Brain Spelunking

Capitalist propaganda: "Monthly food rations per Polish citizen in the early to mid 1980s. But next time socialism will work."

Michael: "Can someone please explain why so many people still take socialism seriously? It has always failed badly, every sing time."

My grandpa remembered until his death young lord who didn't want a boiled egg. On one side of a ridge, local noble's garden, few years old lordling running and screaming he doesn't want to, and governess chasing after him with egg on a spoon, or maybe in a bowl; on the other side peasant children, hungry, watching over geese on a pasture, absolutely sure they would eat that egg with the eggshell if given a chance.

Grandpa was over 70 and still couldn't get over it. How hungry they all were, next to a lordling who didn't want a boiled egg, who never knew hunger.

It is about the tamest image one can get for how commonplace hunger was. History sources say that in Warsaw between WW1 and WW2, where poor flocked in hope for work, at some point street prostitutes took 2 kilograms of onions as a payment.

In same Warsaw, rents were so high and evictions so frequent, that newspapers only informed of those that were somehow special, like widowed father jumping from 6th story window with two small daughters due to eviction; or bed-bound elderly evicted with the bed. Those, on themselves, filled weekly newspaper column.

It was also common practice for middle-class to fire their all-chores housemaid in June, before traveling to countryside or spa for summer, and hiring again in September. About 30% of women in Warsaw were domestic servants. No all-chores housemaid earned enough to survive two months from savings. Starving servants were seasonal occurence.

I'm not even starting on life of a peasant in tsarist Russia.

And in lean months, it would be that and whatever we could get from the garden, or forage/fish, or trade with friends and neighbors. My mom had this awesome recipe for peanut butter balls that utilized the powdered milk, shit-quality peanut butter, and maple-flavored corn syrup that we routinely got in our box and actually made it good. 

I think that these things should be available for purchase at every supermarket, and that the prices should be fixed with relation to the minimum wage. All brands should have to compete with the government option - if SPAM is going to be more expensive than LUNCHEON MEAT in the silver can, then it needs to justify that cost by being better quality.

I want the same thing for housing. I want fucking Commie Blocks to be an option.

This would combat runaway inflation by putting a price cap on survival needs. It would guard against shrinkflation, because a consumers could compare the Government Standard portion to the brands. UBI ought to be such that it covers The Government Option for food, housing, clothing, transit etc. with generous wiggle room for emergency savings and little joys in life. 

Everyone should get their own UBI account in their own name at birth, along with their social security number. It should follow the individual regardless of guardianship. Parents/guardians should have incrementally less and less control over said funds as the child gets older, and should have to provide itemized receipts of how money taken from a child’s account is spent (Similar to what you have to do if you’re in control of an elder’s social security money).

https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/text-repayee-ussi.htm

'Each year, we will ask certain representative payees to complete a Representative Payee Accounting Report showing how they spent and saved the money they received for you during the 12-month report period.'

These are steps that would could easily institute tomorrow be reallocating funding, and they’d have a huge impact on cost of living for everyone.  

It’s one hell of a political statement, coming from a man who is typically all about being very subtle and understated and keeping his cards close to his chest. Just consider how much of a— aha… ballsy move that is.

He’s openly stating with each passing year that he believed in the Glorious Revolution, that he believed that Lord Winder should have been assassinated, that he believed that police brutality on that scale needs to be stamped out once and for all.

That he believed, and still believes, that unfit rulers should be overthrown.

He meets with aristocrats and the “perennial waverers” as they are termed in the book with a lilac bloom pinned to his robe. He wears a symbol of the hopes and dreams of his youth, every year.

Not just the obvious stuff like the danger of people falling off the edge, but how instead of the cardinal directions, they use "hubwards" and "rimwards" because the mountains in the center of the disc can be seen from pretty much anywhere.

Or how the speed of light is significantly slower, which makes earth-like sunrises and sunsets on a disk possible. But this also leads to lines like "On a clear day, you could see all the way to last Wednesday" and descriptions of sunlight literally flooding over mountains like glowing honey.

But one of my favorite bits of disc related lore are the clacks towers.

These towers use the six lights on the top to relay messages over huge distances. Much greater distances than would be possible on earth, since the horizon would get in the way after 10 kilometers or so.

It's basically Discworld's version of radio towers before the discovery of electricity, and it's something that would only work that well on a flat world.

it snuck in through the cracks and seeded better philosophies into a young mind that was being brought up in a cult, and as i grew, those things took root in me, crumbled the cult rhetoric like so much shitty concrete and let something a bit more alive have a chance to blossom.

discworld met me where i was at--in my youthful impotent rage, in my cleverness, in my fears.

discworld said that monsters were real but i was allowed to carry a frying pan and some string. discworld said it was okay to care an irrational amount about pedantic things but it wasn't okay to be an elitist asshole about it because everyone else is people, too, and if you're so clever maybe you have a duty to use it rather than a right to lord it over everyone. discworld made me think about my thoughts.

discworld gave me socks to shove down my pants when i was 14 and didn't know how to have words for not being a girl and it laid out a framework for understanding my autism almost 20 years before i knew what it was. it told me i was allowed to have agency and if i didn't then i was allowed to take it from whoever was trying to keep it from me.

discworld said there are words for that feeling of always watching myself, that it doesn't make me evil for needing to be my own built-in leash. and that it's okay to think the world is full of idiots and bastards as long as i understand at the end of the day they're just as human as everyone else and that has to matter or everything breaks down.

discworld, in particular, drove home just what that humanity meant. what it meant to be part of it, when i had grown up too isolated to understand in any organic way.

discworld was there for me as a kid and it was there for me as an adult revisiting my favourites with eyes ever made fresh by adult worry and grief and exhaustion and hope, understanding me every step of the way. it reminded me again and again through the difficult years that i had to care because caring is all we've got and if we don't care, what's the point?

and it did all of that while making me laugh so hard i couldn't breathe. helped me consistently value joy and humour against a painful world, even at my lowest.

i wouldn't be this me without discworld; i would be some much worse version of me, and that would really suck.

i don't have anything terribly poetic or moving to say today. i'm just full of gratitude and gladness and melancholy and assorted other soft feelings.

it's the 25th of may. i've been wearing lilac in my hair since before i was even old enough to know why.

It’s a parody - and I use that word very loosely, because there’s really nothing funny about it - of Les Miserables. It’s about a failed revolution, and a barricade, and the people who fought and died there for nothing. Nothing changes. Politics with a capital P goes on, and even the most pure and noble of intentions only becomes food for the pit of snakes who pull the strings. The powerful remain powerful, the powerless, despite their solidarity, their desperation, their violence, their hope, remain powerless. Their little lives don’t count at all. Things continue exactly as they always have, minus a few faces in the crowd.

It is also, I think, where we see Sam Vimes at his lowest. Sure, Thud! does similar things in stripping him down, but that is under an outside influence, and he has his family to think of. He has something to fight for.

In Night Watch, though, all of that is taken away. Sam Vimes, eternal cynic, for once has Cassandraic knowledge that his cynicism is absolutely founded. He knows how this will end, and there’s no Corporal Carrot to make the world magically better around him, no Sybil and Young Sam to push through for, no city to protect. The absolute best that he can expect is to succeed, and lose that family, that future, forever. The absolute worst? He dies. Everyone he cares about here dies. And it’s all in vain.

Sam Vimes is an alcoholic. It’s something that we tend to bring up when we’re talking about how amazing he is, how much he’s overcome, but gloss over otherwise. Which is a little sad, because it’s fundamental.

Sam Vimes faced this exact dragon, years ago. Sam Vimes saw there was no way to slay it. He saw the ants eating at the heart of every hope, every effort. He saw the first man he really knew as a good and kind and just - but never passive, never weak - man die, horribly, slain for no reason but petty grudge and Politics. He saw John Keel’s garden wither and die in its bed. He saw the hope of a better, brighter Ankh-Morpork squelched, and the sacrifice of a good man wasted. He saw the world, in all of its rotting, miserable, pestilent despair, spoiling every good thing that dared show its face, its only ordering principle the slow decay of entropy.

Young Sam Vimes had no anchor. Young Sam Vimes had nothing left to turn to but the bottom of a bottle and the smelliest part of an Ankh-Morpork gutter.

Sam Vimes, as of the events of Night Watch, is back there. Not only physically temporally displaced. He has nothing. There is no reason for him to stand up, to take on the role of John Keel, to take responsibility for the barricade, to try to bring Carcer back to justice. To fight the doomed fight. There is nothing between him and finding a quiet seat at the Broken Drum, ordering himself a pint, and giving up. There is nothing between him and despair.

But he gets up anyway. He intervenes anyway. He tries to help anyway, even when he can’t believe it will make any difference. And it doesn’t, in the end.

Except that people lived who, save for the actions of John Keel, would have died. Except it quite literally meant the world to them.

And that’s where the hope is hiding, in this hopeless, bleak, despair of a book. There is no glory. There is no revolution. There is no good thing that cannot be corrupted. There is no point. Except.

That’s why there are no monuments to the Glorious Heroes of Treacle Mine Road. In the grand scheme of things, nothing they did mattered. But they are remembered, because they need to be remembered. Because sometimes what we do does not matter.

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