Latest Posts by sentimentalrobots - Page 3

This tweet saved so many lives actually

You know, the toughest thing is to love somebody who has done something mean to you. Especially when that somebody has been yourself. Have you ever done anything mean to yourself? Well it's very important to look inside yourself and find that loving part of you. That's the part that you must take good care of and NEVER be mean to. Because that's the part of you that allows you to love your neighbor. And your neighbor is anyone you happen to be with at any time in your life. Respecting and loving your neighbor can give everybody a good feeling.

Fred Rogers

not my meme but you all do know about this right? It feels like it's getting buried right now and I feel like its proponents are trying to take advantage of that.

The Holy Ones

I love this. These are great things to remember.

boop the kbity

People on this site will put together polls like "The Banach-Tarski Paradox versus Camembert Cheese", then act like the results prove that they're surrounded by idiots.

Most shows need to end at some point, and in many instances they benefit from ending sooner rather than later. This is not the case with doctor who. To me, half the entertainment value of dw comes from trying to write new content for a show that’s been around 60+ years. I need it to ferment; I need to see what doctor who will look like in another couple of decades. I need it to go on forever. I hope future generations will have to experience centuries, maybe even millennia-old doctor who. I hope they have lore so incomprehensible it takes a lifetime to even begin to understand

Anna Haifisch

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey. Photograph by Daniel Ibanez, 2024

Some ways to honor Terry Pratchett on his death day, march 12th

Strive to understand people you perceive as different from you

Tell a truly outrageous pun

Eat a bacon sandwich

Stand up against an oppressive authority (up to and including punching them)

Sing a bawdy song including wizard’s staffs and/or hedgehogs

Consider the importance of Angels

Demand a free but responsible press

Forge a sword out of a meteorite. If you do not have one on hand, store-bought is fine

Take responsibility for your actions, be they good or bad or neither

Recognize there is injustice in the world, but refuse to accept it

Look Up

If you have the hattitude, doff a nice-looking chapeau of some kind

Make time for the things that matter

Live.

“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

- Naomi Klein

Samuel Delany.

Tax the Rich.

we're so lucky to get to eat so many staple grains tbh. like in early history you'd have to just eat what grew around you on a day to day basis like if you were born in asia hope you like rice if you were born in northern europe hope you like einkorn wheat. but i'm gonna eat rice AND wheat AND oats today. fabuloso

why is this about to make me sob

Some of us will never forget that the burning times were once memorialized in retina-burning fonts; surrounded by violet spinning pentacles on the backdrop of a starry, twinkling night sky. Somewhere in the distance, a partially loaded midi file attempted to play "how soon is now" while the cursor trailed glittering sparkles across the majestic sky-screen...

I know how bleak things seem.

I am not going to lie to you. There is no gurantee you, or me or any of us make it, and taste a better life.

Happiness. Sincerity. Tranquility. Peace. Love. Rest and leisure. Celebration. Cooperation, building something beautiful and meaningful together. A better, more just, more natural life.

None of it is guranteed.

We are balancing on a razor's edge as we ascend closer and closer to our crucible, to our defining moment as a sapient species on the cusp of a new age. Things can go horribly wrong. We have seen sickly dread, clawing woe and untenable rage in our hearts that reverberates through our times. Biblical times, apocalyptic times. Reality may be even worse than the cries of mothers, the silent blood, the vivid imaginations of dystopia.

But, I want you to understand that this is just one possibility.

There is a better world. It may be veiled, we have stumbled through fog and tunnels for so long that we don't believe there is a light anymore. But it is there, and it is not as excruciatingly impossible to hold together as it seems. Tunnels end. Just as we may be staring down the barrel of a gun, we are just as likely simply experiencing a dark, long night before our dawn we so shamefully crave.

Do not be ashamed. You are not weak, you are not naive, you are not stupid. You are a unique shade in a most wonderful swatch of color. We have all been polluted by a system, a feedback loop, a fetishization of fear that has grown its own legs and operates beyond the control of any single person. We are our worst selves right now, it is remarkable we are functioning at all despite everything thrown at us.

It is not doomed to be in vain. The odds on paper do not look great--it is easy to rationalize defeat. Have faith. Have some secret hope tucked away, even when it repulses your sensibilities. History is littered with the impossible being done by those who scoffed at barriers set by naysayers--having the gall to try despite seemingly imminent defeat is what wins the day far, certainly far more often than throwing in the towel before halftime.

Maybe it WILL be in vain. Maybe something miraculous will happen, something unexpected, something that couldn't have happened if we all resigned too soon. Do not be so arrogant as to assume you know the future, you can't possibly, there are variables you cannot possibly forsee at play here.

I know how bleak things seem. I am asking you to try anyways.

Do you think Frank Herbert and Jack Vance explored each other's bodies

That's because you are amazing dear @cryptotheism

Being self taught and talking to actual academics is so funny. Like I have a deep and practiced knowledge of Plotinus, but I'm still not entirely sure on how Plato and Aristotle conflict.

Thank you Supreme Court.

i like how the button to search blast sayus BLAST

blasting the DNA sequence with my wizard beams

Tumblr Code.