Honestly, At This Point, I'd Support Taylor Swift For President

The perfect drink to wash down my ape biscuits

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

Honestly the only slur I ever get called is 'gay' or 'homo', people here just aren't very creative with their slurs anymore

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.

meanwhile on Twitter

you could make the argument that it’s foolish that everyone in the world should know what the Odyssey is but if you’re from a western country that literally has Greek history stolen away in your museum then well, really a child left behind.

Rome in its Republican period was undoubtedly the predominant military force of its time. Something about its religious and military practices, combined with its republican form of government, made the Romans do war unlike anyone else. For this post, the most important point I want to make is that Rome conquered most of its territory as a republic. In its imperial period, Roman territory did grow some, but ultimately the Empire was unstable and fractured into multiple autocratic states.

In 1789 the Estates General met in France. Called by the king and then elected by the people of France, this body rejected their monarchical mandate to address the state deficit and instead wrote a new constitution for France, establishing a democratic order on the European continent. The kingdoms around France reacted to this affront to monarchical power by bringing troops to French borders. Fired by nationalism and democratic enfranchisement, the new French state mustered an army exponentially larger than any of its neighbors. The wars that dominated the next twenty(ish) years of European history would see the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and a large expansion of French territory.

During World War II the United States mobilized to an enormous degree to fight European fascist states and the empire of Japan. Huge numbers of young men were conscripted to fight, entire industries were devoted to military production, and all over the nation families rationed food in order to support the war effort. This just twenty years after women were granted the right to vote. At this point the United States was the oldest democratically elected national government in the world, invoking its national fervor for the cause of mass violence. In the half century after and then some, the United States dominated the world economically and militarily.

All this to say that for a very long time democracy and military power have been bound together. The most democratic nations have been the ones able to muster the largest armies, engage the most industrial production, demand the most sacrifice from their populations. On a geopolitical scale, democracy has meant power.

But here's the twist, and what terrifies me about the current moment: with the rise of machines and machine learning, and the consolidation of server ownership into the hands of just a few oligarchs, it's unclear whether that power dynamic still holds. Drones and other remote, even autonomous, technology have made both factories and battlefields less human. The human crowds that filled Roman or Parisian plazas can be atomized and identified by automated surveillance networks. Mao says that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. What happens when the guns aren't in human hands?

tumblr is a 'yes, and' website

reddit is a 'no, because' website

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, then, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that middle-class home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies”’ dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.

The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz. 2016 edition.