narendur

[narendur]

Anyone here who's into Trilobites, i got a video for you

Based on the new trilobite soft tissues discovered in a Middle cambrian Morrocan specimen that's been buried in a volcano.

Full video on my youtube channel!

https://scitechdaily.com/truly-astonishing-discovery-of-500-million-year-old-pompeii-trilobite-fossils-shake-up-scientific-understanding-of-the-long-extinct-group/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381772319_Rapid_volcanic_ash_entombment_reveals_the_3D_anatomy_of_Cambrian_trilobites

Sources ^

[narendur]

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/23/business/trump-rescinds-anti-discrimination-order/index.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/trump-revoke-equal-employment-opportunity-act-meaning/6119256/

Looks like he mostly repealed Executive Orders, since he can't repeal the Civil Right Act, but he's muddied the waters on what discrimination is legal and what isn't, and how much companies have to report or self-audit.

I'll be real with y'all, I knew Donald Trump was going to do some henious, bigoted shit the second he sat down in that chair in the oval office, but - and I can't emphasize this enough - I didn't not expect him to immediately repeal the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.

Like I'm still stunned by it. We're back to the 1950's now. We on the left were trying to fight to maintain gains we made the past 10-15 years and trump comes in a sweeps the rug out from all of us. You can now be fired for being for your race, religion, sexuality, sex and gender, disability, or nation of origin.

Employers can now fire you for being black or brown or LGBTQ or blind or in a wheelchair or a woman or literally whatever characistic they want.

I can't convey just how fucked we are. The EEOC is one the most important win in the history of Civil Rights. He did it on MLK Day! That's extra fucked!

Y'all thought their anti DEI or CRT or whatever other acronym they were throwing out there crusade was going to start and end at stuff younger than a high schooler, but no they went after one of the bedrocks of civil rights.

The more I think about it the more my head spins.

[narendur]

i'm testing the capabilities of a Large Language Model That Shall Not Be Named and. dear god it's really bad at summarizing this novel

[narendur]

what if instead of being under the impression that Darth Vader killed his father someone told Luke that Vader killed his mother and then Luke hit him w that accusation in the middle of their confrontation and Vader just started crying

[narendur]

Ugh. To kneecap creativity in the name of improving a city is just nasty.

Hey, remember how I was ranting about the reactionary urbanists who prioritize aesthetics of buildings over Livability

[narendur]

fact: when pidgin dialects involve english, -glish becomes the suffix, eg: chinglish, konglish, hinglish fact: slash pair name order puts the top first and the bottom second, eg: deancas vs casdean conclusion: english is an uke language and that’s why we have an omegaverse, not an alphaverse

[narendur]

scientists are in labs right now creating the thinnest and worst material known to mankind so they can make women’s clothing

[narendur]

reading progressive sex ed caricatures with accurate and detailed and realistic diagrams of sexual organs + shows their variation, but all i can think about is how there is no discussion of what srs is besides the fact that it exists

[narendur]

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

[narendur]

i love when the gender options are "male" "female" and "prefer not to answer"

like it just reads as "boy" "girl" and "what are you, a cop? i don't owe you anything"

[narendur]

All right, y'all. Let's talk about legislative dunk-hunting and the upcoming legislative term.

Please, please, please check the score on bills before posting about the Next Most Terrible Thing That Republicans are doing, especially if the bills come from freshman legislators or known bad actors like Nancy Mace. Freshman Republicans are going to be looking to make their bones and getting a lot of 'online liberal tears' is part of the metric by which these dinguses seem to measure success. You'd hope that it would be, like, meaningful legislation that improves the lives of their constituents, but, you know, no.

This is legislatively the same thing as 'dunk hunting,' where people on Twitter/X will put out an objectively bad tweet in order to lure in quote-tweet dunks. This 'dunk hunting' then uses the QT'ing account's audience to raise their tweet's profile in a way that they otherwise would not have gotten. It works when a bunch of little accounts do it, mind you -- the accounts QTing it don't have to be big accounts for this to be a successful strategy. These Republicans can then retreat to their online fainting couches about how they're getting "attacked" by the big mean liberals, and thus get more eyes on their bill and more time on the television news network of their choice.

The above thread on BlueSky gives this bill as a great example.

Scroll down to "prognosis" & you'll see that this bill, introduced 8 days ago as of this posting, is listed as having a 1% chance of passing.

Nobody needs to spend their time worrying about that bill passing. It is extremely unlikely to do so. Your energy is better spent literally almost anywhere else.

We are absolutely going to have to pace ourselves and not burn ourselves out on endless waves of maliciously-cultivated outrage. It's January of year 1. He hasn't even been inaugurated yet.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. Behave accordingly.

[narendur]

A solid 20 minutes after falling fully asleep tonight my husband turned to me in his sleep and said "You can find it on Poob." I said "what? What can I find?" And he said "It." (long suffering sigh) "It's on Poob."

Took me a few moments to realize he'd been reading this post right before falling asleep, so thanks for featuring in my sleep-talker-decoding confusion tonight guys.

compilation of this type of post

[narendur]

the concept of 'sperm whale' is so fucking funny. these prudish victorians found a gigantic, terrifying sea-beast, and, discovering it was full of a thick, oily substance, immediately went 'is this fucking Cum???' and started fueling everything with it. they thought their whole sexually repressed society was running on the monstrous cum harvested by deadly expeditions to the black, icy sea. what kind of immaculate neuroses they must have had.

[narendur]

ms paint study from 2021

[narendur]

I don't think the cultural effect is as much about preserving face as it is about indicating that you dont agree with other things "the worst guy you know" believes. It's a counter to the association fallacy of:

Shithead A believes 'bad' belief X,

Shithead A states Y,

Person B agrees with Y,

Therefore person B believes 'bad' belief X.

This is not an actual logical conclusion - the only case where you know for sure that person B believes something 'bad' is if statement Y is itself a 'bad' belief. HOWEVER. It is often safe to assume the above conclusion because a lot of people want to hide their evil/antisocial/harmful/etc. beliefs as something milder. "Heartbreaking, the worst guy you know made a valid point," allows people to honestly discuss statement Y while quickly clarifying their overall position regarding other things Shithead A believes.

In the immediacy of the conversation, this defangs attempts by Shithead A to use agreement with statement Y to convince people to believe X by separating the two. From a cultural standpoint, the meme breaks down the concept of "good people exclusively hold good ideas, bad people exclusively hold bad ones." It's the opposite of thought experiments like "what would you have done in nazi germany" that challenge people to recognize their own capacity for evil. By recognizing an otherwise harmful person's capacity for intelligent thought and providing a method for identification and recognition of that thought in the mainstream without condoning other beliefs, it helps provide a path for deradicalization and human connection, assuming The Worst Person You Know (or those who follow them) are willing to accept that feedback.

thinking about that post that's like "by providing a face-preserving way to admit the outgroup can be correct, that 'heartbreaking, the worst guy you know made a valid point' article has done more to rectify online discourse than any rationalist ever will"

[narendur]

I admit I always find it funny when people whose entire business is media give on-the-record quotes that sound this much like the villain of a movie about hosting a charity talent show to save the beloved local library.

[narendur]

Hey at least it's not Eliyasse

Hey, who the fuck named almost 7000 babies Elias in 2023??