lorxus-is-a-fox - Tumblr blog

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

should is such a funny word

frankly: they're not gonna. the DNC is a goddamn steamliner, not a speedboat. they can see this iceberg coming half a sea away and still hit it head-on.

this is the medical definition of sundowning (x)

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

this is the medical definition of sundowning (x)

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

I think the fattest wild pigeon in a given city should be venerated as a sort of civic deity.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

tl;dr: he's not sundowning, he's just fucking depressingly-old and well out of his healthspan and the political forces that have made forcing one or another depressingly-old dude well out of their healthspan to have command and control over the world's biggest military make me cry in frustration for pointlessness

this is the medical definition of sundowning (x)

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

inspired by the ‘your afternoon was already ruined’ post

Death Star Stormtroopers: “Freeze!”

Han: (panicking, trying to come up with a lie): Woah there don’t shoot, uh, you can’t shoot us because—because this guy is Darth Vader’s son! You don’t want to be responsible for shooting Darth Vader’s own flesh and bone do you?”

Luke: *glares incredulously*

Stormtroopers: “That is the dumbest thing—”

Leia: (done at this point, absolutely done with this rescue, better than Han at lying) “Exactly! Why would we tell you something so phenomenally insane if it weren’t true! Why do you think Darth Vader is so obsessed with finding Rebels, huh? Call him he’ll tell you!”

Luke: (also done, much better than Han at lying): “Or you could just shoot us; I’m sure my father, Darth Vader, inventor of the lightsaber, would be thrilled to meet the men who killed his son and his son’s friends.” *waves lightsaber arrogantly*

Stormtrooper 1: “Maybe we should call this in. I mean—he’s got a lightsaber, so that’s—that’s Vader stuff anyway.”

Stormtrooper 2: “are you kidding me right now?”

Leia: *shoots them while they’re distracted*

Han: “…We’re friends?”

//

Tarkin: “The rebels said what? You incompetent fool, how could you buy such an absurd stalling—”

Vader: “My…son…”

Tarkin:

Tarkin: Oh fuck THIS.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

My suggestion to boost birth rates: 3-day-workweek

Again the kind of thing that might help at the margins a little, for people who want kids but are worried about having enough time to raise them, but the problem is a lot of people just don't want kids! And thanks to the sexual revolution, they don't have to have them! Which is good. Being raised by parents who don't want you probably sucks a lot. Having to have kids when you don't want to probably also sucks a lot.

Honestly, for marginal fixes that might really make a bigger difference, subsidizing childcare, reducing the social expectation to never let your kids out of your sight, and affording children (especially older children) more independence, to make the whole process of parenting easier, might also help a lot. Right now we demand extremely high engagement from parents for all 18 years of their kids' childhood to be considered a "good parent." And that's not only stressful for parents, it can be really oppressive for children, who should have lots of free time to spend with their peers. Given the world is much safer now than it is when our grandparents were kids, you would expect attitudes/anxieties around child safety to have gotten more relaxed over the decades, but the opposite has been true.

Also funding schools more so they can run social clubs and after school activities for kids to spend time with their peers and also figure out what hobbies/interests/sports they like also seems like it would be helpful, and so these things are not only the province of well-off upper-middle-class-and-wealthier children. Mass transit so that parents don't have to constantly shuttle older children to and from every activity they participate in. Better social safety net so people don't have to worry about having kids then falling into poverty and not being able to take care of them.

Idk, I just think this is a really hard problem that arises due to diverse factors, and can only be solved with a very diverse set of approaches.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

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[lorxus-is-a-fox]

I decided to draw this thing based off of a bigger idea I had when the PPG reboot started using memes (so like… right from the beginning). Kids HATE memes/fads when adults or corporations who have no clue what they’re doing or why it was supposed to be cool or funny in the first place use them. ‘Cause then they just suck out your life essence and make you wanna die. So… clearly they should be used as a tool of evil! To destroy children! And what better lame-o to use a tool like that than THIS chimpy lame-o!

Anyway… enjoy/be terrified!

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

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[lorxus-is-a-fox]

it's true that Shakespeare has several--all of them among the comedies (As You Like It, Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing etc), not sure if there's any significance to that?

yes

it's that they're all 16th c. sex jokes, probably

no I'm not shitposting, Much Ado About Nothing is the most famous such, right after As You Like It A2S7's whole deal

From what I understand giving works of music or art like specific titles, set out by the artist rather than just what the art community calls it (generally just what it depicts) is very recent. I'm not sure exactly how recent. 19th century? Look into like any old painting, specifically it's name, it's either a nickname or just a bare description of who/whats in it. Ditto music. The title is a weird modernity thing. Something about legibility, and the tyranny of the artist...

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

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[lorxus-is-a-fox]

my 84-year-old Korean grandmother for DNC candidate!

strong ties to our westward allies; on board with a strategy of Chinese containment

principled anticommunist

sound business sense, long life experience

speaks better English than current frontrunners

crucially, will totally just delegate complicated policy decisions to me personally don't worry about it :)

its unfortunate that in addition to being 81 biden seems to be like. not even a particularly sharp 81. i mean i havent met that many 81 year olds. but like. he seems no sharper than my 93 year old grandpa. however its hard to tell what my grandpa is ever saying so who can tell

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

I enjoy how Aztec gods have English epithets like "The Flayed Lord" but hes the god of agriculture.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

One of the funniest things you see from Christian evangelists is when they show up in a culture and they end up LOVING Christianity way more than the evangelists.

Like, in Tengrii, the indigenous Mongolian religion. One of the most impressive things a shaman can do is come back from the dead. And one of their major symbols is the cross representing the cardinal directions, obviously an important concept for a nomadic society.

When they learned that the Christians had a shaman who was killed On The Cross and THEN came back to life, they went absolutely nuts for Christianity. To the point where the evangelists had to kinda reign them in like "no no no he's not a shaman he's some different shit please stop depicting Christ as a ghost falcon"

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

I think there are three large classes of socialist concern, which are not reducible to each other and which require different types of solutions. I would describe them as follows:

Distributional concerns — Markets tend towards inequality, and thus even in times of abundance fail to allocate resources to people who need them.

Concerns over autonomy — Private control of resources, especially when it is highly concentrated, comes at the cost of the autonomy of those who don't control the resources. As a significant special case of this, private control of the means of production deprives workers of autonomy over their own work, which constitutes most of their waking lives. Concentration of property in the hands of the few leaves most people with no choice but to sell their labor, turning them into workers deprived of autonomy in the above sense.

Humanistic concerns — Markets optimize for specific outcomes and, furthermore, the desirable properties of market economies are predicated on the existence of firms which optimize for profit. In both cases these optimization procedures are premature; they do not factor in the full human condition and thus come at the cost of many things which people find desirable.

In my view, a successful socialist program must at least attempt to address all three of these concerns. Often when debating other socialists, I feel that they err by focusing on some of these concerns to the exclusion of the others.

I have listed these concerns in order of how difficult I believe them to be to solve. Concern (1) can, in fact, be solved relatively easily even within a liberal economic system, by implementing massive redistributive taxes that equalize wealth. I want to stress that this proposal is still radical by the standards of any nation on earth today, but a solution is easy to imagine. And all these problems are interrelated; solving (1), for instance, would go a long way towards remedying (2).

Concern (2) can also, I think, be solved or at least greatly mitigated under a market framework, though not a classical liberal one. Replacing private firms wholesale with worker co-ops would go along way towards addressing (2), and in combination with the above solution for (1) provides I think the easiest to conceptualize vision of what a workable socialist (socialist enough) economy might look like.

Concern (3) is by far the hardest to address—it is in essence just the alignment problem as applied to economic systems. Suffice it to say, the problem remains open.

A common theme I see in debates between certain (usually more liberal-leaning) practically-minded socialists and certain (usually more radical) utopian-minded socialists is that the practical socialist will propose some solution that aims to address (1) and (2), and the more utopian-minded socialist will respond with vague and often not particularly coherent accusations of insufficient radicalism. The practical socialist will often then reply by dismissing the utopian's criticisms as nothing but hot air, as unserious radical posturing. But I think this represents an unfortunate misunderstanding. That utopian is often pointing at something real, even if it is articulated in a way that offends more pragmatic sensibilities. Concern (3) touches on every part of human life, I think it's fair to say, and though the habit of incoherently blaming everything that goes wrong on capitalism is not that useful, it doesn't point at nothing.

The alignment problem is not solved in the general case, but there are things we can change about a system to try and make it more aligned with specific, known goals. So the job of a good socialist (or really, anyone interested in any kind of political reform) should then be to listen to the ways in which people are dissatisfied with their lives, even when articulated poorly, and try to accrue an understanding of the most recurrent and significant ways in which the present system fails to satisfy people. Then you can look for specific tweaks that will more readily accommodate the things people in fact seem to want. But crucially, this task in empirical—you cannot come upon the most desirable tweaks rationally. It's also empirical in a way that is difficult to approach with any kind of scientific rigor. You have to listen to people, and try to understand them on their own terms. You have to try to understand where people are coming from even if they phrase things in a way that you very much dislike, a way that irritates you or makes you feel threatened.

As I've said before, "listen to marginalized voices" is oft-misused, but not actually incorrect as a description of the practical obligations of anyone who wants to consider themself a leftist.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

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[lorxus-is-a-fox]

"When i grew up, i had to walk to school by myself uphill both ways"

~guy who emigrated from an escher engraving