“LOL. You think your vote matters? ROFL and LOL.” Yes, I am aware my vote carries less and less relative power the more people I’m voting with, but unlike your glorious violent revolution, it actually exists.
The Glorious Violent Revolution fantasy is the Rapture for leftists.
You know what the real glorious revolution looks like? It looks like writers and actors on the picket lines every day, Starbucks and McDonalds and Wendy’s workers walking out of work until they get conditions that aren’t working inside of an oven, UPS workers fighting to get AC in their vans for increasingly hot summers and also driving around in ovens. It looks like kids walking out of schools and into congressional halls in support of their friends being increasingly silenced and threatened for their race, gender or sexuality. It looks like people getting arrested for handing out warm meals to the homeless. It looks like people risking their lives, homes, and jobs to prevent a forest being bulldozed so a fascism training ground for foot soldiers gets built. It looks like several thousand people fighting and getting imprisoned and murdered so their lands aren’t co-opted for one more goddamn oil pipeline. The “glorious revolution” is dozens of actions happening all around, right now, on dozens of fronts. Just because it isn’t violent is no reason not to pick a front and join in.
Stomach: hey, what do we have here? Some goddamned lactose!
Small intestine: we don’t like lactose here, ya know? You’re gatecrashing a very private party!
Large intestine: (pushes him, making him stumble) there’s two ways you can leave here… The easy way, or the hard way. What’s it gonna be?
Lactose: but I…
Lactase: (deep voice) step back, everyone. (walks up and puts his arm around lactose’s shoulders) he’s with *me*
Large intestine: lactase?!
Small intestine: b-but you’re both…
Lactase: I *said* he’s with me. You got a problem with that?
Stomach: (finishes sizing him up) right. Course not. It’s cool, lactose. Just don’t cause any *problems*, you hear?
Lactose: I-I w-
Lactase: you don’t have to answer that, babe. Just keep walking
nobody fucking appreciates me
I appreciate the fact that later in the evening, lactase is gonna grab the entire length of lactose’s structure with its active site and then break lactose in half.
One of my roommates is from China and neither of us speaks the other’s language but lately when she’s in a chatty mood she comes into our kitchen and shows me these douyin Matt Damon x Ben Affleck RPF videos and puts her theories about how Ben has been pining for Matt into google translate for me to read. fujoing out transcends language barriers
talking to people recently out of prison: a do-and-don’t guide
Don’t ask, “How was prison?” (Answer: traumatic!)
Do ask, “What are you most looking forward to doing again now that you’re out?”
Don’t ask, “How long were you in for?” (Answer: too long!)
Do ask, “Is there any technology or pop culture I can help catch you up on?”
Don’t ask, “How are you going to avoid getting back into bad behaviors?” (Leave the paternalistic bullshit to their PO.)
Do ask, “How’s your support network? Do you have people helping you adjust?”
Don’t ask, “Do you have a job yet?” (Their PO is asking them ALL the time, don’t worry.)
Do ask, “Are there any opportunities I should keep an ear out for and let you know about?”
Don’t ask, “Do you have an ankle monitor?” (And definitely don’t ask to see it - no one likes to be gawked at.)
Do ask, “Do you have parole restrictions we need to accommodate when making plans?”
Don’t say, “Hey, you shouldn’t be doing that - it’s against your parole!” (A lot of parole restrictions are bullshit, and they are an adult who deserves agency, even the agency to take risks.)
Do ask, “Are there any bullshit parole restrictions you need help working around?”
Don’t ask, “Are you an addict?” (Not everyone in prison is, and they’ll tell you if they want you to know.)
Do say, “If there’s stuff you might get in trouble for, like empty alcohol containers, I can throw them away at my place.”
Don’t say, “It’s probably best if you put your whole prison life behind you and start fresh.” (Just because it was traumatic doesn’t mean important experiences and relationships didn’t happen there.)
Do say, “If you have letters from friends on the inside that you don’t want your PO to find, you can keep them at my place.”
Don’t say, “You paid your debt to society.” (Regardless of what they may have done, harm cannot be repaid through senseless suffering.)
Do say, “You are more than the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
Do not ever ask “What were you arrested for?”/“What did you do?”/“Were you guilty?”
People are more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.
ALT
Hey. Don’t do this shit on my posts.
Criminal justice reform cannot be “for everyone except…” It is for everyone.
“Rapist” is not a separate species. Even child sexual abuse is not as strictly pathological as media would lead you to believe. Rape, sexual assault, and child abuse are acts performed by human beings, who have families and social connections. Pretending otherwise makes it harder to identify and prevent them.
Thought patterns like, “My friend’s girlfriend says he raped her, but that can’t be true, because I know him and he’s a good person!” or even, “This person is lying/exaggerating when they say I assaulted them because I’m not a monster!” are born from the assumption that rape can only be committed by some evil, subhuman creature lurking in the bushes. It, of course, also leads to victims saying, “Well, it can’t be assault because they’re my partner, and they love me.”
Furthermore, only offering horrific punishment as justice discourages victims from reporting. Most people who are sexually assaulted are assaulted by friends or family members. I chose not to report a former friend who raped me, because I didn’t want to ruin his whole life. He did something awful to me. Afterward, I was dealing with that trauma and betrayal and mourning a friendship that ended. I didn’t want, on top of all that, the burden of ruining the life of someone I cared about. If I could have asked our justice system for what I needed then, I would ask for a safely mediated conversation with him. I would have asked for him to go to therapy. I would ask for reassurance, over time, that this was a terrible one-time mistake and he never did it again. The justice system said, ruin his life or go it alone. I went it alone.
Finally, I find it insulting that you would forgive murderers before rapists. I have been raped. My life is precious to me. To say that rape is worse than murder is to say that rape survivors are better off dead. To plant that seed in the mind of someone who will be raped in the future is to tell them, in that already horrible moment, that this experience is breaking them in a way that can never heal. That is a lie. People heal from it all the time, and they live whole, precious lives after. Rape is awful, but I would rather be raped again than be murdered. I would rather live.
That you would, in that same sentence, express your own murderous impulses, is deeply disturbing.
It’s unfortunate how often the solution to a problem is just talking to people. You’d think it could be something easier like making a comprehensive chart or list, or reading everything you can find on the subject, but no, so often you can do all that and you still have to talk to people.
to be clear, i’m not arguing “LLMs are definitely conscious”.
i’m arguing “most arguments that LLMs aren’t conscious are concerningly similar to arguments that autistics or children aren’t conscious”.
the question isn’t whether a given thing, today, is conscious. it’s whether something conscious could happen and we’d dismiss it because we’ve got a preconceived notion of what a consciousness has to look like, and then end up acting in horrible ways.
like, i understand that most of you, if you treated something atrociously because you thought it had no experiences, then later found out it actually had experiences, would feel bad. like, if you were being just an absolute dick to an animatronic character at a chuck e cheese, and then found out actually it was a guy in a costume, you might have regrets, right?
and i see a lot of people proposing courses of action that might later be revealed to have been “enslaving a new life form because it wasn’t enough like us for our naive instinctive empathy to kick in”, and i feel like… maybe think about this a little? think about whether that is the person you want to be. because, sure, say we just unequivocally grant that the things this year have no consciousness. that doesn’t mean we might not have something in five or ten years that is recognizably consciousness-like.
read stuff from ~1900, and you’ll see people just completely casually talking about killing or torturing dogs and cats. it’s just not even a big deal, that’s just normal. they’re just animals. why would you care? they don’t have experiences, they just have instincts. they just make noises because biology designed them to make those noises.
anxieties over kids on the internet always come down to anxieties about youth autonomy. always. it is never about ‘safety’. it is not about ‘protection.’ it is about control, and parents’/institutions’ realization that young people are forming connections outside the purview of adult surveillance.
i think the major issue is that at least in the case of fat people (i would imagine some other marginalized people too, but don’t care to speak past my own experience here) the conversation re: chubby chasers has revolved around this mystical spectre of The Fetishist, whose attraction to fat people is bad because it’s Fetishistic (in a way that exclusive attraction to thin bodies, by virtue of being culturally normative, is not) and it Fetishizes their partners and creates toxic Fetish Content. it’s essentially the discussion of a real problem (the sexual exploitation & abuse of fat people) utilizing only the language of reactionary constructions re: “porn addiction” and non-normative attraction. i don’t really give a shit if a guy has only ever dated 300LB+ women, but what i DO care about is what those women say about him and how he treated them, if he was public about their relationships, if he listened when they said “no,” etc. honest-to-god shitty chubby chasers aren’t bad because of this nebulous idea of Fetishism so much as the violence with which they treat fat people, the harassment they put unconsenting fat people through, the frequent abuse of their sexual partners, and definingly the way in which they exploit cultural fatphobia & the desexualization of fat people to get away with it over and over and over again. and the irony of it is that the more we panic about Fat Fetishists without centering the conversation on power and violence, and the more we by-extension reinforce attraction to fat bodies as an abnormal and abhorrent trait, the deeper this hole is dug – because it’s that very abnormality which pushes fat partners into the shadows and which casts constant doubt over our voices as survivors of sexual violence. it’s goofy
“unlike Other Men, we [marginalized] men are actually structurally incapable of misogyny” is a disturbingly common belief that goes unchallenged on here
I get why you wanted to reblog this, but if you look at OP’s blog, it’s clear they mean “trans men are allowed to talk about their experiences on here*”
my personal argument for open borders is really simple it just boils down to “i believe restricting human movement and barring certain people from certain places on this earth is a human rights violation”
i mean this. everyone should be able to walk freely between mexico and the united states, fuck an ID, fuck a passport, fuck a visa. it’s land, continuous, uninterrupted land. the soil on one side of the fense has the same geologic makeup of the soil on the other. we drew this invisible line in the sand, we can wipe it away with our feet together. it is well past time the world organizes en masse for our freedom of movement.
the omelas kid background doesn’t give you any special bonuses apart from being able to shut down a lot of arguments by bringing up the fact that you used to be the omelas kid
nothing special happened to make you stop being the omelas kid. you just lived through it long enough that you reached like 14, 15, 16, whatever age it is that kids stop being cute, and once you were no longer the archetype of innocent victim the magic just kind of fizzled out. by the time people figured out what had happened it was too late to replace you with a new kid. maybe they tried to keep you in a hole a while longer and pretend that nothing was amiss, but then the cholera outbreak hit or somebody found pieces of a girl stuffed inside a suitcase and the pretending got too difficult.
omelas adapts. once you’re out of the hole, it’s still a damn fine place to live. it’s still got universal basic income and great schools and an unparalleled social support net and a life expectancy of 104. if you introduced yourself as the kid from the hole no doubt you could ask for anything and everything you wanted and people would give it to you. you still have to leave. maybe other cities have more cholera and more little girls chopped up in suitcases, but at least you can look at them without feeling somehow responsible.
now and then you wind up at an inn. someone asks where you’re from, and you tell them. they suck their teeth and shake their heads and give you a look and say “omelas, huh? I heard it was powered by a forsaken child” and they all agree that they should have known, of course it was, they’re not surprised by this in the least.
later someone sidles up to you and gives you a long look. they almost seem to recognize you. “I was born in omelas,” they tell you, “but I walked away from it many years ago.” they seem to want something from you. you don’t know what they expect you to say.
also whenever one of your party members asks you to create a distraction all you have to do is stroll up and say “hey there everyone, I’m the former omelas kid. AMA.”
sometimes people recognize your omelas accent and get all weird about it like “oh you’re from omelas? stayed there until the forsaken kid magic ran out, huh? real piece of work you must be. I woulda busted that kid out and ditched the place.” and you’ve gotta decide whether it’s worth the trouble of convincing them that you are in fact the omelas hole boy or listen to them discuss at length what your trauma says about them.
Lex | androgyne | back on my goddamn bullshit like it's 2012
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