for the time being

Armand.

“In our grand successes over the past century we have invented a monster called a middle class. Our predecessors pillaged the Ashen Sea, and now the people are accustomed to receiving that pillage. And they are accustomed to their innocence. If they learn what we do on distant shores to secure their safety and prosperity, I am certain they would hang us all. Not for the crime of what we did, mind! But for the crime of allowing them to know.”

“There are many things that I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it.”

I mean this in a gentle and constructive way, but every time this topic comes up, the notes will be full of people who agree that there are exploitation issues in the supply chain due to unequal economic power between the imperial core and (semi-)periphery, and between the petite bourgeois small business owner artists and proletariat workers who manufacture their merch, but then talk about how people should make their own merch by hand as an ethical alternative, as if that doesn't have supply chain issues too - the problem is that capitalism is a system under which there is no ethical consumption, and while it is noble to try your best to at least be less unethical and you should do that if you must make merch, we should not be getting smug about individual solutions as if that makes you one of the good Etsy merch artists not engaging in exploitation; there is also a chauvinist tendency to act like handmade merch by artists is truly handmade and therefore elevated, while the labour behind mass-produced merch in the Global South, which is also handmade, gets dismissed or made invisible even by people who claim to support them, not just the artists exploiting them and taking credit for their work.

its like a pug

if you read about any biology you can quickly lose touch with what is astonishing and miraculous vs what is mundane, from animals that steal chloroplasts to become photosynthetic, to cloning technology being old hat, to trees that didn’t biodegrade for tens of millions of years, to naturally occurring lateral gene transfer between vastly different species, to the creation of gametes from adult cells, to the ability of some cancers to induce blood vessel growth, to desert shrimp that lie dormant for years, to the sensitivity of human touch receptors, to the fact that human hardware has a latent ability to see UV but their corneas block those wavelengths, to birds that echolocate and live in caves, to human skin being covered in enzymes that destroy RNA, to individual trees becoming genetic tapestries branch by branch, to life forms that gain energy from the electron potential of metals in their environments, to plants that recognize their siblings and adjust their behavior accordingly when growing next to them, to metamorphosis