Bisexual Energy Sword

That is, when an official told you, a rice farmer, that you owed more taxes than you really did, it was very useful if you were good enough at math to know he was lying (and could prove it) and if you were good enough at writing to write a letter to your government defending your case.

Education in Japan didn't become widespread, with nationwide standardized exams, until after the Meiji Restoration. Japan of course wasnt a democracy; it was blooming into a fascist nightmare. So why was this the time when education became available to all people, the rich and poor, boys and girls alike?

Education as a universal human right was not a motivation for the Japanese government.

Instead it was motivated by the desire to cultivate 人材, jinzai, human resources/talented people. Jinzai could help the empire expand. Even today, the Japanese government explicitly uses the term jinzai prominently in its Ministry of Education documents.

So if, today, we're heading into an era that looks increasingly fascist, the government could still be motivated to educate its people in order to remain competitive.

But let's say that 50 or 100 years from now, AI is doing for us what the jinzai of the past used to do: the coding, the engineering, the diagnosing, the war commanding, etc., etc.

Let's say we actually only need a few flesh-and-blood jinzai to oversee what AI is doing. Those people would need to be incredibly intelligent and skilled, but if the need and desire for everyone to be educated has dissipated, then who are the select few who will have the opportunity to become educated? Will we fall back into a society where only the wealthy can school their children?

Governments will not explicitly tell you, a student*, what your education is for or why you have access to the kind of education you have access to, but this is something we can research and reflect on ourselves, knowing that historically education has been utilized for expanding empires as much as it's been a tool for promoting human rights.

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"People in the imperial core don't realize how much of the products in our lives are directly there because of colonialism. so they recreate that and then you have the weird implications of fantasy colonialism. You can say 'why does it matter for my fantasy Europe to have coffee' because you don't know why your real life Europe has coffee. And that these facts do actually have a death toll to them."

"The coffee example in particular its very interesting. Bc it'd be quite easy to justify having coffee in a fantasy story that's set in a tropical region. Or in a kingdom that trades with a tropical region or whatever. But then you realize that never happens because. sff writers NEVER set their stories in tropical weathers. I can count on one hand the fantasy worlds where there are prosperous kingdoms in tropical regions. And that opens the can of worms of: why is the default fantasy setting a temperate forest of pine and oak trees. Or a snowy mountainous landscape. While deserts and jungles are always dangerous exotic foreign lands."

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

here's mickey, goofy, donald, and chip & dale. yeah they turned mickey & friends into anime boys. they're an idol unit or something. they're technically not anime boy versions of the source characters, they have different names. mickey's guy is "Neo Michel". not michael, michel, like he's french. chip & dale are "Ruska Moncrief" and "Ranka Monk", they have different last names, they're not brothers anymore so that they can be yaoibait instead, anyways this post isn't actually about these guys I'm just setting the stage for the actual humanizations I wanted to show you

They also did monsters inc. And. Well it's obvious from the designs who mike and sully are. but you will also notice. the blonde one on the left. with glasses. monsters inc is kind of famously about just the two guys so they didn't really have a lot of other non-villain characters to take anime boys inspiration from, I guess, so, well,