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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Last time they picked Finnegans Wake, so the joke is thoroughly on them

    The over-painting of a fascia board bearing the name Shakespeare and Company, in Paris in 1941, remains a significant moment in the history of bookshops. Two weeks earlier, a German officer had walked in and tried to buy Finnegans Wake. The shop’s creator and owner Sylvia Beach had refused to sell it to him, claiming she had only one copy and it was her own. Two weeks later he returned to inform her that all her goods were about to be confiscated and within a couple of hours every shelf had been emptied. Books, photographs and furniture had all been carried to an upstairs apartment and a house painter had obliterated the shop’s title. The Anglo-American bookshop in the rue de l’Odéon, which had been the rendezvous for famous writers and where early purchasers of Ulysses, published by Beach, sometimes found themselves being served by its author, was no more.

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/12/shakespeare-and-company-paris-review

    https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/sylvia-beach-the-bookseller-who-defied-the-nazis/

    Fuck Fascists

    I just want to emphasize, this is a badass moment in history, this bookstore was more of a cultural center for artists in Paris than an actual bookstore, the list of vitally important artists and writers of the era who passed through its doors is intimidating, and it barely even sold books as Sylvia Beach (the owner) would basically hand them out to artists because she wanted people to have books. And yet still, Sylvia Beach hated fascists so fucking much that she boxed the entire god damn thing up and put it into storage rather than comply with fascists even a little bit. Be like Sylvia Beach.

    …however please sell the fascist a copy of Finnegans Wake though, hell give it to them for free, that is fucking hilarious actually



  • You aren’t wrong, there isn’t actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.

    The mafia is only ever just one jerk at the top who makes every chump underneath them sacred enough not to look to their neighbor and go “do we really need this asshole?”. Just understanding the current conditions as a pure product of individual agents agreeing to consent or not to is not a complete picture, you have to include in the context the ways in which a culture of consent both in what is necessary and what is possible is created that is essential to the suffocating power of the system to preclude other possibilities.



  • This is like driving through a decent neighborhood and being like “The mob rules this neighborhood? Why don’t people just tell them to leave?”.

    Academic publishers are just very specialized gangs, there is no functional difference between the business model of Elsevier and the business model of a local crimelord.

    This isn’t hyperbole, it is a joke, but it is also just basically the truth of it.

    Scientists are hamsters that are put onto specific hamster wheels that they must spin for a certain amount of time each day lest they be fired, one of those hamster wheels is doing free labor (peer reviewing) for academic journals like Elsevier. Like a good mafia system, academic publishers don’t have to openly threaten to hurt scientists to compel them to do free labor as the system is set up to simply grind them to dust if they don’t excitedly jump on the hamster wheel of providing free value to said academic publishers.

    Imagine for a minute academic publishing was like the music industry except it paid musicians shit and all the profits, of which there were major profits, never went to the musicians but instead to a bunch of vacuous middlemen who condescendingly took the musicians money while telling them their labor is next to worthless. Lol (I am crying inside right now) now imagine that unlike the real music industry this hypothetical music industry was heavily subsidized by tax payers but still SOMEHOW those musicians still had all the profits of their labor transferred to the ownership of a small number of rich people even though taxpayers had paid for it and thus like the musicians deserved to own it themselves.



  • I was gonna say it is different because you don’t have to blow any pipes up to get kids to behave, but then I realized that parents are constantly blowing up their pipes full blast to try to get kids to listen and behave.

    Honestly, I think parents should blow more oil pipelines up instead of blowing up at their kids, their kids are sad, depressed and acting out because of the oil pipelines and all the awful consequences they entail in the first place anyways.

    They say multitasking is essential as a parent, so whenever you get the chance to hit two birds with one stone (don’t hit your kids, this is a metaphor) it is usually a good idea to take advantage of it!

    TL;DR Cut to the heart of the problem, sabotage oil companies, don’t yell at your kids.

    Just to be clear, while I used a lot of metaphors here, I want to be in no way ambiguous about this, I am directly imploring us all to blow up some oil pipelines to defend the future of our kids whether that means literally jamming a stick in the apparatus of the fossil fuel machine or doing so indirectly, just whatever you do don’t hurt innocent people, that defeats the entire purpose of blowing up oil pipelines in the first place. Also don’t yell at your kids, it really doesn’t solve anything most of the time.

    Don’t call me a radical, my voice is shrill because I soberly understand the implications of this sea surface temperature graph, in no uncertain terms this is undeniable evidence of mass murder being recorded in real time, the murder just hasn’t happened yet mostly, there are unbelievably large amounts of excess heat energy in the ocean right now, many many many many nuclear bombs silently firing off every moment you breath in and out, foreclosing any kind or humane future for any of us, human or not.

    https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

    living your life as if we have some long future ahead of us is a radical act of willing delusion, I don’t say this to hurt people I say this to emphasize the unfolding truth here




  • Luigi responded with more kindness in his violence than healthcare CEOs do when they condemn innocent people to unnecessary violence, maiming and death, at least Luigi bothered to learn the face and name of the person he murdered and bore witness to the horror of the violence himself.

    The healthcare CEO yawns and does another line of coke off his desk to wake up after browsing through yet another spreadsheet of all the people they are going to cut coverage for and thus likely cause life-ending circumstances to precipitate for.

    One act of in-person violence to end the life of someone who decides to take a healthcare CEO job like this and can still go home and sleep at night… is woefully unable to speak to the size of the calamity unfolding here, and that is probably my best argument to someone out there not to do a Luigi. It will probably feel existentially underwhelming compared to the immense mountain of death and pain those mass murderers caused.

    Make them pay in ways that will not end mercifully quickly, don’t count on hell doing the job.


  • We have chosen a future of mass death and suffering.

    Once fascists can do something that is this broadly popular with the public (death to the US for it being so popular) that actually creates a crisis, then that crisis is really better understood as an entrance into a snowball effect for more justification of violence because under these conditions people don’t automatically turn on the incompetent and hateful fascists that caused the avoidable crisis in the first place.

    This is why leftists were screaming at the top of their lungs about not being republican-lite about immigration.

    Centrists and centrist democrats still think they have a handle of control on the increasingly violent and destructive rightwing mob stoked by billionaires and honestly even MORE than climate change that makes me realize how fucked I really am.

    We are not safe, this will not work out, do not concern yourself with longterm strategy in your life. The ocean biosphere is collapsing. Give up if you want but also we really have very little reason to hold back now and not fight with everything we have left.







  • This is why so many highly intelligent people devote as much time in their lives to art as they possibly can.

    It is only through art that you can begin to subvert an architecture of stolen and foreclosed futures.

    In another world maybe Pynchon just became an unbelievably good editor for aeronautics technical journals.

    Let us not forget that the rich, even on the allies side of WW2 (insofar as the rich keep up the theater of needing to pick a side) would rather not have had even a single Alan Turing if they could not impose a conservative trauma upon him and make him deny his basic self, and so he was executed and bigotry was preserved at a terrible cost we can never know the full extent of.

    History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

    edit I am imagining the person who downvoted me was like “hey, I feel excluded as a homophobic computer nerd by this statement” -> downvote


  • ahaha like if you are willing to say hateful shit about your wife’s ethnicity publicly like this I am sorry I don’t think you even know where your wife’s clit is and I am confident enough to bet my whole lifesavings on it (I pull out my wallet and machine gun probably out of date or empty Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts gift cards onto the poker table).

    There is just no chance you give a shit about the pleasure of another sentient human (who happens to be a woman) enough to make them feel safe and welcome enough to go there with you enough times you could learn The Path Of The True Warrior by heart.

    Damn, incels are fun as hell to make fun of, I have to say. Normally bullying fascists feels like more work than this.

    Love your wife you pathetic loser, how the fuck do you actually even manage the mental gymnastics of dating someone from an ethnicity you are especially bigoted towards? Is your wife just an exotic beast you show off to your friends (does jdv have those?) and say “most of these are bad but I found myself the one pure example” ?? like eew wtf get out of my government you slimy prick.


  • I mean, yes he does, there is no way I would trust JD to get me off without a nice premium vibrator if I was woman.

    Even if JD could find your clit with his fingers, he would just treat it like he does the women in his life, and caress it emptily and mechanically as if he was patting his favorite sports car on the hood all the while sighing to himself about the objects in his life taking up too much of his money and time.