many people would rather have entire neighborhoods of unsold mcmansions while homelessness persists than one apartment block of affordable housing because the former looks nicer, and this is one reason “affordable housing” in wealthy areas is unaffordable
(on blind date) oh youre from omelas? i heard that was a pretty nice place. always kinda wanted to live there myself. shame the kid thing stopped working before i had the chance to move out there. have they figured out how to get that system up and running again? not to your knowledge? ah well. probably for the best, i feel like people would be super annoying about that. even out here any time you meet someone from omelas theyre like ‘yeah i walked away.’ like ok? the kids still in there tho like. glad your conscience is clean i guess? people eat that shit up out here tho they buy em drinks and say like 'yeah that was the right decision it mustve been so hard to give up all that to do whats right.’ i dont get it man. sorry im rambling. how’d you like living there? what? it sucked? huh i guess it wasnt all its cracked up to be. so when can i see you again?
(on second date) would i have saved the kid? hahaha! oh, no, its just that thats always been a thought experiment around here. yknow, 'would you save the omelas kid, possibly causing harm to everyone in the city, or would you let the kid suffer, sparing the citizens but definitely causing harm to the kid?’ kinda like the counterpart to the trolley problem. i bet it would be too awkward to catch on in omelas itself so thats probably why you didnt know. but usually its just a circlejerk of people saying 'yeah i would save the kid, the city can probably run itself, probably nothing would happen, theyre probably all complicit anyway.’ kind of a base refusal to engage with the thought experiment. anyway no i wouldnt have. i know things are mostly fine now, it wasnt like catastrophic in retrospect, but there was no way to know before. i wouldnt have risked it for one kid. and frankly i still wouldnt have, knowing what we know now. like its still a nice place but theres more than one kid suffering now. kickstarting that earlier is mathematically cruel. no, i wouldnt change my mind if i knew the kid. its easy to say i would, but ive got tons of friends suffering that i cant do anything for.
(minigolfing (no longer dating because they realised they leaned more masc than im attracted to but the split was amicable)) wait you were the omelas kid? ill be honest i dont know what kind of reaction youre comfortable with here. like i feel like everyone would be so weird about it. what would make you feel most comfortable? … for real? i see. well that explains why you agreed to a second date after that lol. can i be honest with you though? i think thats bullshit. i get why youd need to hold onto that while you were in there, but like. you need to let yourself grieve, dude. maybe it was for the greater good, but that doesnt mean it wasnt also fucked up and unfair. youre kinda clinging to this idea that it was a noble sacrifice, but theres nothing noble about trauma inflicted on you by others. especially if you couldn’t stop it. yeah i know what i said, and i stand by it, but youre allowed to be selfish. youre allowed to say you didnt deserve any of that shit, that someone shouldve helped you, omelas be damned. they cant put you back in there anymore. its over. you can take off the armour. you can learn to live. there, there. let it all out. yeah, sorry, you guys can go ahead of us, they’re gonna be a while i think.
Help me. I am a 8 year old boy living in the illegitimate Yankee Capitalist regime. President Xi, our shelves are empty and we are hungry. I am asking you to liberate my state of Connecticut with your Chengdu J-20 Stealth air superiority fighters and your Dongfeng 41 Missiles.
“Swiss chocolate is known worldwide despite Switzerland growing almost no cacao” is a pretty succinct summary of how the western economic model is fundamentally incapable of functioning with the development of high-value-added production in the global south
