Friendly Daylight Savings reminder from Big Mike
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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On a related note, I wish we'd pick a time and stick with it.
I'd be fine with doing Standard Time year round, but the most popular proposal is leaving it on Daylight Savings Time, and it's still dark at 7 AM where I am right before fall back as it is. I can't imagine how late sunrise would be around the Winter Solstice. I'm not in some extremely northern part of the country either. They don't seem to understand that you can't create more daylight by changing the clocks.
Hot take: DST is good and right-wing, because it opposes modernity (where modernity is sunrise at 4:30 AM).
Clocks are just tools. Very useful tools that make industry possible, but ultimately nothing more. There's really nothing about 5:30 AM that makes it 5:30 AM, other than that it comes five and a half hours after we started the day's timer. Likewise, there's nothing special about midnight that makes it midnight, other than that it's when we started the timer.
Tools should work for us, but in modernity, that's not usually what happens. The clock is the most obvious case of this. Industry requires that we put the world on a schedule, and that means we have to obey that schedule too. That's the trade we made for modern technology.
DST is one tiny bit of control we still have over that tool. The timer that runs our entire world can be started just a little early or late, if it suits us. And it does. Plenty of places in the continental US would see 4:30 AM sunrises, or 4 PM sunsets, if we decided a mechanical timer was the final arbiter of our time. Any power we can hold onto over our tools, we should.
Hotter take:
The world should just use Earth Standard Time. If we're to expand, we can't be splitting hairs over that. People will figure out real quick that 12:00 is sunrise where they are, or sunset.
Perhaps I'm biased by my hatred of DST here, but how is exerting control over arbitrary tools and measurements "right-wing"?
When we say gender is malleable so whether you call yourself a man or a woman or whatever, it doesn't matter, is that "right wing?" When scientists arbitrarily decided that Pluto isn't a planet (which I'm actually fine with) was that "right wing"?
You know sex is real, because you can look at a man or a woman, and see masculinity or femininity. There's obviously something real and inherent there. On the other hand, noon isn't noon because we've recognized some "nooniness" that exists only at noon. There's nothing in reality that can be objectively pointed to.
Pluto is similar, but that's about categories. Categories themselves are somewhat arbitrary, but they're still based on observable qualities (ideally, anyways).
One of the pretensions of modernity is that our scales and measurements are real things, not tools we use to measure real things. We've granted these tools more legitimacy over reality than we ourselves have, even when they fail to represent reality as we're actually living it.
We have other tools that we serve, rather than the other way around. They're not measurement tools, but they're still tools. People live as mouthpieces for something they heard on television or social media. We bring phones with us out of the house, and they act like leashes held by whoever you can't get away with ignoring. And god forbid a fucking adult walk somewhere - That's really gonna fuck millenials and onwards when, come old age, and the age distribution being what it is, we're gonna be far more reliant on our own health to take care of ourselves.
DST is just a minor thing, but our culture took baby steps to get where we are now. Every tiny denial of modernity counts, and I'm planting my fucking ass on this hill.
What's important is who's exerting control: are we as individuals exerting control to make measurements suit our daily lives, or are government committees forcing the results of their political engineering upon us in order to homogenize everything into the same shade of grayish brown?