#you *know* most of these people would be powerful politicians in the 21st century

[blackknight-100]

Going to just say it because I saw a bunch of YouTube videos this is seriously getting out of hand. Every time I see someone saying things like "oh no <insert opinion> is invalid because it's a later addition/interpretation!" I lose faith in humanity because people do realise right, that the Mahabharata and Ramayana at large are and have been passed down by word of mouth, and most people don't read KMG or BORI or Valmiki Ramayana? And these books came much later (BORI, for instance, was published in the 20th century), so it's not like they were accessible to the vast majority of people throughout the ages in the middle, or even now to those who can't read or don't have internet. People told tales about the characters of MB and RMYN, and yes, they added new things, which became a part of folklore and incorporated the struggles of the locals, because most literature and oral traditions are a mirror of the society. So everytime a folkloric opinion is dismissed because it's not "in the original version", we are effectively dismissing the history of those people and the fluid nature of storytelling. And yes, this includes TV and media - they are absolutely influenced by current political situations and mass opinions.

That being said, some people are waaaay too obsessed with whitewashing their MB blorbos or obsessing about Ravana and it's ruining the environment. WHY ARE PEOPLE TRYING TO WHITEWASH RAVANA? In most versions everyone hated him. There is probably NO ONE in all of Lanka who wanted him to win. The only reason Mandodari was supposed to be devoted is because Mandodari was his wife and the only way to represent good women, as we all know, is to make them good wives.

As for MB, any major male character, except the sages maybe and the last generation of Kurus, 90% of the time has something awful in their resume. And you know what? Good for them! LET THEM COMMIT CRIMES IN PEACE GOOD GODS.

[notyouraryang0dd3ss]

like oh my god the way swifties talk like “taylor got get killed by speaking out about palestine she already has security guards because of her stal—” Pause. She has security GUARDS OH MY FUCKING GODDDDDD. and “her fans at the tour could get endangered!” POST PONE THE FUCKING TOUR THENNN. Like wow Taylor swift could get killed if she spoke out? PALESTINIANS ARE LITERALLY GETTING KILLED RIGHT NOW YOU FUCKING MORON! TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE ARE ALREADY DEAD! OVER A MILLION SLOWLY BEING KILLED AS YOU FUSS OVER ONE. SINGULAR. RICH AND POWERFUL WHITE WOMAN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FUCKING WORLD!

like i can Not Stress this enough she is so powerful she has politicians making laws to protect her already she has Security guards she has so much resources she has this gigantic safety bubble simply by being So powerful and Famous. If she said “Hey Israel is right now killing people” and used all the political power for Palestine, by God I believe we would be closer to Palestinian liberation than we would to Taylor Swift getting assassinated by israel.

them valuing taylor’s life over the increased possibility of millions of lives being saved is just. Like you see Palestinians be so dehumanized and this is just an extension of that dehumanization. All their lives is lesser than Taylor Swift’s one life. Its so evil.

Not only is Taylor complicit in this genocide but her fans valuing her privileged white life over millions (yes, the West Bank is officially categorized as going through a genocide) of Palestinians is just so reflective of their racism, islamophobia, whatever you want to call their violence towards of any marginalized group who “threatens” Taylor Swift in some way. Yes, dehumanizing Palestinians to reinforce Taylor as a victim is violent.

The thing is, Taylor’s silence is a continued tactic she’s used her entire career to slip away from accountability by appearing passive and allowing her fans to project whatever they want onto her. She is 100% utilizing it now.

You cannot escape this genocide. It is everywhere. It is undeniable. Everyone knows at this point. Everyone.

Taylor’s behavior is why she’s as powerful and loved by these powerful institutions as well: because she is complicit in genocide. She knows. She’s not and never going to speak up. If she somehow does, the media will focus the attention on her and not Palestinians. Everything she does is always about and will always be for her. Swifties will do all the hard work for her.

We are collectively witnessing one of the darkest moments of human history in the 21st century. Swifties will go down as defending one of the most powerful women on Earth whose silence aids this ongoing genocide.

[roxannepolice]

What do you mean exactly by Saxon representing “Post Politics”?

Hi! First, a bit on post-politics:

Basically this is all bound up into the naive optimism of post-cold war "end of history" hopes, where liberal democratic free market fuelled welfare state becomes the total norm that can only spread throughout the world now that totalitarian centrally steered empire has fallen. Like, the idea for a world without politics understood as various ideologies opposing each other and replaced by state becoming a purely administrative institution has actually been seen as the utopian goal of history- except in practice it resulted in detached from reality technocrats fighting for power with equally but differently detached from reality populists.

But somewhere at the beginning of the 21st century there was this clash of democracy with politics-as-election-of-administrators becoming just straight up boring, leading to elections being less about ideologies and more about personal feelings for a party and even more glaringly - particular person. And that is not to assume that historically people have been very considerate of reading through the agenda of each official, but rather what becomes the norm that politicians rely on. Empty but passionate and eloquent statements about things being bad ("This country has been sick. This country needs healing. This country needs medicine. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that what this country really needs right now, is a Doctor."), lifestyle of the politician (Harold Saxon's model wife, excellent background on a website, also sth sth would you rather vote for an art loving vegetarian from working class or a rude misogynistic chain smoking alcoholic aristocrat), or just freaking LOOKS ("I think Mister Saxon is exactly what this country needs. He's a very fine man. And he's handsome too.") become infinitely more important than actual policies or ideology ("Why do you say that? What was his policy? What did he stand for? I don't know. He always sounded good. Like you could trust him. Just nice. He spoke about. I can't really remember, but it was good. Just the sound of his voice.")*.

Yes, fandom has generally decided Harold Saxon was from a conservative party, but he's explicitly not from any party whatsoever. If anything, BBC really took advantage of having a talented actor that looks like Tony Blair, a LABOUR PM (though I'd say Harriet Jones is more of a Blair stand-in). It's a party whose only premise is the personal charisma of an individual. And that is NOT how you should elect politicians.

*Ngl, this is why I facepalm at Arachnids in the UK. If you think the problem with Donald Trump as one of the most powerful people in the world is that he has OCD and is generally a bad person, then no. No it's not.

[terrence-silver]

Would old man Terry still smoke his signature Cuban cigars?

---

Why'd he stop?

Because it went out of fashion.

(See the above ads. Can you imagine anything similar today?)

In the 70's and the 80's, a Cuban cigar (or just a cigarette in general) would've been a sign of decadence and masculine power; it is what every Senator in his cabinet during his spare, private time alongside every coked out, upstart Yuppie on Wallstreet, every would-be Gangster Mafioso, every Banana Republic dictator and of course, Terry Silver, would smoke. Politicians, would perhaps, secretly indulge the vice, seeing as how Cuban cigars couldn't even be imported into the US up until a certain time, making them even more of exclusive of a habit. Just look at old advertisements. Men smoking in a manly fashion while, optionally, a nearby woman swoons and looks on. It's fun! It's sexy! It makes the ladies drop their panties, you men! You would be surprised how many plain, old Americana style scenes with Cowboys smoking I've found while researching a reply to this question. It meant something then that it doesn't mean now. Today, it is almost comically associated with the (quite literally cancerous) evils of Capitalism to the degree that if you asked a literal kid to draw you a corrupt rich man, they'd probably draw Monopoly man with a top hat and a cigar. Heck! Most public places don't even allow indoor smoking and you're relegated to a separate smoking area and still, people will stuck their noses up at you the entire time even so. What I mean to say is --- times changed and so did attitudes. So happens that Terry Silver lived long enough to witness these changes and I think he stopped smoking somewhere in between the fiasco that took place between him and John post tournament loss in 1985 and those thirty something years they weren't close. Long enough for cigars to go from a symbol of power to a symbol of something disgusting people collectively would rather not be around because it stinks and makes you sick. Gives you bad breath. And Cancer. It used to be cool. It used to be badass. Nowadays, it comes with a little message on the bottom of the box that says 'Smoking Kills!'

Terry Silver went through a (temporary) re-brand.

He changed the way cultural sensitives changed, as I keep on repeating.

Turned into the image of the ''acceptable'' type of the model rich man for the new, 21st century was meant to look and act like for a brief spell. Mellow. Clean cut. Vegan. Considerate and practicing 'mindfulness'. Someone very much in favor of attending therapy, seemingly sworn off of his formerly rotten ways, and in fact, completely tucking them away. A champagne Liberal fundraising apps for the poor from his multimillion dollar beach patio mansion. You see what I'm saying? Cigars --- they don't fit into that whole image, in fact, they completely clash with it. So, he discarded them, the same way he discarded many things that would come off as 'problematic' in the current day and age, shedding his skin and becoming a 'different' man to hide in plain sight, being the ultimate chameleon that he is, always adapting to his surroundings.

I do firmly believe he still has a stash of vintage cigars somewhere, in some golden or silver elaborate, decorative box he hasn't touched in actual decades, in some locked drawer or safe, as a keepsake. Perhaps he even lights up in his more mature age, for old time's sake, seeing it as a sign of authority, refusing to go down as some sad, old man once his existential crisis kicks in as the years advance and advance, taking the reigns of control and picking a poison of his own choosing to rot him from the inside, kicking up his legs on a work desk and smiling to himself.

Who knows?

Nobody's ever there to see him do it, just the way he would want it too.

[guadalupehesus]

"While there's life, there's hope." - Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Dear Harry,

I am writing to you with a warning. As I know, you often have or had inappropriate states due to mental or alcoholic intoxication. God forbid you to use drugs. Why did I bring up this personal problem of yours? I'm not judging you. A person of the 21st century is very vulnerable mentally to temptations. This is our life. Nowadays, even those who pray are afraid of disgracing themselves, if they have any intelligence, of course. Yesterday you were on a horse with a shield, today you are a laughingstock. And what will happen tomorrow is chaotic and unpredictable even for me. For example, Vladimir Putin unexpectedly gave us a kitten. You can say that the President of the Russian Federation gave me and my sister the whole world of tenderness and warmth that exudes from this furry baby. He did it secretly. However, I suspect it could have been a love spell, but I am deeply grateful to him for the only worthwhile act of a man on his part. The only thing that darkens my mood is that the Kyrgyz government used to cast a spell on me to take away the greatness of Russia and the Romanov Family for years. And now, this is being done by the respected Russian president at the behest of a migrant from sunny Uzbekistan - Alina Maratovna Kabaeva.

Don't make these mistakes, Harry. It often happens that a strong politician was ruined not by his professional qualities, but by his woman. You were a strong warrior in past lives. But Meghan Markle has always been a satanic temptation for you, Harry!

Harry, you got involved with a first-class, cunning escort-girl from the circle of the damned Epstein himself, according to the Western media. These are dangerous people who, through sex, subsequently dirty blackmail, achieve great material things. I wouldn't be surprised if they blackmailed some sheikhs, which often influences their big politics. For example, Arabs could at least verbally express their disagreement with the aggression towards the children of Palestine. I wish no harm to either Jews or Arabs. I just have a feeling that people like Epstein behave like spiders. And you, Harry, are naive by nature from your past lives. +You grew up in a palace where everyone respected you. You didn’t know what some people outside of your well-fed, successful circle of friends and sincere fan-girls who idolized you were capable of. And I was often humiliated by vile people and that’s why I tried to warn you from the very beginning.

Harry, if you are originally Elton John or Freddie Mercury, then everything is fine. But it’s another matter if, taking advantage of your intoxication, your wife pushes a homosexual adventure* up your ass for the purpose of blackmail in the near future. First of all, give up drugs and make an appointment with a psychologist. But remember that this psychologist can also work for the protector of your wife. Get a grip, Harry. For the sake of your children. What will they remember about their childhood? The first 6 years are the most important period in the formation of the human psyche. Then - adolescence.

I think, you must accept your mother's passing. This is your Achilles heel. Let Mom go, Harry. Her life was not so bad after all. Your mother lived a vibrant and noble life that one could only dream of. She left an unforgettable mark on the hearts of both whites and blacks. This (!) is important. Think about women in brothels in India, for example. They don’t even dare to dream about the Princess’s life. As for Diana's suspicious death, I will reveal to you the secret of the Higher Powers.

This is the meaning of your mother's suffering: Diana had to see the dark side of the black aristocracy. If she had been happy with Charles III and had not been helped to leave this world, then the hearts of her two sons would not have been pure and, perhaps, they would have been on the side of Satan. Think of it as saving the souls of Lady Di's sons. Apocalyptic times lie ahead of us. But there are few strong people with kind souls on Earth. We, the Light forces, need warriors.

However, I ask you not to immediately write a book 😉 about the fact that I am talking about the Apocalypse. People won't understand. They never understood...

Yours sincerely,

Asel

* I do not hate gays, but I would be dissapointed, if you did it with a man . Sorry, but this is not appropriate for men.

[idkimnotreal]

we need to talk about night elves in warcraft.

(disclamier: i take every lore retcon after warcraft 3 with a lot of grains of salt, and my reasonably canon timeline stops roughly when wod ends. i have reasons for this)

most societies in real life are patriarchal. historians and archaeologists speculate why that is, but nobody knows for certain. some societies are matriarchal, but they are far and in between.

in worldbuilding, i once read something that struck me as very true: if you want to build a world where a matriarchal society exists, there needs to be a reason why women would dominate over men. while matriarchal societies exist in the real world, patriarchal societies are something like 90% of them, so if you're to make use of an exception, you need to explain it. patriarchy is seen as the natural state of things, the status quo, especially in the west, so matriarchy needs to make sense (since in worldbuilding everything that is not like earth needs to be built from scratch. that's what it is). while it's maybe not right that "men are stronger, hence they dominate", it's the idea people in the west have about patriarchy, that while it may not be right, men have ruled women so far in history because they were physically stronger.

so, following that line, if men and women exist in a fictional universe such as they are in our world, but women dominate, the question then becomes: what exists in that world that offsets the physical advantage men have over women?

kaldorei society is a matriarchal one. women rule and men are expected to take on the role of scholars. there isn't such a society in real life, as far as i know (where only women or the dominated sex are scholars, and most importantly, where scholars were separate from priests pre industrial revolution). but it makes sense in fiction. arms and religion in pre-industrial societies were the pillars of power. the fact that only women in kaldorei society are permitted to become priestesses and be sentinels or rangers tells us that, in their society, women are in charge of government, entirely. they're both bureaucrats (priestesses) AND soldiers (sentinels and rangers).

but why does that happen? why is kaldorei society a matriarchal one? because night elves have a very deep connection to the emerald dream. their scholars have to devote quite literally their entire lives to the pursuit of knowledge. and if men are supposed to be the scholars in kaldorei society, then that takes up all of their energy, and the ruling is left to women. i found it surprising, thinking about it, that this is so logical and makes so much sense when they came up with it in the freaking 90s, pre third wave of feminism. and freaking blizzard too, and we know how "egalitarian" their office culture was at the time (bill cosby room etc). they came up with the idea of a society ruled by women that makes sense, that would make sense if it existed in real life (if magic were real too).

since there was no other society in warcraft that practised druidism (taurens only joined/were invited later, and trolls and worgens much later), there wasn't enough time for such changes to take place in their respective societies, or not all male taurens became druids, unlike with the night elves.

it's even up to debate that whether women ruling kaldorei society is a higher role than being a druid. it may be that ruling was left to women because the dream was seen as a much more noble goal. similarly to how politicians aren't the most important pieces in government today, but high ranking businessmen such as ceos. politicians are in charge of government, but they're not the most powerful people. it could be that druids are more powerful than priestesses and sentinels, even though they're not in government. so kaldorei women wield significantly more power than real world women pre 21st century, but still not as much power as real world men did pre 21st century.

see. i find it all so smart. kaldorei society seems so perfectly explainable for a society so different from ours. i know it was always the intention that they seemed very different and mysterious to humans, back in warcraft 3 times. and blizzard did it very well, i think.

[kitty-otome]

VOLTAGE GAMES I WOULD NOT WANT TO LIVE IN

from human trafficking to cohabitating with demons, here are five voltage games i would never want to live in, no matter how cute the boys are.

p. s. they’re in no particular order.

KISSED BY THE BADDEST BIDDER

i love kissed by the bidder, but no. absolutely not. nope. human trafficking??? no. who wants to be put up for auction? who? i don’t care if you’re hot, if you bought me, we aren’t becoming friends, much less lovers. i’m not drinking that stockholm juice, count me out. just imagine how stressful it must be, to live with someone who’s a mobster, a corrupt cop, a shady businessman, a famous artist, a most wanted thief, a mad auctioneer, an assassin or a blood thirsty politician. i don’t know about you, but i really want to survive to see the age of at least 30. the parties, the material goods and the fancy trips are not worth it. plus, getting ordered around by mr ichinomiya all day? nope. i like myself way too much for that life.

PIRATES IN LOVE: CAPTAIN’S CUT

i’m way too vain for this life. living on a disgusting boat with a bunch of pirates who probably never wash themselves and have scurvy? no thank you, i’ll pass. also just the stress of thinking that the ship could get attacked at any time would really get to me, could you imagine all the free trauma you’d have? exactly. i can’t fight for the life of me either, so i’d probably die pretty fast.

A KNIGHT’S DEVOTION

do you realize how absolutely disgusting the medieval times were? people were literally so unhygienic, even the rich were gross by today’s standard. it’s the reason why the black plague spread so fast, it was because people didn’t wash themselves, like ever. yeah, being a princess might be fun and all, but we got to look at the risk to benefit ratio here — what am i risking to what benefit? being a princess is not worth catching 199183 diseases all starting with the letter h! i’m too much of a neat freak shallow perfectionist for this life. if you need me, i’ll be in the 21st century.

edit: actually, it’s kind of unclear what time period they’re in? i was sure they were in medieval times, but looking at their clothes, i’m not so sure anymore... anyways, still wouldn’t want to live in that game, too stressful, next.

ERA OF SAMURAI: CODE OF LOVE

it would be too much for me. i could never live in an environment where people around me are getting killed or injured left and right, where houses and buildings were being set into flames around me, where children and women were being put at risk... i know that’s the reality for many, even these days, but i personally don’t think i could handle it, and quite frankly, i don’t think anyone should have to endure that. not only that but, falling in love with someone that you could lose at any time would absolutely ruin me emotional and mentally. just knowing that there’s a fairly high chance they won’t come home for dinner... i just couldn’t.

ENCHANTED IN THE MOONLIGHT

living with demons? being hunted down my evil creatures? HECK NO! that is a hard no, i already hate having roommates as it is, i would literally leave the country if i had to living with fricken demons. i don’t care how hot you are, if you have crazy powers and wreck havoc at my house, you’re out. oh my god, and don’t even get me started on the evil creatures (AKA the ayakashi’s), could you imagine them following you around wherever you go? i’m already paranoid as heck, don’t do this to me. if i’m going to get killed by ayakashi’s, i want to die knowing i didn’t waste my life trying to house a bunch of horny demons (no pun intended).

[duchessofostergotlands]

Hi Jess :) I just had a conversation with my v anti-monarchy dad where we discussed the issues of becoming a republic right now. I don't know about you, but i don't really trust that our current PM/government would do a good job of creating a new system, and not replacing the monarchy with something else forefronts the existing issue of how well our government is held to account. I feel that cutting to a Swedish-style 'royal house' of 8 people might work, but i would love to know your opinion!

Hey anon :) prepare for a long one lol. So I might be wrong but I don’t personally think that the royals would ever be removed under a government like the one we have now. This is why I laughed at the idea the interview would end the monarchy. In amongst all the chit chat, people seem to forget how incredibly Conservative the U.K. is. I’m from Scotland which is probably the most consistently left wing part of the U.K. I’m from perhaps the most right wing part of Scotland but was still shocked to see how Conservative England was when I moved here. People get very caught up in what their Twitter feed says and forget it’s an echo chamber. Every single election I see my left wing friends being absolutely gobsmacked that the Tories won because “everyone on their Twitter said they’d vote Labour.” If my Twitter feed had reflected the U.K. political sphere Jeremy Corbyn would have led a huge majority in parliament for the last 4 years and we’d be in the EU but in reality he was completely unelectable and we’ve left. I know people might claim that younger people are more left wing so that will change but U.K. studies around this suggest that people become more conservative with age not due to generational differences but because of the psychological impact of the ageing process (x). Older people consistently vote more and are more likely to be conservative.  And the thing is Tories will all vote to keep a monarchy whereas Labour would probably be split - Keir has had to pretend to like the Queen to win back lost Labour voters - so I personally think until the government has been led by a comfortable socialist majority for a couple of elections we probably won’t see it be an option. Again I might be wrong and we might remove them next week but I just think people do the same thing every time anything political happens and never learn that Twitter doesn’t equal real life. Boris Johnson killed thousands of people during this pandemic with his shitty decisions and would still win if we had an election this year! (x)

So with that in mind I genuinely think that a government which would be providing us with the end to the monarchy would be a left wing, socialist administration and whether I trust them or not would depend on who was in charge!! I think they would certainly face a difficult process but difficult doesn’t mean you don’t do it. The difficulty for us is just that we don’t have a single written constitution, we have hundreds of laws from across 1000 or so years of the monarchy which are highly complex to unravel. I think we’d have to institute a formal constitution and most likely have a second referendum on the form of government we’d want to take. It would take a long time and we’d have to have a huge amount of trust in the person leading the process. I think it can be beneficial to have a non partisan head of state. One of the only beneficial things the monarch does provide in the U.K. is a way to curtail abuses of power by politicians. We couldn’t have BoJo issuing an executive order like Trump because the Queen signs everything. By her having that power it means someone else doesn’t. I think that person should be elected rather than an inherited role. DNA doesn’t make you suited for a job and it’s baffling in the 21st century to think that it does. But many would disagree because having it vested in one person for decades limits the likelihood of a populist president. 

In terms of having a “slimmed down” monarchy I can definitely see why you would lean towards that as it’s the direction every royal family has been going but I don’t know how well that would work. The reality is the Queen is head of state for 150 million people across the world and so having too few people would probably be impractical. If the U.K. splits up or the Commonwealth Realms leave then I could see it. It might also work if they have a system of abdication like the Dutch monarchy as we wouldn’t have a system where the monarch is almost 100 and can’t visit any of the countries she reigns over so has to hand it out to family. I also think it would be hard to make it consistent. Only a small handful of monarchies have the Royal House vs Royal Family divide which remains consistent across the generations and all of them are much much smaller in population so they can say easily that just the monarch, consort and direct heirs should work. But what if George only had one child and William and Charles passed away young? His child might not be old enough to do duties so it would make sense to have Charlotte and Louis available as possible workers. Or what if there was another Andrew type situation and someone was cut out of working? I would love to see some kind of Royal House and Royal Family divide because it makes a lot of sense for the countries that use it: it removes personal feeling - Sverre Magnus has a lower title than his sister but it’s just the way it is, it’s not personal - and also provides clarity for the public. But there are downsides when you’re dealing with a much bigger, much more active institution so I think there would be snags that might need to be worked out or the definition of who is in the House might have to be a bit broader/more flexible

[theheadlesshearseman]

As a progressive independent leftist, I'm voting Howie Hawkins of the Green Party for president. We live in an oligarchy, not a democracy; Biden and Trump are on the same team backed by the same corporate donors. I know the Green Party can't win — I'm not delusional. We vote Green for the purpose of getting the party to a goal of 5% popular vote. When this is achieved, they get federal funding and nationwide ballot access in 2024. 15% popular vote will get them a podium on the debate stage and federal funding for the 2022 mid-term elections.

Biden won't support a Green New Deal, ban fracking, publicized healthcare, police reform, and most other policies progressives stand for. We need these things for the sake of our planet and our people. We are in the middle of a God damned pandemic, and the best the Democrats could offer is the revival of the Affordable Care Act — an act which requires you to have health insurance, or else pay a penalty fee for not having insurance. How are so many unemployed Americans supposed to pull off getting insured? Due to the government mandate, companies have consolidated and the market is monopolized, causing rates to go parabolic. But it's okay because pre-existing conditions are covered. That's great, but I still can't afford my medication for chronic asthma. Thank goodness for the black market! We don't see health insurance; we need health ASSURANCE — publicized healthcare (Medicare4All) is how you guarantee everyone, employed or not, rich or poor, is taken care of.

This notion democracy will cease to exist if Trump is re-elected is a farce, regurgitated by every panicked Biden voter. We have a system of checks and balances in place to prevent his abuse of power, yet media outlets are planting these thoughts of paranoia into the general public, and it's sick. Conversely, the Trump campaign tells their constituents that Biden is a radical leftist Marxist whose constituents hate America. Both sides use fear, division, and hate to keep you voting within the two-party duopoly. Either way, THEY win.

Most of the news outlets in the world are owned by 6 corporations. (It was just 24 corporations back in the 90s.) Each media company shares a board member with a big pharmaceutical company board member. Their goal is to augment their bottom line at our expense by lobbying to politicians of both major parties, donating to them in exchange for policies that further increase their bottom line. Remember in the late 90s/early 2000s when we started seeing ads for prescription drugs on TV for the first time? That's when the media company consolidation started growing.

These big corporations have a lot to lose if a third party gets elected. That's why they do anything in their power to sway public opinion via the news media, making you think you only have a choice between Republican and Democrat, shaming you from dare voting a third party for their ideals because "they can't win," swaying the public to vote "Gucci brand politicians" over that unknown brand at the store you keep passing up, but if you actually tried it, you wouldn't go back to "Kraft". You are going to get the same result with Biden or Trump.

I'm disgusted with Trump privatizing national park land for oil drilling. Native American lands are encroached upon and exploited by big oil. Look at the Keystone Pipeline; that happened with Obama at the helm. When Biden gets elected, he will perpetuate the abuse of our lands that Trump has perpetuated from previous administrations. Colonialism forges onward in the 21st century with an unnecessarily large military budget — $750 billion.

Both are rapists, both are racists, both perpetuate corporate control and exploitation of we the people, and I'm sick and tired of it. Plus, what Biden did to Tara Reade is utterly despicable and disgusting, but what's more disgusting is how people still support Biden after Reade has provided more supporting circumstantial evidence for her rape claims than any of Kavanaugh's accusers.

You have forfeited your integrity to say, "me too" and, "believe women" if you support Biden (and especially if you support Trump) because unlike the line-in-item veto power of the presidency, as voters, you, by default, have to endorse the entire package because you GET the entire package: a 47-year career politician who digitally raped a young intern in '93 that won't assure healthcare for the American people during a pandemic, won't ban fracking despite our climate crisis, authored the '94 crime bill responsible for the mass incarceration of back people and people of color for petty drug charges, responsible for the bank bill that pushed an entire generation of Americans into deep abysmal student loan debts due to high interest rates that his big bank donors profited off of while claiming to have no empathy for millennials who have it hard and statistically own only 4% of the nation's wealth even as the largest generational member of the American population, now running off a campaign of being the voice of reason, the light, the good, and not being Trump.

This IS the reality of it. In a way, I do live in an alternate reality from the rest of the JoeBlowHards that go through life not realizing there is a veil over them. I don't fear a Trump re-election, yet Biden is ahead by 10+ points in the polls, mostly by fools who think you can push Biden, a 47-year bought and paid for politician, left once elected. To push a politician left, you need leverage in the form of dollars — billions and billions and BILLIONS of dollars. What are you gonna do, squirt shampoo on a piece of progressive legislation to get the hair sniffer to sign it?! 😂

Biden CANNOT be pushed left for progressive policies because the very policies you support would directly undermine the big industries that are lining the pockets of the Republicans AND Democrats: Green New Deal VS Oil and Gas; Medicare for All VS Big Pharma; Free College Tuition VS Big Banks, etc. If you want ANY of these policies, we HAVE TO break through the two-party duopoly's choke-hold on the American people.

I feel it would be worse for Biden to get elected because I guarantee you, if he does, people will go back to sleep on all that is wrong with our country. With Trump in office, everything is happening in front of the curtain. With Biden, "nothing will fundamentally change" as he closes the curtain in front of the dark doings of the United States, continuing Trump's destruction behind the scenes. At least with Trump, since he attracts the spotlight, we can keep an eye on our oppressors. With Trump, people will stay mad, and we need to stay mad, not go back to sleep. Oh, and with a Biden victory, I will, once again, get charged a penalty for not having health insurance for my PRE-EXISTING CONDITION that I couldn't afford in the first place.

Disclaimer: I wasn't paid by Russia to type this. And if you're a Republican reading this and sick of Trump, come to the Green side; we support the second ammendment! When you swing far enough left, you get your guns back. ;)

Feel free to share and discuss.

[fear-is-the-only-darkness]

What is FEAR about?

It’s dedicated to the despots, dictators and autocrats of the 21st century. People whose decisions affect billions of lives in the wrong way. The purpose is not to elevate or deify these people it’s quite the opposite. It’s rather a hall of faces of the most sordid fear-mongers of our times.

My name is STYGAI and this is my graphic project.

Fool Everyone And Rule

When I was a kid I was taught that an elected political leader of a country is supposed to be some kind of role model, a beacon of light, who is for the people and with the people. This is a nice utopia. As an adult I had to learn that politics is a lot more complicated and the meaning of “for the people” and “with the people” is always relative and changing.

For me it’s very simple when it comes to politicians:

don’t use politics to your own benefit

admit when you screw up and take responsibility

don’t threaten peoples’ lives and livelihood

After a relative peaceful 60-70 years the political landscape is shifting into the wrong direction. For long many people believed that democracy and liberalism is the answer to the opposing threat of communism. In the last 10 years it turned out that democracy is prone to fail and it’s rules can be bent and used at will, provided the right people are sitting in the right places. And so new types of hybrid regimes have emerged. 

The pillars of the liberal world are shaking. Most people don’t even realize what is happening. Maybe liberalism isn’t the best solution to our problems but I’m sure that an oppressing system isn’t one either. History has shown us a few examples of this.

I’ve read some months ago that politics has basically two messages to offer to voters: HOPE and FEAR. I agree on this but the worst part is that most of the time these are just two sides of the same coin. This coin is called POWER.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

We have to be aware that the decisions we make as humans affect our environment and other people around us and - even people we don’t know about. We have to be aware of the fact that currently we are all living on the same planet and if we make it unhabitable we would be simply screwed because we have no other place to go to. Planet Earth would be fine without the human plague for billion years to come.

People with absolute power don’t care about the future they only care about their legacy. All the other people are mere tools and products to achieve their goals. When they disregard science, common sense and basic humanity for the sake of their own short term benefit  we can be sure that they don’t act for the best interests of the human race: SURVIVAL. 

The prospect of wars to come and the changing climate will decimate humanity if we don’t act.

Historia est magistra vitae

History is the teacher of life. Therefore you should learn from history as it provides many lessons.

The lines between good and evil are blurred by the overwhelming consumption of content we have to face day by day through the news, television and social media. We are in a constant bubble and the time for fact checking is basically non existent.

How do you recognize an emerging autocrat? A system of oppression? It’s simple: keep your mind open, educate yourself, learn to read between the lines, check the facts and connect the dots. 

Whatever happens don’t fall for the FEAR! Because FEAR is the MIND KILLER! FEAR is the only DARKNESS!

[asymptotichigh5]

Energy, the economy, and everything else.

I’ve been meaning to address this subject somewhere for a while. For the longest time, I hesitated on what the best medium to achieve this would be : on one hand, a Facebook status needs to be short and concise, which is not necessarily my forte and of course, there is also the fact that it would quickly be washed away in the storm of social media posts that has become 2020. A YouTube video then occurred to me to be most appropriate, but it would be long, my camera sucks and I hate video editing. So, I finally turned to this blog, which I had abandoned for quite some time. Surprisingly, there was an article in my drafts I had started writing almost 5 years ago about exactly this topic titled “A physics crash-course for politicians: a recipe not to kill us all”, but it was a bit too dramatic and I might get called off for taking political stances, when in reality there will be none in this post (which is surprising, for any of those reading this who know me). Anyway, this article will be the first in a series, which I might or might not continue, depending on interest, even though I did promise a friend of mine to carry through the entire message the whole way through, hopefully I’ll be able to do this with some of you actually reading all the way through, though that might be too optimistic.

Energy is a concept which is as important (if not more) as it is misunderstood by the general public. Most people don’t consider energy to be a considerable issue in their daily lives, but hopefully by the end of this post you will understand that energy is what allows you to live your 21st century carefree lifestyle. It turns out that most of us consider energy to be a bill to pay at the end of the month, or an annoyance to pay for when we fill our cars with gasoline at the pump, but energy — before being a bill to pay, or a commodity — is a physical quantity. A quick look at Wikipedia will give you a definition of energy which appears to be rather circular. Perhaps a more appropriate definition of energy for the sake of this post is the following:

Energy [/ˈɛnədʒi/, noun] : a physical quantity quantifying the ability to change the environment, or the ability to do work.

By “change the environment” we refer to the ability to perform any kind of change at all. Letting a ball fall involves energy, heating up water to make a cup of tea involves energy, me typing on this keyboard at this very moment also involves energy, etc. The SI unit for energy is the Joule, which at the human scale represents a tiny bit of energy (roughly speaking, it is the energy required to lift a medium-sized tomato (300 grams) by 1 metre. This unit has the annoying nuisance of being too small, so for the rest of this post we will talk about energy in terms of MWh (megawatt-hours), which corresponds to 3 600 000 000 Joules, which is a hell of a lot more medium-sized tomatoes lifted, or in terms of kWh (kilowatt-hours), which corresponds to 3 600 000 Joules. It is a good exercise to try to understand the MWh in terms of human work to put everything into perspective. To this effect, the BBC actually had a great documentary which appeared in 2009 about electrical energy consumption in the UK which performed an experiment in which a tiny army of people were forced to pedal to provide electricity to an average-sized house with an average-sized family having an average-sized consumption of electricity. While the documentary has great shock value, we need not hire an army of 80 cyclist to get the right orders of magnitude. An 80 kg man carrying 10 kg of supplies with him and climbing 2000 m up a mountain spends roughly 0.5 kWh to go up the mountain. Similarly, digging up 6 m${}^3$ of dirt to make a hole 1 m deep takes roughly 0,05 kWh of energy. By comparison, 1L of oil provides 2~4 kWh of (usable) mechanical energy.

Of course, using the oil to drive up the mountain, or to fuel an excavator to dig up the holes is a no brainer. Oil, or more precisely the machines it feeds, are not constrained by fatigue, do not form unions, do not complain that the ruble is too heavy, or that their legs are tired. It is also incredibly cheap by comparison, even if the human workers going up the mountain or digging up the hole are not getting paid at all. Assuming the cost of a slave to simply be the sustainance cost of a human being (i.e. minimal clothing, food and shelter) it is still a couple of hundred times cheaper to use a machine instead of a person to perform tasks, whenever possible. The reason why slavery ended is not because all of a sudden people grew a conscience out of thin air, or because we are so much better or educated than our ancestors ; it is simply stupid to have slaves in a world where you have access to a dense source of energy, because using this energy for mechanical work is many times more efficient and cheaper than owning slaves. This heuristic argument is also what ultimately explains the correlation between the abolition of slavery and the first industrial revolution (although the latter was mostly fed by coal as opposed to oil). In other words, the huge disparity in the efficiency of dense energy sources is what explains that mankind has historically always transitioned to sources of energy which monotonically increase in energy density.

But just what makes energy so important? Well, the answer lies in the definition. Since energy is ultimately the driver for any transformation of the environment, energy is by definition the main driver of the economy, too. In fact, the availability of a large supply of energy is what has allowed the development of modern society as we know it: paid holidays, retirement benefits, social security, social programs, your trip to Thailand last year, the variety of food you find at the supermarket, the fact that you even have disposable income to spend however you wish, free time, your ability to pursue long years of study, etc. Without the access to a cheap, reliable source of energy, this would all be impossible. Without realizing it, on average, we can calculate an equivalent amount of slaves used by any human on Earth today, given our estimates on the output of energy a human being is capable of delivering above and the total energy consumption of the planet. Doing the math, we find that an average human lives as if he/she had ~200 slaves working for him/her constantly. If we look at developed nations, this number jumps to 600 to 1500 equivalent slaves. This is an outstanding standard of living compared to what any of our ancestors ever knew. And so, it’s not that our generation is 200 times more productive than previous generations of humans, what has been driving the economy for the past 220 years is not humans, so much as it is the increasing access to a park of machines which has driven GDP growth since the industrial revolution. In fact, this can also be seen in developing countries, where an increase in development is immediately accompanied by a rural exodus driven by the introduction of machines to perform the heavy work in the fields. This allows for a widening of the pool of workers, which can then be free to use more machines and increase GDP.

So what sources of energy have we been exploiting in the last 220 years? Worldwide, the mix looks a little bit like this: 

Notice that most of this mix (oil, gas and coal) are sources which are fossil fuels. In essence, what this chart is saying is that we owe all of the societal progress of the past 220 years to fossil fuels. Of course, the use of these fuels has the annoying consequence of releasing CO${}_2$ into the atmosphere which — as we know — has some rather undesirable consequences for the future of humanity. This chart also tells a story about how people have completely misrepresented and misunderstood the problem. Most people think that the energy crisis will ultimately be solved by replacing the carbonated sources of energy by “renewables”, even though the later are basically invisible in the above chart. Luckily, a world where we live only with renewable energy is entirely possible: it’s called the Middle Ages. The impossibility of replacing these carbonated sources with “renewables” is an important point to treat, and deserves an article of its own, but in the end its cause is the same as what has driven this discussion so far: energy density. We shall come back to this important point in a subsequent post. For now, let us finish driving the point home in establishing the unequivocal link between energy, specifically oil, and GDP.  Energy availability is the main driver of the economy, this is simply because the economy is nothing other but the collective transformation of stuff into other stuff by humans. This, and the fact that 50% of the world-wide oil consumption is used to transport goods or people from point A to B is what explains the following correlation between oil and GDP: 

In light of global warming, the question becomes one in which we are forced to arbitrate between real GDP growth and carbon emissions. It is literally that simple, yet it is difficult to grasp what this means. GDP growth is an abstract concept most of us don’t really understand, and most people advocating for giving up growth don’t fully grasp the consequences of what it will mean for all of us. Very really, what it means is diminishing real wages and purchasing power by a factor varying between 3 or 10 over the next 30 years (we will come back to these figures eventually in another article, too). Now, most people will point out that we can and should just take all this wealth from the oligarchs and the billionaires out there, and this is true and should definitely be done, but it will unfortunately still not be anywhere near enough to solve the problem. Orders of magnitude are a bitch and maths sucks, especially when they contradict your political opinions. In real terms, giving up growth means to take your current salary, and divide it by 10, and ask yourself whether you are really ready to live with that. The questions on left and right are at this point so irrelevant that it is stupid to even ask them. Both of these models of thinking completely rely on a pie which is ever increasing and in which the living standards of everyone eventually rise. For the right, this is obvious, but this holds true even in a leftist society, in which the social programs and everything that goes with it relies heavily on economic growth and an increase of the economic pie. This view is flawed, as in very real terms in order to protect ourselves from climate change, the only way is to considerably decrease our dependence on fossil fuels, in other words, considerably decrease global GDP.

(Un)fortunately, whether the politicians decide to take global warming seriously or not, the problem will auto-regulate eventually. You see, there is a tiny and obnoxious problem regarding our addiction to fossil fuels: we are running out of them. We should point out that not all fossil fuels are equal: this is not only true from a carbon emission perspective, but also from a transportation point of view. Indeed, only about 10% of the coal produced yearly is actually exported, because it is inconvenient to transport. Gas presents a similar problem, given its physical form, which is not sufficiently energetically dense to be easily shipped without compression (which itself involves energy). This leaves oil as the main source of energy which is actually exportable and tradable.  And so, not only is oil vital due to the fact that it is the only source of energy which can reliably be used to for transportation, it is also the only option when looking at trading energy internationally. However, oil production has been already past its peak in most countries with considerable oil reserves. From a European point of view, the problem is actually worse as the energy consumption in Europe has been stagnating and in fact decreasing since 2005, when we reached peak consumption.

Incidentally, this explains why there has been no -- and there will be no -- economic long term real growth in Europe in the future, and it this has indeed been the case ever since 2008. In fact, most of the economic growth which has happened in Europe ever since is due to the trade of goods which increase in value over time (such as housing), which gets further gets inflated as there is a surplus of liquidity which has been continuously injected into the system since the introduction of quantitative easing. We will come to this problematic in a latte post. Similarly, we observe analogous curves of decrease in variation of energy consumption in the countries of the OECD (source of data: BP Statistical Review 2017), which means that this halting of real economic growth is not to be expected anywhere else in the OECD either.

During a recent discussion with a close friend of mine, he pointed out that the decrease in consumption in energy could be explained by the fact that the economy in developed countries had essentially become an economy of services, and that thus, this correlation between GDP and energy consumption and production was flawed, but this reasoning is wrong. First, because many of these services introduced involve or depend strongly on developments in e-commerce and industries attached to the development of the Internet and computers. However, the digitalization of the economy has not led to a decrease in energy demand, but in fact quite the opposite, if anything it has considerably increased our energy dependence. Second, the data simply states otherwise across the board. For instance, the chart below depicts an evolution of the percentage of people working in services and the amount of tons of CO${}_2$ released in the environment per capita in the World (data is from the World Bank).

Of course, the fact that these are positively correlated in the world and these countries is expected. In the world, because supporting the increasing living standards of the people working in the service sector necessarily comes out of an increase of the economic pie, which can only mean that the energy consumption (thus, at first order, the tons of CO${}_2$ in the atmosphere) increased. In European countries, the CO${}_2$ per capita has been reduced, partly to a negligible population growth, but also due to the delocalization of the most polluting elements of the economy to developing countries. Nonetheless, the general worldwide trend is clear: more service sector employment correlates with higher output of CO${}_2$, which implies higher energy consumption. But of course, by the reasoning above, this is hardly surprising.

Most of the time, the decline in the rate of growth of oil production is dismissed by saying that we will always find alternative forms of petroleum which will remain exploitable and will secure us with more oil. However, these alternative sources, such as bituminous sands and are problematic to exploit, require more energy input to be exploitable and are of lesser energetic quality. Similar decreasing curves of consumption and production have been appreciated for gas as well. Coal remains an exception to this, but it is not easily tradable, which implies that only 8 countries (including the US, China and Australia) really can consider exploiting coal for long term energy consumption, but given the climate consequences this poses, this is hardly a desirable outcome.

And so ultimately, it is not even a question of deciding whether or not we want to transition out of fossil fuels or not. The decrease in fossil fuel consumption will happen whether we like it or not — and by extension, so will the inevitable shrinking of the economy. The problem is that it might not happen fast enough to avoid catastrophe, which might already be unavoidable. What this also means is that the questions we should be asking ourselves as a society are not so much whether we should adopt liberal or leftist policies, but rather how we optimize the distribution of resources in a world where the economic pie decreases year by year, but no one seems to be wanting to have this discussion seriously.

[pointlesstrashyexistence]

Any idea why my reblog wouldn't go through? Since I obliterated every single point you made, you ought to read it. The reply I posted tagged you instead.

No idea. As far as I know I haven’t blocked you and I don’t know what post you are talking about since I haven’t been tagged in anything.

Never mind. I realized that you were in fact were a racist and I blocked you’re other account so you got bitter and tried to argue using information that is innacurate. And if anybody would like to know the other account of this person, it is thoughtsandreplies.

So I’m going to go over each statement the person made with the exception of what originally began this, Immersion (Piss Jesus). Art is a very personal experience, but how you interpret art does not give you the right to use it as an excuse for racism.

So 1) No one is actually saying that Lincoln was a racist. They’re arguing whether or not the depiction of the Black man in the Emancipation Memorial, a real former slave named Archer Alexander is racist and if it should be taken down because of that. This specific instance is not about the white man involved, but the black man being represented and if his representation as someone physically and what could be taken as symbolically lower than a white man is degrading. This is a complex issues that even two of his descendants are have opposing opinions on. Muhammad Ali was a direct descendant of this man and his third cousin, Keith Winstaed, and his oldest daughter, actress Maryum Ali, have opposing opinions. Winstaed is in favor of keeping it because he is more focused on the historical context, that the sculpture of Alexander was meant to be seen as empowering because has broken his chains and beginning to rise. However, Ali is viewing with the eyes of someone living in the 21st century who expects better representation for minority communities that have historically been vilified in art, literature, television, and politics. She believes the statue is degrading and offensive because even if Alexander’s chains are broken, he is still below Lincoln, a white man, and is in a position that can be interpreted as him bowing to him. As I said before, art is personal and both people have valid interpretations of this piece. This is not the same as tearing down statues of actual racists. We put up statues of people to honor them, but we must be able to recognize that we can no longer honor people who were legitimately horrible. I don’t see any statues of Hitler in Germany so what’s your excuse for why you want to keep up sculptures of racists?

2) off the bat I could tell you were a racist who hasn’t bothered to examine their words and actions by referring to the Black Lives Matter Movement as a “historically illiterate mob”. Most of the people in the movement are black so I can assume you are perpetuating the stereotype that black people can’t read which is enforced by the fact that it was illegal for slaves to be literate and black and brown communities have historically and continue to receive less funding for their schools, which leads to lower quality books and teachers, which leads to students who have difficulty in their studies, which leads to students who have lower grades, which leads to black and brown communities being forced to accept work at lower paying jobs, which leads to black and brown parents that are not able to spend time with their children in order to make enough money for food, water, electricity, and housing, which leads to kids who don’t receive the attention they need, which leads to students who are being taught by these same lower standard teacher with old outdated books, which leads to students being frustrated over not being at the level of their studies that they should be but are unable to seek outside help because of a lack of tutors and familial help, which leads to students who “act out” because they were not able to develop the emotional tools necessary to monitor behavior and are then forced into prisons by teachers who have called the police on them, which leads to another lack of education because the U.S. prison system does not want to rehabilitate prisoners and help them become better people, it just wants to find a way to legally continue slavery.

3) It does not matter if someone had doubts about whether or not someone had doubts over their racial superiority. What matters is that they still willingly continued to be a part of that system that benefitted them because it was more convenient to not do anything. Also, nice job on conveniently leaving out the fact that Jefferson was known to have raped his slaves and produced multiple children with slaves, but still did not bothering freeing any of his slaves.

4) Don’t bother bringing up almost any of the other founding fathers also since they were also slave owners perpetuating the system because it helped them make money. And don’t try to excuse it by claiming that it was just accepted at the time. Abolitionism was a thing during that time. Even when Columbus began raping and pilaging, there were people who knew what he was doing was bad. There is writing about how people already knew Columbus was fucking insane and even Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, you know, the ones who started the Spanish Inquisition, was so disgusted by rumors about Columbus that they had him investigated and took away his titles when they found out about what was happening. They’re not off the hook though because they were still, you know, the reason for why many Saphardic Jews were imprisoned, killed, and forced to run away.

5) No, I don’t use the word “racist” too lightly, you’re standards for what count as racist just don’t include enough things that are racist.

6) Black people live in fear because they have historically and systemically have had legitimate reasons to, not because I’m calling out things that have been blatantly racist.

7) Yes there has been property damage. Yes there are people who are going to use these events as an excuse to do whatever they want. That will always be a part of protesting. But don’t act like cops aren’t doing this same thing, intentionally planting themselves in protests and then creating violence or causing property damage in order to give other cops a reason to attack protestors. If you know enough, you can spot them based on whose wearing shoes that can be run in or heavy combat boots, whose wearing nondescript clothes that you can see protective gear under, and who is wearing the “color of the day”, a tactic cops have used in order to disguise themselves among protestors but signal that they are cops to other cops by wearing matching accessories like armbands, headbands, or wristbands.

8) Funny how you don’t want to bring up the fact that these are populations with large black and brown communities that are usually overpoliced. Also, just because someone is a Democrat does not make them a liberal. The only reason I’m in preference of Democrats is because of the multiple marginalized communities that will hold them accountable for anything they do.

9) Not every single time a black person is killed is it because of racism. That “black-on-Black crime” people like to bring up? That’s not racism, that’s just the fact that people in close proximity to each other are more likely to kill each other and there are still heavily legally segregated parts of America due to wealth disparity. That example you brought up about a black cop killing a black man? That’s not racism. That a person knowing that they are untouchable because of the power that they have because the only good cops are cops that have quit. If you haven’t quit or been fired, you are likely a member of the blue wall of silence that refuses to condemn offices who intentionally act violently knowing that they will not be punished. Also, let’s not forget that people can also be prejudiced against people in their race or ethnicity because of the shade of their skin and the socio-economic class.

10) When have you seen any white man being bashed for having a black wife or being a “big brother” to black children? Often the only people who have problems with black women getting married to white men are black men who feel like they own black women and then claim they are “betraying their race” when they seek love from men in other races and ethnicities, but expect black women to stay silent as they chase after snow bunnies who fetishize mixed children. The only other case I could think of would be racists not wanting races to mix. And the “big brother” thing? The only reason I could think of would be complaints about wanting more black men to be “big brothers” because white men just cannot relate to the experiences of being a black child.

11) You conveniently left out that despite being one of the smallest racial communities in the U.S., black people are also the most policed, and will get arrested for things cops would let a white man go with like weed charges. Look no further than lovely white wonderbread comedien John Mulaney saying in his second comedy special “the comeback kid” “it’s (weed) always been legal silly goose”. This means that they have a disproportionate amount of black people in their records because if black people only make up 13% of people in the entire nation, they should only make up about 13% of all crime to, but they make up more because policemen have quotas to fill for how many people they arrest in order to receive more funding, and its easier with a racist system backing you up to arrest Black than white people.

12) Again, people in close proximity to each other are more likely to kill each other than people who do not know each other and people who live far from each other. Also, it’s the ultra extremists who really want to abolish the police. I still think we need a protective system, but we need it to work for the common people, not corporations and politicians. I think that every district should use the same system as wealthy white neighborhoods, where anyone who wants to be a policeman must be assigned a position in the neighborhood they are from because anything they do wrong will make them accountable to their neighbors, family, and friends. Also I believe that all cops should undergo mandatory psychological evaluations every 3-6 months, especially cops who have worked on extremely traumatic cases. I also believe that the U.S. should require at least 3 years of school for anyone wanting to become a cop because no one is actually able to learn the law, learn to enforce it through peaceful means unless in dire circumstances, and care for the wounded, mentally ill, physically disabled, or anyone mentally impaired by drugs and alcohol in 6 months.

13) Another example of how this person is racist because they are actually suggesting that we enforce racial discrimination and black poverty. Also, if you want to bring up gangs, the biggest gang in the U.S is police force using propaganda that promotes the idea of “belonging” and economic stability in order to entice people who do not feel like they belong wherever they are, and then giving them a gun and badge that basically means “kill whoever you want because we will cover it up for you”.

14) Unless a woman feels like she is able to provide a stable enough home environment for her and her child, NO ONE WILLINGLY CHOOSES TO BE A SINGLE MOTHER! Single motherhood is caused by multiple events. A woman was impregnated by someone who left her, a couple with a child divorced because of legitimate reasons because divorce is a long and financially exhausting process, a woman was raped and decided to keep the child, and woman was raped and forced to give birth because she lives in a state that limits women’s healthcare, which includes abortion.

15) Fatherless homes do not equate to a rise in criminal culture. If that were the case, all wlw couples and single mothers would raise criminals. Do you know what does equate to criminal culture though? Teaching people that they are superior to someone else because of their race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality and then promoting violent behaviors in that child.

16) Black families were never more intact during slavery than after slavery. Slaveowners and slavetraders intentionally worked together to make money and create a lack of unity among slaves by selling individual families members to different regions. One of the first things that former slaves did after they were freed was go out and find their stolen family members.

17) I can’t say anything about economics since I don’t have much knowledge about the economic system before the New Deal. However I will say that this is the only valid point you have made. Politicians have historically tried to get as many black votes as possible when they realized what a reliable voting community they were and then never actually done much to help the black community. However this is a very general statement.

18) How is group called Black Lives Matter that is focused on gaining racial equality attempting to sow discord in a nation by basically say “can you stop targeting us just because you’re racist and don’t like the color of my skin”.

19) How is a group asking for racial equality a lie? Are you really going to deny racism when we have seen shootings, lynchings, and people getting run over by cars all within the last month and a half?

20) WTF IS A LIE ABOUT A CHANT THAT MEANS “I HAVE NO WEAPONS, DO NOT KILL ME”

[skepticaloccultist]

Magic Isn’t Easy

There is, in the study and practice of magic, the allure of power. The endless seekers of quick wealth, easy love and societal fame come to the practice of magic looking for personal gain and glory. Inevitably faced with a life time's worth of work and study these seekers soon turn back, giving up their study and turning to pantomiming some practice made hodgepodge out of a skimmed book or two, or buying some initiation into a "current", order, or coven.

As well there are those who would sell you either their magic or a "path" in which you yourself can "be a god", or some such nonsense. Charlatans and frauds who would sell you a path to a glory they do not themselves possess. Shiftless fakers who would have you believe that the quest for power and money is the alchemist's stone and solvent.

It is by no means a shortcut in life, magic. There are far easier ways to gain love and wealth than through the study of the esoteric arts. Like playing a musical instrument or practicing a martial art the formal, practical and contemplative study of magic requires serious inquiry, endless reading and many hours of solitary working and breathing out in nature.

Magic in the 21st century is all the rage, a counter point to the uncertainty of the world and its geopolitical stage. Endless tv witches in black dresses, spells cast on politicians publicly with a photo op of the ritual included in the press pack. Capitalism has cottoned on to the desire for the 'otherness' that witchcraft and magic possess. Humans worn down by the ever encroaching digitalization of life seek again the uncanny. Yearn for nature at its core, a rewilding of the soul that somehow eludes the mundanes in their day to day living.

Yet there is no quick trick, no simple solution, no spell that brings wealth or love, that provides comfort and riches. Magic can do all of those things, of course, but it is a long road to understanding how and making that practical. Better to find a more direct path to the wealth you seek, for the magician seeks not wealth nor glory, only the endless quest for knowledge of the beyond.

Like it has so many times before in history the high tide of popular awareness of magic and its practice will recede. There may be a rough focal point in near history where magic is briefly taken seriously enough that laws start being made and people get hurt, but that too will pass and the masses so enamored of magic's subtle glamour will move on once again.

Throughout time the narrative of magic has been drowning in a bazaar's worth of hawkers, fakers, charlatans and frauds. They seek money and fame, and their customers are not guileless in their desires for quick solutions. No innocents are harmed in the racket of selling fake charms and spells to those disinterested in doing their own homework.

The internet provides a boundless sea of garbage about magic. Thousands upon thousands of volumes of mostly rehashed bullshit 20th century nonsense. Crib note style 'dark fluff™' for the would be witch or wizard with simple instructions and a how to list of ritual items that can easily be purchased from the publisher's website. Fuck off.

But that is the real initiation into the occult. Having swam through the sea of badly written occult fiction tripe, bdsm ken doll grimoires, and Scott fucking Cunningham wiccan douchery, we emerge like newborn beings out of an abyss of bad knowledge. We see clearly the glimpses of work that have value, and patterns of understanding begin to form.

So read and read and read some more. Look at a book's bibliography as a guide, if it doesn't have one its most likely bullshit. Go back to sources before the 19th century, and look at sources outside of the narrative of magic (aka orders like OTO, GD, AA, etc). Look at folklore records not just Inquisition documents, read children's stories and mythology and know that half of the academics that pretend to objectively write about magic are also secretly practitioners.

Regardless of the interests you have and the path you will find yourself on the only way to understand the mechanics of what you are doing, or the lay of the landscape in which your practice resides, is through a continued year's long regular consideration and actualization of magic. Only when you can see the wiring under the board will you have the ability to gain riches and fame, the irony is at that point you will no longer seek them.

  "Our path is slow, it requires much listening and stillness, learning to see and to hear that which goes unnoticed by society. Only when seasons become like days, when cycles of the moon like hours, will the Veil become clear." from 'The Tenets of the Folkwitch'

[jamiebongwater]

The Front

I am a working-class punk. I have been working as a cook for the last four years, trying to build skills that will enable me to move anywhere in the world and ply my trade while funding my other endeavors.

When I was a kid I was almost pressured into becoming a scientist; at the very least, with my high test scores it was assumed that I would readily enter the information economy as a high achiever. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I would always think about where my talents might have the most impact. I had immense compassion and love for the human race, and I thought that using my analytical abilities in the field of chemistry or physics to solve the problems of humanity would be my calling. Then I got to high school and started reading Chomsky, Taibbi, Eric Schlosser, Freakonomics, books by the Crimethinc. Collective, and the list goes on. When learning about the world I would try to answer questions that had been troubling me privately about apparent contradictions in society. Why do people fall victim to drug abuse despite being informed of the dangers? Why is poverty still rampant in the wealthiest society in human history? Why do people spend their whole lives doing things that they hate and that they know are doing no good for the world? Why do some people hate sexual minorities even though they obviously pose no danger? I learned that all these questions have very reasonable academic answers, and that the reason these answers are not widely known is that their concealment perpetuates a cyclical game of human dominance. I didn’t want to believe it was possible that the most esteemed people in our society would betray the public service for a motive as vulgar as money or power, but I slowly came to understand that almost all human behavior can be understood as power struggle and that the people who are currently dominant always have an incentive to deceive, to misinform, and to manipulate to maintain their dominance.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black – but getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.” - John Erlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon

Drugs are not bad, consciousness alteration is a natural impulse. It is the responsibility of the culture to educate people about drugs and to guide people into safe, productive lives. The reason that we have failed is that the culture was hijacked by big business in order to wage a war for social control that has killed millions of Americans. Rather than setting and achieving meaningful public health goals, the Federal Government concerned itself with heavy-handed enforcement of prohibition laws in order to jail political opponents. Now our entire society buys into a false narrative. Poverty still exists in the U.S. because setting a living wage, nationalizing healthcare, or subsidizing housing would necessarily impact the profits of major political donors. Social responsibility requires everybody to contribute proportionally. If you’re somebody who is bribing politicians, you don’t care about anything but money. You will pay as little as possible, and if that means convincing voters that socialism is impossible or that nationalized healthcare is the devil, then that’s a worthwhile investment. People waste their lives because the work that is being given to us is garbage; the owning class, the people who determine what work is to be done, don’t care about the planet, or about creativity, or about egalitarianism... they care about their bottom line, which means turning your life into a computer program. People get angry about sexual minorities because they are being pitted against each other; if you get people riled up about the culture war and convince them that they are being threatened by things they don’t understand, they will be too distracted to notice that their lives are being turned into a computer program.

I had always been angry that the people around me seemed so uncurious and complacent in the face of a material existence that was strikingly banal; their empty lives were cause for outrage, we should all be unified in struggle and we should know the cause and goal of our struggle. Instead what I heard was, “Sell out. Find something to do where somebody will pay you a lot of money and you can have an easy life.” This statement is the end of life on Earth. I refused to be a part of this horror, this extinction of all that is good. We are a post-scarcity civilization; we can pull more than enough shit out of the ground to feed and clothe everybody. It’s time that, as a society, we seriously asked ourselves “What now?” The problems facing us are not scientific, we know what things we have to do as a species and we’re not doing those things because of petty dominance and political games. The challenge of our times is getting humanity on the same page.

I knew that the purpose and direction of my work would be more important than what I went to school for. We don’t need to create more mechanization for the ruling class to use against us, we need to fight back. We don’t need to fill more mindless jobs, we need to rethink what our jobs are, who fills them, and how they pay. We need to determine who we are as a species and defend our dignity. We need to recapture life for the 21st Century. We need to decide how to spend our time on Earth; we need to have the freedom to develop new culture that will keep us safe and loved in a changing and uncertain world. We need to use our political will, as a class, to demand our governments set meaningful standards of social responsibility so that our civilization can be sustainable. These aren’t goals we can accomplish through corporate jobs. These are things you have to do yourself. It’s hard work and it’s challenging because there’s no map; no generation has had to do this before. It’s almost impossible to know what line of work to get into, what to go to school for, or even what city to live in when your only goal is fixing a world that is completely fucked. But I know I’m not living my life to make money for people who only want to keep my brothers and sisters down. I’m living to move humanity forward. The next frontier is cultural; standing at the frontlines of human history is more rewarding than any check you will ever cash.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day. 

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas. 

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

[aonahht]

Brexit yo

im ranting boys so strap in, sorry not sorry

So Brexit happened yesterday, (or at midnight last night I guess, its whatever), and while I, like most young people, was pro-remain, my opinion is that despite the sham that was the referendum, with literally no independent coverage of the pros and cons of leaving/remaining (love that for our democracy), the results were the results, and as far as I was concerned that was that and we should honour them and move on. cant help whats happened etc, just get it done and move forward, focus on actually funding the NHS and shit. (I respect that not everyone holds that opinion though, and go for it dudes, this is just where im at :)))) 

bit pissed the fuck off now though, bc (no shade to the Tory society at my uni, you do you and express your lil angry political selves or whatever) when I was on campus yesterday I saw them legit out doing a victory march in the piazza like wtf

to contextualise why im pissed: Brexit has been the most polarising and destructive-to-society political change/event or whatever in my living memory: legit its been like watching my parents divorce again- no one is happy, everyone is stressed and upset and arguing, and the people on each spouse’s side automatically are against the other spouse and their friends bc they all disagree- ITS JUST NOT A GOOD SITUATION AND EVERYONE IS BEING HURT BY THE ARGUING AND UNWILLINGNESS BY ANYONE TO TRY AND COMPROMISE BASICALLY BUT YEAH 

 so yeah everyone’s mad, politics is now some cesspit of jabs between politicians and random citizens alike all assigning blame for the country’s problems and defaming each other’s character bc they disagree- literally most of the serious arguments ive had with my parents and family have been about the politics and ideology that informed their decision to vote leave and the putridness of their reaction to any liberal (including me) questioning why they voted leave, but bc at my uni most people are quite intensely left but come from liberal households I almost feel like I have to defend my family bc voting leave doesn't make them bad people, they just have a different perspective than others, and different priorities (as we all do ayy democracy) so its just one big mess and everything’s fucked and the future is so uncertain bc rather than making concrete steps forward everyone’s spent four years arguing, and I don't know how to have opinions and not feel guilty anymore

….and these people are having a fuckin party about it??

ive been seeing pics of people waving their union jack flags, and going to rallies like the pope’s in town for a gav, and they’re acting like this is some kind of ‘victory’ or ‘triumph’ for the united kingdom?? United kingdom my arse bro, we haven't been this divided since (idek when actually, im 19 lol) but POINT BEING this is a fucking shambles and it just makes me angry-

- im angry that despite my attempts to always respect the opinions of the people around me and their voices, their backgrounds, their perspectives on life that I maybe don't share, people aren't willing to do the same for me 

- im angry that people would hold up the union jack, a flag which symbolises in its literal composition the coming together of different demographics into one united kingdom, and wave it as though Brexit has been anything other than the worst and most divisive thing to happen to democracy in 21st century britain

- im angry that some of these people not only hold up this flag, but then legit start referring to yesterday/today as ‘independence day’ like oh my FUCking god do you literally not understand at all the premise of what independence day means to so many people- the words literally represent for so many countries the moment where they, as a nation, took back political agency and control from literal colonisers (spoiler: a shameful amount of those times the coloniser was Britain, so wind your neck in maybe??) and began governing their country again independently of powers who stripped them of their agency against their will. How the fuck, sirs, can one compare Brexit which legit is just pulling out of a CONSENSUAL AGREEMENT WE ENTERED INTO OF OUR OWN FREE WILL, with no resistance from the other party other than the expected attempts to use their power to negotiate (literally we would have done the same, I don't get why ppl were so mad that the EU didn't want us to leave and didn't just hand every perk to us on a silver platter, why would they, our politicians were being dicky and offensive from the get go, how british) but yeah, compare that to LITERAL COLONIALISM WHY DONT YOU- the fucking insensitivity and stupidity just makes me so mad, like read a fucking book.

- also side note, also mad bc people act like they’re the most educated person in the room bc they read the news on facebook, and then dismiss you when you bring up a relevant point that you literally learned from your academic reading and political engagement across a range of news sources from a range of political biases, and then act like formal education is a conspiracy theory formed by the left (its not, and its literally history dude, im not  making it up) 

so yeah, in summary this is just a sad and a shit day, that people are now so divided and polarised that they can look at the hurt and anger caused by the last four years and think of today as a victory. I don't know what it means to be british anymore dudes, other than being angry, frustrated and divided