shokushu goukan for the cyborg soul (2018? i think) - franny choi
“i am just trying to eat rocks”
i feel like every activist should read about fruitlands.
fruitlands was a transcendentalist utopian commune founded in the 1840s. the founders (including louisa may alcott's dad) thought that the existing capitalist economy was evil: alcott described it as a tree “whose root is selfishness, whose trunk is property, whose fruit is gold." so they decided to create a commune that was completely divorced from the economy. like, their response to the "you say you're against capitalism but still participate in it! checkmate socialists!" people was literally "you're right, let's not!"
they refused to consume any materials or foods that couldn't be locally grown, like tea or sugar. they were also highkey vegan: not only was it immoral to eat animal products and use animals for leather and wool, but using animal labor or even using manure as fertilizer was forbidden. and they refused to trade for anything they didn't have within the commune because participation in an oppressive economy was bad, especially if it supported slave labor (ex: wearing cotton fabric).
it fell apart in less than a year because they didn't have enough food to survive the winter.
why?
well, part of it was circumstantial: the site they picked had little arable land and they arrived a month behind in the planting schedule. part of it was the impracticality of living in the 1840s and being so vegan that they couldn't even use oxen to plough their fields or wear clothes that were warm in cold weather.
but the main reason was that the men of the commune (and they were almost all men, except for alcott's wife and another woman, ann page) didn't actually, like, do anything. they left all the household chores and childcare to the women, plus most of the farm work, while they sat around and philosophized about how cool their utopia was. even before it fell apart, most people there had began taking "vacations" away from fruitlands so that they could take hot baths and avoid trying to till the soil with their bare hands.
there are a lot of good lessons here.
1. it's very easy to talk about your great ideas for society but putting them into practice is much harder. you have to actually do the work to achieve the goal: you can't shunt it off onto other people based on the same oppressive systems you're trying to subvert.
2. you need to consider the practical implications of what you're arguing for, including potential downsides. banning wool for ethical reasons is all well and good until you're stuck wearing linen clothes and canvas shoes in the middle of a massachusetts winter.
3. you can't expect that a utopia is going to be all the things you like about society staying the same and everything you dislike being changed. that is at best naïve and at worst intensely selfish.
tl;dr: talk is cheap, praxis is hard.
to be clear, since a lot of responses seem to be confusing this point: the principles on which fruitlands was established weren't the problem. there's no inherent flaw with their being vegan or refusing to participate in an economy that ran on slave labor. and they could have established a commune based on totally different principles and the outcome would likely have been the same.
like, the problem isn't "it's impossible to farm without any animal labor, lololol the transcendentalists were stupid." plenty of people, native americans in particular, managed to do so just fine before them. the problem is "bronson alcott and charles lane said that animal labor was immoral, but found out that digging with your bare hands is hard, and instead of just doing it, they weaseled out of it (taking vacations, making the women do it, and, when it got close to winter, compromising their morals and buying an ox and a cow), and that meant they didn't have any food when december rolled around."
like, you can brainstorm more practical methods of maintaining your values, knowing that sticking to a pure ideal is extremely difficult if not impossible in real life. or you can suck it up and till the soil with your bare hands, because sticking to those pure ideals is more important to you. what you can't do is say you're adhering entirely to your purest beliefs and then be all surprised_pickachu.jpg when it turns out that doesn't result in everything being happy rainbows.
this is a thing that happens in essentially all political circles to some degree: it's not just a thing I see from leftists, but it's also what bothers me the most about libertarians. you need to actually think through your political ideas and consider possible ways that it could fail: because of bad actors, or unexpected issues like a natural disaster, or simply "not everyone is going to just accept that this is a good idea." if you do think that through and go, "yeah, this thing would suck, but that's something I'm willing to do because the alternative is worse," that's fine! but then you need to actually do that! you can't sit on your ass and talk about how wonderful your political ideals are while other people do the work for you!
FURNITURE HELLSCAPE (a song)
video made with ikea's online design tools!
tiktok is doing the same sort of damage to young adults and teenagers that fox news is doing to boomers. i'd even say tiktok is worse with how influential social media is and how it's beginning to take precedent over actual news.
it's so interesting the way zoomers will talk about how old folks are so gullible and will believe everything they see on tv just because tucker carlson is the one saying it, but then turn around and listen to some true crime tuber they believe to be the authority on law and order. you are not immune to biased information.
not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’ for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker
Your mom finding her friend at a store is like unskippable cutscenes
The fucking worst is that as I get older i completly understand the interest to catch up an unreasonable long time because turns out adults just dont get enough time to hang with friends, so catch up next to the Aldi cheese aisle it is
If you know me, you know I’m a fan of “covert” fight scenes. Scenes where two people are fighting but they’re both pretending that something else is going on. This one from Dreadnaught (1981) is one of the best.
By the way, the guy that choreographed this scene, later went on to choreograph The Matrix films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kill Bill.
Who wants to come with me to New Jersey to go on an exciting adventure to find the magical mystery baseball mud
POWERFUL American Potion Ingredient: Secret New Jersey Baseball Mud
The US if areas of states were scaled to be proportional to their population size.
Thoughts?
I think if I touch that I won't be having thoughts for much longer
and while we’re at it, fuck this idea that ONE ACCOUNT has to belong uniquely to ONE PERSON. This is the same thing these silicon valley fucks want; their vision of the future where everyone has a unique biometric ID code implanted in their body is the ultimate extension of Netflix’s “no password sharing” policy. You want to use your friend’s car? Sorry, you can’t, you need to be an authorized user. Your mother wants to let you look something up on her OED account? Too bad! That’s only for her! The concept of perfect market efficiency gives them greedy little money bag eyes.
If I pay money to have a newspaper sent to my house, they don’t charge me extra when I show it to my dad. This password sharing thing isn’t just a Netflix problem; don’t be surprised if it shows up elsewhere in other forms. Stamp this idea out now or we’ll be stuck with it.
covid wastewater monitoring shows there is currently another wave, comparable to the peaks of the alpha and delta variant waves
buy wastewater💎💎✋🤚🚀🚀🚀🚀🌝
I am ANGRY that this doesn’t have sound
HERE’S THE SOUND
In France, I like to think they *remember* what happens when they protest too hard. The French are exceptionally good at protesting, and we should maybe consider learning some things from them.
stuff like this really frustrates me because it’s not like americans are uniquely wimpy little bitches. america has the most expensive military in the world and our police get the surplus. we don’t riot like the french because we are in effect a nation under martial law, with police that will kill us unchecked at any opportunity.
we also have insane incarceration rates, and are held for months to years without trial. once out of jail, our job prospects are shit. if we’re convicted of a federal crime, we can’t vote anymore, and if we’ve been to jail once and are arrested at another protest, we go to jail basically forever.
america the extractive capitalist empire is in a state of active warfare not just against foreign nations but also against its own citizens and generally it wins. that’s how it works. that’s how all of this works. im not saying it’s hopeless, i’m saying americans are fighting against way, way longer odds than you might think for our basic rights to be human beings instead of corporate resources.
