It seems like a lot of people are just not reading the article or the context of the quote:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/07/27/the-witcher-casting-director-says-yennefer-casting-was-to-challenge-beauty-standards-which-is-completely-insane/

Now, this is not Holland saying that Chalotra is ugly, or that they cast someone ugly to play the role of the most beautiful woman in the world. … Rather, Holland is saying that she is challenging the “standard of beauty” by casting a woman with slightly darker skin.

I do understand that traditional Western fantasy is predominantly white, but I disagree fundamentally with the notion that the “standard of beauty” for most people is being white. I don’t think anyone in the entire world outside of a tiny, tiny sliver of absolute racist scumbags would look at Anya Chalotra and think anything other than “This woman is jaw-droppingly gorgeous.” Casting Chalotra may challenge our perceptions of fantasy as white (a complicated discussion on its own) but it does nothing to challenge any standard of beauty.

Emphasis is mine.

they debunked the myth that caffeine causes pancreatic cancer:

https://www.nature.com/articles/bjc2015235

EDIT: Caffeine might make you more likely to have issues with your heart, and isn’t good for you blood pressure.

exactly; there will always be piracy as long as piracy is needed, a post-piracy world is a utopia, even in the worst dystopia people find ways to “pirate”

It is Texas after all.

In 2017 Cory Bernardi, an Australian conservative politician, accidentally ended up in a photoshoot organized by the Labor party to promote voting yes to the question “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” in the same-sex marriage postal survey.

The survey had a turnout of 79.5% and the results were:

• yes: 61.6%
• no: 38.4%

As a result of the survey parliament was able to vote and legalize same-sex marriage. The survey results happened in November 2017 and same-sex marriage was legalized in December 2017.

See:

Bernardi accidentally walked through the marriage equality photo of Western Australia Labor politicians wearing rainbow “It’s Time” shirts in Parliament House on Monday night.

Bernardi is firmly against legalising same-sex marriage and is campaigning for the “no” camp in the same-sex marriage postal survey.

Source: BuzzFeed News

If you would like to traumatize yourself more, here’s a video about another dangerous water slide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIcekOTOqg

yeah, obvs the daughter

ah, I see what you mean - it’s an important distinction, and one that I think some existentialists looked at (not necessarily in terms of slavery, per se, but certainly in terms of freedom). Ultimately we can’t avoid constraints and in that sense there is always coercion from the environment. However, there is a big difference between those inescapable constraints and the immoral and unjustified hierarchies a tiny minority of humans have successfully imposed on the rest, and pointing that out is definitely worthwhile.

Thanks for the clarification!

why didn’t I say working class instead of slave? I don’t think most people have in mind the same meaning of “working class” as I intended, while the term slave immediately communicates the situation and the reasoning of the meme

Sure, my communication could have been more specific, but then it would have been more verbose as well. This is just how we use language, to communicate effectively. I don’t want to dismiss your point that being too glib or broad with our language can be offensive to some, but I also think the TJ Maxx worker is closer to that literal slave in the field than you think. To me, solidarity for the working class and cooperation is preferable and pragmatically more likely to achieve political successes than gatekeeping suffering.

First of all, I think I completely understand where you are coming from. This was the same reaction I had when I heard words like “slave” or “slavery” being thrown around to describe contemporary working conditions.

Coming from a U.S. context where slavery overlaps with racism, it seemed even racially insensitive to me that an office worker would be compared to a slave, which in my mind was an African slave working in a cotton field.

The reality is that working conditions vary considerably in the U.S., so when we speak of the working class we include everyone from the undocumented immigrant who is forced to live in shacks and pick crops without pay or even basic access to sanitary or safe conditions all the way up to cozy financial workers who work in skyscrapers. Something as big as an economic or political system is a difficult thing to analyze and talk about.

But I noticed you did not answer my question. If you’re not open to a discussion I understand, at least I have had a chance to put some of my thoughts out there. I just want you offer the opportunity to discuss the topic if you would like to, but no worries either way.

I wonder what you mean by non-biological here, why is that a helpful distinction?

I don’t see why we couldn’t think of human coercion of other humans isn’t “biological” in some sense, so I also don’t understand what distinction exactly you are making with “non-biological”, but I might just be a bit slow today.

Still, I agree with you that coercion seems central to the idea of slavery.

It helps if you look at it from the perspective of the capitalist class. Workers are a form of free capital. Capitalists don’t have to assume any of the burdens involved in creating life, raising a child, acculturating them to social standards that make them suitable workers, etc. They don’t even have to pay for the education or training that makes them capable as human capital in various industrial contexts.

All those costs are dumped onto the working classes, not just as parents (usually the woman) who are expected to deliver a baby, nurse the baby, raise the resulting child until they are the age of the majority all without any wages, access to benefits like retirement plans or health insurance, etc. but also onto taxpayers who subsidize the rest of the costs outside of the home such as their schooling and transportation to the schools.

There is a huge leverage here that the working class does not take by organizing the production of themselves. If we all agreed to not have children and demanded fair compensation for any new production of human capital, society would be much more just and the capitalist class would have less room to exploit us.

In your view, what’s the most important feature of slavery that makes it slavery and not something else?

“Slave” like any word has contextual meaning. In this context I’m using it to refer to the workers who find themselves caught in a coercive political-economic system. Other similar words are wage slave, proletariat, or just working class. The point is that there is an involuntary aspect which likens it to slavery in the more narrow sense. (The narrow meaning of slave I have in mind being “someone forced into labor without pay”.)

All that said, in the U.S. there are still slaves as defined narrowly as people who are forced to work without pay. Slavery is used in prison systems, for example, and is not uncommon among human trafficking victims and immigrants (e.g. read Tomatoland). If your children are women, indigenous, black, or various other minority statuses they are at even greater risk of getting swallowed into those forms of slavery as well.

no kids means no slaves means no slavery

thanks for this info, I was wondering why PIA isn’t recommended anymore