sparrowhawksshadow - Tumblr blog

[sparrowhawksshadow]

my pet issues are "open the border" and "gas prices should be higher" so I'd put up similar numbers anywhere in the country

I understand why Democrats are running on the “no tax hikes for anyone earning less than $400,000” pledge but I really wish they weren’t. We should definitely be raising taxes on people who earn $300,000 a year, are you kidding me? I mean really we should be raising taxes on everyone, but if you’re going to insist upon a limit that excludes most taxpayers, have it be $150,000 per household or something. Obama used to use $250k as his number, and even with inflation that’s less than the $400k number they now use. My guess is that it’s a compromise number selected to please a lot of upper-middle-class Democratic donors— excluding many of the the dentist-rich from new taxes, but not the executive-rich.

[sparrowhawksshadow]

A couple of times I've driven to work along a narrow winding mountain road full of potholes, steep drop on one side and rockslide waiting to happen on the other, going exactly the speed limit, with four or five human streptococci in SUVs stacked up behind me and honking. Sometimes they would pass me on the left with a blind corner not a hundred feet away. I would have truly savored their tears of rage if I wasn't scared they'd get me killed as well.

i love forcing the people driving behind me to slow down actually. like, hi, sorry. youre in my town. my community loses its kids to drivers like you. the least you can do while youre passing through is go the Fucking speed limit. i dont Care if you had to come down from 70. theres no shoulder, people are trying to cross, youre going 35 and youll like it. cry your eyes out

[sparrowhawksshadow]

coming up with an au were a dead character lives but shaking my head while i do it so everyone watching knows i support the role their death played in the narrative and consider it a legitimate writing choice

[sparrowhawksshadow]

@songofsaraneth look

Feeling funny today

[sparrowhawksshadow]

palisade 42 aftermath

Gucci Garantine, munching a block of Kerrygold butter Calci-Yummm: Hot damn. We do that?

[sparrowhawksshadow]

good morninge immediotely

or else

[sparrowhawksshadow]

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is another example -- absolutely genre-defining work of cyberpunk fiction, also broad parody of earlier cyberpunk in many ways.

one of the things about genres is often the big progenitor of a genre is also a parody of / commentary on that genre.

i have not really processed the implications of this so it's just an observation.

[sparrowhawksshadow]

this is the senshi of affirmation. reblog to have approval for whatever thing you're waiting for permission for

[sparrowhawksshadow]

If im reading a 800 page book I should be freed of all other responsibilities in my life. Like sorry I can’t do that right now because im reading this long ass book. Yeah you know how it is

[sparrowhawksshadow]

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians—which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism (1945)

[sparrowhawksshadow]

It's not even that you can or should believe two contradictory things at once (I don't care, you're not Walt Whitman). It *is* often the case that people talk about two ideas or facts *as if* they are contradictory, when it is perfectly possible for both to be true, but the implications of both things being true at the same time are challenging and uncomfortable and people don't want to think about them.

A lot of arguments On Here are like this. "Nice dichotomy -- now what lies outside it?" Except there's not even a dichotomy, it's just that it would kind of suck if these things were both true and that would force you to question your assumptions. (But they are.)

[sparrowhawksshadow]

You guys want to play a game? REBLOG and put in the tags why you follow this person

[sparrowhawksshadow]

A lot of people went on the computer and never came back

[sparrowhawksshadow]

even when i am not posting, know that horrible sentences are raging within me

[sparrowhawksshadow]

“I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me and a young man occupied the place behind me. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves.”

— American writer and music critic Carl Van Vechten on the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Paris, May 29th, 1913.

[sparrowhawksshadow]

ok what civil war books would you recommend for a non-american. someone whose entire knowledge of the civil war is, like, 'when it was over they had a large army, which was one of the factors leading to confederation-'

I think I’d still go with Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial, primarily because Abraham Lincoln is someone you’re going to have at least the broad cartoon-guy-in-a-top-hat knowledge of so he’s an accessible in and if all you know about the entire Civil War is what Abraham Lincoln though about it, that’s a fine place to start.

I’d also recommend Bruce Levine’s The Fall of the House of Dixie, and not just because I’ve been rereading it with an eye to your question, and it is, by the way, incredibly fun and weird to read a popular history history book with an eye on how someone from another country with no real context would see it. Anyway, The Fall of the House of Dixie has a banger of a title to go with a great thesis about what the confederacy stood for and how it fell. Levine is also great at the emotionally compelling anecdote.

And then for a more contemporary take, I really love Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed as this very thoughtful meditation on history and memory. I think it’s one of those books that got quickly forgotten after that brief interest in ‘anti-racist reading lists’ passed and that makes me sad because I think it’s really something special.