“Between 1970 and 2000, the number of private jets worldwide multiplied by ten times over. These luxury planes emit six times more carbon per passenger than normal commercial jets. Private yachts that stretch the length of football fields burn more than 200 gallons of fossil fuel per hour. The top-earning 1 percent of households, one Canadian study has found, generate three times more greenhouse gas emissions than average households — and twice as much as the next 4 percent. Those in the global 1 percent, Oxfam calculates, may well be stomping a carbon footprint 175 times deeper than the poorest 10 percent. Another analysis concludes that the richest 1 percent of Americans, Singaporeans, and Saudis on average emit over 200 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year, “2,000 times more than the poorest in Honduras, Rwanda, or Malawi.” Our global environmental crisis would not, of course, suddenly melt away if the world’s most affluent suddenly ended their profligate consumption. But the wealthy pose our single biggest obstacle to environmental progress.”
Oh my god i was watching this with my cat laying on me in bed and his head popped up and he started looking for the cat. It was so cute he was peaking over all the sides of the bed.
Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way,
you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction
in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”
What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?
I still remember my own creative writing teacher telling me this because he saw the Terry Pratchett book on my desk and got this smug smirk on his face like “aha, gotcha”. He had the nerve to pick it up and call it “popularist fiction”, like somehow being popular and easily accessible made it less inherent in intellectual value.
I had it in my back pack because I did my final thesis on the evolution of mythology and folk tails into fantasy and sci-fi and the societal importance of telling stories (before anyone asks, no I don’t have it, I lost it when I moved continents), and I used Terry Pratchett because there wasn’t a single humanitarian issue the man did not touch on.
Which I told him. And then he kind of floundered and went “ah, well but, it’s…well I mean it’s not exactly high brow”, like neither the fuck was Shakespeare or Dickens you self-important turnip. Dickens was literally selling his stories by the chapter. He was the popular author of his time. Shakespeare was too, he fucking made up words and phrases all the time because the language he needed to express himself didn’t exist in the way he needed it too.
Intellectual elitism is nothing more than a hold over from class warfare and the belief that only certain people should get to be truly educated. And it needs to be smashed.
funeral-biscuit 