Local Goat Discovers Joy Of Painting

Some time around World War I, maybe earlier, and definitely by World War II, humans stopped being the scariest thing in the world. For thousands of years, the most terrifying thing to see coming towards you was a group of men, always with metal, often with horses. With the advent of the machine gun, chemical warfare, heavy artillery, airplanes, a mass of people no longer seems so frightening. The scariest thing now is a machine. Victims of modern war often never see the operators, only the plane, the barrel of the tank, the drone that just dropped a grenade on them. Sometimes death takes them totally unawares.

'Military' itself means something different now. No longer a reference to mass human violence, now it means networks of mechanical violence.

Luminescent digital fish flickering in the server sea

ok i just got this thought out of nowhere but blog divers (people who scroll through a blog and reblog things that were posted YEARS AGO) are actually a super important part of the tumblr ecosystem

With people going inactive and deactivating, a lot of classic tumblr posts and also missed gems get lost because those connections get broken. Even on my own blog I forget about posts I made until I see someone in my activity reblog one of them- which then inspires me to reblog it myself because it was a good post and I want my new followers to see

do not feel bad about diving through someone's blog and reblogging shit from years ago, it keeps dashboards alive

(and if anyone has a problem with that, they can just block you or they can delete the root post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, two things that have absolutely no effect on the grand scheme of our lives)

Happy 4th anniversary of the Ever Given Suez Canal Obstruction, to those who celebrate

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"

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.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

at the request of @fierifreak, here is a chart i originally posted on twitter that inexplicably did numbers (credit to OP of the blank graph in the corner!)

I’ve been listening to The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and I can’t remember the exact quote but something in his phrasing struck me. He associated the “Old Guard” Republicans with the defense of property rights, sometimes in opposition to human rights.

“Property rights” as they exist today in the US (I can’t claim to speak for other nations) can be traced through law back to Rome. They have a long history that has justified mass deportation, enslavement, and murder of entire continents of people.

Human rights as a secular concept trace their genealogy only back to the 1400s or so in Europe. It could be argued that Jesus preached for human rights in the time of Rome, but the development of his ideas were twisted by the absorption of his church into the Roman power structure through Constantine.

We might view the development of human history through the lens of tension between human rights and property rights. Powerful individuals’ trying to protect (or expand) their claims to land, or people fought wars over their property, expending human lives in the process. Religious leaders have pushed back, insisting on the inherent value of humanity.

Historically law has developed to organize forces around property rights, while religious practice has organized people. Today we live in a world where property rights are ascendant. The Republican party holds property rights absolute, while the Democratic party attempts merely to balance property and human rights. I’m nervous and excited to see how the social media networks that are replacing organized religion will affect these politics.

i think the key difference between george lucas’s star wars and disney’s star wars is that lucas is a man with an ideology. someone with a point of view, and all that entails. which comes with ideas of revolution, anti-imperialism, challenging the status quo, cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes. complex and contradictory ideas because that’s how artists are: complex and complicated people. disney is not. disney is a corporation. a corporation can’t have ideology, because ideology defeats the purpose of profit. and when the only thing you do is to turn on the movie manufacturing machine before you sit down and plan what ideas are you trying to convey to the audience, then your results are going to be washed out corporate garbage. and because when you’re a giant corporation who only cares about selling to the widest audience possible, you can’t take sides. you can’t decide on an idea. because you want to sell your product to people who are on the entire political spectrum. which results in movies without ideology, without purpose, without soul.