Blackmoor Vituperative

People act like copyright is this intrinsic moral law of the universe. It’s not. It’s new. And it very clearly has become a tool to allow huge corporations to annex our shared culture, depriving future generations of what is rightfully theirs. People who shill for copyright are not much different than the polluters who want to keep pumping carbon into the air regardless of the effects it has on future generations — effects which are already very much apparent. It is, at best, grievously short-sighted.

We’ve created the cyberpunk dystopia which used to be fiction.

Key points:

• Decline in wages is directly aligned with decline in unions.
• Top 10% larger share of revenue/wages is inversely proportional to declining union membership.
• There isn’t a lack of jobs. There is a lack of full-time, good paying jobs. There are a lot of contract and part time workers who can’t seem to get a fair shot at full time employment. And despite the low unemployment rate, employers aren’t relaxing their strict requirements for the full time jobs, for the most part.

Source: “Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck. Here’s why.” , Robert Reich. The Guardian. 2018-07-29.

There are legitimate complaints to be made, and there are genuinely bad people who are the reason for those complaints. But as anyone who has worked in customer service knows, not every complaint is reasonable. Many — perhaps even most, it sometimes seems — are not.

If you need to go 100-200 years back to explain why something is “bad”, it’s not bad — you are just fishing for things to be unhappy about. Focus on what’s bad now. Robber barons, for example, are bad — and you don’t need a history lesson on the origin of the phrase “robber baron” to explain why. Private prisons and the racist impact of Drug Prohibition are both bad — and you don’t need a history lesson on workhouses or the Atlantic slave trade to explain why.

History can provide background to what is bad now. It’s really good for that. What history does not do is make something bad now merely because of events that took place before any of our grandparents were born.

[in-sel]
noun

1. Someone whose behaviour is so repugnant that not one of the approximately seven billion humans on Earth will have sex with them.
2. Someone who blames others for their mental and social shortcomings.
    
   “Yesterday Ryan wrote a Facebook post calling himself an ‘incel’. He claims that all women are shallow and exist to torture men by ‘denying’ them sex.”

Origin and etymology of incel

blend of involuntary and celibate

First Known Use: 1997

Fun fact! The Earth’s human population has doubled since 1971. So if, hypothetically, someone were to snap their fingers and kill half of the Earth’s population, they would set our inevitable self-destruction back by less than two generations. Hardly seems worth it, really.

This week’s “Brain Pickings” features a 1910 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, admonishing people to do something, rather than merely criticize what others do.

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt.”

Fun fact! (And somewhat relevant due to yesterday being Cinco de Mayo, celebrating when Mexico helped the United States win the American Civil War). When Roosevelt gave this speech in 1910, there were no border controls between the USA and Mexico. There was no such thing as a Mexican “illegal immigrant” in the USA until the 1920s, when white supremacists in the USA starting imposing quotas on immigrants based on their country of origin. (There were earlier laws regarding immigration, but these did not actually prevent anyone from Mexico from coming to the USA freely. Earlier laws mainly focused on Chinese immigrants, and on preventing the importation of “contract labor”, which is to say, slaves in all but name.)

Fun fact! Increased “security” at the USA-Mexico border in the early 1900s had the perverse effect of increasing the number of permanent Mexican residents in the USA, because it made it more difficult for them to go back home once they got here.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, or as it’s known in Mexico, May 5. This is a day when we Americans celebrate the day that Mexican troops defeated French troops which were on their way to Mexico City. By doing so, they helped the United States win against the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Just one example in a long history of Mexicans and the descendants of Mexicans contributing to make the USA a better place.

¡Viva México!

Psychologist Valerie Tarico has written a very interesting article, “Political Narrative II: Why Some Progressives Are Tearing Each Other Apart“. I have said, many times (and sadly, I think I will have many opportunities to say it again), clinging to past grievances — no matter how valid they are — is not the way to make a better future. At some point, you must put the past behind you, if you want to move beyond it. We need to focus on making tomorrow better than today. Not perfect: perfection is not an option, and we will never make any progress if we insist on that. Just make tomorrow better than today.

As an aside, this also provides me with an insight into some of my more conservative friends. I see them making comments (often defensive comments, as though they’ve been attacked) about “liberals”, but those comments seem to come out of nowhere. It’s because those defensive comments aren’t aimed at me, or people like me — they are aimed at what this article calls the Structural Oppression group.

I look forward to the day when one’s skin colour, facial features, and sex are as easily changed as hair length and hair colour are now — and are finally treated as the superficial traits they are.

Watching a documentary about sugar, called “Sugar Coated” (2015). Briefly, obesity has doubled in the past 30 years, and diabetes has tripled, and it’s because sugar is in literally everything and we eat way too much of it. We eat twice as much processed food, and at least twice as much sugar, as we did 30 years ago. And make no mistake: our sugar consumption 30 years ago was enormous, compared to 30 years before that. It was already far too much sugar.

The people who made the video keep saying that this is a controversial issue.

How is this controversial? It’s obvious. Look at the ingredients in spaghetti sauce, hot dogs, barbecue sauce, ketchup, cereal, pizza sauce, even bread. Bread! Have you seen the cereal aisle at the grocery store? It’s literally boxes of candy. Grocery stores have become candy stores — and that’s not even touching on actual candy and cakes, of which we consume vast quantities.

We are a stupid, stupid species.

This is worth watching, too.