#from a place of privilege

[jadagul]

Excerpts from dating profiles I swiped left on:

"If you're a white man who's lucky enough to match with me, make sure to bring offerings".

"I heal my ancestral trauma by dominating white men and making them do things that improve the environment."

(These were two different profiles, seen within the space of a day or two.)

[jadagul]

I feel this, and complain about it, so often.

I feel like these days I run across it a lot with trans issues. Villains may be terrible mass-murdering psychopaths but not one of them would ever deadname anyone, or speak in anything other than totally acceptable 2020s-coastal-liberal language about them.

And like sure, if you don't want to deal with any of those issues I get it, and that makes sense. Like, Practical Guide to Evil is just set in a world where no one has any issues with gay or trans people at all; none of the villains are transphobic because transphobia doesn't exist. (There are [at least] three trans people in the narrative. Two of them I missed on the first readthrough, because the only way you know they're trans is a throwaway comment like "people had once thought she was a man".)

But I've read a bunch of other stories that want to be very clear (a) transphobia exists (b) it's very common (c) but none of our villains would ever do that, because genocidal mass murder is one thing but none of them are that gauche.

And like there's nothing exactly wrong with that, especially in any specific case, but I feel like on some level that's the Thing To Do in a lot of fiction circles these days and something about it rubs me the wrong way.

"he would not fucking say that" but its about a character being a leftist. he would not fucking believe that

[perrieedwards]

i feel like people are skimming over the uk riots in a way that makes me want to tear my hair out. muslims in the uk are in active danger. immigrants in the uk are in active danger. refugees in the uk are in active danger. people of colour in the uk are in active danger. asian communities in the uk are in active danger. black communities in the uk are in active danger.

there are massive far right riots throughout the country right now and people like fucking elon musk and nigel farage are inciting it and still have a platform to speak. people have used three young girls deaths, people's genuine grief in southport, to try and gain traction for their own racist bullshit and it's working.

a lot of refugee charities have been forced to close leaving many people without support, homes, funding, food, etc. if you aren't able to donate please consider sending a message via the conversation over borders campaign! it will send a hopeful, welcoming letter to a refugee in the uk. there is also a guide to staying safe here.

please do your own research and donate to refugee charities, anti-islamophobia charities, mosques who are trying to rebuild after being destroyed, counter protesters, here are some i've heard positive things about but the list is extensive; southport strong together (support for the southport victims and their families), southport mosque rebuilding, riot repair fund, middlesbrough vulnerable residents, nasir mosque rebuilding, hull help for refugees, bristol welcomes migrants,

[elletromil]

So I do a lot of book suggestion with my public libraries because, well, I'm a big reader and I can't buy all of the books, no matter how much i might want to.

Anyway, it always completely baffles me when, with series - especially when its in ebook form where you can see fairly easily on Libby whether or not there is another installment after the one you're currently reading - *I* have to suggest the next book for it to be picked up.

And not in a 'why is the librarian not buying it' way, but rather in a 'why are people not asking for it????'

For exemple, I've been reading a series of like 5-6 books total. I suggested my library get the first ebook, suggestion got accepted, i read the book and liked it well enough. About 10-ish people were in the hold queue. Of course that doesn't mean they actually liked it but whatever.

I suggested the second book, and because of the nature of ebooks reservation, some people got to read it before me. Ok fine. I read it, about 6-7 people are on the hold queue when i finish it.

Guess what? No one asked for the third book.

For EVERY book in the series, i had to ask for the next one and i'm just...

For people to read it before me, they had to have an alert on the book so they would know when it becomes available at once. Cuz obviously I have those alerts, but even just checking 5 minutes after the notification, there would be at least 2-3 people with a hold on the book already.

And its not even a 'oh, the library will get the ebooks at a certain time every months/few months so that's why it wasn't available yet'

I finished the second to last book of the series recently. It had been available since like october-ish. I had actually started back then, but since I'm not a fan of reading ebooks, I couldnt finish the book in time, so into the hold queue I went.

I know that public library. I know how often they get their ebook. If anyone had asked for the last book, it would be available already.

It wasn't.

Do people not know they can suggest books? Is the process too obscure for them?

Anyway, there is no point to this post except to say, my good peeps, you can make books (or dvds or games or whatever kind of item your public library offer) suggestion! You usually can do it online!

If you can't find where exactly, usually just googling 'purchase suggestion' or 'reccomand a title' with the name of your public library will get you to the right page

And if you're still not sure, you should ask your librarian, they'll be happy to tell you how!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Burning Rotten Bridges

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[jadagul]

Right, exactly, that’s my point!

In the 1990s paradigm, I am uncomplicatedly cis.  In the 2020s Tumblr paradigm I am not.  And I think this applies to a lot of other people as well; I’ve had this conversation with like six different friends who all feel very similarly.  

And obviously one possible endgame is we all revert back to a 1990s-style paradigm, but I think that’s unlikely.  Partly because there is a real set of people for whom the 90s paradigm has real serious costs, and the 2020s paradigm is a big advantage for them.  And partly because, like, gender always was a little fake and once you see that it’s hard to un-see it.

“Gender” was an awkward bundle of, like, chromosomes, reproductive organs, secondary sexual characteristics, body type, social role, internal self-conception, and probably a couple of other things I’m forgetting.  And once you identify all of those separately you realize the bundle was kind of awkward, so it’s hard to go back to taking it super seriously as an ontology.

But on the other hand it’s statistically pretty good; chromosomes, reproductive organs, secondary sexual characteristics, and body type correlate reasonably well.  Social role only correlates okay now that we allow it to diverge, which was the big work of like 20th century feminism.  And then there’s this free-floating “identity” parameter which doesn’t have to correspond to any physical observable.  And there are good reasons to have elevated that one but it also decouples from the reasonably-well-correlated first bundle.

If your goal is to normalize gender-nonconformity you’re gonna have to accept that some people will fuck with gender as hard as they can while still being unequivocally, 100% cis and that is okay. There’s no egg to crack or callout to write. This is a good thing actually.

[lazylittledragon]

i refuse to believe that boycotting is hard. my favourite thing in the world is ordering maccies after a late night at work/a concert/getting drunk. yes i do miss it sometimes. but the other night i ordered from a small place near my house instead and it was the most orgasmic burger i've ever had in my life. i very rarely say this but fucking suck it up people are DEAD

[jadagul]

Was reading this kinda mediocre post on gender and trans stuff, and found this passage striking because it makes a certain common error really explicit (emphasis mine):

To be clear, it's true that categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are "map", not "territory"—and it's possible that trans women might be women with respect to some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, Alexander goes much further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories to make trans people feel better:

> “I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.”

This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world in order to capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to reflect the territory, and there are "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. 

And the fundamental error is the assumption that language is only for one thing.  Language has lots of purposes!  And so do categories.

I think this is a thing that actually gives a lot of neurodivergent/autism spectrum people trouble with certain types of social norms.  There’s a sense that language is supposed to work in a specific way, and using it in any other way is wrong, or lying, or something like that.

It’s not lying to say “great to see you, let’s get coffee some time!” to someone you found super boring and don’t want to hang out with again.  Because that happens to be a standard American English idiom that translates roughly to “goodbye!”  It doesn’t mean that it was great to see them, or that you want to get coffee.

And even beyond that, there’s phatic communication, and signalling communication, and speech acts, and none of those things are about communicating content or efficiently demarcating boundaries.  That’s a thing language does, but it’s not the only thing.

[king-of-men]

That's better than the other dystopias you describe, but I opine that if you need to use PTO for a two-hour errand you don't have a job, you have one of those Ironic Punishments where they don't tell you that you're dead and in Hell, and also you likely have it coming for being some kind of bureaucrat before you died. If I need to go afk for two hours I don't even notify my manager; come the fuck on.

Do not fall for the trap (moreso for salary workers), also known as fto (flexible time off)

[fluentisonus]

I've said this before but valjean's view of the bishop throughout the book gets me so bad because like. he knew him for what, a day maybe? and it absolutely had a vast & profound & positive impact on him. but then he goes on to spend the whole book comparing himself to his idealized vision of the bishop & finding himself wanting & feeling guilty and miserable about every petty or selfish thought that crosses his mind. but it's so fucked up because like we as the readers know the bishop better! we've read the whole first book and we know he came from a privileged & wealthy background, that he was a rake when he was young, it wasn't til he was in his 40s or 50s to have some sort of change of heart & become a priest (a similar age to valjean when he met him!), that he has moments that seriously shake him, that he has some dubious politics left over, that he still has moments of pettiness he has to work through on the page (his initial approach to the member of the convention, e.g.). and also he's just kind of a weird old guy (affectionate). and like this is not to criticize the bishop, I think he's a genuinely really good guy, just that while the bishop has a realistic view of himself & his past ("he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner,"), valjean is not getting any of this except maybe like. what would be mentioned in the newspaper when the bishop died. so his whole view of him is of this one shining moment where he changed his life and he feels he doesn't live up to that. which is sad! because the bishop understood him more than he realized & wouldn't have wanted him to feel that way

[largemandrill]

Bethany Hawke got the entire teen girl experience when she was socially radicalized by her older brother’s mentally ill communist friend. She was told a sentence of theory and was so ready to jump on the mage rebellion before her ass got dragged to the circle.

[jadagul]

Now, this is how every political coalition works, right? The New Deal coalition united racist Southern whites and poor urban Blacks, among others; the late-20th-century fusionist coalition united social conservatives, economic libertarians, and defense hawks; the modern Democratic coalition ties together the educated upper middle class with poor minorities. Politics is about logrolling and that means you have more than one log.

(And part of what makes political rhetoric successful is when you find a way to obscure the gaps: everyone can agree to be "for fairness" or "against communism" or whatever the fuck without needing to agree on what that looks like.)

But yeah, there's a major tension within generally pro-trans sectors of thought between "gender is a game we made up and I don't want to play" on the one hand, and "I am objectively a man/woman" on the other.

I've written about this before, but the more we lean into gender being determined by self-identification, the less there are any, like, objective observables that determine whether you "are actually a woman" or not, and the less it's clear what "being a woman" actually means.

A tensor is an operator that acts tensorially, and a woman is a person who checks "woman" on demographic forms. And there are a lot of advantages to that paradigm but in the limit it does mean you can't tell whether a given person is a woman, or a man in a dress, without asking them.

the fundamental tension between wanting to dissociate modes of dress from gender and people wanting to use modes of dress to signify their gender so they don't have to play the Pronoun Game

[aleksanderscult]

Leigh Bardugo should become universally criticized just for the fact that she presented a victim of persecution and his actions as worse and more important to deal with than the genocide that takes place in that world.

She really said: "It's not the genocide we should worry about. It's that man and his efforts to stop it".

And people applaud her for it instead. Wow. You're all seriously fucked up.

[nederlandsespoorwegen]

I've made this post before but I don't wanna dig through all my old posts. But. From the bottom of my heart, to everyone who doesn't have a drivers license because they don't want to or they cannot get one for any reason, and everyone who does have one but can't get a car or just doesn't want to drive,

I love you! And I know things are not fair towards you and you don't deserve that. And I can't offer you anything, but know that you're not alone ❤️

[jadagul]

I think about this a lot with how the musical Avenue Q has aged.

There's a fine line between "satirizing rampant homophobia and homosexual stereotyping" and just engaging in it yourself. And in the context of 2003 I think Avenue Q was firmly on the right side of the line; certainly my gay friends were generally into it.

(And it absolutely fits my recollection of being a teenager in the South who definitely supported gay rights but also got a little wrong-footed sometimes when I interacted with actual gay people and wasn't sure what to say about some things..)

But as a piece today none of it works. "This gay man is a Republican" isn't a punch line. "God look at how this dude talks he's obviously a closeted gay dude" is offensive. And "this entire building full of Brooklyn hipsters has never met anyone gay before" is flatly unbelievable.

And this is largely because attitudes toward homosexuality just changed so much, so quickly. My friends who are like five years younger than I am mostly don't remember the way gay rights were treated basically my entire childhood up through the middle of college.

I understand that folks tend to think of open homophobia in popular media as a Thing Of The Past, and that the 2000s are still sufficiently recent as not to count as The Past in a lot of folks' minds, but still it kills me the sheer incredulity I keep bumping into when people are confronted with how casually homophobic early 2000s popular media actually was. Like, buddy, you have no idea how recently "isn't it shameful for a straight man to know what a latte is?" stopped being a standard sitcom bit. There were whole shows airing as recently as the early 2010s whose entire premise was "this ostensibly straight man has somewhat fruity mannerisms" – like, that was the entire joke.

[jadagul]

From what I can tell, I'm unusually good at introspection; I have a lot more direct knowledge of my own emotional state than most people do, and I can generally explain what I'm feeling, and why, pretty easily.

I also am unusually bad at theory of mind, and do a lot of typical-minding. I can work around this if I pay attention, but my visceral heuristics all assume everyone else's brain works like mine. Which is not true.

The combination of these two facts means I that on some level I expect everyone else to be able to give clear explanations of why they're feeling whatever they're feeling at all times. And this is...not true.