Slay and serve are part of the drag/queer community lexicon that were made popular (iirc) in the NY ballroom scene. No one cares when 6th graders use them or if they stop.
If you watch queer media or hang out with The Gays, you’ll hear them all the time. They’re a bit campy, but not cringe.
Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.
Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.
The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.
It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.
This is entirely subjective - I haven’t gone around counting things up - but I’ve noticed both more pro-Tesla and pro-SpaceX posts and increased arguments on the anti-Musk posts. It seemed (on lemmy) to be coming from the same small number of accounts, so it could just be an enthusiastic handful of fanboys.
If one of them became a mod, that might explain it. They were very active in the Tesla and SpaceX subs with multiple articles posted within minutes of each other within the past couple of days.
It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.
Please keep in mind that these books should be acceptable by the school and approachable by students who would be unlikely to accept or read very progressive material, so themes that strongly (just strongly) contradict Western narratives should be avoided.
This made me hesitate, but then I decided that you’re more than capable of reading a summary or skimming a book and deciding whether or not it makes a fit.
21 Things They Don’t Teach You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is an economist who I believe studied under the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. They both research the economies of developing countries, with Chang having a specialization in South Korea. He accused developed countries of “kicking away the ladder” when they force the Washington Consensus on developing economies while having violated those norms as their own economies developed.
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - There’s a lot wrong with the book but it does make for an effective deconstruction of the myth of western cultural superiority by proposing a physical/geographical explanation.
Better than GGS would be any book by David Graeber, who for my money was the greatest anthropologist of our time and who brings a radical preconception of some of the most treasured but false narratives in the development of western history and capitalism. Debt is his most famous work, I think, but I’d especially recommend The Dawn of Everything.
Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson - the best bio of Che that I’ve read, but it’s really, really long. Maybe just watch Motorcycle Diaries and Even The Rain (which is about modern and even liberal colonialism but not Che).
Anything about James Baldwin
The Social Conquest of the Earth by EO Wilson. Wilson was the biologist who founded the field of sociobiology and who towards the end of his career came to the conclusion that its because humans exhibit the highest levels of cooperation (eusociality) that we’ve come to dominate the planet, for better and for worse.
I realize that a lot of these are US centric, and I’ve left out virtually everything on LGBT history and culture, but I think this might be a good start.
Based on a recent discussion, I think it was decided that Paul Bunyan (and, one would infer, Babe) should be classified as kaiju. It feels a bit racist (or at least specie-ist) to single him out compared to the damage done by all the others.
I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.
I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.
Being from California (and earlier from New York), that’s very much the intention. Both states (and municipal laws in places like LA, SF, and NYC) make the landlords have to jump through a lot of hoops before an eviction can take place, and the tenants can file for protection.
I know that things vary from state to state, but I’ve only been a renter in NY, NJ, and CA. I’ve also successfully sued a landlord for over $100k in damages and expenses.
No, they mean the same thing, at least in my familiarity with the phrases. “Cry me a river” means that I don’t care to hear about their complaints, even if their tears were enough to fill a river, because I think they’re not legitimate.
No, that’s not a good example at all. This is closer to Orwell’s Newspeak, in which the government makes a word mean its opposite in order to force a change to the way people think.
A more relevant example is the use of the term “fake news.” The term was originally coined to talk about Trump making up “facts” on the fly that were completely disconnected from reality. Then Trump started using the term to refer to news articles he didn’t like.
He was even asked at one point if by “fake news” he meant the story wasn’t true. He said no - he meant he thinks it’s not something the media should be talking about, true or not.
For his fans and for the media in general, it’s come to mean “false,” but that’s an inversion of the original meaning, which is that Trump was inventing “facts,” mutated to Trump thinking the media shouldn’t be reporting on his extensive dealings with Russians, and finally being interpreted as challenging whether those fully documented and verified meetings even really happened.
First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.
Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.
Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.
Slay and serve are part of the drag/queer community lexicon that were made popular (iirc) in the NY ballroom scene. No one cares when 6th graders use them or if they stop.
If you watch queer media or hang out with The Gays, you’ll hear them all the time. They’re a bit campy, but not cringe.