#labouring poor

[indizombie]

The State massively under-funded school education, because the rationally planned, centralised economy was designed to be run only on a thin top soil of managerial and technician class. The concept of a well-funded public schooling system, the bedrock of the process of production of liberal citizenship in postwar Europe, has been consistently regarded by Indian policymakers as an unaffordable luxury on the labouring poor. It is here that the privileged caste interests of India’s ruling class come into startling focus. This merits a fuller discussion; the states where lower caste interests were integrated fairly early in the power structure, such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, represent today the best models not just of public schooling but also of liberal citizenship.

Asim Ali, ‘Imprisoned minds’, Telegraph India

[lesewut]

'The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.' [Dostoevsky 'The House of the Dead']

'I despise […] no one, because it is in no one's power not to become a fool or a criminal, -because we would all become equal through equal circumstances, and because the circumstances are beyond us.' [Blüchner to his parents, 1834]

‘Woyzeck’ is considered the seminal and foremost social drama in German literature and altogether Büchner's most influential work. The play, which will always stay in a fragmentary state, was written between 1835 and 1837; it was discovered and published posthumously in 1879 as ‘Wozzek’ and first performed in 1913, primarly edited by Karl Emil Franzos. The play is directly based on the unemployed wig-maker Johan Christian Woyzeck, who was beheaded 1824 in Leipzig for the murderer of his mistress in 1821. Young and idealist Büchner, who studied politics and philosophy, wanted to show how poverty leads to physical and emotional suffering, therefore leading to deteriorating the mental health, which can seen as the cause for criminal activities. In this epoch the interpretation of the paradoxes of human-nature shifted from a philosophical consideration and got replaced by clinical interpretation, which lead to a self-inflicted assumption with reference to the environmental circumstances.

Scientific explanations of the so called ‘Free Will’ mean a voluntariness of 100 per cent for all actions, this means a knowledge and desire for the success of the act and this leads to higher sentencing, because voluntary element increases the sentence: As people are free to decide everything, the voluntary nature of committing murder is therefore a qualifying feature. This scientific optimism is frightening represented by the character of the Doctor in ‘Woyzeck’.

In a time, where social inequalities arise and progress is just feading the machinery, Woyzeck is barely eke out a living: His desperation for money leads him even to selling himself for scientific experiments. It is heart-breaking, how the most innocent soul of the play is treated and abused in his function by his superiors, driving him to murder. Blüchner also critisises the circumstances of the 'labouring poor', Woyzeck was in real life jobless, but he potrayed him as he experienced many workers at that time: Constantly in rush from one part-time-job to the other. The social hierarchy is clearly shown through the range presented in the play. From the Doctor, to the Drum Major and the Captain, a disfavour resonates. The narrative of the ‘virtuous poor’ is continuously depicted and placed into the mouth of the Captain, but Woyzeck confesses that it would be fine to have morals, if he would have no struggles to ensure the livelihood. With this text I am not aiming to summarise, it is just a fish-bit to not let the pictures of this special edition, unaccompanied. It can just be repeated, that we can understand much of our presents problems when we reflect the basic conflicts of the Epoch of the Industrial Revolution and that back then, the paradox of human-life can not be solved by selecting one way or the other, it can’t be the solution to decide rather spiritual believe or science should deal with problems, it is more important to rise the awareness of dogmatic solutions in all ways, to draw attention to the effects economical decisions have on society, especially the financially weakest ones; to ensure healthy circumstances for living, in which no child has to suffer from poverty, which leads to deficits in many areas. Without appreciation for the significant function every system-relevant profession implies, the value of work and working is expecting harmful effect. Some fruits of thoughts are not new, quite the contrary, but we should be thankful for those humanistic ideas and resume work, as we still have much to do as long our ‘modernity’ could not maintain peace and find solution(s) against world-hunger and general exploitation.

'A good social policy is the best criminal policy.' [Franz von Lizst]

'I think if we went to heaven, we would have to help thunder.'

Gedichte inspiriert nach Woyzeck I. Kindchen, wo sind deine Eltern? Geworfen auf die Welt, musst du bald auch dieser entschwinden Geirrt bist du Tag und Nacht und konntest Niemanden finden und als du im Himmel den Mond sahst, wolltest du dich zu ihm begeben Doch nur faules Holz war der Mond, an dem du dich nicht kannst wärmen Das Kindchen schwamm durch die dunkle Masse in Richtung des Sonnenballs Nur verwelkte Sonnenblumen fandest du da und als du dich zu den Sternen aufmachtest war ihr Licht brennender Mückenschlag Zurück kam das Kind auf die Erde, die war ein umgestürzter Hafen noch immer allein ging es herum und musste sich dann setzen Auf die Welt geworfen das Kind Ohne Wurzeln, geschenkt dem Vergessen II. Das Täglichbrot vermisst von denen, die die Ähren säen Der Himmel wurde eingerahmt und die Robotenden sind in Käfigen Es maschieren in den vordersten Reihen die Ärmsten der Armen niemand kennt die Namen von denen, die als Erstes fallen Dem Hauptmann wird beim Anblick von Windmühlen schwermütig Woyzeck hetzt wie eine offene Klinge Ein guter Mensch, der rennt doch nicht "Es muss was Schönes sein um die Tugend, doch ich bin ein armer Kerl Wäre gern moralisch mit Uhr und gutem Schuhwerk" An dem Körper wird gewerkelt wie an einem lebenden Skelett an allen Wesen dieser Schöpfung experimentiert die ganze Welt Unselig in allen Welten Selbst im Schlafe sie wie auf Arbeit schwitzen und wären sie im Himmel müssten sie beim Donnern helfen! III. Die Wissenschaft verkündet der Mensch ist frei! Er hat den Willen in sich, er ordnet und lässt Sonnenlicht ins Aug hinein! Die Wissenschaft verkündet der Mensch ist frei! Er hat den Willen zu machen was ihm beliebt ob Gutes oder Schlechtes ist allerlei! Die Wissenschaft verkündet der Mensch ist frei! Mit eigenem Willen denkt er in doppelter Raison ihn leitet die Vernünftigkeit

Die Wissenschaft verkündet der Mensch ist frei! Dem Willen sind alle Muskelfasern unterworfen in dem Menschen verklärt sich die Individualität zur Einheit

Die Wissenschaft verkündet der Mensch ist frei! Der Wille reizt nicht zur Wut, wer sich ärgert ist unwissenschaftlich, es gebührt kaltes Blut

Die Wissenschaft verkündet der Mensch ist frei! Der eigene Wille kämpft sich aus der Armut und wer noch in ihr darbt, ist selber daran schuld

Die Wissenschaft verkündet der Mensch ist frei! Tatsachen sind gegeben und werden nicht hinterfragt Der neue Gott: Verbeuget euch vor dem Arzt!

[stevieharringtonwifeguy]

mtf omega stevie where everyone's like why bother transitioning you've already got the vagina and the uterus and everything. but stevies like listen. it's the principle of the thing. also sue me for wanting big naturals

meanwhile alpha eddie's losing his mind bc estrogen makes stevie smell so much sweeter, like honey and caramel, and he's trying not to be a total knothead about it but the 'big naturals' are. ho boy. they're there alright. and stevie already had 'childbearing hips' according to her mother, but the fat redistribution has basically turned her into some kind of fertility goddess, and eddie is so ready to get started on those six nuggets

[magenta-somethings]

reading tim drake's earlier comics (Batman: Rite of Passage, Robin 1991, Robin II, etc) and the politics are... Interesting.

[faithfromanewperspective]

if i were a rich man is such a comment on society and religion and the status of academia

[finitevariety]

“You, Greg, are the welcoming glove into which I slide my delicate hand, right? You protect me from the dirty work. You’re my social dildo. My proxy pecker.”

Greg looked at Tom’s finger, which was so near his face he could have bitten it if he wanted to. “So, um—”

“So I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing shitty gloves. Come on. Are you going to let me down, Greg?”

“No,” Greg said. 

He wondered if Tom would pivot the point into a bracing, bro-ey clap upon the shoulder. Perhaps when he remembered his outstretched finger he would look at it like an alien traitor and draw back in a twitchy, awkward retreat. That eyeglint was still there, though, so what he did instead was step forward again and wag the finger in Greg’s face. 

“Good boy,” he said, because he was really proficient at this—like, maybe it’s not corporate gaslighting, but it’s not not that, right? It was a mixed message, anyway: a stern finger and firm praise; his cruel and friendly gleam. He was proprietary; he disavowed. So, like, how the fuck was Greg to know whether to sit or stay or roll over? 

[soldier-poet-king]

Actually the whole work thing would be infinitely less stressful if I actually knew how to navigate the white collar world and was not from a working class background and I have no idea how anything works because we were poor! No one in my family has done shit like this!

[fatehbaz]

In this remarkably rich account of land and profit-making in colonial Calcutta (now Kolkata), Debjani Bhattacharyya traces the transformation of marshes, bogs, and muddy riverbanks into parcels of fixed, bounded, and alienable property under British colonial rule. Framed evocatively as a “history of forgetting” (6), Bhattacharyya details the everyday enactments and contestations of imperial power undertaken by colonial officials and merchants, hydrographers, Indian property owners, urban planners, surveyors, and speculators between the 1760s and 1920. Over this period, the fluid and culturally multivalent spaces of the delta were translated and transformed into “dried urban landscapes of economic value” (12). [...] [T]he economization of space was so encompassing that earlier ways of understanding and inhabiting the delta’s shifting lands and waters were [obscured] [...].

The British thus had to produce landed property both conceptually and materially in a process that proceeded through two entangled registers of power. The first was the legal register, which translated shifting and indeterminate aqueous spaces into apparently solid landed property through modes of legal classification and arbitration. The second register of power concerned hydraulic technologies of drying and draining the landscape (10), which materialized these legal categorizations in the production of urban space. 

By the early twentieth century, these “technologies of property” (5) had produced new lines between land and water in the city and rendered its fluid ecologies, such as marshes and bogs, as valuable “land-in-waiting” (172) for property development and financial speculation. [...] 

[T]he delta’s fluid ecology emerges at times as a limit on the property-making activities of the East India Company and the British Crown [...]. Bhattacharyya’s account highlights the mobility of the delta’s fluid landscape, with water, silt, and mud taking on agentic roles and shaping historical trajectories. [...] [Bhattacharyya] provides a fascinating account of the meanings of rivers and other watery spaces in Bengali cultural life, drawing on folk songs, poetic genres such as the maṅgalkāvya, storytelling, and forms of artistic representation such as painted narrative scrolls. [...] Bhattacharyya recovers forms of relationality and claim-making in the fluid deltaic environment that exceed the representations of colonial cadastral surveys and revenue records. [...] 

[H]owever, Calcutta became increasingly disconnected from its watery past. [...] [There was an] increasing entanglement of the urban land market with infrastructural projects to dry land and control water. These included the excavation of an extensive network of canals; the construction of docks in Khidderpore and the draining of the Maidan [...]. A collective amnesia about Calcutta’s fluid ecologies set the stage for the emergence of a speculative real estate market by the beginning of the twentieth century [...]. This period saw Calcutta’s remaining wetlands and marshes rendered as “land-in-waiting for property development” (169) in a process that continues to the present day.

---

All text above by: Calynn Dowler. “Debjani Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta.” Asian Ethnology Volume 80 Issue 1. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[bastard-sweet]

The point of A Christmas Carol was not to teach morals by example; it was to teach morals directly. Ebenezer Scrooge was specifically made to be a reader insert. The lessons of A Xmas Carol can mostly be divided into 'you don't want to be this guy (he's suffering)' and 'you don't want to be this guy (he's evil, like ultimately, Biblically, very un-Xtian)', afforded by the third category of Basically Everything In The Book 'you don't want to be this guy anymore (he's deeply relatable to the upper-class Victorians the book is targeted at)'. The fact that he doesn't spend money on himself is not a sign that he needs to care for himself more; it's to show that he's so greedy to the point that it is useless, to show that valuing money this much is bad and senseless. The fact that he were to die if he didn't change for the better is an example of Cosmic punishment. Maybe the story does have a hint of teaching Scrooge to take care of himself, but that's only for the same reason that Scrooge is given a 'workaholic billionaire' backstory. The rich like(d) to see themselves as hard-working, and were the target audience, and Dickens didn't want to insult his target audience while trying to teach them basic human decency. So he also took the opportunity to slot that into the 'you don't want to be this guy (he's suffering)' method of teaching.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-starbucks-union-millrise-alberta-vote-scott-lunny-1.6518534

[pedanther]

"Here is a very fashionable epistle," I remarked as he entered. "Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fish-monger and a tide-waiter."

A tide-waiter was a customs officer who went aboard newly-arrived ships to check their cargo and make sure the correct amount of customs duty was being paid. I can think of a few ways that could lead to a problem calling for Holmes's insight.

(That actually wasn't what I was expecting to find when I went looking for the definition. My guess was that it meant somebody who subsisted by searching below the high tide line on the banks of the Thames for valuable objects washed ashore. This was an actual occupation in Holmes's day, but the term for it – which I used to know and had forgotten – is "mudlark". A mudlark would make a suitably dramatic contrast to the author of the afternoon epistle... but, on reflection, may well not have enough education to write a letter at all.)

[novablisters]

“we shouldn’t have ai make art we should have it do the difficult dangerous labour nobody actually wants to do.” everything is art. anything can be an expression of the soul. there will always be someone out there who wants to have that job. we SHOULD have a system where things are safer but our focus is entirely in the wrong place. it’s produce produce produce when we need to be able to take our time and ENJOY our labour and our thoughts and our creativity and our life. maybe I LIKE sitting in an oven throwing sparks around! I don’t want robots to throw my welding apprenticeship out the window because people “don’t want to weld” because I genuinely love welding. I like working with metal and fire! hell, I like getting burnt! I got electrocuted the other day because I was stick welding with wet gloves! I DO NOT CARE!!!!! it’s a thousand times better for me than sitting around in an office my whole life I don’t want to be forced to learn coding or whatever the hell bullshit the future has to offer I want to work in the real world with real shit I do not want to be smothered to death by modernity and robotics because somebody else thinks that’ll solve the earths problems. it won’t! I need something real or I’m actually going to be admitted to a psych ward and because you assholes were busy focusing on the wrong progress I’ll die in there because there’s practically zero funding going into healthcare where I live HELLO CAN YOU HEAR ME

[hella1975]

Honestly I would love an atla fic of just vibes, characters doing things that they didn't in the show (being dockworkers! awesome!), so actually pls more descriptions of Zuko and Azula's life. Although of course just write it for yourself, the idea sounds amazing!

THIS IS SO REASSURING like on the one hand yes im aware most of the atla fandom are just utter losers (affectionate) about the universe and want to explore it as much as possible just like me but also ive literally written thousands of words with ZERO canon-relevant plot lmfao. i may be catering to a very niche audience but by god if im not having fun with it

[miscellaneous--bones]

HIGHLY doubt i will be drawing her again from here on out, i just wanted a visual refrence for a reader insert character. shes cute, regardless

[hesitationss]

it also reminds me when that person on twit was talking abt gig economy and how a lot of ppl exploit gig workers who are not treated well or paid well to experience luxury and ppl said they were ableist... as if a lot of the ppl working in gig economy are not disabled or will become disabled by their mid 40s from... doing gig economy work like uber or delivering groceries. like the assumption that all disabled people are not in that class bracket or in that type of work because everyone's understanding of a disabled person is entirely clouded by class ignorance is so depressing to me. as if our houseless neighbours are not entirely saturated with disabled people whether before houselessness or during... not to mention how common it is to develop psychosis on the street. i really hate contemporary 'internet discourse' because someone will note something deeply concerning and then somehow people will insert their personal arguments and justifications that have nothing to do with what the original person said.

[steelycunt]

losing my mind at eleven pm last night trying to scour the internet to figure out the route a guy living in talgarth wales would take to get to london victoria if he were to travel via national express coach in the year of 1979. the things i do for him