Memo 22: Marketplace
The beauty of having a shoddy memory is that 1) things will come to the top of my mind without any prompting, and 2) I will easily forget where those random pieces of info come from. This week, it was “this little piggy went to the market.”
That nursery rhyme is relatively commonplace, as its been around for almost 300 years and is a short one to boot. However, in my quest of refreshing my memory, it turns out that the “market” in question is not the piggy going and buying some clothes — like I always thought — but instead is going to the market to be slaughtered?
And unsurprisingly, most nursery rhymes have very dark origins. As that article explains, some of them are subtly referencing historical events (Mary, Mary Quite Contrary = Queen Mary I of England) while some are pretty downright racist. Reading more into the origins of what I said so easily as a kid really made me shiver a little. Yes, whenever you look into the past about 95% of what’s there is pretty grim, I’m not that naive. But it’s kid’s nursery rhymes! Why be so insidious so young?
The silver lining among this reveal is that nobody gives a damn about nursery rhymes anymore. Now though this shocked me, I’m glad that I was kept in the dark about this all as a kid and current kids don’t have to experience this same horror eventually. Maybe bad things naturally die over time without a watchful eye, like how “a free market will keep alive the best ideas.”¹ Current social media trends are just as always as these origins but at least people hyper analyze it online, instead of passively accepting it for years (a la me).
But a small tangent related to marketplaces gives us a very compelling argument for the opposite take. Just last month, it was revealed that whole plots of land in the Amazon rainforest were being sold… on Facebook Marketplace.
Yes, Facebook Marketplace — where you go to find an old lamp or free rugs, others have been illegally selling the Amazon rainforest on there. Even though deforestation in the Amazon is at a 10-year high, Facebook is not going to take any action of its own to halt the trade because of their whole “our commerce policies require buyers and sellers to interact with the law so we’re not guilty” shtick. Clearly, with minimal oversight, lots of terrible things can get down on the Marketplace.
So do evil things fall out of manner with force or with time? It’s boring to say both but yes, both. Or maybe not! There are new bad things all the time, so we have lots of opportunities to see how they fall out. How lucky are we.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
A follow-up to last week’s Ratchelor, 'Raptor Boyfriend' Proves Absurd Dating Sims Are Here to Stay.
A Shooter in the Hills, a story that I have been waiting to see come to light for years! It’s about the ongoing shootings in Malibu State Park for the past couple of years. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because the Malibu PD made sure it was kept out of the media cycle to not alarm people. Now we finally get a story!
Trans Activists in Spain Are on Hunger Strike for Self-Identification, over a new law that would allow individuals to self-determine their gender without a doctor’s diagnosis.
Private Schools Are Indefensible. Interesting article, and obviously as a former private-school child I am in agreement with all the points made here. But seeing how this is coming from the Atlantic, I have to wonder: to the usual readers of the Atlantic, doesn’t this fall a bit on deaf ears? Or are the Atlantic readers the kinds of people who send their children to these schools? Is anyone really in defense of private schools anymore that will have their minds changed by an Atlantic article?
I would have linked the theory here but I cannot find the exact verbiage of this thought for the life of me. Even though it was beaten into my head in my sophomore year of high school, that clearly did not have a lasting effect on me.