kontextmaschine

At the supermarket, noticing that while cat food brands use positive adjectives for marketing everything they make, they give off enough signals that it’d be trivial to arrange product lines in ascending order by class/quality

(well I guess mid-level organic vs. luxury nonorganic is a judgment call)

Meanwhile I couldn’t put USDA Prime, Select, and Choice in order to save my life

So Quakers consider themselves prohibited from doing evil (like going to war) but not compelled to prevent others from doing evil (as pacifists, how would they?) and the legislative result, in colonial Pennsylvania, was a long tradition of pragmatically backing nonbelievers’ violent initiatives ON THE CONDITION that they were worded so they could have been nonviolent if they wanted and their failure to so be was no knock on the Quakers.

Like during the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin got them to make appropriations for “fire engines”, and “corn” (which at the time just meant “fine discrete grains”, cf. “peppercorn”) and used it to buy cannons and gunpowder, which everyone understood would be the result

kontextmaschine:

So Quakers consider themselves prohibited from doing evil (like going to war) but not compelled to prevent others from doing evil (as pacifists, how would they?) and the legislative result, in colonial Pennsylvania, was a long tradition of pragmatically backing nonbelievers’ violent initiatives ON THE CONDITION that they were worded so they could have been nonviolent if they wanted and their failure to so be was no knock on the Quakers.

Like during the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin got them to make appropriations for “fire engines”, and “corn” (which at the time just meant “fine discrete grains”, cf. “peppercorn”) and used it to buy cannons and gunpowder, which everyone understood would be the result

maybe crossed a wire on the “corn” thing, here’s the man in his Autobiography

My being many years in the Assembly, the majority of which were constantly Quakers, gave me frequent opportunities of seeing the embarrassment given them by their principle against war, whenever application was made to them, by order of the crown, to grant aids for military purposes. They were unwilling to offend government, on the one hand, by a direct refusal, and their friends, the body of the Quakers, on the other, by a compliance contrary to their principles; hence a variety of evasions to avoid complying, and modes of disguising the compliance when it became unavoidable. The common mode at last was to grant money under the phrase of its being “for the king’s use,” never to inquie how it was applied.

But if the demand was not directly from crown, that phrase was found not so proper, and some other was to be invented. As, when powder was wanting (I think it was for the garrison at Louisburg), and the government of New England, solicited a grant of some from Pennsylvania, which was much urged on the House by Governor Thomas, they could not grant money to buy powder, because that was an ingredient of war; but they voted an aid to New England of three thousand pounds, to be put into the hands of the governor, and appropriated it for the purchasing of bread, flour, wheat, or other grain. Some of the council, desirous of giving the House still further embarrassment, advised the governor not to accept provision, as not being the thing he had demanded; but he replied, “I shall take the money, for I understand very well their meaning; other grain is gunpowder,” which he accordingly bought, and they never objected to it.1

It was in allusion to this fact that, when in our fire company we feared the success of our proposal in favor of the lottery, and I had said to my friend Mr. Syng, one of our members, “If we fail, let us move the purchase of a fire-engine with the money; the Quakers can have no objection to that; and then, if you nominate me and I you as a committee for that purpose, we will buy a great gun, which is certainly a fire-engine” “I see,” says he, “you have improved by being so long in the Assembly; your equivocal project would be just a match for their wheat or other grain.”

danismm:

1936 … carrots celebrate! - James Vaughan

baumaus:

Simeon Levi House, Tel Aviv - Arieh Cohen (1935)

me: ::falling asleep::

also me: how did preliterate societies leave suicide notes?

lord-kitschener:

littlefuckinmonster:

dear-tumb1r:

lord-kitschener:

Where is that stupid nasty bitch who went and stole bones last January, I’m gonna go whoop her ass to hell and back for cursing us like this in 2016

lol shes still on here having fits whenever people mention her bone theft

aren’t you that wannabe antifeminist who tries too hard yet still no one likes..?

You’re the fucking asshole who stole the bones and did this to us

FUCK YOU

hashtag 2016

sadoeconomist:

Folks, I need to warn you

I’ve been seeing a sudden surge of use of the word ‘thot’ and I’m concerned

We’ve recently seen at least one ancient Egyptian deity resurrected through meme magic

Thoth is a significantly more powerful member of the pantheon than Kek and the consequences of summoning him may be even more drastic than the rebirth of Kek (Brexit, Trump winning the election, a series of celebrity deaths)

The phrase ‘return the bones thot’ radiates an obvious mystical power and it may herald that Thoth will come to preside over 2017 as Kek has presided over 2016 - the bones possibly refer to the millions of mummified ibises buried in his honor at his main temple in Khmun, by reblogging that post you may be unknowingly beseeching this ancient and powerful being to repay the thousands of years of sacrifices humanity once offered him - what form that might take, we can only speculate

Although it’s possible that Thoth has been with us for a while - his name in Greek letters is Θώθ, which is clearly referenced in the ‘OwO what’s this?’ meme

As the inventor of both magic and science and keeper of all wisdom, Thoth assuredly does know what ‘this’ is, but I’m not sure we want to find out

I’m also concerned that Thoth’s wife Ma’at may be connected to the frequent seemingly compulsive and superfluous use of the word ‘mate’ or ‘m8′ in memes

Please be careful with your memes, they may hold hidden arcane power

so I don’t really like how the Final Fantasy series got really J-poppy from X (okay 8) on, because whatever J pop culture was right then didn’t interest me as much as the postwar themes I’d gotten used to seeing

(this weird sunny day/elegaic loss thing that in retrospect was some transparent working-through-the-postwar shit - the Ghost Train in FFVI, Porco Rosso-era anime when it made sense for Patlabor to make a whole series about police mecha and have episodes be about the maintenance crew dealing with the summer heat and subtle longing between colleagues on the drive to an offsite conference)

and I think they’ve found a good balance with FFXV, that’s what got me going on Japanese hairstyles the other day, you notice it but it registers as a variant of something you grok.

which gets you the relief to notice the things that are like-you-could-have-been but aren’t, like the way the music titles and styles invoke this concept of Frenchness as high-status romantic

and I could point out how between Perry’s Opening of Japan and WWII the islands’ most important external contacts were German and how Europe in the Japanese imaginary is still kinda tinted by this third-hand take by way of Victorian Prussia

but I could also point out that the English word “deluxe” comes from the French de luxe and a lot of that was Industrial Age London merchants on a superlative treadmill grasping for a fancy way to say “fancy”

Which also casts light on something else - Atomic Age marketing conventions, where spaceships and atoms and associated adjectives came into style for a while? What Fallout riffs on? That was a real expression of (Made in) American pride. America had until the First World War lived in Australia-style cultural shadow of other continents, to the point where “French” or “English” or “Continental”, basically “not American” was a common idiom for “quality”.

In a very real sense, “We fucking nuked Hiroshima” surpassed “We’ve got some nice paintings in Paris” as the symbol of earthly power that brands wanted to associate themselves with because people who matter wanted to associate their personalities with, that was the 1950s.

Eventually France matched Trinity with Reggane and Bikini with the bikini

Running since 1999, Makeoutclub is shutting down

Huh

All in all this is something both significant and telling I doubt I’d have heard of (yet) if not for the NYT

So

kontextmaschine:

You’re one of the good ones, Jim.

styletaboo:

John Hejduk - The House of the Suicide and The House of the Mother of the Suicide [Prague]

afloweroutofstone:

Ethics are dead, fight everyone

argumate:

I’m already embarrassed at the thought of future historians primly explaining early 21st century communication to an amused audience

sinesalvatorem:

Chinese: How many layers of homophones are you on?

English: Like 5 or 6 right now, my dude

Chinese: You are like a little baby. Watch this:

Chinese: 100 entries for “shi” on this page and more on the next

Chinese: A 92 word poem consisting of nothing but “shi”

Cantonese: I don’t even distinguish “shi” from “si”

Chinese second language learners: *the distant screams of the damned*

That’s why Japanese humor and poetry is so pun- and double meaning-heavy - a lot of technical or literary terms, the stuff that would be Latinate words in English, were borrowed in from Chinese. And Japanese isn’t tonal so it ended up even more indistinguishable. And the way the language works there’s a bit of regularity and end rhyme baked into things already, so an accessible-yet-memorable way to play with words is to overload the same sounds (or characters - irregular sound/kanji mapping, words borrowed in at different points over thousands of years of Chinese language evolution, is a whole other layer) with multiple meanings

hey girl are you a Napoleonic army? cuz I want to drive straight through you and tear up your unprotected rear

notalkingplz:

Castle Guy