Work in Progress

yesterday & today i've been thinking a lot about what it means to take children & teens seriously as knowledge creators. because of course people jump to the "oh so you want me to ask a 5 year old why the sky is blue act like the answer is true"

and then it extends to creative endeavors too. i'm a classically trained pianist & flautist and i really like that i got that experience growing up. it was one of the main ways that i got to enjoy being really good at something at a young age. but it took me a good 5 years of being absolutely miserable in piano lessons before i learned to enjoy it at all. and that was because of LABOR ALIENATION fuck ok i'm putting it all together now. i didn't get to choose what genre to play, what pieces to play, or how much to practice. my job was to reproduce The Greats with whatever little personality flair i could manage to add without bastardizing the work. i learned a lot of music theory but it was mostly so i could understand the pieces i was playing, not so i could use it to create my own work. nobody gave a shit about that.

i have a friend doing piano lessons who is working on the exams before ABRSM exams (so shes rlly good at piano basically) and she absolutely hates it. her opinion of composition is that it is a task in her exams, that she has to "prepare" for composition.

Most homesteaders still need to have a job and keep a job and pay all the fees of living in a society. There seem to be a lucky handful who have reduced their costs by homesteading (usually due to the free labour of friends and family) but there were easier ways to reduce those cost. In the vast majority of cases, homesteading is a lot more expensive than not homesteading. And where people are saving money, the amount of labour per dollar works out to well below minimum wage in savings.

Another thing about this subset of homesteaders* is that they are insistent--proud, even!--of doing things that are unsafe, and encouraging others to also do those things.

The Can/Dehydrate Absolutely Everything people baffle me. Most homesteaders (sensibly) have personal solar panels, because they want to live off-grid and still have electricity. When Shit Hits The Fan, their solar panels will not stop working. Their freezers would work fine. Canning or dehydrating or salting is great for certain foods (especially if you want to ferment, pickle or flavour something) but for so much stuff the best thing you can do to preserve nutrients and preserve it safely is chuck it in the freezer.

Whenever I hear homesteaders and trad wife people talk about how much better it is to do your own canning I remember my grandmother telling me about the canning days from her childhood and how she would help her grandmother can fresh fruit (we lived in orchard country) in a hot canning shed built for that purpose for days at a time in the middle of summer

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

like, yes, my stomach hurts, but that's because my cat jumped on me from a high shelf, not because of lettuce poisoning or stress. These are all "tummy hurts," but they hurt differently!

On this day, 19 July 1936, in response to a right-wing coup by general Francisco Franco, workers across Spain took up arms and launched one of the most far-reaching social revolutions in history. The ensuing civil war pitted the working class against the Spanish capitalists, who were backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In the revolutionary areas, anarchist and socialist workers and peasants took over workplaces and land and began to run them collectively. Thousands of mostly working-class people came from all over the world to aid the workers of Spain. One of them was British socialist author George Orwell, who described the scene in Barcelona: "It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties… Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised… Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’". Western democracies, including Britain and France, abandoned the republic and enforced a blockade on Spain which stopped the flow of aid and weapons to the anti-fascists. Meanwhile, Italy and Germany openly flouted the ban, and the US oil giant Texaco supplied the nationalists with oil and other supplies without even demanding payment, while stopping any supplies to the republic. Ultimately, after nearly three years of bitter and bloody warfare, the nationalists, with their superior weaponry and equipment, were victorious. In podcast episodes 39-40, we give an overview of the events: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/ To support our work, join us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/workingclasshistory

Lmao we have to fucking destroy this company are you fucking kidding me with this shit

Reminding everyone that this exists, and you can make it your default search engine (as explained here)

Have you ever gotten an exact match?

man who found two (2) hot dogs in the park and managed to eat one (1) bite before my wife could intervene