Jules of Nature

ellievsbear
Today's Document

if i look back, i am lost

shark vs the universe
Misplaced Lens Cap

tannertan36

Kiana Khansmith
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styofa doing anything
Cosmic Funnies

JVL
AnasAbdin

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
NASA

Janaina Medeiros
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ojovivo
will byers stan first human second
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@iwouldratherbbc
Discworld is an interesting beast in the age of ACAB. Like, the city watch books are a story about police and the way in which a good police force can help and protect people. Which would make it copoganda. And I'm not going to say that the City Watch books are completely free of copoganda, but they also do something interesting that fairly few stories about heroic police officers do, and I think it has a lot to do with Samuel Vimes. A lot of copoganda stories like, say, Brooklyn 99, are perfectly capable of portraying cops as cruel, bigoted, and greedy, but our central cast of characters are portrayed as good people who want to help their communities. The result is that the bad cops are portrayed as an aberration, while most cops can be assumed to be good people doing a tough job because they want to help protect people from the nebulous evil forces of "Crime". The police are considered to be naturally heroic. Pratchett does something very interesting, which is provide us with Vimes' perspective, and present us with an Unnaturally heroic police force. In Ahnk-Morpork, the natural state of the watch is a gang with extra paperwork. It's the place for people who, at best, just want a steady paycheck and at worst want an excuse to hit people with a truncheon. Rather than be an army defending people from the forces of Crime, the Watch is described as a sort of sleight-of-hand, big burly watchmen in shiny uniforms don't stand around in-case a Crime happens in their vicinity, they stand around to remind people that The Law exists and has teeth. The Watchmen are people, when danger rears it's head, their instinct is to hide and get out of the way. When faced with authority, their instinct is to bow to it out of fear of what it might do to them if they don't. Carrot is a genuine Hero, but his natural heroism is presented as an aberration. Normal Cops don't act like Carrot does. The fact that the Watch ends up acting like a Heroic Police Force is largely due to the leadership of Sam Vimes, but Vimes himself is a microcosm of the Watch. The base state of Sam Vimes would be an alchoholic bully of an officer, one who beats people until they confess to anything because that makes his job easier. Vimes The Hero is a homunculous, an artificial being created by Sam Vimes fighting back all those instincts and FORCING himself to behave as his conscience dictates. Vimes doesn't take bribes or let his officers do the same because, damnit, that sort of thing shouldn't happen, even if doing so would make things a lot easier. Vimes doesn't run towards sounds of screaming because he WANTS to, he forces himself to do so because somebody needs to. It's best summed up in Thud “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Your Grace.” “I know that one,” said Vimes. “Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr. Pessimal.” “Ah, but who watches you, Your Grace?” said the inspector with a brief little smile. “I do that, too. All the time,” said Vimes. “Believe me.”
In the hands of another writer, or another series, this exchange would be weirdly dismissive. To whom should the police be accountable to? Themselves, shut up and trust us. But from Vimes, it's a different story. Vimes DOES constantly watch himself, and he doesn't trust that bastard, he's known him his entire life. The Heroic Police are not a natural state, they're an ideal, and ahnk-morpork only gets anywhere close. Vimes is constantly struggling against his own instincts to take shortcuts, to let things slide, but he forces himself to live up to that ideal and the Watch follows his example. Discworld doesn't propose any solutions to the problems with policing in the real world. We don't have a Sam Vimes to run the NYPD and force them to behave. We don't have a Carrot Ironfounderson. But it's at least a story about detectives and police that I can read without feeling like I'm being sold propaganda about the Thin Blue Line.
Another point about Vimes that is incredibly important to this is that he is furiously defensive of the separation between military and civilians and considers the Watch to be civilians.
It adds a layer to the question of who watches the watchmen, because soldiers are directly answerable to individuals within the government, but the Watch is answerable to the City as an abstraction. Not to the People, mind you. Vimes doesn't trust the People any more than he trusts himself. The City is a concept of everything that a society is: a lot of individuals living their lives and some of them are better at that than others, and collectively they are fucking idiots, and overall they are neither good nor bad on an individual level. And the police are part of the City, and they are people.
Which is, I think, part of the reason that they never stray into the narrative of "defending The People against Crime." Instead, they work (often against their own instincts) to protect individuals from each other as needed, and to keep the peace. They don't decide guilt and innocence. When there's no mystery, their only role is to keep individual people from hurting each other, leaving lawyers and judges to sort out the rest. When there's a mystery, their role is to try to figure out who committed the crime and then pass that along to the courts to decide if they were right.
One of the things Pratchett does incredibly well is keeping his stories about individual people, dealing with systems and trying to do good within them, even when the systems are fundamentally broken.
some time last year in a daze i signed up to be a community notes contributor on twitter, and i have not used this ability once in any meaningful sense, but i do appreciate that it sometimes provides me with exclusive advance previews of muppet discourse
I’d approve that one, it adds context
Posters for National Theater of Korea's production of Macbeth, designed by Yuni Yoshida and photographed by Noh Juhan. [1][2]
He knew about concerned citizens. Whoever they were, they all spoke the same private language where ‘traditional values’ mean 'hang someone.’
Terry Pratchett, “The Truth”
the best part about having a job is being able to go through doors other people aren’t allowed to use the worst part is everything else
“The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite”
🚨TONIGHT! The series premiere of 'Dropout Presents' launches at 7PM ET / 4PM PT.
Hank Green reflects on the good, the bad, and the weird parts of having cancer in his stand-up special titled 'Pissing Out Cancer'.
Over the past couple of years, Hank Green and I have become fast friends. When he told me that he had cancer, my heart leapt into my throat. It felt like a horrible injustice that someone as brilliant, generous, and driven as Hank be weighed down by pain and dread.
Of course, what he did with his cancer was, in true Hank character, nothing short of remarkable. He made it his mission to educate people about cancer - first on his own platforms, and then by learning to do standup comedy - while also fighting cancer.
While most of us prefer to juggle one ball at a time, Hank learned while he educated while he suffered. A year later, he was not only cancer free, but doing his first ever standup comedy special at the Dynasty Typewriter in LA.
"Pissing Out Cancer" airs tonight on Dropout at 4pm PT / 7pm ET.
I am lucky to call Hank a colleague, and even luckier to call him a friend. We are all lucky that we get more of him.
DOCTOR WHO | THE LEGEND OF RUBY SUNDAY + Tumblr & Reddit Reactions
we need a season 2 because edwin deserves to be absolutely insufferable about having survived hell twice
Nothing gives the same kind of random ego boost like managing to finally clean up your home and making it nice. Like ooh look at me, I'm living like people do, I made myself iced tea and I am eating my snack from a real plate. I got floors and shit.
masturbation is evil not for any puritan anti-fun reason but because it has permanently claimed so many verbs
nobody can crank anything anymore. and god forbid you jerk
turning off rbs at 75k btw so get your last reblogs in now
The Guild of Merchants' famous publication Wellcome to Ankh-Morporke, Citie of One Thousand Surprises now has an entire section entitled 'Soe you're a Barbarian Invader?' which has notes on night life, folklorique bargains in the bazaar and, under the heading 'Steppe-ing Out,' a list of restaurants that do a dependable mares' milk and yak pudding. And many a pointed-helmeted vandal has trotted back to his freezing yurt wondering why he seems to be a great deal poorer and the apparent owner of a badly-woven rug, a litre of undrinkable wine and a stuffed purple donkey in a straw hat.
Terry Pratchett / Moving Pictures