twelvemonkeyswere

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"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

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one of the reasons why Columbo is so funny is because he will get on his suspect's nerves sooo badly and then the suspect cannot do anything about it because Columbo will go "I'm just a little guy and it's my birthday! I'm just a little birthday boy!" with the suspect and Columbo both knowing full well that Columbo is lying but the suspect cannot say a word about it not being Columbo's birthday due to the social conventions surrounding them and the fact that they are indeed guilty of murder

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Prima Ballerina Fountain in Poddębice, Poland by Małgorzata Chodakowska

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Look me straight in the eyes and tell me your current music taste isn’t what your father played in the car when you were a kid.

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I keep getting this Etsy ad where this person says, "My personal style wouldn't be what it is without self-expression," and every time, I'm floored by what an absolute nothing sentence that is.

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gonna be a hater for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you HATED like viscerally hated like 1/2 star on letterboxd HATED

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Interview with the Vampire, 2.01 | What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned

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me drowning in a lake while my friend, 11th century french rabbi and prolific scriptural commentator Schlomo "Rashi" Yitzchaki (zy"a) stands nearby: help im drowing help me rashi

Schlomo "Rashi" Yitzchaki (zy"a): "drowing" is likely a scribal error for "drowning." "im drow[n]ing" is to say: my lungs have become filled with water, and i am struggling to breathe. "help" once followed by "help me" a second time: the first [help] is directed to the Holy One, blessed be He, and means: "may He help us by swiftly delivering the World to Come;" the second (i.e., "help me") is to invoke direct assistance in this world, spoken as if to a personal friend. the meaning of "rashi" here is unclear.

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2026 booktok discourse: sad books are a cognitohazard (they make you sad)

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you're the only one who understands me mr strobbery

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Louis: I was haunted by my brother's death, by the abandonment of my sister, by the murder of Lestat, I...

Daniel: Murder? What murder? It was an act of mercy. You didn't kill Lestat. You spared him, out of some fucked-up idea you had about love.

Louis: Love? I bled him like a pig and waited for the death rattle.

Daniel: You were shot point-blank by an alderman. You were dropped a thousand feet and survived. You torched Antoinette just to make sure. Where does the trash go, Louis? You take the trash down to the street and some guys show up in a truck and they throw it in the back, and then, they drive it out to the middle of nowhere, right? No. They take the trash to the dump. And having lived two blocks away from the dump just outside of Fishkill, New York, with my first wife, I can state, with authority, what else you'll find there. Rats. Big fսckin' rats, the size of Kevin Durant's sneakers. Enough blood in them to bring back the dead. Especially one in a trunk with locks on the inside. You knew it, Louis. You had to. The biggest rat-eater of them all.

Louis: I couldn't burn him.

Daniel: But Claudia could.

Louis: No, she couldn't.

Daniel: She stuck a pen in his neck. She recorded his last words in his own blood. The girl did not have a fսckin' problem tossing him on the grill, okay? Was it raining, Louis? She couldn't burn him. You cursed her into the darkness. You chose Lestat over her, time and time again. You don't need a memoir, Louis. You need a hundred sessions of EMDR. You know, the shit they put soldiers through when they see one of their platoon buddies get blown up in front of them? 144 years of life, and you're still Louis the p­imp, paying a whore to sit in a room and talk with you. 'Cause why? You got some story you wanna tell the whole world about yourself?

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE | SEASON 1

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This is by far the most incredible thing I've ever seen. Put the sound on and watch to the end, I promise it's worth it.

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btw it's extremely easy and fast to donate to the sameer project or even just spread the word if you can:

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"i do not dream of labour" is one of the worst pseudo-marxist taglines that western leftists have co-opted because when you ask them what they do dream of, they say traveling, studying, and creating art. broski, who's flying the plane to take you to prague? who's the security at the library with the texts you're studying? who are the clerks in the museum showcasing your art? like bro, you do dream of labour. you just dream of someone else doing it so you don't have to! you merely want to outsource the labour and make it invisible.

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feels like every few weeks I have to relearn how to exist, that I do need to sit in the sun and move my body and not drink too much coffee and dress in clothes that make me feel good and talk to my friends and journal and get off my phone sometimes and eat vegetables and drink more tea and generally reclaim the space in my life for myself ya know