Blasting Off to Planet Geek

I post a bit of everything here. I'll occasionally chime in on science or engineering subjects and I'm a huge space and rocketry dork.  Avatar by @cottaterra.

[giisip]

Pride Aquarium Comic Series 🏳️‍🌈🐢 ft. POLYTRIX/Huntr/x

Kicking off Pride month with a weekly sapphic couples mini comics based at the aquarium!! (As picked by my Patrons ❤️)

First week featuring Huntr/x!

If you wish to see early previews/access, NSFW exclusives and polls, feel free to support me over on Patreon or support me on my other social media platforms!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

Martina McBride didn't win Country Music Association Song of the Year for a song about how burning your house down with your abusive husband still inside it is good, noble, and an allegory for the American Revolution for people to act like the genre belongs to bootlicking fucks

[dragon-in-a-fez]

other things people didn't do for you to act like country music belongs to bootlicking fucks:

Garth Brooks winning video of the year at the ACMs for a song about how none of us are free as long as there's racism and homophobia

Reba McEntire charting with a gothic horror song about an innocent man being executed by an incompetent judge and a corrupt sheriff

Willie Nelson being, well, his entire self tbh

Dolly Parton recording the hating capitalism banger of all time

Kacey Musgraves telling everyone to ignore the haters, smoke weed, and be a bisexual slut

[dragon-in-a-fez]

how the hell did I leave Morgan Wade off this list. wrote a song about being depressed, alcoholic, and suicidal and how mental illness stigma sucks, saw how much people connected with it, wrote a Part II of that song about how she's doing better now but you're never totally free of the risk of relapse. fucking icon.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

I specifically curated this list so people couldn't be like "ah yes but you see here is my simple binary of good and bad country music which always works", I made sure to add different genders, eras, subgenres, etc and y'all are still pulling that shit in the tags!

listen. Alan Jackson, the archetypal mister big hat man sitting on a tractor singing about a pickup truck, wrote a shockingly normal song about 9/11 that was like "yeah I don't know jack shit about politics but my copy of the bible says we're supposed to love everyone" and then went on the radio and explained how he specifically wanted to write a song about that day that "wasn't vengeful". Miranda Lambert took the southern leftist slogan "y'all means all" and made it the title of a corny ass pop-country song for the Queer Eye soundtrack. Kenny Chesney stole a horse from a cop and Tim McGraw put the cop in a chokehold defending him, and I know that's not about their music but it is, and this is very important, fucking sick as hell

it's fine if you only listen to female country artists or pre-1990 country artists or whatever the fuck you want but stop acting like you've cracked the secret code to dividing a whole genre of art into good pure anti-establishment folk songs vs bad corrupted right-wing sellout pulp

[dragon-in-a-fez]

updating this post for 2025:

Luke Combs covering Fast Car and keeping the line "I work in the market as a checkout girl" and doing an interview about how he couldn't change a single word because it's not his story. king shit

Morgan Wallen doing I Had Some Help, literally the first song that spoke to me as a male survivor of domestic abuse. also shoutout to the guy for getting caught saying a racial slur and responding by specifically telling his fans not to defend him and raising a bunch of money for the Black Music Action Coalition. bro had an engraved invitation to the culture war and said "nah I'd rather be normal"

Shaboozey just absolutely obliterating the drunk roadhouse anthem glass ceiling

Maren Morris and Brothers Osborne with a song that okay, released in 2019 but I didn't hear until recently, about how good friends mind their own business and let you love whoever you want and also get high with you when you're broke

Kimberley Perry! If I Die Young Part 2!! "actually I'm glad I lived, bitch" ass song that I bet is gonna mean a LOT to kids fighting depression

Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan with Cowboys Cry Too. okay it's shallow and corny but genuinely a shallow and corny song about how men shouldn't be afraid to have feelings is what a lot of men need

[dragon-in-a-fez]

bringing the full version of this post back around because people are pissing me off today

[musashi]

Hey can you guys reblog Cheeseburger so he can take a sunbeam nap on lots of blogs. No other reason I just want you guys to see him.

[musashi]

So, Cheeseburger died on November 21st after an unfairly short battle with an unfairly rare cancer that is rarely seen in cats. I only got to spend a month with him after his diagnosis, and losing him has been the greatest heartbreak of my entire life so far. He was my best friend and my soul cat, and he was there for me when I was completely alone, for twelve long years.

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.

[sunflowersosa]

Nigerian Pride 🏳️‍🌈🇳🇬

I meant to have this out yesterday. Happy belated pride. :)

[sunflowersosa]

I'm glad you all like the Nigeria Pride post!

Originally, I went in worried the opposite would happen. Growing up, I've been taught that Nigeria, the country, is homophobic. (I was born in America.) But over time, I learned that there's tons of other queer Nigerians; some are out, and some are in the closet 😭.

I'm also not used to this much attention, lol

Thank you all!

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[motherofcatsandmess]

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[horsefriend]

[putnamspuppeteer]

For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times. Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.

[brookietf]

[catgirlforeskin]

Happy pride month to her and her exclusively

[seraphiminn]

she made a comic about the experience on twitter

[catboybiologist]

happy pride

[ikindamaybewanthertositonmyface]

An Update from back in October I'm surprised wasn't added to this post. lol

[vaspider]

#not to woke out on this fun post #but i do find it profoundly weird that it's normalized to react to a person harmlessly expressing sexual desire #for a character KNOWN to be widely considered attractive #with "you deserve violence and jail time for being horny haha. we should beat you with sticks" #like the underlying implications of the whole horny jail and related memes just feels too ominious for me to enjoy #like im glad she finds it funny. but why the fuck is it seen as normal to send a meme like that to a stranger? #"we said no horny" ON THE INTERNET??? ABOUT THE GIANT BIG TIDDY VAMPIRE LADY?????

You're not wrong and you should say it

[silurisanguine]

Linktree will be feeding your images with DALL-E, Open AI from 5th July 2026.

Warning to anyone using Linktree.

From the 5th July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

I deleted my account just now, because there was no way to turn this off or opt out.

[silurisanguine]

Update with some alternatives-

Carrd.co. Free alt with paid features.

Bento.app Currently free, integrated with bluesky

Everlink.tools Closest to Linktree, has some paid features.

Omg.lol Currently $20 a year. If paying for Linktree features this is a great upgrade.

[girlnamedcaramelization]

i think more people should learn to sit with the discomfort of knowing their favorite media has problematic elements. i think more people should learn to examine their favorite media critically and acknowledge that these elements are there. i think more people should look at these elements and say "hey, so that was badly handled and I'm not going to incorporate that into my belief system" rather than "oh god, this media is irredeemable and I can't like it or I'm a bad person" or "oh, so actually this element doesn't exist/isn't problematic at all so I can like it in peace" because i seriously think the last 2 are kind of . dangerous . for us to get caught up in

[girlnamedcaramelization]

self reblogging just to literally remind myself of this because i'm still struggling with the all-or-nothing mindset

[nuvemzinhacorderosa]

Sheik and Tetra, they would make a great duo, I know it.

[mens-rights-activia]

Tumblr in a nutshell

[musicalmelody001]

Is this the girl who made the Anemone Song?

[mens-rights-activia]

Yes

[queerpeers]

me: “yeah I dated a guy in high school who came out as gay. it was before i knew i was a boy so needless to say it didn’t work out”

coworker: “damn dude was preordering”

[queerpeers]

other things this coworker (who is a cis guy) has done/said:

—got confused about why I’d never been a boy scout because he forgot i was trans

—told me he was gonna get top surgery scar tattoos to match me after i get mine

—laughs at all my trans jokes, even if they’re supremely unfunny

—calls me big dog (and him little dog) even though he is about as tall as two of me

— “I can’t believe she would say that transphobic thing to you. In June? Pride month?”

[the-ladyguinevere]

Once I said "My gender is whatever's funniest at the time" and my coworker stops dead in his tracks, turns slowly and says "So are your pronouns honk/honk?" killing me instantly

[doggirlpaws]

I was talking to a friend I knew before I transitioned about my new relationship (my first one ever!) and I said "Yeah, I think I only indentified as aro/ace most of my life because I didn't have lesbian as an option" and he looked me dead in the eye and said "Oh? Why not? ...Ohhh"

Then he said "You know, I completely forgot you weren't always this way. Femininity really suits you" and let me tell you I started tearing up

Of course, not ten minutes later I mentioned that I had to relearn how to sing and he said "oh no, what happened?" so he might just be a little slow

[doggirlpaws]

Update on that friend: a bunch of people sent me "he's a little confused, but he's got the spirit" gifs in response to that story. I can tell you now with certainty that she definitely has the spirit, and she's not confused anymore

[mariacallous]

‘One Man, One Vote’? Maybe Not in Trump’s America

A recent Supreme Court decision threatens a core democratic principle.

The Supreme Court dealt a massive blow to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States with its April decision, Louisiana v. Callais, significantly weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision of the landmark legislation prohibited voting practices that were racially discriminatory. In 1982, a bipartisan coalition in Congress strengthened the law further by stipulating that plaintiffs only needed to demonstrate a discriminatory racial impact, rather than prove racist intent.

With Callais, the Supreme Court overturned Congress’s earlier judgement and now requires proof of racist intent rather than discriminatory effect, which raises the bar dramatically for the federal government to act. Within weeks, several Southern states quickly moved to redraw district maps, with legislatures in states such as Tennessee targeting Black-majority districts that long elected Black and Democratic legislators. Democrats warn that, as a result, one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group of Black lawmakers founded in 1971 in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, could lose their seats.

The decision threatens a core democratic principle, “one-man, one-vote,” that a very different Supreme Court entrenched through a series of landmark rulings between 1962 and 1964. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed in 1953, those decisions rose from a rejection of the entrenched, often corrupt Southern electoral systems in which districts for state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives disproportionately favored sparsely populated white rural areas over more diverse (socially and politically) urban constituencies. The latter typically included larger Black populations and were more supportive of civil rights.

Partisan gerrymandering is almost as old as the United States itself.

For most of U.S. history, political parties have crafted districts designed to benefit their own interests. The term itself is named after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1812 authorized a bizarre state senate district that looked like a salamander. Since the early 19th century, through the redistricting process that follows each new Census, voters have been packed into districts that would elect candidates from the party in power. Sometimes state officials in bipartisan states reached deals so that each side could enjoy the benefits of safe seats.

But partisan gerrymandering took on a distinct racial character in the South, where Democrats dominated. Liberal Democrats viewed redistricting reform as essential to advancing civil rights. Although their primary focus was the South, northern states such as New York and Illinois also maintained districts at the state and federal level that favored rural areas, bolstering conservative power.

By the 1950s, prominent northern Democratic politicians were calling for systematic change. The United States had been transformed by urbanization and industrialization, they argued, yet state legislatures kept district boundaries untouched. “The popular character of the House has been destroyed,” argued Minnesota Rep. Eugene McCarthy in 1952, “by the failure of the state legislatures to provide for Congressional districts of approximately the same population and by the practice of electing Congressmen at large.”

In 1958, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote a New York Times column titled “Shame of the Cities” in which he said: “Of all the discriminations against the urban areas, the most fundamental and the most blatant is political: the apportionment of representation in our Legislatures and (to a lesser extent) in Congress has been either deliberately rigged or shamefully ignored so as to deny the cities and their voters that full and proportionate voice in government to which they are entitled. … At one time, in a then largely rural nation, legislative strength was heavily weighted in favor of rural areas. Though times have changed, many Legislatures have not.” A liberal coalition that included the AFL-CIO, the Americans for Democratic Action, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union championed reform.

But the conservative coalition of Southern Democratic committee chairmen and Midwestern Republicans who had controlled the chambers since the 1938 midterm elections blocked any legislative progress. In the U.S. House, some of the most notorious conservative Southern barons of the committee system counted on being reelected from districts with sparse numbers of voters, most of whom had little appetite for the civil rights movement that was shaking the region.

The responsibility for action ultimately fell to the federal courts. Chief Justice Warren had come to believe that equitable apportionment could have saved the nation “acute racial troubles” by assuring that every person’s vote carried equal weight. Although Black southerners had generally been disenfranchised under the Jim Crow system imposed after Reconstruction, those who had been able to register to vote were often at a disadvantage because of where they lived. Moreover, if the struggle for voting rights legislation was successful, the composition of districts would work against the political progress that would otherwise be made.

Within the Supreme Court, there had been strong opposition to intervening in anything connected to elections. The federal courts were wary of what Justice Felix Frankfurter famously called the “political thicket.” Because the Constitution left elections to the states, earlier justices had concluded that the court had no authority to step in. They also doubted whether the judiciary could define a clear, workable standard for the states to follow. If he and his colleagues attempted to resolve these thorny issues, warned Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Americans might even begin scrutinizing the “political backgrounds or ideologies” of the Supreme Court justices themselves.

But the pressure from the civil rights movement continued to mount. A coalition in Tennessee argued that the state had failed to reapportion seats for the lower chamber of the state legislature, the General Assembly, since 1901. Not only did the state constitution require reapportionment every 10 years, but demographic changes had also rendered the old district lines inequitable. Their lawyers argued that the districts violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment which deemed that states had to treat people the same way. Laws that discriminated on the basis of race were thus unconstitutional.

In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Carr that the courts could make decisions about these issues and legitimated the claims of the plaintiffs about the violation of the equal protection clause. Tennessee’s apportionment scheme violated the 14th Amendment because it diluted the vote of urban residents. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority (which included Warren as well as Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Tom C. Clark, and Potter Stewart), held that such disparities constituted a denial of equal protection. The court remanded the case, sending it back to the lower court for a final decision. Even so, the ruling became a landmark because it established that the court could intervene in apportionment disputes when citizens were denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Within months, over 30 suits were filed. “The rush through the door unlocked by Baker v. Carr,” observed one expert, “has been staggering.”

Baker v. Carr energized supporters of civil rights to demand more. Soon after the decision, the court’s chief opponent of federal intervention, Felix Frankfurter, retired following a stroke. Then-President Kennedy appointed Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to the court, a justice far more sympathetic to Baker v. Carr. The impact was immediate. A Georgia businessman, James O. Sanders, sued the state to overturn its county unit system, which systematically undermined Black political representation. A federal court agreed, declaring that the system could not be justified in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. Jimmy Carter, then a peanut farmer and former Navy engineer running for a seat in the state legislature, later recalled the decision and its aftermath as a turning point in Southern politics: “This was the major news item to be read and discussed at our peanut warehouse, at church, at Lions Club meetings, and in the small county newspapers.”

The next case shifted the focus from state legislatures to the federal government, centering on districts for the U.S. House of Representatives. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), the court ruled that Georgia’s congressional districts were unconstitutional. Plaintiffs from the 5th District argued that their district had nearly the population of the state’s smallest, the 9th, yet both elected only one representative. This diluted the votes of 5th District residents. In a 6-3 decision, the Warren Court held that congressional districts must be drawn to be roughly equal in population so that each person’s vote carried the same weight. According to the majority, led by Justice Black, “It would defeat the principle solemnly embodied in the Great Compromise—equal representation in the House for equal numbers of people—for us to hold that, within the States, legislatures may draw the lines of congressional districts in such a way as to give some voters a greater voice in choosing a Congressman than others.”

Baker v. Carr legitimized judicial intervention in apportionment. Wesberry v. Sanders extended the “one-man, one vote” principle to districts for the U.S. House. In another 1964 case, Reynolds v. Sims, the court ruled that both chambers of state legislatures had to be determined according to population.

The revolution in judicial thinking meshed with the landmark legislation passed by the Democratic Congress in 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, that committed the federal government to ensuring that states did not violate the 15th Amendment, the Reconstruction amendment that protected the right of all (male) citizens to vote. As Black registration rapidly increased in the South after 1965, reapportioned districts that were drawn in response to the Supreme Court decisions ensured that the new votes would be treated the same way as white votes in rural communities.

Democrats also blocked efforts by congressional conservatives such as Virginia Democrat William Tuck, who attempted to pass legislation stripping the courts of their ability to intervene in apportionment cases. Although the measure won support in the House, it failed in the Senate.  Liberals likewise blocked a proposed constitutional amendment from Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that would have reversed the court decision’s rulings on state government. The American Jewish Congress opposed Dirksen’s proposal, arguing that the effort to reverse the Court’s decisions was an attack on “democratic principle.” Ultimately, Dirksen was defeated.

In 1969, in Allen v. State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court ruled that vote dilution fell within the scope of the Voting Rights Act. Under this interpretation, the Department of Justice gained authority under Section 5 to deal with inequitable districting in addition to the denial of the vote. Federal “preclearance” would be necessary for any changes to voting, even matters that appeared technical or procedural. Over the following decades, rural-dominated districts were dismantled, and the number of metropolitan and urban districts steadily increased.

By the end of the decade, the transformation of legislative representation was complete. It didn’t come as a surprise that Warren would later call Baker v. Carr the “most vital” decision of his tenure.

The legacy of the Warren Court is now hanging by a thread. The immense progress that had been made in the 1960s tackling the problem of systemic racism within the electoral system has lost massive ground. A series of Supreme Court decisions, as well as legislation and court decisions in red states, have expanded voting restrictions and are now leading to a dangerous acceleration of the redistricting wars where long-standing concerns about racial justice are losing their hold.

In addition to the obvious political ramifications of the new congressional maps, the erosion of representative values that these developments portend have already sent the country backwards in the struggle to make U.S. democracy whole.

[plecopsar]

[the-problematic-trolley]

Transhumanism, acceptance of progress - furry, specifically protogen.

(Furry has a lot of political weight/associations).

Argument for disability rights with the protogen.

Body acceptance - hip dip, pouch, tig ol’ bitties

Sex positivity - furry, toaster/toast placement

Censorship- toaster/toast placement

[Refer to male/female gaze]

LGBT rights - bi logo on headphones

Freedom of speech/expression - sarcastic “‘all art is political’” to try and disprove it.

Artistic intent/audience response

Argument to be made for symbolism of food insecurity - use of toast for censorship instead of some luxurious food.

[visorforavisor]

I think disability justice would be easier if abled people understood that being disabled is a mixture of all three of

I can’t do that without negative consequences

I can’t do that unless I have support for it

I can’t do that

and that trying to treat one of these as if it’s another one will get you nowhere.

[socialmaya]

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

[sylestial]

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

[scallioncreamcheesebagel]

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

[tayefeth]

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

[antique-scarecrow]

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

[downtroddendeity]

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

[antiterfbutch]

An alarming amount of people seem to think capitalism = all trade, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.