liprairian

[liprairian]

This was interesting to me as a sample bias because it's almost too expansive to be seen - you will get more answers from people who live in densely populated (read: more transit-equipped) areas because... there are more people in them. There are tons of other factors at play, of course, but that one stuck out to me as a bit of a catch-22.

[liprairian]

I have a rant perpetually locked-and-loaded about how libraries have two distinct levels of services, and how people making funding decisions by definition only access one of those levels. The first level is the one in the original post, the books and the storytimes and the cool 3D printing initiatives - the nerd fantasy. And don't get me wrong, we do all that, and really well!

But the second level is the public computer and printers, the de facto daytime homeless shelter, the 211 centre for everyone who doesn't have a phone to call it. If you have a job where you're making funding decisions, by definition you get paid enough that you aren't using most or all of that second level, and most of the time when you walk into the library, you won't even register that it exists. That's how you get the fantasy of late library hours where everyone reads quietly, and that's why we tend to get so annoyed at the fantasy itself. For me, at least, it brings up the frustration of our 'appeal' factor needing to be entirely focused towards those first-level users in order to get funding for second-level services, and feeling like we need to sweep the second-level users under the rug to do it.

This is the DREAM.

[liprairian]

hi i just wanted to say that i, too, miss the chattier aspect of Old Tumblr. also that i really respect how nicholas sparks is your nemesis. both because i think more writers should have nemeses, and also because nicholas sparks is such a perfectly loathsome choice. A+

If I am known for nothing else on the internet, let me be known for my one-sided blood feud with Nicholas Sparks, curses be upon his name.

[liprairian]

The Conspiratorial Mindset

So, I've always had a bit of an interest in scams and hokum, and what people call "Cults".

One of the common refrains when you talk about religious Cults is, "If you think about it all religions have beliefs that seem odd to outsiders" and this is true, but as I read more about cults I started to think,

"Wait, a lot of these groups aren't united just by having unusual religious or supernatural views; a lot of them also seem to have matching patterns of behaviors that have nothing to do with belief in psychic space aliens"

I'm talking about things like,

Having a leadership structure which is absolute, where the top leaders cannot be disciplined or even openly criticized by lower members;

Exerting tremendous control over the dress and behavior of adherents;

Telling adherents that outsiders are untrustworthy and that contact with outsiders should be strictly limited and heavily monitored by organizational leadership;

The extensive and common use of shunning and reprogramming in response to violation of any of the above rules.

In some groups, failing to adhere to the dress code and spending a lot of time with outsiders is, at worst, the subject of a few little jabs at family gatherings. In other groups, those same behaviors are treated as Defcon one crises and become the central issue of the adherent's relationship with everybody else in the organization until they can be bullied back into doing the organization's bidding.

It was gratifying to learn that other people have noticed these patterns (Some people prefer the term "High Control Group" to "Cult" because it highlights what the actual problem is)

I am starting to notice similar dynamics in what are commonly called "Conspiracy theories".

The thing about conspiracy theories is... Well, conspiracies exist, and sometimes groups of powerful people get together to do something in secret which would get them in big trouble if they were to do it openly.

But I am starting to notice a particular, I don't know, a particular way of conceptualizing the organization and purpose of conspiracies which is unique to some people and which characterizes the kind of conspiracy theorist who takes Alex Jones seriously.

I kind of think of it as a "Witch-Hunting mentality".

For certain people in more primitive times and places, if they, say, slipped off a ladder and hurt themselves, their first thought would be, "That must have happened because a witch cursed me. We need to find and punish the witch who cursed me."

And this isn't just the attribution of malice that characterizes this idea:

One malicious conspiracy that might make you fall off a ladder is a manufacturer who doesn't care about safety ratings. Imagine that the manufacturer is really deliberately malicious here. A subordinate comes to him and says, "Our ladders can't reliably hold the weight of a person and a lot of them will probably break and cause people to fall and hurt themselves." and he says, "I know that but who cares, by the time people figure it out it'll be too late to get their money back."

That's a malicious conspiracy, but, importantly, if Bob buys a faulty ladder and falls off, the conspiracy wasn't trying to hurt Bob; it merely didn't care whether Bob got hurt.

Now, this distinction doesn't take away the malice and hostility towards Bob, but if you go to the ladder manufacturer and say, "Hey boss, Bob bought one of our faulty ladders, but he's really skinny so the ladder didn't break" the manufacturer will go, "Who the fuck is Bob? And good, that's one less angry person."

Whereas imagine Bob's ladder has been cursed to break by a witch. The witch did it because she hates Bob, and wants him to fall, and if she finds out he didn't fall, she'll go, "Curses, I'll have to find some other way to hurt Bob."

Conspiracy theorists, it seems to me, are far more inclined to conceptualize conspiracies as acts of deliberate malice aimed at them rather than acts of negligent malice.

@loving-n0t-heyting posted this article from the New York Post which contains a good example of what I mean:

“I thought I was on the cutting edge of promoting rights for gay people,” Yang said. “But then I started looking deeper into where this was coming from and who was paying for it, and I started to get very disillusioned...

I assume the people paying for it are LGBT advocacy groups? Did you, uh, not know that the people you were working for were paying you to work for them?

“When you really dig down you can see how much of this comes from documents and plans at the United Nations,” Yang said, referring in part to the UN’s “Gender Equality” initiative. “It’s part of a global agenda to restructure society, re-structure our social norms and the economy,” Yang claimed. “They are undermining the sexually dimorphic nature of reality and breaking down the differences between the sexes to break down our identity. They are constructing identities for us and they want us to adopt them.”

Oh, I see.

This is exactly what I mean. LGBT rights efforts make Yang and others feel disoriented, like society is being restructured and that they are being left behind, like they aren't quite in control of social norms and that stable identity categories can't be relied on anymore.

Now, one kind of conservative might look at that and say, "These are bad second order effects of LGBT people trying to assert their lifestyle in public and that's why we should oppose them."

But another kind says, "These changes make me feel unstable. Therefore, the main purpose of the changes is to make me feel unstable. In order to understand these changes, I need to figure out who wants me to feel unstable and what they would gain from making me feel unstable."

The idea that Yang's feeling of instability is simply a side effect of a series of efforts mainly focused on LGBT rights is incomprehensible. Instead, she believes that there is a series of efforts focused mainly on making her feel unstable, with LGBT rights as a kind of side effect to the main goal of making her feel unstable.

This kind of thing is, to me, a big red flag that indicates that we are starting to float away from reasonable conspiracy thinking into crazy town.

I am particularly curious if folks can recommend any writers or researchers who have noticed this dynamic.

[liprairian]

i hate when scientists are like ‘this planet cant have aliens on it because there’s no water! the atmosphere is wrong! theres not enough heat to sustain life!’ because dude theyre aliens, nobodys saying they need any of those things to exist

[liprairian]

Oh those things are definitely putting out nonstop horror and suffering vibes. They may in fact be channelling my own horror and suffering at hearing that anyone has to live like this - I'm so sorry. The constant churn of bottom-tier weeds between libraries could power cities.

I don't even know how I ended up in this Dana Scully situation, I used to believe in ghosts as a kid, they are my favorite kind of undead in literature by far, I just can't truly entertain any kind of life after death because my understanding of our existence can be summed up as 'meat briefly gifted with electricity and opinions' and yet I repeatedly find myself hands on hips contemplating some weird shit that happened in our workplace overnight while multiple employees swear to me that the place is haunted, trying to figure out if I can explain it via the cleaning crew. I'll tell you one thing though, as far as I know the building is clean, if we are haunted it is from one of those goddamn ancient books our director insists on accumulating every time another library weeds them and puts them out for offer on the consortium listserv

[liprairian]

dear usamerican high schoolers looking for a way to resist fascism: sit through the pledge of allegiance.

no getting up. no looking at the flag.

everyone will be looking at you. you'll be sweating like a fucking hippopotamus. your teacher will sternly tell you to get up. you'll feel stupid and that maybe its not worth it because you're just a kid in a classroom. but I'm here to remind you that there are no real life consequences to detention. there are however real life consequences to resisting a thoughtless performance of nationalism.

[liprairian]

jstor should have a for you page

[liprairian]

Do you have the Libby library app?

If not, download it to your phone, and under "Add library card" select the button to search for a library and start typing in "queer"...

Sign up with an email, no actual address required, and you are good to go 🏳️‍🌈

[liprairian]

Guy freezes his hair and it stands tall.

[liprairian]

I need some good fantasy or scifi to read that doesn't involve romance. preferably urban fantasy or cyberpunk or just downright weird shit, but I could do with more traditional stuff. as long as people aren't driven by lust. I'm so so soso so sososososoooooooo very tired of reading that sort of thing in traditional print novels.

[liprairian]

Here's my attempt, based on an extension of an idiom I use quite a lot at work that I didn't realize till this post was absolutely Pratchett-inspired (thank you, OP, for this delightful revelation):

"If you gave a man a fish, he'd eat for a day. If you taught a man to fish, he'd eat for a lifetime. But what if the man didn't have time to sit by the riverbank and wait for a fish? He'd go spend money he didn't have on the cheapest takeaway he could find. It was probably about an even risk, anyway, eating the chemical runoff in the takeaway or sinking your teeth into something that could live in the Anhk."

thinking non-stop about the Terry Pratchett Method of Deconstruction (TM) and how it works

[...] the wages of sin is death, but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays. (Witches Abroad)

Take a common concept, metaphor, idiom, trope etc. "The wages of sin is death."

Invert, reverse or subvert it to highlight the inconsistency or issue. "But so is the salary of virtue." (Well, actually, everybody dies, right?)

While everybody's contemplating the philosophy revealed, overextend the metaphor and whack them in the back of the head with the joke like a comedic quintain while they aren't expecting it. "At least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

He does it quite often and I love it every time.

[liprairian]

First impressions:

Finally starting Huckleberry Finn. 100/10 beginning for a book that gets ban attempts from both sides of the political spectrum. I might be in love.

[liprairian]

Someone at an old job asked why I wanted to write up the meeting minutes for our team and I said 'i wanna control the narrative' and they were like 'what' and I pointed out that no one was gonna remember what we said in six months and so my interpretation of the meeting would dictate the assumed reality of what happened

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

That's how several coworkers decided I was a supervillain and how I learned several coworkers didn't understand record keeping as like a CONCEPT

[liprairian]

Finally starting Huckleberry Finn. 100/10 beginning for a book that gets ban attempts from both sides of the political spectrum. I might be in love.

[liprairian]