for the headcanon chart: joe and nile love going to art museums together. sometimes they just spend an hour with a single piece of art. every time he sees one of booker's forgeries, he starts to gleefully explain the common tells to spot them, and then he Remembers. (the way she can tell right now is joe's eyes sparkle for a millisecond and then he gets real sad.)
you need to be able to explain why you shouldnt use ai rather than “oh well its obviously bad and you shouldnt use it or else youre a bad person” because that isn’t logic. “ai generates child porn based off of real children and whether or not it does is entirely up to how it is built and if pedophiles are able to find ways around those safeguards, because ai cannot in itself discern right from wrong” is a genuine criticism. “amazon tried to build a data center the size of tuson outside of tuson just to power their ai that would’ve increased the inability to stay alive outside in parts of arizona” is a genuine criticism. even “using generative ai teaches you not to learn how to do things yourself even when they’re difficult, devaluing necessary skills out of practice” is a genuine criticism when you look at the amount of people who think they are able of doing a difficult major when they couldnt write their own papers in high school.
but “ai is just bad because it’s bad” will convince no one and is a morally lazy position to take. about anything!
you need to know why reading someone’s diary is wrong if you want to learn about privacy and respect. you need to know why child sexual assault is wrong if you want to be able to help children form healthy age appropriate relationships. you need to know why capitalism is bad if you want to replace it with something else. you need actual concrete ideas and ideologies rather than “you should agree with me because i have the right vibe”
its always helpful imo to remember theres a cis person with whatever problem you have as a trans person 9/10 times. theres a cis man as short as you, a cis woman as tall as you, with hands and feet as big or small as yours. theres a cis woman scared to go out without shaving twice a day, theres a cis man whos upset bc he will never grow a beard. theres a cis woman who worries her infertility makes her less of a woman, and theres a cis man feeling similarly about his lack of potency. theres cis women who dilate and cis men with phalloplasty. theres a cis man scared that painting his nails will make people think hes not really a man and a cis woman whos exhausted with spending hours grooming just so people treat her like she wants to be treated as a woman. they dont put it in the terms we do but theyre worried that these problems make them inadequate at the gender they want people to see them as. our patriarchal system has made the boxes were supposed to fit into so small and you arent alone in not fitting it--nobody really fits
I love watching big dogs teach little dogs the rules. They always have such big "old timer employee giving the intern orientation" energy. They're so businesslike about it. This is their valued junior colleague, they are showing them the break room and the photocopier trick.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves A stately pleasure-dome decreed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I had a dream, which was not all a dream. See in her cell sad Eloisa spread, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
If I should die, think only this of me, Between what I see and what I say, In this short Life that only lasts an hour Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow? Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead. I learn by going where I have to go.
disability advocacy went wrong when it became about inspiration porn and “differently abled” and savants. its incredible that that guy with no legs did a triathlon but your sister with no legs will not and she doesnt need prosthetics or five hour training days to deserve respect and compassion and accommodations. its incredible that that autistic guy can look at a city from a helicopter for an hour and then draw the entire detailed skyline from memory when he lands but your autistic friend cannot and they dont need to have a special Autism Power to deserve respect and compassion and accommodations.
activism framed around “we are just as CAPABLE” means that when people genuinely are less capable they are left behind. activism framed around “we are just as WORTHY” is fundamental to radical compassion.
There's something about atheism that I've repeatedly tried and failed to put into words on several posts on this blog but I think I finally got it.
Atheists are the only religious minority who, even (or sometimes even *especially*) in ostensibly progressive spaces are not allowed to ever act like they're sure of their beliefs.
Like I'm not even an atheist, I've considered myself an agnostic for as long as I've been able to articulate my own beliefs, but it's not lost on me how often atheists in leftist spaces are hit with rhetoric like this:
Why is it bad that atheists are 100% sure that no god or any higher power exists? I mean. That's what they believe.
Everyone else is allowed to be 100% sure in whatever belief they hold and express it, but atheists are held to the higher standard of constantly conceding that "yeah I *could* be wrong haha of course I'm not saying it's impossible for gods to exist I'm just personally unconvinced" because openly expressing any confidence on the certainty of their own beliefs will immediately be perceived as close-minded and invalidating everyone else's belief systems when like.
When you get down to it "all this shit is made up" isn't really a meaningfully more close-minded or invalidating position than "all this shit is made up except for this one, which is the real and correct one". Atheism is just held to a higher standard when failing to immediately back down and cede ground in any situation where it doesn't align with anyone else's belief system is inherently seen as a mark of close-mindedness and intolerance, a standard to which no other religious minority is ever held in these spaces.
I was hanging out with American New Atheists at the time, and the main topics of discussion were stuff like "atheists should be able to hold public office" (not illegal but incredibly difficult in many areas because people flat-out would not vote for atheists and it was really hard not to be coerced into Christian rituals even if they could get in) and "the fact that they're trying to introduce legislation to ban teaching evolution in science class and give teachers who do it a criminal record, and instead teach 'Creation Science' (Christian Edition but they keep that part off the papers) is a bad thing actually". There was a LOT of political work going into protecting freedom of religion (including freedom from religion) in legal and educational areas. The evolution/creation science thing (and protecting the teaching of evidence-based science in general, as the evangelical position was that Empirical Science Is Evil, I'm not making it up they were straightup saying that and that science should be 'spiritually lead' and children had to be protected by giving them a spiritually led anti-empiricist science education until they were old enough to choose to go off and learn other science as adults) and a huge issue for a long time. Other common issues were same sex marriage, the right to abortion, and access to healthcare and sex education, all of which the evangelical political lobby opposed using religious justifications (although sometimes they tried to hide the explicit christianity of it, acting like 'it's a sin' is some kind of religiously neutral statement). The New Atheists were putting a lot of work into these causes.
Yeah a handful of youtubers found out that there were easy views in dunking on particularly stupid creationists, got high on their own popularity, and started randomly dunking on anything that looked easy to mock because they falsely believe they're smarter than everyone else and that gives them the right to be arseholes. Literally every movement has that. If you think there's not a handful of "feminists" on youtube right now making the trashiest possible dunk videos in the name of feminism then the youtube algorithm is protecting you. Everyone has these people. Fandoms have these people. But it's always easy to dismiss a whole demographic if you can find a couple of arseholes with a couple of catchy sound bites.
Once I was a member of a left-hand path facebook group and someone there said they could never be a satanist and thought satanism was bad because there had been prominent racist and sexist satanists in the past so it was a sexist and racist religion. When I (politely, I wasn't being an arsehole) asked if they felt the same way about Christianity a bunch of people started sending me abuse for gaslighting them and telling me that, because Christianity was popular among American slaves back in the day, I was being racist by asking that.
Actually, I think that this is a complete nonsequitur, and a wildly inappropriate thing to say on a post about unfair standards being forced upon a minority group.
If your issue is with culturally Christian atheists in America who are ignorant of other cultures in the context of discussing their atheism, that's an issue you have with those people, not "with atheists". The point of this post is how we've created a progressive culture where irreligious people are forced to bow and scrape and act obsequious in order to not get tarred with the same brush as a stereotype of their worst peers from 15 years ago, while religious people are typically not held to the same standard despite religiously motivated abuses being a lot more egregious. That caveat is just also doing the same thing.
When Maedhros comes back from Thangorodrim, the sun burns him. It burns him like it burns orcs, burns him like he is one of Morgoth's fell monsters. And sometimes he thinks that the sun must be able to recognise the darkness in him, the fact that he truly is not so different from the other creatures of Angband that he slays. It's only centuries later that he realises: oh, gingers just do that
