Quick (page 1)
I’m lazy, so instead of writing long, introspective posts about my feelings, I prefer to just link to funny video clips of kittens or people falling off things, and other such worthwhile entertainments. This is them.
7PM Thu
The idea of “planning” a career is now garbage. You can only improvise one. Listening dutifully to old-economy career counselor types at ages 18 and 22 and “first layoff” is now the stupidest thing you can do. To a large extent a) your career picks you, not vice-versa, and b) It isn’t about what you want to do, but which one of the things you like doing achieves a “product-market fit” with the labor market.
(Most of the post is about entrepreneur-ing and startups; skip to the bottom for the “Your Life as a Lean Startup” section.) 0 Comments
11AM Thu This seems sensible. Oh, wait, no, it’s batshit fucking insane:
In addition to criminalizing an intentional attempt to induce a miscarriage or abortion, the bill also creates a standard that could make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by “reckless” behavior.
Using the legal standard of “reckless behavior” all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn’t intend to lose the pregnancy. Drink too much alcohol and have a miscarriage? Under the new law such actions could be cause for prosecution.
“This creates a law that makes any pregnant woman who has a miscarriage potentially criminally liable for murder.”
12PM Wed
Amelia, a 27-year-old Nicaraguan woman, has a ten-year-old daughter. She also has cancer and desperately needs treatment, but is being denied care because she’s pregnant. Abortion is entirely illegal in Nicaragua, even in a case like Amelia’s where she needs a therapeutic abortion to save her life. In Amelia’s case, it’s not just abortion that is being denied — it’s treatment for the cancer as well, since such treatment could harm the fetus. Amelia might die and her ten-year-old daughter may be left without her mother because of “pro-life” orthodoxy.
— Fetuses First — Feministe (via Shakesville)
This is what “pro-life” really means, and is exactly why women need the right to make their own decisions for their own bodies. 3 Comments
6PM Thu
Dull, dirty and dangerous work is stuff that takes scholars to make interesting, priests to ennoble, and artists to make beautiful. But in general, it is actually done by some mix of the deluded hopeful, the coerced, and the broken and miserable, depending on how far the civilization in question has advanced. You might feel noble about recycling, but somewhere out there, near-destitute people are risking thoroughly stupid deaths (like getting pricked by an infected needle) to sort your recycling. Downcycling really, once you learn about how “recycling” works.
1PM Sun
Yes, we can prepare to fight off zombie attacks, build earth shelters in case we lose ours (although odds are most of us will move in with a friend or relative), learn how to handle background radiation – but the first tier problems most of us face – and the ones most people prepare for first, are the ones we’re familiar with – what will we eat? How will we cook it? How will the hungry kids get fed? How will we keep the food and water coming in a supply disruption, or when we’re too poor to buy it? It isn’t that no one needs a gun or potassium iodate – it is that generally speaking the first question you will encounter in most crises is “Is there dinner? Do I get any?”
1PM Fri
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
3PM Thu
The first thing is that I started to eliminate the word “retarded” from my vocabulary a while ago. What happens, when you take any word out of your average everyday roster of words, is that you notice how much you use that word in the first place, and how involuntary it often is: you stop thinking about it for a second, and it just pops out, or you start reaching for a better word, and then notice that you are reaching. This happened when I stopped using “bitch,” “cunt,” “pussy,” all of it; you’re talking, and then there’s a hole in your speech where there wasn’t before, a new set of ellipses. She’s such a… I settled on “dick,” a while ago, because that’s funny. And now I’m back to using “bitch,” but never for other ladies and only in reference to myself, mostly with an absurd suffix because I want to make it a lighthearted and non-venomous word, which I can do because I am a lady and I own it. “Retarded” I don’t own, so it’s just gone. I had to come to terms with the fact that this bit of language was tied to ideas I didn’t want to support, and get rid of it.
Exactly this. 1 Comment
8PM Thu
The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
— Oscar Wilde, The soul of man under Socialism
8PM Thu
…they’re not possessions. Possessions are over. They are data! Data which sometimes manifests itself as my possessions. This refuse then folds itself right back into the social streams of eBay and Freecycle. Light-of-footprint. Door-to-door. Peer-to-peer.
Freedom is just another word for nothing! There is no dead weight in my urban spatiality. No clotted semiotics, cajoling me to behave in the stereotyped haute-bourgeois manner that Deirdre once used to stifle me.
Dematerialisation is defined by its interfaces. That which was product will become a service. That which was a service will accelerate at warp speed toward de-monetisation on the Path-to-Free. So this is not so much a post-divorce flat as a vibrant zone of interactive transaction.
— Bruce Sterling, The Hypersurface of this Decade
11AM Tue
Instead, I would rather that they shoplift. My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.