[video description: person on camera inhales on the party blower, not making any noise and simulating taking a drag off a cigarette. Then exhales as someone off-camera blows into their own party blower, making the sound. Person on camera loses their shit and everyone laughs. End description]
This makes me so sad and also I’m trying to remember if any of the Discworld books dealt with late stage capitalism
yeah I see a LOT a lot of people talking about how previously reliable high-quality brands have clearly downgraded their materials/manufacturing while increasing their prices because hey, they can keep trading on that good reputation as long as no one else starts selling better goods at the same price point.
I’m at a place where I can afford to pay more for high quality goods… if I can trust a corporation to sell them to me. Which I can’t. so I mostly try to buy used wherever I can because if the new stuff is just gonna fucking fall apart in six months anyway then who cares if it’s been used a couple of times? I pay less, corporations don’t get my money, it’s the best I can reasonably expect.
I sent a letter today - something I haven’t done for years
It’s full of plastic bread clips
It’s for Science
At the risk of loosing some mystery, I think I should add some context:
There’s this website-I mean, scientific organization called the Holotypic Occlupanid Reasurch Group.
They are a group of abiologists who study and classify Bread clips.
I found a species that has not yet been described:
Yay for citizen science 👍
wtf?
Update:
Apparently HORG is widely appreciated by pediatricians since knowing exactly what kind of Occlupanid a child may have swallowed makes removing it safely much easier
IIRC this is actually part of the reason HORG was started. A man swallowed a breadclip and the clip closed around part of his tissue linings (in his intestines I think?). The specific shape and flexibility of the clip were significant determining factors in the removal process, as some bread clips have spikes and prongs that would have made extraction more complicated. They started the taxonomy so they could work out extraction techniques for each type.
are you fucking kidding me occlu like oculus or close and panid like bread. its a fancy word for breadcloser
Clara trusts me enough to show me different parts of her body like her belly. show me her mouth and allow me to touch all of those teeth. —right? can you turn and show them all of your teeth? good job!— So we work really hard on being able to look over their entire bodies, and progress those behaviors to things like voluntary blood draws, ultrasounds, teeth brushing, and radiographing. —right? yeah!— But the biggest thing is we find what they find reenforcing and they show us that. and that includes hugs. —right?— And Clara has shown us that she really seems to enjoy tactile, so I give her this hand signal and she will show me what part of her body she wants rubbed. So, right now she wants a big noogie —right? good.— and sometimes what I will do is I’ll make her head a little pancake. or then I’ll rub her side and then she snuggles right in. —huh? huh! good girl thats very nice, good.— And then like I said, she would climb right on my lap and allow me to continue giving her tactile.
this is a post about being right about capitalism. would that, if it were true, make him not right about capitalism
but also uh.
The “Marx hated Jews” thing comes from the fact that he wrote an essay titled “On The Jewish Question.”
That phrasing raises alarm bells because we associate the term “The Jewish Question” with Nazis, but it was just the way issues like this were phrased within these philosophical circles. And honestly even beyond that it’s more of a translation convention than anything else. You could just as easily have translated that title as “Regarding the Matter of Jews.”
The essay is actually a response to another philosopher named Bauer, who claimed that Jews would only be liberated if they stopped being Jewish, because true emancipation requires secularism. The essays Marx is responding to are blatantly antisemitic, even by late-19th century standards. Bauer was arguing that Jews who wanted liberation from oppression were basically asking for “special privileges,” (in an argument that bears some similarity to modern concepts of “reverse racism”) and implying that Jews aren’t even oppressed because they control the economy.
Marx’s “On The Jewish Question” is basically him saying Bauer is dumb and wrong and antisemitic, and he’s being deeply sarcastic for most of the essay.
He does so by throwing Bauer’s antisemitism back in his face, by using a series of antisemitic arguments about how the real religion of the Jew is money and huckstering, and so if you want to abolish Judaism, you’d have to abolish economic exploitation. He’s responding directly to Bauer’s use of antisemitic tropes about how Jews control the economy. He’s using Bauer’s own antisemitic framework to prove Bauer wrong.
This also goes back to the conflict between Marx and the rest of the Young Hegelians (which Bauer was). He was constantly criticizing them for being too idealistic and abstract, rather than focusing on material realities. His argument here was “You’re framing ‘the Jewish Question’ as if it’s a theological problem, but it’s not. It’s a political and economic one.” Because he was Karl Marx and that was his whole thing.
I really don’t understand how anyone reads this essay as anything but sarcasm. I get that some of it is probably lost in translation, but the context makes it really clear that Marx is making fun of Bauer. The idea of Jews giving up their religion would have been deeply personal to Marx. He would have understood exactly what it meant for Jews to give up their religion, and how that was an act of oppression rather than liberation from it. Also, Marx and Bauer had already split by the time this essay was written, and they kind of hated each other. Marx wrote a lot of responses to/criticisms of Bauer, and he called Bauer a “right wing fanatic” multiple times.
Like, what’s actually more likely here?
Option 1: Karl Marx, a Jewish man, wrote one essay that is totally at odds with all his other analysis on the nature of oppression to be rabidly antisemitic and then basically never discussed the subject again?
Option 2: Karl Marx, a Jewish man and a well-known lover of pettiness and drama, wrote an incredibly sarcastic essay making fun of a raging antisemite that he already he didn’t like?
never in all of my years would i have expected to characterize a company’s rebrand as “actively hostile” and “potentially endangering lives” yet here we are
for context, that X sign is dangerously bright, directly faces an entire apartment complex, and to top it all off it fucking strobes
ALT
