tehamelie

[tehamelie]

Idea for pick-up line: "How will humanity survive without my seed?"

about the gen z priority gender divide survey

“women are holding humanity’s survival hostage” 🤢🤢🤢 I think we should go extinct if people simply decide they don’t want to reproduce anymore. But we’re not facing extinction. The birthrate has dropped due to a number of factors, including the political state of the world and the cost of living crisis. Also this survey was about how people define personal success and simply indicates that young women no longer view pushing out children as a badge of personal success, not that they’re not interested in ever having children just that it is not a matter of personal success and accomplishment. Women were told for so long that their worth was directly tied to their fertility that the suggestion of reproducing being the pinnacle of fulfillment disgusts them.

Also as a side note, people who are obsessed with having children to ‘continue their bloodline’ and very adamant about that should not have children and are not having children for the right reasons. Like, eww. Disgusting. It almost always intertwines with white supremacist and misogynistic rhetoric. “Am I interested in putting in the effort to raise healthy well-adjusted and successful children? Nah but I want to continue my bloodline and spread my seed and knock up several people.”

[tehamelie]

In India, polio vaccinations started in the 1970s and the disease was considered eradicated only in 2011. There's plenty of news footage that can show the devastating effects of polio and the unimaginable relief of getting vaccines. Antivaxers are so grossly privileged and ignorant.

Vaccines are suffering from their own success. They worked so well that people forgot why they are so necessary in the first place. They forgot the morbidity and mortality that was commonplace before vaccination efforts did their job.

But the truth of the matter is that anti-vaxxers are privileged. They are privileged to have grown up protected by vaccine mandates are herd immunity. They are privileged not to have been exposed to the reality of what it looks like when disease runs rampant. They are privileged to be in a position where they believe they have a “god-given” right to refuse vaccinations when so many less-fortunate people across the world have prayed for the chance to be vaccinated.

It disgusts me. Because there is no room for “my body, my choice” in this conversation. A fetus is not contagious, but guess what … viruses sure are. And with herd immunity nowhere to be found, it will be the children, elderly, and immunocompromised who suffer most.

I was lucky enough to grow up without seeing the devastating effects of polio, measles, mumps, or pertussis first hand. I’m praying that my future children will have the same privilege.

[tehamelie]

The only universal characteristic of Batman is that he doesn't want to see anyone die. But it doesn't mean he never would. . .

“He would not fucking say that” is a Schrodinger’s phrase when it comes to Batman. There is probably Batman run where he would say that. There is also probably a run where Batman would kill the other Batman for saying that.

[tehamelie]

"I trust my gut" I yell as I die of starvation refusing to alter my body by putting food in it

[tehamelie]

Maybe you don't have to explain to them, but then you also can't complain when they make up their own arguments and get it completely wrong and/or alienate you. Sharing your family history is probably good if you want to be a family.

“not knowing why we got divorced, my children took their mom’s side” and you didn’t tell them? you did not tell your adult children that you divorced their mother because she was extremely manipulative and unfaithful and you expected them to telepathically know you’re the victim? and you are mad she manipulated them like she manipulated you?

[tehamelie]

Normal workers die on the job: "This was a completely avoidable tragedy. We have to strengthen workplace safety standards and actually enforce them so people don't have to die in order to save a billionaire some money."

Cops die on the job: "Our special boys are all heroes and this tragedy where the cops killed themselves by pure arrogance will never be forgotten but used to advocate for how cops need more rights to murder people to keep themselves safe uwu"

[tehamelie]

About a year ago five construction workers in my region died in a faulty elevator, but that didn't make international news because it's not even a big spike in construction workplace death. Cops are entitled crybabies and the media are their helicopter parents.

[tehamelie]

“The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.” Hunter S. Thompson

[tehamelie]

I wonder if they'll call being an immigrant an "ideology" too

damn terfs aren't even hiding their racism anymore

[tehamelie]

Your feelings are not a reliable foundation for morality in general

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

[tehamelie]

I like to think of Lydia in One Day at a Time. Lydia is a Catholic and overptotective as a 500 year old exiled Cuban can be, so when her grandchild Elena comes out as gay it's a big problem. But it's Lydia's problem, and after one (1) argument she never brings it up again, not to Elena or anyone else. She doesn't complain about great-grandchildren. She protects Elena's paperless immigrant girlfriend without question. What she wants most of all is make Elena a dress for her quinceanera that's so beautiful it makes her cry when she sees it, and Elena hates dresses, so Lydia gets her wish by making a suit instead.

Her philosophies, her traditions, her deeply help personal beliefs are less important to her than the people in her life. That's all you need.

an imperfect ally is better than a perfect bystander

[tehamelie]

Our hate and fear for the Other is not like those other hate groups, trans people are a REAL problem because they're different from us

god it is so funny seeing radfems discover that racism spreads thru their ideology like wildfire and instead of thinking abt why that happens like clockwork they just go “guys stopppppp omg stop being racist pls it’s really ruining the appeal of being a terf who judges people’s worth based on biology/phenotype :(“

[tehamelie]

People you're going to have a problem don't generally have cognitive disabilities, but they act stupid. White supremacists absolutely know they're full of shit when they talk about things like immigrant crime rates. Calling them idiots is just buying into the act. Just say they're assholes and their opinions are poorly supported.

You can dislike the use of the r word, but you have to admit, that in origin and use it's all but identical to "idiot". "Idiocy" used to be a diagnosis, just like "retardation" and the only real difference between the two is chronological — the latter was phased out later on.

Like, i get that it's icky. And you don't have to let people ruin your fun — disengage, filter, even block people who use it, if that's what you need to be comortable. Godspeed.

Just don't pretend like saying it is evil, and your are on some moral crusade against that. It's just "idiot" for edgy people, and most edgy people don't actually mean you harm.

[tehamelie]

We have buses and park benches with free wifi, but everything depends on everyone having a smartphone. Bring back phone booths!

I think Australia actually had the best answer to the question "what do we do with phone booths?"

In Australia anybody can make free calls from any phone booth, also most phone booths also provide wi-fi.

So many people benefit, in so many situations.

The free phone booths have been so popular and important that new(fancy) phone booths are being installed.

Making phone booths a free public utility 👍

Ripping them out in the assumption that everyone has access to a phone or internet 👎

[tehamelie]

I like "reality has a leftist bias" as a positive way to explain conservatives tend to disdain reality and testable facts in favor of whatever gets them more power

Why Wikipedia works

The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.

If you've ever spent time around Wikipedians, you've doubtless heard its motto: "Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it's a mess." It's a delicious line, which is why I stole it for my 2017 novel Walkaway.

But this is one of those lines that's too good to fact-check. The truth is that there's a theory that very neatly describes how Wikipedia works; that is, how Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information ever assembled, despite allowing tens of thousands of anonymous and pseudonymous people with no verifiable credentials to participate in a collective knowledge creating process.

Nupedia, Wikipedia's immediate predecessor, tried to solve this problem by verifying its editors and establishing that they had the requisite expertise before allowing them to write encyclopedia entries in the domain of their expertise. This was an abject failure: not only was it so slow as to be indistinguishable from dormancy (Nupedia produced a mere 20 articles in its first year), but also the fact that these articles were written by experts did not mean that they were good. After all, experts disagree!

Wikipedia jettisoned user-verification in favor of source verification. After all, it's impossible for a group of strangers to agree on the identity of another stranger, let alone what qualifies them to write an encyclopedia entry. Instead, Wikipedia created a process by which a source could be deemed noteworthy and reliable source, then instituted a policy that assertions appearing on Wikipedia had to be cited to a noteworthy and reliable source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources

As I wrote for Make magazine in 2009, Wikipedia doesn't contain factual assertions so much as it contains assertions about facts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091116023225/http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol20/?pg=16

Wikipedia doesn't say "It is a true fact that Cory Doctorow is 54 years old." It says that a website called "Writers Write" published the assertion that my birthday is July 17, 1971:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow#cite_note-3

There's no ready way for you to verify my birthday‡, but anyone can verify that Writers Write published this and claimed it was true.

‡ Unless, of course, you are my mother, who does read this blog. Hi, Mom!

Not only did this resolve otherwise unresolvable disputes, but it's also a tactic that got more effective as the internet grew, and more noteworthy sources were digitized and made readily available. A major milestone here was the creation of the Internet Archive's Open Library, which aims to scan and index every book ever published. That meant that the citations to print sources in the footnotes of Wikipedia entries could be automatically linked to a scanned page and verified by everyone:

https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/29/weaving-books-into-the-web-starting-with-wikipedia/

Wikipedia omitted a step that was considered indispensable throughout the entire history of encyclopedias – verifying facts – and replaced it with a new step – verifying sources. This maneuver is characteristic of many of the most successful online experiments: get rid of something deemed essential and replace it with a completely different process, suited to the affordances and limitations of a world-spanning, public, anonymous network.

That's what eBay did in 1995, when (as Auctionweb), it created a person-to-person selling platform that neither verified the identities of buyers or sellers, nor did it use an escrow service that held money in trust until goods were received. Rather, it replaced these existing measures with a new kind of reputation system, whereby reliable sellers could be sorted from scammers by looking at their numeric scores.

That's also what Kickstarter did. Kickstarter is based on a scheme first mooted by John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier in 1998, which they called "The Street Performer Protocol":

https://www.schneier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/paper-street-performer.pdf

In the Street Performer Protocol, a provider of goods or services announces that once a set amount of funds were pledged, they will deliver something. Think of a street juggler who wows a crowd with an escalating series of impressive tricks, before calling out, "For my final trick, I will juggle eleven razor-sharp machetes with my feet – but I will only do this trick once there's $100 in my hat."

Many people tried to implement this as a digital service before Kickstarter. They all foundered on a seemingly insurmountable hurdle: the sellers were raising money to make the thing they were raising money for. All the pre-Kickstarter platforms erred on the side of protecting buyers by holding onto the money until the promised goods or services were delivered. But because the seller needed the money to deliver on their promise, this repeatedly failed. It was a procedural vapor-lock: I can't do the thing until I have your money, but I can't get your money until I do the thing.

So Kickstarter jettisoned the escrow step, handing campaign creators the full payout and then trusting them not to run off with the dough. The platform understood that this would allow a certain amount of fraud and failure, but deemed it worthwhile, especially after they took countermeasures to minimize backer losses, such as verifying sellers, subjecting projects to human review, and canceling any project that failed to meet its funding goals (if you need the money to do the thing, and you don't raise enough money, then you will not be able to do the thing).

In the Oblique Strategies deck, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt counsel us to "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before":

https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

That's what Wikipedia did when it swapped verifying facts for agreeing on sources. It's what eBay did when it swapped validating sellers and buyers for reviews. It's what Kickstarter did when it swapped escrow for acceptable losses, project review, and setting minimum funding thresholds.

Platforms may not know it, but they live by the "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before" maxim. They're forever removing seemingly load-bearing Jenga blocks to see whether the whole thing collapses. After all, it's certainly possible to omit a step and cause a catastrophe.

Kickstarter competitors like Indiegogo tried omitting the funding threshold restriction, passing any amount raised to the creator, even if it was too little to complete the project, but after an initial blush of success, lost a lot of ground to Kickstarter, partly due to customers who felt burned when the project they put money into never delivered.

But that's not the only problem with "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before." Often, the new measure instituted to replace a former bedrock principle turns out to have critical flaws that bad actors can discover and exploit.

So eBay's success conjured up an army of "reputation farmers," who sold a series of low-value items to the public (or to one another, or to alternative accounts they operated themselves), cultivating a high reputation on the platform. Once they reached this high score, they listed a bunch of high-value items (like dozens of $1,000 laptops) and absconded with the money.

And Kickstarter's payment threshold isn't that hard to game: just set a very low funding goal, and you are guaranteed your money. Sure, the funding goal has to be high enough to satisfy a human reviewer, but for many items, it's hard to know exactly what constitutes a reasonable funding threshold.

Then there's Wikipedia. 25 years ago, it seemed easier for a group of strangers to agree on whether a source was noteworthy and reliable than it would be for them to agree on a fact. But while that remains true, it did open up a new avenue of attack: bad actors who wanted to slip lies and spin into Wikipedia could switch from arguing about which facts were true to arguing about which sources were reliable.

That's exactly what's happening today, and it's the conflict that forms the spine of Josh Dzieza's lengthy, magisterial essay on the past, present and future of Wikipedia for The Verge:

https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales

Dzieza describes how compelling and effective the Wikipedia "facts about facts" approach has been. It's such a sweet hack that it converted many Wikipedia vandals and trolls to editors in good standing, who switched from making Wikipedia worse to making it better.

But in an age of endless culture wars, conservatives have turned their sights on Wikipedia. Conservative publications are – empirically speaking – the most falsehood-strewn and conspiratorial branch of the press:

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/

The fact that reality has a pronounced left-wing bias means that many popular conservative publications have been disqualified as reliable sources on Wikipedia, starting with the Daily Mail in 2017. This has the Maga right spitting feathers about "anti-conservative bias on Wokeapedia," and has Maga Congresstrolls demanding that Wikipedia unmask its editors and disclose their identities, a risk formerly confined to Russia, India, China and Turkiye.

The emergence of this threat in the USA is a potential game-changer for the Wikipedia Foundation, which has long relied on its US domicile – and the First Amendment – to protect the core project from political censorship. Wikipedia's status as the best, most trusted source of information on the internet has painted a crosshairs on its back: leaked Heritage Foundation slides detail a plan to force Wikipedia to unmask editors who contribute criticism of Israel to the project.

The Media Research Center has called for the Big Tech monopolists – Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all openly allied with Trump today – to block Wikipedia until it agrees to treat Newsmax, OANN and other conspiratorial publications as reliable sources.

Ironically, one of the things the right hates most about Wikipedia is that it takes affirmative measures to identify and correct its bias, for example, by actively encouraging editorial participation by members of minorities who are underrepresented in Wikipedia's volunteer editor cohort. Right wing demagogues call this "DEI," even as they demand that the government force Wikipedia to institute DEI for conspiracy-addled right wing trolls. As the saying goes, "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

The culture war on Wikipedia isn't the only risk the project faces. Dictators around the world are obsessed with dominating Wikipedia. Dzieza describes how one anonymous editor in a Middle Eastern autocracy was summoned by the secret police, who ordered him to capitalize on his standing as a long-term Wikipedia editor to insert pro-regime materials into the encyclopedia.

One of Wikipedia's great strengths is its structure. While Wikipedia started out as one of the internet's characteristic "benevolent dictator for life" projects, with founder Jimmy Wales taking on the role of "God King" of Wikipedia, Wales voluntarily walked away from his power, creating a nonprofit with an independent board (Wikimedia Foundation) and then handing his veto power over to an Arbitration Committee made up of volunteer editors.

This was a rare and remarkable gesture. The internet has many of these "benevolent dictator for life" public interest projects, and nearly all of them are still controlled by their founders, who may be benevolent, but are far from perfect:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

It's all the more remarkable that the internet's most prominent self-deposing benevolent dictator is Jimmy Wales, a self-professed, Ayn Rand-reading libertarian. While many of self-described leftist benevolent dictators who preside over other key pieces of internet infrastructure decided that their projects needed the long-term control of their founders, it was Wales, a libertarian, who decided that a project of so much collective importance should have collective rule.

But while Wales has stepped down as Wikipedia's God King (and its "single throat to choke" by the world's dictators and thin-skinned billionaires), there is something of his unique genius in the ethos of the project, and its ability to civilly bring together people of many irreconcilable viewpoints to collaborate on something they all value. I've known Wales for decades and count him a friend, notwithstanding the wide gap in our political philosophies.

If you want to be a Wikipedian – and I hope you do – there are many ways to get started. The easiest is probably fixing punctuation errors and typos: when you come across these on a Wikipedia entry, click the edit button and just fix 'em, making sure to check off the "this is a minor edit" box before you hit submit.

But for a more ambitious entree, try this method by veteran Wikipedian – and slayer of cryptocurrency bullshit – Molly White, who, in 30 brisk minutes, shows to go to the library, find a cool book, and use the facts you find therein to make Wikipedia a better, more complete source of knowledge:

https://blog.mollywhite.net/become-a-wikipedian-transcript/

You don't have to be an expert in butterflies, hydrology or the Peloponnesian War to improve their respective entries. You just have to find a useful fact in a reliable source. Go ahead: be the latest person to do what no person (before Jimmy Wales) ever thought of not doing.

Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

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/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before

Image: penubag (modified) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_logo_%28svg%29.svg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[tehamelie]

A fairly impressive feat of fascist doublethink to be ashamed of their country's white supremacist history and at the same time proud to advance their country's white supremacist future