starfieldcanvas

[starfieldcanvas]

[starfieldcanvas]

understanding that other people existing does not HAVE to automatically deprive you of resources is important. but the idea that such a situation can NEVER OCCUR is also a pretty weird claim.

if you are in anything resembling a closed system resource-wise, the fact that you have more mouths to feed but not a way to acquire additional food will mean there is less food to go around. it seems like OP is assuming additional mouths to feed automatically means additional people to help create food, which of course is often how things plays out, but it's not a guarantee!

it's the "closed system" part that's important. much of modern infrastructure and politics has been turned toward making sure that nowhere is a closed system and that any resources you lack can always be imported. in a war zone, however, artificially closed systems crop up all over the place. so it's entirely possible to create a situation where someone else having food means that you do not have it.

i don't know enough about the movement of resources within wartime german territory to know how accurately "closed system" describes Nazi Germany. as OP notes, they sure did a lot of propaganda about how starving the Jews would mean more food for the rest of the population, but the Nazis were also laughably incompetent, so "we killed 6 million people and didn't even manage to redistribute their rations to the rest of the population" sounds like a real possibility. the death camps were work camps first; killing your industrial labor force in the middle of an ongoing war could easily mean you now have to conscript more farmers into abandoning their fields.

but if you're reading a book or article that leads with "the average (non-Jewish) German benefitted" i'd at least want to know what their argument was. people aren't bigoted/racist/antisemitic/xenophobic just because they're stupid and evil; they're bigoted because bigotry is a sociopolitical tool to expedite resource extraction and exploitation.

So it turns out it's possible to type the entire sentence "During the Holocaust, the average German benefitted from the genocides." and not realise how insane that claim is.

If I ever found myself claiming the holocaust was good for the average german I'd use my pattern matching skill to say "huh, wasn't that the point of it according to nazi ideology? Why am I agreeing with nazi ideology on this point?" Then I'd meditate on what exactly has to be true about someone for thier murder to be for the public good, I'd breifly ask myself if that was true of the jews, and when I concluded no I'd ask if it was true of the ethnic group I was trying to defend in my origional argument either.

But you know, I lack the deep moral convictions you need to be an anti-racist in one of the least racist countries in human history.

[starfieldcanvas]

i think there’s something to be said about how the gig economy makes things ostensibly more convenient but also worse. and not just like, doordash guys take too long to get to you so your food is cold. but because the business model is centered around a million people doing work without any familiarity with what theyre doing and decentralized from the businesses they’re working with, you get service that’s being reinvented from scratch every time it’s purchased.

it happens all the time that I’ll order an uber and when they pick me up, they’ll just stop in the middle of the street with their hazards on, making me dodge traffic to get to them and pissing off the cars around them. and then I’ll get in the car and chat with the driver and find out they’re actually from two counties over and they’ve never driven here before, so they don’t know where parking is or whether they’re heading to a wide open parking lot or a busy downtown. and then you start to realize that they’re not being a dick, they’re just given as little information as possible every time they pick up a ride so they have to just guess how and where to pick up a passenger. and since they’re paid by ride, they’re incentivized to pick you up as fast as possible. and all the people who cared about finding a safe place to pick you up quit the app or stopped doing that so all you’re left with is the pissed off cockroach motherfuckers.

and then you see that this happens with every fucking app. doordash sucks because you pay 8 million dollars for delivery and you still have to hike half a mile to find the guy because he got lost in your apartment complex. Instacart sucks because the guy picking your groceries couldn’t care less about getting ripe fruit and replaces your heavy cream with shaving cream. customer support for all this sucks because the guy helping you can’t do anything more than offer you $5 credit, beg for your forgiveness, and hope you get out of the queue fast enough for him to go to the bathroom. because all of them aren’t given enough time to do a good job or enough money to care.

and every time a gig worker makes the experience suck for you, it’s a rational decision. they’re evaluating the money they’re being paid and if it’s worth getting paid less to do a good job, and correctly deciding that it isn’t. so you can’t even get mad, because you’d do it too. and so the company manages to pass on its race to the bottom to its lowest-paid employees.

[starfieldcanvas]

From Jelena Woehr on bluesky

[starfieldcanvas]

I can understand how "modern person thrown into the past gets by pretending to be a healer/doctor" is as surprisingly common of a trope as it is. I mean I'm fluent enough at bullshitting to be pretty sure I could pull it off to impersonate a doctor in any time pre-1800s. If I have no idea what something is or how to treat it, I could just get the opinion of the other whatever-passes-as-medical-professionals around, but if their suggestions sound like bullshit I'm not doing it. And I'll beat the shit out of anyone suggesting bloodletting or mercury. With my healing stick. I've tied little bells on it, that jingle comically with every smack.

The awesome curative powers of my healing stick come from two separate sources: Placebo, and me using it to beat anyone trying to give my patients mercury.

[starfieldcanvas]

There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

[starfieldcanvas]

I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.

[starfieldcanvas]

I don't think modern Tumblr actually has that many trans women, I figure it's still mostly cis people since that's just how demographics work, however I do think trans women are disproportionately really good at posting and that's why it feels like we have a much larger presence than we do because our posts keep blowing up

[starfieldcanvas]

More How To Manage ADHD

“I never remember to take out the trash until my trash can is full, at which point the trash bag is really heavy and the stuff at the bottom has been rotting a while, and it’s awful!”

Small brain: “Try to train yourself to take out the trash on certain days at certain times.”

Large brain: “Buy a tiny trash can. Now you HAVE to empty it.”

[starfieldcanvas]

How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

[starfieldcanvas]

Anyway if you like to think that you care about game design or tabletop roleplaying games as a medium you absolutely need to get the idea that D&D 5e as a game can actually meaningfully support multiple different playstyles out of your head. D&D 5e is still ultimately a fantasy dungeon combat game and the only ones who benefit from people doubling down on its reputation as a multi-genre game are the people at Wizards of the Coast.

It is detrimental to players: players who accept the idea that D&D is good for everything will invariably grow incurious about the types of gameplay that D&D does a poor job of supporting, because if D&D can already do that gameplay then is there any reason to assume that it gets any better outside of D&D? Players will grow to think that D&D is representative of RPGs as a whole, which is simply untrue.

It's detrimental to GMs: when people buy into the idea that D&D can do anything it places blame for the failures of the system on the GM. "A good GM can make it work" becomes the rallying cry of thousands of people who haven't considered whether it's fair to expect the GM to do all the work that the game designers should've done. And more importantly: many game designers have already done the work of making it (playstyles that D&D doesn't support) work! They just have done it in games besides D&D.

And most importantly, it is absolutely detrimental to game designers whose livelihoods can sometimes depend on getting their games out there. These people are passionate about game design, making games that actually do the things that people claim D&D 5e does when in fact D&D 5e simply passes the buck to its GMs, and that is absolutely shameful.

And none of that is to say that D&D 5e the game deserves no credit, but it absolutely does not deserve any credit for things it does not do. When you think about something outside of the scope of its rules that you think D&D supports, ask yourself this: is the support it gives something concrete, like procedures and rules for you to rely on, or is it support in the sense that you have to do all the work but at least the game doesn't actively prevent you from doing it?

And this goes out especially to all the people who say D&D supports queer romance, as a fan of queer romance that's simply untrue.

[starfieldcanvas]

if you're worried about the new ToS for AO3, please remember that you are primed to distrust because of the way politics are intertwining with the internet right now. remember to look into definitions yourself, fact check, and look through the logic lense before jumping to conclusions.

AFAIK right now, the update clarifies terms that have already existed. it's not changing as much as it is clarity-rewriting. i'm still looking through the legalese (law student, i'm learning as I go) and I will be checking in again later, but don't despair.

however, don't get lax. download fics, connect with the authors, build out your communities. comment and bookmark and save, and please don't stop writing.

[starfieldcanvas]

oh btw fellow gay people in my phone, what would you consider the best laptop for a graphic designer that wasn't a macbook and money was no issue ?

[starfieldcanvas]

How long until Dr Oz becomes Surgeon General

[starfieldcanvas]

devastating news for the discourse poster: “media literacy” in the modern age includes the ability to identify which posts are bait

[starfieldcanvas]

Between 500 to 1,000 study subjects were recruited from each of the 23 countries sampled in Napier’s study, for a total number of 16,756 participants. Each participant was asked to report their attitudes toward transgender women and transgender men on scale from 1 to 9, with 1 representing “extremely positive” feelings, and 9 representing “extremely negative” feelings. Attitudes toward gay men and lesbians were also recorded, to echo the Bettinsoli et al 2020 paper that Napier’s work builds upon.

In addition to reporting their feelings toward trans and gay people, Napier’s survey respondents were also asked whether they believed it was possible for a person to be a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth (Napier calls this a “gender identity denial" measure), and to report their religiosity, conservatism, age, and education level. Region of course was also a crucial variable in the study, and so analyses are performed both on the level of individual country, and pooled in order to draw comparisons between Western- and non-Western people.

The first important finding to flag here is that, when collapsed across all countries sampled, participants were consistently more biased against trans women than they were trans men.

When isolating survey respondents by region, however, Napier found that non-Westerners reported a greater bias against trans women. Participants in Western nations still appear to have greater dislike for trans women than trans men, on average, but when isolated by region, the pattern did not reach the level of statistical significance. As in her previous analyses, Napier found that the men in her sample were more biased against trans individuals overall, compared to women, and that non-Western men were particularly prejudiced.

Next, Napier turned her focus to the measure of “gender identity denial” — which asked participants where it is possible for a person to be a gender other than the one they were considered at birth.

Participants from Russia, China, India, Peru, Hungary, South Africa, Poland, and the United States disagreed the most strongly with the idea that a person’s gender can change, of all the 23 countries sampled. Spain, a nation that offers hormone replacement therapy on an informed consent basis, ranked as far and away the least transphobic region in the sample, with respondents generally considering it possible for a person to change their gender identity from what they were considered at birth.

After this, Napier combined attitudes toward both trans women and trans men to compute an overall measure of transphobic attitudes, and built a model examining the effects of all variables in the study, as well as how those variables interacted with one another. Once again, she discovered that men feel more negatively toward trans people than women do, and that non-Western men, in particular, expressed greater transphobia.

Napier also discovered that more highly educated people were generally less transphobic, regardless of region. Older people, on average, were more biased against trans people, and this effect was heightened in non-Western countries. Conservatism was associated with more transphobic bias, particularly in Western countries such as the United States. In Western countries, higher religiosity predicted greater transphobia, though it did not in non-Western countries.

So far, these results mostly line up with Napier’s predictions, and most of the existing social psychological literature on the subject. Nothing super surprising here. Where things get a little more complicated, though, is in step two of the analyses, where Napier entered attitudes toward gay men and lesbians as a control.

After controlling for attitudes toward gay people, younger people were actually found to be more transphobic than elders in the Western countries in the sample. What this means, in essence, is that for older people in countries like the United States, attitudes toward gay people and trans people pretty much hang together: either you accept all LGBTQ individuals, or you don’t.

But among the younger generations, homophobia and transphobia are somewhat more independent. Perhaps on account of rising transphobic rhetoric, a sizeable number of young people in Western countries support gays but strongly dislike trans people. The LGB without the T movement sadly seems to have found some converts among the newer generations.

When controlling for attitudes towards gays and lesbians, the effect of education and conservatism on transphobia largely dropped away. This suggests that more educated people are more tolerant towards both gays and trans folks (which is not super surprising), and that conservatives are less tolerant toward both (also a pretty predictable result).

The effects of religion however, flipped: when controlling for anti-gay bias, highly religious people were actually less biased against trans folks than the non-religious were.

This suggests there’s a contingent of highly religious people who are more tolerant toward trans people than they are gay people. This may indicate they believe that transness, which is a matter of identity or personal feeling, is not a choice or not sinful, whereas being gay is. Since some religious doctrines preach specifically about the evils of gay sex, it’s possible some highly religious individuals view transness more neutrally. But truthfully, more study would be needed to tease this effect apart.

Finally, Napier examined the relationship between “gender identity denial” and general transphobia. She found that people who do not believe it’s possible to change one’s gender are in fact more transphobic (no surprise there), and that a person’s beliefs about the changeability of gender had an influence on transphobia that was statistically independent of homophobia.

In other words, transphobia isn’t just the result of homophobic people applying their bigotry to all members of the LGBTQ umbrella equally — rather, transphobia reflects, in some part, a person’s ideology about what gender is and whether it is changeable.

This might not sound like it’s a big deal, but it suggests that the rhetoric of TERFs, “gender critical activists,” and far-right transphobes about the immutability of gender might have had an influence on public attitudes over the years. People who hate trans folks aren’t just doing it because they hate all queers — they’ve developed specifically transphobic beliefs about how the world operates. Transphobes are therefore not merely “ignorant” about what trans people are — they know about us, and they have constructed a worldview that deliberately shuts us out and makes them more biased against us.

I wrote about an impactful new study on the public's attitudes toward trans women and trans men across the globe -- you can read my full write-up and critique of the study (or have it narrated to you by the Substack app) at drdevonprice.substack.com