#Quotes & extracts

[yourgirlfoe]

Ya'll ever go, "fuckin' hell, I know this smell!" and it's the smell of a February evening from 2017 ?

[earlywintermourning]

that old lady and her damn vanilla extract

[p1nkshield]

Jason: What are you making?

Dick: Haute cocoa.

Jason: Hot cocoa?

Dick: No. Haute cocoa. I am making the best, and fanciest cup of hot chocolate in gotham.

Jason: Is that a cup of corn starch? How much milk are you using?

Dick: Equal parts!

Jason:...Equal parts?

Dick: I gotta make it thick somehow! All fancy hot cocoas are thick. Now where is Alfred's homemade vanilla...

Jason: mmkay. ALFRED! DICK IS MAKING NON-NEWTONIAN HOT CHOCOLATE WITH YOUR GOOD VANILLA!

Dick: Shh Shh Shh! No nonono please! Why would you tell him that!

Alfred: Master Dick...

Dick: -hOW DID YOU GET HERE SO FAST!

[mintytrifecta]

[somerabbitholes]

— index cards, moyra davey

[quixoticanarchy]

Finished reading Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara and he does a good job showing how the cobalt supply chain is inextricable from incredible human suffering, near-slavery, rampant exploitation, environmental devastation, and child labor. And it’s very clear that no promise a tech or battery manufacturer makes that their supply chain is clean means literally anything bc industrially and artisanally mined cobalt are mixed into the same supply untraceably. And the book also covers the fact that cobalt supplies are finite and when the DRC’s cobalt is exhausted the industry will move elsewhere, rinse and repeat, and the people in the Congo will be left with the ongoing and unremediated -maybe irremediable - damage. All of this so that we can have smartphones, electric vehicles, iPads, electric scooters, almost anything with a rechargeable battery.

It’s also clear that the tech and battery industries are interested in good PR and making empty statements about human rights when they should be taking responsibility for the working conditions of small-scale miners (and minors) dying at the bottom of their supply chains. What Kara doesn’t really address is the demand side of this equation, not just the demand by companies whose products use cobalt-containing batteries but also the consumers sustaining that demand, who buy every new smartphone and eagerly pin their hopes on electric vehicles to let us keep our car-dependent world without the fossil fuel guilt. The book takes it for granted that cobalt will be required in high quantities for consumer electronics and for “green” tech, and to some extent this is true - as in, none of those demands or uses will cease overnight and in the meantime we should worry about how to address industrial and business practices and government corruption in order to treat Congolese miners as human beings.

But it feels incomplete without also asking questions like: should that demand continue? Can it? Do we need this many devices? What costs are acceptable? Can we really have our cake (smartphones, EVs, etc) and eat it too (slavery-free, non-exploitative supply chains that don’t kill the people at the bottom and lay waste to the environment)? What if - as the book would seem to suggest - we really cannot? If one goal of the book is for people to realize what conditions underlie the extraction of cobalt, what action is then incumbent upon us? Personal consumer choice will not undo all this harm, but it is a necessary step in rethinking or attempting other ways to live. Is it a right to have a smartphone, a new one every year or two, if it comes at the price of other people’s human rights? At what point do we say that it is not an acceptable cost that the extractive industries are perpetuating neocolonialism and near-slavery in order that we should have comfortable lives?

We know we have to stop relying on fossil fuels or we’ll burn down the planet (to a greater degree than is already locked in) but the “green energy transition” is not clean at all. Capitalism seeks the lowest price for labor and the highest profits; obviously these extractive relationships owe a lot of their horror to being conducted in a capitalist milieu. But even thinking about, say, a socialist world instead, if it aspires to still provide smartphones and electric vehicles en masse and maintain the comforts and conveniences of the “Western” lifestyle then we would still be relying on massive amounts of resource extraction with no guarantee of less suffering. The devices are themselves part of the problem. The demand for them and the extent to which “modern” life in “developed” countries relies upon them is part of the problem. It is unsustainable. It is built on blood and it makes a mockery of purported values of dignity, equality, and human rights. The lives of Congolese cobalt miners are tied to how we in the “developed” or colonizer countries live and consume. I do not think their lives will change substantially unless ours do.

[aquiescentmoon]

I want to see my mother’s childhood, wish there was a thing like i kept my palm on her forehead so I can see her vision, something like that...

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

Karkat: WHY IS IT THAT WHENEVER I SEE YOU EAT, IT'S SOME DUMB SHIT LIKE BUILD GRIST BREAD OR SOPOR PIE?

Gamzee: ThEy HaTe To SeE aN iNoVaToR cReAtE a MaStErPiEcE

Jade, taking a bite of fully irradiated steak: it's like no one knows how to take care of their body anymore!

[marejadilla]

“… To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives… locked outside of all that's real… … to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong ... believe me, (can you?)... what's wrong…” ― Anne Sexton, "A Self-Portrait in Letters", (extracts)

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

Sanna Wani, “Who is the Sun, Asking for Sleep?”, My Grief, the Sun // Brenna Twohy, A Coworker Asks Me If I Am Sad, Still

[votive]

— Alejandra Pizarnik, Small Prose Poems

excerpts from: Extracting the Stone of Madness

[positivelypresent]

Your wisdom is yours to keep!

[daurnut]

My roman empire is that no one is perfect. That everyone is too busy dealing with their own insecurity to notice yours. That person who you think is perfect is equally battling his own demons and is just as insecure as you are.

There's comfort in knowing that you're not alone, that everyone is just trying to survive too

[softlysilverfountainsfall]

"But no true Man nor Elf yet free / would ever speak that blasphemy"

Beren and Finrod are willing to blow their cover right in front of Sauron himself rather than repeat these words:

"Death to light, to law, to love! / Cursed be moon and stars above! / May darkness everlasting old / that waits outside in surges cold / drown Manwë, Varda, and the sun! / May all in hatred be begun / and all in evil ended be / in the moaning of the endless Sea!"

So...how do the elves perform this part of the Lay of Lethian? Because these lines are from the Lay, and the elves must sing and perform the Lay fairly often since it's one of their most beloved stories.

I find it difficult to believe that they would willingly and frequently repeat the blasphemous and seditious words that Finrod and Been were willing to lose their lives not to repeat just for a song (however important that song might be). If nothing else, it would be very disrespectful to the heroes they are trying to immortalize who did in fact die in large part because they blew their cover by not repeating those words.

So, my theory is that the words quoted above from the Lay of Leithian are sung and performed but are not actually the words that Sauron and the orcs used. In other words, I believe that the verse in the Lay is a toned-down or altered version (it is a little overdramatic, after all) of the actual oath to darkness because "no true Man nor Elf yet free / would ever speak that blasphemy"

[sea-changed]

"Allied officials and journalists, especially but certainly not only Jews or leftists, recorded their impressions [after Germany's surrender] in virtually identical terms: no one, it seemed, had known anything about the atrocities that had been committed in the name of the Volk [German people]. Critical observers were particularly angered and sometimes mystified by this determined insistence on innocence of everyday complicity as well as Nazi atrocities--the 'enigma of German irresponsibility,' aptly named by U.S. Military Government official Moses Moskowitz. "'The Germans have talked themselves into innocence. We cannot, therefore, expect them to atone for a sin they do not admit to having committed,' he concluded with bitter resignation. They 'complain[ed]' that they were the victims who had been 'deceived and betrayed' (belogen und betrogen) and, even when directly confronted with evidence of German crimes, chose to blame the Nazis that none of them had ever been. "Beneath the Germans' defensiveness there lurked also, Jews sensed, some inchoate shame that led to a deep resentment of Jewish survivors, whose memories were a constant affront and reminder of German crimes and losses. 'The Germans,' Jews joked among themselves, 'will never forgive us for what they did to us.'"

Atina Grossman, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007). Emphasis mine.

[somerabbitholes]

An Area of Darkness, V. S. Naipaul