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ellievsbear
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Stranger Things

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styofa doing anything
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izzy's playlists!
Acquired Stardust
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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hello vonnie

JVL
dirt enthusiast
Game of Thrones Daily

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@oldgaffergamgee
stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life
Reblog if you would burn down the statue of liberty to save a life
Here’s the thing, though. If you asked a conservative “Would you let the statue of liberty burn to save one life?” they’d probably scoff and say no, it’s a national landmark, a treasure, a piece of too much historical importance to let it be destroyed for the sake of one measly life.
But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”
The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical.
But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?
People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you.
P.S. I would let the statue of liberty burn to save a pigeon.
also, there is an extreme difference between what things or principles *i* personally am willing to die for, and what i would hazard others to die for. and this is a distinction i don’t think the conservative hard-right likes to face.
an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.
they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.
the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.
if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.
and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.
but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.
would i be willing to risk death, trying to save the statue of liberty? probably, yes. but there is no culture without people, and therefore i also believe there are no cultural treasures worth more than other people’s lives. and as far as i’m concerned the same goes for laws, or markets, or borders.
Well said!
This is an excellent ethical discussion.
The first time I came across this post, randomslasher’s addition was life changing for me. I suddenly understood where the right was coming from, and I had never been angrier.
This is also why so many people on the right fail to see the hypocrisy of trying to make abortion illegal when they themselves have had abortions. They can tally up their own life circumstances and conclude that it would be difficult or impossible to continue a pregnancy, but they’re completely mystified by the idea that women they don’t know are also human beings with complicated lives and limited spoon allocation.
This is also why they think “get a job” is useful advice. In their heads they honestly do not understand why the NPCs who make up the majority of the human race can’t just flip a switch from “no job” to “job.” When they say “get a job” they’re filing a glitch report with God and they honestly think that’s all it takes.
This is also why they tend to view demographics as individuals. They think that every single Muslim is just a different avatar for the same bit of programming.
Borrowed observation from @innuendostudios here, but: there’s also a fundamental difference in how progressives view social problems versus how conservatives view them. That is, progressives view them as problems to be solved, whereas conservatives do not believe you can solve anything.
Conservatives view social issues as universal constants that fundamentally are unable to be changed, like the weather. You can try to alter your own behavior to protect yourself (you can carry an umbrella), and you can commiserate about how bad the weather is, but you can’t stop it from raining. This is why conservatives blame victims of rape for dressing immodestly or for drinking or for going out at night: to them, those things are like going out without an umbrella when you know it’s going to rain.
“But then why do conservatives try to stop things they dislike by making them illegal, like drug use or immigration or abortion?” And the answer is: they’re not. They know perfectly well that those things will continue. No amount of studies showing that their methods are ineffective will matter to them because effectiveness is not the point. The point is to punish people for doing bad things, because punishing people is how you show your disapproval of their actions; if you don’t punish them, then you’re condoning their behavior.
This is why they will never support rehabilitative prisons, even though they reduce crime. This is why they will never support free birth control for everyone, even though that would reduce abortions. This is why they will never support just giving homeless people houses, even though it’s proven to be cheaper and more effective at stopping homelessness than halfway houses and shelters. It’s not about stopping evil, because you can’t; it’s about saying definitively what is Bad and what is Good, and we as a society do that by punishing the people we’ve decided are bad.
This is why the conservative response to “holy fuck, they’re putting children in cages!” is typically something along the lines of “it’s their parents’ fault for trying to come here illegally; if they didn’t want to have their kids taken away, they shouldn’t have committed a crime.” It doesn’t matter that entering the US unlawfully is a misdemeanor and child kidnapping isn’t typically a criminal sentence. It does not matter that this has absolutely zero effect on people unlawfully entering the US. The point is that conservatives have decided that entering unlawfully is Bad, anything that is not punishing undocumented immigrants – due process of asylum and removal defense claims, for example – is supporting Badness, and kidnapping children is an appropriate punishment for being Bad.
mooching off the government is a good thing actually. what the fuck else are they gonna do with the money? buy more bombs?
If you are paying taxes it’s impossible to “mooch” off of the government. It’s just going “hey, remember that money I gave you? It’s your turn to help me out now.”
It is always impossible to mooch off the government. It is the government’s job to look after its people.
Literally why even have a fucking government if not to take care of people.
I would argue that there is such a thing as mooching off the government.
Like when Amazon steals fucking 129 million dollars in tax rebates despite making 11 billion dollars in profit and not paying one fucking penny of tax.
That’s what ‘mooching off the government’ looks like.
Everything the rich accuse the poor of is another thing they actually do themselves.
The Outbursts of Everett True was a comic strip that ran in papers from 1905 to 1927, wherein the aforementioned Everett True regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude. Men have not only been taking up too much room on public transport for about as long as public transport has existed, but the people around them have been irritated about it for at least a hundred years. The next time someone tries to claim that manspreading is a false phenomenon, please direct them to this strip so that Everett True can correct their misconceptions with an umbrella upside the head.
I have never before heard of Everett True, but if he “regularly beat the everliving shit out of rude people as a warning to anyone else who might consider being rude,” I have a strong spiritual connection with him.
I fucking love him
i can imagine this guy’s voice very clearly in my head but i couldn’t put a name to it
He also jabs racists in the eye!
I love the justice grandpa of fists
A lot of people in the replies to this seemingly have no idea what “class” is.
It’s not a set of values or something you automatically earn after college or like some mysterious inherent quality your parents pass down to you.
(Like, maybe your parents have enough money/assets where they can sustain you through economic insecurity, but let’s be honest…that’s not most people’s situation.)
If you are struggling with bills, if you don’t have savings, if you constantly question even small purchases, if spending a few thousand dollars on a vacation seems like a distant dream…you are not middle class.
And most importantly, saying you are not middle class is not an attack on your character.
Instead it’s a reminder to fight for your own economic interests, and not to let companies, your boss, or politicians trick you into working against yourself by believing you’re part of the “mythical middle.”
Damn
What’s more, if your first response to “you’re not middle class!” is to treat it like an attack on your character? Then you really need to stop and examine what you think about lower-class people.
Americans like to quote Kurt Vonnegut, that ‘socialism never took root in America because Americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’
What that politely obscures is why Americans see themselves as future rich people: they despise the poor, even if they themselves are poor, and so would rather see themselves as “middle class” rather than ever see themselves as “poor.”
I would also like to add on this that if you are paying a mortgage on a home, but it’s a 30 year mortgage…you’re NOT middle class. Sorry!
“But by these definitions, almost NOBODY I know in the USA qualifies as middle class?!?!” Yep. Correct. Turns out the result of several decades of a “disappearing middle class” is almost everybody is poor.
The Addams Family ( 2019 )
There was a voice actor hired to make that indecipherable gibberish
And it was a big name too just like the rest of the cast so it shouldn’t be that surprising but
I cannot stop laughing at the apparent fact that they got snoop dogg to do this
They got FUCKING WHOM
Yup! Snoop Dogg.
Gay white couples really look like identical twins all the time, I have been in Hanks shoes before
Scientists invented fabric that makes electricity from motion and sunlight. To create the fabric, researchers at Georgia Tech wove together solar cell fibers with materials that generate power from movement. It could be used in “tents, curtains, or wearable garments,” meaning we’d virtually never be without power. Source
Y'all are fucking idiots. Clean energy will NEVER be enough to replace the energy we have now. We’d have to tear down DOZENS of forests just to fit enough windmills and solar panels to get even a QUARTER (probably less, tbh) of the energy we can produce now.
Yeah, sure, when they’ve already calculated that a few square miles of panels in the empty ass Arizona desert could power the whole nation. But ok, fracking and the diminishing petroleum supply is worlds better.
Nevermind that windmills are often most efficient off the coast. There they take up no land, impact no trees, don’t pollute the water, and are conveniently located where winds are often strongest anyway.
And solar panels can literally be built into roofs of buildings and in empty areas like deserts. The sun strikes the Earth with the same amount of energy in an hour that our civilization uses in a year.
But yeah, it would be impossible for us to ever have enough energy from clean sources.
Durr hurr technology is bad and I would rather light shit on fire than have clean energy
I can also testify to the Arizona desert being empty ass. And the California desert. And the Nevada desert.
also…no forests were cleared to make space for Denmark’s windmills and yet they regularly produce so much power that it covers almost all of the country’s power needs. Oh, and then there’s the times when the windmills generate 140% of Denmark’s power needs. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/10/denmark-wind-windfarm-power-exceed-electricity-demand
Friendly reminder that oil pipelines are a scam.
The fact that anyone can believe a limited amount of dinosaur oil is more plentiful and efficient than moving air or fucking sunlight is proof that entire populations can be completely brainwashed.
And don’t forget wave and geothermal power.
The best place to install solar? Parking lots! Here’s the Community Mercantile in LFK:
Not only can it supply almost all the power needed for stores that build these, it also reduces ambient heating from the roasting pavement and keeps cars covered from the elements.
Everyone wins!
The ways we can produce sustainable, renewable energy grow by the year. There is zero reason to keep maintaining oil and natural gas industries!
let them live, riker
stop interrupting their date, riker
fuck OFF, riker
again, there IS a problem of straight actors playing all the gay roles, but the answer isn’t as easy as “straight people shouldn’t play gay people” because a) it’s acting and there’s nothing intrinsically physical about gayness and b) it’s bad to insist that actors make their sexuality public information
you know what that’s exactly it
Disney's fucking quaking in their
imagine telling someone two years ago that a live action Dora the explorer movie will get certified fresh on rotten tomatoes while a lion king remake will pathetically sit at a 53%
You are over-encumbered and cannot run
my favorite student is this little excitable turkish kid who waves me over at lunch every day to holler a joke at me & then urges me to get the other teachers to come listen to his jokes. my favorite so far is Q: what do you call somebody who doesnt want you to go to the bathroom? A: a teacher (the other teachers did not find it as hilarious as i did)
this child, hollering at me in the middle of class: YOU NEED PUN.
me: yeah i do whats ur pun
this child: what was the real name of the titanic? …the fathership. ……….because fathers are Big.
me, at recess: hey u got any jokes today
this child, stumbling off a log & dramatically yeeting his paper hat full force for no apparent reason: i have,,,,, ONE. [dramatic pause] i really have to KETCHUP on fortnite
todays the last day i have this kids class & he was like “u need a GOOD final joke” & i want yall to know his final joke to me was: why are frogs so happy? because they eat what bugs them. he then proceeded to hug me for a solid minute while a bunch of other kids came & took turns hugging me,
can we stop acting like “baby boomers” are a class. like if you mean rich white people just say it...poor & non-white baby boomers aren’t responsible for the poor state of the economy and are in fact very affected by it...i thought we were over this
I know a lot of landlords are jerks but my favorite landlord ever was an older eccentric gay man and whenever something went wrong in my apartment he would always say “I’ll send one of the boys over.” And then some absolutely shredded young man would show up in white jeans, exceptionally polite, and fix it the same day.
you had the only valid landlord ever