Luisa Capetillo, born on this day in 1879, was a Puerto Rican labor organizer, feminist, and Christian anarchist. Capetillo advocated for women's suffrage, was arrested for wearing pants in public, and helped raise the minimum wage.
As a labor activist, Capetillo organized workers throughout the United States, worked as a reporter for the FLT (Federacion Libre de Trabajadores), and traveled throughout Puerto Rico, educating and organizing women. Her hometown, Arecibo, became the most unionized area of the country.
Capetillo is considered to be one of Puerto Rico's first suffragists. In 1908, during the FLT convention, Capetillo asked the union to approve a policy for women's suffrage, insisting that all women should have the same right to vote as men. Along with other labor activists, she also helped pass a minimum wage law in the Puerto Rican Legislature.
Today, Capetillo is perhaps best known for being arrested for wearing pants in public, although the charges against her were later dropped.
In 2014, the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico honored Capetillo, along with eleven other women, with plaques in the "La Plaza en Honor a la Mujer Puertorriqueña" (Plaza in Honor of Puerto Rican Women).
Capetillo, Luisa - a biography
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The right wing conception of life as fundamentally, inescapably being about familymaking and reproduction always sounded more like a prison sentence to me.
Like, shit, if propagation is my only purpose, why do I have a nervous system and all this apparently extraneous bullshit? Mint plants do it loads better. There’s a reason you don’t put them directly in the ground.
“That’s it?! That’s the journey of life? That was just budding, going to seed, and wilting!”
I get the impression that right wingers mostly use that argument to justify the subjugation of women. Women's purpose is babies and homemaking while the men Make the Tough Decisions and Get Shit Done(tm). What this means in practice is that they expect their wives to be their mother, while they go out and do what they want. It's a lot easier to make someone a subservient housekeeper and progeny maker if you convince them it's their life's purpose.
I mean, unless you have some spiritual beliefs that is what the evolutionary concept of life is about. The fact that humans live relatively good lives is the exception to the rule of life. Some animals live short shitty lives and die in extremely painful ways because evolution found that strategy to be advantageous. It's like those boars who tusks routinely grow into their skulls and kill them. "What a stupid thing to happen" you may say. But this happens long after the boars mate and thus has no real evolutionary pressure to change. Nature doesn't give a shit about the individual, only the species. If it became advantageous to torture you, it would eventually do so.
The reason you're not mint is because a long time ago more mobile, longer lasting, fruiting bodies of fungus found an evolutionary niche. You can certainly find purpose beyond that, I highly encourage you to. But that doesn't change the fact that the reason you have all these emotions/highly complex instruments is because it was evolutionary advantageous.
It’s honestly kind of absurd in that typical cosmic way. I almost can’t understand how people find beauty in this shit anymore.
I sometimes wish I could autoclave the earth clean out of spite for the mechanisms that gave rise to me. Sure, abstract natural processes can’t understand or feel spite so it’d all just be collateral, but god damn it
I've literally thought the exact same thing, like today even. Nietzsche's Death of God is a question that has been haunting me for a while now. I don't like his solution but I understand the feeling. I think a legitimate answer to the Ferni paradox is that sentient life is inherently prone to self-destructive urges as it realizes what it is. I think most people are still social animals instead of thinking animals. When we reach a critical mass of fully-aware thinking animals, I think it could lead to extinction. Life evolves into thinking animals and either destroys itself intentionally or chooses to live in ignorance.
The only way I sorta cope is taking a pseudo-Buddhist approach. If I'm just a vague collection of experiences and neurons, then I was never really sentient in any way that matters. All that was me was just an organ created by the body in order to navigate society. I don't think I'll really die because I never really lived in the first place.
I really do hope I'm just a mistake and life is inherently self-affirming enough to survive the weight of existence. I wouldn't be too upset then, to see myself as a mere link to a theoretical human species worthy of a soul. Even if I'm not evolved enough to deserve a soul, I hope I can contribute to the development of a species which is.
Embrace the absurdity. Laugh at the absurdity. Life is a meaningless struggle to survive and procreate. The entirety of the universe is a pointless expression of chaos resulting in order and order resulting in chaos. Everything is always doing the unexpected and moving towards higher complexity in an attempt to create something new. Even the universe is just doing what it is driven to do because it cant figure out what else to do. Its incredibly depressing to the point of absurdity, so just laugh at it. Its more enjoyable than crying and by laughing in the face of depressing pointlessness you win.
Oh yeah, I like dicking around with electronics a lot but the pressure they put on me - even indirectly - is enough to refill me with that existential dread. I'm trapped in a small enough box without their shit