a sloth

”Ryland Grace’s life was valued less because he was single,” is such a weird take because it depends entirely on the idea that Eva Stratt might have hesitated if he weren’t.

Do you like the smell of gasoline?

Of course, as much of the previous research has shown, federal lawmakers who initially enacted blood quantum statues and Bureau of Indian Affairs administrative officials who drafted blood quantum rules and regulations did so, in large part, because of reasons related to property. That is to say, the seemingly cut-and-dried math of blood quantum was a cynical, underhanded way to minimize the funds, benefits, and resources expended on behalf of Native nations and their citizens. The formula seemed to always end up as subtraction, magically reducing the actual number of communities and individuals eligible to receive federal financial support. As the population was fractionated and subtracted, the expenses associated with the trust obligation diminished in tandem. These bureaucratically vicious yet bloodless means sought to erase entire peoples and thereby reduce the federal budget allocated under treaties and statues to native affairs. Interestingly, and not surprisingly, federal and state officials creative applied precisely the opposite social and racial arrangement to African Americans. In that instance, blood quantum was all about addition. By devising the infamous one-drop rule that maintained a single drop of African blood made a person Black, the government sought to increase the number of persons who could legally be held in bondage, thus setting up a maniacal system to maintain slavery as an economic institution in perpetuity. After emancipation, the calculation continued to support patently discriminatory Jim Crow legislation that severely constrained the civil and human rights of African Americans even after the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitutions had been ratified in 1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively, in the way of the US Civil War. As Vine Deloria Jr. succinctly put in 1969 in Custer Died for Your Sins, “Because the Negro laboured, he was considered a draft animal. Because the Indian occupied large areas of land, he was considered a wild animal.” In a society that valued property over virtually everything else, more draft animals were required to maintain and grow the economy, and fewer wild animals were necessary because they were considered nuisances or threats. Thus, blood quantum was a powerful economic tool created by the US government to control resources and property by simple addition or subtraction, depending on the need. It was never about kinship or humanity.

I think nowadays I generally have a pretty comparatively chill view of most randos because I keep finding myself in situations both irl and online where someone points out something a person I don't personally know who is clearly going through some shit did and expects me to get upset with them. And they slowly get upset with me when I'm... Like, not indignant about it. Often it's really freaking petty, like some kind of social faux pas. Idk man when ppl are inconsiderate it's not usually because they personally are trying to disrespect you, it's usually because they're just preoccupied with something else at the time. Don't we all got ADHD and know exactly what that's like? I know I'm not so important that people bother to go out of their way to piss me off specifically.

Constant fluctuating between "wow the vastness of the human experience is fascinating and beautiful" to "it's fckin infuriating how hackable people are"

And thinking about that being the point of the novel Harmony. If everyone acted perfectly logically in the interest of the collective good, it functionally is a form of mass ego death. What gives people a sense of personal identity is that conflict between a being capable of understanding reason and higher processing, but also fundamentally we are irrationally emotional and situationally selfish apes. Having a difference in what we as individuals want and what the collective wants is what makes people aware they are a distinct person. To get rid of the ape part is to get rid of everything interesting about being human. No need for art when all communication is rational and connections are easy. Conflict resolved with mutual understanding and work from both sides. We might as well be the LCL soup in Evangelion.

And another thing is no amount of critical thinking or CBT or reading comprehension or emotional intelligence will make a dent if people just straight up don't have access to good information. Or even if they do have easy access to good information, they're uninterested in looking or don't even know that they don't know enough to even begin to make a well considered assessment of the issues. You can be the smartest person in the world but make dumb choices because you were given wrong info or no info. I don't have a solution. I don't want censorship, I do want better fact checking, I don't want a big centrally controlled institution, but I also don't want unaccountable crowdsourcing that's easily exploited by extremism and corporate guerilla marketing. We all just... Gotta have the humility to admit we don't know enough and fact check everything ourselves. Which is not going to happen on scale.

Constant fluctuating between "wow the vastness of the human experience is fascinating and beautiful" to "it's fckin infuriating how hackable people are"

And thinking about that being the point of the novel Harmony. If everyone acted perfectly logically in the interest of the collective good, it functionally is a form of mass ego death. What gives people a sense of personal identity is that conflict between a being capable of understanding reason and higher processing, but also fundamentally we are irrationally emotional and situationally selfish apes. Having a difference in what we as individuals want and what the collective wants is what makes people aware they are a distinct person. To get rid of the ape part is to get rid of everything interesting about being human. No need for art when all communication is rational and connections are easy. Conflict resolved with mutual understanding and work from both sides. We might as well be the LCL soup in Evangelion.