I have to hand it to Donald Trump, I didn’t think the sequel to the 1932 Great Emu War would be a trade war against the penguin nation but he truly continues to be an innovator in the stupidity industry
I have to hand it to Donald Trump, I didn’t think the sequel to the 1932 Great Emu War would be a trade war against the penguin nation but he truly continues to be an innovator in the stupidity industry
Scrolled past this agakn and just can’t get over how much I love it. We need to make things beautiful again and this is such a wonderful example. The beadwork on the wires of a utitarian object, contrasted with the grey concrete.
Actually that no punctuation plot hole ooc wattpad fanfic written by that 12 year old will ALWAYS be better than character ai. And I love that 12 year old btw
I’m at a sociology conference and just attended a memorial for one of the giants of our field, and one of the panelists told this story…he was at a meeting with this guy, who he got his PhD under and had a long standing relationship with, and he was bemoaning the current state of the world, and he asked this old professor, “how can you be so optimistic? I can’t ever be anything but a pessimist.”
and the old professor said, “you little fucker, I’m going to make a statement and then I’m going to take you out to the parking lot and beat your ass. What good does your pessimism do?”
and that really struck me. not the least because I also knew this old professor and he very rarely swore, so I know this was something he was really worked up about. what good does your pessimism do? What GOOD does your pessimism DO. I’ll be thinking about that for awhile.
“Now there’s this about cynicism, Sergeant. It’s the universe’s most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you’re not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace.”
- Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity (1989)
“It helps me be prepared!”
As a recovered pessimist raised by a horrendously toxic pessimist: No, it doesn’t.
Foresight and practicality are completely separate qualities that can exist without pessimism. You can acknowledge the worst that might happen and prepare for it without having a completely negative worldview.
And pessimism can absolutely exist without those qualities. Which is a miserable way to live.
There actually is academic work that point out how cynicism can make you more gullible, and how fascists take advantage of it. The Jewish German political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about it in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). I wanted to include this passage, even though it’s long, because incredibly important. And true.
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leader for their superior tactical clearness.
This leader is spared from ever having to be accountable to his own statements. Naïve are those who thought then (or believe now) that such a leader would be brought down by his lies, or made to adhere to his promises. ‘The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is fool-proof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretence’. In yesterday’s totalitarianism and in today’s totality, the fake dominates. Gullibility embraces the fake, and cynicism embraces gullibility. The totality is immune from truth because the very idea of truth is dissolved within it.”
One of the funny things about LotR is that almost every people in it professes to disbelieve in the supernatural, but because they live in a fantasy world their baseline for “natural” is so jacked up. The Rohirrim are like, yeah, there’s a wizard in this tower and ancient tradition that we have no reason to doubt says this mountain is full of ghosts, but walking trees? Short people? I don’t think so. Galadriel is like, “Listen I heard you describe what I do as magic and look I just gotta clear some things up, okay.” Gondorians are like, yeah, of course the Enemy has spectres of men who lived long ago and never died and can now fly above us and incapacitate us with just their voices. This is just a fact of life, okay? But shut up about this magic weed that makes comatose people better. That’s an old wives’ tale. Royalty? Press X to doubt.
The people group in Tolkien’s work who seem most receptive to magic and least restricted by their own notions of what it can do actually seem to be the hobbits. And they use it to avoid meeting people they don’t want to talk to
ALT
