“Yeah!”
"A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness”
"He talked about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige. Had Karhide lost so much prestige in the Sinoth Valley business that the subject could not be brought up? No; for he often talked about the Sinoth Valley. I decided that he was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. He wanted to stir up something that the whole shifgrethor-pattern was a refinement upon, a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Left Hand of Darkness”
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Fuck you, tumblr
…fuck you.
But this one was!
SPRINKLER CONTROL
ON
OFF
And yet they didn’t flag this one, which is unto pornography, for me
“The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. ‘In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,’ the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. ‘Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.’ The sale of these slaves—‘in whose bodies that money congealed,’ writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto itself, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy”
"The ‘rising tide’ theory rested on a notion of separate but equal class ladders. And so there was a class of black poor and an equivalent class of white poor, a black middle class and a white middle class, a black elite and a white elite. From this angle, the race problem was merely the result of too many blacks being found at the bottom of their ladder—too many who were poor and too few who were able to make their way to the next rung. If one could simply alter the distribution, the old problem of 'race’ could be solved. But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal—that to be a member of the 'black race’ in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did poor blacks tend to be much less likely to advance up their ladder, but those who did stood a much greater likelihood of tumbling back. That was because the middle-class rung of the black ladder lacked the financial stability enjoyed by the white ladder. Whites in the middle class often brought with them generational wealth—the home of a deceased parent, a modest inheritance, a gift from a favorite uncle. Blacks in the middle class often brought with them generational debt—an incarcerated father, an evicted niece, a mother forced to take in her sister’s kids. And these conditions, themselves, could not be separated out from the specific injury of racism, one that was not addressed by simply moving up a rung. Racism was not a singular one-dimensional vector but a pandemic, afflicting black communities at every level, regardless of what rung they occupied."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy”
