Pure-electric - Created Chaos - Tumblr Blog

appalachia is devastated. towns i loved, towns i visited all the time, are gone. not damaged, GONE. they are leveled to the ground. there is nothing left but rubble and ruin. people are dead. appalachia is poor to begin with and relies on tourism for a lot of its income, and multiple of those tourist locations are just...gone.

my town is okay, but it's flooded and wrecked. trees are blocking all but one way out of our neighborhood. power lines are hanging limp in the roads. we've been without power for over 24 hours and will continue to be without power for likely another 24+. disabled people and poor people are GOING to die from this. gods save appalachia.

As much as I deeply believe that the abolition of capitalism would be an absolute improvement for everyone, I really do find it concerning how many leftists— especially in the west— don’t seem to want to grapple with how much that would change about our day to day lives. How scarce would computer hardware and agricultural products like chocolate and coffee be without exploitation of the global south? How many manufactured goods are there that don’t use cheap overseas labor or prison labor? Do the carbon emissions required by global supply chains as they currently exist justify the comforts they provide? There are, to be clear, ways to provide the things people need, and a lot of luxuries, without exploitation. But you do have to actually deal with the idea that a large number of things you probably like will get much more scarce.

Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.

shocked that i haven’t seen a post about this already but the way that “full body deodorant” is being pushed on us is so vile. that woman in the commercials being like “i’m a woman and i know how it feels to be ashamed of your body’s natural odors. that’s why i invented this shit to rub between your thighs so you, too, can feel ashamed of your body’s natural odors. unless you buy my product :)” die die die die kill yourself fuck you fuck you

They Do Not Exist (1974) by Mustafa Abu Ali (watch)