As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap

  • 6 Posts
  • 338 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 8th, 2024

help-circle

    1. Be informed. Read books rather than endless snippets of doom. Arendt, Orwell, Graeber, Steinbeck—there’s plenty of options. Avoid spiralling into ideological rabbit holes—reading Marxist literature is good, exclusively reading Marxist literature is deeply concerning.
    2. Share quality content on the open web where fascists cannot sensor speech. Focus on building communities.
    3. Encourage others by being kind and supportive, and understanding of differences. Inspite of popular opinion there’s still a big gap between centrists and fascists—welcome the centrists with open arms, take their points seriously, and debate on reasonable terms. You can both learn something from each other—just because you understand the contours of the system of oppression it doesn’t mean you’ve got it all figured out. Remain humble.
    4. Take care of yourself, if it feels heavy maybe make some tea and craft something or read a pleasent book.

    That would be my advice, I guess. In general I think there’s more positivity to be found in long-form content, as people have had time to think about issues beyond the initial shock and disgust of the state of affairs expressed in daily news and short form content.











  • I guess this is where the insight that you should judge a society by how it treats its weakest comes from. That’s a problem with OP’s scenario, as you’d be thrown into a completely foreign context without access to the more family and community-based security nets that are essential in poorer parts of the world.

    I have travelled to some not very wealthy regions to small communities that can only be accessed by a 4x4, horse, or motorcycle (or by foot, as I prefer), and seen severely handicapped people in such places live what at least appears from the outside to be highly dignified and decent lives as the community works together to take care of them. It’s not at all obvious that they would be happier in a western city. Once anyone needs professional medical care or expensive treatments it of course becomes more clear-cut, and if you’re an outsider (or just unlucky) you’re of course out of luck.

    Taking away enforced regulations on housing, employment, and banking makes things easier for me, not harder

    In the short run, maybe, but sawing off the branch one is sitting on is dangerous business. :)








  • Yeah, fair point about the horse hairs at least. But I also can’t help but feel like people might have had all kinds of strange ideas about how they want things to look in the past, and a lot of it would probably surprise us if we had the chance to go back and check. So I still struggle to see things like this as genuinely upsetting. Had it been a proper blunder like imitating a roman armour or something I would have agreed much more, but taking some creative license with what ancient Greece looked like I feel should be expected.


  • I’m not a historian of ancient Greek armature, but if I were to fasten a bunch of horse hair to stand up like a Mohawk on top of a helmet chances are I would drill a bunch of holes of roughly .5 cm diameter systematically throughout hardwood base and stuff each hole as full of hairs as I possibly could. It would probably come out looking something like a shoe brush.

    Of course, I have no idea how they were made; again, I’m not a historian. I just don’t see what is so obviously machine made here. On the contrary, I would be surprised if this helmet wasn’t in fact custom made by hand by the costume department. It would be very unlike Nolan to buy a mass produced Halloween costume from China.