People on such short trips usually don’t stick around long enough to realize how ineffective they are being. In Uganda, I got used to seeing groups of young people come for week-long visits at the orphanage where taught English. They would play with the kids, give them a bracelet or something, and then leave all-smiles, thinking they just saved Africa. I was surprised when the day after the first group left, exactly zero of the kids were wearing the bracelet they had received the day prior. The voluntourists left thinking they gave the kids something they didn’t have before (and with bragging rights for life). But the kids didn’t care, because what they really wanted was school uniforms, their school fees to be paid, guaranteed meals, basic healthcare, and the like — the basics.
Worse, they can even be harmful to children who struggle with abandonment issues. This should not be understated; have you ever considered the negative impact it routinely has on kids after they bond with someone for a week, and then that person disappears from their life? If your justification for going on these trips is “seeing the smiles on the kids’ faces”, then you’re part of the problem.
Remember kids: Pluto is not a planet, WAS never a planet, and any acknowledgement of Pluto as a planet was an error of assumption
Fuckihg fight me right now viva la Pluto
F u c k you it was a clerical error!! The real ninth planet is out there but it’s not Pluto! Stop ruining science!!!!
A clerical error? Oh, no – the truth is far more absurd.
(Hold on, folks – this requires a bit of background.)
In a nutshell, since the late 19th Century, it had been suspected that there was a ninth planet, based on apparent irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. This as-yet-hypothetical planet, whose gravitational influence would have accounted for those irregularities, was termed “Planet X”.
The trouble is, nobody could find the thing, no matter how hard they looked. That seemed to have changed in 1930, when a new moving object was finally detected on the outskirts of the Solar system. When word of this discovery got out, the media declared that Planet X had been found, and the object was subsequently named “Pluto”.
However, there was a problem with the newly dubbed Pluto: its faint albedo and lack of a visible disk suggested that it was much too small to be Planet X. In fact, while school textbooks treated the matter as resolved, the truth of the matter is that we had no idea what Pluto was – we didn’t even know for sure whether it was a planet at all, much less that it was Planet X. Though little reported-on by the mainstream press, the search continued.
It wasn’t until 1992 that data from the Voyager flyby of Neptune revealed that prior estimates of the masses of the outer planets had been slightly out of whack. With the corrections enabled by Voyager, the apparent anomaly in Uranus’ orbit was proven to be a math error: there was no Planet X after all.
So what the hell was Pluto?
Eventually, it was determined that Pluto had less than 0.2% of its initially estimated mass, and that its appearance near the predicted position of Planet X’s orbit was just a bizarre coincidence. In spite of this, it retained its provisional planetary status; it had already captured the public’s imagination, and the fact that Pluto was the only “planet” to have been discovered by an American created enormous political pressure against classifying it as anything else.
This would remain the status quo until the discovery of additional outer-Solar-system objects as large or larger than Pluto in the mid 00s – most notably Eris – forced the classification issue to be resolved.
TL/DR version: Pluto was never uncontroversially classified as a planet in the first place. It just happened to coincidentally be near the orbit of a hypothetical ninth planet that was later proven not to exist, and sort of inherited the planetary status of its phantom sibling on a provisional basis due to a combination of institutional inertia and politics.
(As icing on the cake, at the time of this posting, early 2016, there’s new – albeit controversial – evidence that there really is a mysterious ninth planet lurking out there. Note, however, that this conjecture is based on a completely different set of anomalies from the ones that led to the Planet X hypothesis.)
tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism
I’d like to clarify:
dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain.
dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense – in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making – well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place – it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)
so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame – this site has some nice examples.
but from my perspective – there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing
in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement.
so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.
related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this
tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal
a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:
you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:
shitposting is the deconstruction of hegemonic discourse through the use of the absurd and surrealism.
I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.
As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.
My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:
and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:
And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.
Aside from color palettes and materials used, I see literally zero difference.
This is one of the top 3 best posts I’ve ever seen on tumblr and I’ve been here for years.
Love
My grandmother took several classes on Dadaism, and I attended them with her growing up. Then I took plenty of art history when I got my BFA in Illustration.
This post is 100% legit in their observations. I’m seriously impressed.
Duchamp’s Urinal was one of the most famous, well known Dada pieces ever made, and he made it purely to prove that literally anything can be art. It was all about ignoring the Establishment’s rules of what art was and wasn’t, – this is exactly the same thing happening in real time.
ah yes, my favourite foreign language feel, “I know what all of those words mean individually but not together like that”
not to forget its twin “i know (roughly) what you’re saying, but what are those words?”
And their cousin, “i’m trying to tell you about a thing, but i don’t know the word for it. Luckily, i know enough words to describe it so i can just sound super poetic while explaining what a gummy bear is.”
callanswall 