#“[Their] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

[the-local-bohg-witch]

honestly all I can say on the election is that we just have to keep going. I know it feels impossible, but the fight against fascism always has. If we give up, they win. Take a breather now, if you in the us stock up on essentials and have a plan in place, but do not give up. I'm thinking a lot about history and what has happened in the past, and the thing is, marginalized people have always survived through so much horror. We can't fail that legacy with giving up now. Find your community, talk to you neighbours, get a library card, stand up in every way you can. Both to fight for the future and to have some hope. I think of the quote by Ursula K. Le Guin "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art." we have to have faith that we can fix things, other wise we never will I love you all <3 take care of yourself and the people around you

[hopeworth]

SUN COMING UP ON A DREAM COME AROUND ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM THE EMPIRE NOW SUN COMING UP ON A WORLD THAT’S EASY NOW ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW

[eleanor-arroway]

“The job is the unquestioned goal for all free citizens of the world – the ultimate public good. It is the clearly stated exit goal of all education and the only sanctioned reason for acquiring knowledge. But if we think about it for a moment, jobs are not what we want. We want shelter, food, strong relationships, a livable habitat, stimulating learning activity, and time to perform valued tasks in which we excel. I don’t know of many jobs that will allow access to more than two or three of those things at a time, unless you have a particularly benevolent owner or employer.

I am often told that I should be grateful for the progress that Western civilization has brought to these shores. I am not. This life of work-or-die is not an improvement on preinvasion living, which involved only a few hours of work a day for shelter and sustenance, performing tasks that people do now for leisure activities on their yearly vacations: fishing, collecting plants, hunting, camping, and so forth. The rest of the day was for fun, strengthening relationships, ritual and ceremony, cultural expression, intellectual pursuits, and the expert crafting of exceptional objects. I know this is true because I have lived like this, even in this era where the land is only a pale shadow of the abundance that once was. We have been lied to about the “harsh survival” lifestyles of the past. There was nothing harsh about it. If it was so harsh – such a brutish, menial struggle for existence – then we would not have evolved to become the delicate, intelligent creatures that we are.”

- Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World

[salteytakesonmanga]

Normally I tend to agree with Zoro in these situations but I have to agree that Luffy is absolutely right here. You can’t just NOT go through the special entrance to start the special journey!

This is another personality trait that gets played for laughs but Luffy has a very keen sense of the emotional and symbolic importance of things like these. There are definitely times when his arbitrary decisions about “because it’s cooler that way” are patently ridiculous, but when it really matters this kind of emotional intelligence is crucial.

Humans need ritual, story, magic… all that jazz, to give their lives meaning. Luffy may not understand it in that way, but he does know that when you allow yourself to be impressed with the world around you, when you find things special and meaningful, your life is a lot more fun.

There’s another layer to this that is part of what makes Luffy so powerful. As Terry Pratchett has said, you need to believe in fun little lies like tooth fairies and Easter bunnies as practice for believing in the big lies, like Truth and Justice and Love and Freedom. When you put all these things together, you start to see how Luffy’s unwavering excitement for silly little rituals lets him believe in other things that should be impossible, like beating an Emperor or becoming the King of Pirates. Or finding the One Piece. And when you combine that with his Devil Fruit power…

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

Thinking about how Adam Young made War, Famine, and Pollution vulnerable by saying they’re not real, that they’re just like nightmares. Maybe that wasn’t true before he said it.

Thinking about how there’s a pattern of treating these things as powerful forces outside our control (gods, horsemen, unavoidable outcomes of natural laws). But then we figure out what we’re doing to make them happen, and that gives us the ability to modify them. Calling them human-made makes them so.

[clonerightsagenda]

You shall not outlast the beast. Even the great and ruined world may not see a future beyond its trembling footfalls. But it will die. Its writhing throes will be abominable, aggrieved, and monstrous. The worst of times may be yet to come. It will devour every servant - no matter how loyal - in its long centuries of final desperation. It will curse every witness - no matter how compliant - in its long years of final spite. But it will die, and its rot will sink into the soil, and if we are very fortunate in the future to come, a future we cannot see beyond the stomach of the beast’s final devourings, some tainted but brave new form may grow outside of its desolation- -and as it perishes, the thrusts of your spear will be one bold, dark scar amongst the innumerable wounds that killed it. Your life’s work will be one teeming page in the book of its final reckoning. It will die, our great and terrible beast. Because in the end it was only another animal. We know this, because it hungers. And so one day it must perish.

has the Cairn Maiden been reading Ursula K Le Guin quotes

[overthemushroomcave]

I just miss being 12 and having enough space in my pre internet knowing mind to create just for the sake of giving something life, without the notion of monetization or growing your socials. Idk if there's any coming back to that, maybe gotta wait til I'm 70 and for all this competitive facades to fall (hopefully)

[viiridiangreen]

Apparitor stared at the figure with hot distaste. “He believes that the isoamorous—people like you and I—must be consumed by incredible passion. Like addicts. Why else would we persist in our obscene fascinations, when the whole world is against us?”

Baru remembered her fathers flirting on the beach, fearless and beautiful. The whole world had not been against them, no matter what the Empire said.

And that was the beginning of hope: if the world had not always been as the Empire demanded, then it might not always be as the Empire demanded.

- The Monster, Baru Cormorant

[igottatho]

A new world is possible, my friends. Le Guin famously said: “The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

We WILL free Palestine

[aceoflights]

So, what are everyones favourite Ursula K. Le Guin quotes? Please tell me

[thebrainofmae]

thinking about how hadestown said No answer will be heard to the question no one asks, so I’m asking if it’s true [what they say], and how black sails said If no one remembers a time before there was an England, then no one can imagine a time after it and how Ursula Le Guin said We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings and how fat ham said We just gotta…uh…commit./Why though?/Cause this is a tragedy. We tragic./I’m not and how hadestown said the kingdom will fall for a song and how black sails said They paint the world full of shadows and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true and most of all how Hadestown said It’s a tragedy. But we sing it anyway.

[alpaca-clouds]

The Power Of Media

I need do address one thing, because I see that kinda mindset creep up again and again.

Basically, under postings about utopian media, be it Star Trek, Solarpunk, or - heck - just bare Hopepunk, sometimes people will just go: "Media does not do shit. It does not change the world."

And that just is... demonstrably fault and a very defeatist attitude.

Now, one thing first: Yes, media on its own will not change the world. It will not. If you have this mindset, you are right in so far. We can have endless amounts of hopeful media and the world will not change from it.

But...

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. - Ursula K. LeGuin

This quote of Ursula K. LeGuin is very powerful to me. Because it really captures the issue very well.

See. Right now we get bombarded with capitalist propaganda left and right. It already starts in school, we will often get it at home and obviously in media again and again.

It is so hard to escape, that to many it is hard to imagine that there ever could be anything else. I mean, we even have the issue within Solarpunk. When I read through those Solarpunk Anthologies, I will again and again find stories, that feature either capitalist worlds - or a world that has to be rebuild after the apocalypse. Because people really struggle imagining how it could be otherwise.

And this is why fiction is so important. Why Hopepunk is so important.

A lot of young people right now are able to see that the system is broken, that it has left them behind. Most young folks, who do not come from generational wealth, see that they will under the current system never own their own house. Their own retirement seems to be rather unlikely. And that is, if they do not die before from either the effects of climate change, from some pandemic through which we have to work because line needs to go up, or just in general because the health care system does not take care of them.

And these young people are willing to fight. They are. But right now they are only fighting against a system. They do not know what they fight for.

I know, for some this might sound like a small thing. But it is not. Especially not in a world, where more and more people are struggling with their mental health.

People need hope.

And again: No, it is not enough on its own. Just hopeful fiction on its own runs the danger of just being endless escapism.

We also need to offer mutual aid for each other. We also need to organize. And, yeah, we need to protest and actually get out there to fight.

But don't underestimate the power of fiction, when it comes to giving people something to fight for.

We know that media and stories have these powers. It is, after all, why those in powers dripfeed us the kinda stories that vilify those, who want to change the system. That tell us, that "everything is fine, okay, just trust the good billionaires" and what not. Because they understand this power.

And we should not leave this power to them along.

[librarycards]

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” Fantasy and science fiction never meant escapism for Ursula Le Guin. The dragons of Earthsea and the reimagined genders of The Left Hand of Darkness were always lenses, lenses she ground in order to sharpen her readers’ focus on everyday life. Indeed, for Le Guin, there was no difference between the stories she invented and everyday stories about the institutions governing our world. The dragons of Earthsea and capitalism are woven from similar material: it is imagination all the way down. James Baldwin said not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed without being faced. The word for facing things in Le Guin is recognition, or you might even say re-cognition. Her characters—and readers—find themselves forced to think again. When they do so, what had seemed a fundamental truth about their universe turns out to be anything but. [...] Here is what I learned from Le Guin: Imagination is a beautiful and a shadowy builder. Over the generations, it supplied language, gods, music, arts, pretty much everything we sum up as culture. But imagination’s power comes at a familiar price: all power corrupts. Looking at those delightful surfaces painted onto the world by past acts of imagination, it can become hard to catch sight of what is really there, underneath. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has a wonderful phrase: “a picture held us captive.” It applied to divine right of kings at one time, and may apply now to capitalism. Ending a picture’s captivity involves cracking common sense, and that is where some of my favorite writers come in. Jane Austen’s wit helped her readers peer beneath the surface of Regency England’s marriage market; Mark Twain’s Huck Finn tore aside the racial lies of 19th century America. During the Nixon era, Le Guin’s fantasy and her science fiction did the same: she pushed aside captivating pictures and let the light shine in. Then she returned to Earthsea decades later and did it all over again.

John Plotz, Dragons Are People Too: Ursula Le Guin’s Acts of Recognition.

[salteytakesonmanga]

Very annoyed dishonorable mention for changing this line from “I’m going to get him and break his nose” to this muddle.

Luffy always says exactly what he’s going to do, and then he always does exactly that. It’s part of the subtle magic of One Piece, it’s why the theorycrafters froth at the mouth over every single word in the most innocuous of phrasings, because Oda drops hints like this everywhere. And Luffy never lies, even unknowingly.

Arlong says his nose is unbreakable. Arlong says it’s impossible to break his nose. Zoro, the strongest member of the crew after Luffy, couldn’t put even a scratch on it. So when Luffy says he’s going to break it we’re meant to think “no way, how could he, Zoro couldn’t do it with a sword, Arlong is using it like a frickin harpoon, this is another one of Luffy’s wacky ideas.”

But what if Luffy could do it? What if Luffy could do something that everyone said and everyone believed was impossible? Wouldn’t that make you start to think… maybe something else that we were told was impossible could actually be possible?

[nicolegendary]

we live in a top!eddie/bottom!buck fandom majority and its power seems inescapable. but then, so did the divine right of kings