Description: A captioned TikTok by user @ scrubbymo. A person says “I just wanna remind everyone to say bismillah before drinking water during the month of Ramadan, because there’s three Jinns inside water.” They begin laughing as they continue, “Two hydro-jinns and one oxy-jinns.” They are still laughing as the video cuts off.
On 28 January 1917, Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old Mexican maid who worked in the United States, refused to take the mandatory gasoline bath given to day labourers at the border, and convinced 30 other trolley passengers to join her.
Her protest spread in what became known as the bath riots. Torres was one of many workers who crossed the border between Juarez and El Paso each day. In the name of public health, Mexican workers were frequently subjected to degrading and humiliating treatment. They had to strip naked, brave, undergo a toxic gasoline bath, and have their clothes steamed. The stated aim of the programme was to kill lice, which can spread typhus. However, it was not applied to everyone crossing the border: just working class Mexicans.
In addition to gasoline being poisonous, it was also a deadly fire risk. A group of prisoners in El Paso being treated with gasoline were burned to death in an accidental fire. Furthermore, US health workers were secretly photographing naked Mexican women.
On January 28, anger at the practice finally exploded, and within a few hours Torres had amassed a crowd of several thousand mostly women protesters. They blocked all traffic and trolleys into El Paso. They pelted immigration officers with rocks and bottles when they try to disperse them, and when US and then Mexican troops arrived they received the same treatment. The riots were eventually suppressed by the soldiers, and Torres herself was arrested. This appeared to have the effect of discouraging future protests.
The enforced bathing and fumigation of Mexican workers with toxic chemicals like gasoline, and later DDT and Zyklon B, continued until the 1950′s. The use of Zyklon B at the border appealed to scientists in Nazi Germany, who in the late 1930′s began using the agent at borders and in concentration camps for delousing. Although notoriously they later used it to exterminate millions of people in the Holocaust.“
@ the gringos in the notes whining about how they didnt know this and how their education system is shit…
1- the US consistently ranks higher than mexico in education
2- WE dont use that excuse, no one else but you does. google is free, shut the fuck up
3- if youve ever used that excuse you are now legally obligated to read about the following (on the internet, which again is free and you have access to)
most if not all of these have articles on wikipedia (i linked them), which again you can access for free RIGHT NOW. if you fail to do this i will hack you to pieces and feed you to the dogs. you have no excuses for being ignorant
I don’t know how to break it to some of you, but you will never know everything. Shit’s been happening on this planet for a long time and there’s a lot of people out there – at least a hundred. Schools teach whatever curriculum is approved and for reasons that should be obvious, they focus on basics and general knowledge. Should the schools teach us about atrocities and dark moments in our history? Other countries’ atrocities? Times we failed each other as a society and turned on each other? Maybe! Probably? At least some of them, for sure.
But your school is never going to have the time or the funding to teach you everything. No one knows everything. Every fucking day we learn something we didn’t know yesterday – and if that statement isn’t true for you, that is a personal problem and you need to examine why you aren’t learning and gaining knowledge and experiences.
A bunch of Americans learned their government did some pretty racist and abusive things to Mexicans and instead of learning more about it, or internalizing it as something to be wary of in the future the next time someone starts talking about illegal immigrants or talking about immigrants and migrants bringing illness or infestations across the border (anyone remember the way Chinese-Americans and immigrants were treated during Covid? If you don’t, that’s your new knowledge for the day), a bunch of you decided to make yourselves feel better by wailing and putting on a show about how no one told you.
Yeah, except OP did tell you. They told you just now. You have been educated and now you can choose how you react to that. Engage with OP and ask questions? Look it up and learn additional details and context? Discuss it with other people in the comments? Or are you going to sit there on your phone and make loud, unnecessary protests about how no one else spoon-fed you every bit of knowledge in history because it makes you feel better?
Hey, look at me. Look at me. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: you need to condition yourself to being okay with being inconvenienced by things. The first time I spoke about this I meant it in a mental health way- it is good to go out to the store and see people versus just ordering alone at home- but there is another more pressing societal issue you should be more concerned about as well.
Any service you rely on for convenience can be weaponized against you the moment you begin to rely on it. Streaming used to be a cheap and convenient way to see movies at home. It is now exorbitantly expensive, you need multiple accounts just to get what you want, and any of those movies can be taken from you at any time. And unless you have gotten used to going through the “inconvenience” of owning physical media, you can do nothing about it. Same goes for buying things on Amazon. Same goes for any service like DoorDash etc. These companies WANT you to be reliant on them for convenience so they can do whatever they want to you because, well, what else are you gonna do?
Same thing goes for the uptick in AI. If you train yourself to become reliant on AI for doing basic things, you will be taken advantage of. It is only a matter of a couple years before there are no free AI services. Not only that, but in the usage of AI’s case, it is robbing you of valuable skills that you need to curate that you will be helpless without the moment the AI companies drive in the knife the way they have done with streaming. Delivery. Cable. Internet. Etc. It will happen to AI too. And if you are not practicing skills such as. Writing. You are not only going to be at the mercy of AI companies in the digital world, but you are going to be extremely easy to take advantage of in real life too.
I am begging you to let go of learned helplessness. I am begging you to stop letting these companies TEACH you helplessness. Do something like learn to pirate. It is way more inconvenient at the beginning, but once you know how, it is one less way companies can take advantage of you. Garden. Go to the thrift store (older clothes hold up better anyway). These things take more time and effort, yes, but using time and effort are muscles you need to stretch to keep yourself from being flattened under the weight of our capitalist hellscape.
Inconvenience yourself. Please. Start with only the ways you are able. Do a little bit at a time. But do something.
amhrancas 