I have had it with this likescolding. “Tumblr doesn’t have an algorithm so likes don’t actually do anything” motherfucker I am not clicking that heart to give some post better ~algorithmic visibility~ I am clicking that heart to help my internet friend microdose on serotonin as god fucking intended
shoutout to Sam who gave me the idea for this one
this was a great read. “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price
So do I just like....follow...anyone? Like real people? Like the actual people and not the subject matter? That isn't like following someone to their doorstep? Why does this seem so personal???
Think of it as, you are a stray cat, and every evening I put out my garbage and you come and eat it
This garbage is now mine.
A discussion about politics today made me struggle to find a way to articulate why it is that for some people, politics is more personal than it is to others, and why some people mistrust people who vote in a way they can’t agree with (e.g., this comes up a lot in voting for Trump, even though i wasn’t talking about american politics).
and i thought about a classroom example that i think helps make it clear, though it’s a bit long:
imagine a middle school classroom, lets say there’s about 25 kids in it. last year, this particular class had different teachers for a couple of different subjects (like one for math and one for english) and one of those teachers is going to be their home room teacher this coming year. but the schools is weird and innovative and decides to the kids vote on who they want to be their home room teacher for this coming year.
the two options for teacher are mrs. grady and mr. malley.
mrs. grady teaches to the top, but she plays favorites. she has students that she hates for essentially no reason. she’s favoritist against them, “loses” their work frequently, makes them stay in at recess for minor and imagined infractions, never puts their work or behaviour up for awards or selects them for anything.
then there’s mr. malley. he’s not perfect. sometimes he’s slightly dopey and doesn’t always get along with the principal. but he treats all his students fairly, and delivers a good education. the thing is - mrs. grady as their homeroom teacher has promised to take the students doing well in the class on a super wicked trip partway through the year, and mr. malley just can’t deliver that.
now take chester. he’s a great performing student. he won’t get much out of being mr. malley’s student, except a good learning experience for them and their entire class. but mrs. grady loves him, and he’ll get to go on that field trip and have a cool experience and enhance his learning if she’s his homeroom teacher.
but chester is in a group with 4 other friends. these 4 are all among the students that mrs. grady happens to hate. all of them barely passed their class with mrs. grady last year, despite being awesome students who work hard and know their stuff. and if she’s their homeroom teacher this coming year with control over the whole report card, those 4 kids are pretty much guaranteed to be held back a year, and stressed out the entire time because of it.
now chester has to decide - does he vote for mrs. grady and get that awesome learning experience and trip that benefits him, knowing that his classmates and friends will suffer under mrs. grady? or does he vote for mr. malley, who’s not perfect but will deliver them all a fair and equitable learning experience and probably make things better overall for the class, even if the top performers like chester get little to nothing from him?
you don’t have to decide who chester should vote for. maybe you have an opinion. it’s good if you do. keep it to yourself, that’s fine, but let’s consider how these options might play out for chester.
let’s say he votes for mrs. grady, and lets say that mrs. grady does get picked and now she’s going to be their teacher. suddenly, chester is surprised to find that his 4 friends? they’re all mad at him. some of them don’t even want to talk to him or be his friend at all anymore. it hurts, and he doesn’t think it’s fair. he was just doing what was best for him.
but his friends - they’re not just hurt. they are, but also they’re now up doing an extra hour of homework and studying every night. all of them get held in for recess at some point. their grades get docked for things that chester doesn’t get in trouble for. and honestly, they’re so busy and stressed just trying to pass and not get unfairly held back that they don’t have time to worry about chester’s hurt feelings. after all, he didn’t worry about theirs when he voted for mrs. grady. he decided that his own self-interest and field trip was more important than their ability to go the year without stress and with fair treatment, so they’ve decided to protect themselves by only being friends with people who they can trust to be in their corner, who help them achieve their goals, rather than making it harder for them to succeed and be treated fairly.
chester goes on the field trip. he has a great time. he gets a leg-up on his next year’s coursework.
three of his former friends manage to pass the class. one of them fails, despite the fact he would’ve passed easily under mr. malley. one of them ends up sick for half the summer because she worked herself to the bone all year just to pass. one of them only passed because he changed the way he behaved just to get in mrs. grady’s good books. one of them passed but with such low grades that she now can’t make it into the advanced-track classes she was gunning for, which has a snowball effect for which track of classes she’s allowed to take in high-school, and eventually which college she gets into.
what matters isn’t if chester was right or wrong for voting for mrs. grady. what matters isn’t whether his friends are right or wrong for not wanting to be his friend anymore. the point is that when people act purely and predominately in self-interest, to the detriment of the more pressing needs of those they purport to care about, there are consequences, and there is a reciprocity to that lack of empathy and care.
why should i be close with someone i can’t trust to have my back? if your field trip matters more than my well-being and my ability to pass this class, then you’re probably not someone i can rely on to have my back in other situations either.
for many marginalized individuals, keeping our distance from those who vote for our oppressors isn’t done because of a difference of opinion. to steal a quote here: pineapple on pizza is a difference of opinion, voting isn’t. votes with consequences to society in this way aren’t abstract. they have far-reaching consequences for our security, well-being (mental and economic), and long-term capacity for success.
imagine if chester had voted for mr. malley, and mr. malley got elected. now chester and his friends all stay friends. they’re all doing reasonably well in their studies. chester doesn’t get to go on that awesome field trip, but because they all have the time and energy, they manage to organize a trip for themselves anyway. it’s not the same, but they have fun, and learn something, and chester gets to enjoy it with all of his friends and not just the couple of top achievers in the class that mrs. grady would’ve picked for it.
and imagine if chester had voted for mr. malley, but mrs. grady still got selected by the majority of students. now chester hasn’t lost his friends. they’re still struggling, but because he’s close with them, he’s able to spend some of his time studying with them and helping them out to achieve better. he helps push back against mrs. grady’s unfairness, feeling empowered to do so because his friends gave him the green light to. through all of this, all of them pass with his help, and two of them even get to go on her exclusive field trip.
and if he’d voted for mrs. grady but mr. malley was elected? well, i bet his friends wouldn’t be happy, but they would possibly forgive him. they’d still be hurt though, because he did put his field trip above their education and well-being, but without the tangible consequence, people tend to move on easier.
this deserves more notes, it’s the purest explanation of politics I can think of
So let’s talk about the Lost Generation.
This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they – in retrospect, optimistically – called it the “war to end all wars”. And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.
On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.
And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It’s often referred to as “the Spanish flu” because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.
Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.
But once it was finally contained – anywhere from a year to a year and a half later – the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.
Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women’s skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.
Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they’d seen and done and all that they’d lost, and lost for nothing.
Reality seemed so pointless. It’s not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre – J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis – both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.
(There’s a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn’t live his whole life there. There’s a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)
It’s also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.
It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn’t new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn’t been open to them before.
There was also horrific – and state-sanctioned – violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.
It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos – god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.
Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn’t fit their mold.
There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn’t, and that’s the fact that they did it first.
We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren’t any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.
I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.
We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There’s a reason modern audiences don’t find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling – they’re different kinds of humor from different realities.
I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We’ve been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn’t then: there is a future.
The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art – in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared – is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.
So don’t bottle it up. Don’t pretend to be okay when you’re not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else – not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.
Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, “in a hundred years we’ll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive.”
There is a future….
This is scholarship that resonates.
every hundred years…
Anonymous asked:
hold on a fucking second. delaware is a state?? i thought it was a river? or is the river more important than the state? why don't i know this? (i should mention i don't like in america, i'm just confused)
dear-ao3 answered:
there is delaware (state) and delaware (river)
both are equally strange
the state is a tiny little cryptid thing
the rive is a monster that spans new york, pennsylvania, new jersey and delaware. also washington crossed it once and that was like kinda a big deal i guess. like crossing the rubicon in rome.
the state tries to me more important with its “im the first state!!!” bs (seriously its even on the fucking license plates) but we all know. its the river.
THATS TUPPERWARE
i thought delaware was a place in ohio? why are there so many things named delaware?
delaware is too powerful
what the fuck
Wait what? I thought Delaware was a store with building supplies. Like paint, wood, nails and stuff?
I know home depot, but dude I don't know anything about America mad have never been there. Are you sure there is not a some sort of store called something close to Delaware!?!
.....ace hardware....?
this post has only been around for a few hours but could very well be a world heritage post
but at what cost
This post launched at 8am PST on 12 Feb 2021. The above conversation has happened in 3 hours.
he WHAT? i thought he was from. w. wait. ???
delaware stole the presidents shoelaces for clout and became too powerful
From the UK- and what do you mean Delaware isn't a type of ceramic?
it is now
@hellsite-hall-of-fame is it too early?
Isn’t delaware what they make computers on???
software ??
I think they meant Dell Ware, a specific computer type. We had a Dell computer once.
I thought Delaware was that famous singer they spoofed in Zootopia.
oh i thought delaware was that one british singer lady, you know, the one from chasing pavements
that's fucking adele
isn’t delaware that place you go when you die
youre thinking of superhell and all of you are going there
how the fuck did any of you come to the conclusions you all made
we live in america?
I thought Delaware was that food delivery service that keeps interrupting youtube videos with their ads when I'm trying to have a good time
..... are you talking about Doordash???
Isn't Delawere the name of that one girl in the song that goes "Hey there, Delawere"? She's from NYC or something.
Pausing here to point out that op is “dear-AO3″ and now I’m wondering if Delaware fanfic would be categorized as RSF (real state fic) or AU (alternate unitedstates)
stop i do not want to think about this
Isn’t Delaware that SPN ship that exploded the internet
Everyone on this post:
I love that the “no, that’s [x]” meme is making a comeback here and only here and nobody has any idea what’s going on
Keep up the good work, we can make poor OP have a melt down yet.
Isn't delaware that one brand of pizza that's like "it's not delivery, it's delaware."
isn't delaware the god of the sea
Isn't Delaware the name of that guy who painted the Mona Lisa?
delaware is that one evil cyborg guy that has a son named Luke and a red laser sword
Thats Darth Vader. Im pretty sure Delaware is that other red-laser sword guy. You know. The one that stabbed Qui-Gon.
what have i created
I usually only reblog older posts, but this definitely deserves to be in every tumblr hall of fame
this post has only existed for 8 days.
This is fantastic because it goes great with my theory that Delaware only exists for tax purposes. Like, all the states really only exists for Tax Purposes, but Delaware is particularly fake because back in 2012 I got lost in the Alleged Delaware Area looking trying to get to a family reunion, but every time I pulled over for directions, I would ask what the hell state I was in now, and I went through Mayland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey AND Virginia and I never fucking found Delaware but I did eventually find the Family Reunion and earned the repsepct of my then-prospective- Great-Grandmother-In-Law by saving her favorite grandchildren from a furious oceangoing horse so I’m convinced that not only is the state a purely legal construct, they didn’t even dedicate any landmass to it, or it’s a gov’t blackzone where the carnivorous horses live.
World Heritage Post
fun fact, i actually drove through delaware on this posts 6 month birthday. i hate it here.
This post literally fills me with life,tysm.
mrshamill
awed-frog
On most days I try to be nice and decent and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but if I had a magic button to ensure Sir Christoper Chope instantly got an infected ass injury that would force him to lie down and sob for the rest of his miserable days, I’d press it twice.
For context, this guy is a Tory MP who
I mean I’m not saying kill him, but surely a moron like this a) shouldn’t find his place in a mainstream political party in 20-bloody-19 and b) shouldn’t receive a fucking Knighthood? For shame.
the stupid is spreading rapidly and I can’t just blame shitler any longer
