steel cameltoe

someone will

someone out there will see you and say "yes. the world is scary. but let me hold your hand and show you how to do it anyways"

Breezy

Watercolor On Birch Panel

2022, 11"x 14"

Found this on facebook but reposting to SAVE A LIFE.

Or at least some of y’all’s GPAs.

also, use Unpaywall

In reality, populations only rise so sharply as people begin to receive better access to healthcare and maternal and infant mortality in particular decrease. Eventually, as healthcare access is more evenly distributed through a population and people on a larger scale are able to access family planning care, the population stops increasing and levels out and decreases.

So on the one hand, you have capitalism, which relentlessly tells you that everything is a competition, your value as a person can only come at someone else's expense, some people are just intrinsically better than others, and your position on this hierarchy is determined by what's in your bank account. On the other hand, individualist liberalism can only answer this with a sort of weak-tea "self-esteem" discourse, which at best amounts to "try your best! Do what you love! It doesn't matter!" and at worst amounts to shouting "Everyone's a winner!", a position that even children automatically view with cynicism.

Never is there any discussion that maybe value shouldn't be intrinsic to the self. Maybe your value is in how much you make life better for other people. Like, do you make a worthy and necessary contribution to society that helps other people? That adds to the net happiness of the world? Then congratulations, you should take pride in that. Someone who plants a bee garden for free is worth more than a hedge fund manager who only contributes misery to the world, even if he makes a lot of money doing it. Someone who uses their body to block, however temporarily, the export of weapons or the laying of pipeline is infinitely more valuable to society than the skilled engineer who makes his living designing them. Even simple activities like telling jokes or doing chores are worth infinitely more than developing advertising software that only makes people annoyed and parts them from their money!

Reading rahaeli's bsky feed is an education in itself. I did not realize it was so common for undercover agents to join even harmless social activism groups and try to encourage people to do things they could be arrested for. The song has about a dozen verses, all of them based on incidents that resulted in felony charges o.O