Global warming is probably a problem (and possibly a severe* one?) but its not anything remotely near an existential risk.
As far as I can tell, there are basically three human caused scenarios that could maybe lead to human extinction (not counting technical extinction via transhumanism)- UFAI, world war with WMDs (I’m not sure if today’s nuclear arsenals can accomplish this?), or some kind of synthetic super-pathogen. UFAI would kill “Mother Nature” dead too.
That caring about people over “nature” is labelled “self centered” with negative connotations really highlights why I despise environmentalism though. (IDK if that’s the intentions of the artist, this might just be cosmic horror, but I’ve encountered that attitude a lot)
*the scale/scope is a bit wonky when labeling worldwide problems by severity
[”But the real version. Where the ant let the grasshopper die.”]
THESEUS ARMED FOR WAR AGAINST THE GODDESS OF CANCER AND THE GODDESS OF EVERYTHING ELSE.
If you meet Gaia, mock the “selfishness” of her apparent desire that so many ecosystems and species thrive. It is an appropriate response to the assertion that a desire for 7 billion happy and prosperous humans is selfish.
To be fair, the Gaia in this comic didn’t explicitly voice pro-biodiversity viewpoints, as she seems equally apathetic about the species we cause the extinction of with her ”eh, life goes on” attitude. That is, she is a much better representation of Mother Nature’s impersonal indifference to our individual living and suffering, especially being better than most depictions of her as a “kind and caring” deity. The only thing missing is that her garment should perhaps be red, for she is Nature, red in tooth and claw.
Truly, our signs of reverence to such a deity should be growing sharper claws and tougher skin to face the coming days.
I would take a thousand Frankensteins, Herbert Wests, and Moreaus over Mother Nature.
Diversity is useful and beautiful. BUT, Mother Nature doesn’t care about keeping any of us around, or the richness of life that’s already here. You like those fancy black-and-white bears? Nature doesn’t. They’ll go extinct without us someday. You like those jungles? Tomorrow, they will be gone whether we stop cutting down the trees or not, because Nature is a dumb Black Goat with a Thousand Young. Death, sickness, and pain producing endless struggle, that’s the secret behind everything we judge to be beautiful that Nature contains. Kinda makes Ol’ Shubby not something to pray to, but something to tame and care for. We can be the benevolent gardeners and nature-loving hermits our ancestors imagined their nature deities to be. Certainly, we have enough power today to begin taking some responsibility.
PS: We COULD kill off all of Nature, if we put our minds to it, by the way. That’s the funny thing.The damage we do today, to various species? It’s just us not paying attention to how we use our power. We create horrific destruction by accident. We can do worse on purpose. I’d like to think that means we can do better, as well, if we concentrate.
Reblogging again because this keeps getting better and better.
i work as a barista & people tell me all the time that The Drinks Got Gender. Thats A Lady Coffee, people try to say
its fucking bean water
can’t believe i can’t just reply to this but: maybe they’re actually telling you that this coffee has an important status. Lady Coffee
oh shit i was in the presence of bean water royalty oh fuck i must have looked like such a rube. such a fool.
what the fuck does this post mean ive been trying to decipher its hieroglyphic encrypted message but i cant
“From a deconstructionist stand point, I have to disagree with a large portion of the customers that I, a humble barista tend to each day. The assertion that certain coffee drinks are more suitable for one gender or another is folly. For as we know: 1. gender is a social construct, & 2. coffee of any type is simply hot water strained through roasted beans, & has no greater affect on either culturally assigned sex.”
“What ho, kind friend! Is it not unfortunate that I cannot simply reply to this post, & most reblog it? What a farce, this blue website! Ah, but I digress: what if perhaps your customers were not asserting not the suitability of the drink for a given gender, but rather indicating some matter of status? Perhaps the coffee is possessing of a high rank in society. This is of course my purely grammatical viewpoint on the subject.”
“Oh, damnation! This does in fact seem much more likely than my own ludicrous assumptions, & I was no doubt in the presence of roasted bean royalty! Some emissary from foreign soil! Curses! What a country bumpkin I’ve made myself out to be!!”
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
Bill Clinton: it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.
Yoda: taxation, theft it is!
Doge: so taxation, very theft, wow
Journalists: is taxation theft? let’s interview some Millennials and ask them.
Buzzfeed: 17 ways taxation is like theft (the 11th is coercion!)
Wikipedia: A tax (from the Latin taxo) is a financial charge or other levy imposed upon a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a state or the functional equivalent of a state to fund various public expenditures. A failure to pay, or evasion of or resistance to taxation, is usually punishable by law.
wirehead-wannabe asked: What if the high proportion of trans women in our community, the never ending plight of the lonely nerd boys, and lesbian sheep syndrome are all connected? *X Files music*
that explains it! lesbian sheep syndrome affects even lesbians who don’t know they’re lesbians yet. truly, the power of lesbian sheep syndrome is strong
tbf in my experience it totally does
CORRECT
In fact, I discovered that I indeed am lesbian because I found out about men having something very much like the lesbian sheep syndrome being like “I think the gender role is bullshit but it’s not like I can stop being a man” and I was like “this is not me because I have no reason to keep trying to be a man, how silly of me in hindsight” and then protomethea was lesbian.
I have… mixed feelings about this article? For one, it denigrates both (admittedly masturbatory) avant-garde works and popular works in favor of a very narrow view of High Art, which I’m not fond of; there is also, perhaps unintentionally, a tone of nostalgia and longing for kings and robber barons, their “better taste” justifying their equally terrible (if not worse!) political/economic actions.
It’s an interesting topic but the actual execution feels very poor + simplistic.
Yeah this article takes a bunch of interesting topics and does just about the least interesting thing it could with them.
The trend among the super rich to seek out populist cultural experiences is important, but not in the way that the author thinks it is. The fact that dictators listen to the same pop stars as their citizens but can also afford glamorous private concerts with those stars says something about the way displays of power work in the modern age. There’s a reason they’re not building opera halls, and it’s not just a matter of taste.
That… doesn’t seem quite right.
(I remember opera in recent times as being popular with Literally Everybody Who Can Perform The Upper Class Identity Temporarily, which can be anywhere from the top 10% to top 50% of the population, and individual songs or light opera, and burlesque that grew up in parody of it, being even more widely popular)
There would seem to be three or four broad categories: Modern Popular, Traditional, Modern Intellectual, and the Anti-Art offshoot of Modern Intellectual.
Modern Popular is usually opposed to Traditional on the basis of modern snobbery, but from my (Reactionary Reconstructionist) point of view Modern Popular is actually pretty close to Traditional, at least when the totally unmoored wierd shit category is removed.
Also a lot of people forget that the lower-class forms of Traditional ever existed.
A fucking ugly yacht painted in dazzle camoflauge is opposed to both Traditional and to Modern Popular.
Maybe it’s because I’m feeling pretty sick right now but I’m not really clear how this disagrees with my post. I meant that having your name attached to an opera used to be an effective way of showing you’re a big deal, but these days having Beyonce play at your wedding works much better. The article attributing everything to personal taste is missing the meaty stuff. Not my best phrasing up there though.
Edit: okay just reread and I can totally see how my post came across. I didn’t mean to imply that opera was never popular.
Excuse my amateur history and sociology here, but isn’t that just a facet of the decreasing popularity of patronage* systems in general? Rich people used to show off their wealth by sponsoring artists and musicians long-term, but now it’s more fashionable to shop around and to know what you’re getting before you buy it.
This seems like a result of consumerism (I guess this is the best word available for the not-capitalism-but-associated-with-it thing that academics call capitalism or neoliberalism sometimes?) and larger urban centers. There are far more works of art and entertainment available, so why would you sponsor a single artist or musician for years when there are hundreds of equally deserving creators out there? Especially since it’s become much higher-status to be seen as a buyer and consumer.
*Patreon is a really far cry from Maecenas and Vergil for reasons I won’t go into because I’m tired and should probably be writing proofs not shitty history speculation. Mostly just the degree of commitment and the level of showing off involved. Also, not to be confused with the Roman patronage system that was actually called a patronage system–that was more like a hierarchical kin network without the blood relations, and had nothing to do with art.
Put bluntly, the upper class just aren’t as classy as they used to be.
So too has public funding for high art taken a beating. While Americans might yearn for the sort of well-funded public arts programs they imagine Europeans prioritize, the reality is much bleaker. Despite Europe’s zealous emphasis on promoting a rich culture for a united continent, the European Union is constantly hacking away at centuries-old institutions in the name of belt-tightening.
I am quite irritated at these “old Art is dying because nobody wants to pay for it” thinkpieces.
Austerity is hurting opera? Why should I care, austerity is hurting people too and people are far more important than opera.
The state isn’t funding enough High Art?
Let the people choose the art they want to have, and if they are Wrong, anyone is free to try to do differently. Every euro in public funding for the arts is an euro not in the pockets of basic income recipients, and the stuff we europeans use the art money on is pretty bullshit. The government has no place deciding what art is worthy of support and what isn’t.
A parlour game suggestion from a nineteeth-century book of “indoor amusements”. Sounds fun to me.
just a hilarious game nothing going here nope nope
IMPORTANT UPDATE: more weirdly kinky highlights from the ‘fun and flirtation’ section
People back in the day knew how to have FUN
w o w
i somehow found a parlor game book when i was v young. since i didn’t have much to read*, i committed the whole thing to memory. i don’t remember it all now, but i do recall this:
there were a lot of kissing games
* there were several hundred books in the house. i’d read all of them at least thrice
Global warming is probably a problem (and possibly a severe* one?) but its not anything remotely near an existential risk.
As far as I can tell, there are basically three human caused scenarios that could maybe lead to human extinction (not counting technical extinction via transhumanism)- UFAI, world war with WMDs (I’m not sure if today’s nuclear arsenals can accomplish this?), or some kind of synthetic super-pathogen. UFAI would kill “Mother Nature” dead too.
That caring about people over “nature” is labelled “self centered” with negative connotations really highlights why I despise environmentalism though. (IDK if that’s the intentions of the artist, this might just be cosmic horror, but I’ve encountered that attitude a lot)
*the scale/scope is a bit wonky when labeling worldwide problems by severity
[”But the real version. Where the ant let the grasshopper die.”]
THESEUS ARMED FOR WAR AGAINST THE GODDESS OF CANCER AND THE GODDESS OF EVERYTHING ELSE.
If you meet Gaia, mock the “selfishness” of her apparent desire that so many ecosystems and species thrive. It is an appropriate response to the assertion that a desire for 7 billion happy and prosperous humans is selfish.
