Dianne. “Children Cannot Be Required to Recite the Pledge of Allegiance.” ProQuest; SIRS Issues Researcher, Arizona Capitol Times, 3 March 2023, https://explore.proquest.com/sirsissuesresearcher/document/2903965524?accountid=6160. Accessed 8 April 2024.

Roos, Dave, and John Donovan. “How the Pledge of Allegiance Went from Marketing Ploy to Classroom Staple.” People | HowStuffWorks, 13 March 2020, https://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/national-traditions/pledge-allegiance.htm. Accessed 10 April 2024.

Ryan, Cathy. “Villain Columbus | Christopher Columbus: The good, the bad and the ugly.” Ohio State University, https://u.osu.edu/posterchildchristophercolumbus/villain-columbus/. Accessed 14 May 2024.

U.S. Const. amend. I, cl. 2

WJCL. “Parents of South Carolina teen file suit against school district over Pledge of Allegiance incident.” WJCL, 14 March 2023, https://www.wjcl.com/article/marissa-barnwell-pledge-of-allegiance-lawsuit/43305680. Accessed 13 May 2024.

[21october1986]

tamerlan was not crazy in any sense.

you have to understand the context behind his actions and his political beliefs; america has spent a century meddling in the middle east, murdering muslims, starting wars over islamophobia, racism, and a lust for oil.

i think it's immensely reasonable to retaliate with hatred for america. the government is responsible and the people are complicit; they didn't care, they don't care, and they likely won't care anytime soon.

do you even try to imagine how that feels? watching your people be murdered and seeing everyone around you ignore it? or even justify it?

political extremism doesn't come from nowhere. it's not insanity to recognize what's happening in the world around you.

[panimoonchild]

How to react Russia's aggression in Ukraine and also in other countries it's to support Ukraine, it's allow Ukraine to use the weapons they already have the way they need to use them

I'm almost on the verge of tears because of acknowledgment.

The President of Ukraine and the Prime Minister of Spain signed a bilateral agreement on security cooperation.

According to the Presidential Administration, the agreement provides for €1 billion in military assistance to Ukraine through 2024, including, in particular, the provision of Patriot missiles and Leopard tanks for a total of €1.1 billion. The people of Ukraine feel enormous gratefulness for such immense and important support!

Also, we receive Spain support throughout the 10-year term of the document.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said that by 2027, Spain would provide another €5 billion in aid through the European Peace Fund.

Always spot on👏🫂😌

[thosemotivationalquotes]

If you are a resident of Florida, please read this!

Florida is going to be having 2 special elections in April of 2025, and here’s what you need to know.

There will be special elections for FL congressional districts 1 and 6. If you you live in FL but don’t know your congressional district, you can check here.

If you are a resident of district 1 or 6, are a U.S citizen, and will be 18 or older by April 1st of 2025, you will be able to vote in the special election.

For FL District 1:

This spot is open due to the resignation of Matt Gaetz

There will be no democratic candidate, and republican primary will be held on 1/28/2025

General election will be 4/1/2025

For FL district 6:

This spot is open because the current representative was appointed to be the national security advisor

There will be a primary on 1/28/2025 for both parties

General election will be 4/1/2025

Florida voter registration deadline is 29 days before the Election Day, so for the primaries you must be registered by 12/31/2024 and for the general election you must be registered by 3/2/2025!

You can click here to register to vote in Florida

You can click here to check if you are registered already in Florida