If you’re unemployed, it’s not because there isn’t any work.

Just look around: A housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there’s work to be done.

So ask yourself, what kind of world has work but no jobs? It’s a world where work is not related to satisfying our needs, a world where work is only related to satisfying the profit needs of business.

This country was not built by the huge corporations or government bureaucracies. It was built by people who work. And, it is working people who should control the work to be done. Yet, as long as employment is tied to somebody else’s profits, the work won’t get done.

Was expecting classist bullshit, got the exact opposite

This is so ubelievably important and I hate that I have to keep re-explaining it to people.

The way Terry Pratchett handled police in the Discworld continues to be one of the many, many things I love about his works. I certainly don’t have time to describe all the details of why he wrote such good policing, but I think the best summation of it is the arc that Sam Vimes had in many of the books.

I haven’t read all the watch books, but in the ones I have, there’s often a similar plot structure. We meet a truly detestable criminal Vimes is chasing down (think the Deep Downers in Thud, or Carcer in Night Watch). They show themselves to be truly awful people who do awful things, and they’re also just plain jackasses. They’re characters you hate to read about, the grind the audience’s gears. They also grind Sam Vimes’s gears. 

Throughout the story, they commit more and more crimes. Horrible crimes, like torturing and killing innocent people, or practicing violent religious extremism. They do things that personally target our protagonist, like go after his wife and son, or relentlessly taunt him and try to kill him and his past self. They consistently do bad things, and even as Vimes is chasing them, they do more bad things. You want them to be punished.  Finally, at the climax, we get some sort of final confrontation between the villain(s) and Vimes. In a different book, Vimes might kill the people who sent people to hurt his infant son, or tortured and killed innocent people, and the audience would probably cheer. In fact, Vimes wants to kill them. 

But he doesn’t. Every time, he suppresses the urge to enact his own justice, and he doesn’t kill them. He arrests them. Because, as he says many times, if you’ll do something for a good reason, you’ll do it for a bad. Even when there’s every excuse as to why this particular villain doesn’t deserve to live, he just arrests them. It’s not his job to decide how they should be punished for their crimes.

I think this is a masterful takedown of police brutality and Punisher style characters. Vimes isn’t a perfect person, it’s not that he could never dream of killing the bad guy. He can, and he does, often. But he never follows through, he understands why he can’t do that, so no matter how tempting it is, he doesn’t.

Because in this story, the hard boiled cynical cop truly believes in following the law. The message is always that law enforcement killing a criminal is never ok, even if they’re undeniably guilty of something truly dreadful. Hell, police brutality is personified as a millennia old demonic quasi-deity possessing Vimes, one that’s never been beaten before, but he beats it and doesn’t give in. I think that’s a really unique message in cop stories, and another reason as to why Pratchett was such a good author. 

this book was published in 1996 btw

I wrote an essay about the importance of rage, kindess (as opposed to niceness), and justice as highlighted in Pratchett's work, and posted it in a group of Pratchett fans on Facebook. It went like this:

This one [is directly relevant to Pratchett and his work] and covers: Anger and Kindness, among other things.

It's taken me a while to work it out, but one of the reasons why I still engage so strongly with Pratchett's work is because of these two themes running through the thoughts and actions of pretty much every main character to whose point of view we get to bear direct witness. That, and the notion of Justice as opposed to Mercy.

Pratchett's main characters are almost all angry, often as a ground state of being - Granny Weatherwax and Commander Vimes springing immediately to mind. Polly Petks (and, to be fair, pretty much everyone except perhaps Lieutenant Blouse in Monstrous Regiment), Archchancellor Ridcully, The Patrician, Susan Sto Helit, Esk, Glenda Sugarbean, Agnes/ Perdita Nitt, Angua von Uberwald, and Tiffany Aching, to name a few more, are people to whom rage comes easily, and is a motivating force. Even those who are seen as generally more easygoing or placid of temperament have illuminating moments of anger which tip them over the edge to somewhere inspired, and that click of fully engaged rage is often a pivotal moment (for a near perfect example: Magrat's core is revealed to be sheer, molten ire when her personality is ablated by the Faerie Queen).

That's not to say that inchoate choler is venerated - the malicious, bubbling spite of Corporal Strappi is vilified as destructive, and the ever-seething, undirected bile of Mister Tulip is likewise outlined as useless because he is unable to focus it himself (hence depending on Mr. Pin's guidance).

Which brings us to kindness. Pratchett's heroes have all realised, at some level or other, that anger is a force that can - and should - be used for good. Weatherwax and Vimes, in particular, are constantly vigilant against the darkness inherent inside themselves which could snap at any moment under the weight of a wicked world and set it alight for a better one to be rebuilt from the ashes. They know that they shouldn't (it's pretty much treating people as things, after all), but that's ever constant. That's not to say, however, that the anger is never shown, utilised openly, or acknowledged by those around them. Vimes and Granny have both owed their survival against powerful, wicked creatures to rage's primal surge, but also to the enormous, almost terrifying love they bear the world.

Granny tells us that kind is not the same as nice. Nice is pretty, petty, and a lie. Nice is slapping an attractive plaster over a wound without cleaning it properly first, or dealing with the thing that caused the injury in the first place. Nice paints a gloss over injustice and asks us all to be quiet for the sake of those for whom the world works just as it should. Nice is self-delusion, and a wilful one at that. Which isn't to say that we should never indulge in a little of that - peel every cover off the world and it's too much, too raw, all at once, and we all need our masks in this world of fake it til you make it - but the Turtle cannot move if it never acknowledges the epic tides against which it must strive, and the Turtle Moves. It must.

Because justice moved Pratchett and, through him, all his finest creations. His villains were remarkable for their ability to subvert justice, to delude - themselves and/ or others - and to take and take for the sake of sometimes strange, but, all too often, all-too relatable motives. Money, power, comfort and, above all: control. And his heroes were glorious for their ability to see past the smoke and mirrors, the age-old inequities held up as a normalcy that must be protected at all costs, and tear through unjust conventions to make the necessary changes for everyone to step that bit closer to being truly free, with all its inherent terrors and responsibilities.

Pratchett wasn't nice, or whimsical - he was angry and (increasingly explicitly) vocal about justice in his works. And none of his heroes - our heroes - are either. They are kind, they serve justice, and they kick arse on behalf of those with less power, but they are neither nice, nor insipid, nor silent. And neither should we be.

Change is uncomfortable. Change feels like a death, which is why, no matter how positive the shift, we all move through the grief cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance and exploration. True bravery is being afraid of the pain of righteous change, of letting go of who we were, of bidding farewell… and doing it anyway.

Be brave, [Pratchett Fans]. Be bold and angry and loud about justice, and strive for true equity.

The Turtle Moves. And so should you.

god i love being at home!! catch me at HOME!!

Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I'm always like "why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day."

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you're inside the car, inside the situation, it's easy not to notice all the extra work you're doing just to maintain the status quo.

There's all sorts of work that we think of as "free" that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged by sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

The next time you think you're tired from "nothing", consider instead that you're probably in situation where you're doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.

genuinely cant stop thinking about whatever early human first looked a literal wolf full in the face and thought domestication would be fun but ALSO cant stop thinking about the ENTIRE early human tribe that absolutely did NOT think to stop them

HOLD THE PHONE

Slightly related: I read a book by Rick McIntyre, who was official Wolf Guy at Yellowstone Park for 25 years (and studied wolves for 40 yrs total). He describes how, when they’re alone, wolves—both adults and pups—will pick up sticks or bones or bits of animal skin and toss them around to entertain themselves, the way you might toss a ball up and down. They essentially play catch by themselves.

So if wolves do this by themselves, in nature, that means that we saw them playing this game and thought “huh, that wolf enjoys fetching the stick it’s throwing for itself, maybe I could throw it further and it would like that more?” And thus began our two species’ mutual favourite game to play together

But the point is that they invented fetch

brb screaming into a pillow for a thousand years

Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.

Terry Pratchett will write books about how powerful is never to be trusted; that the elites will turn us against each other for their own interests; about death and grief and hopelessness; how people are vile creatures capable of saintly acts of good and beauty; about prejudice and classism; and all of it tied in a beautiful, growing and changing world and aren't we so goddamn lucky to have this fucking world to be in.

And then sometimes the madlad will call up Niel Gaiman and be like "Hey what if a wizard went to Australia? Wouldn't that be wacky? There'd be like talking kangaroos and shit. Wacky."

- Jingo by Terry Pratchett

sometimes i think about the golden record and i want to cry

there is a disk. it is 12 inches in diameter, it is made of copper, plated with gold. there is an inscription— “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times” on its surface. it lies on the space probe, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, to explore interstellar space beyond our solar system.

it contains human existence.

116 images— the sun, the location of our solar system, mathematical and physical unit definitions, and our planets, including a blue and swirling white sphere simply labelled “Home.” it contains images of human dna, of our atoms, their structure, the way they divide, our anatomy, our conception, our birth.

it does not contain an image of war. nor of disease, nor poverty, nor crime, religion, or ideology.

it does contain a father looking lovingly at his daughter. it does contain the picture of a tree toad in a gentle hand, of a woman eating a grape at a supermarket.

the remainder of the disk is audio. a 90-minute selection of music from all over the world, sounds, and greetings. there are greetings in 55 different languages, one akkadian, spoken in sumer about six thousand years ago, and one wu, a modern chinese dialect. the greetings call out to a friend. it wishes them well. it asks them if they have eaten yet.

but it contains other sounds too. it holds the sound of rain, of thunder, of a volcano and an earthquake. it holds the sound of mud pots and trains. it holds the sound of a mother kissing her child.

with little to erode it in space, the golden record would probably outlast all human creation. it will be 40,000 years before it approaches another planetary system. if it does, it cannot find intelligent life. intelligent life will have to find it, retrieve it from where it floats silent and small through space. we still don’t know if they would understand it.

in 7.5 billion years, the evolution of the sun would burn the earth up, and we would not exist any longer, but the voyager would fly on, bearing a memory.

bearing a disk with a little inscription etched by hand on its surface.

And what it looks like in the side of the Voyager probe:

I’d pay top dollar to watch this for an hour

Why isn’t any form of martial arts in the Olympics

This is the most badass thing I’ve seen all year

This don’t even make no sense! Damn

Not to be boring and ruin the fun but there’s like 5 different types of martial arts in the olympics………

Assorted wizards and friends

This is amazinggg!!!!!!😭😭😭😭

And hella adorable!!!!!!!!😭

People who believe that small children are proof that gender roles are natural are really on a whole other level.

A young child, using words she learned purely by mimicking the way others speak: I want to be a mommy when I grow up.

Y’all absolute Mensa candidates: Wow. This child is a blank slate. Completely unaffected by society. Guess lady-brains truly are the only explanation here, science deniers. 

Babies cry with an accent within a day of being born, and can even observe sounds while they’re still in the womb. There’s no stage of life where people aren’t already affected by socialisation, everyone who believes that nature can truly be separated from nurture is naive as fuck. 

I absolutely love this post just because of the “y'all absolute mensa candidates” at the top.

So there’s this part of the mammalian brain called the neocortex. It’s the part of the mammalian brain which is basically a blank slate that just process input, figures out and predicts patterns from that input, and suborns autonomic processes to higher-level abstract patterns it works out from all that data. (On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, excellent neuroscience book, I highly recommend it). And humanity’s whole Thing is that our neocortex has become massively oversized and completely taken over our brain, to the point where it directs the action of the rest of the brain rather than the other way around like in other mammals. That’s basically our whole schtick as a species, being run by this massive blank-slate pattern matching machine rather than preprogrammed instincts.

Other mammals are instincts with some learning thrown on top, but humans are basically only learning, with some residual instincts to make sure we don’t fuck up too bad. That’s one of the reasons why humans take so much longer to develop motor skills than other species, because our brain has usurped the typical mammalian in-born neural motor programming with a blank slate that has to just like … figure that shit out on it’s own. Human babies can’t even see properly when they’re first born, even though they have perfectly functioning eyes, because our brain replaced all that silly mammalian visual recognition software with the neurological equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, a pencil, a shrug, and “you’ll figure it out, go get ‘em tiger”.

And that’s a huge advantage! Evolution can only adapt a species really, really slowly, to changing conditions over millions of years. Typical mammalian neocortices are a fantastic patch on that which allow adaptation over the course of a creature’s lifetime, but they don’t allow for that adaptation to be passed on, and it’s still just a patch on the greater impetus of evolved instincts. But humans. Ohohohoh. Humans are nothing but adaptation. Our ability to mimic and pass on behavior means that we don’t need a lot of those built up evolutionary behaviors which change so slowly, because we just can figure that shit out by mimicry and raw learning anyway. So we just ditched most of it and a lot of what’s left now comes with a “you can learn to override this if you need to” feature. It’s a way, way more flexible and adaptable system than that old clunky “being a bunch of preprogrammed mental software” thing other mammals use.

So the idea that you can assume anything about humans’ intrinsic instincts by looking at their behavior when young is just ridiculous. From the moment we’re born we are tiny pattern matching machines, intaking and copying everything around us, because we literally do not have enough instinct left as a species to exist without pattern matching other’s behavior. We can’t even fucking see without having to learn it from scratch. But yeah, I’m sure intrinsic gendered social skills and housecare aptitude made the evolutionary cut when fucking sight and walking got the axe.

@prime89 because SCIENCE

Also, check out the book Delusions Of Gender by Cordelia Fine, which talks about the extent to which itty bity babies are bombarded with the kind of largely self-fulfilling gender stereotypes that result in toddlers acting out exactly the clichés that make people think that these kinds of preferences must be innate.

I think the moment that convinced me the operating logic of our society is truly fucked in a way that cannot merely be reformed was after that eclipse in 2017 when the articles started coming out about how much money had been lost by productivity dropping from people stopping momentarily to watch it happen. To measure the world by the metric of the dollar to such a devotion that any cult leader would be jealous of that you would look at one of the most sublime experiences in nature which we, our ancestors, and even a not insignificant number of non-human species, have been observing in awestruck wonder for millennia, and decide that such a moment of profundity is something to be fought and preferably expunged from the human experience because it briefly impacts quarterly revenue.

It's a feeling that has been coming up repeatedly, but with increasing frequency in the last few years. That being: what is all of this for? Where are we going? Nobody who defends the status quo can seem to answer it. What's the point of an uninterrupted quarterly revenue stream if we can't even look at an eclipse every few years? What's the point of hustling and grinding 50, 60, 70 hour weeks if you never have time to have dinner with your friends, talk to your family on the phone, but on a bigger spectrum, what's the point of all of that if you still don't have any way of retiring in the future? With the way that our lives are being increasingly monetized and squeezed every second, what is there to look forward to?