[homoluigi]

[kaylmao]

[kaylmao]

[thememedaddy]

[the-final-sif]

So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.

[straawberries]

can ppl pls reblog this version

[obsidian-flame]

Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!

[janmisali]

oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this

what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)

0, 1, or 2

3

4 or 5

6

7, 8, or 9

Remaining time: 4 days 2 hours

[tsarina-anadyomene]

I am sometimes sympathetic to "there needs to be academic affirmative action for humanities conservatives" because I feel that they are in incredibly desperate need for someone to articulate a vision for them that isn't completely fucking stupid. Like they really need the help

[batshit-auspol]

Here's our most requested item: Bob Katter's same-sex marriage speech, in all its unhinged glory

Follow for more Batshit Moments in Australian politics!

[tsarina-anadyomene]

I remember when I was first learning about institutional theories of art in undergrad, I thought that the mere fact that something had been chosen for art candidacy was not the interesting part. The interesting part came from the deeper reasons that the institution cites for inclusion or non-inclusion. I still think I was kind of right about that and I think newer, fancier institutional theories are a lot more keyed into that. But gallery culture just isn't tuned into what analytic philosophers of art are doing for better or for worse. There is a deeper point I want to get to here. We have really lost the conception of artists as having a special ability to articulate the world or our values (and this makes the claim to the glory of the arts feel a bit hollow). And in part I do think that it is because as a result of the liberal world we have become very in love with the mere fact of choice. What makes the banana on the wall function is the regime which says "there is nothing beyond the mere fact of my choosing." I am rather cynical now of the fallout of Kant's "to be of value is to be an end set by an agent" (a paraphrase). Back to the artworld: even when that phrase is stated as a criticism or a cynical declaration of despair it still functions to reinforce that regime. But our choices aren't without substance or basis. They are not Sartrean moments in the void. We do things for reasons or in response to value and we do things in connection with a real world. It seems like one way in which people have tried to wed the moment of choice back to the world is by talking about the role of various structures in informing our choice. The result, I think, is a kind of fixation on identity and a kind of contingency. And part of the appeal of this is that it makes scholarship rather mechanical (and I think this scholarship has become quite mechanical) in a way that can sustain a growing professional class that can keep its jobs by simply following a formula. But notice that this still involves a kind of obsession with the moment of choice and the features of the decider. There is still (quietly) the longing for the existentialist free decider whose choice is authentic because it is subaltern. More importantly: notice how far back we've still retreated from the world. There is only a very thin scaffolding which the artworld can see from either this perspective or the perspective of mere choosing. Part of the hope of the arts from the 19th Century onward is that it would renew our sight of the world and let us see past the restrictive scope of various regimes of abstraction and rational organization. The thought appears again and again that we can break free from our habitual modes of seeing. The full richness of the world could be reclaimed. And so perhaps the fact that the special power of the arts becoming so laughable is not a transhistorical fact but a contingent and local one, where the artworld is seized by a self-undermining kind of thought. The ideology is at odds with the constitutive aim of the practice.

[filmphotofranz]

[rilamonster]

They left the republic for being too beholden to corporate interests to make their own government, made up mostly of weapons manufacturers and private banks.

[filmphotofranz]

The Democratic Party

[mini-wrants]

The thing that’s always missing from the “women didn’t fight for the right to work they were already working they fought to get paid” is that many women also very much wanted to work.

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

I know not everyone is born with intellectual curiosity or drive or determination but some people are and many of those people are women.

[mini-wrants]

[mini-wrants]

Literally.

[gexavery]

It's unbelievable to me that everyone crops out the fourth panel of this comic

[tariqah]

Americans be like: My grandpa 😠😠😠 served in the Korean War 😠😠😠 and killed 9 people 😠😠😠 to fund his college degree in clownery 😠😠😠 Respect him or leave the country 😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬

[username00000000001-blog]

That’s a super light story huh? My great grandfather got killed in action from a land mine to protect this country. If you don’t wanna respect the history or stand for a national anthem😁then leave to your peaceful home and fuck right off

[butchflirt]

How did your great grandpa stepping on a landmine protect this country

[zanabism-deactivated20200529]

skjdfgkjgfkhjfgkljdlkfgkldklKLDKLGHKLGHFKLkslkjfglkjflkdnfklgnkldkgnhkogfdhinsxfnhdfoijnlkdajfp;srgsr;p;gmjthijdtijhbdijiojfp

[sodiumfreakbyeguysiloveu-deacti]

so called "free thinkers" watching a game of tennis

[contemptible-scoundrel]

[aspiring highway bandit voice] oh yes absolutely your decentralized anticiv pastoral utopia with no form of organized or regulated transport of goods sounds incredible

[tsarina-anadyomene]

this is a really interesting point. can you think of some material conditions like, I don't know, the state of transport infrastructure or maybe form of commodity production (pastoral, etc.), forms of state/non-state organization that would contribute to that?

[geyfrog]

Modern life is too atomized; life would be better on net if we more interdependent like we were in the past

Strongly agree

Somewhat agree

Neutral

Somewhat disagree

Strongly disagree

Voting ended onMay 29

[tsarina-anadyomene]

Well, I think there is a sense in which this isn't terribly surprising. I remember oh, I don't know, fourteen, fifteen years ago when libertarianism was poised to be the future of the Republican party (at least this is the way everyone was talking; we know now that is was a bunch of bullshit). There was a lot of debate over rugged individualism and personal independence. And I think a lot of the modern (populist) left identity bears the marks of that argument and was pressed to emphasize ways in which we actually are interdependent and can't stand alone—and they needed to do so in such a way that this didn't seem like a bad thing. I think this is a period that kind of intensified the progressive left's attraction to socialist or at least social democratic thought.

Now these critiques of liberal society as too alienated and too atomized have long prefigured this shift in the popular culture of the American political left. There is a great deal of left-wing and feminist criticism of Kant, for example, insofar as he seeks to mold us into subjects that are principally independent and don't depend on other people. The 21st Century versions of this are in turn prefigured and influenced by Marxist critiques of "bourgeois individualism" in the 20th. You might also turn to the critiques of the Romantic "heroic individual" who is in some sense outside of society and sees his (from the feminist critic: his) alienation as insurmountable. Of course this isn't strictly a left-wing idea: obshchina in the Russian context is a curious mixture of conservative and socialist.

It does seem to me that there are a few dimensions that favor pre-modern "collectivity." One is that we do seem to have a longing to be part of things that are larger than ourselves and this can be things so simple as playing in a band. But we notice that these sorts of collective enterprise, in order to really work as the things that they are, involve a kind of unalienated attitude toward other individuals in the collective—an attitude that liberal individualism makes it harder to articulate or at very least forces a kind of reductive view where the division between weak and strong evaluation dissolves. You might also be inspired to take arms against the independence ideal by how lonely and disconnected the world seems to be growing. Sometimes instrumental rationality inadvertantly brings us to experience things that did not initially appear on our list of goods and it seems that society and technology are restructuring the means of achieving certain items on our given (immature) list such that they make less and less contact with the things that really matter. They no longer add the important things to the list. And we find ourselves needing something that we struggle to articulate to ourselves or otherwise find ourselves without a non-embarrassing way of seeking after those things.

Of course individualist modernity has given us many wonderful things. It seems like modern acceptance of homosexuality, for example, would be very difficult to achieve without it. We have to be alienated to the degree that we can get what we need without others needing to like us or approve of our lifestyle. It can't be the end of the story if your (unalienated) support network will cut you off when you say "I don't want to get married and have children. I want to start a household with my lesbian lover." But notice that this kind of independence is facilitated by the liberal state (and indeed, it is what the liberal state sees itself as being for) and its explicit maintenance of impartial systems of exchange (be those market or planned). But, of course, even the libertarian has to admit that much.

This is all to say that I don't think it's all so simple as "modernity good" or "modernity bad." But it does seem a bit naive to think we can just "go back" to something. The Romantics had a way of looking at the Greeks a certain way, as an organically unified society but they thought they were no longer naive in a way that the Greeks were. They had to figure out a new way of reunifying themselves that didn't involve pretending that a sort of fragmentary individualism hadn't transformed them; hadn't made them see new features in the world. The Eve story sometimes gets deployed here. There's something to be done once we've eaten the fruit of knowledge. But there is something embarrassing about the naked unselfconscious way of being once you're on the other side. You can't go back.

[wizardelf]

[beaft]

bitch moment: obviously this is subjective but a lot of modern queer lit (especially YA) has this specific tone that i find really grating. i want to call it "smug" but that's not exactly it. it's more like, that sense that the author is utterly convinced of the correctness of their own worldview and expects everyone else to agree with them on principle

[beaft]

two poles on this one btw

author is scared of me = terrified of ambiguity, uses excruciatingly precise language to avoid being misinterpreted, treats diversity as a box-ticking exercise, bends over backwards to explain itself when Literally No One Asked, all morally grey actions have to be immediately justified and resolved

author wants me dead = protagonist is unfailingly righteous and good, antagonist is irredeemably evil strawman, narrative refuses to make space for opinions/experiences that don't perfectly match up with the author's perspective, lots of Teachable Moments where an ignorant character is kindly shown the error of their ways by a wiser, more enlightened character

[mikkeneko]

#these things are not opposites on a spectrum#I see these mindsets packaged together more often than not#the author wants you dead because they are scared of you

[ladysisyphus]

I was in fact thinking of this post while writing re: The Red Blossom Blades [final edits] (though there it is not the author but the commercial publishing house's editor that both is scared of and wants the reader dead), so I return to re-endorse this take.