#where there's a lot of research and theoretical work going on

[hollowistheworld]

A lot has been said about Leebeebee's existence, much negative, but personally I think she's a great addition. Not only because I like when characters being handsy/flirty/objectifing are portrayed as being weird and creepy as fuck so everyone can feel how I (an ace) feel 94% of the time, but because I think she's there, in large part, to be a counterpoint to Murderbot itself.

LBB is weird. She has no filter, no apparent social skills, and she is soooooo suspicious. Like, it is really obvious she's up to something by the time she finally pulls that gun out. But no one, with the possible exception of Gurathin (I can't quite tell if he's suspicious or just like this with anyone he doesn't know well) really bats an eye at her. They think she's a bit odd, but they wave it off as cultural differences or shock or whatever. She gets the benefit of the doubt.

Unlike Murderbot. Who is questioned and side-eyed for almost everything it says. It's on the verge of a nervous breakdown for the first four episodes because they're paying attention to it and they are thisclose to guessing something is up. If even one other person was as wary as Gurathin, Murderbot would have been toast (going by Ratthi's 'you don't trust anyone' comment I'm guessing Gurathin tends toward the paranoid, especially with company people/equipment).

Because LBB is human. And Murderbot is not. And it's not that the PresAux bunch are lying when they say they believe Murderbot is a person, they do - theoretically. On paper. But that doesn't stop them from having preconceived biases. It doesn't stop them from consuming the same media as everyone else, where SecUnits are always going on murder sprees. So their guard is up around MB even when it hasn't really done anything (see: their suspicion that it's been hiding the faulty maps from them) and it is not up around LBB, even when she's asking for specifics about their research and asking where monster attacks happened.

And I think that's very deliberate. The PresAux people are good people, but good intentions don't automatically give you the tools to be a good person in every circumstance. They believe Murderbot is a person on an intellectual level, but they're having trouble getting that belief to an emotional, instinctual level. Mensah is the closest, after getting to see it watching its show and singing its theme song. But it's a viewpoint that's going to take work, and I think the difference in how they treat LBB and how they treat MB really helps show that, and I think that's doing a lot of good build-up for how season 1 is (likely) going to end

[northopalshore]

South Node Persona Chart

This is more of a theoretical type of astrology observation. However, whether you believe in past reincarnations or not you may mind that your south node persona chart does mirror a version of you that may have caused whatever it is you're feeling & experiencing in the present moment; including memories or karmic debts carried onto this life. Shaping the way you act and feel, as well as the experiences you go through.

Observations

Masterlist| South Node persona chart masterlist| union persona chart masterlist | Venus persona chart masterlist| Briede persona chart |

How to find? astro.com, extended chart, persona charts, desc. lunar node

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☕ Aries Stellium

You likely had a very rough life. One where you had to be independent & do everything on your own; fending for yourself, taking care of others. Either way, it was not an easy time for you. This likely made you stronger & more independent in this life.

☕ Pluto in the 2nd house

Money was likely a problem in your life, it felt like it was so hard to gain & even if you did earn it you'd have to work your ass off for it. It was likely a hard life for you financially.

☕ Pluto in the 1st

Mayhaps, you suffered from an accident that injured your face of physical looks. You may have spent a lot of time obsessing over how you look, being told that you are too this or too that. You were attractive, but you seemed to be always obsessed with yourself or had the need to control everything around you.

☕ Mercury in Scorpio

You were very intelligent in a past life. Often having to use your mind for life or death situations, analizing others, speaking on behalf of others as well. You likely held a sort of position of power as there was control and motivé behind your words, what you wrote and what you thought. There was a tendency for you to indulge in overly negative thoughts, thinking of the worst that could happen. You may even had to manipulate the way you spoke or your thoughts were often manipulated by others. Some of you may have taken a vow of silence.

☕ Sagittarius 6th house

You could have been an educator in a past life. A researcher, a philosopher, an explorer or navigator. Christopher Columbus? Is that you? Lolol

☕ Chiron in the 6th house

You may have gotten a serious illness or injury while working, or an ailment might have stopped you from being able to work or live life freely.

☕ Chiron in the 3rd House

You may have lived your life being criticized by your thoughts and ideas; people seeing you as obnoxious, loud or even stupid. People didn't value your opinions and your voice which has left a great scar.

☕ Chiron conjunct Groom in Aries

Your past partners may have been quite abusive or selfish. They may have been a survivalist with the mentality of scarcity as they have lived their life in agony & selfishness. Either your partner had to be independent to survive the world or you had to be to survive them.

☕ Sun conjunct Groom

If you are a man, or identify as the masculine counterpart in any relationship, or even just in this past iteration of yourself you took much pride in being a husband. That was also one of your main motives; being a husband, being in a long-term relationship. This aspect of your life may be brought up now as well (unless different placements say otherwise).

☕ Sun/Mars/Mercury/Saturn in Aries 6th house

You might have worked in the military, or in defense/safety operations. You were likely forced into hard labour, or may have had a career where you needed to be strong physically. Did you enjoy it? Hell no. Though this can manifest as you having more physical endurance & stamina in the current life.

☕ Chiron in the 7th house

It was almost impossible for you to find & connect to people that you could really trust or depend on. For some of you, your actions (whatever it may have been) drove a lot of those that loved and cared for you away due to betrayal or distrust. This may have carried over to your current life as severe trust issues, or deep attachment to whomever gave you that live or attention that you craved.

☕ Saturn in the 5th house

You often had to repress your desires, due to either your sense of discipline, need for control, or disgust towards "tainting" yourself. That repression could have stemmed from the desire to be faithful, to abide by religious beliefs or to abstain from it indefinitely by preference. You may have wanted to explore and do more than you could, but stopped yourself from truly indulging in those desires.

☕ Pisces Stellium

You could have had a life lived as a musician or a singer. Your spirituality was the cornerstone of your entire existence. Some semblance of it will follow you into this life; whether choosing to fully embrace it or abandon it completely. Still, it calls for you now and again.

☕ 4150 Starr in the 11th house

You were likely very popular, famous even to some degree especially if moon or venus is accompanying it. Either way, you had a lot of friends or people on your side, admiring you. It was very easy for you to get around and catch the eyes of those around you!

☕ North node in the 7th house

Relationships, love and diplomacy were a driving force behind your very living being in a past life. You may have been destined to a specific person, group or organization/company and have spent many a lives dedicated to them (either pursuing, living for or just tied to them through some sort of contract/legal binding agenda which yes, includes marriage but not completely limited to!)

☕ Jupiter in Leo or °5,°19,°29 in the 1st house

You were a sight to behold. Likely someone rather revered too wherever you were. You may have had great pride in yourself and was praised of everything that you did. Your presence was big and unmistakable. You were likely very proud or boastful. As this is related to your karma you may crave the same attention that you were given in the past. Though some light remains, it's dim compared to what you were like in the past.

☕ Pisces Stellium in the 8th house

You were a very spiritual person in the past, some of you could have devoted your entire life to a religion or spiritual belief wholeheartedly. Especially if you have Neptune, Sun, & Mercury in the mix. Though for some, it might have led to your demise due to a connection with a cult or deep obsession towards spirituality.

☕ Groom 5129 in retrograde

Love was likely difficult for you. Your spouse (usually masculine) could have left you alone often or have contributed nearly nothing to you. They/you may be the rather lenient type when compared to other men at the time. Usually meaning you/your husband was quite a gentle person too.

☕ Groom 5129/Briede 19029 in Aries or the 1st house

You or your spouse likely were involved in the military in some way. Life way hard for the both of you, and it seemed like trouble was coming left and right either preventing you from being together, or pushing you to your limits. You likely lived a hard life together.

Ex: I have Briede in the 1st in Libra°0 & Groom retrograde in Aries°5 in the 7th. I've had dreams of living with a woman who seemed to be my maternal figure who had some sort of position of power. I wouldn't be surprised if my husband was in the military either with these placements & a couple others sprinkled around my chart.I also have a Stellium in the 2nd house (Libra Jupiter °29, Scorpio Sun°0 & Scorpio Mercury°21). In my dreams I always used my voice in some way. I was likely more affluent than my spouse at the time as well. Both my parents have Aries influences in their charts too, but looking at their lives, it makes sense to think that they had something similar going on in their past life (poverty, instability, fights, wars etc)

☕ Groom 5129/Briede 19029 in Pisces or the 12th house

You were likely deeply attached to someone, mayhaps a soulmate in a past life. The idea of true love was something that you truly believed in. Both of you could have been very religious or spiritual as well, believing in a love that that last forever. However, there could also have been a lack of maturity or focus on the more practical side of life due to that. Could also have been "the one that got away" type of situation. Unrequited love.

☕ Briede 19029 in Libra in the 2nd, 8th & 12th house and Groom 5129 retrograde in the 6th house

Love and marriage may have felt or have been equivalent to a transaction in the past. You may have had many suitors or have found it difficult to settle down with a man that you genuinely loved. You may have had many lovers as well treating them as "work". Mayhaps you were an escort or a consort (kept maiden) of sorts. Though that's not necessarily the case. Your spouse may have always been away for work for example and you were left in solitude.

₊ ˚ ⊹ ࣭ ⭑ . ₊ ⊹ .₊๋‧₊ ˚ ⊹ ࣭ ⭑ . ₊ ⊹ .₊๋‧₊ ˚ ⊹ ࣭ ⭑ . ₊ ⊹ .₊๋‧₊ ˚ ⊹ ࣭ ⭑ ⊹ .₊๋‧₊ ˚ ⊹ ࣭ ⭑

🔍 Additional note

This time around, I wanted to share some observations (or rather speculation based theoretical knowledge & chart comparison). There is no concrete way to determine who we were in any past life (like literally name them), but we can uncover our experiences which have led us to how we are today. You will however, find a connection with your south node pc placements & your natal albeit in a different form. Still, there is no true definitive way to determine it's credibility (at least from a material i.e tangible perspective).

Hope this was interesting ♡

@northopalshore

@northopalshore south node 2025 all rights reserved. Disclaimer

[mantisgodsdomain]

The part that you haven't heard about in more detail here, for reference, is our miscellaneous research on typography, calliography, and type design, because we haven't done it in anywhere near as much detail and still arguably know nothing. In this case, you get to hear "oh yeah we're relearning cursive" as part of an unrelated ramble. This is because if we don't have at least one thing to chew on throughout the day, we wind up in a dull, grinding state of mind where we start losing chunks of important things, such as our ability to not be a huge asshole and/or hit people with sticks.

Sometimes, this means gnawing on plots, either ours or others'. Sometimes, this means learning new things. If we're operating on any subject in particular, we prefer to keep a level of basic competence high enough to let us feel like we have reasonable authority in saying something. If we are expressing an opinion, we want it to be one that is informed, because seeing people say things where they obviously don't know what a single word in that sentence actually means makes us want to chew through glass and people spreading blatant misinformation and unexamined, unbelievably blatant bias makes for our absolute least favorite dish. If we don't know something, and it's worth knowing, then we should bother to learn, because it is worth it to know at least enough to know when someone's bullshitting you, and be able to apply the knowledge you have acquired in one field to other ones over time. Many things work along the same basic lines - if you look at enough of them, then eventually, you'll learn the intersections, and the way one thing interacts with another.

In unrelated news, now that we are officially in formal education again and thus interacting with people who feel very confident in the idea that they are bringing an objectively correct perspective to the room, we are learning that apparently our "basic level of knowledge that we feel like we need to possess to feel even vaguely confident talking about the subject in any context" is most other people's "at least bachelor degree level knowledge". We are unclear on if this is a new discovery or not, as last time we were in an actual physical school it went badly enough that our memory of the year it occurred in is functionally irretrievable. This is not good for the superiority complex, probably.

is the fountain pen thing why your broskis been rbing the occasional fountain pen post or was that shared brainrot

It depends which broski you're talking about but probably. We have been exploring the ins and outs of the fountain pen since, like, the start of this month and we have already regaled our MOTW group with "hey did you know that you can buy a fountain pen that looks like a shark for three dollars" and similar such thoughts.

Though not all of our miscellaneous interests make it onto this blog, as we try not to post on things until we are reasonably informed on them, our close friends get to be regaled with the lovely story of whatever niche subject that we have dedicated our time and energy to learning things about every week or so, and we've been talking about pens for slightly longer as we learn more thoroughly how to work with them, and being told about things by an enthusiastic insect tends to get you looking at things (whether you like it or not)

[kedreeva]

#we spoke of this a LOT at work after that one tech was murdered and hidden in a wall

hi!👋 hello! kedreeva! i’m going to need to ask you to explain this!!!!

So back in 2009, a lab student named Annie Le was murdered at Yale university. Cameras saw her going on into a building, but not out again and it was like, the eve of her wedding (or close to? I don't remember) so clearly she had places to be and people waiting for her so they immediately started looking and the next day (or so? Anyway on the day of her wedding) they found her body in a recess in a wall, down in the areas where the research animals were kept. It turns out, a tech had killed her, but since there were cameras like EVERYWHERE, he just, I guess, left her there. Well, hid the body where it was. I don't remember how they caught him, but they did. It was a horrifying story. It still is.

And it was a huge news story among the folks at my workplace because, at the time, I was working at a different university, as an animal husbandry technician. As you can imagine this was a kind of intense time to be in that situation. They started offering, like, I'm not gonna say counseling but it was "if you need to talk we would prefer you talk to us about something wrong rather than kill anyone about it" and as techs (even if we were not even the same kind of tech, the killer was a lab tech and we were husbandry techs but I think a lot of people assumed it had been a husbandry tech since she was in an animal area), we were kind of getting the side eye from lab people for weeks afterwards. Like they thought we were gonna go "wow that's a fantastic idea, you're next!" or something, idk. And I mean like, people would freeze when you were alone in a hallway, or turn and walk the other way, or duck into the nearest room and watch you walk past, and they were all being super nice/civil to us when they did have to interact. It was very atypical behavior for lab people. Like not all of them, some of them had always been nice and weren't worried, but some of the people who had been unbelievable dicks previously were walking on eggshells. And the people who had friends in other universities reported this was happening at their jobs, too.

And instead of talking to The Man (because all the higher ups were garbage at the time), we just. talked among ourselves. It was a lot of "I may say I feel like strangling lab people sometimes when they do things that drive me up a wall but I don't MEAN it you know that right" and it also led to group discussions of what would be a theoretical *better* solution to hiding a body than what happened, with clear disdain for doing things like hiding bodies in walls, which is a terrible idea and one we would never do (looking at the people who think we might have decided this was a great idea actually).

Which consequently led to a lot of supervisors and/or managers that happened to overhear us bringing us donuts or arranging pizza for lunch in like, some kind of bid to help us feel appreciated, I guess, so that we wouldn't murder anyone, even though none of us were going to do that anyway. But also none of us were in a position to turn down free donuts or pizza or whatever.

And then after a few weeks, maybe a month or so, people just kind of forgot and moved on and things went back to normal like fifty people hadn't spent every lunch hour for weeks talking quietly among themselves about how human bodies would definitely fit into a carcass disposal barrel or that you'd have to crush hip bones and/or skulls before incineration. Hypothetically.

Like I said, it was a VERY weird time to be at my job, and every time I remember it happening feels like a fever dream. I can't even imagine what it was like at Yale.

[intersexbookclub]

A lot of thoughts about Cripping Intersex

On 2024-09-29 we met to talk about Chapters 0 and 7-9 of the 2022 book Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr. This was a book that numerous people had requested we read, and we wound up with deeply mixed feelings about it. 😬

Overall reactions:

Michelle: I found the concept of “hauntology” incredibly compelling. I’m here for some shitposting. 🍵

Apollo: I loved the concept of compulsory dyadism. I found the downplaying of “perisex” as a term to be weird, and the lack of divulging intersex/disability status was weird. 

Elizabeth: the lack of diverging intersex/disability status wasn’t just weird, it was anathema to standpoint theory, and so every time Orr cited standpoint theorists, it made me seriously doubt Orr’s understanding of the theoretical basis that they actively chose to use 🧐. I was disappointed by this book. I agree with its central premise, so I should have been an easy sell. Instead I came out shaking, upset, feeling like Orr was a voyeur to our community, that Orr does not actually view intersex studies as a serious research area, that we’re just a theoretical fascination.

Remy: There were a lot of good points about how disability is socially constructed, but how Orr used “bodymind” detracted from their arguments for me. This book had a lot of uncomfortable conversations, some of them I was happy to read, some I need to come to terms with myself, while others I felt were treated a little too artificially equally such as the section with the phrase "the future is female" and the intersex community being involved in the queer community. 🤔

Bnuuy: it's really jarring how they approach the topic. There are a lot of pieces for a good theory here, but it’s kinda like Orr is just like the completely wrong person to go try to assemble them 🫤

As a collective, we generally were receptive (if not enthused!) about the central message that intersex benefits from disability studies/rights/justice perspectives, and that our community would benefit from more interaction with the disability studies/rights/justice communities! 💜

At the same time, we all agreed that Orr felt like a voyeur to our community. Rather than engaging with the intersex community, they seem to have a one-sided relationship where they read a bunch of things by intersex people but never actually conversed with intersex people. Whether Orr is intersex or not matters a whole lot less to us than whether Orr is actively participating in the community. 

We made a lot of (unflattering) comparisons of Orr’s book to Envisioning African Intersex by Swarr, an intersex studies book by a perisex author. The latter is a great example of how a perisex scholar can do right by the intersex community: Swarr is clear about being perisex, clearly lays out her motivation for writing the book (she saw medical photography of intersex people, thought it was fucked up, later became friends with intersex activist Sally Gross, and then wanted to honour Gross’ memory after Gross died tragically.) Swarr was clearly connected to multiple African intersex organizations and made an explicit, deliberate choice to publish her book as open access so that the work could actually be read by the African activists she has been working with. Swarr’s perisex status matters a lot less than the fact that Swarr writes in a way that demonstrates personal investment in advancing intersex rights/justice.

Orr may or may nor be intersex. We don’t know. We don’t really care, because Orr doesn’t demonstrate personal investment in the intersex rights/justice/studies communities. That’s what actually matters to us, and it's what a lot of this post is going to talk about.

Underneath the cut we're going to go into a lot more detail about the book. There were things we liked about the book, and want to be fair in our assessment. Some of the complaints we had about the book hinge on an understanding of sociological theory and academic practices, so we'll give some context on those issues.

What we liked

This book had a bunch of things going for it.

The one thing this book did better than Swarr was its use of hauntology. Swarr invokes hauntology in her book, but not nearly as effectively as Orr does. Orr gets a lot of effective mileage out of how the spectre of intersex haunts people’s bodies. Not just intersex people’s bodies, but also the bodies of pregnant people who are called upon to exorcise the spectre of intersex through selective abortion should a foetus be identified as possibly intersex.

The haunting metaphor rung true for talking about how we intersex people are haunted by past surgeries, forced treatments, medical trauma, and so on. Even when we’re “done” with receiving gender-altering “treatments” we live with their ghosts every day.

We liked the explicit connections that Orr drew between intersex and disability studies. Elizabeth in particular was warmed by the shoutout to how Garland-Thompson explicitly includes intersex in her disability studies work. We felt that Orr perhaps underestimates how receptive many intersex people would be to their central argument - Orr takes on a tone of “hey bear with my crazy radical argument” that we weren’t sure was really necessary.

Orr is not the first to make the argument that intersex organizing and scholarship would benefit from more alignment with the disability world. This gets into criticisms, but Orr isn’t the first to make this argument yet seems unaware of how regularly the argument comes up. Indeed there’s a whole chapter in Critical Intersex (2009) arguing that intersex is better off allying with the disability community than the queer community. It’s not hard to find intersex people on this very website arguing similar things. Intersex-support even has a whole section on it in their FAQ, though it does cite Orr (lol). Orr does at least seem aware of Koyama’s work making this argument.

We appreciated Orr calling out ableism in a lot of intersex organizing. When intersex people and organizations insist that intersex is NOT a disorder or disability, they conflate disorder and disability. This is an ableist conflation: disability activism tends to start from a place of resistance to the medical model of disability, whether it be by the social model or more recent ones like the political/relational model. 

Intersex activists insisting that intersex is “NOT a disability” reinforce the idea that disability is a negative, tragic thing. It’s the “I’m not like the other girls” rhetoric: putting down people who experience the same oppression you do in an effort to gain some credibility. It holds our movement back, because ableism is a very potent part of how we intersex people are oppressed. Orr does an effective job of laying this out, and we recommend reading the first chapter for this.

Orr coins a term, temporarily endosex, to talk about how people can learn at any age or time that they have had intersex traits all along. (Another way in which intersex can haunt!). For Elizabeth, the idea of temporarily perisex helped zer understand why perisex people can be *so* insistent in defining intersex as something visible at birth: because if intersex is something you can become at any age, this threatens perisex people with the possibility that they too could find themselves on the minority side of the tracks.

Other terms that Orr uses were big hits with the group. Elizabeth loved “curative violence” and ze expects to get future mileage out of the term. Ze also liked the framing of IGM as medical malpractice. Apollo praised “compulsory dyadism” as a concept. Remy shared that the cyborg stuff in the book gave them a lot to think about.

The book features a takedown of eugenicist rhetoric by a bioethicist by the name of Sparrow. We all agreed that Sparrow’s arguments sucked, were grossly eugenicist, and welcomed that Orr had put in the work to rebut his hateful messaging. Michelle praised how they invoked Sparrow’s lists of undesirables that Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis is supposed to prevent: for xem, it evoked monstrosity identification theory and ideas of the abject.

Elizabeth liked Orr’s argument that genital differences are a threat to the heterosexual (perisex) imagination: there’s so much porn out there that incorrectly presents intersex as “typical fully-developed penis plus typical fully-developed vagina” that really reflects how perisex people have a serious lack of imagination about genitals.

Fact Checking

There are a number of things that Orr says that we felt warrant an explicit fact check.

Orr presents the terms “perisex” and “endosex” as though they are contentious within the intersex community. They are not. The general consensus that one’s choice of perisex/endosex/dyadic is a question of personal preference and familiarity.

Orr clearly prefers the term dyadic, and makes a show of casting aspersions on “perisex” and “endosex”. They make it seem like their origins are disputed, and selectively cite Tumblr posts to make this argument. “Perisex” is actually the most common antonym to intersex on this very website, so it feels surreal that they're publishing the rare anti-“perisex” posts on this platform. Orr does correctly cite the Tumblr which coined “perisex”, the issue is they try to discredit it as a means to make it seem like this is not a term embraced by the intersex community.

Orr makes it seem like the origin of “endosex” is a suspicious mystery. It’s not. the term was first used in German in 2000 by Heike Bödeker. Bödeker is controversial for supporting autogynephilia 😬, but we've never seen anybody doubt Bödeker having mixed gonadal dysgenesis. 

Orr clearly prefers the term “dyadic” and makes zero attempt to source the term, and the most minimal attempt at covering its controversy. This term actually does come from outside the intersex community! The term came from gender studies, popularized by 1970s radfem Shulamith Firestone. And it’s controversial for more than just being a laundering of “sex binary”. 

Nobody calls it “ipso gender” anymore. It was coined as “ipso gender” but in actual usage has been “ipsogender” from basically as soon as the term was coined.

Orr uncritically repeats a quote which romanticizes home births in Black & Indigenous communities as that intersex-at-birth babies were accepted and cared for in a way that wouldn’t happen if the baby were born in hospital. This, sadly, is deserves scrutiny. We’re not saying it never happened: one can find stories supporting it. But the historical and sociological evidence show that infanticide of intersex infants has been widespread globally, and this includes traditional Black and Indigenous birth attendants. Collison (2018) as quoted in Swarr, reports that 88 of 90 traditional South African birth attendants they interviewed admitted to “getting rid” of a child if it was born intersex. That very story we just linked to about a Kenyan midwife saving intersex babies made the news because infanticide was the norm. In North America, some First Nations had similar traditions, e.g. the Navajo would leave intersex babies to die in arroyos, and the Halq’eméylem would leave them to die on a specific mountain. 😢

Michelle was visibly upset when talking about Orr’s  repeated comments which insinuate that LGBT marriage equality was an attempt to fit in + liberalism + conformity. In Michelle’s words: “AIDS activists did not watch their lovers die for you to say that marriage equality is conformist bullshit. As a [polyamorous] person who is not legally married to xer spouses, I really felt that one, and I was intensely angry about how Orr was dismissing those activist efforts and the importance of them.”

The Voyeuristic Vibes

The consensus in the group was that Orr’s writing came off as voyeuristic of the intersex community. There were several points in the book where Orr seemed strangely disconnected from the intersex community. Sometimes it was small things, like spelling ipsogender as “ipso gender”, or favouring the term “interphobia” when “intersexism” is actually more popular in the community (it also avoids the potential casual ableism of framing bigots as clinically insane! Which you’d think a crip theorist would be sensitive to…. 👀) 

Other times, it felt like a deeper, conceptual thing. For example, Orr’s top priority in future work was to apply their interpretation of intersex issues to critique how LGBT marriage equality was a homonormative, neoliberal, conformist movement. Not only was this viscerally upsetting to Michelle, for Elizabeth it was galling that this is what Orr seems to think intersex perspectives are good for: pushing down other queer groups. 😬 It added to the sense that Orr saw us as a nifty theoretical lens, and wasn’t particularly interested in advancing the intersex cause.

Another disconnection that was noted was in how Orr rebutted Sparrow’s claims that genital differences are disgusting and will not elicit sexual desire in others. Despite detailed rebuttals to other appalling comments from Sparrow, Orr does not bring up the intense fetishization of intersex genital differences which is uncomfortably familiar to all of us. Objectifying medical photography of intersex people with genital differences are shared widely and known to be used for sexual purposes.

Bnuuy was annoyed that Orr seemingly didn't try to talk to or otherwise get input/feedback from any disabled intersex people for their thesis, given that disabled intersex people are not actually that hard to find! (Indeed, four out of five of us are both intersex and disabled.) Given Orr’s emphasis on intersectionality, it’s notable that when they sought intersex texts to analyse, they focused on texts from nondisabled intersex folks.

Orr does not reveal if they are intersex nor if they are disabled. It sticks out. Whether they’re actually intersex or not isn't actually that important to us. We’ve previously read intersex studies works by perisex authors which we loved, and we believe strongly that it is possible for perisex authors to do right by the community if they take the time to engage WITH the community. (See Swarr as an exemplar!)

What we had major problem with is the faux “objective” tone that the book takes on. Orr seems to be trying to hide behind academic language, the “view from nowhere”, and an expensive paywall. This was noticeable to everybody. But Elizabeth, as the only academic in the call, came in with a lot more context as to why it felt gross.

The Misuse of Standpoint Theory

For Elizabeth, Orr's “view from nowhere” became egregious when Orr cites standpoint theorists like Donna Haraway, Nancy Hartstock, and Pat Hill Collins. In a surreal move, Orr explicitly points to Haraway’s famous paper “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. This paper is an evisceration of the “view from nowhere”, “objective” approach to academic knowledge production. Every view is a view from somewhere, and pretending otherwise feeds into the history of how science has been violently used to gaslight and oppress minority groups.

In short, Haraway says:

Elizabeth explains that as result, feminist methodologies accept subjectivity as part of the process: the researcher is expected to articulate their own standpoint, to be transparent about their subjectivity rather than to hide it behind a pretense of “objectivity”. There’s an emphasis on reflexivity, the fancy word for when scholars reflect on how their own social position affects how they do their research.

Feminist disability studies and crip theory both build on feminist standpoint theory, and Orr claims to be using both. Both frameworks understand disability as socially constructed, and that this social construction is entwined with other social forces such as capitalism, sexism, racism, and so on. Feminist disability studies scholars like Wendell (who Orr cites) clearly position themselves and how their disability (or lack thereof) affects their research. 

Crip theory builds further on feminist disability studies, and acts to subvert ideas of ability. It began in the arts - cripping performance art by having wheelchair users perform as dancers, blind people doing photography, Deaf people making music, etc. It spread into other domains, such as crip technoscience. Crip theorists also inherit the tradition of reflexivity, whether it be Eli Claire writing about their personal experiences of disability or Sami Schalk talking about how being nondisabled affects her work as a disability studies scholar.

We provide all this exposition to emphasize how unusual it is that Orr provides absolutely zero information about their positionality nor their personal motivations to this research. 🧐 They provide zero reflexivity as to how their position may have affected their work. Yet their personal biases and subjectivity seemed obvious to us - we were all, in varying ways, set off by Orr trying to pass off subjective opinion as “correct”. As an example, we mentioned how Orr clearly prefers the term “dyadic” and manufactures controversy about the origins of “endosex” and “perisex”, while at the same time conveniently leaving out the unsavoury origins of the term “dyadic”. 

Elizabeth pointed out that the ironic thing is Orr didn’t even need to invoke standpoint theory to make the argument that intersex studies would benefit from a disability studies lens. Plenty of intersex and disability studies is done using different frameworks.

Indeed, Elizabeth was surprised that this kind of error made it through a PhD thesis defense. In the department where ze teaches, if a student displays a major misunderstanding about their chosen theoretical framework, the student would be asked to redo the relevant thesis checkpoints (e.g. candidacy paper, thesis proposal/defense) until they get it right.

Some background on academia

Elizabeth brought up a structural problem with the book: it looks like it had zero intersex studies scholars review it prior to publication. 💀

This book originated as a PhD dissertation, which anybody can read for free here. A typical PhD programme is structured as a master-apprentice model of education, where a PhD student apprentices to one (sometimes two) professors. These are known as thesis advisors. The culmination of the PhD is a thesis (aka dissertation), which presents original research done by the student. 

To graduate, the thesis needs to pass examination by a committee of professors. The committee acts as a secondary source of support to the student, providing guidance or perspectives to complement the advisors.

Elizabeth explained that when ze assembles a thesis committee for one of zer graduate students, the goal is to ensure any area that the student is venturing into has at least one committee member who is well versed in it. So, let’s say you propose you’re going to do a thesis on “intersex studies meets disability studies” but your thesis advisors are both gender studies people (as Orr’s were). Elizabeth would expect that Orr’s thesis committee would then include at least one disability studies scholar and at least one intersex studies scholar.

Instead, Orr’s thesis committee doesn’t have a single intersex studies scholar on it. Neither the book’s acknowledgements nor the thesis’ acknowledgments acknowledge any intersex studies scholars. Even though Orr is citing intersex studies scholars like Georgiann Davis, Morgan Holmes, and Cary Gabriel Costello, there's nothing to indicate that Orr has ever gotten feedback from any intersex people. This is HIGHLY unusual: normally, intersex studies books have acknowledgments which acknowledge several publicly intersex people, and often one or two intersex organizations. 

Research is a highly social activity: researchers are expected to go to conferences, to be in conversation with people working on similar topics. And Orr is clearly social about their research, acknowledging the feminist/gender studies communities they have been a part of. It just seems like intersex studies scholars weren’t a priority for Orr’s academic socializing. 🙃

Orr’s acknowledgments doesn’t even contain the word intersex, which is unprecedented in our collective experience of intersex non-fiction. This is why Elizabeth says that ze was left with the impression that Orr doesn’t think intersex studies is a serious field of research. It appears that Orr views intersex literature as something to be consumed for their benefit, and not a community worthy of participation and a bi-directional relationship.

Early in the book, Orr points to Lennard Davis’ work with the Deaf community on reframing Deaf activism away from the “we’re not disabled we’re a linguistic minority” rhetoric. It’s a great example of disability studies scholars having an impact. Thing is: Davis openly talks about how he grew up in a Deaf family that was part of the Deaf Community. While Davis is not little-d deaf, he took on the project as a member of the capital-D Deaf community. His writing (including book acknowledgments) reflect this.

Elizabeth also pointed out that there are scripts and precedent in academia for how to handle positionality and reflexivity when you’re questioning or closeted. If Orr were closeted or questioning, they would have an excellent way to talk discreetly about it through their very own concept of “temporarily endosex”: Orr could write they don’t know they’re not perisex, frame it around how few perisex people actually know they’re perisex, and retain plausible deniability. 

Other notes

Bnuuy was frustrated with the implication that disability studies is The Only Right Way to analyse intersex. It’s a useful lens for understanding intersex, but at times it felt like Orr was arguing it was the only appropriate lens rather than one of a collection of suitable lenses. Theories are analytic tools, and social phenomena are complex and fluid - it’s a matter of finding a suitable tool for a given research question, rather than there being One Correct Way to understand things. 

Orr’s use of “bodymind” didn’t quite land. The term was created by Margaret Price to subvert the idea that body and mind are dichotomous: many disabilities cannot neatly fit into “mental” vs “physical”. It’s a term that’s had productive use in disability studies. But Orr’s use of it got a negative reaction. Remy pointed out it felt like it instead it actually reinforced the body-mind distinction. Intersex is, after all, a physical thing, and the idea of “brain intersex” is very poorly received by the intersex community - it’s seen as a way that perisex trans people appropriate intersex and/or live in denial about being perisex. It felt like Orr was using the word on autopilot rather than thinking about when and where it is actually subversive.

Bnuuy was concerned that Orr was reading OII Australia’s information on intersex in bad faith. Orr criticizes them for discursively distancing intersex from disability. Bnuuy points out that OII Australia is not writing for an academic (disability studies) scholarship. This is an advocacy organization speaking to a general audience that understands disability through the medical model. Bnuuy read the quotes from OII Australia as them just distancing themselves from a medicalized understanding of disability.

Elizabeth brought up that Orr’s manufactured controversy of “perisex” may have a classist element.  While endo- does make sense as an antonym to inter- if one has formal science background, the term peri- is not conventionally an antonym to inter-. Elizabeth has personally noticed a resistance from zer fellow academics to perisex on the grounds that it’s “using scientific terminology incorrectly”, and thinks that’s a classist take. 

Michelle brought up that “it also didn't sit great with me that they [Orr] were very condescending about Tumblr like, ‘aww, look at the baby activists trying to do a scholarship," whereas what I'd describe as ‘folk scholarship’ on Tumblr has been very valuable to me. It's not always correct and there can be misinformation, but it has worth.” Remy was unimpressed with how limited/selective Orr’s engagement seemed to be with intersex Tumblr, as well as Orr’s centrist take on “the future is female”.

Closing thoughts

This was a deeply imperfect piece of scholarship. Orr came across as disconnected from the intersex community, and uninterested in working with the community. The work still has some merits: Orr’s first chapter provides an incisive discussion of how ableism is detrimental to intersex advocacy and that trying to distance intersex from disability only adds to societal ableism. Ableism is a serious force in intersex discrimination and we’re stronger off understanding this and explicitly resisting it.

We hope that the stink of Orr’s voyeurism does not sully the important central message of their book. Work needs to be done to teach more intersex people about disability studies. Disability does not mean disorder. Disability does NOT mean medical problem. The disability rights and justice movements are FULL of disabled groups who, just like the intersex community, are actively seeking de-pathologization, bodily autonomy, patient-led care by respectful and well-informed physicians, and fighting neo-eugenics. We are in good company with groups like the Deaf, neurodiversity, and little people communities. 

[corvidexoskeleton]

Its extremely funny and mildly irritating seeing so many people get disgruntled about emmrich's approximate age vs. his appearance, because nobody can seem to agree if he looks younger than he should, if he looks his age, or if he looks older than he should

It mainly highlights something I was discussing with my sister the other night, which is that a lot of people don't have an especially good idea of what people tend to look like at different stages of life or ages. Part of this is definitely because of modern beauty standards, as well as social factors, expectations, and trends that differ from place to place

That being said, genuinely I think a lot of people just seem to forget that there is a LOT of variation when it comes to how fast or how well someone ages, and it can be influenced by your genetics, environment, stress, and countless other factors. You can't always tell how old someone is just based on their appearance, attitude, or how they act. Sometime it's possible to get a good idea or guess, but there's always going to be people who age very well and look much younger than they are, and also people who age poorly and look much older than they are

Whether or not you believe the bioware devs and ms. Sylvia with regards to emmrich's age, I think you have to keep in mind the fact that he works and essentially lives in an underground city-sized crypt and probably doesn't get a lot of sunlight. He's fastidious and extremely particular about his appearance, and probably his health, too, given his thanatophobia. And he's a busy guy! He's a researcher, a scholar, a teacher, and has his own fair share of responsibilities around the necropolis. I think these are all extremely relevant factors that some people don't seem to be taking into consideration when it comes to discussing if he "looks his age" or not

And about him being overdramatic about his age and acting like he's on death's door... I think some people are genuinely overstating the case based on a few interactions in game. But I also do think that him being a diva about his age is entirely in character, because his entire thing is that he has a severe fear of dying. It doesn't matter if he gripes about his age constantly (which he doesn't) or if he only brings it up on occasion (which he does), because the entire point is that he's terrified of dying, and people notoriously DIE when they get older

Does emmrich look his age? Do the people at bioware not know what people in his supposed age bracket look like? Do the people claiming he doesn't look his age know what people in his supposed age bracket look like? Does it really matter if he "looks too young" or if he "looks too old"?

Can you really not imagine a scenario where someone like him could theoretically look and act the way he does at his age?

[purplepeptobismol]

Yes! I did indeed create a theoretical formula for my time-travel theory that I ALSO invented for a South Park fanfic! Why do you ask?

Jokes aside, I think it’s time for me to break down the formula to explain what all these symbols mean and tell you my thought process while making this. For starters: I’m not a scientist, astrophysicist, mathematician, or smart enough person to exactly know what the hell im even saying. I was only able to have a solid grasp on what this all means because of my more smarter friends, google searches, and physics-related YouTube video essays. Anyways….

Realistically, in order to make something like this work in real life, you’re going to need to know AND have these three major components:

Understand/study everything you know about gravity and the theory of relativity.

Solve the creation of a wormhole and be able to control it within an enclosed space

Create a “Blind Filter” to prevent a total collapse on neighboring grids/columns

Have tools, devices, and technology advanced enough to: detect anomalies and measure temporal signatures in spacetime, create maps of gravitational fields, generate copious amounts of energy to keep a wormhole stable during transit, and have quantum computers to perform complex calculations for navigation.

If you don’t have none of these things, time travel won’t be possible 😔🤙. But, if you do… well.. perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to try! Anyways, let’s start with the first equation!

Wormhole Stabilization: The main purpose for this equation, is purely for the stabilization of a wormhole’s throat to prevent a total collapse! Mind you, wormholes have never been discovered to be an actual thing— it’s all purely a theoretical possibility— unlike black holes!!! Throughout my research, I took refrences from Einstein field equation and the Morris-Thorne wormhole metric in general relativity! Like I mentioned, we won’t know how the equation truly works because we don’t have an actual point of reference, therefore, this equation could be a bunch of hippy dippy bologna!! [*So are all the equations I will mention btw*]. This equation can be rewritten depending on how wormholes would actually work in a non-theoretical sense… BUT ANYWAY— if it were to work, this formula could be something that keeps a wormhole stable in order to be traversable through time!!

Grid/Column & Gravity: Yeah, pretty self explanatory. Because I had to create a formula that needed to be connected to the One-Tab Guide, then the purpose of this formula is to FIND a grid and column by combining general relativity and gravity. There are so many theoretical grids, and the columns are even harder to find since they’re interwoven with other grids/columns!

Spacetime Interval Adjustment: Also pretty self explanatory! This calculates the spacetime distance between the current and targeted timelines. It’s specifically modified for multiversal travel! See, the one-tab guide isn’t just a formula to help with time-travel, but it’s also a formula that can allow multiverse travel across multiple dimensions!!! Wow!!! Personally, I feel like multiversal travel would be a whole lot more easier to accomplish with this formula compared to to the possibility of time traveling in your own column. You won’t really have to worry about exact calculations because you basically just pick and choose which area outside of the specialized grid you wanna go 🤷‍♂️! Though, if you want to go to a time and place in a certain multiverse where YOU exist, you’ll probably have to be more specific with that calculation in order to find your parallel self (if said universe even has one).

Temporal Signature Correction: When you want a certain location marked, you use a geographic coordinate system! And with parallel travel, it’s a Temporal Signature Correction! This basically insures that a traveler goes to the correct timeline by using a unique “temporal signature” (St). No, I still don’t understand quantum mechanics that well (the MCU has ruined the word “quantum” for me). And yes, I still get confused when I think about entropy for too long. Best way to think about it within the context of the one-tab— is that entropy is the universe’s obsession with making things not messy. Each grid could have a unique entropy value to help distinguish between them, higher entropy grids could be more chaotic to the “anchor of reference” of a traveler. Which means if someone messes with time, entropy might fight back by making timelines chaotic or cause a fissure in a grid.

Proper Time Interval: Basically to travel to a specific timeline, the time machine needs to solve the proper time interval required to navigate that targeted timeline. Usually if you miscalculate, you could cause paradoxes, universal fissures, a collapse in the grid, etc.. But in my fic, Kenny created an entirely different machine (a sort of blind filter) to prevent any impact on the multiverse. But, if you don’t have that machine, then this formula is very important in that sense.

—

Anyways…. this probably won’t make sense to anyone except me. But I thought it would be cool to have some fictional formula with cool little symbols for this silly little theory. Maybe when our technology is advanced enough, this could all be tested and disproven 🙂‍↕️. Now go read (and reread) my bunny fic! Please…

[inkzectz]

Pstpstpsrsttt drop ur ideas and hcs on shepvance and their dynamic … teeeheee

I remember the first time I thought about Adrian and Alyx was a while ago when I was talking with my friend about an idea for a half life game that had to do with both of them. It was a co-op game where Adrian and Alyx are paired up, and that was initially how I first thought of genuine interactions between them besides just little “oh they’re both in stasis”. I think their dynamic is something like Adrian puts up a tough exterior and acts like he needs no one, Alyx pretends to be cool and sly, but around eachother Adrian begins to let loose and allows himself to be vulnerable, and alyx is a cornball and cringe fail.

if you wanna know the details ab the game concept I’ll put them below 👇

the story would be a bit of a play on a scrapped HL2 EP3 concept, but basically Gman gives Alyx a new mission and tells her that it will be too dangerous for her to do it alone, so he provided her with an ‘advocate’ blah blah, one ominous and extremely vague gman monologue later. She blinks and is in the middle of the snowy forest next to a strange man.

I imagine since Gordon had his hev suit taken from him, Adrian would also have his gear taken as well since that too is “government property”. I think first interaction they’d both be scared of each other and probably fight before realizing 1) they’re in the middle of nowhere 2) it’s snowing 3) there are probably bigger dangers than each other. And decide to call truce and help each other figure out what’s exactly going on.

setting wise Alyx soon realizes they’re in white forest, but something is very wrong, it’s abandoned and when they find the resistance base it doesn’t look like anyone had been there for a long time, they find a computer and upon turning it on an old recording of a transmission plays basically letting them know they made it to the borealis but something went wrong, and now both the combine and the resistance were wiped out, and earth is abandoned. Both alyx and Adrian are deeply disturbed by this and they kind of realize they are all that they have now. but before they think all hope is lost they find another recording about the possible whereabouts of some remaining resistance leaders, and they both decide it is worth the risk to go and look for them.

I think some of the aliens are still on the planet (for some threats) and possibly even some new ones? Idk. But in regards to Adrian and Alyx I think they’d begin to grow on each other, especially since they both realize they are kind of all they have, I also think in terms of ‘game play’ Alyx would be the one to work with the combine tech, while Adrian would do a lot more of heavy lifting or more laborious parts of puzzles. What that’d be? Beats me.

filler game stuff, they make the journey and don’t find anyone but do find another resistance base and some research about how to use the borealis for time travel, it seems to be Kleiner’s work, possibly from after whatever happened with the borealis went down, but it seems something happened to him before he could put his work to practice. Alyx and Adrian decide to use his research and both think that they could use the borealis and travel back in time to stop whatever took place from happening.

They go and find the borealis and successfully make their travel back pre- allat.

in my head I imagine this theoretical game as an unnecessarily complicated way of bringing Adrian back and make it make sense in the grand scheme of things (in typical valve fashion of making a whole ass game that barely progresses the story) I don’t know how much it would make sense in the entirety of HL lore since there’s so little information on most of the stuff this concept involves but we ball

idkkk like and subscribe for more of Neil screaming into a void

[mostlysignssomeportents]

In defense of bureaucratic competence

Sure, sometimes it really does make sense to do your own research. There's times when you really do need to take personal responsibility for the way things are going. But there's limits. We live in a highly technical world, in which hundreds of esoteric, potentially lethal factors impinge on your life every day.

You can't "do your own research" to figure out whether all that stuff is safe and sound. Sure, you might be able to figure out whether a contractor's assurances about a new steel joist for your ceiling are credible, but after you do that, are you also going to independently audit the software in your car's antilock brakes?

How about the nutritional claims on your food and the sanitary conditions in the industrial kitchen it came out of? If those turn out to be inadequate, are you going to be able to validate the medical advice you get in the ER when you show up at 3AM with cholera? While you're trying to figure out the #HIPAAWaiver they stuck in your hand on the way in?

40 years ago, Ronald Reagan declared war on "the administrative state," and "government bureaucrats" have been the favored bogeyman of the American right ever since. Even if Steve Bannon hasn't managed to get you to froth about the "Deep State," there's a good chance that you've griped about red tape from time to time.

Not without reason, mind you. The fact that the government can make good rules doesn't mean it will. When we redid our kitchen this year, the city inspector added a bunch of arbitrary electrical outlets to the contractor's plans in places where neither we, nor any future owner, will every need them.

But the answer to bad regulation isn't no regulation. During the same kitchen reno, our contractor discovered that at some earlier time, someone had installed our kitchen windows without the accompanying vapor-barriers. In the decades since, the entire structure of our kitchen walls had rotted out. Not only was the entire front of our house one good earthquake away from collapsing – there were two half rotted verticals supporting the whole thing – but replacing the rotted walls added more than $10k to the project.

In other words, the problem isn't too much regulation, it's the wrong regulation. I want our city inspectors to make sure that contractors install vapor barriers, but to not demand superfluous electrical outlets.

Which raises the question: where do regulations come from? How do we get them right?

Regulation is, first and foremost, a truth-seeking exercise. There will never be one obvious answer to any sufficiently technical question. "Should this window have a vapor barrier?" is actually a complex question, needing to account for different window designs, different kinds of barriers, etc.

To make a regulation, regulators ask experts to weigh in. At the federal level, expert agencies like the DoT or the FCC or HHS will hold a "Notice of Inquiry," which is a way to say, "Hey, should we do something about this? If so, what should we do?"

Anyone can weigh in on these: independent technical experts, academics, large companies, lobbyists, industry associations, members of the public, hobbyist groups, and swivel-eyed loons. This produces a record from which the regulator crafts a draft regulation, which is published in something called a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking."

The NPRM process looks a lot like the NOI process: the regulator publishes the rule, the public weighs in for a couple of rounds of comments, and the regulator then makes the rule (this is the federal process; state regulation and local ordinances vary, but they follow a similar template of collecting info, making a proposal, collecting feedback and finalizing the proposal).

These truth-seeking exercises need good input. Even very competent regulators won't know everything, and even the strongest theoretical foundation needs some evidence from the field. It's one thing to say, "Here's how your antilock braking software should work," but you also need to hear from mechanics who service cars, manufacturers, infosec specialists and drivers.

These people will disagree with each other, for good reasons and for bad ones. Some will be sincere but wrong. Some will want to make sure that their products or services are required – or that their competitors' products and services are prohibited.

It's the regulator's job to sort through these claims. But they don't have to go it alone: in an ideal world, the wrong people will be corrected by other parties in the docket, who will back up their claims with evidence.

So when the FCC proposes a Net Neutrality rule, the monopoly telcos and cable operators will pile in and insist that this is technically impossible, that there is no way to operate a functional ISP if the network management can't discriminate against traffic that is less profitable to the carrier. Now, this unity of perspective might reflect a bedrock truth ("Net Neutrality can't work") or a monopolists' convenient lie ("Net Neutrality is less profitable for us").

In a competitive market, there'd be lots of counterclaims with evidence from rivals: "Of course Net Neutrality is feasible, and here are our server logs to prove it!" But in a monopolized markets, those counterclaims come from micro-scale ISPs, or academics, or activists, or subscribers. These counterclaims are easy to dismiss ("what do you know about supporting 100 million users?"). That's doubly true when the regulator is motivated to give the monopolists what they want – either because they are hoping for a job in the industry after they quit government service, or because they came out of industry and plan to go back to it.

To make things worse, when an industry is heavily concentrated, it's easy for members of the ruling cartel – and their backers in government – to claim that the only people who truly understand the industry are its top insiders. Seen in that light, putting an industry veteran in charge of the industry's regulator isn't corrupt – it's sensible.

All of this leads to regulatory capture – when a regulator starts defending an industry from the public interest, instead of defending the public from the industry. The term "regulatory capture" has a checkered history. It comes out of a bizarre, far-right Chicago School ideology called "Public Choice Theory," whose goal is to eliminate regulation, not fix it.

In Public Choice Theory, the biggest companies in an industry have the strongest interest in capturing the regulator, and they will work harder – and have more resources – than anyone else, be they members of the public, workers, or smaller rivals. This inevitably leads to capture, where the state becomes an arm of the dominant companies, wielded by them to prevent competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is regulatory nihilism. It supposes that the only reason you weren't killed by your dinner, or your antilock brakes, or your collapsing roof, is that you just got lucky – and not because we have actual, good, sound regulations that use evidence to protect us from the endless lethal risks we face. These nihilists suppose that making good regulation is either a myth – like ancient Egyptian sorcery – or a lost art – like the secret to embalming Pharaohs.

But it's clearly possible to make good regulations – especially if you don't allow companies to form monopolies or cartels. What's more, failing to make public regulations isn't the same as getting rid of regulation. In the absence of public regulation, we get private regulation, run by companies themselves.

Think of Amazon. For decades, the DoJ and FTC sat idly by while Amazon assembled and fortified its monopoly. Today, Amazon is the de facto e-commerce regulator. The company charges its independent sellers 45-51% in junk fees to sell on the platform, including $31b/year in "advertising" to determine who gets top billing in your searches. Vendors raise their Amazon prices in order to stay profitable in the face of these massive fees, and if they don't raise their prices at every other store and site, Amazon downranks them to oblivion, putting them out of business.

This is the crux of the FTC's case against Amazon: that they are picking winners and setting prices across the entire economy, including at every other retailer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The same is true for Google/Facebook, who decide which news and views you encounter; for Apple/Google, who decide which apps you can use, and so on. The choice is never "government regulation" or "no regulation" – it's always "government regulation" or "corporate regulation." You either live by rules made in public by democratically accountable bureaucrats, or rules made in private by shareholder-accountable executives.

You just can't solve this by "voting with your wallet." Think about the problem of robocalls. Nobody likes these spam calls, and worse, they're a vector for all kinds of fraud. Robocalls are mostly a problem with federation. The phone system is a network-of-networks, and your carrier is interconnected with carriers all over the world, sometimes through intermediaries that make it hard to know which network a call originates on.

Some of these carriers are spam-friendly. They make money by selling access to spammers and scammers. Others don't like spam, but they have lax or inadequate security measures to prevent robocalls. Others will simply be targets of opportunity: so large and well-resourced that they are irresistible to bad actors, who continuously probe their defenses and exploit overlooked flaws, which are quickly patched.

To stem the robocall tide, your phone company will have to block calls from bad actors, put sloppy or lazy carriers on notice to shape up or face blocks, and also tell the difference between good companies and bad ones.

There's no way you can figure this out on your own. How can you know whether your carrier is doing a good job at this? And even if your carrier wants to do this, only the largest, most powerful companies can manage it. Rogue carriers won't give a damn if some tiny micro-phone-company threatens them with a block if they don't shape up.

This is something that a large, powerful government agency is best suited to addressing. And thankfully, we have such an agency. Two years ago, the FCC demanded that phone companies submit plans for "robocall mitigation." Now, it's taking action:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/telcos-filed-blank-robocall-plans-with-fcc-and-got-away-with-it-for-2-years/

Specifically, the FCC has identified carriers – in the US and abroad – with deficient plans. Some of these plans are very deficient. National Cloud Communications of Texas sent the FCC a Windows Printer Test Page. Evernex (Pakistan) sent the FCC its "taxpayer profile inquiry" from a Pakistani state website. Viettel (Vietnam) sent in a slide presentation entitled "Making Smart Cities Vision a Reality." Canada's Humbolt VoIP sent an "indiscernible object." DomainerSuite submitted a blank sheet of paper scrawled with the word "NOTHING."

The FCC has now notified these carriers – and others with less egregious but still deficient submissions – that they have 14 days to fix this or they'll be cut off from the US telephone network.

This is a problem you don't fix with your wallet, but with your ballot. Effective, public-interest-motivated FCC regulators are a political choice. Trump appointed the cartoonishly evil Ajit Pai to run the FCC, and he oversaw a program of neglect and malice. Pai – a former Verizon lawyer – dismantled Net Neutrality after receiving millions of obviously fraudulent comments from stolen identities, lying about it, and then obstructing the NY Attorney General's investigation into the matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/31/and-drown-it/#starve-the-beast

The Biden administration has a much better FCC – though not as good as it could be, thanks to Biden hanging Gigi Sohn out to dry in the face of a homophobic smear campaign that ultimately led one of the best qualified nominees for FCC commissioner to walk away from the process:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Notwithstanding the tragic loss of Sohn's leadership in this vital agency, Biden's FCC – and its action on robocalls – illustrates the value of elections won with ballots, not wallets.

Self-regulation without state regulation inevitably devolves into farce. We're a quarter of a century into the commercial internet and the US still doesn't have a modern federal privacy law. The closest we've come is a disclosure rule, where companies can make up any policy they want, provided they describe it to you.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to cheat on this regulation. It's so simple, even a Meta lawyer can figure it out – which is why the Meta Quest VR headset has a privacy policy isn't merely awful, but long.

It will take you five hours to read the whole document and discover how badly you're being screwed. Go ahead, "do your own research":

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/annual-creep-o-meter/

The answer to bad regulation is good regulation, and the answer to incompetent regulators is competent ones. As Michael Lewis's Fifth Risk (published after Trump filled the administrative agencies with bootlickers, sociopaths and crooks) documented, these jobs demand competence:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/27/the-fifth-risk-michael-lewis-explains-how-the-deep-state-is-just-nerds-versus-grifters/

For example, Lewis describes how a Washington State nuclear waste facility created as part of the Manhattan Project endangers the Columbia River, the source of 8 million Americans' drinking water. The nuclear waste cleanup is projected to take 100 years and cost 100 billion dollars. With stakes that high, we need competent bureaucrats overseeing the job.

The hacky conservative jokes comparing every government agency to the DMV are not descriptive so much as prescriptive. By slashing funding, imposing miserable working conditions, and demonizing the people who show up for work anyway, neoliberals have chased away many good people, and hamstrung those who stayed.

One of the most inspiring parts of the Biden administration is the large number of extremely competent, extremely principled agency personnel he appointed, and the speed and competence they've brought to their roles, to the great benefit of the American public:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But leaders can only do so much – they also need staff. 40 years of attacks on US state capacity has left the administrative state in tatters, stretched paper-thin. In an excellent article, Noah Smith describes how a starveling American bureaucracy costs the American public a fortune:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy

Even stripped of people and expertise, the US government still needs to get stuff done, so it outsources to nonprofits and consultancies. These are the source of much of the expense and delay in public projects. Take NYC's Second Avenue subway, a notoriously overbudget and late subway extension – "the most expensive mile of subway ever built." Consultants amounted to 20% of its costs, double what France or Italy would have spent. The MTA used to employ 1,600 project managers. Now it has 124 of them, overseeing $20b worth of projects. They hand that money to consultants, and even if they have the expertise to oversee the consultants' spending, they are stretched too thin to do a good job of it:

https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html

When a public agency lacks competence, it ends up costing the public more. States with highly expert Departments of Transport order better projects, which need fewer changes, which adds up to massive costs savings and superior roads:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4522676

Other gaps in US regulation are plugged by nonprofits and citizen groups. Environmental rules like NEPA rely on the public to identify and object to environmental risks in public projects, from solar plants to new apartment complexes. NEPA and its state equivalents empower private actors to sue developers to block projects, even if they satisfy all environmental regulations, leading to years of expensive delay.

The answer to this isn't to dismantle environmental regulations – it's to create a robust expert bureaucracy that can enforce them instead of relying on NIMBYs. This is called "ministerial approval" – when skilled government workers oversee environmental compliance. Predictably, NIMBYs hate ministerial approval.

Which is not to say that there aren't problems with trusting public enforcers to ensure that big companies are following the law. Regulatory capture is real, and the more concentrated an industry is, the greater the risk of capture. We are living in a moment of shocking market concentration, thanks to 40 years of under-regulation:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Remember that five-hour privacy policy for a Meta VR headset? One answer to these eye-glazing garbage novellas presented as "privacy policies" is to simply ban certain privacy-invading activities. That way, you can skip the policy, knowing that clicking "I agree" won't expose you to undue risk.

This is the approach that Bennett Cyphers and I argue for in our EFF white-paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly":

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

After all, even the companies that claim to be good for privacy aren't actually very good for privacy. Apple blocked Facebook from spying on iPhone owners, then sneakily turned on their own mass surveillance system, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

But as the European experiment with the GDPR has shown, public administrators can't be trusted to have the final word on privacy, because of regulatory capture. Big Tech companies like Google, Apple and Facebook pretend to be headquartered in corporate crime havens like Ireland and Luxembourg, where the regulators decline to enforce the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

It's only because of the GPDR has a private right of action – the right of individuals to sue to enforce their rights – that we're finally seeing the beginning of the end of commercial surveillance in Europe:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act

It's true that NIMBYs can abuse private rights of action, bringing bad faith cases to slow or halt good projects. But just as the answer to bad regulations is good ones, so too is the answer to bad private rights of action good ones. SLAPP laws have shown us how to balance vexatious litigation with the public interest:

https://www.rcfp.org/resources/anti-slapp-laws/

We must get over our reflexive cynicism towards public administration. In my book The Internet Con, I lay out a set of public policy proposals for dismantling Big Tech and putting users back in charge of their digital lives:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The most common objection I've heard since publishing the book is, "Sure, Big Tech has enshittified everything great about the internet, but how can we trust the government to fix it?"

We've been conditioned to think that lawmakers are too old, too calcified and too corrupt, to grasp the technical nuances required to regulate the internet. But just because Congress isn't made up of computer scientists, it doesn't mean that they can't pass good laws relating to computers. Congress isn't full of microbiologists, but we still manage to have safe drinking water (most of the time).

You can't just "do the research" or "vote with your wallet" to fix the internet. Bad laws – like the DMCA, which bans most kinds of reverse engineering – can land you in prison just for reconfiguring your own devices to serve you, rather than the shareholders of the companies that made them. You can't fix that yourself – you need a responsive, good, expert, capable government to fix it.

We can have that kind of government. It'll take some doing, because these questions are intrinsically hard to get right even without monopolies trying to capture their regulators. Even a president as flawed as Biden can be pushed into nominating good administrative personnel and taking decisive, progressive action:

https://doctorow.medium.com/joe-biden-is-headed-to-a-uaw-picket-line-in-detroit-f80bd0b372ab?sk=f3abdfd3f26d2f615ad9d2f1839bcc07

Biden may not be doing enough to suit your taste. I'm certainly furious with aspects of his presidency. The point isn't to lionize Biden – it's to point out that even very flawed leaders can be pushed into producing benefit for the American people. Think of how much more we can get if we don't give up on politics but instead demand even better leaders.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, coming out on November 14. It's about a generation of people who've grown up under good government – a historically unprecedented presidency that has passed the laws and made the policies we'll need to save our species and planet from the climate emergency:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

The action opens after the pendulum has swung back, with a new far-right presidency and an insurgency led by white nationalist militias and their offshore backers – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaires.

In the book, these forces figure out how to turn good regulations against the people they were meant to help. They file hundreds of simultaneous environmental challenges to refugee housing projects across the country, blocking the infill building that is providing homes for the people whose homes have been burned up in wildfires, washed away in floods, or rendered uninhabitable by drought.

I don't want to spoil the book here, but it shows how the protagonists pursue a multipronged defense, mixing direct action, civil disobedience, mass protest, court challenges and political pressure to fight back. What they don't do is give up on state capacity. When the state is corrupted by wreckers, they claw back control, rather than giving up on the idea of a competent and benevolent public system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

[xclowniex]

at risk of being annoying--I know I can theoretically look this up, but I prefer to ask people over google--what is "nobody wants this" and what was your opinion about the jewish rep in it? I'm in the middle of a long project about modern antisemitism and it sounds like it might be useful for my research.

So to give some background on the show, it was created by a jewish women who converted when she was with her jewish husband, and it is meant to be very loosely based off of her own experiences in regards to family members of the rabbi.

Whilst I do not know her personally, so I cannot comment with absolute certainty oh her thought process, I am under the assumption that she has some antisemitism she never worked through before she converted and brought into the project.

Firstly, all the jewish women are written with the whole jewish women aren't fun trope, and jewish mothers are all overbearing and hate any women in her son's life trope. Like it is just straight up this specific type of misogyny which is done to jewish women which is showcased in the show. And it wouldn't be inherently bad if there was anything addressing it. Like the main character is told or realizes that how she views jewish women is bad as that is simply representing a perspective. But there isn't any of that, it just leans into the stereotype for a lot of the plot. Like a decent chunk is contingent on this

It also does the "pervy bar mitzvah boy" trope, which is sadly common. And historically speaking, (since its not always meant in this way in the modern day) the pervy bar mitzvah boy trope evolved from a lot of negative sexual stereotypes about jewish men. Like the tropoe that jewish men are also pedophiles. The flipping of that trope, so taking jewish men being into children being fliped into jewish boys being gross to (subjectively) older women, is part of what cause the pervy bar mitzvah boy trope. And then there is the whole thing of jewish men all being these sexually repressed men simply because they're religious. And I'm not going to comment for all jews of all genders being sexually repressed as it does happen and it would be foolish for me to deny it, but the idea that all jews, and specifically jewish men, is yucky and is also something which lead to the trope at hand.

There is also the hyperfixation of jews consuming pork which has bled into this show. Like the mother of the rabbi secretly eats pork and the main character accidentally sees her, AND THEN strikes a deal to not rat the mother out to her family if she is nicer to her.

Like I have seen so many stories from jews where people have either threatened to or have snuck pork into their food, most often when they know the jew doesn't eat pork. The fixation of jews consuming pork is insane.

A conversation and representation of jews who don't keep kosher is important, especially stories of those who hide not keeping kosher. However the way those stories are told need to be respectful, both to the character who is not keeping kosher as well as to the concept of kashrut in general. And the show did not achieve that in any capacity.

[finnlongman]

Do you have to get a master’s degree or a PhD to publish research? Or work at a university? I don’t currently plan to go into academia but I really enjoy doing research, is it possible to do that as a hobby/side job? (Specifically asking in relation to literature, obviously research in things like the natural sciences requires the extra training and lab access by default)

An important note to start with: basically nobody is getting paid for academic publishing. Especially not for articles. They write them for free, they're peer-reviewed for free, they're edited for free. The only people making money are usually the big corporate owners of journals, if it is a big corporate journal and not one of the small independent ones. It's all a huge scam, obviously, but the idea is that people who have an academic job will be publishing the research produced in the course of that job, and thus they are already being paid for doing the research. In an age of precarious employment, it doesn't really work like that, but that's the idea.

That means you can't really do it as a side job, because there isn't any money in it. Doing it as a hobby, on the other hand, is theoretically possible, although I'd have some major caveats to offer:

On the publishing side, I can only speak for my particular field of medieval Celtic Studies, which is weird and old-fashioned and works on arcane and unknowable systems that deeply confuse anyone in a field advanced enough to have heard of "digital submissions" and "online journals". One of our major journals is literally run by one guy who requires you to do all the page proofs by hand and post them back to him and you can buy the (physical-only) journal for £5 per volume. This is not typical for academia these days, so all of my answers are going to be shaped by that.

On the publishing side, you definitely don't have to have a PhD or an academic job to publish an article, which I know because I have published several articles and am only now doing a PhD, so by definition I did that without a PhD or an academic job. This is unusual, for the record; I know very few people who've published before doing a PhD, but that's partly because a lot of my friends went straight through from undergrad to postgrad with no time out, and thus wouldn't have had time to be publishing in between, whereas I took a more leisurely approach.

However, two of these articles were significantly based on my MA work, and one of them -- the only one so far published in an actual journal rather than a conference proceedings -- would have been completely impossible without skills and knowledge gained during my MA. That isn't to say there is no way to gain those skills without doing postgraduate study. But it does mean that there are specific skills required that require training and experience, whether you get that in a university context or find a way to learn it outside of that. (For example, palaeographical or linguistic training, or a firm grounding in theoretical approaches, specific methodologies, etc.)

The purpose of doing an MA or a PhD a lot of the time is to pursue research and gain those skills. If you really enjoy doing research to the point where you would want to publish it (note above: zero financial reward for doing so), I would question why you don't want to pursue higher education. There are lots of reasons not to, for sure, so this isn't me saying the only valid research comes out of that environment or that it's the only path to academic fulfillment. Again: I published articles before I started my PhD. One of my articles is even based on undergraduate work, though substantially revised and redeveloped.

But... that is a point. It was substantially revised and redeveloped. Because for the most part, work produced without the higher-level study and skills (whether gained formally or informally) is not going to be of the same calibre as work produced with them, which seems kind of obvious when you spell it out. There is more to literary research than just close-reading a text and having a lot of thoughts about it, because if there wasn't, nobody would need to do postgrad study about it.

Literature may have different, less obvious skills required than natural sciences, but that doesn't mean it has none. It does mean they may be easier to acquire outside of formal academic courses, but that doesn't mean they don't need acquiring, however you do it.

There are also practical barriers to publishing as an independent scholar. Sometimes these are financial barriers, where not having institutional support will mean you can't publish open-access because you don't have the funding to support it. Sometimes they're things like library access -- when my article in Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies came out in 2022, I was not currently in academia, nor was I living within easy reach of an academic library, which made it incredibly hard to check references or follow up on suggestions from peer reviewers. The editor of the journal was kind enough to send me scans of articles that had been recommended by reviewers, but not all editors would do that, and so without access to past scholarship, it would be very hard to write something academically solid.

Again, there are other ways to gain that access. I have spent a fair bit of my adult life working in universities in a non-academic capacity, which entitled me to use their libraries even though I wasn't a student or officially "in academia". Many fields have a larger proportion of their scholarship digitally available, which can make it easier to access without physically going to a library. Etc. But it is a barrier, and the financial hurdles are less easily overcome. (Fortunately, very little in my field is pay-to-publish, but Open Access costs can be troublesome!)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that all of my currently-available articles were published before I started my PhD, and I was not "in academia" at the time that I wrote them, but all but one of them was based on work I had done as a student, and they relied heavily on skills and knowledge I developed as an MA student. I am now as a PhD student seeing elements I could have done better, having built on those skills and that knowledge further. Subsequent work was submitted while working for a university in a non-academic capacity, because this gave me access to their libraries. (Which really shows you how long I've been procrastinating on finishing the edits for this article, because I've been a PhD student for over a year now... I originally submitted it in January last year, whoops.) Again, I have ended up subsequently revising this as I improve as a scholar.

So, technically I have done research as a "hobby" alongside a non-academic day job. Technically it is possible. It is hard, but you can do it, if you really want to. But I think I would have struggled to produce anything of a sufficient standard for publication if not for my MA and the skills I learned during it, and there is zero financial reward for academic publishing, so it's definitely not a viable "side job".

Having said all that: If you want to keep researching things alongside your other work, there is absolutely no reason not to do that. Formal academic publishing isn't the only way of doing research, you know? It's probably not even the best way, even if it's the current institutional standard for sharing that research with other people. But you can just... learn things, and enjoy them, and post about them on your blog, and so on. Lots of people do this. Sometimes the most useful website collecting resources or variants of a text or commentaries or whatever is run by a complete randomer with a job in a totally unrelated field who is just super into this in their free time.

And I will also note: my MA and PhD thesis proposals both came out of research that I was doing independently alongside my day job when I realised that I needed more support and skills to do it properly, so I would benefit from doing it as part of a formal programme. I did not originally plan to do postgrad study. By the time I finished undergrad I was fairly sure I was done with academia forever, because I'd mostly been miserable at uni. But it hit a point where I kept chasing up details by myself and going "damn, I wish I knew how to read these manuscripts", or "if only my Old Irish skills were better", or "I wish I could access this obscure text that's only found in special collections of that university library", and that's the point at which I decided to do an MA. So sometimes it happens like that too.

(I have been adamant all along that I wasn't aiming to stay in academia as a career. Given that my previous claims that I was not going to do a PhD and then, before that, that I was not going to do a Masters, turned out to be categorically false, well... I'm not necessarily right about that. I would certainly love to keep doing research, but the short-term contracts and precarious employment of early career academia don't appeal to me, and there's absolutely no way I want to start moving cities/countries every year or two again when I've just managed to get semi-consistent healthcare after moving back to the UK and having to start on all the waiting lists from scratch. I am too chronically ill for that kind of lifestyle and, I suspect, for the demands of academia in general. We will see how long I can stretch out "getting people to pay me to research things" without those aspects, but it may be that I end up as an independent researcher alongside my other jobs again. At least now I live in Cambridge, and can access the University Library as an alumnus wherever I end up working... that's something!)

I published 'early' both because I felt I had something to say and if I didn't say it, nobody would say it (nobody else cares about Láeg), and also because I didn't think I was sticking around in academia, so if I didn't say it then, I would never say it. I was definitely right about the first part, but if I end up sticking around, I'll disprove the second part and I'll probably start regretting publishing at such an early stage as I continue to disprove my own points with further research. I do think that's normal no matter when you start, lol, but there's a degree of "and why do I expect any more senior academics to listen to what an MA student had to say, anyway" at times. (Because I don't believe in hierarchies and I'm convinced I had something meaningful to offer, that's why, but hey.) The only tangible benefit to having published that research for me was being able to point at it when applying for PhD funding and say "look, I'm already published and everything!". The main benefit to other people wasn't much beyond what it would have been if I just... put that research on my blog for them to read anyway.

Where am I going with this? I don't know. I apologise, this is rambly as hell and I'm going in circles, I'm not very awake. Maybe I'll just stop there. I could start talking about popular history books that you'll find in bookshops and how most of them are written by people without postgraduate degrees, but I don't really know that much about those, and I feel this would be getting us off-topic.

tl;dr you technically don't need postgraduate qualifications to publish academically, but you do generally need postgraduate-level skills to produce work that's good enough, however you acquire them; there are a fair number of practical barriers to publishing without institutional support; and there's no money in any of it anyway

[who-is-page]

If you're someone who requires us to have specific theories of origin about our multiplicity in order to pass your DNI: do not pass go, do not collect $200, please just unfollow and/or block us.

Origin frameworks are useful for a lot of people! Absolutely nothing against people who find them helpful. But we don't use them, and we never have. Our struggles when we were kids were with ideas around personhood, not with system cosmology. We predate -genic terms, and we've never found them particularly applicable to us collectively. It's like asking us where our queer-ness comes from, if there's some sort of personal hidden hypothesis of nature or nurture behind our gender and sexuality developing into what it is today. While a potentially valid question to ask some, we just literally don't think about our experiences in that way.

So while I theoretically understand the people out there who only want other multiples of the exact same backgrounds and origin stories to interact with them, that whole system of thought is non-applicable to us. If your DNI is reliant on that type of thing, you're following the wrong blog.

And origin-specific DNIs are also just something I'm honestly not all that comfortable with in the ways I have often seen it presented! We've been publicly multiple since high school; the entire psych department at our college was in love with us for it, and were fascinated by how much our now-spouse could talk about multiplicity from his own research and his personal experience directly with us for over a decade, and other multiples he knew. That is an example of the type of experience I have with multiplicity and professionals in the psych field: not one of demanding one-size-fits-all answers from books years out of date and studies with pathetic sample sizes, but one that focuses on enthusiastic, delighted learning in an area of knowledge that was suspected to have been flawed or lacking. That hasn't changed now that my spouse works professionally in the field himself and has worked with other multiples, so many years later. But the way I see the "you need to have THIS backstory to interact" boundary presented is usually almost the absolute opposite energy, of the pretentious dismissal of others' lived experiences and assumptions about their relevancy and legitimacy... Of an almost Karen-esque level of entitlement to what is potentially deeply private and personal information about something... And I'm just not about that. I'm just not

[indecisiveavocado]

YOU are a fascist 🫵

not a question

aw thanks! good to know i'm not. cause if you had any evidence you'd be using it. but you don't. just emojis. wowza. so convinced.

TLDR: If anyone is fascist, it's Hamas, maybe the PLO, and possibly you. Find me cases where I've said fascist shit (as defined by Eco, unless you propose your own definition), or cases where Herzl and other major (not Kahane) Zionist leaders said this stuff, and I'll retract the appropriate parts.

But in all seriousness, here's Umberto Eco's essay on ur-fascism, which I trust more than a dictionary definition (it's more detailed, for one thing)

The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

Where have I done that? Where have I said that I want to go back to some mythical 'good old days' when queers knew their place and marital rape was a-ok and there were, at best, a lot of 'NO DOGS OR JEWS' signs allowed, and at worst, a lot of killing? WHERE?

If you're talking about Zionism, I admit Herzl titled his work 'Altneuland', or 'Old-New Land', but that was patterned on the famous Altneuschul. By contrast, look at the Hamas or PLO charter, and you will see a pervasive sense of yearning for the good old days. Not entirely without reason, but then again the same applies to Southern white people.

Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism....The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

Quoting Herzl: "Hence the misery of the Jews is an anachronism—not because there was a period of enlightenment one hundred years ago, for that enlightenment reached in reality only the choicest spirits." Hardly indicative of a rejection of modernism; the general sense throughout The Jewish State is that modernity is good but incomplete.

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.

Quoting Herzl: "In America the occupation of newly opened territory is set about in naive fashion. The settlers assemble on the frontier, and at the appointed time make a simultaneous and violent rush for their portions. [paragraph break] We shall not proceed thus to the new land of the Jews.... Great sacrifices will thus be rewarded by the establishment of universities, technical schools, academies, research institutes, etc."

Besides, if that theoretical testimony does not convince you, Israel is an academic powerhouse. According to one source, it ranks number eleven in Nobels per capita. If you exclude econ, literature and peace as less scientific/not awarded by the official Nobel committee (in the first case) it ranks #9. By research publications in English per million people it ranks #28, and if you exclude territories (French Southern and Antarctic Lands, Falkland Islands, Hong Kong, Macau) and those with under 500 publications (looking at you, Vatican, Monaco and Liechtenstein) as a crude filtering method for tiny countries (the Vatican has 5 publications and under a thousand people, giving it an absurd rate; relatedly, it has two popes per square kilometer), it gets bumped up to #21 (I think. Plus or minus one). Israel has more publications per million people than the US, South Korea, or the EU. Research and development expenditure made up 5.6 percent of its GDP in 2021, placing it as the world leader. Despite Spain having around 50 million people and Israel around 10 million, Israel has more patent applications -- in absolute numbers. And despite having about the same GDP per capita and roughly similar populations (in both cases, Belgium is slightly ahead), Israel has almost twice as many patent applications. Et cetera, et cetera. And while there are worrying signs for Israeli academia, they concern the growing number of yeshiva students, who are hardly known for action. Browsing the Wikipedia page is interesting: Israelis have discovered or invented quasicrystals, proposed black holes have entropy, two of the three letters of RSA (R and S), the Intel 8088 (which kickstarted the PC revolution), Voice over IP, instant messaging, drip irrigation, the PillCam, cherry tomatoes, and pioneered water desalinization. At one point they had more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any other country in the world except for the US and China. That's hardly indicative of a disdain for academia.

Culturally? Shmuel Yosef Agnon, an Israeli, won the Nobel prize in literature. Yehuda Amichai's books have been translated into twenty languages, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature multiple times. Etgar Karet's work is internationally known to the point of coming up in a random, not specifically Jewish book club I was in. Meir Shalev's books have been translated into twenty-six languages. Amos Oz won German, French, Spanish, Romanian and Czech awards, had his works translated into over forty languages. Museums? The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is ranked one of the best in the world. And on, and on.

No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

Israel's parliament has not once ever had a majority be one party. Alignments, sure--although between 2019 and 2022 they held five elections.

Besides, look at Haaretz, Maki, Hadash/Ta'al, 972 mag. Or what Heba Yazbak said and how she was still allowed to run. That's not fascist. That's the opposite of fascist. (In Meah Shearim, Jerusalem, Neutrei Karta -- you know, the token antizionist Orthodox Jews -- freely do stuff.)

In contrast, look to Hamas holding one election and never holding one again. Look to the PLO's current leader not having called elections that might jeopardize his position in twenty years. Look to Hamas's actions against dissidents, those it claims to protect. Look to that, and tell me what you see. Go on. Tell me.

Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

In this case it's rather more understandable, but Hamas speaks of a "vicious invasion", among other things. The PLO also calls it an "invasion".

Find me a case where I have done so.

Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class

Where have I done that?? Where?? I mean, I guess you could say I'm pissed at the resurgence of antisemitism, but...

To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.

Hamas? (Bolding mine) "For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there....With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources...You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II [! Jews! Our numbers are still lower than in 1939!] through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it....It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups."

If you don't call that a plot I don't know what you call it. Except maybe a ton of antisemitic conspiracies. And anti-Masonic! It's like they're trying to check all the boxes.

The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies....However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

See above as regards the power of Jews and also their commitment. This also indirectly provides evidence against Israel being fascist, as historically it has won almost all of its wars.

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

Let's see...Hamas? "so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement." PLO--which, recall, is the more moderate of the two? "Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine."

In contrast, Israel's declaration of independence contains an appeal to Arabs to stay and not join the fighting against them; the number of wars Israel has started is, perhaps, two; the Sinai War being joint, and the Six Day War being preemptive following news of a planned joint Arab attack. Compare Arab/Palestinian attacks: Independence, War of Attrition, Yom Kippur War, First Lebanon War (which, to be fair, Israel heavily overcommitted on--the analog would be how the US, in the Korean war, didn't stop at retaking South Korea but marched much further up. Doesn't really change who started the war), the Intifadas, the Second Lebanon war and the current war. If one group is permanently at war, it's pretty clear who's choosing that and who isn't.

Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism.

Technically all sides claim to support the weak here.

In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

Slogan of Hamas, bolding mine: "Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes."

The PLO directly addresses education: "It is a national duty to bring up individual Palestinians in an Arab revolutionary manner....[The person educated as such] must be prepared for the armed struggle and ready to sacrifice his wealth and his life in order to win back his homeland and bring about its liberation."

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality).

In Israel, you can make out with your same-sex partner on a nudist beach.

In Gaza or the West Bank, you can get killed.

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say....For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter....Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments....Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

Again, Israel once held five elections in four years. Last I checked, the most recent election in which the leader could be voted on, in either Gaza or the West Bank, was about twenty years ago. Both Hamas and the PLO claim to be the voice of the people.

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

I can't really find this one anywhere, but then again I haven't really examined Palestinian or Israeli textbooks. The education of Haredi men in Israel is atrocious, but that's not really government-sponsored.

[asnarkyandironicusername]

Every person has a RomCom, just like a soulmate; I truly believe there is one out there for everyone. To prove this, let me share the recommendations I would give to our favorite profilers

My recommendation for Aaron Hotchner would be Beach Read by Emily Henry. Now, it may sound like a bit of a reach, but I think he would connect with Gus - he had a complicated relationship with his father (which arguably could have led to him pursuing his career to help others) and also has regrets from his younger years. I think he would appreciate the cheesiness of their competition, as he is a competitive person but, around the right people, has no problem laughing a little at himself.

David Rossi would be Love In the Time Of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson because he could relate to her researching serial killers & how that work, along with personal trauma, shapes our social connections. Also, the love interest is mildly put off by serial killers & notices her self-sabotaging detachment but plans to stick it out with her anyway and he definitely needs the kind of partner who is willing to meet him where he is.

We were robbed of lesbian Emily Prentiss (personally always saw her Bi, but that’s neither here nor there), but I know she won’t even look at a rom-com if it isn’t Sapphic. I know One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston has a home on her bookshelves and would definitely recommend her Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner.

Derek Morgan is definitely a sports rom-com guy. However, my recommendation for him is actually The Rom-com Agenda by Jayne Denker. I will not be elaborating.

Now, JJ could go one of two ways - She definitely still has a competitive edge so I could see her digging some sports romance, but the real question in my mind is would JJ read a queer romance? I don’t think she would avoid them in a homophobic way, but I definitely could see her going through a phase where she questioned her sexuality, but it made her nervous so she just compartmentalized it and now only reads straight rom-coms OR she was totally comfortable with her sexuality and can actually enjoy a queer rom-com without it stirring up complicated feelings. In this scenario, I’m picking the latter and recommending (despite the cliche of it) Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner.

For Spencer Reid, I have three suggestions: Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood and Love In the Time Of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson and The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston. I think his physics inclinations could make Love, Theoretically a good pick, but IDK if there are any inaccuracies. Love In the Time Of Serial Killers is up his alley and deals with a protagonist who seeks academic validation instead of social. The Seven Year Slip only feels like a fit because he’s a Doctor Who fan & it involves time travel & wobbly wobbly stuff.

You know that Penelope Garcia is just gobbling up any and all rom-com with a fistful of popcorn and lots of giggling and feet kicking.

[ryuichirou]

Replies

Hi again

More replies, all twst-related this time. Sorry for the wait!

Anonymous asked:

I’m glad you guys are taking a break and I hope you both enjoy it!

Thank you so much, Anon! We try our best lol But I really hope when we come back we feel refreshed and excited to post.

Anonymous asked:

Random thought i had and i lowkey wanted to share: idia's blowjobs must be so good and thrilling. One because whimpering loser, who doesn't like that? and two bc one wrong gag the peepee is gone bcs of his shark ahh teeth.

Anon, you are absolutely right. And you know what? A lot of people are probably getting this random thought. People like Lilia, the Leech twins, Azul, Rook, and of course Trey as well—

Idia’s appeal is incredible, he’s both miserable and dangerous!

Anonymous asked:

The solo clubs, the light music club as well as the science clubs are the only clubs to feature only clubs to feature only tops or bottoms, a bottom really seeing as it's just Malleus as the odd one out, meaning theoretically club activities cannot be disturbed by unwholesome activity and should therefore be more productive, they are not

That being said, Rook has jerked it and put the results in a potion before

This is a very good observation, Anon 🤔 Now that I think about it, you’re absolutely right. Woah… At least someone gets shit done in this academy I guess… the boards game club, the track and field club and the film research club are also couples, and the rest of the clubs uhhh surely have a lot of fun with three people around!

Also I don’t even question what you said about Rook, it really is something that he had done at some point… multiple times, even! He brings unholy activities wherever he does, but then again, Trey isn’t much better, he just acts like he is lol

Anonymous asked:

SebeMall thoughts (because you inspire me :p) <<<333 :

Sebek would be so nervous about asking for permission. He would be stuttering and worried, because how dare he ask Waka-Sama such a thing.

But once Malleus gives him permission, he is a fucking beast. No questions, no thoughts. Malleus said yes and he doesn’t care about being nice or the perfect retainer anymore.

Malleus isn’t mad, but it throws him off the first time, how quickly Sebek goes from reverent to absolutely destroying him.

This is related to a pretty old conversation with potential Diasomnia scenarios, so sorry if it lacks context! But to be honest, it doesn’t even need context because this is exactly the dynamic we really love for Sebek/Malleus <3

I love how Sebek can’t even comprehend the possibility that Malleus could allow him to do such a thing, and how once he gets a “yes” his brain just stops working, which is both surprising and amusing to Malleus.

Earlier this year I started sketching a SebeMal doujin, and while I have absolutely no idea when and if I’ll be able to finish it, but thinking about these two really made me smile. Like an obsessed lunatic.

Also, I’m very happy that our stuff inspires you to think about these two as well, Anon >:3c

Anonymous asked:

Okay, so, imagine a world where Sebek is talking with Lilia for advice on how to please Malleus sexually. But, unfortunately, Silver overhears the wrong part of the conversation and comes to the conclusion that Lilia and Sebek... are dating.

Naturally, he goes to Malleus, very upset and jealous about this. That's his Dad and Malleus' Sebek. Malleus is also very upset and jealous.

The two of them decide they're gonna make Sebek and Lilia jealous as well, and make them pay attention to their bottoms again. However, they don't want to go to anyone about this, and they're both way too much of bottoms to do it with each other.

Sebek and Lilia, of course, have no clue why they're sulking all of a sudden for no reason.

This is an ever earlier ask woah sorry Anon! Also I have a feeling of dejavu but I don’t think I replied to this one 🤔

lol my favourite consequence of Diasomnia being a 2tops+2bottoms group is that their dynamic is very unhinged at times. Poor Malleus and Silver being unable to do anything to each other due to being bottoms…

Lilia would be so tickled if he finds out about why everyone is so upset, and he would be super amused if he finds out about Malleus’ and Silver’s solution to the problem.

An actual solution to this misunderstanding and conundrum? A foursome, of course!

[saturdaynightghostclub]

Theo Price is a Catch

Theo Price is a catch. On a theoretical level, you know this to be true. He’s handsome, intelligent, and charming in his own quiet way. He knows how to dress. He loves his mother, but he’s not a freak about it. He even makes decent money now that the University is paying him for his research. Personally, you think he’s a solid ten; it just never really occurs to you that other people will agree. It’s not like it sounds–you’re just so well-matched that, truly, the idea of Theo as the object of anyone else’s desire really doesn’t register. So what he’s about to reveal to you, admittedly, takes a moment to set in.

It’s been a quiet evening, with Theo downtown at a work dinner. You’ve spent the time painting your nails in front of the TV, and now you’re trying like hell not to smudge your hard work all over the latest issue of Vogue. There are some seriously stunning runway looks coming out this season, and you’re pondering ways to recreate a few of them on a budget when, in some parallel universe, the front door opens and shuts.

“Hey,” you call. Theo doesn’t respond right away, but you hear his soft footfalls in the entryway as he hangs up his keys and toes out of his shoes. Within a few moments, he’s standing before you.

“Check me out,” he says, dangling something white–a napkin–into your line of sight. You dog-ear your magazine and set it down, squinting in the half-light to figure out exactly what it is you’re meant to be looking at. Scrawled on the napkin in hasty, looping handwriting is a phone number, followed by a note from who you can only assume is a beautiful waitress: “Call me sometime! X, Jolene.”

“Jolene, huh?” You ask, quirking an eyebrow, “she a redhead?”

Theo looks puzzled for a moment. “Blonde, I think? I wasn’t really paying attention.”

You smile–of course he didn’t catch your reference–and stand to meet him, wrapping your arms around his neck. He kisses you softly, his hands sliding across your back to pull you closer. When you break apart, you can’t resist teasing him just a little–I mean come on, did he really think he was going to dangle another woman’s phone number in your face and walk away unscathed? “So,” you say, letting the mischief creep into your voice, “you gonna call her or what?”

Theo’s eyes blow wide for a moment before he realizes you’re kidding and lets them roll back toward the ceiling in simultaneous relief and exasperation.

“Okay, I know you’re messing with me,” he says, dropping his forehead to rest against yours, “but you are the only woman for me. You know that.” It’s a statement, not a question–you’ve been together long enough now that there can be little doubt as to his devotion to you (or yours to him, for that matter)–and you rest steadily against the certainty of it.

Seldom in your life have you been so assured, having lived for the most part under the philosophy that the world exists in the liminality between certainties. There are universes between church and state, friends and lovers, time and overtime, but with Theo there’s no gray area. You know where you stand because he tells you so, and he’s nothing if not a man of his word. A born psychologist, he just doesn’t see the use in dancing around the point when he could just call it like he sees it and save you both some time. “I love you.” “You’re the only woman for me.” “If you don’t take your car in for an oil change it’s going to explode.” God, even when he’s bugging you he’s perfect.

Theo rubs your back in a familiar sort of intimacy as you let your body melt away from his, tugging him gently to sit beside you on the couch.

“Just out of curiosity,” you say, “do you get hit on a lot? When you’re not with me?” You’re not worried about sounding jealous; honestly, even if you were, you’re confident Theo would find a way to assuage your concerns in thirty seconds or less. He’s good like that.

Your boyfriend is silent for a moment, staring contemplatively at the wall opposite you. “Honestly, I don’t know,” he says, “I mean, this girl was pretty bold. But usually when women approach me I just kind of assume they need directions or something.”

You laugh. You’ve witnessed this in action, actually; just a few weeks ago, the two of you were grabbing cocktails in a hotel bar downtown when Theo very sweetly mistook a young woman’s attention for friendly. Her flirtatious “what are you drinking” was answered quite earnestly with “it’s called a spritz, my girlfriend got me hooked on them,” followed by genuine confusion at your resulting laughter. “That explains a lot about the early days of our relationship,” you tease, remembering the frenetic energy emanating off of him in the leadup to your first kiss.

“You know me,” he says, touching your cheek. After a moment, he reanimates. “Hey, what about you? You must get hit on all the time.” Likewise, there’s no envy in his voice, only genuine curiosity.

You shrug. “I do alright,” you say good-naturedly. Like any woman with a pulse in the city of Chicago, you get your fair share of male attention. Like your boyfriend, however, it never makes much of an impact on you.

“Damn,” Theo whistles, reclining on the couch with his arm slung lazily about your shoulders, “we’re just a couple of foxes, aren’t we?”

“Foxes?” you giggle.

“Foxes,” he repeats, “stone-cold foxes.”

You love that you can still flirt like this. Everything with Theo feels new, despite time making you beyond comfortable in his presence. It’s a happiness you actually didn’t realize was possible; that you can be here, curled against the side of the person you’ll undoubtedly spend the rest of your days with, and still feel butterflies when he looks at you is nothing short of magic.

“Next time we go out, we should have a contest,” you say, “see which of us can get more phone numbers by the end of the night.”

Theo squeezes your shoulder. “Okay, I know you’re joking,” he says (it’s something he repeats probably twenty-five times a day), “but I might actually die if I had to see other men making passes at my girl for an entire night.”

You gasp in mock surprise, turning to face him. “Jealous?” you tease.

Theo raises one challenging eyebrow. He raises a hand to your face, traces the line of your cheekbone lightly with one knuckle, and then lifts your chin to kiss you deeply. It’s the kind of kiss that leaves you gasping, your pupils blown out and your skin tingling with anticipation. “Yes,” he says, “very.”

You’re torn between “no need” and “prove it,” so instead of speaking you simply place a hand on his chest, letting it drag down his torso as you press closer to him. You hitch a leg over his so that you’re straddling his hips and kiss him hard. As his hands slide up your thighs and over your hips, you grin; you might have him in the palm of your hand, but the sensation is mutual. You think, not for the first time, that you have truly met your match.