#as a political philosophy

[rustchild]

one of the wild things about people’s stubborn insistence on misunderstanding The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is that the narrator anticipates an audience that won’t engage with the text, just in the opposite direction. Throughout the story are little asides asking what the reader is willing to believe in. Can you believe in a utopia? What if I told you this? What about this? Can you believe in the festivals? The towers by the sea? Can we believe that they have no king? Can we believe that they are joyful? Does your utopia have technology, luxury, sex, temples, drugs? The story is consulting you as it’s being told, framed as a dialogue. It literally asks you directly: do you only believe joy is possible with suffering? And, implicitly, why?

the question isn’t just “what would you personally do about the kid.” It isn’t just an intricate trolley problem. It’s an interrogation of the limits of imagination. How do we make suffering compulsory? Why? What futures (or pasts) are we capable of imagining? How do we rationalize suffering as necessary? And so on. In all of the conversations I’ve seen or had about this story, no one has mentioned the fact that it’s actively breaking the fourth wall. The narrator is building a world in front of your eyes and challenging you to participate. “I would free the kid” and then what? What does the Omelas you’ve constructed look like, and why? And what does that say about the worlds you’re building in real life?

[typhlonectes]

[andreadworkinq]

Depression is commonplace among women because women are often angry at the conditions of their lives, at what they must do because they are women, at the way they are treated because they are women; and depression truly is anger turned inward.

Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin

[queercodedangel]

The richest country in the world VS a small economy that the US actively keeps poor through sanctions and an embargo.

A good example that shows GDP says a lot less than many think. The way wealth is distributed, produced and invested matters a lot more than the overall amount of wealth.

[obscurescholar]

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

[3sbeee]

Can we talk about how the idea that STEM and the humanities are mortal enemies with no overlap is actually incredibly harmful and is not only preventing people from pursuing their passions but also part of the reason why the humanities aren’t given their proper respect? No, artists are not all snobby pretentious assholes who think they’re more cultured than everyone else and no scientists are not all emotionless robots who think they’re smarter than everyone else and it’s possible to be an artist and a scientist at the same time. By acting like you have to choose between STEM and humanities we are eliminating thousands of potential careers and causing unnecessary divisions in a time where nothing is more crucial than unity. I’m so tired of people acting like STEM majors are incapable of understanding art and humanities majors are incapable of understanding math when the two fields are crucial to one another. Who would design our architecture if it weren’t for artful engineers? Who would discover the rules of composition? At the end of the day we are all just people trying to learn and make a living, and all of these careers are important to humanity. People can’t say that STEM is more important than humanities if there’s no such thing as STEM vs humanities.

[kafkasapartment]

[tmninjagirl]

[quote-bomber]

[liberatingreality]

There's simply no polite way to tell people they've dedicated their lives to an illusion.

Daniel Dennett

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

do you ever think about how we have phannies in every field? like we have doctors and baristas and mental health therapists and geologists and audiologists and engineers and neuroscientists and authors and social media consultants and activists and child care workers and museum managers and teachers and biologists and emts and linguists and accessibility coaches and sign language interpreters and artists and musicians and editors and actors and chefs and fucking EVERYTHING. not to mention the specific knowledge bases and hobbies we have outside of our professions—coding, linguistic and cultural diversity, artistic creativity, political/social awareness, passion for justice, research, make up and hair and fashion design, media literacy, philosophy, all of our special interests/hyperfixations, etc. we could run a successful commune no problem at all. we’re so smart and talented and resourceful and powerful.

the phandom is rooted in a past of being infamously shitty, and i do see yall slipping back into old habits sometimes (mostly on twitter but sometimes here and you know it <3) but it’s pretty fucking cool how capable this community is and our ability to unify. anyway phanmune when.

(if you want, leave your knowledge base/skills in the tags or replies. can be profession, hobby, major/program of study, what you study in your free time, what you want to learn about, what you’re interested, all of the above, anything)

[andreadworkinq]

Pornography exists because men despise women, and men despise women in part because pornography exists.

Letters From a War Zone, Andrea Dworkin

[independentanon]

Be Safe Out There

People are going to be protesting in every state today. I hope you all are safe and successful. I wanted to go to my state capitol myself but I wasn't able to arrange a carpool with it being so short notice. However, I'll still be going to Midland, MI to protest later today. I'll be handing out three signs and an un-cut stencil there.

Don't forget to fly your flags upside-down, boys and girls and non-binary types. Stay safe, and fuck Trump & Co!

[obscurescholar]

"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

— Thomas Jefferson

[queercodedangel]

"The CIA runs the biggest news service in the world with a budget larger than those of all the major wire services put together. In 1975 a Senate intelligence committee found that the CIA owned outright 'more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book publishing complexes' and subsidized many more. A New York Times investigation revealed another fifty media outlets run by the CIA in the United States and abroad, and at least twelve publishing houses, which marketed over 1,200 books secretly commissioned by the CIA, including some 250 in English. As the Times explained it, these figures were far from the whole story. 53 The CIA subsidized books on China, the Soviet Union, and Third World struggles, which were then reviewed by CIA agents in various US media, including the New York Times.

Supposedly such practices ceased after the CIA’s penetration of cultural and news organizations were exposed in the 1970s. In fact, there is evidence suggesting that the CIA continues to recruit from various professions, including journalism, that it subsidizes journalists’ trips abroad, that it still maintains hundreds of news conduits that feed disinformation to people at home and around the world, and that it funnels to ultra-right groups information that these groups then run in their newsletters and give to politically sympathetic newspapers."

- Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality