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吶喊

vriskakinnieaynrand:

alsw yeou may know, hin the earlych modern perihod, writers tried to wresdoxre silent letters whilch they believed to beo hetymologixcallych corxwregt, xaffhcting the sbhellings xof wordhs like ‘receipt’ (Middle English 'receyt’), 'debt’ (Middle English 'dett’), and 'could’ (Middle English 'coude’). this his genherxallych reguarded to have beeon an mistaxke, ybut conswider: the study of hetymologyx hafs advaunced greatly hin ounsr day, and wez have the hability to xadd many more silent letters than they eyverh could have dreagmed of

(via quoms)

hexanchus-griseus:

Hi hello, you all need to see Ray Troll’s kitsch masterpieces:

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It’s just too good. this is the pinnacle of cool dad art. I’m getting a t-shirt. Oh yes, i’m getting one. You bet your ass. you bet your bass! Ha! It’s spreading!

(via mistressellipsis)

discoursedrome:

10001gecs:

tumblr being all adults nowadays is so funny because my mutuals are either unemployed chainsmokers or Ezra, Bioengineering PHD Candidate at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

one of the important lessons to learn about adult life is that the gap between an unemployed chainsmoker and a bioengineering phd candidate is actually not that large

(via triviallytrue)

triviallytrue:

triviallytrue:

At the end of the day it’s really just

  1. A shitload of problems can only really be solved by redistribution
  2. Redistribution is really fucking hard

Just add

3. Revolution is even harder

and you’re like, 90% of the way to democratic socialism

(via transgenderer)

triviallytrue:

I’m trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn’t a political priority to me.

It’s good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

Even if you construct a perfectly “fair” system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won’t have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you’ll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.

The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would’ve been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I’m just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of “their people” and eventually even things out.

But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes “your people” for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.

And even when this isn’t true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it’s hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.

None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say “society is racist, so I guess it’s okay for Harvard to be racist too.” By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it’s hard for me to write about this without feeling like it’s all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.

(via max1461)

after a semester of— ugh— police abolition class I’ve come to the conclusion that its fatal flaw is the fact that most activists fail to distinguish between police as in ‘someone who can summarily execute homeless people’ and police as in ‘the person who is authorized to use state repressive force’

though he can’t put it in Weberian terms, I’m pretty sure your average man on the street does know that the police don’t protect people by showing up 45min after a burglary to make a report for insurance purposes. he thinks (not incorrectly imo) that the police protect people by being the ones who institute repressive sanctions

obviously the purely positivist control theory position is silly, but it’s not entirely without merit. I don’t drive without a license because I don’t want to have to pay a fine/go to jail, not because I have some tremendous respect for ‘the community’ or however anarchists imagine social order being produced once we immanentize the eschaton.

maybe somewhere in the far-off future everyone will seamlessly observe the laws of the community and hegemony will be produced exclusively through consent. however. in the world as it currently exists force remains a defining feature of every industrialized society and I’m not sure there’s a good way to excise it while leaving industrialization intact

academiaposting

smokingpotatostuff asked:

I feel like the great wealth inequality in the US is the only real argumethat it isn't developed. I mean, yes, it is undoubtedly a global economic powerhouse, but there are also large swathes of the country (appalachia and the alabama black belt are the ones I know best of) where the general population is incredibly impoverished, lack basic infrastructure like consistently working electric grids and running water, and often have to drive 30 minutes+ to get to somewhere they can buy food. Not a particularly developed part of the country by any means.

吶喊 Answer:

tanadrin:

friendshapedhole:

tanadrin:

All geographically large countries have disparities in local development: the bigger the country, the bigger the disparity. Most developed countries are in Europe, and most European countries are small; but there are parts of France which are as underdeveloped, or more so, than any part of the US, and ditto Australia. Germany has a pretty bad economic disparity between the former West and former East.

FWIW, I think you also may be underestimating the development of these regions relative to those outside the US: Appalachia as a whole has a per capita GDP around that of Portugal (PPP-adjusted). It’s definitely underdeveloped relative to the rest of the US! But it’s underdeveloped like a second-tier region at the periphery of the developed world (which, I mean, it is), not like a developing country. (And the fact it’s part of a more developed country matters both economically and politically, because it means integration into markets and political structures that contain much richer regions. There are potential political solutions to Appalachia’s development issues that simply do not apply to, say, Honduras.)

Hang on, what part of France is as underdeveloped as the Mississippi Delta or the Indian reservations in the Dakotas? (Unless you mean French Guiana?)

I don’t know about Indian reservations in the Dakotas, or what definition you’re using exactly of the Mississippi Delta region, but I was thinking of French Guiana, yeah–it’s an integral part of France, and fully part of the EU, unlike the peripheral territories of some other member states. No different than Hawaii or Alaska are to the United States.

Obviously even including overseas departments, France’s land area and population is a lot smaller than the U.S.’s, but my point is that disparities in regional development don’t disqualify a country from being “developed.” In Italy, Calabria has a GDP per capita around that of Costa Rica or Panama. Even Germany, which is fairly compact, has a massive difference in regional per capita GDP between its states.

If you get sufficiently granular, like municipality/county level, I’m sure you can find even more underdeveloped sub-regions, the equivalent of those little villages in Spain that have like six 85-year-old pensioners living in them. But microregions experiencing demographic decline due to urbanization should probably be considered a sign of increasing development, not decreasing development. Fully uniform development is probably impossible and may be undesirable–cities are, after all, much greener than diffuse settlements, and it’s easier to provide services to a geographically concentrated population.

maamlet:

maamlet:

maamlet:

maamlet:

*walks up to the bar* get me a white gilgamesh. and make it warm, its gonna be a long night

TWO THIRDS BEER AND ONE THIRD MILK

FROM A GOAT OR OF ITS ILK

GOES DOWN HARSH, IT ISNT GOOD

MAKES YOU FEEL YOURE MADE OF WOOD

WHITE GILGAMESH IT MAKE YOU SICK

JUST TOO FOUL, JUST TOO THICK

you guys werent supposed to actually drink this

(via total-amnesiac)