Francis 🇾🇪 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @francis@greenplenty.social

I've seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards.

Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech.

She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead inthe eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit.

She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable".

She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees.

And to cap it off, she warns them: “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. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire willfall. And I wil help it along."

#writer #LeGuin

Totay in the Orange Slopbucket, "you can be jailed in the UK for posting mean stuff!", apparently. (Not since 2013, really, but crack on.)

Except they think "mean stuff" includes "inciting racial hatred with a side of murder" which is quite the tell on your internal beliefs, dude. Probably not one you want to be putting out into the open, either, I'd say.

I have had a number of sessions lately where I'm having to spell out "Listen, you are stressed and sick because your capitalistic employer is choosing to pay the CEO X times your salary, squeezing you literally to death, instead of having adequate staffing. This is not about 'time management' or 'coping techniques.' "

Spotted in Times Square, New York City

The FT is reporting that the Darzi report will identify a nearly £40bn shortfall in NHS capital expenditure since 2010 (against comparable countries' rate of capital spending in their health sectors).

While workforce planning is more often in the news (as it very immediately impacts waiting lists & NHS capacity) behind that is the problem of crumbling, inadequate infrastructure (as well as a lack of new responsive developments).

The fruits of austerity are fatal!

#health #infrastructure

A reminder that the richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity.

Eliminating capitalism and billionaires it produces is the only way to start meaningfully addressing the #climatecrisis.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-planet-heating-pollution-two-thirds-humanity

Diane Abbott warns us about recovering from #EnglishRiots :
"My concern now is that [ministers] pivot to draconian anti-immigration legislation to address ‘the root causes of the violence’. But the root cause wasn’t immigrants. It was #racism ."

#UKPolitics
#BlackLivesMatter
#RefugeesWelcome

people who yell about trans kids having genital surgeries (doesn’t happen)

sure are awful quiet about intersex kids having genital surgeries (actually forced on them all the time)

because all they care about is enforcing the cis binary

which, if it were a real thing

would not need enforcing

“We created a self-opening fridge with an AI camera that tracks what you put in and take out.”

Please for the love of any and all deities I am PROSTRATE on the floor begging you for fair energy prices and accessible public transport I do not need a fridge incorrectly guessing what is in my 17 Tupperware containers and refusing to open because I haven’t paid my monthly £24.99 subscription of “Fridge Door Lock Plus”

😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱

🆘😱🆘 #StarmersBritain 🆘😱🆘

'UK journalist under house arrest on terrorism charges...'

#NetPol #PoliceState #CrispinFlintoffShow

https://youtu.be/WjwycG_9Ujo