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Not really a meme, I know, but I thought this was amazing and worth sharing and I didn't know where else to share it on Lemmy.
Ursula LeGuin was an incredible person and, although she did live a long life, her death was still a huge loss.
What a badass
She really was. She has an amazing essay that starts "I am a man." It is not about her gender identity, it's just a terrific feminist essay which is also about what society thinks of the elderly (especially women).
You see, when I was growing up at the time of the Wars of the Medes and Persians and when I went to college just after the Hundred Years War and when I was bringing up my children during the Korean, Cold, and Vietnam Wars, there were no women. Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.
So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html
I also cannot recommend enough (thanks for the correction!) her novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
The former is about a visitor from Earth to a planet colonized by humans thousands of years before and those humans were genetically engineered to be hermaphrodites. It's an amazing view of a society that has no concept of either sex or gender.
The latter is about two societies- an ultra-capitalist society on a planet and an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist/communist) society on an orbiting moon. She illustrates the positive and negative aspects of both societies, although the capitalist one definitely has more negatives.
Incidentally, she also has a series of fantasy novels about a world of islands called Earthsea. The first novel is about a seemingly normal boy who turns out to have magical powers, is sent to a school where you learn to be a wizard and ends up fighting the biggest threat to magic after becoming the most powerful wizard on Earthsea. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Funny that it was written back in 1968. A certain well-known TERF was born in 1965...
Mad respect. She has bigger balls than I do.
A few months back my boss asked me if I wanted to join him and the CEO for coffee. Apparently the CEO was doing a thing to see how the lower level employees were feeling about things. It's not exactly a small company either, few people at the company meet the CEO.
I turned him down because I knew it would be too tempting to tell the man to his face that he is effectively a dictator, that the company should be employee owned, that they shouldn't have the power to restrict where people work (90% of the staff can do their jobs remotely), etc.
And saying that shit would have probably lost me my job.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
To me that seems like a bold claim considering "the divine right of kings" has not been successfully resisted nor was it escaped from. Monarchies still exist on every continent, people of royalty still get more rights and better treatment than others, once-royal families still possess loads of wealth, still rule countries in high political positions, still own many companies and other wealth generating assets. Humans have gained unfair advantages due to their lineage for thousands if not tens of thousands of years and I highly doubt that this will change massively in the next thousand years.
Regardless, it still sounds like a really nice speech though.
Monarchies still exist on every continent
Sorry, but where are the monarch in the American Continent? And I mean from the north of Canada to the South Of Chile.
Where are they?
The US president reminds me of the kings of old - more so than anybody actually called a king. The kind of fawning exaltation their current and former leaders receive is way, way over the top. 'Presidents Day' like there's a pantheon that needs worshipping: pathetic. The fear/respect people close-to treat them with reminds me of the servile peons under some all-powerful autocrat, and not for no reason. The power these people have is way, way, way over the top, power that - rather than helping disillusion an entire population brainwashed by the lie of superiority - wages revenge wars and swings dicks.