nötclêv'r

Tiny houses.

Not the concept, the notion, the Platonic ideal of a low-cost low-impact high-efficiency dwelling. That’s great. That’s awesome.

What really imagines my dragons is that in practice about 9 times out of 10 tiny house communities are just a way for rich hipsters to finally fulfil their greatest fantasy:

you will NEVER be able to guess what this post from the official US government consumer product safety commission was in response to (under the cut)

The incident involving Nancy Bentley took place in 1920, when she was just six years old. After being bitten by a snake near a coastal area, she urgently needed medical care. At the time, Australian naval regulations were strict: civilians were not permitted to receive treatment aboard naval vessels.

Faced with a child’s life at risk, the Royal Australian Navy improvised an unusual solution. Nancy was formally enlisted so she could legally remain onboard and receive treatment from the ship’s medical staff. She was given the official naval rating of “mascot,” making her, on paper, the youngest person known to have been enlisted in the Australian forces.

She stayed onboard for eight days, during which she received care from the ship’s medical staff. She was formally “discharged” from service after eight days, completing an eight-day “career” that remains a record for the youngest known enlistment.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.