I Come From A Culture That Has No Nudity Taboo - Nudity Is Not Considered Inherently Sexual, Or Somehow

imma have a lil rant now

“you can’t say crippled it’s a slur” fuck off with that stigmatizing bullshit! i know what crippled means.

when i was going to the gym in my wheelchair, that wasn’t crippled. when i was fiercely sweating my way through agonizing medical procedures, that wasn’t crippled. when i was laughing through my tears because my spine was so on fire it was funny, that wasn’t crippled.

the days when that meant i couldn’t DO anything? THAT was crippled. it happened, i got through it, i’m proud. i don’t need some officious little shit telling me i can’t use the most apt term to describe the event of my disability keeping me from acting. crippling pain is crippling. crippling executive dysfunction is crippling. don’t try to force me to minimize my experience just because you’re uncomfortable with the english language.

say it until it loses all meaning if you have to. cripple cripple cripple. it starts to sound like an english beverage involving nutmeg and whiskey. mmm, hot cripple.

Blake Flayton

Patron Saint Bluebell

Hey, listen. I know the world’s on fire. But listen. I’ll tell you a thing. On the day after the election, when everything was worst and all I could do was go numb or cry hysterically, do you know what gave me the most comfort? It wasn’t the words of Lincoln or Gandhi or Maya Angelou, it wasn’t Psalms or poetry, it wasn’t my grandmother, it wasn’t contemplating the long arc of history. It wasn’t even hugging the dog. It was the Twitter account @ConanSalaryman. This is a joke account. It’s somebody who narrates as if Conan was working in an office. Tweets usually sound like “By Crom!” roared Conan. “You jackals cannot schedule a mere interview without gathering in a pack and cackling?!” or “Conan slammed his sword through his desk. Papers and blood rained through the office. Monday was slain.” I followed it awhile back and have found it funny. (I’m not a huge Robert Howard fan inherently, but whoever is writing these does the schtick well.) But if it had not posted once that day, no one would have noticed at all. Instead, Conan the Salaryman posted something inspirational. And then replied to dozens of people replying to him, for hours, in character, telling them that by Crom! it was only defeat if we did not stand up again, that the greatest act of strength was to keep walking in the face of hopelessness, that the gods have given the smallest of us strength to enact change, that we must all keep going as long as Crom gave us breath, and tyrants frightened Conan not, but we must look to those unable to fend for themselves. (“Though by Crom! We must hammer ourselves into a support network, not an army!”) I have no idea who is behind that account. But it was the most bizarrely comforting thing I saw all day, in a day that had very little comfort in it. There was this weight of story behind it. It helped me. I think it helped a lot of people. If only a tiny bit–well, tiny bits help. I have been thinking a lot lately about Bluebell from Watership Down. There’s absolutely no reason you should remember Bluebell, unless, to take an example completely and totally at random, you read it eleven thousand times until your copy fell apart because you were sort of a weird little proto-furry kid who loved talking animals more than breath and wrote fan fic and there weren’t any other talking animal books and you now have large swaths memorized as a result. Ahem. Bluebell is a minor character. He’s Captain Holly’s friend and jester. When the old warren is destroyed, Captain Holly and Bluebell are the last two standing and they stagger across the fields after the main characters. By the end, Holly is raving, hallucinating, and screaming “O zorn!” meaning “all is destroyed” and about to bring predators down on them. And Bluebell is telling stupid jokes. And they make it the whole way because of Bluebell’s jokes. “Jokes one end, hraka the other,” he says. “I’d roll a joke along the ground and we’d both follow it.” When Holly can’t move, Bluebell tells him jokes that would make Dad jokes look brilliant and Holly is able to move again. When Hazel, the protagonist, tries to shush him, Holly says no, that “we wouldn’t be here without his blue-tit’s chatter.” I tell you, the last few days, thinking of this, I really start to identify with Bluebell. I am not a fighter, not an organizer, certainly not a prophet. Throw something at me and I squawk and cover my head. I write very small stories with wombats and hamsters and a cast of single digits. I am not the sort of comforting soul who sits and listens and offers you tea. (What seems like a thousand years ago, when I had the Great Nervous Breakdown of ‘07, I remember saying something to the effect that I had realized that if I had myself as a friend, I would have been screwed, because I was useless at that kind of thing. And a buddy of mine from my college days, who was often depressed, wrote me to say that no, I wasn’t that kind of person, but when we were together I always made her laugh hysterically and that was worth a lot too. I treasured that comment more than I am entirely comfortable admitting.) But I can roll a joke along the ground until the end of the world if I have to. And increasingly, I think that’s what I’m for in this life. Things are bad and people have died already and I am heartsick and tired and the news is a gibbering horror–but I actually do know why a raven is like a writing desk. So. First Church of Bluebell. Patron Saint. Keep holding the line.

jaggedwolf said: can’t say this and not link/say which one it is

the original “turing test” paper is so beautiful.  more beautiful, i imagine, than most expect going in—he’s got this underlying warm humanism and gentle humor throughout.  (it’s present even in his more technical papers, but it shines here)

and the section that slays me each time is this:

“It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it […]”

like.  this is the original “turing test” paper.  this is the first dude to formally conceptualize the whole “~*~what if computers learn to think, how could we tell~*~” thing.  which, in subsequent SF invocations, is used mostly in spooky or paranoid contexts: the Voigt-Kampff test of Blade Runner, the preemptive rushes to constrain that budding will in I, Robot and others, and in modern worries over AGI.  and i like those stories!  they’re interesting and cool and eerie!

but

but

the original guy was not scared or unsettled or spooked by the prospect of new minds.  this dude’s primary concern, when facing the dawn of artificial intelligence, was instead: “what if we teach computers to think and then the other kids on the playground bully the computer, that would be so mean :(((”

i love that, so much.  i love people so much, sighs into hands

NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh

They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.

So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:

“I” →  “thou”

“Me” →  “thee”

“My” →  “thy”

“Mine” →  “thine”

Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.

We could first imagine it in the first person-

“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.

And then replace it-

“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”

do you ever think about chuck palahniuk writing “we don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression… the great depression is our lives” in the early 1990s as a young gay man living in america at the peak of the aids epidemic

Rings my fucking bell, like a perennial fucking plague maiden:

Center harm, not disgust!

When in doubt (and when not in doubt, just swept by problems bigger than you and assured by someone that they know the answer, so don't think right now, just Do!), center harm.

Focus on what specific harm you're reducing with your actions. Make sure it's tangible and concrete. If your actions are minimizing hypothetical harm at the cost of real, tangible harm on others, 9 out 10 times you're on the wrong fucking side, being weaponized by propaganda.

If a conversation revolves around disgust as a driver for action, you're being radicalized. If a call to action depends on your emotional response, you're being manipulated. I'm sorry, this isn't the 90s anymore, social media has eroded the web of respectability of the pre internet society. The primary axis for misinformation to spread in this day and age is emotional response: half the things you believe are true and share as such are not based on fact, expert opinion or personal research. Social media has conditioned us (all of us! You and me and most dangerously of all, the idiots we put in power) that if something feels true, it probably is.

But do you know for sure it is? Do you think it's true because you have first hand experience or actual time spent on reputable sources learning it to be fact? Or just because it aligns with your worldview and it would be nice for you if it were true?

Are you taking action because you're angry and a group of fellow angry folk invited you to join them? Do you have a plan or is this just catharsis? Are you aware of the consequences of your actions or are you drunk on rage and focused only on the immediate future?

Center harm. Center specific actions and their consequences.

Discomfort is not harm. Disgust is not harm. Hypothetical paranoia is not harm.

The reactionary pipeline is real and your self-image as a progressive is not actually enough to save you from falling down the hole. Radicalization is not hinged on politics alone. Saying you're a leftist is worthless if your thought process and actions themselves are indistinguishable from qanon losers. Conspiratorial thought has literally no politics inherently, and your insistence it does is pure lack of critical thought on display.

Center harm, not feelings, not politics, not group think.

Center harm, and remember that individual actions cannot dismantle systemic structures on their own, so anyone who calls for individual action at the cost of community structures is not actually trying to change anything, and instead actively suppressing efforts to make anything better in any way.

jaggedwolf said: can’t say this and not link/say which one it is

the original “turing test” paper is so beautiful.  more beautiful, i imagine, than most expect going in—he’s got this underlying warm humanism and gentle humor throughout.  (it’s present even in his more technical papers, but it shines here)

and the section that slays me each time is this:

“It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it […]”

like.  this is the original “turing test” paper.  this is the first dude to formally conceptualize the whole “~*~what if computers learn to think, how could we tell~*~” thing.  which, in subsequent SF invocations, is used mostly in spooky or paranoid contexts: the Voigt-Kampff test of Blade Runner, the preemptive rushes to constrain that budding will in I, Robot and others, and in modern worries over AGI.  and i like those stories!  they’re interesting and cool and eerie!

but

but

the original guy was not scared or unsettled or spooked by the prospect of new minds.  this dude’s primary concern, when facing the dawn of artificial intelligence, was instead: “what if we teach computers to think and then the other kids on the playground bully the computer, that would be so mean :(((”

i love that, so much.  i love people so much, sighs into hands

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

Disabled people - Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

In 1933 the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ was passed, allowing for the forced sterilisation of those regarded

Kinda just got gut-stabbed by shit from a corner I wouldn’t have expected, but I suppose I shouldn’t actually be surprised at the willingness to forget about the universal comfort with removing the right of the disabled to actually connect with the history that connects us or …. anything.

In 1933 the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ was passed, allowing for the forced sterilisation of those regarded as ‘unfit’. This included people with conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Prisons, nursing homes, asylums, care homes for the elderly and special schools were targeted to select people for sterilisation. It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1939, 360,000 individuals were subjected to forced sterilisation.

In 1939 the killing of disabled children and adults began. All children under the age of three who had illnesses or a disability, such as Down’s syndrome, or cerebral palsy were targeted under the T4 programme. A panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the ‘euthanasia’, or supposed ‘mercy-killing’, of each child.

Many parents were unaware of the fate of their children, instead being told that they were being sent for improved care. After a period of time parents were told their children had died of pneumonia and their bodies cremated to stop the spread of disease.

Following the outbreak of war in September 1939 the programme was expanded. Adults with disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health problems and criminals who were not of German origin were included in the programme. Six killing centres were established to speed up the process – the previous methods of killing people by lethal injection or starvation were deemed too slow to cope with large numbers of adults. The first experimental gassings took place at the killing centre in Brandenberg and thousands of disabled patients were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

The model used for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialised murder within Nazi concentration and death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.