greatestgargadon
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Latest Posts by greatestgargadon
Patriarchy
Child is born. Child grows up among family, cared for by family. Child reaches puberty. If child is female, child stays among family and continues to be cared for. In lower status families girl will probably be put to work. If child is male and lower status, he most often leaves family and works to live. Sometimes he leaves voluntarily, sometimes he is pushed out. If male child is higher status, he continues to be cared for by family as he pursues his ambitions in society. He will be married off to a high status female to continue the family line.
Patriarchy is both the uplifting of the high status males and the casting out of the low status males. Neoliberal ideology tells these low status males they can gain status through the market. Patriarchy keeps women at home and disempowered but generally more in community than men. Isolated women are especially vulnerable. Patriarchy tries to erase people who don't fit into the binary gender system.
“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Now a definitively answerable question: the egg. That’s how evolution works.
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?
so i hear tumblr's dying and this moby dick meme idea has lived in my head for literal years...
At times, I'm depressed by the minuscule percentage of all the literature from Greco-Roman antiquity that's survived to the present day. (For example: of the roughly 120 plays we know Sophocles to have staged at the Dionysia, all of seven have come down to us intact.) At other times, though, I'm amazed that we have any ancient literature at all. Consider: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2), one of the finest and most beautiful poems we know of from Archaic Greece, survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript, which turned up in Moscow in 1777...in a stable.
Local goat discovers joy of painting
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.
sapphic saturday
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
What does does it mean to be a citizen of a nation built on genocide? America is made of conquerors and refugees, killers and survivors. Can the US absolve itself? I can't say we were ever great, don't know if I can say we were ever good. But I think the best we've ever been is when we've held a welcoming hand to the world's refugees. At this point it feels like the least we can do.
#childrensrights
I think one of the most damaging ideologies towards children is the conviction that having children isn’t a calling but a moral obligation.
the fact that pro-monarchy arguments have degenerated, over the past few centuries, from “the king rules by divine right and is accountable to nobody but god”, to “uhm the royals generate a lot of income from tourism” will never stop being extremely funny to me
when Brennan said "The first rule of existence is: as above, so below. People are fractal images of the universe. You are as we are. In the same way your heart feels and your mind thinks, you, mortal beings are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don't, then it doesn't."
when Brennan said "It is a horrifying responsibility to think because things cannot remain the same, each and every one of us must shoulder some responsibility for how they will become different."
when Brennan said "Sometimes decisions are not difficult. Sometimes they are just hard."
when Brennan said "There is no moral. The Wolf eats you one day and until it does, the forest is beautiful."
when Brennan said "I always felt the fundamental substance of the universe is creation. None of this makes any sense, when you really break it down. It's like, none of this had to happen, but it's beautiful and art is the definition of 'this didn't have to happen, but it's beautiful.' [...] It resonates with the universe because the universe is consciousness playing with itself."
when Brennan said
when Brennan said
Batman: dystopian fascism
Superman: utopian fascism
Iron Man: techno-fascism
Captain America: nationalism
Spider-man: anarchism
My brain can be so exceptionally bad sometimes.
Endless short video feeds are completely inescapable for me; i can't use tiktok, i couldn't use vine, I can't watch youtube shorts. It's the same way I can't play video games - if I engage with them it is impossible to disengage until something physically forces me to look away. I sat for seven hours last night watching videos thinking to myself "I should go get my coffee that I left in the kitchen; I should go to bed; I should go to the bathroom" and I couldn't make myself move until tiny bastard had to go outside.
Anyway. uBlock origin is great because it blocks ads but you can also use it to totally block elements that are tar pits for your brain. The youtube shorts player has now been banished from my firefox.
This is yet another reason that I prefer stuff that can be used in-browser rather than in exclusively in-app. Way too easy to have a stream of content projected directly into my eyeballs with no action or choices needed on my part when I'm looking at the app passively instead of looking at a website where I have to choose the next video to watch.
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.
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)
Hot take: every ironic Internet post is also an unironic Internet post
What are the ethics of advocating violence against machines?
"How much do you earn?" "How much do you make?"
No. How much have you wrested from the grubbing hands of the capitalists? Or, flip side, how much have you stolen from the workers? You don't make money unless you work at a bank. Otherwise you're just dropping your line in the flow of capital and snagging whatever you can. But of course, it's catch & release only without a bank-issued permit.
Happy 4th anniversary of the Ever Given Suez Canal Obstruction, to those who celebrate
In the first years, herds of over a hundred pigs would sweep through the farms and homesteads of Indian territory in eastern Oklahoma, devastating the land and driving rural people into nearby towns. They quickly armed themselves and formed militias to fight the hogs, but progress was slow. Over the next decade they pushed herds out of open land and into more vegetated areas. The hogs found enough shelter and forage in the forests and shrubland to breed at still alarming rates. Hunting parties started regularly scouting open ground for any pigs daring enough to venture out of cover. Over time these parties became more systematic and economical, figuring out how to anticipate and capture entire herds. Although they still had no usable farmland, the people developed efficient butchering and processing techniques and found safe routes through the landmine fields to trade for Texan crops. Initially devastated by the hog invasion, the east Oklahoma nations eventually fought back and carved out a niche for themselves in the new American order.
The US government, hollowed out, has all but collapsed. The east coast states down to Georgia have mostly held together and still recognize the authority of Washington DC. California, Oregon, and Washington have formed an independent coalition on the west coast. Texas' influence captures the whole coast of the Gulf of Mexico, now called the Gulf of Texas by several hundred million people. The Great Lakes states have merged with Canada. And the Great Plains in the middle of the continent are overrun by feral hogs, and war.
The Texan Federation's first military act was to push the hogs out of their territory. Beginning in a line from the coast, the army drove every pig northward. They devastated the landscape, using grenades and mortars whenever they caught a herd on open ground. A few soldiers, unsuspecting and inattentive, were knocked down by a big male and trampled by hundreds of hooves. A few more were lost to equipment failure, or their own mistakes, or the mistakes of fellow soldiers. Eventually, at the cost of a few dozen people and a few thousand hogs, the herds were driven north of the Red River and west out of the Arkansas area, into Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee territories. The Texans placed landmines across long stretches to mark a northern border and block the hogs' return. For several decades the Texan military would maintain this defensive line, blocking both pigs and refugees from the north.
The US government, hollowed out, has all but collapsed. The east coast states down to Georgia have mostly held together and still recognize the authority of Washington DC. California, Oregon, and Washington have formed an independent coalition on the west coast. Texas' influence captures the whole coast of the Gulf of Mexico, now called the Gulf of Texas by several hundred million people. The Great Lakes states have merged with Canada. And the Great Plains in the middle of the continent are overrun by feral hogs, and war.
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.
There are 100-200 feral hogs loose in the state of New Hampshire. They are considered to be "Running at large", and are escapees from the Blue Mountain Forest association. They mainly reside in forests in the Connetecut river valley, where they wait, amassing their numbers, waiting for a chance to strike. The South and California have already fallen. We are next.
