promethea.incorporated

ozymandias271:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ozymandias271:

socialjusticemunchkin:

argumate:

attemptstobeunproblematic:

argumate:

@attemptstobeunproblematic:

Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.

Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.

If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.

But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.

One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.

What you said:^

What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.

I’m gonna leave you with this:

You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.

Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.

Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.

Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.

This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)

A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.

Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.

Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.

I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.

Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)

They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)

I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.

And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.

(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)

ACE’s numbers are incredibly over-optimistic about how much they get people to be vegan, everyone agrees with this, they don’t know how much over-optimistic they are and are starting to do research to figure out how much, the research is pretty fucking dispiriting. (Leafleting doesn’t work, online ads don’t work…)

So this is a nice essay about buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately, except that it is not true and for people who get a normal level of utilons from meat you can reduce animal consumption more effectively by not eating them yourself than you can by purchasing online ads convincing people to do so. 

I stand corrected on the specific case, although I still suspect that there must be *some* way to leverage that stuff more effectively. I would be extremely surprised that buying not!cheese for 20€/kg instead of cheese for 8€/kg, or soy yoghurt for 3€ instead of animal yoghurt for 1,4€ would be the best marginal use for that money from an animal rights perspective. (in case you’re wondering, Finland is expensive)

At the very least one could pay someone else (such as school lunches etc.) to substitute more cost-efficient animal product replacements (such as adding some fraction of soy protein to meat products) after picking the lowest-hanging fruit oneself, or possibly investing in research to speed up the introduction of affordable and popular replacements.

The fact that one way of doing it doesn’t work doesn’t mean that purity veganism (the person being argued against doesn’t sound like one of the moderates who are happy with people reducing their burden if they don’t go all the way to scrutinizing the smallest details of ingredient lists) deserves praise and thus I want to signal against purity veganism pretending to be effective.

Why are you assuming that being vegan is more expensive than not being vegan? You’re ignoring the possibility of just not eating yogurt at all (which most vegans I know do, because vegan yogurt is awful) and instead eating Oriental-flavor Top Ramen, pasta with tomato sauce, baked potatoes, cabbage, lentils and rice, or any number of other inexpensive vegan options. I expect that most vegans spend less on food than non-vegans do. 

The cost of veganism is in time, pleasure, and health, all of which matter.

You seem to me to be taking a sort of arguments-are-soldiers mindset. Deontologist veganism is silly, but there’s no reason to descend to their level.

I’m addressing price when the rest are held constant, because simplicity. Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances (I for one am certainly sacrificing veganism because I have neither the money nor the effort to spare; that’s why I talk about things like expensive cheese substitutes instead of the cheapest way of nourishing oneself). I believe it’s not rational from an animal rights perspective to be deontologically vegan, and in fact now my brain can even output the calculation for believing it in the general case:

Let’s assume that the suffering caused by 1kg of cheese is equivalent to a single meal with meat, because simplicity. Let’s also assume that everything else being constant I’d buy either that kilogram of cheese, or a kilogram of nutritious cheese substitute, with a difference of 12€. Now this means that I can alleviate more suffering if I can get someone else to switch to a meatless meal at a price of 11,99€ or less. That shouldn’t be too hard.

Take school lunches, for example. In Finland schools provide free food for everyone. It’s as predictably cheap and not-always-as-appealing-as-it-could-be as one would expect, but it’s free food even for the children of the families where their only warm meal is in school. A typical cost is (iirc) 1-2€ a meal.

Assume a school system which feeds 1000 children every day. If you get them to have the first friday of every month be a meatfreiday, it’s a net win of 10 000 kilograms of cheese a year, or equivalent to 119 900€ in marginal cost. With this money you can afford to hire a full-time lobbyist (we’re talking about not!rich activists here, not expensive people in suits) for an entire year, *and* pay the meat-free lunches for everyone at a higher price than the regular ones, thus making them more appealing to the students, *and* still have a lot left for bribery administrative expenses.

Thus, instead of buying not!cheese, if I care about animal suffering I should just buy the damn cheese and use the difference for political lobbying. Leafleting and ads might not work, but political lobbying in high-leverage targets probably does. The Arkea company in Turku serves 10 million meals a year, and upping the vegetarian days from one to two a week would have an impact of over a million meals, or 12 million euros when translated to cheese. Would it cost 12 million annually to successfully lobby it through? In a country where even the head of the drug police is a small-timer whose corruptedness doesn’t exceed six digits of graft money? Yeah. Buy the damn cheese, and advocate others to pick the low-hanging fruit as well.

Arguments aren’t soldiers, they are fighting robots and one is supposed to design the best fighting robot, enthusiastically copying design patterns from the strongest ones, and even if that one robot using this weapon was defeated doesn’t mean that my robot having an improved version of the same weapon would be just as vulnerable.

(via ozymandias271)

3 months ago · tagged #scrupulosity cw · 106 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

ozymandias271:

socialjusticemunchkin:

argumate:

attemptstobeunproblematic:

argumate:

@attemptstobeunproblematic:

Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.

Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.

If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.

But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.

One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.

What you said:^

What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.

I’m gonna leave you with this:

You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.

Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.

Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.

Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.

This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)

A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.

Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.

Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.

I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.

Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)

They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)

I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.

And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.

(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)

ACE’s numbers are incredibly over-optimistic about how much they get people to be vegan, everyone agrees with this, they don’t know how much over-optimistic they are and are starting to do research to figure out how much, the research is pretty fucking dispiriting. (Leafleting doesn’t work, online ads don’t work…)

So this is a nice essay about buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately, except that it is not true and for people who get a normal level of utilons from meat you can reduce animal consumption more effectively by not eating them yourself than you can by purchasing online ads convincing people to do so. 

I stand corrected on the specific case, although I still suspect that there must be *some* way to leverage that stuff more effectively. I would be extremely surprised that buying not!cheese for 20€/kg instead of cheese for 8€/kg, or soy yoghurt for 3€ instead of animal yoghurt for 1,4€ would be the best marginal use for that money from an animal rights perspective. (in case you’re wondering, Finland is expensive)

At the very least one could pay someone else (such as school lunches etc.) to substitute more cost-efficient animal product replacements (such as adding some fraction of soy protein to meat products) after picking the lowest-hanging fruit oneself, or possibly investing in research to speed up the introduction of affordable and popular replacements.

The fact that one way of doing it doesn’t work doesn’t mean that purity veganism (the person being argued against doesn’t sound like one of the moderates who are happy with people reducing their burden if they don’t go all the way to scrutinizing the smallest details of ingredient lists) deserves praise and thus I want to signal against purity veganism pretending to be effective.

(via ozymandias271)

3 months ago · 106 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

In “ridiculous overregulation”:

SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.

It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.

Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”

Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.

If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:

(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.

(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.

(h/t Lowering the Bar)

original post

That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.

It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.

The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures

Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.

For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:

• Sex work is banned.
  
• Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
• Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
• That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
• Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
• This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
• Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
• We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.

And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT

(still better than Finland tho)

(via socialjusticemunchkin)

3 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #drugs cw #ageism cw #regulation cw · 57 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink

shlevy:

Not sure why but the “having sex, no matter what precautions you take or agreements you make with your partner in advance, obligates you to two decades of at-least-financial-and-possibly-more support” position is consistently a hot-button issue more than any other.

Maybe it’s related to the fact that people haven’t properly internalized that we have easy access to contraception and abortion nowadays (okay, we should have them and authoritarians should get their grubby paws the cuck off from other people’s bodies and that includes socio-cultural coercion as well as state power although just getting the state to cuck off would be a damn fine start) so having sex doesn’t obligate one to rent their body to a non-consensual occupier and thus the Worst Outcome for one party has fallen a lot lower than it used to be when the system has established, and zero-sum biases of identity politics have prevented them from realizing that symmetrically reducing the other party’s Worst Outcome would be the Only Morally Justifiable Decision.

Also, everyone loves making someone else pay for stuff they want to see done, therefore they go hunting for people who have interacted with the problem and upon whom the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics lets them assign the costs so they don’t have to bear the responsibility of taking care of innocent otherwise possibly insufficiently ofcaretaken children from their own tax dollars.

3 months ago · tagged #in which promethea is very happy that they are infertile #steel feminism · 8 notes · source: shlevy · .permalink

ozymandias271:

the secret evil motive behind my cuck memeage is that if you call out the altright, it feeds into their image. They are the Revealers of Dark Truths The SJWs Don’t Want You To Know, the Badass Warriors Against Cathedral Orthodoxy, the Edgy Rebels Who’ll Say What Everyone Is Thinking But Isn’t Brave Enough To Say

on the other hand, if you just point and laugh, they are shown to be a bunch of nerds elaborately LARPing being Revealers of Dark Truths The SJWs Don’t Want You To Know, which is just goofy

they want to be Darth Vader. Make them Kylo Ren.

Pictured above: the same basic principle the Loldiers of Odin operate on.

Related: now that the NDAs are lifted, I can finally reveal to the international public that some awesome genius has TRADEMARKED “Soldiers of Odin” (machine translation as shitty as always because finnish) so they can sue their asses off if the fash try to sell stuff with their name on it. So much the æsthetic and as unbelievable as it might sound, it was not even me. Using IP law to fight edgelords, the world truly is ridiculously incredible.

3 months ago · 104 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

Anonymous asked: MtF (male-to-futa)

ozymandias271:

ozymandias271:

prediction: at least six people will reblog this with the tag #me

Bayes Points for me, @daughter-of-adam needs to get with the program here

Would tag it with #it me just to be non-conformist now that the criterion is already fulfilled but I can’t in good faith endorse even the retroactive application of the word male, as cis people have ruined it (scorn dem) by effectively turning it into the adjectival form of “man”. I was assigned male at birth, but flunked it, dropped out, and studied enbie futa N E O T E N I C androgyny on the internet instead.

3 months ago · tagged #it me · 57 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

ilzolende:

In “ridiculous overregulation”:

SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.

It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.

Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”

Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.

If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:

(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.

(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.

(h/t Lowering the Bar)

original post

That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.

It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.

The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures

Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.

For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:

• Sex work is banned.
  
• Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
• Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
• That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
• Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
• This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
• Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
• We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.

And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT

3 months ago · tagged #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #drugs cw #regulation cw #ageism cw · 57 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink

argumate:

davidsevera:

If I were visiting Bay Area rationalists someday and on a trip to the shore a Giant Pacific Octopus crawled out of the ocean and dragged me back to my doom while everyone watched helplessly, it wouldn’t be funny exactly, but it would definitely be something people talked about for a while.

tag yourself, I’m the thing that isn’t funny exactly!

I’m doom while everyone watched helplessly.

3 months ago · tagged #shitposting · 20 notes · source: davidsevera · .permalink

argumate:

raggedjackscarlet:

argumate:

sonatagreen:

hybridzizi:

sonatagreen:

zerofarad:

sonatagreen:

There’s lots of stories about women succeeding at traditionally male things (e.g. Mulan, Legally Blonde) but almost none about men succeeding at traditionally female things. When a woman does male things, it’s “she’s a woman but she’s awesome enough to live up to male standards”, but when a man does female things, it’s treated as a joke at his expense.

We need more stories about “he’s a man but he’s awesome enough to live up to female standards”.

I imagine you don’t count, like, Mrs. Doubtfire?

While I can see how Mrs. Doubtfire is sort of about a man learning to succeed at femininity, I find it deeply unsatisfying for two reasons. First, Daniel Hillard (Robin Williams’s character) only attempts to learn feminine skills in order to pass as a woman. This reinforces the idea that femininity is a female thing. Second, at the end of the movie, I feel that he’s presenting as a more-well-rounded masculine, rather than simply feminine. The message seems to be “it’s okay to cook and clean and spend time with your kids, because it doesn’t compromise your masculinity”. I want a message of “it’s okay to not be masculine”. I’m vaguely reminded of countersignaling; I get the feeling that Daniel Hillard is allowed to have feminine traits because he manages to not let them overshadow his masculinity.

By contrast, consider Kanahe Tomohisa, from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. He’s a stay-at-home husband who wears an apron and takes care of the housework, his build is slim and his demeanor submissive, and this is (at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far) not remarked upon at all or treated as a source of either drama or humor. It’s treated as perfectly normal, natural, ordinary, healthy, unremarkable that he should tend the home and the children while his wife earns the family income as a career businesswoman. The show isn’t really about him, he’s only a supporting character; but he’s the sort of character that would be a natural consequence of the shows I want to see.

I feel like the fact that Elle didn’t compromise her femininity was a big part of Legally Blonde, though. Do the two movies do this differently or am I just completely misunderstanding what you’re saying? (I haven’t actually seen Mrs. Doubtfire. I’m just going off what you say)

I’ve actually only seen a couple of scenes from Legally Blonde, but I got the impression that, while she’s femme in a shoes-and-lipstick kind of way, she’s also characterized as having qualities that are necessary to success specifically in classically male endeavors: proactive, academically gifted, a take-no-shit attitude, etc. She’s undeniably girly, but I don’t think she could be characterized as soft and vulnerable. What I know of Legally Blonde gives me a “women can be strong too” vibe, as opposed to the “it’s okay not to be strong” that I’m looking for.

popular culture cannot bear the sight of a weak man.

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while.

And it occurs to me that, just as stories about a woman breaking into the male role center partially around the secondary characters being forced to confront their own sexism and disrespect for her abilities, reversing this trope would require the story to center partially around the secondary characters around the male protagonist being forced to confront their contempt for weakness.

At least one example of this exists. There is a famous movie about an emotionally broken man who acts out in pain, until the the people around him are forced to confront and repent for the contempt and disgust they displayed towards his brokenness.

Rambo: First Blood.

Sure, in the sequels, Rambo was a straightforward action hero. But not in the first movie.

In the first movie, Rambo was the male Carrie.

goodness me, that is a good point

although it sort of reinforces the idea that men can only admit weakness once they have managed to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard?

Men’s weakness only gets recognized and acknowledged once they have managed to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard, and that’s very very bad and we as a civilization need to do way better so men don’t feel like they need to be able to singlehandedly fight off the entire national guard to be allowed to display a bit of weakness without having instant crosshairs of thermonuclear contempt painted on their backs.

3 months ago · tagged #steel feminism · 238 notes · source: sonatagreen · .permalink