#tutter is so real

[diet-bathwater]

current top ten best tutter moments 2022

[bump1nthen1ght]

A Very Monstrous Kinktober: Day 26 (Masturbation)

Kink: Masturbation

Pairing: Mothman x GN!Reader

Other Kinks: Consensual Voyeurism, Mutual Masturbation

Warnings: N/A

Word Count: 1091 words

Kinktober Masterlist

There is a vivid squelch, silicone against lube, when you press the dildo into you. It’s loud, wet, and perfectly lewd. The kind of sound you’d hear amped up in volume in a schlocky porno or some hentai. It’s the kind of sound you’d avoid making in fear of being caught; But your partner is gone, has been for the past 3 days, to help in the forewarning of an oncoming disaster two states over.

And gods, how you have missed him.

A year ago you never thought you’d be this touchstarved, this desperate for affection for one man’s touch. You thought that kind of stuff was only in romance novels and smutty fanfiction, accepting that no human man was ever going to be that exciting, leaving you wanting so much more.

Well, you had been right about the human part, at least.

Still, your body ached for the soft feeling of your partner's fuzzy wings, his long fingers which always held onto your waist so gently. His ruby red eyes that seemed to stare directly into your soul, always filled with a gentlemanly love, even when he had you bent over a table.

“Hmmm, Atticus.” You moan, feeling the fake balls of your toy nudge against your entrance, sunken full inside of you. “It feels so good.”

Familiar with a…tool this size, you waste no time and begin to thrust it in and out, moaning your sweet partner's name as you do. You imagine his deep, southern drawl. His claws running down the side of your face. His antennae twirling and buzzing as you come undone for him.

You even imagine the familiar tapping on your window, the one he always uses to sneak into your bed late at night. So quiet despite being 7 feet tall.

“Oh my.”

And now you can even hear-

Wait.

Your eyes shoot open, sitting up from bed, realizing you now lie spread eagle in front of your very-real boyfriend who is very much actually present in your bedroom.

His antennas tutter back and forth, hand thrown over his mouth like a shocked 50s housewife. The dildo slides an inch out of you as you scramble upward, something like an excuse on your lips, face red hot with embarrassment.

“Did you miss me that much?” Your partner chuckles, lighthearted, a matching blush lighting up his black fur.

“I-” You stutter, wondering if he heard you calling out his name. You may have been dating for a year now, but still, being caught by your refined, almost-victorian gentleman partner is a little mortifying.

“Well, if it helps.” Atticus’ voice sinks to a lower octave, big eyes narrowed like a smirk. “I missed you a whole lot too.”

The hand around his mouth slides down his chest, leading your eye across his scrumptious body, right to his unsheathed cock.

When did he even get that out?

“C’mon baby.” Atticus drawls. “Keep going.” He sits down in a corner chair, stroking his swollen dick. “Gimme a show.”

A shiver rolls down your spine.

My god, where’d he learn to talk like that?

You ain’t complaining, slipping back to your comfortable position, making sure to keep your legs extra wide. You slide the dildo all the way back in.

Atticus hums in approval, hand rubbing at his flushed head.

“How's it feel?”

“Good.” You pant, slowly rocking the dildo in and out, making sure to press it extra hard with each thrust.

“As good as mine?” Mothman chuckles, rubbing some leaking precum down his shaft with his thumb.

You eye up his cock, biting your lip.

“No.” You gasp, the dildo hitting a particular sensitive spot, sending tingles down to your toes. “Not even close.”

“Hmm, but good enough while I was away?” His eyes shoot to the clear bottle of lube on your bedside table, almost halfway empty. “Seems it got put to work.”

“Couldn’t-” You breath hitches, spreading up your pace, “Couldn't h-help myself. Missed your cock so much.”

You throw your hips up, making a show of your entrance clenching around the thick shaft of the dildo. Lube and juices trickle down the curve of your ass.

Atticus remains dignified, silent as he lazily jerks himself off. But you know the signs by now, see the way his chest tightens and his antennae twitch.

“That right?” Atticus’ other hand reaches down and begins rubbing at the slit where his cock protrudes, an extra sensitive spot you're well acquainted with. “This cock missed you too.” He finally shows some sign of his pleasure, a small hitch in his articulation when he squeezes his head. “Missed that tight hole, missed filling it up.” He rolls his neck, a move he knows you love, showing off the sinewy muscle as it cracks. “Hmm, felt like torture, not being able to fuck you whenever I wanted.”

Your wrist aches and goes ignored, your focus solely on Atticus and the burning fire in your belly. You hang off every word like it’s gospel, letting it sink into your chest and stir up your insides.

“You got me addicted, honey. How could I resist coming home early?” Precum squirts out his head, splattering the top of his hand. “Knowing I’d have such a sweet little thing to greet me?”

Your moans are breathy, vision getting fuzzy are your orgasm climbs. Your brain wants to close them to ignore everything else and focus on your high, but you force them on Atticus. His cock twitches in his hands, and you think you can make out a low “Damn.” as he jerks it.

“You gonna cum?” Atticus asks.

All you can do is nod, head stuffed with cotton and legs trembling. You imagine it’s his cock, the cock in front of your eyes, fucking you open. That it's his hands wrapped around your hips, his pelvis in between your thighs.

Atticus leans forward, cock still humping into his palm, but those big eyes only on you.

“Then cum.”

“Ahh-nggh!” You keen, hips spasming as your orgasm wracks your body, exploding across your abdomen and miking your toy.

Your limbs feel heavy, sweat dripping down your chest. The toy slips out of you and you pant, leaving trails of lube on the bed. Its that post-orgams kind of high that has you going “Wait, what was I doing again?”

“Good job.”

You don’t even have the energy to react when you feel Mothman’s palm against your face, not even wondering how he moved over so quickly, now straddling your hips.

“Now, it’s my turn.”

[stayxlix]

AYY MOOTERS ON MOOTERS THEY KNOW HOW TO MOOT! TUTTER PULLING TO THE PARTY IN MY CRAZY PINK WIG!!!! BEST WRITER? BEST WRITER? BEEN A FAN SINCE PART ONE!

I was getting beaten to lunacy, depression, delusion, confusion even. I got the 1st grade knowledge beat out of me with this one, i couldnt count for a sec. My vision got all blurry, thought this was chapter 17 for a minute there👹

Bitch, out the gate you be coming in HARD. You know how to set the mood, I get scared for their asses! It feels like being on drugs or something (though i aint never been on drugs, but this is how i imagine it feels like👀) I visualize like I ain't ever visualized before, put on some music reading this at night, DAYUM🛐‼️

I reread this tasty ass story atleast once every week. It's tradition at this point.

1."The physical contact was grounding—you were grounding. A lifeline anchoring Felix to the reality he so desperately needed to return to." This fucked me up😪 So beautifully written!

2. "How he'd transformed from someone potentially willing to end your life, to someone committed to protecting it at all costs." Had to pause, take a breather, and look out my window to reflect on who I am as a person, then keep reading. Absolutely Precious.

3. "Some day," he dropped his voice, "When all of this is over, I'm going to carry you back into that palace." His lips found the curve of your jaw, trailing a heated path down. "I'm going to take my time with you, princess," he nipped at the sensitive skin on your neck, causing your core to flutter with anticipation. "And then," he whispered, "I'm going to lay the world at your feet." I was hyperventilating baby I couldn't breath for shit reading this 👀

4. "Minho sighed in annoyance, as if holding a conversation with you was some sort of burden. “I didn’t want to discuss it with the others,” he snapped." TIRED, TIRED OF THE WAY HE TREATS ME. (Jk lol I get his stress but chill out, damn.)

5. "You were always mine," Felix breathed, "before we met, before all of this, you were never their princess," he leaned in, pressing his lips to your forehead. "You were always mine.” I had to stop reading and get some water, my throat dried out.

6.“You can’t,” Felix emphasized. A distant look clouded his eyes, a flash of whatever it was that had crossed his features after the nightmare seemed to resurface. “You grew up with servants to meet your needs while the rest of us bled for every scrap of food and warmth. You can’t understand, y/n. And even if you could, it won't change who I am or what I've done. The blood on my hands will never wash away.” This is where the problem occurs. Cuz what are you implying? You ate this part so much you gotta be locked away like that one song. 🗣 IM LOCKED UP THEY WONT OUT, THEY WONT LET ME OUT IM LOCKED UP🗣

7. "Go collect your friend," the man waved a hand at the door, "I will shelter you for the night. You're young, exhausted, and it looks like you've been through quite a lot." I LOVE HIM ALREADY DAMMIT

8. You knew this would not last forever with him. Nothing ever does. And you wondered if you will ever be able to accept that, even when you no longer have a choice. But in that moment, Felix was there. You extended a hand, and he was warm. He was real, and he felt more like home than anything ever had. You loved him too, and it was a feeling you did not dare let go." MY HEART! RIPPED OUT MY CHEST! I CANT BREATH! IM SOBBING!IM DEVASTATED.

IM FEELING LIKE IM ON THE LAST BITE OF MAC AND CHEESE ON THANKSGIVING, IM GUTTED, I DONT WANT IT TO BE OVER!!

But as always, let me calm down and get a lil sensitive. I love you my pookie bear❤️✨️

Your adding some good into my world with this story that i really need. Its like the same day everyday for me, then out of the blue, you pop up and you give me something to look forward to.

Like most people, there's lots of things I need to be distracted from, and you do just that for awhile❤️ I appreciate this lil story more then you could know, and I always get SO happy seeing you posted a new chapter. I can tell how much passion and effort you put into this story, and I applaud you for that🫶❤️ Take your time, take care of yourself, and feel no pressure on when you need to put a new chapter out, YOU should always come first❤️ -👹

hihi my spicy little👹💕once again, i truly have no words for how thoughtful and sweet all of this is. im so grateful to have you with me on this journey (since part one, day ONE) and im so glad its been able to keep your interest after all these months.<3

"got the 1st grade knowledge beat out of me" literally had me CACKLING please!!😭✋ your excitement and the photos you send (which are hilarious too btw) always have me grinning from ear to ear. i swear my favorite part of reading feedback from you is that i will NEVER be able to predict whats coming next.😂 seriously though, im so glad youve been able to immerse yourself in the story like this (if we're being honest i definitely lose touch with reality a little bit when i get lost in writing it lol) but im so touched that it could evoke such a response in you too. (ps "i reread this tasty ass story atleast once every week. It's tradition at this point" might just be one of my favorite compliments ive EVER received about my writing. this is literally one of the nicest things you can tell someone who writes imo🥹).

MY HEART! RIPPED OUT MY CHEST! I CANT BREATH! IM SOBBING!IM DEVASTATED

(okay but why is this literally me reading any of your asks) this was also one of the most fun parts of the chapter to write omg. i love writing the end of a chapter so much that sometimes its the first thing i do.🤭

the detailed journey through each little part of the story that you go through in your asks always leaves me on cloud nine.!!! i love this so so much, i swear it does not get any better than when someone quotes the story back to me.<33 so thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to share your thoughts on these specific moments. i loved reading every. single. one.💕

Had to pause, take a breather, and look out my window to reflect on who I am as a person I was hyperventilating baby I couldn't breath for shit reading this 👀 I had to stop reading and get some water, my throat dried out.

(also btw if it makes you feel any better i had a similar reaction to ALL of these after i typed them out. felix really does things to me, i probably need an intervention or some shit but here we are.🥹)

knowing that this story adds a touch of goodness to your world means more to me than i can ever express. :( im sorry to hear that you’ve got some challenges to face, but like you said i know we all do from time to time, so im just forever grateful that my writing can provide a little distraction for you in the midst of the everyday chaos.<3 (ps. if things ever get too rough, you know where to find me!!❤️)

okay okay i’m cutting myself off here, but i really do appreciate the little reminders to take my time and prioritize self-care too.<3 the way you express yourself is so unique, please never change. i love that you’re as insane and unhinged about this story as i am.🥹 as always thank you so much for the continued support, it is more appreciated than you could ever know.🤗💕

[zephyr-together]

self care is watching Bear in the Big Blue House

[notgonnarememberthis]

today (of all days) - pt. 1

Hello! I am back! Dropped off writing for a bit due to hiatus and my utter inability to write things in order but I have returned with a brand new 5+1 idea. Hope y’all enjoy it!!

5 times Gil helped Jessica + 1 time he was too late

Jessica wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing here, not really. With a bottle of bourbon in one hand and two suite tickets to the Mets game in the other she was certain it was a thank you. For helping her with the interrogations, for being there for Malcolm the past few months. Everything felt like a tornado right now, ripping her life apart but Gil-

Gil felt like something to hold onto.

However, standing here, in front of the door feels a lot more like moving on than she expected. Having someone to hold onto meant having something to lose. She’d already lost everything. She couldn’t do it again. Not this time.

She’s almost completely convinced herself to leave the gift on his doorstep and call once she was out of earshot when the door swings open. Gil doesn’t even look shocked to see her there, only raising an eyebrow at her dumbfounded look.

“How long were you planning on standing outside my door?” The smirk on his face tells her he’s joking.

“How-”

“I heard your heels. Nobody that lives on this floor would risk their neck walking in those.” He steps aside pulling the door open a little wider for her. “Come on in.” She does, taking a moment to look around. She’d seen his place for only passing moments. Mostly when she needed someone to watch Malcolm and Ainsley when she had a court hearing. The process of Martin’s trial was exhausting enough without Malcolm having a panic attack at the thought of being left alone with even just Luisa, who he’d known his whole life.

Though, he’d thought he’d known Martin his entire life too.

“Would you like a drink?” Gil’s voice pulls her out of the spiral she’d slipped into. He looks concerned, not many people do now-a-days.

“No, actually. I brought these for you.” She lifts the gifts to hand over to him. “It’s a thank you. For everything you’ve done for the past few months. Without you I-” She almost laughs. Truthfully, without him she would be nowhere. Likely lost in some pit of alcohol and pills, praying that neither of her kids are the ones that find their mother like that. After her family disgraced her with tuttering remarks that they always knew Martin Whitly was trouble, she felt abandoned. Cast aside with two children, one traumatized beyond any reason for a 12 year old and the other so painfully oblivious that even when she tried to go on as normal it unintentionally ripped Jessica’s heart out. Suddenly a single mother with no family.

“You didn’t need to do this.” Gil smiles, taking the tickets and bottle from her hands.

“I wanted to.”

“Well, I can’t wait to teach Malcolm the correct team to be rooting for.” Her jaw drops again. That wasn’t who the other ticket was meant for. He was supposed to bring a friend, or family, or a girlfriend. Not Malcolm. “What? You didn’t think I’d bring Shannon, did you?”

She tilts her head disapprovingly. “You don’t.”

“Jess.” He sighs placing both down and taking her by the shoulders. It’d become a common practice. A stance he adopted when he could see everything becoming too much all at once. Especially on the days of the trial where she was forced to testify against the man she loved. Or, once loved. “Malcolm is a good kid. I like having him around. Right now, he needs to feel normal and If I can give him a day where I teach him everything I know about baseball? If it distracts him from everything else for just one day, that makes me happy.”

“You’re a good man.” She smiles, almost lamenting how she wishes for a moment that Gil was Malcolm’s father. He was the antithesis of her, grounded and calm. A hero for both the city but for her son too.

“Should I get two glasses?” She looks to the door, her lips searching for an excuse to leave that truthfully doesn’t exist. Her schedule completely cleared of everything shortly after Martin’s arrest other than press hounding her every other day. Publishists demands for the story of Mrs. Whitly flooded her voicemail. Both Malcolm and Ainsley at school for another 5 hours meant she would be all alone in a home that whispered with the voices of dead women she never even met before.

“Sure.” She decides. He moves to the cabinet retrieving two glasses that look more expensive than anything she’d really expect him to own.

“Family heirloom.” He explains, having caught her expression of surprise. “My mother gave them to me as a good luck gift after I graduated from the academy.”

“Well I could use all the luck I could get.” She chuckles dryly.

“That and I don’t think glasses I got on sale at Macy’s are quite fitting for what you brought.” That does actually get a genuine laugh from her. It feels good to laugh. Truthfully she doesn’t remember the last time she had a real one, not laced with a fake polite tone or sarcasm. He pours them both a glass and they move into the living room.

His decor is much simpler than her home. The walls hold a lot more frames, family and friends smile back at her and she stops in her tracks when she notices one of Malcolm. He’s smiling at the camera with a wide toothed grin that brings tears to her eyes. She remembers Gil had asked her if it was ok that he had that photo in his apartment. A small moment from a diner she heard Malcolm talk about a lot, Mel’s if she remembers or something along those lines. Seeing the photo here, amongst other family of Gil’s, hit something different. A chord struck that she wasn’t the only one looking out for him now.

“Jess,” Gil calls to her, his voice a little panicked. She looks over and she wonders just how long he’d been trying to get her attention.

“Sorry. I was thinking.”

“How are you doing?” The question catches her off guard. So many people have asked her that in the past month alone. A call from her mother, from Birdie, her attorney, Alphonso, the therapist that Luisa recommended to her.

“I’m fine.” She tries.

“Jessica.” The tone is a don’t bullshit me one. He had a knack for knowing when she was lying.

“I can’t think about it. Not right now. It’s all-” Her voice catches in her throat and she chases the lump away with a drink. “Right now everything is too close. If I stop, it will all hit at once. I can’t let myself be swept up by Martin. Not when Malcolm and Ainsley need me.”

“But who’s there for you?” She stops again, staring off for a moment. Truly, the only person that she thought was ever there for her is getting a cushy space in a psychiatric hospital when he should be rotting in prison. When she can’t find an answer Gil speaks up again, “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you ever need anything my door is open.”

“I can’t do that to you. Not when you do so much for this family already.”

“Well, how about this. You bring the bourbon and we can talk about anything you need to talk about over a good drink that probably costs more than my paycheck.” She laughs, again it feels like it loosens some of the tension in her chest. A part of her screams at her, knowing that she’s getting to close again but yet his eyes are so gentle. With a smile that feels so soft that it should only be shared with the purest of heart. She doesn’t deserve to be smiled like that, and yet.

“I’d like that.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#3yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical

"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.

Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.

It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.

As far back as Engels, Marxists refused to countenance the idea of limits to human growth. While Malthus was (incorrectly) predicting that humanity would exhaust its food stores any day now and plunge into barbarism, Engels wrote, in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:

Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

But how can a finite planet sustain infinite growth? Through improvements in material processes. We use a lot less to make things today than we ever have, thanks to science -- and capitalism. The less labor and material used in a process, the less it costs to make and the more profit there is. But growth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:

The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.

Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated -- no longer "free" -- and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won't mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can't solve the problem, because it's always fighting a rear-guard action:

...[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.

The answer, Phillips argues, is a democratically planned economy -- a socialist solution. Not the "green lefty" answer, which requires "de-growth," but growth that is guided by democratic, not market, forces:

•  The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

•  The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

•  The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

"Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!" There's something gloriously anarcho-steampunk about that, right in line with Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine motto: "Love the machine, hate the factory."

Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world. Material abundance is the end of want and immiseration, and it's what progressive activists have demanded for their brothers and sisters since ancient times.

In the wake of the Black Friday sales after US Thanksgiving that in recent years have begun to take place in other countries as well, or Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas in Commonwealth countries, where people line up (or queue) before dawn in the freezing November weather outside the local MegaMart for ridiculously cut-price deals on everything, I’ve begun to notice a welter of Facebook status updates, tweets and ‘news’ articles sneering at videos of the trampling, stampeding chaos and images of people coming to blows over 40-inch plasma TVs, lap-tops or tumble dryers.

A survey of the incomes of those racing through the aisles to get to that hundred-dollar stereo that normally sells for $400 should give the smug tut-tutters pause though. This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works. In a democratically controlled economy, we may collectively decide on different production priorities, but surely we would still organise the production of items that bring people joy. Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure? Is the pleasure derived from a box-fresh pair of Nike running shoes or a Sony PlayStation 4 inferior to the pleasure the subscribers of Real Simple magazine derive from their $2000 coffee table made from recycled traffic signs? Likewise, why is the £59 hand-carved walnut locomotive from a Stoke Newington toy shop any less consumerist than the free plastic Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozen accompanying a Subway Fresh Fit Kids Meal?

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Anti-consumption politics almost always seem to be about somebody else’s wrong, less spiritually rewarding purchases. It is perhaps the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption. At the very least, no one should mistake this lip-pursed bien-pensant middle-class scolding for speaking truth to power.

The left once campaigned for better conditions for the workers who make things, now it is preoccupied with buying less of what's made, but "An anti-consumerist model of campaigning simply and ineffectively replaces that of a trade unionist model." Sure, the stuff is made by terribly exploited workers. That needs to stop. But rather than campaigning for a retreat from the comforts of technology, let's campaign for their provision to all who want them: "Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance."

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lot more with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides and requires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

But I also know the tremendous advances that evidence-based medicine has achieved over the last 200 years as a result of the germ theory of disease, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, pharmacology, lab technology and genetics. As Ben Goldacre, the doctor and health campaigner who manages to be simultaneously Britain’s most trenchant critic of Big Pharma and of medical frauds such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture and ‘nutritionists’, puts it: “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” The socialist left, with its historic commitment to reason and science, has to separate itself from the distractions of the crunchy left.

We could do far worse in this regard than learning from the AIDS campaigners of the late 80s and early 90s in organisations like ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group. They described and continue to describe themselves as “science-based treatment activists.” While engaging in multiple high-profile acts of militant civil disobedience against the pharma giants and both Republican and Democrat politicians, they also soberly, rigorously plunged deeply into the science of their condition, and were willing to change tack upon the advent of new evidence, as happened when early demands of expanded access or “drugs into bodies,” as was the slogan of the time, proved to be insufficiently nuanced. Despite most of the activists lacking any formal medical training, the extent of their evidence-focussed self-education and the quality of their reports and recommendations were such that clinicians began to recognise them as their equals in an understanding of the disease. And through this combination of a grounding in science and militant activism, ACT-UP and TAG changed the course of an epidemic, forcing governments to care about a plague killing queers, drug users and minorities.

Agrarianism isn't intrinsically leftwing. There's something inescapably Tory about the idea of a world as a Richard Scarry village where everyone is a small shopkeeper in a shire. It's the same force than animates xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment (and there's plenty of people in the green left who also militate against immigration, for the same reason). Small is beautiful only after you get rid of 80% of the world -- otherwise, we need dense, intense, technological living. The more of that we get, the more of the countryside we can be left for wildlife.

We are not in a lifeboat. Lifeboat politics are awfully convenient for thugs who would rather force you to do what they say than convince you. The Earth is imperiled, and it can't be saved by telling the world's majority that they will never enjoy the comfort that the minority of us enjoyed for the past century: "It is important for those who quite rightly care deeply about the threat to humanity represented by myriad ecological problems to inoculate themselves against such thinking, to foreswear anti-modernism and the lifeboat politics of limits to growth."

In the past century, certain leftists pretended that Stalinism's horrors were the price we had to pay for socialist rule. Today, the austere greens tell us that hairshirts, de-growth, and radical population reduction are the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of undoing capitalism's excesses. Neither is right. Dinosaurs walked the earth for ten million years; we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. The idea that we'll just stop now, stop progressing and improving on the things we developed, become "steady state" creatures, for the next 9 million years and change is a terrible one. Let's not swear off our futures.

Some people love living in the countryside, genuinely prefer it. But a mass-scale back-to-the-land experiment would be a disaster: "a wistful, sentimental appreciation of nature and lamentation of a lost Eden arises from a certain level of city-dwelling privilege forgetful of the tribulations of rural life and ever-present menace that is the wilderness. It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturalist—or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine—any day."

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

As a result of our audacity, our ultimate resource, each of the limits imposed upon us by nature that we have breached—from fire that allowed us to expend less food energy intake on digestion and permitted more energy to be given over to our expanding brain, through electric lighting that allows us to stay up after dark, to the technologies of the bicycle, the washing machine, the pill, abortion, and fertility treatments that have chipped away at patriarchy—has required a growing consumption of energy. All of these natural limits were imposed as arbitrarily as the rules and dictates of any illegitimate government. For this reason, one would think that the most defiant possible demand of anarchism—the political philosophy that challenges not just the power of the state, but all illegitimate authority—would be for the ever greater degrees of freedom delivered by the liberatory power of more energy. Indeed the entirety of the left, not just anarchists, in recognition of this potential for liberation, used to argue not against energy expenditure or technology, but that these advances be shared by everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology marries incisive science writing, radical politics, and blazing prose. It's an important book about climate, and an even more important book about the politics of doing something about the climate.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html

[a-gardenwaited]

@prxtty-in-pxnk​ sent:  "... I-It.. It CAN'T be.." (for my main verse, maybe?? bc i'm unoriginal)

“P-Pink. . .?” The pink gem’s words came out it little more than a squeak. Weak and quiet. Trembling and uncertain.

It was shocking how much a single voice could shake another. How nothing more than sounds uttered by another could bring everything to staggering halt. After everything...Spinel believed she’d never hear H E R voice again. She never wanted to. Not again. And yet, she had.

Stuttered words, yet still just as painfully clear. Still just as she r e m e m b e r e d. No. No, she didn’t WANT to remember. She didn’t want-- This wasn’t possible...was it? Was this some cruel joke on her? Some twisted game concocted by fate. By the universe?

Or, maybe her gem had finally cracked.

That had to be it! There was no other way. Pink was gone. Steven. It was Steven now. Only Steven. But, if this-- This thing was here... No, she couldn’t be. “You can’t!” Spinel finally bellowed, rushing thoughts finally spilling from her mouth in torrents of words. “Y-You’re not-- I know ya ain’t. You’re gone. Y’left! Th’s ain’t REAL.”

Hands darted up to press against her eyes, rubbing at them, scratching at them. At her face. Anything to jolt her out of this living nightmare. How funny was it all? How cruel? A moment where she believes perhaps things will be okay. That s h e might be okay. Ain’t she just a fool twice over now? How stupid of her to think it would be.

“Y-You-- Hehe-- hahaha! Y’never st-stop--AHAHAHA!

A half choked laugh silenced any further bumbling from Spinel. Hands still pinched and pulled at her face, her muffled laugh splitting into a howling cackle as it all settled it. 

It truly was H I L A R I O U S, wasn’t it? So torn and scarred by this single gem, and now? Now she was here to haunt her. Oh, how horribly wonderful that was. How perfectly sinister. The universe truly did have a TWISTED sense of humor, didn’t it? And she was just the punchline of it all.

[hamethyst]

Depth

Summary: If the halls are equivalent to a sea’s shallows, the bridge is an ocean’s deep, dark blue on darker.

 In which Shiro seeks something and finds someone seeking the same. Or: the Black Paladin and the princess meet...again.

Rating: G

Character(s): Shiro, Allura

Also available on AO3.

He didn’t think he had much naiveté left. At thirteen, he clung to his parents’ shoulders as they shared see-you-soon’s in the center of the Galaxy Garrison’s entrance hall. That first night in his new bunk, he thought about the sky he used to study from his window and longed for the lens of his sticker-tatted telescope and the cheap green-glow stars stuck to his bedroom ceiling back home.

Of course they knew. In the side pocket of his carry-on, he found a pack of those stars and a message from his mother. Keep shooting. He stuck the molds to the bottom of the top bunk under which he slept, and went to sleep with the feeling that home was a little bit closer.

Those stars remained until he graduated, little points of light to guide his hand through messages to family and friends, to provide company through late-night workouts on the floor. By the time he received his first official badge, they still glowed a dull green, brightest when the darkness was deep enough.

He almost took some on the mission to Kerberos, for old times’ sake, as a childish symbol of good luck. Bought a packet and ultimately left them in his desk drawer, with plans to give them away to some new homesick recruit maybe, after they returned to Earth.

He could’ve used some, he thinks now with a wry smile, during his…time with the Galra. The ones in his old bunk, maybe; deep as that darkness had been, they would’ve glowed good as new, and maybe made that seemingly endless night a little shorter.

At least this ship isn’t lacking for light. As he traverses yet another hallway, it follows his footsteps as much as it guides them, subtle as it bounces off the metal walls and floor in hues he’s only ever seen in sea shallows. It’s comforting, in its own small way, a gift he didn’t think he’d need at this age, as he is now. Nevertheless, he can’t deny the admittedly fragile calm that overtakes him as he goes from hall to hall, past door after door, and never encounters a corner dark enough for his mind to manipulate.

Perhaps that small boy in him hasn’t left entirely. He still follows the light patterns on the floor, after all, the length of his strides altering to find them, catch them beneath his boot as if they might scurry away. He still finds curiosity taking hold with each chamber he passes, flesh fingers itching to press against a door in the hopes it’ll open and reveal.

And when he finds himself inadvertently entering the castle-ship’s bridge (and he feels a residual stir of excitement at the idea. A real castle, just like in the fairytales Ma sometimes read to him), his heart still tut-tut-tutters a rhythm of wonder against his ribcage as he catches sight of the one thing his ten, sixteen, twenty-one-year-old self knew to be true, long before the evidence ever presented itself.

He pauses just inside the huge, arching threshold, quiet but not quiet enough. With a sharp whip of her head, the extraterrestrial princess to his newly-christened Paladin captures his gaze and holds it.

“Sir Shirogane?” she asks, her head tilting, voice lilting, growing already familiar to his eyes and ears.

“Princess…” he murmurs. Allura, his memory supplies. He starts and finally comprehends his whereabouts, glances down the hall from which he came. “Uh, wow. Didn’t realize I’d come this far.” He turns back, eyes catching on the high ceiling, windows looking out to the foreign world beyond. He shrugs, trying for a sheepish smile. “Sorry for the surprise.”

“Oh, that’s alright.” Princess Allura smiles, her stance (protective, obviously born of practice, he can’t help but notice) relaxing with the lift of her brows. “A bit of a start, is all it was. I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be awake at this time.”

“Same here.” Stuffing down a mild case of curiosity, Shiro meets her smile with a small one of his own, and prepares himself to return to the halls. “I’ll, uh…leave you to your business, then.”

“Oh, it wasn’t business.” Her words make him pause. With a rustle of her gown, the princess turns and takes a step away from her pilot’s stand. “Well, no urgent business. Just some simple maintenance.”

“Oh,” he echoes. He still preps himself to leave. “Well, I still don’t want to get in your way. I’ll just–”

“Sir Shirogane, you’re fine,” she interrupts, firm yet polite as she smiles again. “You’re not intruding,” she continues. “This room – as well as all within the castle’s perimeter – are yours to peruse as you and the other Paladins wish.” Her smile widens. “You are welcome here.”

Certainly more welcome than you were last time you chanced upon an alien ship, a part of him thinks absently, half-amusedly. “Uh…thank you, Princess.”

Maybe the halls can wait a few minutes.

Still a touch self-conscious, he steps past the threshold and onto the bridge, steps seeming louder somehow, perhaps in comparison to the princess’ barely-heard tread. He hesitates, unsure where, exactly, to go, before he settles against the Black Paladin’s – his – designated bridge seat. “So, you said you were doing maintenance?” A perhaps poor topic of conversation. How does one make small talk with royalty?

“Yes,” the princess answers easily, returning to her stand; settling against the side of his seat, he watches as her fingers fly over the holograph. “Mostly tests of internal systems.” She surprises him with a half-teasing grin. “Well, the quiet ones, anyway.”

He chuckles. “It is pretty late, isn’t it?”

“Far later than I assumed. I imagine morning’s not far off.” With a final swipe of her palm, she steps back once more from her stand, her blue gaze curious. “Which begs the question, Sir Shirogane: what has brought you here so late in the cycle? I imagine the past quintant has been quite trying for you all.”

“Understatement, Princess,” Shiro says with a humored smile; he overlooks the strange term she uses. “But we’re managing.”

The princess’ brows lift. “Do humans not need as much recuperation after a significant loss of energy?”

He blinks. “Uh, no, we need it.” He shifts slightly. “Some more than others.” With a slightly self-deprecating smirk and shrug, he looks out the large, arcing windows. “I guess I’m ‘others’.”

“I see.” He thinks she doesn’t; he’s not entirely sure himself, after all. Too much to process, too many thoughts that, with too much introspection, could lead to feelings and images and memories he’s just not prepared to face. Not yet.

Silence, almost pregnant, if he thinks about their shared space too much. If the halls are equivalent to a sea’s shallows, the bridge is an ocean’s deep, dark blue on darker. He remembers the star map illuminating it like a thousand bioluminescent little creatures, like a thousand of his tacky star stickers, all so seemingly inconsequential.

And now they represent everything my – our lives have become.

It’s almost a relief that the only stars he sees now are those beyond the bridge’s massive glass panes. They shimmer on the like-silk of the princess’ gown as she moves, and that’s when he decides to say something. “Princess?”

She looks to him with a simple smile. “Yes?”

“Where did you learn my last name?”

The princess blinks in surprise, momentarily lost with the sudden subject change before his question seems to click. “Oh! The other Paladins told me. They enlightened me as to your reputable station on Earth. As a well-ranked member of your ‘Galaxy Garrison’, it was only appropriate that proper respects be paid.” Her smile turns slightly sheepish as she offers him a small incline of her head. “I do hope that our previous interactions were not cause for offense. I can assure you, from here on, that such oversights will not occur.”

He wants to laugh. Or sigh. Or roll his eyes. Maybe even channel his seniority and scold his fellow Earthlings for what they obviously considered to be quite the gag.

He does half. A breathy chuckle as he shakes his head and smiles at the young woman watching him so curiously. “Sir Shirogane?” she inquires, and he smiles wider.

“It’s just Shiro, Your Highness.”

The princess blinks. “I beg your pardon?”

Somehow, he’s thinking that this – clearing up misunderstandings, both intentional and not, between these so different parties –  will quickly become a thing for him to do. “The others were…” he pauses, weighing his options, “accurate enough about my position in the Garrison. It was one I took great pride in, and on Earth, it might even still hold weight. But…”

He pauses again, and recalls, once more, those thousand small solar systems. “Out here, amidst all this, it isn’t so important.” ‘Paladin’ is far more important, these days, than ‘pilot’.

“Perhaps,” the princess says, and for an impossible second or tick or whatever, he thinks he maybe spoke his thoughts aloud. Can (could) the Alteans read minds, sense brainwaves and interpret the emotions behind them? Farfetched as it sounds, he’s already had his mind blown at least four times today. Once more really wouldn’t be all that strange. He’s still wondering when she continues. “Regardless, however, I would still seek to learn. Is there a title – or name by which you would feel most comfortable in our referring to you?”

“Shiro,” he repeats immediately. Protocol is nice, when simplicity and efficiency is needed, and if she insists (he’s starting to think she seems the type, when she feels it’s necessary), he knows he’ll adapt to the sudden surge of ‘Sirs’, ‘Shiroganes’, and ‘Black Paladins’ that come his way. But he’s always been the casual sort; a nickname does the job as well as any title, and if he has the privilege to choose, he chooses the former.

The princess blinks. “I see. As the other Paladins call you?” He nods.

“It’s simpler than anything else. It’s my preference, at least.”

She only hesitates another moment before nodding. “Very well. ‘Sir Shiro’, it is, then.”

He chuckles again, a solid sound that echoes in the space between them. In hindsight, it surprises him. “Just ‘Shiro’, Princess, if you would. No formality needed.”

“Oh,” she says, eyebrows lifting again, higher. “My apologies. Exactly as the other Paladins call you, then.”

He smiles, his shoulders lifting in a shrug. “We’re all in this together, after all.”

The smile she returns is somewhat bittersweet. “That, we are.” A companionably silent moment, and then a chime, like the tinkling of bells. “Ah,” the princess sounds, and with a wave of her hand, regains access to the ship’s systems. “Diagnostics are complete.”

“Fast,” he replies, for lack of anything better to say. It doesn’t bother him so much this time.

“Yes,” she agrees, and perhaps it’s the acoustics of the room but the word to him sounds...off. He can’t help but recognize something in it, an echo of inflection he usually hears in his own voice, not often in another’s. And he realizes…

He wasn’t the only one seeking distraction tonight. Maybe the princess does see, after all.

“Well,” she announces, before he can say…what? “I suppose the rest can wait ‘til later. I’ll need Coran’s assistance, anyway, and he’ll be as cross as a kard’iel if I try to wake him now.” She makes a gesture, a tapping and swiping of fingers, and something in the belly of the ship seems to quiet. “I suppose it would be prudent for the two of us to achieve some form of rest, hm?”

He nods with a small chuckle around the clench of his gut. She’s right, of course. It would do little good for either of them to continue forgoing sleep now, only to be the weak links come tomorrow, when so much of this will finally solidify into reality, when guides will be needed to navigate through this encompassing blue. He rises from his seat, his hand running along the smooth metal as he goes, and follows the princess as she retreats from the bridge to the hallway. “Well, um…good night, Princess.” He looks to her, small smile still etched across his mouth. She returns it with a small incline of her head.

“Thank you for your company tonight.” She lifts her head, and her smile makes his own widen. “However unexpected, it was appreciated.” She lifts her hand into a small wave. “Rest well.”

“You, too.” He doesn’t get a chance to stumble through a ‘thank you’ of his own; with a final parting smile, she turns her back and departs, her steps as light and even as they were on the bridge.

He is thankful, though. It’s become so normal for him to spend his restless hours alone; he even prefers it that way, if only because it means he’s maybe the only one experiencing them. It was nice to have company, if only this one time, and he basks in the feeling until the guilt and doubt (you shouldn’t have bothered her, you should’ve tried harder to sleep, you’re just a soldier, you had no business taking up the time of someone so important) inevitably begin to gnaw at his bones. Before they overwhelm him, out of a little more of the same cautious curiosity that led him here, he tosses a glance over his shoulder.

Earlier that ‘evening’, as they all departed for their new respective quarters, he remembers Coran insisting on escorting the princess to hers. If he recalls correctly, the path would require she turn down another incoming hallway.

Shiro watches as she bypasses it entirely, her steps purposeful. He sighs silently, and returns to his own path in the opposite direction.

It’s just as well. If she were paying attention, she’d have noticed him missing his own junction.

His resumed journey eventually brings him to the combat arena. With a bit of fumbling at the controls, the activation of his arm, heat and artificial life awakening with a hum, he sets the course for the remainder of his night.

Only one thing manages to grab his attention beyond the pull of adrenaline and the push of his opponent. The information listed on the holographic screen that chimes into being with his first victory. Script that must be Altean, and script he recognizes, a title.

Sir Shirogane.

He doesn’t deserve it; not the title, nor the standing that clearly comes with it. But he has to admit, however wryly, that from her, the princess – Princess Allura of planet Altea, pilot of the castle-ship that houses the universe’s greatest defense…it certainly does sound impressive

[broodingsoul]

50 Random Things About So You Think You Can Dance (S14E3)

1.  Why did the New York City auditions get an introduction like it was the season premiere?  I’m assuming because they needed to fill 28 minutes of the episode.

2.  Mary Murphy looks fucking ADORABLE in this school-girl length pleated skirt and deconstructed blazer.  It’s honestly the best she’s ever looked.

3.  And behind her is “triple-threat” “superstar” Vanessa Hudgens, looking like a turd in that shit-brown coat and dark matte lip.

4.  I seriously still don’t understand how Vanessa Hudgens got on the judges panel.  Who on the production team thought, “You know who’s hip and the teens relate to?  That one girl from that Disney movie that was popular 9 years ago.”

5.  Oh ew ew ew, Vanessa Hudgens also has on a weird buttoned straight-lined bodice the same color as the coat.  What is this look?  Who said this look was okay.

6.  “La La Land’s choreographer” LET IT GO.

***

Kaylee “Impavido” Millis

7.  “And what name did your parents give you?” Who gives a shit, Nigel, she wants to be called Impavido.  It costs you zero dollars to call her that.

8.  I’m 100% surprised it took three episodes for us to hear “Issues” by Julia Michaels as a choreographed number.

9.  I like Impavido’s movement.  It’s like if animation and contemporary had a baby.  The choreography itself is really unique and nothing this show has ever really seen before.  Her dancing is almost like if Pixar decided to animate dancing.  I really hope she makes it to the top 20, because I think she’s got the style to nail hip-hop, and I think she’s got the carriage to nail ballroom.  I’d love to see her paired with Jaja.  Incredibly charismatic and just an absolute joy to watch.

10.  Impavido cries when she gets her ticket to the Academy, as she said she would, and then she kisses deuces up to the heavens, so I’d really like to know more of her story.

11.  She and Mark Villaver from the first episode are my two favorites so far. 

***

Ana Sanchez

12.  “I heard about the Hot Tamale Train.  I’m like, I wanna be on that train so bad.”  I don’t have a comment.  Just the quote.

13.  Great lifts and tricks, but there’s something a little juvenile about her energy onstage.  I might be that the choreography in-between just seems like she’s bopping around and not actually dancing?  Plus her mugging is super annoying.  I’m not a fan.

14.  Mary’ll put her on the train, tho.

15.  “I love that way that you’re like “WHOOO!” when you’re dancing!” exclaims Vanessa Hudgens.  The animatronics in her jaw squeak as the wheels that control how wide her eyes open push past their limits.  Her teeth glow impossibly white.  “WE’RE GONNA BOP TO THE TOP” she screeches.  Mary Murphy’s Hot Tamale Train ceases to exist.  Mary Murphy becomes but a wisp of smoke of a memory.

***

Koine Iwasaki

16.  This has nothing to do with Koine, but I’ma already so fucking done with this “It Ain’t Me” song by Selena Gomez.  SO done with it.

17.  Before Koine even starts dancing, her mother Yuriko and friend Alesha are already crying.  Oh God, my heartstrings.

18.  The most interesting parts of Koine’s audition are when she’s doing the really cool contemporary/crump fusion movements.  It’s really interesting the way Impavido’s animation/contemporary was.  When Koine goes back to straight contemporary, it’s less moving for me, because it’s a little paint-by-numbers, a little too schmaltzy with the music.  Overall, I like her, but I don’t think she deserves a standing ovation from the judges.

19.  “And then when you smiled, I literally said, ‘Aw!’”  I might have to end each recap with a list of the stupidest things Vanessa Hudgens said during the episode.  It’s either that, or I stop recapping her entirely, because godDAMN does she say some stupid shit.

***

20.  Hip-hop montage.

21.  Kyle Bennett Jr. is “an animator-slash-tugger.”  I’m just a tugger, but we’re not supposed to talk about that in public.

22.  OH.  He’s a tutter.  I am definitely not that.

23.  Alex Diaz grabs his crotch a lot and has a beautiful smile.  I’d do him.

Joseph “Klassic” Carella & Huwer “Havoc” Marche Jr.

24.  Cat’s hair is EVERYTHING right now.  Just really relaxed waves, like she’s going to the beach.  In New York.  In February.

25.  I don’t know how to critique their style of dance.  I like their imagination, and I’ve always been a fan where it looks like one dancer controls another.  They do it well.

26.  Nigel and Mary Murphy give them a standing ovation, and it takes Vanessa Hughes about three seconds too long to realize she should probably also stand.

27.  How many uppers do you think Mary takes on any given day?  It can’t all be natural personality.

***

Chaz Wolcott

28.  Is a tap dancer, and I hope he’s good because I love a good tap dancer.

29.  That was the most boring sentence I’ve ever written.  I’m sorry.

30.  Here, I’ll take my shirt off to make up for it.

31.  Holy shit, Chaz Wolcott is 29 years old, but looks all of 20.

32.  Technically he’s very good, but there’s something a little too white bread about him for me.  I think that he’s tapping to an old jazz classic and wearing this weird members-only style jacket.  I want to see him do something fun and fresh and contemporary.  His choreography is great, but I’m just kinda bored.

33.  Vanessa Hudgens seems like she hates Mary Murphy, and it’s the only thing I like about her.

34.  “It’s so fun, just making dreams come true!” Vanessa Hudgens croons.  Her throat undulates, her body ripples.  She phases in and out of time, the blips of her being spelling out Morse Code.  “We’re just getting started,” it spells.

***

Darius “The Bigger Cheese” Reed

35.  Look, I know Darius is doing this as a joke, but I am here for this fabulous display of fearlessness.

36.  “What about ‘The Grand Fromage?’”  I have never loved Cat Deeley more than I do in this moment.

37.  Nigel wasn’t expecting Darius to be a man, which is annoying and homophobic.  You think after 14 seasons I’d be used to that.

38.  For once, Vanessa Hudgens didn’t piss me off.  Nigel and Mary were kinda low-key shady about everything, but VH just told him how fun he was, to keep being himself, and to keep dancing and come back.

39.  Oh, except now that he left, Darius is copping an attitude.  If you’re gonna be The Bigger Cheese, be the Bigger Person.

***

40.  They could have let me see shirtless Logan Hernandez’s entire shirtless routine.  I’ve done enough for this show, it’s time they do for me.

41.  Abby Griffin’s contemporary-pointe routine seemed really boring, so thanks for editing through that.  We’re still not even though.

42.  “I have a lot of technical aspects, but it’s technique in ways you haven’t really seen it yet.”  Christina Moya-Palacios sounds like a real special snowflake, but the snippet of her audition puts the proof in the pudding.

43.  “You dance the way I wish I danced,” Vanessa Hudgens admits wistfully.  Suddenly she grows cold,  Her jaw slacks, her eyes dim, as something else inside her takes control.  “I don’t dance,” the entity growls.  As quick as it comes on, it lets go.

***

Ryan Bailey

44.  “My own dance style is kind of weird.  I do a lot of shaking, almost like seizure things.”  I just—I don’t have the patience, y’all.

45.  Somewhere, Sia’s choreographer is like, “Biiiiiiiiiiiitch.”

46.  This audition is ten seconds in and Nigel is NOT. HAVING. IT.  Dude has technique, though.  It’s frustrating, because I want to see him dance, but his choreography seems like a gimmick.  When he combines his style with actual dancing, like in his jumps and leaps, it’s actually breath-taking.  Everything in between just seems weird for weirdness’s sake.

47.  Nigel’s response surprises me.  “You know why I liked it?  Because I didn’t like it.  I liked that I didn’t like it because it gave me emotions.  It changed my thought about dance.  I hated it, so I liked it.”  Fair, but also I just need to see more elements of dance combined with his style.

48.  “I saw a duck.  There were a lot of duck things happening,” Vanessa giggles.  The giggling grows louder and louder, more desperate, as she tosses back glass after glass of champagne.  “This is a night to remember!” she shrieks.  Her legs shake.  This could be too much.

49.  That was a rather unceremonious end to the episode.  I would’ve put Ryan through to choreography, because I wouldn’t have been able to merit his style just on style alone.

50.  But then, nobody’s paying me for my opinion.  Yet.

[c-chara-dreemurr-r-blog]

like obviously i try be likeable but i think my nasty Real personality shines through with how i speak sometimes

[baycubabymama-blog]

       ooc; sometimes to make mun & muse happy, all you gotta         do is give us a big glass of mountain dew and a jar of pb         knocks us out better than warm milk & cookies ever could         and when the trazadone starts kicking in, that’s the best         thing where pre pass out session is concerned.

[stayxlix]

TUTTER IN THIS BITCH, FINNA GET CRUNK, EYEBROWS ON FLEEK, THE FUCC? AHH IT ALWAYS MAKES ME SO HAPPY WHEN YOU POST. MY INVESTMENT IN THIS SERIES IS INSANE.

Oooooo I don't have real words to describe how much I love your work, so I'll make a new one lol. 🧚‍♀️✨ Wonderfying ✨️🧚‍♀️ just absolutely wonderful and electrifying lol.

Monkey knuckles, coming from the bottom of my heart I'm SPEECHLESS.

"A knife adorned with an intricate floral design, mercilessly embedded in your heart." WHAT!!! IM GOING INTO CARDIAC ARREST!!!! MAKE IT STOPPPPP!!! PLEASE! IM SHAKING! IM SHAKING OH GOD!

DELICIOUS! TASTY! INDUCING SADNESS! A FEW WORDS TO DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL!! I NEED TO BE SEDATED👹👹👹

On a more serious note, please don't ever rush your work, take your breaks, and know that I'd wait an eternity for a chapter as scrumptious as this! -👹

MY TUTTER.👹💕IT ALWAYS MAKES ME SO HAPPY WHENEVER I GET A NOTIFICATION FROM YOU. YOUR ENERGY IS SO UNIQUE AND IT BRIGHTENS MY DAY EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

"wonderfying" is so cute and creative and i love it so so much, crying bc nobodys ever made me a whole new word before.😭 tbh i don’t have real words to describe how your asks and comments make me feel either…maybe ecstastic??? ecstatic and fantastic?? (lmao i tried okay, maybe it’s better if i just leave the word making to you..🥹)

if you’re speechless then i guess it means i’ve done something right.🤭 that last line was definitely meant to induce a sense of sadness/heartache (along with like half of the rest of the chapter lmao) so im giggling to myself rn knowing that it resonated with you in this way.

your positivity and excitement is SO infectious and provides me with endless motivation.💕 i promise ill try not to leave you hanging for tooooo long until the next chapter comes out, although i really do appreciate that you always encourage me to take my time🥹 (more than you know💛). its readers like you who breathe life into the narrative and give these characters and their experiences such depth and meaning. it keeps me inspired to write and weave this story, and i’m very thankful for the bond we've formed through our shared love for these characters and their world.🥹

until the next notification lights up my screen, take care my crazy little friend👹🫶so much love for you alwaysss.🤗💕

[elizabethnightingale4]

What Happened, After

She looked at him and he shared the look, a calculating look. Slowly she from the back of her ratty jeans she pulled a small pistol and held it by the barrel. "Okay." He looked at her confused for a moment before taking his other hand out from behind his back, holding the gun by the barrel and offering his hand. "Thanks." She shook his hand firmly and quickly. "Alright we have to find somewhere safe for the night. Also, there are three other children, I uh, have to grab them really quick-" "Wait, you have kids with you too?" He looked suprised, "I have two siblings with me too." She smiled slightly. "Alright then lets get these kids together now." She smiled. "Have them play for a bit." He grinned. "Sounds great." "Heh" She put her gun and her crude dagger away. "Alright," She turned to go back to the car they had locked themselves in. He watched her go before heading back to his siblings who looked scared. "Hey you two. We have some friends tonight, and some real food." His half starved siblings looked up at him with wide eyes. "Do you mean it?" His sister was holding her twins hand tight. Their tiny bodies were slowly wasting away from his inability to find food in the apocalypse. It was killing him. "Yes silly head. Of course I mean it. Lets go before they decide to leave us." "Are there little kids bubba?" "Yeah bro, and they want to play with you two, so lets go!" He finally got the two of them moving down the road. Cora wasn't sure about these people. The boy looked like he hadn't eaten in a long while, and hunger could make even the most loyal betray their friends. She sighed and knocked the SOS signal to her siblings. Her sister was obsessed with maritime disasters and had insisted they use it. "Hey you three, its safe now. We have some dinner company." "W-wh-what do you mean Sissy?" Kenny looked at her sister, her eyes wide. "Stop st-t-tuttering loud mouth." Meg was always upset with Kenny. "Don't fight. We have to be prepared for anything." "Yeah listen Meg. We have to be on our best behavior." "You're right Davey." She smiled at her brother and patted his head gently. "Alright guys, UP AND AT THEM!" She fake yelled, striking a pose. All three of her siblings rolled their eyes. The three filed out of the car. her brother toof her hand and the other two held hands walking next to her. "Sissy! There are little kids! A boy AND a girl!" Kenny was so excited she clapped her hands together. "Welcome back." He grinned. "Looks like have a mini army on your hands." She chuckled quietly; "Yeah, if they threw fits it'd be hard to handle." she sighed, "theres a town a few miles down the tracks." She points to a rusted railroad track. "We saw a sign a while back for it. I worried poachers might be residing there though because of all the graffiti and nooses on the trees." She trailed off, "but uh, I think its our best shot though. Its getting late and repers come out at night." "Yeah, okay, sounds like a plan. Lead the way General." He grinned again, gesturing for her to lead the way. "Why do I have to lead?" He shrugged, "Well, you seem the best prepared to lead." She glanced at him. "Are you calling me bossy?" He just laughed, "Careful Sugar, you might ruin that pretty face with all those wrinkles." "Already flirting huh?" She started moving ahead. "Heh, it got you to lead didn't it?" She stopped dead in her tracks and looked at him a smile barely staying off her face. "You sneaky fucker." He just laughed. "To answer your question though, I wasn't flirting. I'm not really into magenta heads." She laughed now, starting to walk again. "Yeah, when ever we find a hair place I take a new color. Wait for the new one to fade then change it." "What for?" She just shrugged, "Just something I did before the End, and I can't find my regular color any more." He picked up his sister and put her on his shoulders. "What was your 'regular' color?" "I've forgotten what the word for it was but it was like.. Okay it was like a dark purple that faded into a pink at the ends-" "Ombre" "Thats it!" She shifted her giant backpack and moved her duffle bag to her back. "How'd you know that?" "Oh, my girlfriend did that too, just with red and black." "Heh, yeah it was pretty popular before the End." She watched her sisters balance on the rails next to her. "Remember to watch out for traps you two." They replied together, "Yes sissy." "You know its been years since we met someone who wasn't insane." The girl grinned. "I'm sorry, you must be mistaken. We are all mad here. Some of us just hide it better than others." He was quiet, "Damn you were a nerd weren't you?" She snorted, "Didn't you see my shirt?" Shrek is Love-" "Shrek is Life. Someone had a tumblr." "Yeah I did." The children were walking a little further up the tracks, even though no trains had run since the power had shut off, it was never safe to wander too far from one another. She called them back over. "Who was your favorite band?" She laughed a the question, "Well?" "Sorry it's just weird being asked such normal questions after so long. It was probably the Beatles or maybe the Barenaked Ladies. Although I do carry a fondness for any sort of musical." "Oh?" "Yeah, I wanted to be a stage performer before the End." She shrugged, "musical theater and band were my beat yo." "Oh god never say that again." "What you got a problem man?" "Dude don't talk like you're from the sixties either." "Damn son, there is no pleasing you." She grinned "Damn straight." She laughed and took out a water bottle and drank from it. "You know, winter is hot on our heels. My siblings and I are headed down south to stay away from the cold." "Florida's supposed to be like super dangerous." "I was thinking of going to Louisiana. They still have some sort of state there, everyones cool and chillax." He was silent for a while and they walked on in silence for a few yards. "I thought you'd be smarter than to believe in fairy tales." "You have to believe in something otherwise you lose hope an hope is like super important... man." "Pffftt" he looked down and sighed, "Hope is an illusion. We created it to get away from the bad shit in the world." "Wow thats depressing... yo." "Quit it." He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. "So uh, can I carry one of your bags or something? I feel bad letting you do all the work." She snickered "And who said chivalry was dead?" "Uh some guy?" She smiled, "Oh gods bro, you can barely hold you siblings, let alone a bag full of shit." "Yeah sorry, I was just trying to help." "Yeah I know." The two passed the next hour in silence listening to the children laughing and running around. A roar was heard over head as a Canadian plane dropped supplies to an unknown group of people who would soon be dead now. Cora whistled and her siblings came running back to her followed by Ashton. "To the trees. Now. No talking, no rough housing, and be very careful." They nodded and followed her over to the wooded area next to the tracks. "Hey what are you doing?" His siblings followed the other children into the woods. "Get off the tracks before you get us all killed." An echo sounded from a not too far away yell."We're gonna eat great tonight."The boy stumbled and Cora yanked him into their spot as from around the far bend came a large crowd of poachers, hooping and hollering. "Yo, Grait!" A scout picked up the water bottle Cora had dropped and handed it over, "It was still spilling out." The one who took the bottle looked to the woods. "Shit" She whispered pulling the kids behind her and hiding them behind a rocky outcropping, dropping the bags beside them. She took out her dagger as the man with dried blood across his face shouted, "Shut up! We aren't alone." The whole group fell silent and Cora looked at her new friend and gestured for him to watch the kids as she moved closer again, watching them through the dense brush. "WHos there? Come out. We won't bite, hard." He grinned, the rotting flesh sewn into his cloths caught her nose and she gagged, covering her nose with her hand, trying to keep from making noise. "Aw are you a she?" Cora quietly tried to size the group up. There were almost thirty grown men, a handful of younger guys and one female. Her neck had a chain attached to a lease, one of the men held it. "Oh we won't hurt you if your of the fairer sex. Come on out." The silence that followed was only broken by a few bird calls. "Go in after her." He ordered, lighting a cigerette and looking away. A few of the men walked into the woods as Cora scaled a spruce tree to keep hidden. "Grait, I think shes long gone. Theres nothing but birds out here." Everyone groaned and made general angry remarks. Such as "This ones getting worn out and refuses to eat." and "we wasted all that time." The party slowly made its way down the tracks and out of sight. Cora waited about ten more minutes to move back down from her tree. "I'm glad there weren't many girls." He looked shaken "She didn't. She didn't have any teeth." He looked horrified as Cora went over and patted the kids heads and grabbed the bags, "Yes. She must have put up quite a fight to be in such a tortured state." "You say that like its nothing!" "I've seen worse-Whats your name?" They looked at each other for a moment. In the past few hours they had talked about a lot of different topics but they never asked each other their names. "It's, it's Steven, I'm 16." She smiled, "I'm Cora, I'm 16 too. Its good to meet you. She walked to the tracks. "We have to keep going and get to the town. "How did you know they were coming before they made noise?" "You haven't been near the north in a long time have you?" "No?" "The Canadians think that they're helping or at least I hope they do, but the air buckets bring little kids and the weak. It makes for easy pickings for the poachers." She sighed going forward on the tracks "And poachers rarely keep others around for long." "Are you saying-" "Animals are too fast for them to catch, the dependents of animals however, such as long pig." She had this look of hate and pain filling her face. "I had another sister once. She was eight when they caught her and I had to choose between abandoning my other siblings, giving away their hiding spot, or letting her die alone. The last bullet I had stopped her from experiencing what the chained woman felt." They were both silent for a while. "I love my siblings more than life." She trailed off again, continuing to walk. "I just.. I keep my eyes and ears open. I watch and remember everything I can. The tracks are a path probably right to the drop off. We knew there were poachers in the area. even if they hadn't come its safer to hide for a while after an air drop." he was quiet for a while. "I wish I'd been able to be a kid for longer." The girl nodded in agreement. "I don't think she'd blame.." He trailed off again and took a bag, patting her back. "Lets go find somewhere to rest for the night?" She smiled, "Thanks, yeah lets find somewhere."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#2yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical

"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.

Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.

It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.

As far back as Engels, Marxists refused to countenance the idea of limits to human growth. While Malthus was (incorrectly) predicting that humanity would exhaust its food stores any day now and plunge into barbarism, Engels wrote, in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:

Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

But how can a finite planet sustain infinite growth? Through improvements in material processes. We use a lot less to make things today than we ever have, thanks to science -- and capitalism. The less labor and material used in a process, the less it costs to make and the more profit there is. But growth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:

The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.

Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated -- no longer "free" -- and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won't mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can't solve the problem, because it's always fighting a rear-guard action:

...[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.

The answer, Phillips argues, is a democratically planned economy -- a socialist solution. Not the "green lefty" answer, which requires "de-growth," but growth that is guided by democratic, not market, forces:

•  The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

•  The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

•  The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

"Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!" There's something gloriously anarcho-steampunk about that, right in line with Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine motto: "Love the machine, hate the factory."

Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world. Material abundance is the end of want and immiseration, and it's what progressive activists have demanded for their brothers and sisters since ancient times.

In the wake of the Black Friday sales after US Thanksgiving that in recent years have begun to take place in other countries as well, or Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas in Commonwealth countries, where people line up (or queue) before dawn in the freezing November weather outside the local MegaMart for ridiculously cut-price deals on everything, I’ve begun to notice a welter of Facebook status updates, tweets and ‘news’ articles sneering at videos of the trampling, stampeding chaos and images of people coming to blows over 40-inch plasma TVs, lap-tops or tumble dryers.

A survey of the incomes of those racing through the aisles to get to that hundred-dollar stereo that normally sells for $400 should give the smug tut-tutters pause though. This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works. In a democratically controlled economy, we may collectively decide on different production priorities, but surely we would still organise the production of items that bring people joy. Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure? Is the pleasure derived from a box-fresh pair of Nike running shoes or a Sony PlayStation 4 inferior to the pleasure the subscribers of Real Simple magazine derive from their $2000 coffee table made from recycled traffic signs? Likewise, why is the £59 hand-carved walnut locomotive from a Stoke Newington toy shop any less consumerist than the free plastic Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozen accompanying a Subway Fresh Fit Kids Meal?

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Anti-consumption politics almost always seem to be about somebody else’s wrong, less spiritually rewarding purchases. It is perhaps the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption. At the very least, no one should mistake this lip-pursed bien-pensant middle-class scolding for speaking truth to power.

The left once campaigned for better conditions for the workers who make things, now it is preoccupied with buying less of what's made, but "An anti-consumerist model of campaigning simply and ineffectively replaces that of a trade unionist model." Sure, the stuff is made by terribly exploited workers. That needs to stop. But rather than campaigning for a retreat from the comforts of technology, let's campaign for their provision to all who want them: "Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance."

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lot more with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides and requires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

But I also know the tremendous advances that evidence-based medicine has achieved over the last 200 years as a result of the germ theory of disease, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, pharmacology, lab technology and genetics. As Ben Goldacre, the doctor and health campaigner who manages to be simultaneously Britain’s most trenchant critic of Big Pharma and of medical frauds such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture and ‘nutritionists’, puts it: “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” The socialist left, with its historic commitment to reason and science, has to separate itself from the distractions of the crunchy left.

We could do far worse in this regard than learning from the AIDS campaigners of the late 80s and early 90s in organisations like ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group. They described and continue to describe themselves as “science-based treatment activists.” While engaging in multiple high-profile acts of militant civil disobedience against the pharma giants and both Republican and Democrat politicians, they also soberly, rigorously plunged deeply into the science of their condition, and were willing to change tack upon the advent of new evidence, as happened when early demands of expanded access or “drugs into bodies,” as was the slogan of the time, proved to be insufficiently nuanced. Despite most of the activists lacking any formal medical training, the extent of their evidence-focussed self-education and the quality of their reports and recommendations were such that clinicians began to recognise them as their equals in an understanding of the disease. And through this combination of a grounding in science and militant activism, ACT-UP and TAG changed the course of an epidemic, forcing governments to care about a plague killing queers, drug users and minorities.

Agrarianism isn't intrinsically leftwing. There's something inescapably Tory about the idea of a world as a Richard Scarry village where everyone is a small shopkeeper in a shire. It's the same force than animates xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment (and there's plenty of people in the green left who also militate against immigration, for the same reason). Small is beautiful only after you get rid of 80% of the world -- otherwise, we need dense, intense, technological living. The more of that we get, the more of the countryside we can be left for wildlife.

We are not in a lifeboat. Lifeboat politics are awfully convenient for thugs who would rather force you to do what they say than convince you. The Earth is imperiled, and it can't be saved by telling the world's majority that they will never enjoy the comfort that the minority of us enjoyed for the past century: "It is important for those who quite rightly care deeply about the threat to humanity represented by myriad ecological problems to inoculate themselves against such thinking, to foreswear anti-modernism and the lifeboat politics of limits to growth."

In the past century, certain leftists pretended that Stalinism's horrors were the price we had to pay for socialist rule. Today, the austere greens tell us that hairshirts, de-growth, and radical population reduction are the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of undoing capitalism's excesses. Neither is right. Dinosaurs walked the earth for ten million years; we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. The idea that we'll just stop now, stop progressing and improving on the things we developed, become "steady state" creatures, for the next 9 million years and change is a terrible one. Let's not swear off our futures.

Some people love living in the countryside, genuinely prefer it. But a mass-scale back-to-the-land experiment would be a disaster: "a wistful, sentimental appreciation of nature and lamentation of a lost Eden arises from a certain level of city-dwelling privilege forgetful of the tribulations of rural life and ever-present menace that is the wilderness. It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturalist—or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine—any day."

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

As a result of our audacity, our ultimate resource, each of the limits imposed upon us by nature that we have breached—from fire that allowed us to expend less food energy intake on digestion and permitted more energy to be given over to our expanding brain, through electric lighting that allows us to stay up after dark, to the technologies of the bicycle, the washing machine, the pill, abortion, and fertility treatments that have chipped away at patriarchy—has required a growing consumption of energy. All of these natural limits were imposed as arbitrarily as the rules and dictates of any illegitimate government. For this reason, one would think that the most defiant possible demand of anarchism—the political philosophy that challenges not just the power of the state, but all illegitimate authority—would be for the ever greater degrees of freedom delivered by the liberatory power of more energy. Indeed the entirety of the left, not just anarchists, in recognition of this potential for liberation, used to argue not against energy expenditure or technology, but that these advances be shared by everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology marries incisive science writing, radical politics, and blazing prose. It's an important book about climate, and an even more important book about the politics of doing something about the climate.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical #1yrago

"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.

Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.

It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.

As far back as Engels, Marxists refused to countenance the idea of limits to human growth. While Malthus was (incorrectly) predicting that humanity would exhaust its food stores any day now and plunge into barbarism, Engels wrote, in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:

Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

But how can a finite planet sustain infinite growth? Through improvements in material processes. We use a lot less to make things today than we ever have, thanks to science -- and capitalism. The less labor and material used in a process, the less it costs to make and the more profit there is. But growth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:

The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.

Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated -- no longer "free" -- and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won't mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can't solve the problem, because it's always fighting a rear-guard action:

...[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.

The answer, Phillips argues, is a democratically planned economy -- a socialist solution. Not the "green lefty" answer, which requires "de-growth," but growth that is guided by democratic, not market, forces:

•  The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

•  The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

•  The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

"Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!" There's something gloriously anarcho-steampunk about that, right in line with Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine motto: "Love the machine, hate the factory."

Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world. Material abundance is the end of want and immiseration, and it's what progressive activists have demanded for their brothers and sisters since ancient times.

In the wake of the Black Friday sales after US Thanksgiving that in recent years have begun to take place in other countries as well, or Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas in Commonwealth countries, where people line up (or queue) before dawn in the freezing November weather outside the local MegaMart for ridiculously cut-price deals on everything, I’ve begun to notice a welter of Facebook status updates, tweets and ‘news’ articles sneering at videos of the trampling, stampeding chaos and images of people coming to blows over 40-inch plasma TVs, lap-tops or tumble dryers.

A survey of the incomes of those racing through the aisles to get to that hundred-dollar stereo that normally sells for $400 should give the smug tut-tutters pause though. This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works. In a democratically controlled economy, we may collectively decide on different production priorities, but surely we would still organise the production of items that bring people joy. Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure? Is the pleasure derived from a box-fresh pair of Nike running shoes or a Sony PlayStation 4 inferior to the pleasure the subscribers of Real Simple magazine derive from their $2000 coffee table made from recycled traffic signs? Likewise, why is the £59 hand-carved walnut locomotive from a Stoke Newington toy shop any less consumerist than the free plastic Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozenaccompanying a Subway Fresh Fit Kids Meal?

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Anti-consumption politics almost always seem to be about somebody else’s wrong, less spiritually rewarding purchases. It is perhaps the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption. At the very least, no one should mistake this lip-pursed bien-pensant middle-class scolding for speaking truth to power.

The left once campaigned for better conditions for the workers who make things, now it is preoccupied with buying less of what's made, but "An anti-consumerist model of campaigning simply and ineffectively replaces that of a trade unionist model." Sure, the stuff is made by terribly exploited workers. That needs to stop. But rather than campaigning for a retreat from the comforts of technology, let's campaign for their provision to all who want them: "Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance."

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lotmore with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides andrequires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

But I also know the tremendous advances that evidence-based medicine has achieved over the last 200 years as a result of the germ theory of disease, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, pharmacology, lab technology and genetics. As Ben Goldacre, the doctor and health campaigner who manages to be simultaneously Britain’s most trenchant critic of Big Pharma and of medical frauds such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture and ‘nutritionists’, puts it: “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” The socialist left, with its historic commitment to reason and science, has to separate itself from the distractions of the crunchy left.

We could do far worse in this regard than learning from the AIDS campaigners of the late 80s and early 90s in organisations like ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group. They described and continue to describe themselves as “science-based treatment activists.” While engaging in multiple high-profile acts of militant civil disobedience against the pharma giants and both Republican and Democrat politicians, they also soberly, rigorously plunged deeply into the science of their condition, and were willing to change tack upon the advent of new evidence, as happened when early demands of expanded access or “drugs into bodies,” as was the slogan of the time, proved to be insufficiently nuanced. Despite most of the activists lacking any formal medical training, the extent of their evidence-focussed self-education and the quality of their reports and recommendations were such that clinicians began to recognise them as their equals in an understanding of the disease. And through this combination of a grounding in science and militant activism, ACT-UP and TAG changed the course of an epidemic, forcing governments to care about a plague killing queers, drug users and minorities.

Agrarianism isn't intrinsically leftwing. There's something inescapably Tory about the idea of a world as a Richard Scarry village where everyone is a small shopkeeper in a shire. It's the same force than animates xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment (and there's plenty of people in the green left who also militate against immigration, for the same reason). Small is beautiful only after you get rid of 80% of the world -- otherwise, we need dense, intense, technological living. The more of that we get, the more of the countryside we can be left for wildlife.

We are not in a lifeboat. Lifeboat politics are awfully convenient for thugs who would rather force you to do what they say than convince you. The Earth is imperiled, and it can't be saved by telling the world's majority that they will never enjoy the comfort that the minority of us enjoyed for the past century: "It is important for those who quite rightly care deeply about the threat to humanity represented by myriad ecological problems to inoculate themselves against such thinking, to foreswear anti-modernism and the lifeboat politics of limits to growth."

In the past century, certain leftists pretended that Stalinism's horrors were the price we had to pay for socialist rule. Today, the austere greens tell us that hairshirts, de-growth, and radical population reduction are the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of undoing capitalism's excesses. Neither is right. Dinosaurs walked the earth for ten million years; we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. The idea that we'll just stop now, stop progressing and improving on the things we developed, become "steady state" creatures, for the next 9 million years and change is a terrible one. Let's not swear off our futures.

Some people love living in the countryside, genuinely prefer it. But a mass-scale back-to-the-land experiment would be a disaster: "a wistful, sentimental appreciation of nature and lamentation of a lost Eden arises from a certain level of city-dwelling privilege forgetful of the tribulations of rural life and ever-present menace that is the wilderness. It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturalist—or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine—any day."

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

As a result of our audacity, our ultimate resource, each of the limits imposed upon us by nature that we have breached—from fire that allowed us to expend less food energy intake on digestion and permitted more energy to be given over to our expanding brain, through electric lighting that allows us to stay up after dark, to the technologies of the bicycle, the washing machine, the pill, abortion, and fertility treatments that have chipped away at patriarchy—has required a growing consumption of energy. All of these natural limits were imposed as arbitrarily as the rules and dictates of any illegitimate government. For this reason, one would think that the most defiant possible demand of anarchism—the political philosophy that challenges not just the power of the state, but all illegitimate authority—would be for the ever greater degrees of freedom delivered by the liberatory power of more energy. Indeed the entirety of the left, not just anarchists, in recognition of this potential for liberation, used to argue not against energy expenditure or technology, but that these advances be shared by everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology marries incisive science writing, radical politics, and blazing prose. It's an important book about climate, and an even more important book about the politics of doing something about the climate.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

https://boingboing.net/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-gre.html

[c-chara-dreemurr-r-blog]

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