“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

  • 82 Posts
  • 412 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 25th, 2024

help-circle
  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldwhere?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    59 minutes ago

    Problem is that you’re still pretty close to Butt-Head (I assume Muscle Man is polite enough to be reasonably quiet). Granted you get an aisle seat so you can occasionally “go to the bathroom” to get some peace and quiet (edit: and House might be willing to slip Beavis and Butt-Head, the former especially, some Vicodin for you because he also wants them to shut up.)

    Then again, sitting in or near the very back might save your life with Beavis and Butt-Head aboard. (edit 2: Forgot this wouldn’t be possible after 9/11.)






  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldto Memes of Production@quokk.au1984
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    10 hours ago

    Sort of. For example, actual, later-confirmed Soviet agents appeared in the list, but you also had some wildcards like Charlie Chaplin (on which Orwell, funnily, wasn’t alone; the FBI, completely unhinged, hounded him for decades and tried to rope MI5 into it, telling them Chaplin’s real name was “Israel Thornstein”). The main points in his defense being that this was just a list of people Orwell thought were Soviet sympathisers and therefore shouldn’t be writing anti-Soviet propaganda, he did want leftists writing it, dying of TB probably inhibited his judgment, and there was no real consequence for the people named because this wasn’t some McCarthyist blacklisting or investigation. Not that it’s fine.



  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldto Memes of Production@quokk.au1984
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    edit-2
    12 hours ago

    You can judge it for yourself, but Orwell’s list wasn’t naming “anarchists” (what the fuck are you even talking about? Orwell was close friends with multiple anarchists and wrote for anarchist publications, and horror at the oppression of anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish Civil War was one of Orwell’s formative experiences). The list was of people Orwell considered sympathetic to Stalin and therefore unsuitable to write for the IRD, a secret propaganda department. (He was also dying of TB at the time.)

    It’s problematic, but it’s not so problematic that you can seriously call Orwell “not a leftist” for it. That’s asinine.







  • Sorry, I didn’t mean to spread misinformation. Nothing in the OP is dangerous (that I know of). I thought we were doing a shitpost-y rehash of the cow-based versus plant-based leather argument you see online sometimes.

    Specifically, plant-based leather normally is plastic, but then over 90% of cow-based leather is chromium-tanned so it doesn’t naturally decompose (cross-links the collagen fibers). In a recent study, 82% of cow-based leather products sampled from southeastern China contained more than the EU regulatory limit for CrVI.

    The argument being that, between that poor disposibility of the overwhelming majority of cow leather and the relatively enormous amount of resources that go into making it (raising the cow, slaughterhouse, tannery (esp. toxic runoff for the latter)), citing the environment as a justification to dunk on vegans for using plastic-based leather reflects a narrow understanding of cow leather’s impact on the environment.