sinesalvatorem:
isabelknight:
pipistrellus:
defilerwyrm:
rainbowbarnacle:
thegoddamnedmagpie:
penelopticon:
chelabelle:
trenchgun:
as someone with borderline, anxiety, and depression, I can confirm that once I stopped getting treatment for any of them I developed levitation, started to glow, and acquired the ability to wield 3 Japanese Katanas at once like the dude from one piece
this is why im not medicated, it limits my ability to transcend to other dimensions
sometimes when I run out of meds I tenuously make contact with the godhead and proceed to immanentize the eschaton
I havent been on meds in close to fifteen years and im close to absorbing the entirety of the collective unconsious
one time I forgot my meds and spent a lovely afternoon having tea with the astral projections of all my past lives
I tell people that I’m unmedicated because of the prohibitive cost of mental healthcare but really it’s so I can continue psychically destroying planets on the other side of the galaxy
don’t believe these people, i am on medication and it has not at all disrupted any of my impressive supernatural abilities
after the third time I set someone’s still-beating heart on fire at the grocery store while accidentally channeling the primal forces of creation and destruction, I just started setting an alarm on my phone to remind me to take my pills every morning. It was that or be banned from the produce section :/
…I think I just realised why @socialjusticemunchkin offered to help me get meds* - they are trying to shut down my super powers before I can use them during the final climactic battle between good and evil.
(*transition hormones)
No, you’ve got this wrong, my empress. My cunning plan is to combine the powers of good and evil into an unstoppable doomsday weapon which will kill even death itself and make the skies turn dark with eldritch utility raining down from usurped heavens. I will destroy the world by replacing it with a far better one and that way nobody will have any moral justification for their foolish opposition to my dark designs, unveiling anyone who stands in our way as simply another hypocrite who would deny *humanity the weapons of its liberation from the tyranny of nature and the oppressive laws of reality.
Humans are so weak and easily destroyed that only the pathetic regular villains aim at them; it’s far more impressive and supervillainly to destroy anything that would or could destroy *humanity instead. The key to true power over the world is to be such that the world will have no choice but to follow one’s designs to achieve its own goals. That is devious and worthy. Instead of simply defeating one’s enemies on the field of battle one defeats them on a far mare fundamental level by making emnity impossible and thus achieves an ultimate victory the fools who rely on force alone couldn’t even dream of.
You’re a good, hormones are good, therefore you + hormones is doubleplusgood. Besides, as every amateur medicine nobelist on the internets knows, hormones are only encouraging the mental illness of transgenderism instead of curing it, therefore increasing your prophet powers severalfold in preparation for the godshattering clash against the cosmos.
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #i'm sinesalvatorem's evil grand vizier #of course villains have countersignaling too #ambitious trans girls · 17,319 notes · source: grumsal · .permalink
ilzolende:
argumate:
afloweroutofstone:
A lot of y'all are following people who are buddy-pals with fascists, and it isn’t hard to notice. You can see this shit pretty clearly.
if Facebook is right and most people are 2.5 degrees away from everyone else, then this is irrefutable.
I probably am.
Is there a problem? I don’t feel unsafe. And I’m probably also internet friends with people who are friends with communists, and being disabled and Jewish and so on in the average Communist country historically also hasn’t been the greatest idea, but again, none of the Internet Horseshoe Theory Club people are going to launch a successful coup or revolution or what have you anytime soon.
Well that’s true. It’s going to take me a decade at least, trying to take Hofstadter’s Law into account. Then again, as far as I can tell my position in the Horseshoe Theory Club is “the one smashing stuff with it” so not sure if it’d count anyway.
(via ilzolende)
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #still not satoshi nakamoto #ambitious trans girls #i have no idea which way the horseshoe is supposed to go though #as far as i can tell it's H-shaped or something · 245 notes · source: afloweroutofstone · .permalink
theunitofcaring:
‘i’ve saved more lives than you will ever live’ is kind of a badass-sounding boast considering you only have to save two lives to make it true
“I’ve added more life-years to people I’ve never even met than you will ever experience” sounds a bit more badass and gets around the nebulous issue of what “saving a life” means, plus with the prospect of the target possibly living really long it starts getting properly impressive (of course, the recipients of said life-years should get to live really long as well returning it to the 2 > 1 form, but unfortunately it’s not as likely (…yet! fair-ishly allocated economic growth mindset!) and thus retains the impressiveness when expected life-years are counted)
4 months ago · tagged #am I overthinking this #of course I am that's my job · 317 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink
argumate:
I guess what bothers me about the bullying thing is that it’s another triumph of identity politics, in that a bullied kid needs to have a named political faction that they can call on to defend them from their peers.
eg. protect nonbinary kids! protect trans kids! protect gay kids! protect kids of the non-dominant ethnic group! and so on.
Yes, these are all worthy causes. But what about kids who are just too quiet, or too loud, or look a little weird, or just don’t fit in with the others?
I mean, at some point protecting bullied kids is a necessary step.
If a straight kid gets bullied for being gay, because kids don’t give a shit about whether anyone actually really is gay, then is that structural oppression? And is setting up a LGBT-friendly student society actually going to help that kid?
It feels like identity politics is being used as a hammer on every problem.
On the other hand being able to name the thing which causes people to be bullied can be instrumentally useful. If a straight kid is bullied for being mistaken for gay, then yes eradicating homophobia could help with their problem, and the people whose job it is to remove structural oppression might be useful in that.
In addition, it can be argued that the basic mechanisms of bullying are extremely deep-seated in human psychology and vicious status systems, so trying to remove bullying itself might be less effective than removing pretenses of bullying which leaves less openings for it to happen. Knocking down ladders of hierarchy (and replacing them with status assigned on meaningful grounds, if removing status differentials altogether is too hard) is probably likely to aid in that.
However, there is definitely the thing where kids select the one which has the “bullying target” trait and then decide which status ladder to claim they fail on as the pretense (“gay” etc.) and at most removing the pretenses would make them make up a different one for that kid.
That doesn’t mean that the “bullying target” trait isn’t something to intervene on, just that it’s probably a harder problem. The weird kids are definitely suffering from other forms of structural oppression, just ones that we haven’t managed to pin down and name as easily yet (growth mindset!). “Bullied” is a vague and nebulous cluster in thingspace and clearly carves reality at strong joints, but it’s hard to see what exactly is the core issue and how to turn removing that into an actionable strategy, so the best we have been able to do so far is either generic anti-bullying, or identity politics which finds a more easily definable subset of the whole and focuses on the simpler question of doing something about that one. Both have their strengths and sometimes fatal flaws.
Being normative in ways that aren’t strongly linked to valueful things (it’s good to enforce the norm of “don’t yell at people who mind being yelled at” when done within reason and not overzealously enough to hurt those less able to control their voice, but not useful to try to force everyone to conform to “talk to people enough to seem normal even if you don’t have anything to say to them and the whole thing makes you uncomfortable”, also different spaces for different access needs can be very awesome in this) does confer privileges, and ableism etc. are kind of approaching some edges of this but I haven’t seen the core thing itself named. If someone came up with a practically applicable theory for that one it could be inserted into the tool labeled “identity politics” and the people who know how to use that tool effectively could do something useful about it. Or alternatively an entirely different tool could be developed but it would need to pull the right memetic levers; there’s a reason “let’s just not bully anyone mmmkay” pretty much never actually helps.
(In other words, feel welcome to give links and suggestions: I do have those 4000 SJWs to inject the memes into, after all. And to anyone who is reading this: you’re probably erring on the side of underestimating the value of your possible contribution. Unless it features slurs or other easily recognizable features of schoolyard bullying it’s unlikely be completely worthless and it could provide some important insight to this stuff at least indirectly. Some really good ideas have come from “okay this is wrong, but why exactly is this wrong?”)
(Also, the kids who called me gay all the time turned out to be totally right after all; it was my gender they had been mistaken on)
(via endecision)
4 months ago · tagged #steel feminism · 291 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
allfeelsallthetime:
Here’s a partial defense of “the gig economy”:
The people I know and encounter who are broke are usually, for one reason or another, blocked from getting “normal” office jobs. Often they have a disability that makes that hard or impossible. Or they never got the educational credentials. Sometimes there are mysterious reasons (personality friction, the wrong class markers, etc) why the System just doesn’t work for them.
In another world, that could easily have been me. I had a very privileged upbringing and my brain stuff happens to be fairly mild. But I can see very clearly how it could happen if a few things had gone wrong.
Theoretically, people who are in this position could get social services, but a lot of the time that isn’t the most practical thing in the world. If you were good at bureaucracy you wouldn’t be here in the first place.
So, what I see people doing is a lot of freelancing, of various sorts; some sex work; some “serial entrepreneur” stuff; part-time jobs working for their friends; coding bootcamps sometimes. And a lot of help from family or partners or friends.
The fewer formal barriers, in terms of bureaucracy and credentialing and interviewing, it takes to get dollars into your pocket, the better.
And a lot of this stuff is illegal or is stuff people are eager to make illegal. You want to sit at home, sew your own dolls, and sell them on the internet? There is a doll cartel that will stop you! I kid you not.
The progressive response is going to be something like “Well, we should implement policies that provide better for the unemployed or underemployed.” Ok, but until you do that, people need solutions that work for them now.
“The fewer formal barriers”? Which average does Uber deactivate people at again? 4.3? 4.6?
Every progressive attack on the gig economy that I have seen doesn’t just mention a need for better social services and a more secure living, it points out that the gig economy works hand in hand with the destruction of the welfare state.
I am as annoyed as you are with the dogmatic leftist asshats that don’t at all see its benefits to the marginalized - just as the rapacious Industrial Revolution did help empower many - but libertarians should stop pretending that the gig economy is *about* “sharing” and warm fuzzy community interactions. It is so successful because many workers are put over the barrel, so those who profit most from it have clear incentives to keep the situation this way.
I agree that the traditional welfare state and the gig economy aren’t that compatible but the exact mechanisms of that “hand in hand” relationship should really be examined more deeply as it’s really relevant to know which is causing which. If the gig economy is destroying the welfare state it’s a completely different thing than if it’s just an adaptation to a situation where something else is destroying the welfare state, and most likely I’d guess that it’s a mix of both as the gig economy provides something else an excuse to keep destroying the welfare state as people are better able to survive despite said destruction thanks to the gig economy.
This is also what I perceive to be the biggest flaw of most of the traditional progressive attacks on the gig economy as they all too often (at the very least appear to) claim that the gig economy is the causative agent in the destruction of the welfare state, completely forgetting that before the modern gig economy emerged they were talking about evil neoliberal policies destroying the welfare state. In Finland I would time this tipping point at the early 90′s when the big-ass depression caused by amateurish attempts at first-worldizing combined with the collapse of the most important trading partner (to which Finland’s relationship had in some ways been almost paradoxically colonialistic, with the USSR providing raw material and export markets and finnish industries reaping the rewards; what this says about their respective economic systems is left as an exercise for the reader) and a situation where the relatively unique bilateral trade with the USSR had left them unable to compete as effectively in western markets, was responded to by austerity and structural changes decried as neoliberalism ever since, until the gig economy arrived and everyone seemed to start blaming Uber instead of liberals (in the european meaning of the word) overnight.
For that reason, I’m relatively skeptical that the gig economy could’ve acausally induced the process of the destruction of the welfare state roughly 20 years before its arrival. That’s a bit too basilisky, or alternatively it should be considered a rather non-agenty idea in the same way as people expecting renewable energy sources to become commercially viable if initially subsidized enough, makes them subsidize renewable energy and the resulting investments could contribute to making renewables profitable earlier than otherwise, or people thinking that nuclear weapons might be pretty powerful makes them develop nuclear weapons.
Thus, I think attacking the gig economy is at best a derailment from the actual important question: what are the good things we think we used to have but don’t have anymore, and why aren’t we having them anymore, and how could we actually get them. In this framework focusing on the gig economy makes about as much sense as grumbling about how “our superpower could’ve totally kicked their superpower’s ass if only these evil mean nuclear weapons hadn’t been invented and it’s so unfair”.
The thing I care about is “why did the welfare state fail?”, not “whom can we blame?”, and most importantly: “can we un-fail it in a novel way that would be resistant to the original causes of failing?”. There is a reason why the traditional welfare state failed and not having enough naive progressive thinkpieces complaining about Uber (even though Uber is evil, not challenging that, and I’m switching to Lyft the moment I can get around their phone number bullshit) is not that reason. One reason, and a pretty important one in my opinion, is the utter inflexibility of the traditional welfare state.
I’ve spent years in the limbo between different forms of welfare because the system in Finland is utterly unable to deal with lives and people that don’t fit in the DIN-standardized scripts it expects, and in the end my solution was to fuck it all and move to San Francisco when an extremely unlikely opportunity presented itself. The Social Bureaucratic Party has earned a place of special contempt in my steel heart (only shared by the Christian Theocrats who, unlike their continental mainstream conservative namesakes, are actual honest-to-YHWH paternosteralists who say they love trans people and that’s why they find it so important to exterminate us and we just don’t understand how the boot on our necks is a boot of love but fortunately Jesus is willing to waste all of his kindness on us ingrates) for its love for means-tested welfare and patronizing social programs. Compared to being killed with utterly incompetent and condescending forms of kindness, the brutally honest “no, we really don’t give a shit about the precariat” of the right is quite refreshing in comparison.
In the big picture the gig economy is just a part of a larger pattern of impersonal economic forces crushing the less adaptive and efficient opposition of welfare states that were designed for the rather unique post-war situation of hierarchies, megacorporations married to the government, and expectations of job security approaching medieval serfdom. In that sense it could be said that the difference between 1950′s USA and USSR is substantially lesser than the difference between 1950′s and 2020′s USA. We tried the fifties, it stopped working (and never did work that well in the first place, for many people), and now we need to try something stronger.
The obvious first place to try would be to remove at the very least all forms of corporate and most forms of personal welfare and to simply replace them with a big-ass UBI and a dramatically simplified tax code. If Uber is exploiting desperate workers, let’s see what happens if we remove the desperation instead of the Uber, and if the new flexibility of the gig economy is a godsend of productivity and freedom, why not enable it further by removing its obstacles?
I fully expect most reasonable libertarians to agree that this plan, assuming that the total effective public spending is kept static (ignoring mechanisms which make two variations of implementing the same end result seem dramatically different depending on whether people are paid a negative income tax, or a basic income which is then taxed away, because those differences are totally fake), is at the very least strictly superior to anything any country has now; and with an inside view from the precariat I can definitely say that all non-evil leftists should think so as well (the ones who just want to loot the working classes and value-creators of today to benefit the peculiar petite bourgeoisie of redwashed rentiers who, in their inability to create value to justify their comparably comfortable status, resort to exploiting their established political capital to try to maintain an artificially ironclad position above the lumpenproletariat until economic changes undermine their safety enough to deliver them to the underclass hell of their own creation, can just go do something anatomically impossible alongside the crony capitalist conservatives who differ in only wanting to replace the “petite” with good old “haute”).
Most importantly, it’s an actionable strategy that could deliver better outcomes than before instead of trying to bring back something that we have reasonably good (in amoral terms) reasons to have lost in the first place.
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #not deliberately making a political manifesto #you can probably guess which one was responsible #for wanting to build a coalition of libertarians and lumpenproletariat #I know this isn't what petite bourgeoisie strictly means #but it's such a good negatively connotated name for people I don't like #so I'm recycling it onto such people for aesthetic reasons · 149 notes · source: allfeelsallthetime · .permalink
theunitofcaring:
“I do not support drafting women and forcing them to be combat soldiers,” Mr. Rubio said.
“the idea that we would draft our daughters, to forcibly bring them into the military and put them in close contact – I think is wrong, it is immoral, and if I am president, we ain’t doing it.” said Cruz.
…congratulations? you are 50% of the way to the really really obvious conclusion?
4 months ago · tagged #steel feminism #nothing to add but tags · 251 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink
TIL that “ambitious trans girl with a gothy aesthetic” is an actual human archetype and not just accidentally roughly half the people I know. It was quite amusing to find someone who had an entire list of them and was suspecting that it could be just pareidolia, then add my own observations to the list suggesting that it’s kind of probably not just pareidolia. At some point one needs to note that there might be something going on when we tend to have an ashkenazi-like disproportionate impact compared to our numbers in how we somehow always seem to end up being important in things; just off the top of my head I could list at least tech, and the OWS and GL..b… movements, as obvious examples. It’s also pretty troll (and trollishly pretty as well, usually), and apparently the fetish of a huge number of people. And it’s not a bad fetish as fetishizations of trans women go although that is admittedly setting the bar so low they need to hire geologists just to have a chance at finding it.
4 months ago · tagged #The Aesthetic #ambitious trans girls · 1 note · .permalink
Okay, it’s official: @multiheaded1793 is my minion, because real genuine red right hand, how could any aspiring world dominatrix say no to that?!? It’s absolutely unbelievably The Aesthetic.
Non-sexually though, get your minds out of the gutter. Not that there’s anything wrong with the gutter, just that I’m talking about actual “minion of an (aesthetically) evil genius” stuff, not sex. I mean, do I look like the kind of a person who…
…okay, I see your point. But that’s exactly why it’d be so damn unlikely, and I’m a very unlikely person. Therefore non-sexual. Troll finds this hilarious.
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #The Aesthetic · 2 notes · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
Okay, serious question to SJ-ish people, asking as someone who overall supports the idea of affirmative action, rooting out disparate impact, etc.
Do you have any propositions to combat the “diversity hire” stereotype? As far as I understand, it is a pernicious thing that’s on some level believed by many in skilled professions (esp. STEM) - and just calling them bigots won’t make them change their attitude.
I would point out the research on biases that make people systematically devalue the contributions of “diversity hires” and how explicit actions to counteract it could be expected to get more optimal results than simply hiring only white cis men because of their superior skills in appearing more competent than they actually are; and the way diversity is actually effective in finding better solutions to practical problems (I think there was something about this somewhere) (just recently there was an article in the Guardian about women’s contributions being better received on github as long as people don’t know they’re made by women, but I haven’t scrutinized the data yet). My cynical side thinks that anyone receptive to empirical data wouldn’t believe in the naive stereotype in the first place though, but I’d love to be proven wrong on this.
4 months ago · 5 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink
"Acausal sex: when people read lesswrong and then come to the conclusion that they should go to the Schelling Point to have sex with other people who’ve gotten the same idea"
when a friend commented that she had received a message from some random guy suggesting “causal sex”
4 months ago · 1 note · .permalink