biden 2024 - making things work
This is why I honestly feel like Biden was the best possible choice in a shitty situation, even with his age and potential health issues. Because if nothing else, he is NOT REACTIONARY. He is methodical and dedicated. Do I wish he acted a little faster and with more of an eye towards progressive policies? Obviously yes. But given the choices, and given everything else that's happened, Biden has absolutely made the best of a bad situation. Sometimes you don't need a hero, you need a fucking repairman to come and just make it work until it can be fixed. And he's a damn good repairman.
Okay, I’ll give him the W for this one.
This is his biggest problem unfortunately. He's the kind who "doesn't want to gloat" but he NEEDS to let people know what he's accomplishing! Most young voters are never going to see this article and just remember him "busting the strike." The Democrats need to learn how to do a victory lap.
The art of arranging marine algae into designs, bouquets, and even sometimes intricate little scenes, was surprisingly popular in the 19th century. See an album of such pictures by a woman named Eliza A. Jordson here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/album-of-seaweed-pictures-1848
beeftea78-deactivated20200113
Women have more power and agency in Shakespeare’s comedies than in his tragedies, and usually there are more of them with more speaking time, so I’m pretty sure what Shakespeare’s saying is “men ruin everything” because everyone fucking dies when men are in charge but when women are in charge you get married and live happily ever after
zetsubouloli
I think you’re reading too far into things, kiddo. Take a break from your women’s studies major and get some fresh air.
penfairy
Right. Well, I’m a historian, so allow me to elaborate.
One of the most important aspects of the Puritan/Protestant revolution (in the 1590’s in particular) was the foregrounding of marriage as the most appropriate way of life. It often comes as a surprise when people learn this, but Puritans took an absolutely positive view of sexuality within the context of marriage. Clergy were encouraged to lead by example and marry and have children, as opposed to Catholic clergy who prized virginity above all else. Through his comedies, Shakespeare was promoting this new way of life which had never been promoted before. The dogma, thanks to the church, had always been “durr hburr women are evil sex is bad celibacy is your ticket to salvation.” All that changed in Shakespeare’s time, and thanks to him we get a view of the world where marriage, women, and sexuality are in fact the key to salvation.
The difference between the structure of a comedy and a tragedy is that the former is cyclical, and the latter a downward curve. Comedies weren’t stupid fun about the lighter side of life. The definition of a comedy was not a funny play. They were plays that began in turmoil and ended in reconciliation and renewal. They showed the audience the path to salvation, with the comic ending of a happy marriage leaving the promise of societal regeneration intact. Meanwhile, in the tragedies, there is no such promise of regeneration or salvation. The characters destroy themselves. The world in which they live is not sustainable. It leads to a dead end, with no promise of new life.
And so, in comedies, the women are the movers and shakers. They get things done. They move the machinery of the plot along. In tragedies, though women have an important part to play, they are often morally bankrupt as compared to the women of comedies, or if they are morally sound, they are disenfranchised and ignored, and refused the chance to contribute to the society in which they live. Let’s look at some examples.
In Romeo and Juliet, the play ends in tragedy because no-one listens to Juliet. Her father and Paris both insist they know what’s right for her, and they refuse to listen to her pleas for clemency. Juliet begs them – screams, cries, manipulates, tells them outright I cannot marry, just wait a week before you make me marry Paris, just a week, please and they ignore her, and force her into increasingly desperate straits, until at last the two young lovers kill themselves. The message? This violent, hate-filled patriarchal world is unsustainable. The promise of regeneration is cut down with the deaths of these children. Compare to Othello. This is the most horrifying and intimate tragedy of all, with the climax taking place in a bedroom as a husband smothers his young wife. The tragedy here could easily have been averted if Othello had listened to Desdemona and Emilia instead of Iago. The message? This society, built on racism and misogyny and martial, masculine honour, is unsustainable, and cannot regenerate itself. The very horror of it lies in the murder of two wives.
How about Hamlet? Ophelia is a disempowered character, but if Hamlet had listened to her, and not mistreated her, and if her father hadn’t controlled every aspect of her life, then perhaps she wouldn’t have committed suicide. The final scene of carnage is prompted by Laertes and Hamlet furiously grappling over her corpse. When Ophelia dies, any chance of reconciliation dies with her. The world collapses in on itself. This society is unsustainable. King Lear – we all know that this is prompted by Cordelia’s silence, her unwillingness to bend the knee and flatter in the face of tyranny. It is Lear’s disproportionate response to this that sets off the tragedy, and we get a play that is about entropy, aging and the destruction of the social order.
There are exceptions to the rule. I’m sure a lot of you are crying out “but Lady Macbeth!” and it’s a good point. However, in terms of raw power, neither Lady Macbeth nor the witches are as powerful as they appear. The only power they possess is the ability to influence Macbeth; but ultimately it is Macbeth’s own ambition that prompts him to murder Duncan, and it is he who escalates the situation while Lady Macbeth suffers a breakdown. In this case you have women who are allowed to influence the play, but do so for the worse; they fail to be the good moral compasses needed. Goneril, Regan and Gertrude are similarly comparable; they possess a measure of power, but do not use it for good, and again society cannot renew itself.
Now we come to the comedies, where women do have the most control over the plot. The most powerful example is Rosalind in As You Like It. She pulls the strings in every avenue of the plot, and it is thanks to her control that reconciliation is achieved at the end, and all end up happily married. Much Ado About Nothing pivots around a woman’s anger over the abuse of her innocent cousin. If the men were left in charge in this play, no-one would be married at the end, and it would certainly end in tragedy. But Beatrice stands up and rails against men for their cruel conduct towards women and says that famous, spine-tingling line - oh God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace. And Benedick, her suitor, listens to her. He realises that his misogynistic view of the world is wrong and he takes steps to change it. He challenges his male friends for their conduct, parts company with the prince, and by doing this he wins his lady’s hand. The entire happy ending is dependent on the men realising that they must trust, love and respect women. Now it is a society that is worthy of being perpetuated. Regeneration and salvation lies in equality between the sexes and the love husbands and wives cherish for each other. The Merry Wives of Windsor - here we have men learning to trust and respect their wives, Flastaff learning his lesson for trying to seduce married women, and a daughter tricking everyone so she can marry the man she truly loves. A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The turmoil begins because three men are trying to force Hermia to marry someone she does not love, and Helena has been cruelly mistreated. At the end, happiness and harmony comes when the women are allowed to marry the men of their choosing, and it is these marriages that are blessed by the fairies.
What of the romances? In The Tempest, Prospero holds the power, but it is Miranda who is the key to salvation and a happy ending. Without his daughter, it is likely Prospero would have turned into a murderous revenger. The Winter’s Tale sees Leontes destroy himself through his own jealousy. The king becomes a vicious tyrant because he is cruel to his own wife and children, and this breach of faith in suspecting his wife of adultery almost brings ruin to his entire kingdom. Only by obeying the sensible Emilia does Leontes have a chance of achieving redemption, and the pure trust and love that exists between Perdita and Florizel redeems the mistakes of the old generation and leads to a happy ending. Cymbeline? Imogen is wronged, and it is through her love and forgiveness that redemption is achieved at the end. In all of these plays, without the influence of the women there is no happy ending.
The message is clear. Without a woman’s consent and co-operation in living together and bringing up a family, there is turmoil. Equality between the sexes and trust between husbands and wives alone will bring happiness and harmony, not only to the family unit, but to society as a whole. The Taming of the Shrew rears its ugly head as a counter-example, for here a happy ending is dependent on a woman’s absolute subservience and obedience even in the face of abuse. But this is one of Shakespeare’s early plays (and a rip-off of an older comedy called The Taming of a Shrew) and it is interesting to look at how the reception of this play changed as values evolved in this society.
As early as 1611 The Shrew was adapted by the writer John Fletcher in a play called The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed. It is both a sequel and an imitation, and it chronicles Petruchio’s search for a second wife after his disastrous marriage with Katherine (whose taming had been temporary) ended with her death. In Fletcher’s version, the men are outfoxed by the women and Petruchio is ‘tamed’ by his new wife. It ends with a rather uplifting epilogue that claims the play aimed:
To teach both sexes due equality
And as they stand bound, to love mutually.
The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed were staged back to back in 1633, and it was recorded that although Shakespeare’s Shrew was “liked”, Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed was “very well liked.” You heard it here folks; as early as 1633 audiences found Shakespeare’s message of total female submission uncomfortable, and they preferred John Fletcher’s interpretation and his message of equality between the sexes.
So yes. The message we can take away from Shakespeare is that a world in which women are powerless and cannot or do not contribute positively to society and family is unsustainable. Men, given the power and left to their own devices, will destroy themselves. But if men and women can work together and live in harmony, then the whole community has a chance at salvation, renewal and happiness.
In the immortal words of the bard himself: fucking annihilated.
Western Honeysuckle.
And...the Ferocious Apex Mininectarivore. Get too close AND THEY WILL ABSOLUTELY CUT YOU.
Neanderthal tools might look relatively simple, but new research shows that Homo neanderthalensis devised a method of generating a glue derived from birch tar to hold them together about 200,000 years ago—and it was tough. This ancient superglue made bone and stone adhere to wood, was waterproof, and didn’t decompose. The tar was also used a hundred thousand years before modern humans came up with anything synthetic. After studying ancient tools that carry residue from this glue, a team of researchers from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and other institutions in Germany found evidence that this glue wasn’t just the original tar; it had been transformed in some way. This raises the question of what was involved in that transformation. To see how Neanderthals could have converted birch tar into glue, the research team tried several different processing methods. Any suspicion that the tar came directly from birch trees didn’t hold up because birch trees do not secrete anything that worked as an adhesive. So what kind of processing was needed? Each technique that was tested used only materials that Neanderthals would have been able to access. Condensation methods, which involve burning birch bark on cobblestones so the tar can condense on the stones, were the simplest techniques used—allowing bark to burn above ground doesn’t really involve much thought beyond lighting a fire. The other methods involved a recipe where the bark was not actually burned but heated after being placed underground. Two of these methods involved burying rolls of bark in embers that would heat them and produce tar. The third method would distill the tar. Because there were no ceramics during the Stone Age, sediment was shaped into upper and lower structures to hold the bark, which was then heated by fire. Distilled tar would slowly drip from the upper structure into the lower one. The resulting tars were all put through chemical and molecular analysis, as well as micro-CT scans, to determine which came closest to the residue on actual Neanderthal tools. Tars synthesized underground were closest to the residue on the original artifacts. “[Neanderthals] distilled tar in an intentionally created underground environment that restricted oxygen flow and remained invisible during the process,” the researchers wrote. “This degree of complexity is unlikely to have been invented spontaneously.”
Weeping with joy over the idea of a Neanderthal industrial engineer
PSA: Don't use Open Office
I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.
Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.
Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!
quiteliterallyhotsauce
I’m not saying fight the teacher but if you did…I understand
White people, call this as you see it. Stand up for your non-white classmates and co-workers.
for white people looking for specific directions to make constructive use of your privilege in those classroom spaces:
when you see this kind of dismissal happen, that is a great time to raise your hand next and say something like “excuse me, but you still haven’t answered [other student]’s question” or the less confrontational (if you think the teacher will respond better to this approach) but still effective “actually, i was also wondering the exact same thing [other student] just asked, could you go over that again?”
when you see someone get shot down in a request for accommodation you know is normally granted, pipe up with “but wait, when i asked for [extra time, assistance, etc] you gave it to me? [other student] should receive the same grace i did, that’s only fair”
use the imbalanced power the instructor is giving you as a white student to back up the validity of your classmates’ points, and draw everyone in the room’s attention to the failure to educate equitably that is occurring. don’t let it get swept under the rug as the lesson rolls on — the instructor is counting on that happening. if you have kids, consider how you might teach them to speak up in their classes when they see anyone’s learning needs being ignored by the person who is supposed to fulfill them.
(do this without expecting or demanding thanks or acknowledgment from your classmate. do this even if you are not friends with them outside of class. you are not doing this for clout or popularity points or to feed a white saviour complex, and in a situation that is already frustrating and embarrassing, your classmates of colour are not required to also summon the emotional energy to give you kudos for decency)
be firm, be calm, be consistent, be direct. you just might embarrass the teacher into learning better for next time, when they realize other people can see the shit job they’re doing — or at the very least, you’ll get that question answered.
I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is "if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in."
"These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends." Okay, so you'll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald's or Starbucks on your lunch break.
"They can get a roommate." For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?
"They can live farther from city center and just commute." Are there ways for them to commute that don't equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.
If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.
You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There's only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.
"Nobody wants to work anymore" doesn't hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.
So there are some perks to living in a tourist destination. There are a lot of detractors mostly that you cannot shoot the tourists because you rely on them for your income but you have a semi captive audience with no context for any of the bullshit you spew. You can tell these people anything and they will believe you, the trusted friendly local. Now this is a very much Spider-Man situation where Great Power begets Great Audacity and even worse Responsibility.
My buddy goes on a run and when hes done there is a bar near a creek. So he wades into the creek because the day is hot and the water is cold.
Tourists ask what hes up to, with his running stuff he didn't want wet piled on the shore and him very obviously cooling off in the water. He says he's fishing.
But now here is why I am telling you this story. The universe occasionally aligns in such a way that we get to really really fuck with people and their perception of said universe. The opportunities do not come often and when they come you must seize the day. This is what my buddy did.
So this Creek runs through town and as a result of the highway and neighborhoods and culverts and roads it does not have a great salmon run. It's a short Creek the headwaters are only a few miles from the ocean it never had a great salmon run to begin with. But there are salmon.
One such fish brushes past my buddy's leg. Immediately he knees the fish like he is juggling a soccer ball and pops it out of the water, then slaps it out of the air on to the shore.
This is dumb luck. He could not do this again if he spent years training. Noodling (catching fish with your hands) is a thing that is legal to do with salmon but it is so much harder than literally every other way to catch salmon, including grabbing them with a garbage can. What he just managed is the kind of thing that should make you want to grab the fish and swing it around your head like a stripper with her panties off.
But,
He has an audience.
This is the opportunity offered by the universe.
He plays it cool.
He puts on dead pan straight face on and wades up to shore to grab his fish and nod to the tourists. Someone asks something and he assures them this is the standard way to get a quick dinner here. The tour guide has caught up with his group. He looks at my buddy and his fish and the general lack of fishing accoutrement. Without missing a beat, the guide backs up every ounce of bullshit out of my buddys mouth because if there is one true fraternity it is locals bullshitting stupid tourists.
FYI the poor folk of the UK, men, women and children, were known for walking into the creeks and streams, and tossing fish to the shore but oh, no, it soon became illegal to fish it in an ungentlemanly, unsportsmanlike way and that meant full force expensive poles, lines, hooks, bait, regalia and all the nine yards. Let us ignore for a moment that the rural mindset always faced the concept of such things as dirty dealings, or, an unfair advantage over the food-species.
It was turning the basic human need for protein harvesting into something that only the elite could do, because they were the elite.
Not posting this as a reblog because I don't want to screw with somebody else's notes, but the whole "theological implications of Tolkien's orcs" business has some interesting history behind it.
In brief, a big part of why the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe™ is so cagey about what orcs are and where they come from is that later in his life, Tolkien came to believe that orcs as he'd depicted them were problematic – albeit not because of, you know, all the grotesque racial caricature.
Rather, he'd come to the conclusion that the idea of an inherently evil sapient species – a species that's incapable of seeking salvation – was incompatible with Christian ethics. (Basically, it's one of those "used the wrong formula and got the right answer" situations.)
In his notes and letters, Tolkien played around with several potential solutions to this problem. (Though contrary to the assertions of certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars, there's no evidence that he ever seriously planned to re-write his previous works to incorporate these ideas.) In one proposal, orcs are incarnated demons, and "killing" them simply returns them to their naturally immaterial state; in another, orcs are a sort of fleshy automaton remotely operated by the will of Sauron, essentially anticipating the idea of drone warfare.
Of course, this is all just historical trivia; any criticism of The Lord of the Rings must be directed at the books that were actually published, not the books we imagine might have been published if Tolkien had spent a few more years thinking through the implications of what he was writing. However, the direction his thoughts on the matter are striking for two reasons:
- Tolkien's orc conundrum is very nearly word for the word the problem that many contemporary fantasy authors are grappling with fifty years later. They want epic battles with morally clean heroes, and they're running up against exactly the same difficulty that Tolkien himself did – i.e., that describing a human-like species who are ontologically okay to kill is an impossible task.
- After all the work he put into solving this impossible problem, one of Tolkien's proposals was literally just "what if they're not really killing the orcs, they're just sending them to the Shadow Realm?"
Peeling a Predator Part 1: Cherry Picking
This is not easy to do.
I am going to start writing small moments in time where I should have seen the red flags in my relationship with a monster. It is personal. It is stripping myself bare and it absolutely will not put me in a good light. Let’s make this clear. I may have been mentally ill, but I was still a participant. Something happened, I broke free. But I was still there and the fact that I didn’t get away sooner means I, at least in my heart, was partially responsible for the horror.
Red Flag #1. Cherry Picking.
The X cherry picked from the most respected writers in the English Language to suit their personal morals. The ones that he relied on the most that he eventually used to justify his inhumanity:
Leslie Marmon Silko:
Killing a cop in print because he was a witch. Yes, it was fiction. No, it should never have been a justification to kill someone you think is a witch. Silko’s fiction, and I reiterate FICTION, has a lot of scenes where people rise up in defense against poisonous witchcraft and they kill. It never once occurred to him that in these scenes, the people actually had a choice in the matter, They were fight to the death or die scenarios.
For that matter, he cherry picked anything from Silko if it meant an excuse for murder. This is absolutely not a slur on the writer, who sure has suffered enough in this world. But as far as Ivan D. Cales Jr is concerned, she was one of his major script writers that justified murder if it suited his purposes.
Matthew Wood.
I bought one of his books on herbalism and pored over each page as a treasure. I looked for ways to help and heal; I hadn’t expected him to exam it too but it was for his own gratification...but there’s a small, poignant notation where someone identified as witch/wiccan and went to the rez despite warnings to do so. The language is very brief and doesn’t give up anything, but it sure implies a lot. He was obsessed with that page and read it over and over.
John Trudell.
After reading and listening to the spoken poetry of STICKMAN, he went on a deep dive of his work and latched on to the his quote, “there is no good or evil, there is only consequence.” In this case he ignored the absolute pain and suffering this Native American artist endured with his children, wife, and mother-in-law dying in a fire during a horrible chapter of First Nations rights advocation. Like Silko’s work, I am condensing this into the most basic terms because it is far more appropriate that a concerned reader investigate their own words for these situations, and not someone else’s perspectives and translations.
Conclusion: Your partner has the right to quote and emulate whoever they wish among the poets, philosphers, and essayist. Just PAY ATTENTION TO THE COMMONALITY.
Nest post: PORK IS EVIL or, Overly Justified Bias.
