Another Thing To Remember For These Next Four To Eight Years Of Biden: While The Capitol Rioters Were

The simple fact is that in retrospect whatever we do WILL have been either an under- or an overreaction. Either we don’t do enough and it becomes an absolute disaster, or we do just enough, it doesn’t become an absolute disaster, and everyone goes “haha why was everyone panicking? Why did I have to stay at home?” It’s like the Y2K bug, after nothing bad happened it was seen as an absolute joke, but the only reason why nothing happened is that a lot of smart people spent a lot of time and money fixing it. If we social-distance and self-isolate properly and make this go away, it WILL be seen as a joke and an overreaction in the future. That’s fine, that’s the best possible outcome.

"why would urban supercities depopulate?" plague, obviously

something to look forward to in 2020

another day, another dollar, another instance of wanting to write a long post calling out the 2015 discourse’s massive, massive classism problem but not wanting to invite the wank and criticism it would induce

but in short: the rural poor are not your punching bags for jokes about homophobia, trump supporters, and fat ugly americans, and poor people as a whole are grossly underrepresented in talking about marginalization and are not included in discussions about the issues that affect them directly. and a massive part of that comes from there not being a vanguard of like, Poor Academics the way that there are Feminist Academics and Queer Academics and Black Academics and so forth. every other institutionally marginalized group is represented in academia but because of the inherent lack of opportunity to pursue higher education that comes along with being poor, poor people’s voices aren’t really heard to the same degree. 

not to mention that structural and institutional poverty is a problem that can only really be solved by politicians, and the problem is that right wing politicians have a vested interest in keeping poor people poor and uneducated so that they will continue to vote against their own interests and effectively continue to marginalize themselves, and meanwhile said conservative politicians keep their jobs and nothing changes. and even well-meaning leftist economists can’t do anything about it.

and MEANWHILE, youth activism is so intently focused on gender and race to the exclusion of class because most activists are college students, who have not really had to deal with the effects of Poverty with a capital P. see also: the difference between being poor and being broke. and activist language policing is so inherently classist in the first place because it serves to exclude and silence anyone who doesn’t have an academic background or the free time to read blog after blog on the internet to figure out why, exactly, using that word or that asterisk is so offensive and makes you such a terrible person even if your intent is, actually, good. so much of activism requires a significant time investment and a certain level of education that people who work minimum wage jobs and have families just cannot afford. so because they’re insufficiently educated, they’re regarded as insufficiently oppressed or treated like they’re actively part of the problem. 

(not to mention the internet’s obsession with degrading service workers who are employed by problematic – ugh that word, but it’s the one that fits – companies. “we went to party city and threw all the racist costumes on the floor!” “we vandalized the ‘girl toy’ and ‘boy toy’ signs at target!” literally nothing enrages me more than this.)

see also: the co-option of the term “emotional labor,” which originated as a phrase coined to describe the mental and physical toll of the requirement for service industry workers to display cheerful, positive emotions toward customers, which has been bastardized by middle-class feminists to refer to standard politeness and talking about feelings within any form of relationship, be it with a friend, significant other, or parent. 

i could go on and on. i won’t, because i already wrote way more than i intended. it’s a massive, massive intersectionality fail. i’m just so tired of it.

I’m in South Africa and much as I want the vaccine I absolutely DO NOT object to the fact that the places where people are dying the most are going to be getting it first. Whether it’s “their” fault or not - I swear people will turn into one of those “don’t use my tax dollars for healthcare for people who may have smoked and drank and...” assholes the moment you wrap it in a woke-sounding veneer. 

beyond pisses me off that the US and england - two countries that did virtually nothing to stop the spread of covid on their own - are getting premier access to the vaccine just bc they have the $ and the desire to send all of us back to work asap no matter the human cost. meanwhile many countries in the so called third world that took covid seriously, locked down, and provided for their citizens without a second thought or complaint wont receive the vaccine until 2022 or beyond. totally fair and cool.

"may this great plague pass by me and my friends, and restore us once more to joy and gladness"

Feeling a powerful kinship with this scribe from 1350 today.

That’s dope

Horses running in the snow

 Earlier today I was inventing a conspiracy theory that the whole “Parents Are Useless” trope in children’s fiction is secretly meant to prepare us for that eventuality (it eventually lost out to the Anthropic Principle of Parental Uselessness, where out of all possible fictional universes, only the ones where parents are useless produce viable children’s stories)

the trouble with parents who expect absolute obedience from their children is that even if the parent was right all the time (already laughable) there will eventually come a day when their faculties begin to fail and the children must step in; it helps to lay the groundwork for that sooner rather than later.

The perfect storm of intelligence and agility

though I still love Chronicles of Narnia the older I get and the more I learn the clearer it becomes to me why it would have driven Tolkien completely insane