Luddites didn’t hate looms. They smashed looms because their bosses wanted to fire skilled workers, ship kidnapped Napoleonic War orphans north from London, and lock them inside factories for a decade of indenture, to be starved, beaten, maimed and killed.
Designing industrial machinery that’s “so easy a child can use it,” isn’t necessarily a prelude to child-slavery, but it’s not not a prelude to child-slavery, either.
The Luddites weren’t mad about what the machines did — they were mad at who the machines did it for and whom they did it to. The child-kidnapping millionaires of the Industrial Revolution said, “There is no alternative,” and the Luddites roared, “The hell you say there isn’t!”
Today’s tech millionaires are no different. Mark Zuckerberg used to insist that there was no way to talk to your friends without being comprehensively spied upon, so every intimate and compromising fact of your life could be gathered, processed, and mobilised against you. He said this was inevitable, as though some bearded prophet staggered down off a mountain, bearing two stone tablets, intoning, “Zuck, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles, and lo, thou shalt mine them for actionable market intelligence.”
guys i have BEEN to this restaurant and i just want to let you know that when you order and say like “i am grounded” the waiters have to reply “ok, you are grounded.”
Fun fact! Having a job every day is actually a fairly new thing.
In olden times, people had daily chores and other things to do but their workload/ daily working hours was actually much lower than it is today. Even in farming communities.
The concept of working super hard every day actually comes from capitalism, which in turn comes from Puritanical ideology.
The Puritans believed in salvation through work and in no play.
Early capitalists adopted this ideology because it meant higher productivity and therefore more money if their factories were running near constantly.
The idea of needing to be continuously productive in order to be useful/ allowed things like food and shelter, is actually quite an insidious ideal that is deeply rooted in the American culture.
4 day work weeks have actually proven to be more productive than the 5 day week. But corporations won’t adopt it willingly because it means less of a stranglehold on their workers.
we need ugly gross disgusting feminism again without conforming to aesthetics and advertisement companies i want pit hair i want leg hair i want weird haircuts i want to get rid of diet culture and ads for pink razors and make-up i want women to reject biological determinism and push away from the overwhelming tradwife narratives that social media feeds everyone (‘natural hormone cycles’ and 'divine feminine’ and all of that shit) etc. i want more women working i want heterosexual relationships to get more balanced i also want it to be a norm for heterosexual couples to assess role assignments in the relationships and think critically about why they want children i want having children not to be something people just do because it is expected of them. I want a dyke for president. Etcetera
Just before the 1986 draft his Maryland coach, Lefty Driesell, was asked what Bias was like off the court. “All I can tell you,” replied Driesell, “is that Leonard’s only vice is ice cream.”
[…] “I did not know who Len was,” says his mother Lonise. “I knew that he played basketball, that he was my son, and he was doing well. I didn’t know who he was as a man. It wasn’t until he died that I found out who he was. People around the world were grieving over the loss of this man and this was just my son that I love. I didn’t know the level of popularity he had until he passed. We received flowers from the president and other personal cards from the vice president of the country, from the Senate leaders, Michael Jordan sent flowers, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson’s mother called.”
[…] Bias’ death, at his physical peak, with a future laid out before him, was part of the justification for harsher sentences for smaller amounts of certain drugs.
[…] Bias’ death prompted two questions. One has been a source of fascination to basketball fans: what if he had a chance to play in the NBA? The second spread fear throughout America: what if this happens to our children?
I laughed so hard at this I accidentally exited the Tumblr app and when I reopened, Tumblr had bolted back to the top of the feed, so I just rage scrolled through every single thing both posted in the last hour and that I scrolled past in the last hour to find to present this incredible tiktok to you, my dear followers. Esp @ritterssport
quotes by Victorians about the 1920s view of their generation’s women
“We are frequently told that the Victorian woman…generally behaved like a pampered and neurotic infant. This is all moonshine. I do not think that I ever saw a woman faint before I came to London in 1869, and not often after then…they enjoyed a hearty laugh, and a good many of them a contest of wits with any man.” -Nineteenth Century, a Monthly Review, 1927 (written by a man born in 1850)
“What queer ideas the girl of 1929 has about the Victorian period- they are not a bit true…Marriage was by no means the end and aim of our existence. Oxford and Cambridge claimed quite a few of us after school days were over. We had great ideas about ‘life’ and what it all might mean to us.” -St. Petersburg Times, 1929 (written by a woman born in 1853)
“True, debutantes were chaperoned at balls. But that fact did not prevent them from dancing as frequently as they chose with their favorite partners. The idea that girls in the Victorian era spent their days sewing seams and practicing scales is another fallacy.” -Gettysburg Times, July 1, 1927 (quote from the Dowager Lady Raglan, Ethel Jemima Somerset, who lived from 1857 to 1940)
