"Boom!"

I didn’t realize until five minutes ago that some people are sexually aroused by trees. (If anyone has a time machine that will return me 301 seconds into the past, please let me know.) Apparently it’s a real thing called dendrophilia. An excerpt from an Ask Me Anything on Reddit by someone who claims to be a tree hugger (and far, far worse):

“[–]FABULOUS_fo_sho 17 points 1 day ago

Because robotics has lacked, above all, a Marxist perspective, here’s the opening of a manifesto by Communist Robot which believes that tin machines can free the masses:

“If not within our lifetime, than within the lifetime of our children there will be a revolution in robotics that will change every aspect of human society as we know it. Will we be ready for it? We are just now settling into the information age; enjoying the luxuries of the industrial revolution while sharing prosperity around the world, but in this age not everyone lives a life of luxury. Everyone can’t, because if everyone did who would clean the toilets? Who would do the farming? Who would make our Nike shoes? The prosperity of the modern world is dependent on the unfortunate unskilled workers living in poverty locally and throughout the world.

The rich of the world don’t physically labor; their work is to manage the resources they’ve attained that make them wealthy. Those resources, textiles or commodities are intrinsically dependent on the people paid to manufacture and distribute them. It is in the interest of the business owner to pay those people as little as possible to insure maximum returns and increase wealth. Obviously. Less obviously is the bare bones necessity of maintaining the monetary divide between wealth controlling business owners and the laboring masses. A business owner’s personal incentive for furthering financial growth is only a catalyst that preserves a more fundamentally important economic truth: The rich need the poor.

If you work out of necessity to support yourself you are poor. The middle class is just the fancy poor living in prosperous countries where even the poor are often richer than the richest of poor nations. The rich are dependent on the poor for their productive value, they need workers and the rich don’t labor so they need the poor to work for them. The poor spend their money buying the commodities the rich control, which means anything they were paid is just going back to their employer. Ultimately it’s not about the money; it’s about getting people to work for you.”

People will go to almost any length today for status, sacrificing whatever it takes for a brush with fame, for the chance to appear special. But that’s nothing new, not a product of media saturation or any other sort of modern condition. Desperation didn’t start with us. Earlier today, I came across this 2009 New York Times article about palace attendants in the ancient city of Ur, who angled for jobs that would provide them with a fleeting sense of importance before resulting in their brutal deaths. An excerpt:

“A new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered in Iraq almost a century ago, appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists say.

Palace attendants, as part of royal mortuary ritual, were not dosed with poison to meet a rather serene death. Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike perhaps, was driven into their heads…There were two round holes in the soldier’s cranium and one in the woman’s, each about an inch in diameter. But the most convincing evidence, Dr. Monge said in an interview, were cracks radiating from the holes. Only if the holes were made in a living person would they have produced such a pattern of fractures along stress lines. The more brittle bones of a person long dead would shatter like glass, she explained.

Dr. Monge surmised that the holes were made by a sharp instrument and that death ‘by blunt-force trauma was almost immediate.’

Ritual killing associated with a royal death was practiced by other ancient cultures, archaeologists say, and raises a question: Why would anyone, knowing their probable fate, choose a life as a court attendant?

‘It’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand,’ Dr. Monge said. ‘But in the culture these were positions of great honor, and you lived well in the court, so it was a trade-off. Besides, the movement into the next world was not for them necessarily something to fear.'”