If you don’t have the ability to bleed off excess pressure – if you don’t have that safety valve, if the exhaust can’t escape from the gas engine, whatever – then what you have is a very different machine: a bomb.
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Now, I’ve had a lot of thoughts on genre fiction in the past, and this list is going to be more useful for people interested in writing a secondary world story, with a particular (but not exclusive) eye towards fantasy fiction. As a result of a number of factors, there are going to be several works that I often make use of in my political thoughts, but this list isn’t primarily or solely focused on that.
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A right is a particularized (and reified) liberty or freedom. By “particularized,” I mean that your freedom of speech doesn’t give you freedom of movement or freedom of worship. Each one is a specific thing. By “reified”, I mean that it is an immaterial thing that’s treated as a discrete object that one is able to possess: presumably, we’re endowed with these rights at a certain time (by our creator, or at age of majority.) It’s specifically, in my opinion, the reification that’s the problem with “rights” as a concept – it’s something conceived of as separate from the person, rather than as an attribute of the person.
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What I have come to understand is that transience – that is, the state of being transient – is a problem. For the past decade or so, I have been transient to one degree or another. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, performing as I do a certain middle-class identity in my dress, speech, and profession, but that is what I am. This is what it means to be part of the so-called “precariat”.
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Summer reading, you say? More like, “The second hellish summer we have endured while in an active pandemic, under an ineffectual national government and a malignantly stupid state government, now with an even greater likelihood of heat stroke due to accelerating climate change,” am I right?
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