Wir sind ein Zusammenschluss von Menschen aus Köln, die sich ein Leben in Freiheit wünschen. Wir sind gegen alle Formen von Diskriminierung und Ausschluss und streben den Abbau struktureller Hindernisse für Minderheiten an.
Schreibt uns gerne, wenn ihr auch aktiv werden wollt!
your fat activism posts should include people who are not healthy at their current weight or have an eating disorder where they eat too much btw
like YES there are plenty of fat people who ARE healthy and that is a super important thing to say but fat people who are not currently healthy (especially fat women) are treated like dirt by both camps. like i dont know how to explain to you that unhealthy people dont deserve to get treated like garbage
Instead of sharing posts about how to grow your own food we should post about how to steal from supermarkets
High end stores have less security and are less likely to chase you down
I know everyone says the staff won’t approach or anything but managers and hired security absolutely will and they don’t care if it’s illegal to detain you. Keep an eye out for them
Creating a distraction with a small group of people is less effective than everyone taking something and leaving at once, or one person taking nothing and submitting to a search while everyone else walks by
If someone tries to stop you, check your bag etc. just keep walking, say “sorry I’m in a rush” or whatever but don’t stop under any circumstances. Stores do not have the right to search you, if you decline to be searched they can only ask you to leave
Some stores will keep a record of frequent shoplifters and nab you when your guard is down so don’t do the same place over and over
One trick I learnt from a friend is to go in with a half full trolley from another store, fill your resusable bags from the previous store with stuff in the current store, then walk out (as above, don’t stop for a search)
Stealing from high end department stores is surprisingly easy. Pick one that doesn’t have a lot of security and you can take clothes into the change rooms and leave with them underneath your streets (obviously only if there’s no attendant)
Pay for cheap, bulky items like milk and bread, and pocket small expensive stuff like fancy cheeses
Don’t steal (or at least don’t steal much) from a local store you rely on. Firstly you don’t want to be recognisable in your local community but also don’t shit where you eat
You can resell stuff like skincare and cosmetics, we even bought our game controllers off someone who pinched them from the electronics store and sold them for half price
When it comes to department stores in particular, it’s better to grab a lot once in a while than to take a little bit regularly because the more times you do it mean more chances of getting caught statistically speaking and because you’re more likely to be recognised
Of course, the self checkout is a blessing. Leave your fancy juice out of bags in the trolley and forget to scan it, ring up all your weighted items by whatever’s cheap, slip small items up your sleeve and drop them in your bags
Whatever you do, do it with confidence. If you’re looking around anxiously people will notice
Paying with cash and not using rewards cards can provide some extra protection. Why make it easier for them?
Some stores have plain clothes security, they usually stick out like a sore thumb cos they’re generally failed cops trying to look tough. Keep an eye out for big dudes in jeans and black muscle tees who aren’t buying anything (and anyone wandering around without a basket or trolley), especially in department stores and the like
Avoid pharmacies, they always have a lot of security
If someone tries to detain you by grabbing your trolley or bags, let go and get away, don’t try to wrestle it back (if you do, you could land an assault charge)
Security guards and managers can place you under citizens arrest in a lot of places, and even if they can’t, can you afford a lawyer to argue you were wrongfully detained while shoplifting? Probably not. Just because it’s against the law for staff to do something doesn’t mean they won’t do it!
Stealing from a store is perfectly ethical in Mahayana Buddhism because stealing, like any action that accrues negative karma, has to be perpetrated against a person who experiences harm from your actions. Stores aren’t people and they have insurance for loss
Now that you’ve saved all this money, give some change to an unhoused person outside or fling a couple bucks to someone in need if you can
Source: I’m poor, my kids father was a security guard for many years, and my ex got arrested for shoplifting because they didn’t follow this advice
If ur white, over 20 and got kids (or know someone who is) you can hide a lot in a pram and nappy bag and no one argues with “oh they must have put that in my bag, you know how they are at that age”. Plus cute kids keep eyes off you.
Other good options for self checkout supermarkets
• get carrots or something in a paper bag. Put your higher price items like supplements in that same bag and if you can, under the carrots (or lentils or whatever they offer with brown full yourself bags) and weigh it all as carrots or whatever you can afford
• in general buy something cheap while stealing other things. People are not going to suspect someone who theyyve seen pay from something.
• flat things are your friend, blocks of chocolate for example. They lay flat and don’t create bult in your bag
• big box stores like the warehouse (NZ) and Kmart often don’t have scales, use this. It’s good to buy a big, cheap bin/container and then as you walk around doing you shopping put pricey things in there. This doesn’t raise alarms because it’s easier to carry one big thing than a big thing and many small things. When getting to check out, just scan the bin/container. Then put everything you bought back into the container, on top of things unpaid for.
• wear a mask shopping. Regardless of how you feel about the pandemic wearing a mask will make Identifying you harder.
• when it comes to non self checkout stores, say for hypothetical example, a charity shop by an organization that hates queer people, where things are priced with stickers, find stickers that are easy to remove and swap them with a lower price sticker. If you’re practiced you can do this easily while walking around but it can also be done in the changing room. Although not ideal as an unethical store is still getting a few of your dollars it can make getting a good quality sweater for winter more achievable.
•coats/jackets with big pockets.
It’s safer to do things with some amount of plausible deniability. Go to the bathroom after you’re done shopping then “forget” that you haven’t checked out yet. “Forget” to scan things under your cart. Take your bag of groceries to the pharmacy to get your prescription and “forget” to put it on the counter to be scanned. Usually the loss prevention person won’t yell “Stop! Thief!”, they’ll walk up to you in the parking lot and say “Sir, did you pay for that?” to which you can say “Oh my god, I completely zoned out, I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for it now”. You’ll have to pay for your groceries, but you won’t be arrested. That doesn’t go as well if you have everything stuffed into your pockets
Using a reusable bag looks natural and helps with plausible deniability over just carrying things or putting them in your pockets. Using a t-shirt bag you previously got from the same store (with an old receipt if you’re feeling ambitious) is even less likely to arouse suspicion, but has very little plausible deniability if you do get caught
Grab a soda on the way in, drink some of it as you shop, and when you check out just keep holding it and don’t say anything. 90% of the time you can walk out with it no problem, 10% of the time the cashier will ask “Did you come in with that?” and you can just say “ya” and they’re not about to call you a liar over a $2 drink
Working retail gives a lot of perspective on just how little the average retail worker is looking out for shoplifters (which is not at all). We’re not paid enough to care, and trying to stop someone is just extra work and extra drama. A lot of us steal ourselves, too
Most places don’t have dedicated loss prevention people (Target is a notable exception) because that’d be another wage to pay, but loss prevention people are the exception to the above rule. Looking out for shoplifters is literally their job. Be more careful in places that have them
Everything I’ve said is only my experience as a white man, and may not be universally applicable. Use your own judgment
Think about this quote like all the time and how it really undermines so much shit in capitalism
Image transcript:
“But what will you do with the lazy man, the man who does not want to work?” inquires your friend.
That is an interesting question, and you will probably be very much surprised when I say that there is really no such thing as laziness. What we call a lazy man is generally a square man in a round hole. That is, the right man in the wrong place, And you will always find that when a fellow is in the wrong place, he will be inefficient or shiftless. For so-called laziness and a good deal of inefficiency are merely unfitness, misplacement. If you are compelled to do the thing you are unfitted for by your inclinations or temperament, you will be inefficient at it; if you are forced to do work you are not interested in, you will be lazy at it.
Look, this is probably going to end up as an unpopular post, because God knows the level of brainrot capitalism and fast consumption caused in people’s brains, but I’d rather not get TV shows for a while if it means writers get their rights defended and recognized.
Entertainment can’t come at the cost of fair pay, healthy work environment and ethical practices.
i gotta say i agree that exposing children to algorithmic content feeds is going to make them grow up with one billion new kinds of mental illnesses and it’s a serious societal problem that urgently needs addressing but it makes me v. v. v. uneasy when i see posts going around that identify this issue and come to the conclusion ‘this is why it’s important for parents to know what their kid is doing online’ and uh girls there are a lot of kids out there who would be dead if their parents knew what they were doing online
“yeah this aspect of capitalism is extremely alienating and traumatizing” and im nodding and smiling and then they add “which is why we must retreat to the safety of the family” and i start abruptly high-pitched screaming like a fire alarm
I will pretty much instantly distrust a fellow leftist if they paint the enemy as being ugly (’all terfs have bad hair’, ‘all far-right bros are fat people with neck beards’, etc). It shows me they haven’t done some of the most basic work of un-linking appearance from character, which leaves them open to a vast array of bigoted tropes, from fatphobia, ableism and classism to homophobia, transphobia antisemitism and racism, because who we see as ‘attractive’ or looking ‘wholesome’ and who we assume to look ‘untrustworthy’ or villainous’ has been coded by all these things.
lots of people in the notes pointing out that this is also true about:
Dismissing people because of their age
Pretending that the people who disagree with you are ‘unintelligent’ and the people who agree with you are ‘smart’
Accusing the people you disagree with of having some mental illness.
Accents and speech patterns
Mocking personal hygiene
Mocking someone not getting laid or mocking genital size or shape
Mocking lack of productivity and independence (’you probably live in your moms basement’ stuff)
And YES. You are all right. These are all bad reasons to claim superiority over someone and every time someone brings up this stuff their ageism/ableism/classism/sexism/etc is showing.
And ya know, 99 out of 100 times, the person(s) that you’re insulting either can’t hear you or doesn’t really care what you have to say. But the fat people, disabled people, mentally ill people, etc. in your own community do hear and feel a little less safe in that community because of you. Do better.
Shoplifters who spoke to Novara Media said the cost of living crisis had pushed them to steal more of life’s essentials. “A couple of times I’ve been on the verge of crying when I go to buy Sainsbury’s Basics apple and blackcurrant squash and realise the price has doubled in the past three months,” said John.
Lara, a culture worker from London, has started shoplifting groceries more frequently; she said it has become more socially acceptable in her circles. “I know that other people do it, and I’ve seen how other people do it, and that really helped,” she said. Previously, she avoided stealing because her upbringing and wider moralism had convinced her it was “a shameful thing” to do.
“Before, I would have described stealing as this really anti-Islamic thing to do,” she said. Shoplifting is also especially frowned-upon by “parents who come from a working-class or lower middle-class background,” she said, because of how classist ‘scrounger’ stereotypes “trickle down to how we surveil and shame each other.”
Nowadays however, Lara sees shoplifting as “one of the few guerrilla tactics we have available to us.”
Alan, a construction worker from London, who, like John and Anna, has been shoplifting around half his groceries in recent months, has “no moral qualms” about stealing from supermarkets. “I just think that the stuff in the world is ours, all of ours,” he said, “and that we’ve invented a really stupid system for the distribution of resources which doesn’t treat them as ours, and treats them as things that can be used for capitalists to make profit.”
He wouldn’t steal things if it meant that “someone’s labour went unrewarded”, he said, but all shoplifting affects is “the profits of shareholders” he said. “[I have] no concerns about that at all.”
[…]
While, for many, shoplifting feels like a form of resistance to untenable living conditions, no one who spoke to Novara Media was sure how to build solidarity between shoplifters. Alan shoplifts food for rough sleepers, but wishes there were more organised approaches to shoplifting – like the mass stealing and redistribution of food that occurred in Greece following the 2008 financial crisis.
Lara believes shoplifting could be “revolutionary” if it could be “more of an organised operation” that involved “getting workers on side”.
“I think it would be really radical if there would be a widespread recognition and acceptance of stealing as a necessary mechanism for resistance,” she says. “If you can’t afford the things that you have to buy, then the logic should be that you just take them.”
“Across the U.S., it’s extremely rare for any child welfare agencies to require disabilities training for social workers…Parents with disabilities are often judged by a system that doesn’t understand how to assess their capacity as caregivers,“
Other points that made me fucking pissed, bold added by me:
What they measure matters. A recent analysis by ACLU researchers found that when Allegheny’s algorithm flagged people who accessed county services for mental health and other behavioral health programs, that could add up to three points to a child’s risk score, a significant increase on a scale of 20.
Through tracking their work across the country, however, the AP found their tools can set families up for separation by rating their risk based on personal characteristics they cannot change or control, such as race or disability, rather than just their actions as parents.
Over time, Allegheny’s tool has tracked if members of the family have diagnoses for schizophrenia or mood disorders. It’s also measured if parents or other children in the household have disabilities, by noting whether any family members received Supplemental Security Income, a federal benefit for people with disabilities. The county said that it factors in SSI payments in part because children with disabilities are more likely to be abused or neglected.
The county also said disabilities-aligned data can be “predictive of the outcomes” and it “should come as no surprise that parents with disabilities … may also have a need for additional supports and services.” In an emailed statement, the county added that elsewhere in the country, social workers also draw on data about mental health and other conditions that may affect a parent’s ability to safely care for a child.
People with disabilities are overrepresented in the child welfare system, yet there’s no evidence that they harm their children at higher rates, said Traci LaLiberte, a University of Minnesota expert on child welfare and disabilities.
The Los Angeles tool weighs if any children in the family have ever gotten special education services, have had prior developmental or mental health referrals or used drugs to treat mental health.
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