remember how i said israel has to expressly permit any entry or exit even through egypt’s border with gaza? and that this has always been the case and why gaza is considered an ‘open air prison?’
israel is now not allowing irish or brazilian citizens in gaza waiting at the border because their countries called for a ceasefire. it is effectively holding them hostage in gaza as it bombs them. insofar it has bombed the rafah border with egypt five times, and bombed injured evacuees in ambulances en route to the border too.
rogue state, terrorist country, accountable to no one and immune to consequences. israel continues to make a mockery of international law.
alright gamers tell me: what’s the game that’s the equivalent of a weighted blanket for you. it’s not necessarily a good game or a fun game but a game that gives you a sense of peace and warmth
my new thing whenever an embarrassing memory jumps up out of some backwater neuron to t-bone my present-day thought process is to declare a statute of limitations. like i can burn down an entire building in the state where i live and the law deems it both unfair and illegal to prosecute me after six years have passed, i think that thing i said in high school can be expunged from my record.
whenever i click the cc button on a youtube video that clearly has a high budget and is made by a fucking studio and i see “english - auto generated” i spit daggers from my eyes and mouth at whoever decided to not pay someone to make actual captions
Meanwhile every time I watch a video clearly made by one guy in his living room and it has complete descriptive subtitles, I feel more love in me than I can contain.
“The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:
If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.
‘Those are the terms’, indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat’ or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!’), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?
This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away’ does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise’ is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).
But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away’ as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here’, the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away’ might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty.”
- Kurt Schiller, from “Omelas, Je T'aime.” Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.
THAT FABRIC IS NOT CALLING TO YOU! LEAVE IT ALONE!
boy it’s me the textiles speaking to you inside your head. you need the yarn. you need thread. your soul hungers to participate in the act of creation. you must feed it. you must buy so many beads.
