hot take: Countries should never be run like businesses, because people are not commodities, and communities are not assets to be bought, sold, and traded away.
Here’s the thing, though. If you asked a conservative “Would you let the statue of liberty burn to save one life?” they’d probably scoff and say no, it’s a national landmark, a treasure, a piece of too much historical importance to let it be destroyed for the sake of one measly life.
But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”
The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical.
But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?
People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you.
P.S. I would let the statue of liberty burn to save a pigeon.
also, there is an extreme difference between what things or principles *i* personally am willing to die for, and what i would hazard others to die for. and this is a distinction i don’t think the conservative hard-right likes to face.
an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.
they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.
the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.
if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.
and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.
but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.
would i be willing to risk death, trying to save the statue of liberty? probably, yes. but there is no culture without people, and therefore i also believe there are no cultural treasures worth more than other people’s lives. and as far as i’m concerned the same goes for laws, or markets, or borders.
The first time I came across this post, randomslasher’s addition was life changing for me. I suddenly understood where the right was coming from, and I had never been angrier.
This is also why so many people on the right fail to see the hypocrisy of trying to make abortion illegal when they themselves have had abortions. They can tally up their own life circumstances and conclude that it would be difficult or impossible to continue a pregnancy, but they’re completely mystified by the idea that women they don’t know are also human beings with complicated lives and limited spoon allocation.
This is also why they think “get a job” is useful advice. In their heads they honestly do not understand why the NPCs who make up the majority of the human race can’t just flip a switch from “no job” to “job.” When they say “get a job” they’re filing a glitch report with God and they honestly think that’s all it takes.
This is also why they tend to view demographics as individuals. They think that every single Muslim is just a different avatar for the same bit of programming.
Borrowed observation from @innuendostudios here, but: there’s also a fundamental difference in how progressives view social problems versus how conservatives view them. That is, progressives view them as problems to be solved, whereas conservatives do not believe you can solve anything.
Conservatives view social issues as universal constants that fundamentally are unable to be changed, like the weather. You can try to alter your own behavior to protect yourself (you can carry an umbrella), and you can commiserate about how bad the weather is, but you can’t stop it from raining. This is why conservatives blame victims of rape for dressing immodestly or for drinking or for going out at night: to them, those things are like going out without an umbrella when you know it’s going to rain.
“But then why do conservatives try to stop things they dislike by making them illegal, like drug use or immigration or abortion?” And the answer is: they’re not. They know perfectly well that those things will continue. No amount of studies showing that their methods are ineffective will matter to them because effectiveness is not the point. The point is to punish people for doing bad things, because punishing people is how you show your disapproval of their actions; if you don’t punish them, then you’re condoning their behavior.
This is why they will never support rehabilitative prisons, even though they reduce crime. This is why they will never support free birth control for everyone, even though that would reduce abortions. This is why they will never support just giving homeless people houses, even though it’s proven to be cheaper and more effective at stopping homelessness than halfway houses and shelters. It’s not about stopping evil, because you can’t; it’s about saying definitively what is Bad and what is Good, and we as a society do that by punishing the people we’ve decided are bad.
This is why the conservative response to “holy fuck, they’re putting children in cages!” is typically something along the lines of “it’s their parents’ fault for trying to come here illegally; if they didn’t want to have their kids taken away, they shouldn’t have committed a crime.” It doesn’t matter that entering the US unlawfully is a misdemeanor and child kidnapping isn’t typically a criminal sentence. It does not matter that this has absolutely zero effect on people unlawfully entering the US. The point is that conservatives have decided that entering unlawfully is Bad, anything that is not punishing undocumented immigrants – due process of asylum and removal defense claims, for example – is supporting Badness, and kidnapping children is an appropriate punishment for being Bad.
the distortion of "there is potential profit we did not earn" as "there is money we lost" is fascinating and disgusting to me. "megamediaconglomerate lost $1,000,000,000 to piracy this year" is a flat out lie. it is not true. they did not have a billion dollars, that they now do not have. they felt entitled to one billion dollars, that they did not have, and still do not have. it's an infuriating perversion of the truth
cant believe i lost $1000 when i told some guy at walmart to give it to me and he said no
I love not knowing who 95% of celebrities are. every day someone new is trending and I go "I don't know who the FUCK this is" and move on. I love that
so 87 people protesting her death have been charged with felonies but the 3 cops who murdered her have had no repercussions?
call the attorney general, daniel cameron, to demand that the officers who murdered breonna taylor – brett hankison, jonathan mattingly, and myles cosgrove – be prosecuted immediately: (502) 696-5300 then press 1. or send an email to the mayor, greg fischer, to demand they be fired: mayor.information@louisvilleky.gov.
takes 3 min to do either of these!
imagine being gay in june 2004. five days into pride month and ronald reagan dies, and then a mere three days after that, three cheers for sweet revenge is released. i wouldnt know how to act
i’ve been working out some thoughts on how femininity allows women’s bodies into to be drawn as aestheticized objects to be consumed — and illustration so often focuses on commercial art, thus leaving gnc women out of its scope entirely. i’m entirely sick of seeing women’s bodies used as a product to be sold rather than a portrayal of our complex humanity.
alternatively, this piece is titled “i paid thousands of dollars to get disrespected and misgendered every single day at art school”
Chickens were traditionally machines to convert agrarian debris (bugs, seeds) into protein-rich eggs. Their current battery-farming use turning corn feed into breast, thigh, and wing meat is relatively novel.
Pigs are traditionally a way to convert farm waste and forest forage (grubs, mushrooms, nuts) into fat and protein, with pigs hardy enough to stand up to the forest's threats
Cows turn grassland forage into protein-rich milk, meat, and leather. Cows are sturdy enough to be turned loose to live freely outside of direct supervision for long periods in secured territory and then rounded up, so can be raised with little labor on large amounts of poor land. Can move long distances under own power, can be raised in remote areas and sold fresh in high-demand population centers. Dairy herds, by contrast, were kept right outside population centers. Quick-spoiling milk can be processed into cooking lipid butter and stable, transportable, marketable protein source cheese. Can be used as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts.
Sheep are similar to cows at smaller scale and requiring closer attention, process grassland into mutton, milk, and wool, once most important textile in world before cotton.
Horses convert grassland to service as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts. Intelligently trainable, nimblest animals practical to tide.
Donkeys convert grassland to service as traction-generating and load-bearing beasts. Size and output/consumption ratio makes more practical than horses for many applications, but intensely annoying.
Mules - we bred a donkey with a horse to make it less annoying.
Deer, Antelopes, Turkeys, Ducks, Pheasants, etc. - game animals. Sustain their own life cycle from undeveloped land, are hunted in regulated fashion to sustain stock.
Bees - plant-fertilizing function radically increases productivity of fields, yields rich, high-sugar, indefinitely stable honey
Doves - we used to fuckin' farm doves, we'd have big-ass birdhouses out in the fields. Not sure what that was about.
Ostriches - one of those 80s things, a tax dodgee that sounded cool on cocaine
heres some random updates so you can get a grasp on whats happening here in the philippines:
- professors are urging their students to let them know if theyre not gonna come to class so theyll know that theyre still alive
- parents are telling their kids not to come home late, or if they will, to take an uber even though its priced like 5x more
- people are sharing constitutional rights on twitter, to teach everyone what to say to the popos just in case
- nobody trusts the police anymore
- police have a QUOTA of “drug addicts” they need to kill
- almost 13k dead without due process, but chines drug lords and presidents son who were involved in a drug smuggling worth 6 billion are still walking free
- all it takes is a facebook rumor to put you on the hit list
- politicians who are criticizing the administration are being impeached
- politicians who love the administration admit that their duty is to the president, NOT to the people
- theres been talks in extending the presidents term
- It literally feels like an unofficial dictatorship
- please help us
hiya i made that post on mobile so i wasnt able to add links but here are some sources on whats been happening in the ph for the last few months:
numbers of people dead and arrested because of the war on drugs as of january 2017
17 and 19 yr olds tortured and killed by the police
presidents son involved in 6 billion drug smuggling has charges suddenly dropped
twitter thread on what to do in case the police accuses you of being a drug dealer
what to do in case the police demands to search your stuff
police suddenly shows up at bars near a university demanding to search students bags
president orders police NOT to share case files with the commission of human rights
talks about extending the presidents term until 2025 bc federalism
house of representatives votes to give commission on human rights a budget of $20 for the WHOLE YEAR
im p sure i missed a lot since something bad happens literally EVERYDAY so like feel free to add more
in what ways can we help? like. this is a pretty bad situation yall are in and we’d love to help out any way we can
@crystalthecool for the most part just keeping awareness up helps. Making it a big deal and pointing out just how fucked up it is actually does help put it into perspective for the Filipinos who have no idea just how serious the situation is (mainly because awareness and education are so lacking that most Filipinos don’t even know what the CHR does and will just parrot Duterte when he says he doesn’t like it)
The budget hasn’t been finalized but with Duterte’s well documented vendetta against Human Rights and his friendship with the Marcos family aka the reason the Human Rights Commission was created in the first place after Ferdinand Marcos stole billions during a two decade Martial Law era which saw the torture, disappearance and death of thousands of Filipinos we’re not very optimistic about it.
Here’s a fun tale from your local Target employee:
I was pushing truck for OTC today which is the pharmacy area. I was pushing cases of hand sanitizer because we got the “good stuff” in today (purell) and it goes quick even with the the product limit put in place. People were literally taking it from my hand before I could put it on the shelf, but that’s not the point.
As I was putting the goods on the shelf, this woman comes up to the stand and she’s very excited. “Yes! You guys have it! How many can I take, is there a limit?” I say yes, 3 per person per transaction per day. She nods, accepting, and grabs her three. “Sorry, that was weird. I’m a teacher, I’m trying to stock up. I promise I’m not a hoarder.” I smile and nod and say it’s fine. She starts to walk away but stops and turns back.
“Do you have any Clorox wipes in stock by any chance?”
Heart sinking, I shake my head and say no, sorry, and we don’t know for sure when we’ll get more. (We get them maybe once every two weeks, but the product limit for those is one per person per transaction per day and they usually sell out within hours of going on the shelf.)
Her face dropped and she kinda looked down at her hand sanitizer and said “that’s okay, with the product limit I wouldn’t be able to get enough before school starts anyway. It’s only 4 weeks away.” She laughed a little but I could hear the frustration in her voice and see the tension in her face. She sounded defeated. The most I could offer her was one of the small bottles of pure bleach. I honestly wanted to cry. For a second there I thought she would. I had no clue what to say as she turned and walked away.
This is what teachers are dealing with. Even in years when there’s not a pandemic they have to rely on donations from parents or their own money to be able to buy hand sanitizer, wipes, tissues, etc. for their classrooms. Now they’re being forced to return to school with no extra funding, no extra supplies, no support from the government; they’re STILL expected to provide for and protect these kids *on their own.* All while, now, risking their own lives and their own health because the government doesn’t want to admit that they fucked up handling this pandemic.
Every time I hear someone say “kids don’t die from it, it’ll be fine,” I realize that person does not give a flying fuck about teachers. Sure, *maybe* the kids will be fine. But the teachers are not children. They are adults with underlying conditions, adults living with elderly family, adults who are over 50 and are at more risk. Adults with at risk family at home. Adults who are at risk themselves. But they are STILL trying their hardest to protect your children in the classroom.
It’s honestly fucked up that we live in a country where police departments get millions or even billions of dollars in state funding, yet teachers have to buy their own cleaning supplies and doctors have to reuse PPE in hospitals. Police get tens of thousands of dollars worth of riot armor to wear and terrorize peaceful protesters, while the Navajo Nation get sent body bags instead of medical supplies.
Honestly I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I’m tired y’all. I’m tired and frustrated because leadership in this country doesn’t care enough to prioritize human life. Idk, it was a small moment in the grand scheme of things but it really was a slap in the face reminder of how this country treats it’s own people. I feel like we’ve all been getting those lately.
Again, to reiterate: teachers are NOT getting extra funding. they are NOT getting extra supplies. they are NOT getting smaller class sizes or bigger classrooms or extra personnel whose job it is to ensure sanitation and masking protocols are adhered to.
They’re not getting temperature-taking stations that will ID kids with a fever and send them back home. They’re not being trained to handle parents who insist they and their kids don’t need to follow rules.
Trump and Devos are just “letting school districts decide.” With a side helping of threatening any school that dares to recognize COVID as a threat.
As a teacher this is seriously making me consider a career change. Also, recent evidence is suggesting more and more that yes, kids do carry this, get sick from this, and die from this. And who knows what lifelong complications they’re going to have. Please write, email, or call your local school district and pressure them into going 100% online this fall. Even if you’re not a parent, they are more intimidated by their tax payers than the teachers they’re sending to die.