#north eugene

[sir-ballister-boldheart]

You get Goldenheart off that fucking list right now

[hazelbutterflies]

House Bill 237 Rapid Response Info Sheet (5/24/2024) (link to this on Google docs)

(id: Simone Hetherington, a speaker during public comment, urges lawmakers not to pass the masking bill during the state Senate Rules Committee in the Legislative Building in Raleigh, N.C on May 15, 2024. She is wearing a gray sweater and standing in front of a brown podium and microphone, she has long brown hair and is wearing glasses and a white face mask with head straps.)

Update + Call to Action!

The House of Representatives did not concur with HB 237! Next, the bill will be going through the Conference Committee to be amended again. We still need to fight and let the members of the Conference Committee understand the implications of this bill. Please focus your calling and emailing to members of the Conference Committee, found in this document and the link here! We have scripts you can utilize to communicate with them!

Our goal is to contact legislators to 1) oppose HB 237 altogether and reject the criminalization of masking, 2) advocate for, at minimum, the inclusion of a health exemption!

So far, there are no Senate Conferees for this bill. We will update this sheet if they are added! We do not know when the Conference Committee plans on meeting but it is important to continue contacting them!

CALL + EMAIL THE FOLLOWING REPRESENTATIVE CONFEREES FOR HB 237 TO TELL THEM NO ON HB 237!

Scripts, talking points, and contacts can all be found below!

Step 1: Email NC Representative Conferees

Copy/Paste the email below and the contact list of the NC Representative Conferees. You can also use ncmegaphone.com to send these emails automatically!

Example Email/Letter

Hello Senator/Representative [Last name],

I am emailing today to express my opposition to the amendment to HB 237, also called the Unmasking Mobs and Criminals Bill, that was proposed on Tuesday, May 7th, 2024. I am a constituent of District [Number], living in [Town Name], North Carolina.

The proposed removal of the health and safety exemption ignores the ongoing pandemic, impinges on federal rights, and would have larger material consequences on the economy and our communities’ collective well-being.

As we speak, new COVID variants have emerged and are predicted to cause a wave of infections, disabilities, and death this summer. Thousands of people continue to be hospitalized, disabled, or killed by COVID-19 every day in this country and around the world. Health and safety professionals identify masking or the use of high-quality respirators as the best protection against airborne viruses and diseases. To remove the medical exemption in the midst of an ongoing risk to public health is irresponsible and endangering your constituents.

Earlier this year, Congress held its first hearing on Long COVID and the need for research and resources on this complex and often confusing illness. From the advocacy and testimony of doctors, frontline workers, and Long COVID patients themselves, there has been an international push to recognize Long COVID as a disability. Disabled Americans are protected under the American Disabilities Act to have access to accommodations necessary for thriving and survival. High-quality masks and respirators are medically necessary for those disabled by or at risk of being disabled by COVID-19 and other airborne viruses. To remove the health and safety exemption would be a violation of the federal rights of disabled and immunocompromised citizens.

The larger material consequences of this amendment to the bill on the state of North Carolina cannot be understated. Hospitals, schools, social services, and even restaurants and recreation spots are massively understaffed, underfunded, and overworked. This amendment to remove the health and safety exemption, essentially increasing the potential spread of sickness and disease, would put these already overextended aspects of our society and our economy into further disarray and strain.

I strongly urge you to consider these material consequences, but more importantly, your disabled and immunocompromised constituents by voting against any amendments to House Bill 237 that would further restrict masking as a necessary precaution.

NOTE: ADDITIONAL TALKING POINTS ARE LISTED AT THE END OF THIS DOCUMENT.

NC House Representative Conferee Emails

Erin.Pare@ncleg.gov

Sarah.Stevens@ncleg.gov

John.Torbett@ncleg.gov

Brian.Biggs@ncleg.gov

Step 2: Call the NC House Representative Conferees!

Rep. John Torbet (R), 704-263-9282

Rep. Brian Biggs (R), 919-733-5865

Rep. Sarah Stevens (R), 919-715-1883

Rep. Erin Paré (R), 919-733-2962

Phone Zap Script

Hello Senator/Representative [Last name],

I am a constituent of District [Number], living in [Town Name], North Carolina, and I am calling today to ask you to vote against the proposed amendment to House Bill 237 (the Unmasking Mobs and Criminals Bill). Removing the health and safety exemption for masking in public would harm my life and the lives of many other constituents. Thousands of people continue to be hospitalized, disabled, or killed by COVID-19 every day in this country and around the world. Removing masking as a protection would contribute to economic decline through overcrowding and understaffing of schools, hospitals, and businesses.

High-quality masks and respirators are medically necessary for those of us who are disabled and/or immunocompromised. This amendment would be a direct violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act which was created to protect and accommodate disabled citizens. People have the right to protect themselves from airborne contaminants. I strongly urge you to consider these material consequences, but more importantly, your disabled and immunocompromised constituents by voting against any amendments to House Bill 237 that would further restrict masking as a necessary precaution.

Additional Talking Points

Masking as ADA accommodations

Masking as a tool for survival; medically necessary like a wheelchair or other mobility and accessibility aids, glasses, hearing aid

When we criminalize masking we make it impossible for immunocompromised people to work, support the economy, be part of society

Collective Wellbeing & (What they Care About) The Economy

Collective impact on hospitals, school and work sick days. Will cause more people to miss work and school; cause delays in receiving crucial healthcare; deplete the labor force and damage the economy

Disconnecting from COVID, and focussing on masks as necessary for general health & wellness for many elderly and disabled people. (COVID is triggering potentially)

Ban as Impinging on Personal Freedom / Protections of 14th Amendment / Encouraging Profiling

It is not a functional or rational measure, it is like saying that because people wear shirts in one context then no one can wear shirts in any other setting; it impinges on our freedom

Mask wearing has been presented as a matter of personal choice and now we suddenly don’t have that choice, the choice is being made for us

People have different reasons for needing to cover their bodies (religious, physical, psychological) and they should have a right to do so. You cannot determine the reason that someone is covering their body just by looking at them; this ban could impinge on 14th amendment rights

This will disproportionately impact people who are already discrimination and biased treatment from law enforcement.

Lawful or unlawful behavior can’t be predicted by mask-wearing, nor can intent. Mask wearing is not inherently bad or harmful. It should remain a neutral choice

There is no legitimate link between medical mask wearing and the original intent of this law against racist hate groups; this is an outdated and a misguided use of previous legislation.

Ongoing Pandemic/Risks to Public Health and Safety

As we speak, new COVID variants have emerged and are predicted to cause a wave of infections, disabilities, and death this summer. To remove the medical exemption in the midst of an ongoing risk to public health is irresponsible and endangering your constituents.

Personal Connection

Having been disabled by COVID-19, I worry for others who could be disabled and also for what would happen if I were to get sick again; I could lose the ability to work and support myself or to participate in social life, be dependent on systems that can’t support me

Quick Facts

What is HB 237? What’s happening now?

HB 237, also known as the “Unmasking Mobs and Criminals Bill”, is a law that makes face coverings in public illegal. There are several exemptions, including an exemption for “health & safety reasons” that was passed in March 2023 to account for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, NC lawmakers are attempting to remove the health & safety exemption to retaliate against students holding Palestinian solidarity protests. The removal of this necessary exemption would further isolate disabled/immunocompromised people and create even more consequences for protesters who are arrested.

What is a phone or email zap?

Phone and email "zaps" are an easy and direct way of letting public officials and others know what you want them to do or to stop doing. It may involve voting on a particular bill, or actually implementing plans they have proposed but haven't acted upon. People in positions of power take such actions seriously. Politicians usually keep track of their pro and con calls on controversial issues. Phone and email zaps are particularly useful when you need to respond to something quickly. (ACT UP)

If you’d like to hear more about why this bill is bad please listen to this episode of death panel. Something the podcast highlights is that this is revenge on behalf of Republicans because Republicans hated that we cared about others and had mask mandates during 2020-2021. They also hate that we care about solidarity and we’re masking during protest against the genocide of Palestinians. It’s all connected.

[glitter-lisp]

You know I don’t really know these guys outside of fics of yours I’ve read, but pls tell me abt Barvarian team awesome flank steak

omgomg okay so this fic is wholly and completely @nart-is-a-monster and @gayleafpool's fault, because i said "here is a pwp omegaverse fic that is all about smut and literally nothing else" and then those inspirational mofos got me talking about it and thinking about and oops i accidentally plotted all over the place

(popping the rest of this under a cut because im not going into detail but there is some mentioned and implied fantasy sexism. omegism. omegasogyny)

SO ANYWAYS the basic plot of that one is "it's omegaverse and they're all sexy barbarians who fight and fuck, sexily, while wearing skimpy armor and fur and stuff," and varian ran away from an arranged marriage and wound up falling into hugos lap and mating him for political reasons to help get revenge on his family for effectively selling him

AND ANYWAYS there's a throwaway line in the first fic in that series where varian mentions that he had an older cousin who ran away from their clan when varian was a kid and varian never knew why, but looking back he knows that his cousin was also an omega so it was probably similar to what happened to varian (he is So Correct)

aaaaaaand aaaaaaanyways while varian is settling in to hugos clan and figuring out how to fuck shit up as a general and advisor masquerading as a sexy consort, there's background mentions of someone in the country taking on the persona of an old folk hero to rescue omegas from shit situations, and varians like "wow good for them i used to love all the old stories and legends about that character im glad someone is using the old myths to help people"

and. anyways. varian goes out hunting with an alpha buddy in hugos clan to get a break from his super duper busy new job as a strategic slut (or a slutty strategist, depending on the day) and their first night out said buddy gets got with a sleeping dart and varian actually runs into this flynn rider character except woahhhh you'll never guess who it is!!

also it's called flank steak cause i went "team awesome fluff and angst. haha flangst. haha flank steak" and then giggled to myself all day for some reason about that

[yahoo201027]

May 12: Happy 38th Birthday to Actor Eugene Cordero, who provides the voices of the characters of Brain (from “Legends of the Mall”) and Sawyer D. (from “Tappy Tappy Tappy Tap Tap Tap”) on Bob’s Burgers, Brendan Brandenham on Central Park, Jamie on Steven Universe, and Craig Ptarmigan on The Great North.

[imgonnascreamandnoonecanstopme]

Why "fearing" ai, especially ai art, is extremely non intersectional and potentially ableist or even eugenecist of you.

Posting this here cus thank god no one reads this blog but i'm frustrated over how disgusting y'all are acting.

Firstly, none of y'all fucks gave a single damn when klaus used ai to colour 2d drawings and people wanted to redefine 2d as being ok if all we see is computer generated.

None of y'all fucks even gave a damn when pixar tried to redefine 2d as 3d art with a 2d filter. So don't try to claim you give a damn about art when you were fine throwing everyone who's ever done 2d animation under the bus repeatedly. (this doesn't apply if you, like me, were there arguing against these fucks. You're fine. But you know the fucks i'm talking about "future of 2d, new frontier bluhbluhbluh")

In fact most of y'all fucks encouraged it and wanted your hands on the tech to use for yourself. so feck off with your fake ass concern

2.

The shit you claim ai is doing now. It's not. And i've seen some truly unhinged shit that's either 1. been disproven or 2. is just fully illogical.

Example A: The ai is stealing actual furry art scam that was REPEATEDLY proven to be false. But this sure went around on twitter and tumblr and then the people who literally faked it tried to pull some bs "it was a social experiment" "It was to show how it could end up" nonsense. Fuck you.

Example B, the only case i've seen a job "stolen", word used FUCKING loosely: In a comments section i saw a dude explained that for his souvenir photography shop, their boss is using an ai to colour correct the photos and the photographers aren't allowed to change the settings on the camera (implied: because the ai won't work unless it has specific camera settings).

So this dude thinks the photographers job got stolen because the photographer can't adjust the camera settings and because his job description changed from colour correcting to checking that the ai hasn't messed up. Homeboy wasn't fired/ctx

To explain to you, in case you genuinely have no knowledge of history or how things work in job markets /gen:

These things have been happening since the industrial era and yet i'm not seeing a single one of you arguing for us to go back to pre machinery sweat shops for young girls. Cus y'all do realise that pre machinery, in history, the norm was FUCKING SWEAT SHOPS in the global north, right?

Job loss is bad, yeah, and it was super fucking bad for the people who had typewriting jobs when the computer came. A lot of people either pivoted to the computer and if they couldn't, they lost their job. However, how many of you, genuinely, who currently own a business, even a small one, wants to go back to only using a typewriter? /genq No google docs, no google calendar, no printing receipts or packing labels. All written by hand (rip fellow dysgraphics) or by typewriter just so that you can hire some of the ex type writers who are now retired and lost their job in the past? I'm gonna venture not many of you are willing to make that decision in terms of being conservative of jobs. Especially if you own a modern small business.

Let's say you are one of the people who lost their job to computers becoming the norm. Did you once think the computer was sentient and actively trying to replace you? I'm not asking if you got angry at the computer replacing you, i'm asking if you thought the computer was alive and walked into the office and said "Hey, i want a job and can do it better than Doris" and your boss said "hired" and fired you. Or, did you think your boss bought a MACHINE a TOOL (non sentient) that ended up replacing your job?

And Lastly if you were replaced by a computer. Did that makes authors extinct?/genq Even authors who handwrite or use a typewriter? Cus i have a bunch of nanowrimo stats to prove you wrong if you think that went away just because your job went away.

You might be wondering, why am i talking about this, especially the last one. The answer is really simple you see because THATS HOW THE ABOVE DUDE SOUNDED IN HIS FEAR MONGERING COMMENT He heavily implied that the "AI" replaced "HIM" and that it will continue and ripple out and replace ALL photography always and forever.

Which btw last i checked for freelance photographers, i thought y'all did your own colour correction or is that just for small businesses?/genq And for tourist photographers where it's sometimes an entry level part time job, i thought the ones who were doing it not as a passion already didn't mess with camera settings that much cus y'all didn't give a shit about the job if they treat you like shit and pay you less than minimum wage. And didn't the photography business get this already where things shifted when we went from physical film to print? Was that a catastrophe? cus y'all seem fine and like y'all survived but idk maybe there was a mass genocide i didn't hear about due to us stopping the use of substances with carcinogens. (heavy sarcasm incoming) Maybe not using carcinogens is what's actually killing us/s

Lastly why tf do the arguments in response to ai have a net total of 5 minutes of knowledge of human history????? If you know shit about the history of technology and humans oppressing other humans, something in you should be getting weird vibes from the arguments people are making currently. And yet i keep seeing people arguing that if you don't support being anti ai (of all forms, even as accessibility tools) then you're actively taking money from a freelance artist that you have never met and would never purchase from, even if you would never pay for ai art. Which is not how the economy, facts, money, human rights or customers work??????

So many people will say art is a luxury product when people wanna price gouge artists but not say it when artists are harassing people for not buying their shit (istfg if you dare say that hasn't happened once in history then fuck you, it's not just people on tumblr who are artists and drawing isn't the only form of art. Problematic and bigoted people exist everywhere, even in the small business freelance world.)

Not to mention the issue with losing your job isn't the tool that replaced you ITS THE FUCKING SYSTEM THAT REQUIRES YOU TO HAVE A JOB TO BE ABLE TO EAT! YOU'RE SPENDING YOUR ENERGY PROTESTING THE TIP OF THE SWORD WHEN YOU SHOULD BE PROTESTING THE ARMED GUARD WHO ARE USING THE SWORDS OR THE RULING GOVERNMENT THAT SANCTIONED THOSE ARMED GUARDS TO EXIST! And if you don't wanna protest for a system change to ensure that no one ends up jobless and only care if you get a crappier title, then i dislike you.

Tldr of this section: I'm sorry but if you're gonna induce a world ending (aka genocide level) threat, then i'm gonna need more than just "i wasn't even fired, i just do something different at a normal non specialised job", otherwise i'm gonna assume at best you're ego is bruised and at worst actually that fucking priveleged that you think having a job description change, when people are losing their jobs for unrelated reasons to ai, is actively oppressing you. Or that you're trying to water down the concept of what a threat is in which case i actively dislike you as an individual. Extrapolating that a literal computer program will end the photography business because your job description changes due to a shitty decision from your human boss and due to the shitty decisions the government makes to make income security a privilege and not a right, makes no sense.

3. Here is shit ai actually has done:

It's found a fucking antibiotic, i repeat AN ANTIBIOTIC! A NEW ONE! AND ITS WORKING! OUR LAST ONE WAS DECADES AGO! DO YOU NOT REALISE HOW FUCKING IMPORTANT THIS IS FOR DISABLED PEOPLE YOU PRIVELEGED LITTLE SHIT?!??!?!?! (this doesn't apply to the people who are excited for this, if you're not excited (excluding mental illness reasons like depression) for this despite knowing how many people die due to antibiotic resistance then block me now, your energy is fucking rancid)

made colouring 2d animated work easier aka more accessible

helped make other art things accessible to disabled people

Outed people as problematic if not as literal alt-right people or even neo-nazis based on the shit they're spouting as "valid" arguments towards a potential sentient being capable of emotion.

4. Here is shit ai hasn't done based on my research which is inherently limited. Please provide actual proof and not the human faked posts that were going around on twitter:

copy actual drawing

do convincing art from just a text prompt (there's a v funny youtube series where someone tries to get chat gpt to draw a simple circle, it sadly can't, cus it's not sentiently aware of what it's doing)

be able to write anywhere near like a human would communicate for anything longer than

Be sentient about any of the above or show understanding that it knows what art even is.

Be able to make autonomous choices unrelated to what it's learned

Made you have bigoted ideals, that's you, not a fucking random computer, take responsibility for your actions as an actual sentient human

Lastly, let's assume, ai, becomes sentient. Why THE FUCK is the main argument in "managing" it, GENOCIDE?!?!?!?!?

Anyone who is on team "just shut it down/turn it off" instead of "hey let's raise it with love and kindness. And if we don't and it becomes hostile, then it'll be very hard for an ai who is only trained in communicating with humans, to become a world class hacker, despite having no training on that front. And even making a rudimentary shitty ai costs much more energy and time than we should use. And even replicating it takes so much time and physical electrical volt/watt energy so the concept that the ai can replicate itself in a split second and evilly take over the world is illogical at best."

No, no. Instead let's decide "yes i wanna keep my right to kill living life forms because i'm scawed UwU"

Fuck all you fucking fucks who aren't even veiling your genocidal agenda. Fuck you.

Guess what you fucking motherfucker. WE ALREADY HAVE TOP HACKERS WHO ARE SENTIENT AND GUESS WHAT HAS HAPPENED YOU FUCKING FUCK. WE DONT NEED TO FUCKING KILL THEM TO KEEP THEM IN CHECK HOLY SHIT. What is it. With y'all fucks in the global north. And just wanting to murdermurderstabstab anything that is different or as "revenge"?!?!?!!??!?!? Y'all need 20ccs of barbie movies during your childhood and it shows. Fucking hell.

You fucks will use "i'm scared" and other forms of "fear" as a defense but use it to bear your fangs and rip into the first best example you see without making sure it's even a threat or that you are even being threatened because to you privileged fucks, being slightly uncomfortable is what you interpret as oppression. You're not fucking scared. You're hateful and bigoted. Check yourself. Cus you're not helping anyone and you're putting people in danger by having that mentality. Cus thinking you can be objective enough to not turn on other actual sentient beings, when one of your main arguments against a sentient being, is killing them. That's just not how anything has *ever* worked.

Not to mention. IF THIS IS FUCKING PLAN A. TF IS PLAN B.

TF IS PLAN B

THE AI "GETS OUT" AND FINDS OUT THE ONLY PLAN IN EXISTENCE FOR IT WAS GENOCIDE.

ARE YOU EXPECTING THAT TO GO OVER WELL?!?!? FOR AN INFANT NEWBORN CHILD?!

HAVE NONE OF YALL FUCKS READ FUCKING FRANKENSTIEN?!?!?!? LIKE:

The keep reading thing didn't work so to protect people from potentially flashing images, instead imagine, if you can, that there is a gif here of someone screaming in anger and frustration and pain.

Feel free to let me know if i say smth bigoted but not if it's the fucking "you're just saying adapt or die" argument CUS ITS NOT FUCKING TRYING TO KILL YOU ITS NOT FUCKING SENTIENT. IF YOU DARE FUCKING ARGUE THAT AI IS TRYING TO ENACT FUCKING GENOCIDE WHEN ACTUAL FUCKING GENOCIDES ARE HAPPENING THEN I WILL NOT HOLD BACK MY WORDS!

MY PEOPLE DID NOT SURVIVE THAT FUCKING SHIT ONLY FOR SOMEONE LIKE YOU TO TRY TO FUCKING WATER DOWN THAT TERM AND IT'S IMPLICATIONS!!!

[vizuart]

[sigmastolen]

Blue Shades | Frank Ticheli

Eugene Corporon; North Texas Wind Symphony

[memoriesfrombooks]

A small piece of the book description - "set in 1935 against the very real backdrop of a recently formed state eugenics board" - speaks to the history behind The Last Carolina Girl by Meagan Church. The ending of the book somehow does not feel real. It packages everything. Leah's story is a sad one. How could you not empathize with the plight of this child! The horrific history of eugenics in our nation is an important one to remember. For that, I am glad to have read the book.

Reviewed for NetGalley.

[phoenix-joy]

[Disclaimer: I don't have anything to do with this event, it just sounds interesting and I wanted to share (as well as remind myself)].

A variety of in-person, online, free, and paid options are available for this event.

Time: 14.05.2024 / May 14, 2024 19:00 - 20:00 / 7 PM to 8 PM [GMT+1 / BST] 14:00 - 15:00 / 2 PM to 3 PM [GMT-4 / EDT] 11:00 - 12:00 / 11 AM to 12 PM [GMT-7 / PDT] Location: [Online or in-person at] Lighthouse Bookshop, Edinburgh

Extract:

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Akira O'Connor & Erin Robbins

Psychology, as it is taught in the Global North, strives to be an objective science beyond reproach – but what happens when we examine the discipline critically, through an anti-colonial lens?

Akira O'Connor & Erin Robbins join us to discuss their tremendous new book, Colonised Minds, which illuminates the historical power structures that shaped the discipline, and examines the extent to which psychology today continues to uphold oppression.

The book directs the reader to critical, antiracist, and feminist approaches for the field and the modern university more generally – looking to voices and perspectives that have been marginalised for ways to rethink the way we see, and teach, psychology.

Our speakers will share insights from 8 fascinating chapters that cover topics such as eugenics, segregation, Mental Illness and Marginalisation, psychology's problem with race, and with women, universities, brains and technology and so much more.

Our Speakers:

Akira O’Connor is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and the Institutional Race Equality Charter Chair at the University of St Andrews. Erin Robbins is a Lecturer in Psychology and the Director of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion for the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews.

/endofextract

[hussyknee]

So my own anthropology B.A was cut off because I got too disabled to continue, but I have been reading a lot about decolonization and disability justice since. Two years ago I took a summer course on decolonial academia, focusing on writings about race, caste, gender and disability from the Global South. I'm kind of laid up at the moment, but here's the summary of what I got out of it (C+P from another explainer I've done before):

Every system of oppression in the world is based on the body. Which means the bedrock of all things is ableism.

The European elite based their world order on "who gets to be human?" Their rationalizations of this evolved into an understanding of humans as bodies, and humans as minds.

Humans as bodies are mindless things only equipped to toil, suffer, labour and die – the unwashed masses. You can see this narrative in how Global North news and media has historically portrayed and continues to portray black and brown bodies as hordes, conflicts, the crush of humanity. This is what gives rise to the concept of "bare life" – human bodies stripped of citizenship, of rights, and consequently of personhood, belonging nowhere and counted by no one. Refugees, undocumented immigrants, the enslaved, indentured workers, people trapped in no man's land.

(Btw any fantasy or sci-fi media where the enemy is a faceless horde is smuggling white supremacy and imperialism. Because that's how they justify white anxieties of invasion and fears of the empire.)

Humans defined by their minds are thinkers and philosophers and scholars and interpreters of the human condition. The management, the nexus of the knowledge economy, the enlightened. Their bodies are merely a house or vehicle for the mind. The driving ideals of "hard work", "lazy", "productive" are all the triumph of mind over matter.

This is eugenics. It was first invented as a rationalization for the oppression of the poor and the disabled, and later exported to the colonized. Whiteness defines itself as the absolute mastery of the mind over body. Whether they call their bodies "temples" or "instruments", white Western thought sees bodies as something that exists apart from the body, and meant to transcend it. This is why they have such a yen for Orientalist philosophies, with no thought for their cultural roots. By spinning a narrative of our cultures being "dead" or "ancient", they can rationalize our own knowledge as rooted in the past, people who used to think for ourselves until our civilizations (the humans as minds) "died", and now they're generously taking them out of our hands into the "modern" (white Western) world, where they can evolve and thrive (I could write a different essay on how PoC get to have "culture" but white people get "civilization"). In this way, they conceptualize and propagate the idea of the Global South as a machinery of production while the Global North is naturally the market for it.

(This is just about what's happening in the present global system built by ongoing colonization, that we call coloniality. Some version of the mind-body split exists in other stratified and hierarchial societies, predating white supremacy, like the Indian caste system. In fact, Martin Luther King, when he visited the Dalits in India whose struggle had been inspired by the US's Civil Rights Movement, he conceptualized Black people as the "Untouchables" of America – race itself as a caste system.)

Now we could try and challenge this by saying that no, we (BIPOC) are also minds as well, which is what a lot of other colonized people's have done in their struggles for reclamation and independence. But we have found that we then have to live in a constant state of proving our capacity for "intelligent" thought and "civilized" behaviour, which are simply more ways we have to perform to white abled standards, and just as much an arbitration of who gets to be human. In essence, respectability politics, that just makes us turn around and eat our own in a desperate bid to be accepted. It's made colonized societies harsher, crueler, more fearful, and drives a generational trauma that makes us inflict all of that anxiety around failure and exclusion on our children.

With the pandemic, people are finally hitting their limits with this narrative of absolute control and transcendence, realizing it doesn't work. Our capacities and limitations and needs not only matter, but they define us as humans. We are not made to work beyond our capacities, nor beyond the obstacles and barriers to life as we are meant to live it. More, they're finally realizing that humans are not made to work. No other species except hive insects are made by nature to work into the grave.

More people are coming to understand what it means that humans are a species of animal. The human animal, whose minds and bodies are one, where neither exists independently of the other. That we have to put ourselves back into the framework of nature, of what we were evolved to be as animals, and see our place in ecological networks. Because we do belong in them. We aren't an inherently destructive plague that never should have happened. We were always integrated into our environments and contributed to them before everything spun out of control. We can see this in indigenous ways of life. And in returning to our place in nature, we let go of supremacy. Over nature, over each other and most of all, over ourselves. This is the very essence and end goal of decolonization.

Like I said, this didn't start with race, but it's perpetuated by it in the present day. That's why we say that race issues affect every single person in the world whether you're white or not. You just don't realize it when you're white.

Things i learned as a child that probably no one intended to teach me

To grown-ups, being bad at stuff is a sin. Forgetting stuff is the worst sin of all, and also doesn’t exist - it is widely believed (and your behaviour will be interpreted thusly) that in some Freudian sense, it is impossible to forget things if you care about them or their consequences or the people who care about those things.

Your being happy and enjoying what you do doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether you are Fulfilling Your Potential.

Human beings do not require rest outside of sleep. Thinking that you do is called ‘being lazy’.

Who you show physical affection to is a matter of politeness and social protocol, and has nothing to do with your own desires

It is rude to inform people of your preferences, even if they seem to care about catering to them and therefore might find this useful information.

Etiquette centres around doing things in especially awkward, skilful and time-consuming ways in order to demonstrate superiority over people who aren’t able to keep up.

[goalhofer]

[rondaincorporated]

Hummingbird Species, Part 212

Today’s focus is on Rivoli’s hummingbird, Eugenes fulgens. Rivoli’s Hummingbird, scientifically known as Eugenes fulgens, is a fascinating species within the hummingbird family. This essay delves into various aspects of Rivoli’s Hummingbird, including its physical characteristics, distribution and habitat, behavior and diet, breeding habits, and its role in the ecosystem. Physical…

[tenth-sentence]

He also gave intelligence tests to southern-born blacks who had lived in New York City for different lengths of time, reasoning that if selective migration was at work, length of residence in the North should make no difference in the scores, but that if environment counted, then the scores should arise in proportion to time in the North.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[originalleftist]

Actually, this makes perfect sense assuming their goal is to wipe out immunocompromised people and other disabled people who they consider a "burden" on the system.

THE WEEK MAY 31, 2024

Mean Republican insanity at every turn. WTF is wrong with these people?

Come on America, WAKE UP.

[yahoo201027]

May 12: Happy 37th Birthday to Actor Eugene Cordero, who provides the voices of the characters of Brain (from “Legends of the Mall”) and Sawyer D. (from “Tappy Tappy Tappy Tap Tap Tap”) on Bob’s Burgers, Brendan Brendanham on Central Park, Jamie on Steven Universe, and Craig Ptarmigan on The Great North.

[onwardtheygo]

Big Adventure One

For our first trip, we decided we wanted to do somewhere that seemed familiar but also new and exciting at the same time. We have both been to USA, and Andy has been to Canada, so it seemed like the first place we should try our big adventure. Our big adventure is going to be two months long across these two wonderful countries. It is so exciting as I’ve always wanted to do a tour across the USA…