I’ll never forget the time I was sitting with this guy, nice kid, didn’t know him well, I think we must have had a bottle of wine or some questionable hashish or something, and in response to an awkward silence I just started talking and ended up going on a long meandering rant about how ugly American robins are. I’m talking a full monologue. I had an intro and conclusion. It was pointlessly vehement. I have never been so mean or loquacious about anything in my life.
Consider my horror when this perfectly nice guy wordlessly lifted his shirt to reveal a full-torso prismacolor tattoo of his spiritual soul animal, the American robin.
Their scientific name sounds like “Migrating Turd” but otherwise I find them charming if fairly derpy and mundane. I don’t know if I’d get a tattoo of one though. They’re like the potato of American birds.
I have no actual animosity towards them. They’re fine. I like them. They remind me if my college roommate and beloved friend. I don’t know why I said any of that—I was grasping at straws for something kind of provocative to say and failed so catastrophically that I was catapulted into a Seinfeld skit.
eerily similar to the time in college someone tried to make conversation by making fun of a silly book a former high school teacher of theirs had written only for me to just pull out a physical copy of the exact book because i’d realized he was talking about my dad
the foot seeks the mouth like leaves seek the sun
yesterday was the ten year anniversary of my insensitive American Robin comment and my tattooed friend messaged me to celebrate the “funniest thing that had ever happened to him” so sometimes critically failing a charisma check leads to a whole decade of joy for someone else
Kind of a Reddit AITA post but sometimes it is a little funny to fuck with people in ways that deliberately conform to a stereotype of what they must think of you. the other day I was talking to my friend and I randomly said that I wanted a pet chimpanzee. I’d dress it in person clothes (dungarees and hats) and I’d teach it to love science fiction. And this girl nearby was like “you know how dangerous those things are, right? Also how unethical it is to keep an ape as your pet for your own amusement” and I was already seeing where the conversation was going so I was pretending ignorance like “yea but it wouldn’t just be for my amusement. It would have practical points too.” And she ignored that statement entirely to say “Well chimpanzees can rip faces off” and I was like. What’s the most frustrating thing I can say now. Finally settled on “Mine wouldn’t do that though.” and you could tell she wanted to hurt me very very badly. Like a chimpanzee would if I had one as a pet
I’m up to the “I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys” part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven’t read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring “experts” to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how “well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it’s actually just so complicated, it’s too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It’s science, you see. Economics doesn’t work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN’T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It’s just so complicated…”
That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where “everything is so complicated, and it’s actually a lot more complicated than you think..” that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how “complicated” everything is, and how “unrealistic” a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of “intellectuals” “explaining” how working 13 hours at age 10 was “vital” to the “moral fibre” of those poor kids.
