On this day, 3 October 1896, designer, artist and socialist William Morris died of tuberculosis at age 62. In describing his political goals in 1894, he wrote: “a brief sketch of what I am looking forward to as a Communist: to sum up, it is Freedom from artificial disabilities; the development of each man’s capacities for the benefit of each and all. Abolition of waste by taking care that one man does not get more than he can use, and another less than he needs; consequent condition of general well-being and fulness of life, neither idle and vacant, nor over burdened with toil.”
Learn more about Morris’s life in this great biography by EP Thompson, and see reproductions of his artwork here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/william-morrishttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1822253861293089/?type=3
One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it’s the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.
For context here is a picture
what
It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park.
I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it.
Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.
But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night.
Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys.
Shoutout to this guy for debunking the argument about the market regulating itself with a real life example
Can you imagine if the social-media-interlinked self-reinforcing “save the world by buying different stuff” crowd could communicate with each other during the period of removing lead from gasoline? Deafening constant voices going, “just don’t drive so much sweaty don’t be selfish” “i myself prefer a clean lifestyle. I take the train everywhere” “if you really cared about the world you’d just buy expensive EthicGreenPetrol, only available in select stations in prosperous cities. Its the only way to get them to listen 😇 if EVERYONE does it then the companies will just have to change because they’re following our dollars!”
And ten years later, scientists and activists are largely unable to move the public, because everyone believes that the people who care about that stuff have the option of buying expensive EthicGreenPetrol, so surely that’s enough work on the topic - after all, there’s an alternative that people can freely buy if they want to. It becomes harder for people to get research funding or action change because inertia develops: a solution is readily purchasable but most people don’t buy it, so therefore nobody cares, humans are awful and one lives on a planet full of enemies. After all, it’s hard to go without nice things to afford the expensive gasoline that seems to be no different, especially when the people buying leaded gasoline are 1) instantly cancelling out your own efforts and 2) seem perfectly happy.It’s quite easy to dismiss the “just don’t buy the poison gas” crowd because they’re smug, patronising Facebook bullies. Distraction and exhaustion do the rest of the work.
A generation later it transpires that the “buy yourself free of sin” message was funded, disseminated and encouraged by the fuel industry. Lead is still in gasoline. When their heirs challenge them on this mass failure of obligations, the people who allowed it to happen say weakly, “Well, I always bought EthicGreenPetrol.”
Anyway corporations can’t be trusted to manage shared communal resources like atmospheres, even if you gently twiddle them along by the strategic deposition of dollars into different pockets. It is also perfectly possible to remove their ability to do so.
