71 posts
Latest Posts by greatestgargadon - Page 2
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.
Kinda feels like George Washington's main leadership traits were tall, charismatic, and handsome. That said, here are some other things he did (and didn't do):
He supported his lifestyle by enslaving dozens of people, claiming to own them and forcing them to work on his plantation.
He got a bunch of people inoculated against smallpox
He released all his slaves only on his and his wife's deaths
He kept together a defensive army for several years without wrecking the landscape or alienating the populace
He was given executive power and ceded it to a democratic(ish) process
He never figured out how to live without enslaving people
He never had a child
He raised up Alexander Hamilton and let him build a banking system
He led a militia force against US citizens in the whisky rebellion
He ordered a 3-year colonial war against native Americans in the Great Lakes region
In 1971 Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Jimmy Carter assumed office during some of the economic and geopolitical turmoil that followed. Reagan took office, radically changed tax policy to benefit wealthy people, and ushered in a boom era in the economy. He handed off power to his vice president Bush, then Clinton took over during the Internet boom of the 1990s. Bush 2 started the Iraq War, ushering in an era of heavy US military involvement in the Middle East. All US administrations from Truman onward involved themselves in affairs of that part of the world. Obama inherited and continued that era, his main domestic accomplishment being a health insurance for all system that expanded and subsidized the private health insurance market.
Trump came to power and held it until the Covid-19 pandemic. His administration lowered taxes on rich people, disrupted US international agreements, and appointed a large number of judges. The murder by police of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests that occupied major cities for months leading up to the 2020 election. Joe Biden won with a tenuous legislative majority and governed the country during four years of adaptation and recovery from the pandemic and the nation's response to it. The democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 elections.
Donald Trump won the election of 2024 with a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. He invited Elon Musk into the White House and cabinet meetings, and gave Musk unprecedented access to data systems across the federal government through the newly created DOGE. DOGE began directing the firings of masses of government workers, actions that were challenged in the court system.
The perfect drink to wash down my ape biscuits
I'm posting this link mostly for myself, so I can find it again when I go looking, but if other people see it here then that would be beautiful.
I first saw this exhibition in the free art gallery on the campus where I did my grad program. I would walk across the quad on days when I had a free hour or two and just browse the artwork. One day they had a small section with a few pairs of photographs, each pair taken in the same location at different times, with one or more subjects missing from the later photograph. Four boys sitting together, next to a picture of three men in similar poses. Two young men running down a hill next to one old man running down the same hill. Follow the link and you can see for yourself.
I looked at the pictures for a few minutes before I read the description. The collection was called Ausencias Argentinas, chronicling the fallout from Argentina's 'Dirty War' from 1976 to 1983, in which the government 'disappeared' social workers, social work students, militants, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists and others they thought might be left-wing activists. Their families and friends got no closure, but were simply left to carry on their lives with los desaparecidos conspicuously absent. I had to sit down for a few minutes, overwhelmed, before I could move on.
Anyway, stay safe out there.
This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.
Leaving a cult is really hard, so I really respect the people who are speaking from this place.
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"
Honestly, at this point, I'd support Taylor Swift for president
Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear adopted by the Polish II Corps during World War II. He was officially enlisted as a soldier to ensure he could travel with the unit and was given the rank of private. He became famous for helping carry artillery shells during the Battle of Monte Cassino. Wojtek was also known for drinking beer, eating cigarettes, and wrestling with soldiers.
After the war, he was taken to Scotland, where he lived at the Edinburgh Zoo until his passing in 1963.
masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved
these are all creatures to me
…psychiatry assumes that society does not cause distress in biologically normal people, who are considered biologically normal at least in part because they are economically productive. This assumption permits the conclusion that if a person is distressed to the point of unproductivity, it is because that person—not society—is abnormal. Thus, psychiatry’s commitment to biological essentialism not only masks the role of the constructed sociopolitical environment in creating distress but depoliticizes it by characterizing that allegedly irrational distress as induced by biological abnormality.
– Kiera Lyons, “The Neurodiversity Paradigm and Abolition of Psychiatric Incarceration” (2023)
There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"
The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.
We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...
My Zelda headcanon is that the three main characters are all cosmic actors whisked through time and space to play out their predetermined mythic roles in different settings. Ganon seizes power in the setting, Zelda reaches outside the setting to pull in the player, and Link serves as a vessel for the player who can defy the in-setting odds to defeat Ganon.
So instead of trying to knit together the Zelda timeline, I imagine the three of them in between games hanging out in a breakroom at the Hylian multiverse agency. They're doing whatever (frankly none of our business--they're on break), when suddenly a new game gets released and they each get drawn through a portal to somewhere they can settle in and play out their story once more.
I'll need to read about this more, but I think there's something interesting about temples in the Roman imperial era and server farms today
What do you think happens first: the last human dies, or the last machine gives out?
I have to admit, the Pacific garbage patch excites me a little. What freakish(endearing) microorganisms are breeding out there? The seeds of new life that will emerge when humans and our machines have collapsed into rust and dust
Doctor House * is a real doctor * not a real house
Doctor Worm * not a real doctor * is a real worm
Eyes on the future, the past is fuel
Dig deeper, burn hotter, run faster
Don't think about what was here yesterday
Don't think about what won't be here tomorrow
The age of machines sneaked up on us. Steadily over the past century, the world has been increasingly shaped to the needs of machines. Farmland is designed for the tractor, millions of miles of road and acres of parking lots designed for cars, plus airports, shipping ports, distribution centers, factories, server farms... Everywhere we find spaces hostile to humans but welcoming to machines. Human beings relegate themselves mostly to apartment buildings, offices, and houses. We spend large amounts of time and energy powering and operating machinery. Meanwhile all over the planet the land, ocean, and sky is dominated by billions of metal and plastic amalgamations animated and set loose by human beings.
Our age of machines is not the classic Terminator apocalypse scenario, where an AI script gets out of control and destroys humanity. These machines are still physically operated by people, who are taking orders from other people. But it's pretty clear that the world is more welcoming to a person in a machine than one walking free on their own feet.
I get such a kick out of the prefix 'cis'
getting a book cislated: yup, still can't read it
cisition timeline: just a selfie
cisformation: make a bunch of super saiyan sounds and walk away
cisubstantiation: by the power of god this bread has remained bread
idk its just neat
Honestly the only slur I ever get called is 'gay' or 'homo', people here just aren't very creative with their slurs anymore
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.
and how many petulant letters embedded in well-designed structures?
This is the exact sort of passive-aggressive Rich Old Man Grumpiness I can get behind
