Le Strawberry

atlinmerrick:

woolandcoffee:

aspiringwarriorlibrarian:

I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

We stan an icon.

I never knew the whole quote or its circumstances. Lord she was amazing.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” – Ursula K LeGuin

blacksocialists:

VIDEO LINK:

natalunasans:

doolallymagpie:

doolallymagpie:

straight up, i think we need to start unironically using the term megacorporation

amazon, disney, pepsi, pretty much any company that owns enough subsidiaries that you’re probably touching five of their products at any one time without realizing unless you know very well where everything you buy comes from

that’s a megacorporation

and it’s bad, todd

WE LIVE IN AN OLIGOPOLIC KLEPTOPLUTOCRACY AND NOBODY SEEMS TO CARE

we care, it’s just hard to spell

dykesymmetry:

dykesymmetry:

why is it so difficult for ppl to distinguish between “this person is a literal bigot and should not have a platform” and “this person is not actively malicious but has accidentally done a couple harmful things that should be addressed” and “this person has made a few poor taste jokes several years ago but has since grown as a person” and “this person simply just didn’t know the ‘proper’ term for something”

fuck it adding on what i said in the tags

kurhanchyk:

love it when wikipedia once again lies about ukraine. demographics of lyman city in donbas according to it:

literally the link it refers to. 84,4% of ukrainians, 13,8% of russians

cthulhulovesewe:

grubloved:

oil & gas companies produce tons of literal radioactive waste and then sell it to rural towns to spread it on roads as de-icer. radium. fucking radium. radium on the roads, in the water, in the soil. radiation in the cornfields. nobody is warned, nobody is told, nobody knows to check for fucking radium. this shit will outlive us. that dirt is radioactive forever. this isnt shit you can undo. xxxxxx

Gotta love that profit motive - yay capitalism.

cluegrrl:

april:

so funny how for a brief time we managed to get perfect alignment for extensions between browsers, webextensions from chrome to firefox to safari, and then google decided “nope, we’re going to enforce some new rules now, time to choose us as your only platform or put in extra work” and now you can’t even publish the same extension on every chromium fork.

reminder that it’s in your best interest to stop using Chrome before January 2023, or you’re going to lose extension data.

Seriously guys – Chrome is NOT WORTH IT.

The more of us who actually lean in to open source OS’s like Firefox, the more of the Internet will respond to the market demand, and the more actually useful ALL the options will have to be.

Do your part to push back against the monopolies. At least try it, ok?

edwardchup:

these imdb reviews are the only thing keeping me going right now they’re KILLING me

cushfuddled:

I know I’m being really snooty rn but I am literally begging television shows to go back to having endings that make actual thematic sense and don’t use tragedy as a way to peddle their finales as a more “honest” and “meaningful” experience