615 karma · joined January 25, 2021
You may feel that having kids is an optional luxury; the evidence suggests this is not a majority perspective.
And whether we are talking factories or mansions, it’s behind the big walls that you find big resource use.
Blaming “consumers” for climate change, if they are not also material stakeholders in major emitting entities, is borderline gaslighting.
“Gosh, it’s tough being born outside the cultural norm. Why do all that coping when you could just pay this social media personality to make it all better? So get off those too-close-to-the-ground tooshes and work it, sweet cheeks! Some of us need to capitalise on your insecurities and people’s worst innate tendencies for a living.”
Not one remark to the effect that, “Hey, heightism is in the same class as racism, sexism, ableism and other unfashionable isms - so all the good folks who can’t afford the surgery, can enjoy the dignity of some cultural assurance that you are the victims of atavistic shitfuckery from people with this objectively bad belief.”
Indeed, why do the work of being a better person by giving folks shorter than ourselves the same dignity we’d demand of someone much taller… there’s a metaphor for some other contemporary macro issues… and, more generally, leaving behind this infantile judgment of others by heredity.
In a for-profit healthcare context with extreme built-in distributional inequities, I cannot see this usage as equivalent to evening up mismatched limb lengths.
Dating preference is one thing - our sexual attraction parameters are mostly out of hands - but to discredit an experienced adult human and treat them as a child on the basis of their height or weight or muscularity or whatever, then, god forbid, using that to score points on that person (e.g. by mocking them at work) is egregious and should earn you social, if not legal, censure.
It’s wrong to mock a woman for her figure, including her height, and the converse is true of a man. And it’s wrong to paywall cultural acceptability behind expensive surgeries - further interlinking height with the perceptions of health and wealth in the culture - rather than doing the collective emotional work of sincere introspection to change habitual heightism.
But having done it myself, I couldn’t deny any human their own experiment towards fulfilment of their imaginary with these unbelievably neat little bits of maths. If art is ways of feeling, this helps me see the labels to my own world in new ways, and make new inter/extrapolations - seems legit! And the possibility for infinite subtle gradations with the interplay of model, data, and hardware is extensive.
And no longer cloistered behind membership institutions, but available to any with the noggin and consumer hardware to access it… except, expanding equitable access to those things goes through a fraught moral calculus of social and planetary justice. So, in a sense behind membership institutions for those who are excluded by the monetary cost.
Work has been exhibited, transacted in and reified for far less. This feels unfortunate, but I don’t know why.
But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
In a strictly limited sense, I’d rather get my cross of iron at 66% off than for the full $6.4T. Better yet would be universal healthcare, enough homes to go round, clean, sustainable energy production systems, and bridges that keep on bridging.
The Brits got lots of mileage out of that one - Hong Kong for starters, and HSBC, which continues its storied tradition of facilitating immorality to this very day [3][4]. JM itself diversified after the wars and the company lives on as “a multinational conglomerate... with legal domicile in Bermuda”.
Kids, if you want to make it big without actually having to challenge yourself too much, make sure you stick to large-scale, officially-sanctioned crimes against othered groups of humans. That way, you get the George W. Bush treatment instead of accountability!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jardine_Matheson_....
[2] https://www.eiu.edu/historia/Cassan.pdf
[3] HSBC money laundering report: Key findings http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18880269
[4] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...