#amazon is a mosquito

[procrastinating-falcon]

Crazy how in media, it’s the Amazon that’s made to seem as “oooh scary” when most of the fucked up giant fauna is in North America

[crtter]

Now I’ve gotten many an American on this post talking about how they’ve driven longer than this (about 19h) before. Which is funny, because I never said it’s an impossible trip to make! Just one I had yet to do it myself. Bit out of the way, y’know? It’s not unheard of for a person from, say, Texas to have never been to New York to see the Statue of Liberty, is it? But it’s not like people over here don’t go on trips this long or even longer, though! It’s pretty common, actually. In fact, check this out:

We’re about the same size! You’re the big guys from the north and we’re the big guys from the south. I often say that the town I’m going to move to in the future is “a quick trip away” from the city I live in right now but it’s actually five hours away, heh.

That being said, though: We’re talking driving here, you silly goose! Bringing up planes is cheating. Of course 1000 km is nothing if you’re flying there. It’s like three hours. Barely enough time to see a movie. I’ve traveled like 11000 km by plane before (my dad lives in Saudi Arabia). In fact, I’ve been to Disney World in Florida myself! it’s the number one international travel choice for Brazilians, apparently. Warm enough so we don’t keel over and die of exposure AND Mickey’s there.

”How come you’ve never seen the Amazon rainforest if you’re from Brazil?” big country

[nilasvesture]

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[dachmanarts]

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[bonzatrading]

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[bogleech]

Reminder that a truly monumental thing happened last year which many of you foolishly overlooked.

Life-sized fake cockroaches in translucent brown rubber have existed since before I was born, in dozens of subtly different models usually sold by the bagful. A classic cheap children's toy, prank, Halloween decoration, crafting item, gaming token, you name it!

Scorpions, lizards and centipedes have also existed in this style for at least ten or fifteen years....

....But only in 2024 I think (wait, maybe it was 2023???) did a never-before-seen cricket variation come into existence. I can't find non-Amazon sources of them but if you need them from Amazon this is where you get 100 at a time.

Now if only they'd make a few more. Obviously the only animals chosen for this esteemed status are those that can believably be small and look uniformly brownish or blackish at a glance, so with respect to that aesthetic principle here are my top ten most wanted small bulk brownish rubber bugs, in order beginning with my personal most wanted:

ticks

fleas

mosquitoes

isopods

earwigs

weevils

slugs

bed bugs

wasps

scarab beetles

Actually does @archiemcphee still pay attention to tumblr? Archie Mcphee can you make us some new kinds of bulk plain brownish rubber bugs. You made the world's first bags of plastic tardigrades and the world thanks you for that.

I'm talking about bigger bags of much lower quality bug though. The quality can't be too good. It's gotta be like "five for a dollar" quality at best.

Like did you know these big, expensive Japanese import plastic isopods are just about the only fake isopods??? That nobody's just made bags of little life-size fake isopods?

[brandwhorestarscream]

Building a mad scientist lair, go

I have literally no reason for this I just wanna have fun lol :) Please help me make a silly lab if this gets 100 votes I'll draw it

[atavist]

Ayahuasca, fortune-tellers, a heroic dog, and more: Inside the race to find four children who survived a plane crash in the Amazon. “Mayday,” issue no. 147, is now available:

Disoriented, Lesly unbuckled her seat belt and wrenched Cristin from her mother’s arms. She used one of the baby’s diapers to stem the flow of blood coming from her head. The smell of fuel filled her nostrils. Debris was scattered everywhere. Lesly saw that Hermán Mendoza and Hernando Murcia were dead, but that Soleiny and Tien were unharmed.

With Cristin in her arms, Lesly led Soleiny and Tien out of the plane. A few yards away, she built a makeshift camp, stringing up a towel and a mosquito net to keep the constant rain and bugs at bay. Then the four children waited to be rescued. Tien kept asking when their mother would wake up. Lesly worried that her brother was too young to grasp the concept of death, so she said she didn’t know.

No one came for them, and Lesly knew it wouldn’t be long before predators arrived, attracted by the bodies. So she gathered a few of Magdalena’s clothes, some farina she found in Mendoza’s bag, and juice, soda, and candy from elsewhere on the plane. She salvaged a few other items that seemed useful: scissors, a first aid kit, diapers, a baby bottle. Then she led her siblings west, using the sun as their guide.

[andy-15-07]

Hi, I would love to see a Paulxactress fix where Pedro Pascal is like a father figure to her and Pedro give Paul a hard time.

Irish Charm

PAIRING:Paul Mescal x reader

WORD COUNT: 1229 | requests are open (send requests, I will gladly answer them all)

Paul Mescal Masterlist

The Los Angeles sun beat down mercilessly on the set of "The Lost City of Z." Y/n, drenched in sweat, swatted at a pesky mosquito. "Pedro," she groaned, "I swear, these bugs are out to get me."

Pedro, ever the stoic observer, raised an eyebrow. "Embrace the Amazon, mi amor. It's part of the experience."

Y/n rolled her eyes, "Easy for you to say. You're practically one with the jungle."

Pedro chuckled, his deep voice a rumble that always sent a shiver down her spine. "Years of training, chica. You'll get there."

Their banter was a familiar rhythm, a comfortable dance of playful teasing and genuine affection. Y/n had met Pedro on the set of "Kingsman: The Golden Circle," and an instant, unlikely bond had formed. He was older, wiser, a seasoned veteran of the industry. She, a rising star, still finding her footing. He saw something in her – a raw talent, a fierce spirit, and a vulnerability that reminded him of his own younger self.

He became her mentor, her confidante, the closest thing she had to a father figure. He'd offer tough love, honest criticism, and unwavering support. He'd scold her for staying out too late, worry about her dating life, and celebrate every single one of her successes.

"Speaking of experience," Pedro said, a mischievous glint in his eyes, "I hear you're working with a certain Irish charmer these days."

Y/n blushed, "Oh, Pedro."

"Don't 'Oh, Pedro' me, chica. I've seen those eyes. They sparkle like the goddamn Milky Way."

"He's... nice."

Pedro snorted. "Nice? Paul Mescal is a force of nature. He could charm the birds out of the trees." He paused, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Tell me, does he treat you right?"

Y/n hesitated. "He's... good. He's kind, and funny, and incredibly talented."

"Talented, yes. But is he kind to your soul? Does he make you feel safe?"

Y/n smiled. "He does. He makes me feel seen, you know? Like I'm not just an actress, but a person."

Pedro nodded approvingly. "Good. Good. Now, about this 'Normal People'…"

Y/n groaned. "Pedro, no."

"I've seen it. Twice. I'm a fan. But I'm also a concerned friend. I've seen the way he looks at you, chica. That boy is head over heels."

"He's just… nice."

"Nice? He's like a puppy dog, always by your side, those eyes full of wonder. And don't even get me started on the accent." Pedro chuckled. "Sounds like melted butter."

Y/n laughed, "You're impossible."

"Just looking out for you, mi amor. Don't get hurt."

Y/n knew he meant well. Pedro's protectiveness stemmed from a deep-seated love for her. He'd seen the industry chew people up and spit them out, and he wanted to shield her from the worst of it.

A few weeks later, Y/n found herself on the set of her new film, a romantic comedy opposite Paul. The chemistry between them was undeniable, both on and off screen. They spent hours dissecting scenes, their laughter echoing through the soundstage.

One evening, after a particularly long day, Paul invited her to grab dinner. They found a cozy Italian restaurant, the warm glow of the candlelight casting a romantic haze over the room.

"You know," Paul said, taking a sip of his wine, "Pedro keeps talking about you."

Y/n raised an eyebrow. "He does?"

"Yeah, always asking how I'm treating his 'little bird'."

Y/n chuckled. "He's so protective."

"He seems like a great guy. A real mentor."

"He is. He's like the older brother I never had."

Paul smiled. "You're lucky to have him."

The evening progressed, the conversation flowing easily. They talked about their childhoods, their dreams, their hopes for the future. As the night deepened, Paul leaned closer, his eyes searching hers.

"Y/n," he began, his voice husky, "I know we've only been working together for a short time, but…"

Y/n's heart pounded in her chest. This was it. The moment she'd been waiting for.

"But what, Paul?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

He reached across the table, his hand gently brushing against hers. "I think I'm falling for you."

Y/n felt a wave of warmth wash over her. She wanted to say it back, to confess that his words echoed her own feelings. But a flicker of doubt, a ghost of Pedro's warning, crossed her mind.

"Paul," she began, her voice hesitant, "I… I really like you too. But I'm scared."

"Scared of what?"

"Of getting hurt. Of getting my heart broken."

Paul's expression softened. "I understand. I don't want to scare you. I just want you to know how I feel."

"I know," she said, her voice catching. "And I appreciate it more than you know."

They spent the rest of the evening in comfortable silence, the unspoken words hanging heavy in the air.

The next day, Y/n sought out Pedro. She found him on set, deep in conversation with the director.

"Pedro," she said, approaching him cautiously.

He looked up, a smile spreading across his face. "Mi amor. How was dinner?"

Y/n hesitated, unsure how to broach the subject. "It was… nice."

Pedro raised an eyebrow. "Just nice?"

"Well," she said, taking a deep breath, "Paul… he told me how he feels."

Pedro's smile faded. "And?"

"And… I don't know what to do."

Pedro listened patiently, his gaze unwavering. When she finished, he remained silent for a long moment, lost in thought.

"He's a good man, Y/n," he said finally. "A kind, talented man."

"I know."

"But you have to trust your gut. Don't let fear hold you back."

Y/n looked at him, her eyes filled with uncertainty.

"Remember what I told you, chica?" he said, his voice gentle. "Does he make you feel safe?"

She thought back to the previous night, to the way Paul had looked at her, the way he made her feel seen, cherished. A slow smile spread across her face.

"He does," she whispered.

Pedro smiled, a genuine, heartfelt smile. "Then go for it, mi amor. Go for it all."

With Pedro's blessing, Y/n finally allowed herself to fully embrace her feelings for Paul. Their relationship blossomed, a delicate flower nurtured by trust, respect, and a healthy dose of playful banter.

Pedro, ever the watchful guardian, kept a close eye on their progress. He'd offer subtle advice, a knowing glance, a gentle nudge in the right direction.

One evening, while visiting Y/n and Paul at their apartment, Pedro found himself watching them with a fond smile. They were curled up on the couch, lost in conversation, their laughter filling the room. Paul, ever the charmer, was making Y/n laugh until her sides ached.

"You know," Pedro said, his voice soft, "I think I did alright."

Y/n looked up, a mischievous glint in her eyes. "You think?"

"I knew you two were meant to be," he said, a twinkle in his eye. "Besides," he added with a wink, "I wouldn't want to miss out on all the wedding stories."

Y/n blushed, while Paul grinned. "Don't worry, tío," he said, "you'll be the first to know."

Pedro chuckled, his heart overflowing with pride. He had played his part, nudging them towards happiness, ensuring that his "little bird" found her safe harbor. And as he watched the two of them, their love a radiant beacon in the fading light, he knew that he wouldn't have had it any other way.

[sudaca-swag]

the south american mosquitos summer 2024 edition are hands down robots released by tesla to spy on our natural resources or some german idiot scientist was resucitating eggs from the jurassic that he found in the amazon rainforest

[splatoonpolls]

If you’re a fan. DO NOT SPOIL in the reblogs or comments

[petermorwood]

I first read this book when I was about ten years old - a senior cousin's copy - and finding a scan on the Comic Book Plus website let me refresh memories long ago consigned to the furthest recesses of the Mind Palace (or in my case, Untidy Mind Attic).

Its stories are fairly typical Ripping Yarns, but I'd forgotten just how Keen On Sport "The Champion" was. The title alone should have warned me, because there are six annuals on the website, all full of Hearty, Keen and Sporty goings-on.

I've posted more than once that Organised Sport was at the bottom of any list of Things I Liked To Do. In particular I detested the compulsory variety inflicted at Big School, which started happening when I was about eleven and made recollections of Jim's jolly-good-stuff annual increasingly sour.

A lot of the stories are pure sport, but several others have their sporting angle jammed into action-adventure yarns of completely non-sport-related genres, often with all the subtlety of a square peg put into a round hole with a sledgehammer.

For instance, "Rockfist Rogan of the RAF", hero of World War Two air-combat stories, was better known in his story universe as a boxer than as a fighter pilot.

Despite this, illustrations of aircraft were spot-on - as here, a Mosquito FB Mk VI with Dornier Do.217s overhead and a nosed-over Typhoon Ib in the background, or Spitfire Mk IXs defending B-24 Liberators against Messerschmitt Me.163 rocket fighters (though from the text description they should have been Me.262 jets. Oh well.)

If readers of "The Champion" were anything like readers of the war comics I used to read, the editor would have got a lot of disapproving letters if those illustrations weren't accurate. I might have sent one myself about the Messerschmitt error.

At least I might have done if I'd been of letter-writing age, rather than not yet born...

The Rogan stories aren't the only example of Sport In Unexpected Places. There's "Cap' Dan, the Sporting Pirate" (snrk), "The Racing Rajah", "The Sporting Mountie", "Johnny Fleetfoot the Redskin Winger" (rolleyes) and "Kog's Amazon Marathon", which reads like "Apocalypto" remade with a cast of Keen and Sporty English schoolboys.

And, thanks to how language and attitudes have changed, one story nearly sent a spray of tea across my monitor.

I don't think either the title or the plot would work very well today...

:->

[fiuworks]

What is the dynamics between each of your tla entities oc?

There's some of them who are next to each other in the drawing, does that represent something?

Some of their stories are more intertwined than others!

Roman is a former (and extremely conditioned) member of the People’s Church, and when the Church fell apart, he found independence, and also found love in aspiring archeological thesis writer Gail! Their romance is brief and passionate, until the death of Gail in an illegal cave ruin expedition that causes him to be crushed under a collapsing wall. Roman uses the Dark’s power to comfort Gail in his last moments, and then afterward in his grief submits his body to the Church as a new vessel, in hopes to re-ignite the cult and lose himself completely.

I think these three are some of my oldest ocs, and can be found under the #laika fear of flying TMA tag!

Santiago fell to the corruption when he accompanied his scientist brother into the Amazon on a trip, and got lost in the jungle and bitten to hell by mosquitos. He found himself enamoured by the life cycle of mosquitos and how they spread and survive, and went back to camp and felt compelled to drink all the vials containing all kinds of bug samples and experiments his brother was working on. Shocked at his survival, his brother begs him to test on him, but by the next morning, his brother is dead. Enthralled by the Corruption and living his best life, Santiago later joins Hermes’ permanent crew- and spends his days making passengers lives miserable.

Marina was born in a thriving community in croatia in the 60's that she slowly watched descend into gentrification and those she loved began to starve and die and so she decides to confront some of the buisness owners in their factory and mid heated conversation an oil tank bursts, killing the men she was talking to and so she flees but everywhere she goes she's overwhelmed by the effect rapid gentrification is having on society at large and in the mid 80's ends up by sewage pipes at the sea's edge and starves to death inside of one, but is brought back by the extinction, which claims her, and she's kept alive by the vigour of haunting mankind of their mistakes and inevitable deaths. She later joins Hermes’ airline crew.

Hermes always liked to roam and had big dreams of being a pilot but was very quiet and bullied on a bit by his two older brothers, but on a trip to the shard (tallest skyscraper in london) when he was 17, his eldest brother cabhan goaded him to go up the scaffolding ladders on the building onto the maintenance platform and as hermes is savouring the veiw, cabhan pushes him off. however, hermes miraculously survives the fall after failing to see the ground or the sky for what feels like hours, and suddenly finds himself injured on the ground. after recovery, he enters university and then flight training but the day before he gets his results, he tests what he experienced by jumping off another skyscraper and the sky 'catches' him again and he keeps testing it and realises he can do this to other people, and then when he becomes a pilot, realises he can do it to passengers, too

Hermes starts his own flight company, and hires two people first, two people hes met through various flights and who have since become his lovers over time- santiago and marina. hermes scouts budding avatars and those marked by the fears as well as normal flight attendants and such and has created the most efficient airborne system for harvesting and feeding off of fears.

(marina gives sleeping passengers or passengers watching movies imagery of plane crashes and emissions, santiago messes with the plane food and drink and the quality of the plane or illness in surrounding passengers, and hermes loves flinging people into the vast)

I love this evil throuple they’re great ❤️

A devoted, married pair of biologists who go down a dangerous spiral of seeing how far skin graft developments can go- and when no subject wants to come near them for fear of getting too familiar with the brains and bodies of animals, the Wilsons turn the scalpels on themselves. These days, they seem to act just a little off. Almost as if they’re the same person. However- nobody sees them enough to know for sure.

Two friends who started a rock duet, Miss Direction, rocket to stardom in their mid twenties. However, as their fame increases, their need to have control over the other does too. It reaches a breaking point, and while Rina is supposedly weak and pliable, Danys attempts to take their own eyes out to put them in Rina’s body. However, Rina sees this coming from miles away, and at the last second implants one of her eyes into Danys. Danys is now a lifeless puppet who is stuck watching their body move, as Rina gets exactly what she wants.

but yeah those lot are very interlinked! I do have a joke between Victoria and Uriah, as Uriah uses the Spiral to make pottery out of people and abstract their self-image into obscurity, and Victoria is a famous nude painting model who uses the Eye to embed her Oversight into any painting made of her and compel her artists into telling her their life stories, so the fact that Victoria and Uriah could cancel eachother out and have beef amuses me greatly

But yeah LOL soz for the infodump

[letterful]

If people know any portion of Herodotus, they almost certainly know the story of Croesus, the immensely rich king of the Lydians, who asked the oracles at Delphi whether he should go to war against the Persians: “The answers both oracles gave to the question were perfectly consistent with each other: they told Croesus that if he made war on the Persians, he would destroy a great empire.” Thus reassured, Croesus attacked and was utterly routed: The empire he would destroy was his own. Herodotus is a treasure chest of such stories and of what he calls thomata, or wonders. He tells us about temple prostitutes in Babylon, the Scythians’ use of cannabis to get high, fathers inadvertently feasting on the flesh of their own sons; he shows us the oases of North Africa (the Ethiopians, he says, “are the tallest and most attractive people in the world”), giant ants that bring up gold from underground, and Amazons who must first kill a man before they can marry; we even glimpse a high-born Persian who cuts off his nose and ears to accomplish a daring undercover military operation, a circumnavigation of Africa, and a foolish king so infatuated with his wife’s beauty that he insists that one of his counselors see her naked. With his usual charm, Herodotus notes that there are so many aromatic spices in Arabia that the entire country “gives off a wonderfully pleasant smell.” His book’s famous second chapter alone, a long excursus on Egypt, describes the use of mosquito netting, how to hunt a crocodile, the legend of Helen in Egypt, the building of pyramids, and three ways to embalm a corpse. After the mortuarial details, he gruesomely adds, “When the wife of an eminent man dies, or any woman who was particularly beautiful or famous, the body is not handed over to the embalmers straight away. They wait three or four days before doing so. The reason for this is to stop the embalmers having sex with the women.”

— MICHAEL DIRDA, from Bound to Please.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The internet is not a (link)dump truck

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-081-war-with-mosquitoes

Here in the twilight of capitalism's planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there's more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn't fit into the week's "Hey look at this" linkdumps.

Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am very excited about this. Disoriented, even.

When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It's enough to make one giddy. Plus, the New York Times let me call Amazon "the apex predator of our platform era"! Now that it's in the "paper of record," it's official:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism's imminent demise since The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for "crisis" also translates as "opportunity." Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/30/bedbugs-take-paris.html

But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (Stein's Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.

What's the difference between feudalism and capitalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, it comes down to whether we value rents (income you get from owning things) over profits (income you get from doing things):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

By that metric, the FTC's case against Amazon is really a case against feudalism. Through predatory pricing and acquisitions, Amazon has turned itself into a chokepoint that every merchant, writer and publisher has to pass through in order to reach their customers. Amazon charges a fortune to traverse that chokepoint (estimates range from 45% to 51% of gross revenues) and then forces sellers to raise their prices everywhere else when they hike their Amazon prices so they can afford Amazon's tolls. It's "an economy-wide hidden tax":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-ftc-sues-to-break-up-amazon-over

Now, feudalism isn't a straightforward proposition. Like, are you sure you mean feudalism? Maybe you mean "manorialism" (they're easy to mix up):

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Plus, much of what we know about the "Dark Ages" comes from grifter doofuses like Voltaire, a man who was capable of dismissing the 800 year Holy Roman Empire with a single quip ("neither holy, roman, nor an empire"). But the reality is a lot more complicated, gnarly and interesting.

That's where medievalist Eleanor Janeaga comes in, and her "Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire" is a banger:

https://going-medieval.com/2023/09/29/against-voltaire-or-the-shortest-possible-introduction-to-the-holy-roman-empire/

Now, while it's true that Enlightenment thinkers gave medieval times a bum rap, it's likewise true that a key element of Enlightenment justice is transparency: justice being done, and being seen to be done. One way to distinguish "modern" justice from "medieval" trials is to ask whether the public is allowed to watch the trial, see the evidence, and understand the conclusion.

Here again, there is evidence that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism and feudalism. The Amazon trial has already been poisoned by farcical redactions, in which every key figure is blacked out of the public record:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

This is part of a trend. The other gigantic antitrust case underway right now, against Google, has turned into a star chamber as well, with Judge Amit P Mehta largely deferring to Google's frequent demands to close the court and seal the exhibits:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted. While the court's Zoom feed has been shuttered and while Judge Mehta is still all-too-willing to clear the courtroom during key testimony, at least the DoJ's exhibits aren't being sealed at the same clip as before:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892215/google-search-antitrust-trial-documents-public-again-judge-mehta-rules

In 2023, the world comes at you fast. There's an epic struggle over the future of corporate dominance playing out all around us. I mean, there are French antitrust enforcers kicking down doors of giant tech companies and ransacking their offices for evidence of nefarious anticompetitive plots:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894863/nvidia-offices-raided-french-competition-authority

As ever, the question is "socialism or barbarism." But don't say that too loud: in America, socialism is a slur, one that dates back to the Reconstruction era, when pro-slavery factions called Black voting "socialism in South Carolina."

Ever since, white nationalists used "socialism" make Americans believe that "socialism" was an "extremist" view, so they'd stand by while everyone from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump smeared their opponents as "Marxists":

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4066499-trump-paints-2024-campaign-as-righteous-crusade/

As Heather Cox Richardson puts it for The Atlantic, "There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-socialism-racist-origins/675453/

The cruelty isn't the point, in other words. Cruelty is the tactic. The point is power. Remember, no war but class war. All of this is in service to paying workers less so that bosses and investors can have more.

Take "essential workers," everyone from teachers to zookeepers, nurses to librarians, EMTs to daycare workers. All of these "caring" professions are paid sub-living wages, and all of these workers are told that "they matter too much to earn a living wage":

https://www.okdoomer.io/praise-doesnt-pay/

The "you matter too much to pay" mind-zap is called "vocational awe," a crucial term introduced by Ettarh Fobazi in her 2018 paper:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Vocational awe is how creative workers – like the writers who just won their strike and the actors who are still fighting – are conned into working at starvation wages. As the old joke goes, "What, and give up show-business?"

https://ask.metafilter.com/117904/Whats-the-joke-thas-hase-the-punchline-what-and-give-up-show-business

In this moment of Big Tech-driven, AI-based wage suppression, mass surveillance, corruption and inequality, perhaps we should take a moment to remind ourselves that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Or, more to the point, the warning was about high-tech corporate takeover of our lives, and the suggestion was that we could seize the means of computation (a synonym for William Gibson's "the street finds its own use for things"):

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

We are living in a lopsided cyberpunk future, long on high-tech corporate takeover, short of computation seizing. This point is made sharply in JWZ's "Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City," which is beautifully packaged as a Hypercard stack that you run on an in-browser Mac Plus emulator from the Internet Archive:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/neuroblast-dispatch-from-the-cyberpunk-city/

Cast your gaze ahead, to the near future: Public space has all but disappeared. Corporate landlords use AI-powered robots to harass the homeless. The robots, built slick and white with an R2-D2 friendliness now most resemble giant butt plugs covered in graffiti and grime.

Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. It can also be a wellspring of hope. That's what I tried to do with The Lost Cause, my forthcoming Green New Deal novel, which Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Writing a hopeful novel of ecological, social and economic redemption, driven by solidarity, repair, and library socialism, was a powerful tonic against despair in this smoke-smothered, flooded, mosquito-bitten time. And while the book isn't out yet, there are early indications I succeeded, like Kim Stanley Robinson's reaction, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."

And now, we have a concurring judgment from The Library Journal, who yesterday published their review, which concludes: "a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak":

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

[notfeelingthyaster]

so, imagine tim goes to the amazon in a mission with young justice, maybe something related to that spider guy in the rr comics? who knows

he thinks it's ok to put on the short sleeve robin uniform. he's wearing mosquito repellent, he is covered in sunscream. it's fine.

the mission ends no problems, and the team goes back home... a week later, tim is at the batcomputer fighting a very surprising headache. caffeine withdrawls?

one would think so: one would be wrong. that night, he gets a 40°C (104°F) fever.

he tries and work through it, but he gets caught pretty easily, bc when he goes on patrol, his joints lock up and he almost falls from a building

it's dengue fever. now, it's nothing lethal: he just has to rest and drink a humongous amount of fluids, but he can't do ANYTHING for a week or so.

bc he doesn't have an immune system (or a spleen) so there's big worries about it becoming a hemorrhagic fever, and such, tim cannot even get a tablet to work from. just... liquids. loads and loads of liquids.

there's need to tie him up to the bed. there's need to call conner kent to supervise. there's need to exact vengeance upon all the mosquitoes of the world.

it passes. next year, he catches malaria from a mission in southern asia.