the tired avenger

Mensah gave everybody watch shifts, including me. This was new, but not unwelcome, as it meant I had blocks of time where I wasn’t supposed to be paying attention and didn’t have to fake it. Mensah, Pin-Lee, and Overse were all taking turns as pilot and copilot, so I didn’t have to worry so much about the autopilot trying to kill us, and I could go on standby and watch my stored supply of serials

Network Effect, middle of chapter 10

Arada finally ordered the others to take a rest period, though it took her a while to really understand that ART and I would still be active and there was no reason for the humans to take shifts. (I finally had to tell her that I had a list of things I needed to get done and it would go much faster if they would all stay in one place and shut up for a while and sleeping was the most efficient use of that time.)

Your best case scenario after that is you talk to someone who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about and you get embarrassed because you can't answer basic questions about your own ideology because you never learned anything past "the ruling class/capitalists/politicians are making things bad and if we got rid of them the bad things would all go away!"

Your worst case scenario is obviously the woo-to-fascist pipeline and you end up believing Jews are poisoning American food supplies with GMOs in order to turn us all into beta cucks, so like . . . maybe just stop blaming "them" before you fall down that route.

"They created the 40-hour workweek to --" QUERY: What was the average working-class person's weekly workload before the 40-hour workweek was standardized?

"They created credit scores to --" QUERY: How did banks determine who was and wasn't worthy of a loan before credit scores?

"They promote bad media to --" QUERY: What was the average working-class person's entertainment before this era of "bad" media?

"They invented schools to crush children's creativity and --" QUERY: What was the average working-class child's daily life like before universal public schooling?

To be clear. Before someone accuses me of pissing on the poor.

I AM NOT SAYING "Stop opposing current social practices because Things Used To Be Worse, stop complaining about a 40 hour workweek because great-grandpa worked 90 hours a week uphill both ways in the snow --"

We should advocate a shorter workweek, actually! We should advocate abolishing credit scores, actually! We should advocate non-authoritarian schooling, actually!