This but also the person who you forced to carry a fetus to full term could’ve cured cancer. Or you know if the government didn’t slash cancer research funding those people could’ve cured cancer.
A patron came in to the library a few weeks ago looking for a copy of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”. She said she wanted to replicate Peter’s coat for her daughter’s rabbit. Library staff found her the book thinking she meant a stuffed rabbit. But, lo and behold, it was a real rabbit! Introducing… Melvin Rabbit!
FDR already solved the “what are people supposed to DO in a post-scarcity capitalist society besides imploding and then overthrowing the government” with the New Deal and specifically the public works project/Works Progress Administration. the library doesnt really NEED a cubist mural, especially not a government-funded one, but that’s the kind of shit you actually should be directing taxpayer money towards if you want to create a relatively stable capitalist socialist state. i mean we did and do actually need bridges and manhole covers and asphalt and apartment blocks which were also a major part of the program as i understand it, in current year of our lord a ton of American infrastructure is still running on top of New Deal concrete which desperately needs retrofitting and maintenance lol, but the new deal funded a lot of library murals too. borderline unthinkable in 2025 to imagine a widely-known and publicly-accepted presidential plan to occupy idle labor force during an employment crisis with building playgrounds and lawns and so on
It’s the sort of thing Europe does with their mixed economies.
Also literally meant to stop a communist uprising, despite being accused of being communist, which tells you the people screaming commie use it to refer to things they don’t like.
Alright. So. I have a confession to share with you.
In middle school, I strongly identified as a libertarian. In my defense, I was 13 and I had autism. Against my defense, I was literate, and capable of using common sense. I confessed this to you willingly, so go easy on me.
One thing about this that I can share with you is that I, as a 13 year old boy, read Atlas Shrugged. I read it as someone very committed to the ideology, who wanted to believe it, who wanted to like it, and there are two things I can share with you about that book from that time period.
The writing is terrible. It has the slowest, most boring, most pretentious prose you could possibly imagine. Calling it glacial would be a compliment. It makes glaciers look like Formula 1. There is no description for the pacing outside of hellish torments. It is like being condemned to watch a dog with an itchy ass wear the Himmalayas away only by scooching. It is like counting the grains of sand on a beach while Alexa reads off random phone numbers. It is like dipping saltines into lukewarm tapwater while listening to white noise in a beige room with no doors. It is like wearing a blindfold and being told to guess what a man is painting by sound alone, but there is no man, there is only a dog licking cold vaseline off a window. Forever. It is all of those things and more.
There is a multipage rant about how affairs are Good and Rational that is so insanely desparate that even middle-school-autist me thought she must have been having an affair while she wrote this. And then I googled it, and the answer was yes, she was. She called her philosophy Objectivism, because she believed, like everyone else in the world, that her ideas and motivations were Pure and Rational and Ojectively Correct, but I still find the name accurate, because it was really written with one Objective in mind, and that was finding a way to never admit that Ayn Rand had ever made a mistake in her life.
I was going to rant more about this but I kind of lost my train of thought. The book fucking sucks. It was propaganda of such remarkably low caliber that it actually helped me move out of those circles. Every time someone talked about liking the book, I’d reply with something along the lines of “Yeah, I especially loved the part where she destroyed the post modernists by unequivocally condemning affairs”, and if they agreed with me, they would have lost my respect forever, and if they looked very embarrassed, I could at least acknowledge that they had a soul, albeit small and malformed. I had dozens of people claim that they read the book, and only three or four actually passed the test.
And now, goodnight.
Reminder that Ayn Rand had many affairs, didn’t get rich and ended up on Medicare, which she applied to under a fraudulent name so people wouldn’t find out about it.
@cuprohastes anytime you reply to a post of mine, you improve it AND give me a fun fact. Mutual of the day award. Thank you.
had a dream that the cool new trend was to drink water but only while standing in doorways because that made the water “more liminal” which was a good thing for unclear reasons
I decided to do my civic duty and start going to my local city council meetings, in the hope of staying more informed about local issues, and affecting the things I can actually affect.
I was one of two people in the audience. Things that happened tonight:
-Only other lady in the audience got up at the end during the public comment period and gave an absolutely scathing rant about Trump, comparing his actions to Nazi Germany and predicting a new Holocaust. I am officially in love with her.
-Apparently all the council people and Mayor were speculating about who I was, because they know everyone who usually shows up and I was a stranger. (Someone thought I was a reporter 😂).
-I got waylaid afterwards. They are starved for attention & participation. One of the councilwomen literally pressed her business card on me and told me about the secret meeting prior to the council meeting, which isn’t on their website but is still open to the public. (She’s the one who told me her colleague had accused me of being a reporter 😂)
-I got introduced around the room to several additional people, and got to complain about the shitty sidewalks in my neighborhood. They said they would look into it!
Anyways- positive experience overall; do recommend. If nothing else, our city broadcasts the meetings on local TV and yours may too; you can stay informed that way. But going in person gets your face known, and means you can actually have an effect.
Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26 million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.
Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.
Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.
fuck everyone who voted for Trump, and particularly fuck everyone who said it didn’t matter who won, who said there was some higher point to prove by having Democrats lose, fuck everything, this ocean of blood and human suffering is all your fault and it a far and just universe you would all burn in hell for it.
LGBT people, I need you to know that any “pedophile execution bill” passed in the US is meant to put you, personally, to death. When the right says “groomer,” they’re talking about you. When they say “predator,” they’re talking about you. When they say “pedophile,” they’re talking about you. Any actual child sex abusers who are convicted and executed would be, to them, a happy accident, a cherry on top of a law that’s meant to exterminate anyone who deviates from the cisgender, heterosexual norm.
amhrancas 