the wonderfully bizarre amount of detail (like the reporters on camera right outside the site) is what makes it so good to me
i feel like every time i try to watch weekend update that one guy (the one who isn't scarjo's husband) makes a misogynistic statement and everyone pretends like it's a joke for some reason and i quit watching snl to do something much richer with my one wild life
“wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all raised our children on books instead of screens and let them play outside in the fields with other kids and walked to the local market and farmed our own food"
yes. as an educator, let me repeat--yes. these are good things that are children would benefit from. doing the weird, rhetorical strategy of implying these ideas (or the people advocating for them) slide seamlessly into racism is just...weird. like, you can dislike cottagecore while also accepting that it wasn't..."cryptofacist propaganda"
a few years back when i was more online, i was in a few cottagecore kind of spaces. they tended to be dominated by queer women and there was nothing particularly conservative or propagandistic about it. to me at least, it seemed to come organically from women who wanted to uplift things that were seen as outdated or stiffing or gender-stereotyped (threadwork, baking, gardening, etc.) as solutions to artificial and consumerist life. why buy fast fashion when you could thrift, mend, or make? why buy processed food from megacorps when you could grow your own ingredients and make food yourself? etc. and yeah, a lot of them were taking inspiration from the old american transcendentalists and brittish romantics, which you could say are colonialist, etc., but nothing is without fault and generally there are a lot of beautiful ideas from that era that can be taken into and discussed in the modern day, as we navigate tensions between technology and pastoralism (the machine in the garden, by leo marx, is an interesting bit of lit crit on this if you're into that kind of thing). i'd say too that a lot of them were community minded, either through advocacy groups, spirituality (witches and theists alike), community gardens, etc.
maybe the vibes have shifted in the years since, as i feel like the "tradwife" has become a thing on tiktok. but like...the people i know irl who are cottagecorey aren't on tiktok? they're reading and spending time outside and crafting things. so if you're getting the "cryptofacist propaganda" angle from that kind of thing, then I think we're talking about two discreet movements that just have some aesthetic overlap. influencers are never gonna be authentic representations of any kind of group, but most of the cottagecore people i've known irl haven't been rich in the slightest, they've actually mostly been retail workers or biology or lit grad students lol.
but ultimately...it would be wonderful if we were raising our kids on books instead of screens. anyone working in education can tell you that. and yeah, playing outside is good, actually. having a garden is also awesome, and being able to walk to the local market is doubly so. and the awesome part is, all those things can be done in the city, or the suburbs, or in rural america. they can be done in diverse communities built on compassion.
anyway, there are a lot of good things to be drawn from that whole subculture, imo
"cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return"
psh ur mom showed me her full moon last night and it wasn't even half that thick
makes me want to become a beacon of pure love for my fellow lost fireflies winking and blinking in the long, dark night of the cosmos
fucking beautiful, stealing it
brb, boutta update my teaching philosophy in case I decide to go on the job market again
we’re not born “to” anything
umm ackshually someone else told me that we're born to pass on our genes, so checkmate camus
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE
Introduction
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.
The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can't predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.
In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.
snoopy is my spirit animal tbh
yes and they are all gay
consume. you will be happy. just consume more. you need these things. consume. fuck the environment. consume. you will not be good enough without our product. consume. wrap yourself in the narratives we create about who you are by buying or not buying our product, subsume your understand of the world under the one we give you, prostrate yourself upon the altar of pseudo corporate idolatry, consume. consume consume consume.