this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

As a kid I just wanted to read weird old shit. LOTR, Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, Philip K Dick, you can guess where this is going. I still can't let go of my childhood Lovecraft nightmares. I am aware most of that is stupid and racist and misguided. But strip that hateful garbage out, you still have a lot

Addendum I f'd up and didn't mention my adoration for Ursula K. Leguin

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How is wanting to read weird old shit racist ??

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ok they weren't all racist. Racism is the basic premise for Lovecraft for sure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

hah, Lovecraft specifically. I heard he was racist af but couldn't see it in his work (haven't read all of it but a good chunk when I was younger)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Some people are right way before their time. Fortunately, they sometimes also know how to write.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Truly we do live in a society

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago

They should have expected as much. She's basically just paraphrasing The Lathe of Heaven for that speech.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 month ago (3 children)

And it's now 2024, and nothing has changed. Maybe for the worse.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

Honestly the last decade plus does feel like the lead up paragraph in a history textbook to some major paradigm shift. But it could still be years and years away. But it does feel inevitable.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago

And a czar was killed by a revolutionary’s bomb decades before the first of the three socialist revolutions of Russia. Will is slow to build and spent suddenly.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You're not wrong, but when you compare the general perspective of baby boomers vs the general perspective of Millennials/Zoomers, you can at least see that there now exists a will for change.

I like to think that maybe Ursula LeGuin was able to play a role in that change through her words.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

yea change takes time and active effort, the fact that corporate interference is so present in the newer generation's minds is already a massive step in the right direction, doomerism (as always) does jack shit for fuck to actually solve anything

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You would expect that from the author of The Dispossessed. She's an anarchist (Paul Goodman leaning) through and through. She also wrote the preface to Murray Bookchin's The Next Revolution.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn't try to finish but couldn't quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn't want to study war no more,[3] I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be. And I found that its principal character, whom I'd first glimpsed in the original misbegotten story, was alive and well—my guide to Anarres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed#Background

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

CEO s are too stupid to know that stuff. They can't start a car without help.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The monarchy of England is still in charge of Canada.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

While true on paper, they don't have any actual power here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Then why do you keep them around?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Inertia.

Also while a wealthy family enterprise, they neither

  • a) rule over any nation(s)
  • b) receive any authority through divine appointment

It's actually a huge step down from the kind of power royalty used to enjoy.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago

In general, monarchs no longer claim to rule by divine right. Monarchs are not necessarily running their country as more than just figureheads by reasoning that it's what a god wants. That's a big change.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you ever get the opportunity again, it would be interesting to ask for the smallest win worth fighting for and see if it’s scoffed at or received well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Potentially. However, I'm a very argumentative person, and I have a very hard time biting my tongue. So for me, it's just not worth the risk to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lmao friend, you probably did well to say nothing and not participate. But please don't forget: you got good ideas

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah. There is a time and place, you gotta choose your battles. That was very much not one of them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well, it's none of his business what you think.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

There is that as well. There is no convincing a CEO that capitalism bad. So he can get bent before I have a conversation with him.

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