ozymandias271:
ilzolende:
Please support this fine and entirely real organization.
original post
I am unironically in support of this organization
please somebody cure mesolexia so everyone will STOP BEING SO FRUSTRATINGLY SLOW
Yes! The mesolexia activists may say it’s just a normal variance in human abilities but they’re ignoring those of us who desperately do want a cure for ourselves (tbh not sure if fully mesolexic myself but definitely on the spectrum). Remember, they are the privileged ones who don’t suffer from their mesability and generalize it upon everyone, impairing our chances at getting our individual needs and desires met!
(via ozymandias271)
3 months ago · tagged #still unironical · 40 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink
socialjusticemunchkin:
sinesalvatorem:
Mum: Finding hair-dresser that can do braids shouldn’t have to be hard work … send out plea on yr blog and see what yr fan-dom can find ( :
Me: My fandom which has, as far as I can tell, 0 black people?
Me: (I swear this was unintentional)
Mum: yes, but this would be a treasure hunt … who has black friends? or who can acquire black friends fast enough to help Alison with her braids? ( :
Mum: or at the very least acquire information about black people … …
Mum: You’d be helping them broaden their cultural horizons … .
Me: I am putting this conversation on Tumblr.
Mum: oh yr wicked!
Me: Winner gets to add me to their (probably tiny, but growing!) pool of black friends
Hey, I kind of know (we’re working in the same conspiracy together, never met her IRL though because I’m an internet ghost to a lot of people) like one black person who I think has the relevant kind of hair (and who probably knows where to find someone who can braid… so the upper bound for the distance within a suitable black friend-of-a-friend can be found is less than 9000km! Not very helpful but intersectional feminism is actually really useful sometimes. (now that I think of it I could like seriously try to leverage some connections to find someone who’s actually in the right hemisphere at least…)
@sinesalvatorem: I got a personal recommendation from someone suggesting that this place is not only actually in the right hemisphere and even the right region but also “the owners of the salon are two Eritrean women who are renowned in the area for braiding (esp Sesen)”. Does this count as winning?
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
3 months ago · tagged #also i am entertained how i did it almost 9000km away #from by far the whitest country in western europe #my little feminist: networking is magic · 37 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
sonatagreen:
For those of us who identify as villains, there are two kinds of stories, which I might call Luna stories and Lilith stories.
Luna stories are about the hero realizing that she’s in the wrong. Ozy talks about the ethical principle that you might be the baddies[1]. A Luna story is about self-doubt, and re-examining one’s assumptions, and redemption.
In a Luna story, something initially seems good, and then turns out to be evil.
Lilith stories are about the hero realizing that others are in the wrong. She’s taught a certain system of morality, either by a well-meaning society or by devious abusers, and gradually comes to see through it and recognize its flaws. She casts off what she has been taught about good and evil, and fashions for herself a truer and stronger morality in its place. She makes choices that result in her being called a villain, but we can see that she is a hero in truth.
In a Lilith story, something initially seems evil, and then turns out to be good.
Both of these stories are necessary.
The distinction can sometimes be blurry. But we always must have both.
1. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/the-enemy-control-ray/
(via endecision)
3 months ago · tagged #it me #support your local supervillain · 25 notes · source: sonatagreen · .permalink
michaelblume:
I’m starting to come around to something like anti-horseshoe theory, where the US is in an uncanny valley between two different ways of ordering a society and they’re both better than what we’ve got.
Take schools. In libertarian utopia, everybody pays whoever they want to to educate their kids. In socialist utopia, everybody in the state pays into a general fund, which funds a bunch of schools, with all of them receiving equal resources. In America, each school is funded by the property taxes of the people immediately surrounding it. People who can afford to pay lots of property tax don’t want to live in districts where other people can’t, so they set up lots of zoning barriers to turn “public” schools into effectively private schools. And in doing so, they don’t just fuck up schools, they fuck up the housing market, they fuck up ease of relocation, they fuck up the national economy.
Or take medicine. My girlfriend needs to get a doctor to blast ultrasound at her kidney stone, but she’s between jobs. In libertarian utopia, she goes to a urologist today, pays them some money, and the kidney stone goes away. In socialist utopia, she’s already gone to her doctor, been referred to a urologist, and had the kidney stone destroyed. But as it is, she has no coverage, and has to wait weeks to find a way to see a urologist.
The uncanny valley is really wide though, as even a “scandinavian socialist utopia” in which it’s supposed to be the latter of those two cases (with a strong emphasis on the ‘supposed’ because the de facto ends up being closer to the middle) falls deep into it when it comes to a lot of things.
Take my life situation. In socialist utopia, I’d be having a basic income I could easily live off while growing my skills, and when I’m making wicked $$$$ I’d pay taxes to fund the system. In libertarian utopia, I’d enter an agreement with my bank/insurance company that they lend me $600 a month to cover my basic living expenses and help me acquire marketable skills, and once I’m selling those the bank would be entitled to some fraction of my income, lessening over time and increasing as my income increases to incentivize them to train me to be really profitable really fast. In the social democratic mess of a means-tested illfare state, I’m literally told by the state to live off my friends or stop training my skills and get a bullshit mcjob instead because without the right paperwork and studying stuff the right and correct and Officially Approved™ and not-promethea-compatible way I’m ineligible for any support at all. Nonetheless I’m obligated to pay obscenely high taxes, to support a system that has mostly just thrown me under the bus repeatedly, unless I route around them which I’m technically not supposed to do even though the state is really wink-nudgeing when it says so.
In fact I suppose this describes my political leanings pretty well; my ideology is something like 90% either-of-those-instead-of-this-bullshit-we-have-now-ism.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 47 notes · source: michaelblume · .permalink
I am literally a corporation
…soon!
Got denied every single form of personal welfare because the social bureaucratic illfare state is unable to comprehend my situation (come on, I’m simply learning skills while ignoring credentialist bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand even for socdems), and the advice at the social security agency was literally “beg from friends, then take your tax money somewhere more deserving when you start making it”.
The obvious solution is to register myself as a corporation, because corporate welfare is far more generous than personal welfare around here (it wouldn’t be too much of a simplification to say that every single cent collected in corporate taxes goes back to politically favoured businesses in subsidies and deductions; this is defended as “keeping the important sectors afloat” aka they are literally and blatantly taking money from the successful entrepreneurs and businesses and distributing to cronies and unsuccessful ones who serve the bureaus instead of the markets).
If I start a holding company that sells my “unpaid” labour to other businesses and creates profit to its owners, I can not only apply for startup subsidies (basically a modestly-but-sufficiently-sized basic income for 6-18 months!) but also avoid a lot of taxes later on when I actually start earning money and routing it as dividends instead of wages (no payroll taxes for pensions, unemployment insurance etc. for redwashed rentiers; this worker won’t let the holders of political capital steal their surplus value). The risk is simply that entrepreneurs are totally and utterly ineligible for any personal benefits at all (save for rent subsidies which simply mean I’m paying effectively 95€ a month for housing instead of the nominal 320€), which is already exactly my situation so I have literally nothing to lose here (except some money for the paperwork).
In addition, it’s so unbelievably the æsthetic.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #future precariat billionaire #i am worst capitalist · 6 notes · .permalink
sinesalvatorem:
Mum: Finding hair-dresser that can do braids shouldn’t have to be hard work … send out plea on yr blog and see what yr fan-dom can find ( :
Me: My fandom which has, as far as I can tell, 0 black people?
Me: (I swear this was unintentional)
Mum: yes, but this would be a treasure hunt … who has black friends? or who can acquire black friends fast enough to help Alison with her braids? ( :
Mum: or at the very least acquire information about black people … …
Mum: You’d be helping them broaden their cultural horizons … .
Me: I am putting this conversation on Tumblr.
Mum: oh yr wicked!
Me: Winner gets to add me to their (probably tiny, but growing!) pool of black friends
Hey, I kind of know (we’re working in the same conspiracy together, never met her IRL though because I’m an internet ghost to a lot of people) like one black person who I think has the relevant kind of hair (and who probably knows where to find someone who can braid… so the upper bound for the distance within a suitable black friend-of-a-friend can be found is less than 9000km! Not very helpful but intersectional feminism is actually really useful sometimes. (now that I think of it I could like seriously try to leverage some connections to find someone who’s actually in the right hemisphere at least…)
4 months ago · 37 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
ilzolende:
eclairsandsins:
ilzolende:
pronouns are hard
do countries go by “she” or by “it” these days?
original post
I imagine “they” makes the most sense
Canada is a country north of the United States. They are known for having a low population density and exporting maple syrup. Americans often talk about moving to them when US politics swings right.
Canada is a country north of the United States. She is known for having a low population density and exporting maple syrup. Americans often talk about moving to her when US politics swings right.
Canada is a country north of the United States. It is known for having a low population density and exporting maple syrup. Americans often talk about moving to it when US politics swings right.
Presented for comparison.
It. Definitely it.
(then again my native language uses it for everything and it may be coloring my perceptions of what sounds right but that’s exactly how it should work)
(via ilzolende)
4 months ago · 13 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink
fireandwonder:
You know what I want to see more of in sci fi? Aliens who deviate from their species’ “norm.”
Like, queer aliens, but queer in alien terms; like, aliens whose typical family unit is a trio comprised of three different gendersexes, but sometimes aliens will form trios that only have two different gendersexes, and they still produce viable offspring, but only of the two parent gendersexes, and that carries a social stigma because each gendersex is supposed to play a separate role in the family unit.
Aliens for whom it is the norm to change gendersex upon reaching a certain age, but sometimes (possibly due to a genetic anomaly) it doesn’t happen, so those aliens either a) continue to present as a juvenile gender despite being a stage 2 adult, b) present as a stage 2 adult despite their physical characteristics, or c) undergo medical procedures to change their body artificially, though the technology in that area is still imperfect.
Or disabled aliens who have prosthetic tails/fins/wings/tentacles/etc. Aquatic aliens who can’t hold their breath for an accepted amount of time and so have to carry around atmosphere tanks. Aliens with degenerative conditions that are slowly losing their infrared vision. Aliens who lack their species trademark color-changing camouflage skin. Aliens who are allergic to common foods on their own planets and are frustrated that interplanetary restaurants don’t take that into account when listing which menu items are “safe” for which species.
Neurodivergent aliens who are not connected to the hivemind, who do their best to blend in and guess what they are supposed to be doing, but who are cast out when they are discovered, only to have their numbers build up enough that they are able to build a society on their own using communication aids such as verbal or manual language.
Aliens who are just different in small ways, like generally all three eyes are different colors, except that rare genetic quirks sometimes cause two or even all three to be the same color. Aliens born with five fingers instead of four. Aliens who are more coordinated with their prehensile toes than with their hands, which is inconvenient when most products are designed to be used with hands, but they manage. Aliens born with vestigial wings instead of just residual bone nubs. Aliens born without horns or tusks or spines.
and okay, so I’m basically arguing for more diverse representation of aliens, but like, if our default mode of thinking is to assume that all members of a species are a certain way, then what does that say about how we view our own species? that only ones who follow certain norms qualify as “human”?
or whatever maybe i just think that thinking about this sort of stuff is cool.
(via multiheaded1793)
4 months ago · 6,769 notes · source: fireandwonder · .permalink
Thoughts on the STEM “class”
tsutsifrutsi:
(Required reading: Siderea on Class)
It’s interesting to think about the (many) ways in which the modern “bay-area rationalist techno-libertarian” culture (i.e. Scott Alexander’s Grey Tribe, and to a lesser extent all of STEM academia) is effectively an outgrowth not of the bourgeoisie “entrepreneurial” class identified with the American upper-middle, but rather of the historical-and-present military officer class. Examples:
- seeing things in terms of game-theory, negotiations, and logistics—in est, in terms of strategy;
- breaking debates down into positive vs. normative subcomponents, and then setting out to solve the positive subcomponent; thus, technocratic politics;
- the default assumption of meritocracy, and the belief (against evidence) that organizations with many members from this class will naturally end up meritocratic;
- thinking in terms of capability rather than intent or policy, e.g. “the only thing stopping the state from seeing your data is encryption”, or “the only thing stopping nuclear war is MAD”;
- the whole notion that while the world is suboptimal on a macro-political level, this is fixable through strength of arms: directly through war, or indirectly through technological innovation. Culture is the thing presumed to be immutable and worked around—an attitude foreign to most every other class, who think of culture as the first and only viable battleground for macro-political change;
- an enjoyment of futurism (i.e. speculative fiction, X-risk debates) but also Futurism (the aesthetic of early speculative fiction, of games like Portal and Bioshock, of clean elegant spaceships and “fixed” transhuman genomes.) This is the only class that sees nothing wrong with the concept of a “supersoldier.” (It assumes the advances will turn the crank of genomics tech, which will result in the positive macro-political shifts mentioned above);
- the ideal of Heinlein’s competent man, completely autonomous, able to restart civilization from its bootstraps—not quite a Nietzschean übermensch, since the philosophy and beliefs of the “competent man” are mostly irrelevant—it is instead the skill-set that matters, and its concentration all in one (or rather, every) individual;
- the drawing of a sharp division between “officer-quality” and “enlisted-quality” people, where the distinction comes down not to acculturation into this officer class, but to potential: raw intelligence and willingness to learn, but not to labor (i.e. the ability to be the “competent man”, and then—having gained the knowledge to do so—the desire and analytical capacity to properly delegate to others who have a comparative advantage in those skills, rather than to do them oneself);
- for the above reason reason, the highest likelihood of any class to hire skilled laborers and tradesmen or pay for services, instead of attempting to do “amateur” work themselves. The numerous profitable startups serving exclusively the “rich SV engineer who wants to automate something” crowd can attest to this. (Though, as above, this class first seeks to understand the work that will be done, such that they can then observe and evaluate the performance of the contractor or service. This leads to many a tradesman being “told how to do their job” by members of this class whenever they do something nonstandard);
- the scouting for un-acculturated members, with an explicit path to acculturate them, vis. officer training schools, or coding bootcamps. This is one of the few classes (the only?) that almost universally encourages, and attempts to facilitate entry into it. This class doesn’t see people in the other classes as doing something inherently “bad” that must be corrected. Instead, it sees most people as being in their “proper” class, the one that fits them—but sees the “officer-quality” people who are in some other class as being in the “wrong” class, and assumes they will feel much better when “rescued” by this class. (Which is at least sometimes true; many who were bullied in a differently-classed public school do feel “rescued” when they enter a STEM program in university.)
Remember, Silicon Valley was a DARPA project center first, and the startups there are the diaspora. SV and Bay-area culture is military-officer culture.
If you identify strongly with characters like Miles Vorkosigan and Ender Wiggin, it might do to ask yourself how much of that is a feeling of identification with a member of a class you didn’t realize you were in.
Sounds very pattern-matchable and The One Which Watches The Watchers is demanding controls to calibrate for confirmation bias: my prior is for the “STEM class” to be pattern-matchable to quite a lot of the classical classes in exactly the same way. Heck, I’m even pattern-matching it into the land-owning aristocrats of pre-industrial times.
(via michaelblume)
4 months ago · tagged #i'm even pattern-matching these pattern-matchings together #after all the aristocracy was formed from the medieval equivalent of the officer class #pattern-matching is everyone's superpower #even the more reason to be suspicious about any specific one · 209 notes · source: tsutsifrutsi · .permalink
I don’t know which one made me more pleased today: the fact that I was able to afford not only weightless hypertechnology space-metal cyborg glasses (from a local small business even) but also post-apocalyptic mad scientist sunglasses (yes, exactly the ones you’re thinking of; you know, those worn by the person who’s our best hope at getting out of this mess but might kind of have been responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place); or the fact that the optician recognized the IT ME -ness of the latter exactly as quickly as I did. This is so the æsthetic and other people are seeing it too :3
(also, do you have any idea how hard it is to shop for new glasses when the shops have sections “for men” and “for women” but none “for androgynous cyborgs”? I wasted pretty much several entire days looking for something suitable because of this severe suboptimality in the universe)
4 months ago · 2 notes · .permalink