Googledocs You Are Getting Awfully Uppity For Something That Can’t Differentiate Between “its”

Kinda feels like George Washington's main leadership traits were tall, charismatic, and handsome. That said, here are some other things he did (and didn't do):

He supported his lifestyle by enslaving dozens of people, claiming to own them and forcing them to work on his plantation.

He got a bunch of people inoculated against smallpox

He released all his slaves only on his and his wife's deaths

He kept together a defensive army for several years without wrecking the landscape or alienating the populace

He was given executive power and ceded it to a democratic(ish) process

He never figured out how to live without enslaving people

He never had a child

He raised up Alexander Hamilton and let him build a banking system

He led a militia force against US citizens in the whisky rebellion

He ordered a 3-year colonial war against native Americans in the Great Lakes region

In 1971 Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Jimmy Carter assumed office during some of the economic and geopolitical turmoil that followed. Reagan took office, radically changed tax policy to benefit wealthy people, and ushered in a boom era in the economy. He handed off power to his vice president Bush, then Clinton took over during the Internet boom of the 1990s. Bush 2 started the Iraq War, ushering in an era of heavy US military involvement in the Middle East. All US administrations from Truman onward involved themselves in affairs of that part of the world. Obama inherited and continued that era, his main domestic accomplishment being a health insurance for all system that expanded and subsidized the private health insurance market.

Trump came to power and held it until the Covid-19 pandemic. His administration lowered taxes on rich people, disrupted US international agreements, and appointed a large number of judges. The murder by police of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests that occupied major cities for months leading up to the 2020 election. Joe Biden won with a tenuous legislative majority and governed the country during four years of adaptation and recovery from the pandemic and the nation's response to it. The democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 elections.

Donald Trump won the election of 2024 with a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. He invited Elon Musk into the White House and cabinet meetings, and gave Musk unprecedented access to data systems across the federal government through the newly created DOGE. DOGE began directing the firings of masses of government workers, actions that were challenged in the court system.

The perfect drink to wash down my ape biscuits

At times, I'm depressed by the minuscule percentage of all the literature from Greco-Roman antiquity that's survived to the present day. (For example: of the roughly 120 plays we know Sophocles to have staged at the Dionysia, all of seven have come down to us intact.) At other times, though, I'm amazed that we have any ancient literature at all. Consider: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2), one of the finest and most beautiful poems we know of from Archaic Greece, survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript, which turned up in Moscow in 1777...in a stable.

I am glad that bee hummingbirds hatch nests of eggs each smaller than a pea. I am glad that there are oceans two miles deep where fishes unknown to science glow like fireflies.

I am glad that the crumbs taken from my bedroom are returned to tiny cities built by ants, and that the thunder of the storms rolling in from the north trembles in my chest when it is still a ways off. Hello, says the world, you are so little. Hello, says the world, you are so big.

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

What does does it mean to be a citizen of a nation built on genocide? America is made of conquerors and refugees, killers and survivors. Can the US absolve itself? I can't say we were ever great, don't know if I can say we were ever good. But I think the best we've ever been is when we've held a welcoming hand to the world's refugees. At this point it feels like the least we can do.

so i hear tumblr's dying and this moby dick meme idea has lived in my head for literal years...

Patriarchy

Child is born. Child grows up among family, cared for by family. Child reaches puberty. If child is female, child stays among family and continues to be cared for. In lower status families girl will probably be put to work. If child is male and lower status, he most often leaves family and works to live. Sometimes he leaves voluntarily, sometimes he is pushed out. If male child is higher status, he continues to be cared for by family as he pursues his ambitions in society. He will be married off to a high status female to continue the family line.

Patriarchy is both the uplifting of the high status males and the casting out of the low status males. Neoliberal ideology tells these low status males they can gain status through the market. Patriarchy keeps women at home and disempowered but generally more in community than men. Isolated women are especially vulnerable. Patriarchy tries to erase people who don't fit into the binary gender system.

Enjoying westerns but keeping a shocked look on my face so people don’t think I’m pro-Manifest Destiny

“liking something in fiction doesn’t mean you condone it in real life” but instead of dark fanfiction tropes it’s about liking jeeves and wooster while being a socialist