That lots of fascists and other reactionaries appear “dumb,” in that their views and positions have no relationship with historical/biological/sociological reality, doesn’t mean they have no political savvy. If anything that’s what makes them a danger, not having to remain grounded in the rules of the game that is rational public discourse. They’ve cottoned to the fact that liberal society will let them play that game without fuss anyway, even if their contribution is “there is a race war between white people and the Jews and we’ll stop at nothing to see our side win.”
I was talking with a group a few weeks ago about how fascist ideology (and right-wing ideology more broadly) is deliberately anti-rational – it appeals to cults of action and war, mythical depictions of a glorious past, and emotional manipulation through patriarchal affirmations and racial scapegoating. And then someone replied by saying “well, I agree that fascism is a dumb ideology,” which is precisely the opposite of what I was saying. Some of its adherents might be dumb but as a political strategy, it is very, very clever.
That’s the threat they pose. There are some who will actually be dumb saps and some who will just be playing the part to sneak their way into the mainstream, as they have already done; either way it’s to our detriment not to take them seriously, or to not take the steps to dismantle even the potential for them to gain any more ground than they have.
i hope you’re all aware of the 300 recently discovered love letters between two gay british soldiers during ww2 that are going to be possibly adapted into a film.
they’re beautiful and poetic and tragic and heart-wrenching and brave. i highly suggest going and reading the excerpts.
here’s the one that broke my heart:
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are.“
Here, then, is the case for a [universal basic income], as I see it. For many — perhaps even for most — work brings both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. For those who can work, and can find jobs, a UBI isn’t likely to lure them into indolence. Hell, it may even increase their incentive to work, both because they’ll achieve a higher standard of living and because employers will have to offer better pay and better conditions to attract workers. (As Dylan Matthews notes here, past experiments with basic incomes have shown little effect on work incentives.)
But for those who can’t work or can’t find jobs — and there are millions of these people, and our country has nothing even approaching an answer for them now — a UBI could be a boon, so long as relying on a UBI for income is respected. It could give them the freedom to turn their passions into their vocations — they could be an artist, or a writer, or a Reddit commenter, or a competitive video gamer, even if they don’t make much or any money from those pursuits.
Instead of their social status being in the hands of employers with no use for them, it’s in their hands, and they’ll have plenty of incentive to figure out a way to present themselves as high status.
concept: an austen-inspired tabletop rpg where there are five classes
single man in possession of a large fortune who is in want of a wife
young woman with low connections who must marry so that she can secure her future
cad whose main goal is to convince someone to elope with him
wealthy, scheming woman whose goal is to ruin the happiness of the aforementioned young woman
tiresome & vulgar elderly busybody (can be either a man or a woman)
I’m gonna split this out a little farther, because I feel like we’re blurring the lines between classes and stats. First you should pick your Austen class:
Bachelor/Bachelorette
Cad / Floozy
Husband/Wife
Matriarch/Patriarch
Busybody
Then you roll for your stats across the 6 basic Abilities:
Don’t know Polite Society(so maybe it IS this), but just jumping in to suggest this would ALSO make a really good “Werewolf” style hidden-role card game.
there’s dozens of stories about some kid from our world falling into a different, magical one, being the chosen one or the close companion of the chosen one and saving the world, and then going home where they’re delighted to see their family again and have a new appreciation of their own life. but what about someone who didn’t miss it? what if you save the world and you’re given your medal and stripped of the magic you learned and put back in a world you never missed? and you’re furious.
maybe you gave up a few years of your life. you have callouses and muscles and a few scars and maybe a missing eye or something. you definitely have some blood on your hands. you might have PTSD you can’t talk to anyone about. and suddenly you’re fifteen again, in a body that’s too soft and too short and too complete. you’re always cold because there’s no magic burning in your veins anymore, and even as you grow up the feeling of not fitting doesn’t go away because when you look in the mirror at eighteen you look all wrong: this is not what you’re supposed to look like at eighteen. the sky clouds and you rub at the phantom ache of injuries this body never received. you wake up screaming sometimes remembering the sorcerer who burnt your hand to ashes, or the final battle you almost didn’t make it through, or the moment you felt the magic in you go out.
but here’s the thing: they took you and made you into a weapon that was determined enough and powerful enough to save a whole world. they can put you back where they found you but they can’t undo everything. and there’s this, too: the place between worlds clings to you. you can’t tease fire out of the air but you can feel the pull of the doorways all the time, although none of them so far go to your world.
but you try to make it work for a decade, anyway. you’re dutiful. but one night you leave work late and for the thousandth time you catch yourself searching the sky for firebirds. and you break. of the three portals within five hundred miles, one is a howling, frozen wasteland and one is a deep violet void, but one opens into a misty forest that you step into and don’t look back. it’s not your world, but if you keep going long enough, you’ll get there.
(and maybe much, much later, hundreds of worlds later, you climb through a window, or a door of woven branches int he middle a field, or push aside a curtain, and as you set foot on new land you feel the fire in your veins and sparks at your fingertips and finally, finally, you’re home)
this is going around again and I want to add that if you want to think about sad, angry ex-heroes trying and failing to live normal lives, nothing left to say by imagine dragons is a good song to do that to.
I really want to write a novel about thus.
Imagine the families of the people that came back. Imagine seeing your child, kissing them goodnight one night and shutting their bedroom door, or seeing them off to school. When you see them again they’re angry (but they won’t say at what), and a noise that sounds like an arrow whistling through the air makes them turn. For a moment you see their eyes darken.
They left for school with hunched shoulders, slouching over their work; but they come back and hold themselves tall, and even though they’re a teenager you can’t help but think that no fifteen year old should have that kind of posture, that kind of fire that flashes out sometimes. No fifteen year old or sixteen year old should have muscle memory that falters, suddenly, when it realizes it can’t keep up with this body
One lost an eye, in their world (not this empty shell of a world that they returned to) and even though they know perfectly well that their left eye here sees just as well as the right one, they find themself spinning to look at people when they talk to them. Sudden noises make them whirl. Reigning in their intense feeling of self preservation that’s been honed to make them a hero is too hard to do here, where the skidding of tires is frequent. Heroes with missing arms have to explain to their siblings and friends why they are left handed now.
“Every Heart A Doorway” by Seanan McGuire is pretty much what you’re looking for OP
the my immortal author turns out to be an indigenous girl raised in the new york foster system who spent her teenage years searching for her little brother from whom she was separated and she wrote my immortal with her “beloved” foster sister as she looked for her brother and held on to herself in a life that couldn’t have been easy and the only reason she’s come out as the author of my immortal is because it plays such an important role in her childhood in the memoir she’s about to publish called “under the same stars”
and honestly of ALL the possibilities we’ve all ever considered surrounding this fic…… .
my friends and I passed the fic around in college after poetry class every day and read it laughing having no idea what we held in our hands.
I JUST.
I’m LITERALLY awe-stricken. I love her and want her to have everything good in the world.
I try and bring up how he ruined free in state tuition in the name of hippie bashing when he was California’s governor often, but don’t exactly have the biggest platform.
“Worst of all, these students’ sense of the future is constrained by planning for and then paying down their student loans, often for decades. Economists are waking up to the fact that when young Americans enter the workforce burdened with over a trillion dollars in cumulative debt, they become risk averse, unwilling to move, less able to make major purchases, and slower to become homeowners. Not coincidentally, they don’t feel safe enough to register any major protests against the society that’s done this to them.”
Damn.
i am reblogging again because….. fuck ronald reagan forever and ever and ever and ever.
Economists should be adept in their fields, how are they only now realizing that paying off our student debt is a fucking priority over anything else other than food?
Weird, it’s almost like there’s something missing from the study of economics.
Who would have possibly thought that a young generation owing trillions of dollars cumulatively could have an effect on the economy?
I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD. If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?
CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY
this is awesome but the original link just turned into a redirect loop for me, here it is again (x)
just moving along like everyone else 