life's short, do something to a bagel

(Credit: Andrew Russell) (link to instagram) (yes this is a legit link)

does treating women like idiots bring you joy?

in this video she describes the act of bombing japan because germany had already surrendered as “going to the grocery store after spending all day doing your makeup because your plans were cancelled and you still want someone to see it”.

i just think a lot of these people in the notes saying “it’s just fun she’s a comedian it’s cute” should like. go read Hiroshima by John Hersey. and then tell me how u feel about the subject.

Call me whatever names you wish, but I think this is a much better (and healthier) attitude than “anyone under 18 should never be allowed to see any sexual imagery ever”

(For reference: this was at the Tom of Finland exhibition, containing actual, queer, kinky af pornography. There were definitely some young people there, perhaps in their late teens. There was even a parent with their baby who was probably too young to understand anything at all. And guess what, all those people are probably going to be fine.)

[ID: a sign saying “Please note: there is no age limit, but the exhibition is not recommended for children due to the explicit sexual imagery it contains. Parental or guardian discretion is advised.”]

i feel these needed to be compiled. feel free to add more genre related posts in the notes if you want

no, they actually do mean kites

as in, a loooooooooong piece of steel cable with the sail at the end of it

of course it's ~basically a sailing ship~ but you can't stick masts on a container ship, that is a disaster waiting to happen for so many reasons

you'd only really get one point to anchor the mast, and that is right where it meets the deck, the containers get it the way of any ropes you might wish to use further up

you'd have to build entirely new container ships or some sort of ... mast container frame to account for the fact that the ships are built to exactly fit the containers, and sticking a mast in the middle of it will mess with that entire system by not being the size of a container

loading and unloading around the masts is going to be hell for the crane drivers and there will be damage to everything given the speed they usually work with, so every harbor will hate you if their cranes even have the height to work around the masts

and if you still decide to stick masts on a container ship, they won't be easily and quickly removeable, so you have to recertify and reclassify the entire ship, and it's going to take ages and ages to do properly, and they'll have to figure out how to do it so it's either expensive as fuck or they may refuse entirely. a steel cable on a winch is by definition removeable (that is, uh, uprollable?) so you don't have to deal with any of this nonsense. hell, if you calculate the pre-determined breaking point properly, it'll even fail safely

this isn't ~ooooooooooh we invented sails! we're the smartest~

this is "hey, we finally figured out how to do this tried and tested thing in a way that works with the circumstances we're working under". it's a good thing, even if it is presented badly

Thank-you for that info ^ because this is very heartening then. Transport really is so awful rn in what it’s doing to our atmosphere. Looked this up and this is actually a really neat prospect for the planet if it gets implemented.

oh that is very cool actually!! i fully retract my reactionary bullshit meme in favor of the new information, thank you :D

"How does that tiny sail pull that giant ship?"

Well, it doesn't. It helps the existing engines, which results in fuel savings. It's a sail-assisted ship.

Kinda like how solar panels on an hybrid car are nowhere near enough to run the car(*), but they help stretch the battery life and reduce the amount of fuel needed.

(*) Roughly speaking, even covering the entire top surface of a sedan-sized car in solar panels is gonna top out around one horsepower. I expect the container sail kites will have a similarly "tiny fraction, but every little big helps" effect.

PSA for artists during disability pride month

CRIPPLE YOUR ART

From experience: Sleeping with a prosthetic limb on is like sleeping with a backpack still strapped to you after a long day of school ok yall gotta stopppppp making art where characters are wearing a prosthetic to chill or nap or have sexy time come onnnn now

Yes yes i acknowledge nuances and suspension of disbelief and magic and exceptions blah blah blah but the point of this post is that as a limb different bitch IM TELLING YOU yall gotta get past the aesthetic of able bodiedness and get comfy w understanding and representing disabled bodies in their natural state bc it's limiting your art and yall don't even know it. Cripple your art, you cowards!!!

(This is a desperate plea from a one-armed Trigun 98 fan art enjoyer)

I was debating pre- and post- smartphone existentialism with an older gentleman today and he stopped part way through and said “Why are you a security guard? Why aren’t you teaching this at some college somewhere?” And I didn’t know what to say so I went with “Well I used to make art but nobody pays an artist”

I want to invoke thought and wonder and introspection and encourage the passions of every soul I meet forever and ever and dig until I find the glorious potential for creation and experience and joy in every single one but unfortunately I must pay rent and so I stand, a meat shield, an NPC with unlockable dialogue

#capitalism brain tells you that anyone interesting must fight to the top of their interest#and precludes the possibility of everyone everyone everyone already being interesting

whats cool about being trans is my parents are totally right. i did kill their beautiful son. im the thing that animates his corpse in an ever more convincing parody of a happy girl. i devoured him from the inside out and now there is nothing left of him and he is dead dead dead and there is only me, with my hollow eyes and dark eyeliner and long hair, and my big smile. my limp, effeminate gestures belie the marionetting of the boy they loved. my fagginess is his death. already his body becomes a fitter home for my parasitism in full; the tits, the hips, the thighs. sorry about your kid. thanks for the biomass <3

My idol

This will never not be funny.

a hero for the ages

This is poetry

that's what i'm saying.. what's with the erasure

I've seen a handful of people on here remarking that she became Muslim but like...framing it as a bad thing...

And like. The thing that defines her entire public life is that she unapologetically and uncompromisingly lived her truth. If you respect her tearing up a picture of the Pope but don't respect her being Muslim, then you don't really respect the person she was. You respect the person you wanted her to be.

She was one of us.

[Image transcript follows]

Tweet(?)/story by aljazeeraenglish in #music: Sinead O'Connor's Muslim identity is missing in obituaries, some fans say.

[Photo of Shuhada' Sadaqat, nee Sinead O'Connor, holding a microphone stand steady and waving at her audience with a smile. She's wearing long sleeves and a hijab.]

As musicians, politicians and fans remember Sinead O'Connor, some muslims are disappointed that the Irish singer and lifelong activist's religious identity is not being highlighted in tributes.

[End description]

finger-licking good

and its ontological opposite:

toe-sucking evil

Colonel Sanders and Quinton Tarantino locked in mortal combat

Very occasionally, Twitter has some good advice.

"if mushrooms are the superior lifeform that really calls the shots on this earth, why haven't they destroyed us yet?" listen to yourself. have we as humans gotten rid of every mountain on the planet just because we are smarter than big rocks? no!! because they don't pose a threat to us. sure some people die rock climbing or skiing and that's tragic but mountains aren't dangerous to us as a global society. do you see where i am going with this. it's your misplaced hubris that makes you think that humankind is worth destroying to a mushroom. we are a part of the mundane landscape on the surface. we pose no threat to the mycelian era. humble yourself

One of life's biggest cons is how often one task turns out to be several smaller tasks in a trench coat.

this is a post about being right about capitalism. would that, if it were true, make him not right about capitalism

but also uh.

The "Marx hated Jews" thing comes from the fact that he wrote an essay titled "On The Jewish Question."

That phrasing raises alarm bells because we associate the term "The Jewish Question" with Nazis, but it was just the way issues like this were phrased within these philosophical circles. And honestly even beyond that it's more of a translation convention than anything else. You could just as easily have translated that title as "Regarding the Matter of Jews."

The essay is actually a response to another philosopher named Bauer, who claimed that Jews would only be liberated if they stopped being Jewish, because true emancipation requires secularism. The essays Marx is responding to are blatantly antisemitic, even by late-19th century standards. Bauer was arguing that Jews who wanted liberation from oppression were basically asking for "special privileges," (in an argument that bears some similarity to modern concepts of "reverse racism") and implying that Jews aren't even oppressed because they control the economy.

Marx's "On The Jewish Question" is basically him saying Bauer is dumb and wrong and antisemitic, and he's being deeply sarcastic for most of the essay.

He does so by throwing Bauer's antisemitism back in his face, by using a series of antisemitic arguments about how the real religion of the Jew is money and huckstering, and so if you want to abolish Judaism, you'd have to abolish economic exploitation. He's responding directly to Bauer's use of antisemitic tropes about how Jews control the economy. He's using Bauer's own antisemitic framework to prove Bauer wrong.

This also goes back to the conflict between Marx and the rest of the Young Hegelians (which Bauer was). He was constantly criticizing them for being too idealistic and abstract, rather than focusing on material realities. His argument here was "You're framing 'the Jewish Question' as if it's a theological problem, but it's not. It's a political and economic one." Because he was Karl Marx and that was his whole thing.

I really don't understand how anyone reads this essay as anything but sarcasm. I get that some of it is probably lost in translation, but the context makes it really clear that Marx is making fun of Bauer. The idea of Jews giving up their religion would have been deeply personal to Marx. He would have understood exactly what it meant for Jews to give up their religion, and how that was an act of oppression rather than liberation from it. Also, Marx and Bauer had already split by the time this essay was written, and they kind of hated each other. Marx wrote a lot of responses to/criticisms of Bauer, and he called Bauer a "right wing fanatic" multiple times.

Like, what's actually more likely here?

Option 1: Karl Marx, a Jewish man, wrote one essay that is totally at odds with all his other analysis on the nature of oppression to be rabidly antisemitic and then basically never discussed the subject again?

Option 2: Karl Marx, a Jewish man and a well-known lover of pettiness and drama, wrote an incredibly sarcastic essay making fun of a raging antisemite that he already he didn't like?

I like this addition. Funny how capitalism, antisemitism and right to exist just hasn’t changed in the last 200 years since this German economist’s time.

That passage about the Suez Canal wasn't written by Marx, it was written by a Marxist economist named David Harvey in 2003. And that's kinda the whole point that people who say 'Marx failed to predict _______' are missing, isn't it? As Mao put it,

'When we say Marxism is correct, it is certainly not because Marx was a "prophet" but because his theory has been proved correct in our practice and in our struggle. We need Marxism in our struggle. In our acceptance of his theory no such formalisation of mystical notion as that of "prophecy" ever enters our minds.'

Yes, a lot of what he said about capitalism in the 1800s is still relevant today, sometimes in ways one might not expect, because we still live under capitalism. But you could easily say that Marx (and Engels) failed to predict the Russian Revolution, failed to predict that the first socialist state in history (that lasted more than a few weeks, anyway) was established in what was then the Russian Empire, just as easily as you could say he 'failed to predict' anything else. But the people who carried out that revolution, and who established that state, or any other socialist state in history, didn't think see it that way. Because the point is not that he got everything right, but that the analytical methods that he developed, dialectical and historical materialism, are correct, and lead to a correct understanding of what forces shape societies, and only by using those methods could the revolutionaries understand their situation, succeed in overthrowing their oppressors, and establish socialism.

The part about Marx's supposed antisemitism is more or less correct though, it's a ridiculous, willful misunderstanding based in total ignorance of history, and anyone who repeats it is either themselves antisemitic or is willing to listen to antisemites, yes even if they are Jewish.

Last couple additions are all correct, just adding though that during the Cold War anticommunists liked to selectively quote that essay in a bad faith effort to smear Marx as antisemitic. Somewhere I have a copy of a 1950s reprint of the essay with the parts that sound worst out of context bolded and underlined, so if you skim through it you get the opposite impression of what Marx intended. So basically people who go "wasn't Marx an antisemite though? 🤔" are (whether they know if or not) trying to sell you on lukewarm propaganda from 50 years ago.

being so fr when I say that transmisogyny has put feminism back like 50 years

what i thought we had distanced ourselves from was the reduction of women to vaginas and wombs and the ability to bear children. i thought we had progressed past ‘dresses are for women and pants are for men.’ i thought we progressed past the idea that someone is less of a woman if she does not adhere strictly to beauty standards. i thought we progressed past the idea that naturally being comfortable adhering to highly feminine standards is vulgar. but i (sarcastically) guess no one could have predicted that trans-exclusive feminism would be the downfall of all the progress we’ve made

— Quote by Leslie Feinberg, from TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.

the new dj crazytimes song … now that’s what I call music!

This song by Estonian band Push Up is the greatest achievement of this trend:

The song features ground-shattering lyrics such as:

Woman: oh baby be my Spiderman

Deep-voiced man: I am Spiderman