Oceans Yet to Burn
Month
people in Melbourne regularly ask me where I am from, which causes a slight degree of difficulty if I answer “Melbourne”.
the real question is “tell me your life story and the saga of your ancestors”, but you know I’m just trying to buy socks in this exchange.
Having forgotten his Discourse Keyboard, the owl struggled to explain that the native range of Tyto Alba includes all of Australia and Tasmania, but the nuance of his argument was interpreted as little more than a confusing series of hoots by his interlocutors. After refusing an offer of a small rodent, he retreated to his apartment in frustration, tiny owl socks unpurchased.People make this assumption at times in the United States as well, depending on accent, frequency of tourists and international students matching the general appearance in the area, local demographics, etc.
I suspect the deeper version will die off as visible race is turned into fashion near the end of the century.
Who do you think you are to make a reference like this, some kind of guardian?
If one is creative enough, one can reference scenes they’ve never heard of from movies they’ve never seen, books they’ve never read, mangas they’ve never written.
Or maybe I really am from the alternate timeline and I’ve just been ripping off video games and movies that will never exist, Super Love Love Demon Battle included.
The proof, using advanced Time Cycle Theory, is left as an exercise for the reader.
abstractagamid said: that’s just sweat!
nightpool said: why not just add liquid combiners to Splashing Sweat Symbol
and skin tone modifiers to the eggplant, yes
The lack of a green skintone modifier is disriminatory towards orcs! I demand RGB modifiers!
remember capitalism made your iphone so it is uncriticizable
Originally read this as the iPhone itself being uncriticizable, which, well, Apple fanatics…
The year is 2064. It has been 26 years since the United States of America collapsed in the Justice War, replaced by the Special Action District by order of the World Court as punishment for its sins. The last surviving members of the Alt Right are a group of buff tradgay paramilitary cyborgs existing in the forgotten Undercity of New York. They have just radicalized a group of trapwives into spreading the WHITEOUT virus into major Population Replenishment Centers…
You are detective GEOF BAILEY, an agender multiple system cyborg and member of the New York SAD Police, tasked with ensuring the interjustice of the last metropolis in the land that used to be known as America. Can you stop the last fascist remnants of a dead country from destroying the diversity of the city?
Shining Darknet Entertainment presents…
“I don’t like antifa because I don’t consider political violence a hammer for every nail”: good opinion worth engaging
“antifa is a terrorist group, are the real fascists” etc: really bad political analysis here, friend
describing yourself as “anti-antifa” and talking about human rights are secondary to stamping the “antifa scum” out forever: hello, friend! we have plenty of rope left since Nuremberg, so I implore you to reconsider
Antifa is a terrorist group, they are also real fascists.
Not every dumb ideology is Fascism. There is also Communism, of both the intentionally and unintentionally authorian kinds.
While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.
this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.
but at least we can all agree that killing is bad
I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.
But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.
entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.
To be honest I don’t think anyone believes that, the entire class as a literal enemy in the military sense. No ones out there shooting landlords and business owners at random. No one but the fringest of tankies imagines that any revolution consists of literally murdering the entire former ruling class.
Me thinking it wouldn’t be so bad if someone iced an oil company CEO or war criminal US official is not at all the same as thinking every human being in the entire capitalist class and state apparatus is a “legitimate target”.
right, but we’re kind of haggling over price, now.
On the contrary, I think your acceptance of a “minimal” level of state violence that’s just allowed to go on unpunished and that doesn’t reasonably give credibility and justification to retaliation by victimized nonstate actors, is an unacceptable moral imposition on my conscience, a price too high for me to pay.
I’m not willing to take the position of a black-hearted school principal who just tolerates a certain level of abusive victimization by bullies as acceptable but would never allow for a victim to hit back and “start a fight”.
I think the problem in the scenario you describe is tolerating state violence, and the solution doesn’t involve molotov cocktails.
The unprincipled principal may punish both sides equally while the principled principal assesses the situation and delivers justice, but they still have to stop the fight!
No! The fight IS justice. Justice consists of the victim delivering a well-deserved fist to their assailant. Some investigation and punishment afterward will only ever be a second-best outcome, unless in those (admittedly quite common) situations where there’s confusion about who actually did what and who’s responsible.
The partisans shooting Mussolini and the liberated Jews who picked up a cane and beat up their former SS captors were better deliverers of justice than the war crimes tribunals as far as I’m concerned.
Extreme cases make bad principles; concentration camp guards directly committing heinous crimes are clearly asking for it, yes. But that’s hardly the typical case of political violence, is it.
And ideally we would have both more and better war crimes tribunals; Saddam Hussein may have deserved the noose, but it should have been for a clear accounting of his crimes, not because he was overthrown by a different gang of thugs.
“The fight IS justice!” says political Tumblr user, “but any unpunished incorrect state violence is too much.”
Yeah, that’s just acceptance of a minimal level of violence by another name. Confusion of who intiated what violence and/or manipulation by social adepts is the dominant case, not the edge case.
While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.
this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.
but at least we can all agree that killing is bad
I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.
But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.
entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.
All we need is a revolutionary vanguard, and-
Donald Trump has spent years telling outrageous lies. He’s continued to do so since assuming office, even lying about obviously verifiable things like what he’s tweeted about or the size of his inauguration crowd.
He is attacking the idea that truth matters, and trying to make people give up on telling the difference between the truth and a lie. This is dangerously disoriented.
In order to stay oriented, we need to care what’s true. This is easier said than done. In the short term, bullshit is often much more politically convenient than the truth. In the long term, if we create a world in which the truth doesn’t matter, we will end up defenseless.
We need to keep in mind that being on the right side doesn’t make everything someone might say true. Good people can tell lies. Good people can get things wrong. Their goodness doesn’t make the lie true.
Being marginalized doesn’t mean that someone always knows what they’re talking about. Being oppressed doesn’t make people infallible; being wrong doesn’t make someone privileged.
Similarly, not every rumor about a bad person is accurate. Lies told about a bad person are still lies. (And not everyone who has a bad reputation is actually a bad person.)
Be careful about spreading rumors. Learn to recognize fake news, and avoid spreading it. If something doesn’t sound true to you, ask for citations or investigate. Everyone can be wrong, and you don’t have to believe anyone without being persuaded that they are right. Evidence matters, arguments matter. (And being a good person isn’t a substitute for either.)
You can’t fight evil with bullshit. In order to fight evil, we have to care what’s true.
The rivals have been lying/bullshitting/misrepresenting/omitting a lot in their attacks on Trump. Every time I go and investigate one of the claims, I come back less trusting of the media and less trusting of the left and liberals, instead of more.
But it’s growing less surprising every day, since why was I ever foolish enough to think the Left and Liberals weren’t every bit the truth-apathetic political operatives as their rivals, when correct only correct by coincidence and not by process?
And I don’t mean to say that Trump is great, because he isn’t, but one can’t beat him on his level. He lives there.
The future of meme warfare lies in staging fake corporate versions of memes in order to discredit them.
Anyway, before I miss out on the other discourse going on: Piper Harron has basically said that universities need to fire white mathematicians, because WOC have no chance to be hired to do math otherwise.
Problematic?
Or super problematic?
No. Woke.
Dammit! Are you sure?
Does she look white to you? Woke.
Granted, I was just shitposting and hadn’t checked first, but this whole edge case wokeness thing has been more stupid than politics in general so it seemed like a good guess. Of course if a white man said the same thing it would be a sign of his racism, but SJ informally asserts that truth value is based on race, sex, and orientation of the speaker, so…
Massively uninterested in anything following the phrase “his personal demons” unless it involves a bunch of wacky demon minions that follow this guy around.
“His personal demons, Laila, Kovi, and Jiala, all battled for his affection - sometimes leaving a trail of destruction in their wake!”
- back cover, Super Love Love Demon Battle!
Anyway, before I miss out on the other discourse going on: Piper Harron has basically said that universities need to fire white mathematicians, because WOC have no chance to be hired to do math otherwise.
Problematic?
Or super problematic?
No. Woke.
I understand now that you’ve rediscovered the 13th amendment everything looks like a nail, but murder isn’t a status crime like vagrancy, some pretext to reincarnate slavery as convict leasing. We were always going to punish murder (traditionally, by hanging).
And against the complaint that even fixed-term sentences don’t come with an exit plan these days, “ease out your last few years doing off-campus catering around the most powerful people in the state” doesn’t strike me as rank barbarity tbh
The real issue isn’t the amount of suffering by inmates performing janitorial work, but creating a system in which there is a reward for incarceration other than lowering the crime rates. You get what you pay for, after all.
@cromulentenough
FWIW, i’m someone born in the UK but with background in bangladesh, and i get annoyed when other asians ask me ‘where are you FROM from’ after i tell them i’m from london the first time. It’s not just a white thing.
“But I’ve always lived in the UK,” he said, “never anyway else. I’ve not even set foot outside the British Isles.”
“Yes,” said the man, “but where are you FROM”
The man’s face opened, revealing several strange, glossy, robotic orbs. Beams of various colours and intensities swept over the questioned man’s body.
“HAPLO GROUP 2A, PRIMARY GENETIC DENSITY,” the robot man said in the middle of the restaurant.
A hush fell over the guests at the dining tables as the robot’s face slowly closed, synthetic skin seamlessly fusing to hide the cold mechanical components underneath.
“So anyhow,” said the robot man, “how about Liverpool vs. Manchester United?”
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
“Where are you from?”
California.
“No, I mean where are you from?”
Pasadena.
“No, what are you?”see also:
“What are you mixed with?”When it goes away from “hey, what’s up, are you traveling, fellow human” to “how can I categorize you” is where people start to see a clear problem.
Like, look there are tons of blonde-haired, blue-eyed 8th generation American people who are happy to natter on about the small Dutch village and French provincial town where Gran-gran-gran-mere and UberGrosOpa lived until the war brought them together, but asking someone to bring out that story upon first introduction is a bit rude, especially when the answer is “well my family has been here for four hundred years but we lose the thread somewhere in the middle passage” or “we’ve only been here two generations and fled from an oppressive regime” or “I’m not telling you because I’m not actually from here and I don’t know if you’re an ICE agent who’s going to follow me home and deport my parents.”
Seems like the kindest question is “so do you live/work/go to school around here?” for light chatter, but you’ve gotta be a level four friend to unlock someone’s backstory whether it’s tragic or mundane.
Also this sort of thing comes up a lot after people hear an “exotic” name or if someone isn’t easily slotted into a stereotypical category, which intensifies its interpretation as a microaggression - Janey from Omaha likely doesn’t get asked where she’s from as much as Zuelma from East LA does. The vast majority of people I know who interpret “where are you from” as a microaggression only do so after experiencing another microaggression (a long assessing stare or a comment on the strangeness of their clothes, hair, or *loudly* commenting on an accent).
Most people I know don’t see “where are you from” as an irritation, it’s the “where are you *really* from” that’s read as hostile.
[I work with a man who has a really hard-to-pronounce-for-the-unpracticed name, even though he’s the owner of the company and I’m fielding calls from cold-call vendors I hear “wow, I’m not even going to try to say that right - where is Boss from?” about 2-3 times a week. Montrose. He’s from Montrose.]
Aaaaaaalso the question of when it’s appropriate to use Spanish [or insert applicable language] is somewhat fraught. Another man I work with is the son of immigrants, has dark skin, and has a name that reads as Mexican, but his parents never allowed him to learn Spanish or speak Spanish with them because they though it would make it hard for him to get a job or would get him in trouble at school. As an adult he speaks only rudimentary Spanish and each time it comes up he insists that he doesn’t speak Spanish and is embarrassed by his poor command of the language. It’s difficult for him to talk to his parents because their command of English isn’t very strong. So when someone speaks Spanish to him he A) gets reminded of all that history and B) has to explain to the Spanish speaker that he doesn’t speak the language, and I’ve seen people call him a liar or stuck up for not speaking Spanish. No one speaking Spanish to him knows all that history and is bringing up that strain for the sake of being mean, but fuck I can’t blame him for getting worn out by it coming up on a regular basis. If I, a white woman, speak Spanish to a Latinx person am I making the assumption that they can’t speak English or am I trying to be accommodating and accept the fact that I live in an area with a dozen languages in use and a wide array of cultures sharing space? Am I being rude by asking them to tolerate my poor Spanish or polite by making the attempt? Both. Neither. It’s complicated.
Different people have different ideas about what’s rude, and I think that may be a better context to set that in. Is is rude to ask someone where they’re from? Probably not the first time, but it is rude to stare at someone then ask where they’re from.
The post was motivated partly by South Asian exchange students in $REDACTED ordering curry in Hindi and asking where the waiter is from when he does not understand.
Everybody immediately assumes the asker is white. Kind of my point here.
My dad has a co-worker who married a son of an Italian immigrant. The other day he (the father-in-law born in Italy) came to the shop and my dad used it as an opportunity to practise his Italian.
Turns out the co-worker took it as a slight. She had never learned to speak Italian.
This is also part of the more indirect costs of multiculturalism. A dozen different cultures, cultures mixing and flowing but simultaneously being prohibited from mixing and flowing because it’s “appropriative”…
You don’t just get 12 scales of what’s polite and impolite behavior. You get somewhere between 12 scales and one scale for every person in the area.
It was said some study found that above a certain level, diversity imposed a higher cost due to all the needs to overcome communication and negotiation barriers, effectively wasting what could have been productive time for insufficient gains. I wish I cold find it.
You realize when you cut out the beginning of the post like this it’s practically impossible to tell what you’re responding to? In this case, your point stands alone, but it’s still mildly irritating.
Huh. I was trying to do my readers a service by not cluttering their dashes so much with long posts that they’d already read 90% of.
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
> in which Augmented Reality Zuckerbook™ simultaneously clears up nation of origin, allowing users to instantly disambiguate whether it is polite to ask where someone is from according to their appearance and Zuckerbook™ profile, while simultaneously showing the entire life history of every user hovering above their heads, making the entire line of questioning irrelevant
But also your Chinese-American grandparents will tell you where you are from and tell you how important it is to not forget that and always get it right and point to it on the map. They also never want to go back because that place was a hellhole and they’re so glad they made it out of the cultural revolution alive.
God Bless the United States of America, friend.
The effect wears off over generations, until it becomes a “well your great great grandfather was German” but you don’t speak a word of German and the most that’s left of unified German ethnic experiences in your life is some hollow copy of Oktoberfest.
(Right now I’m trying to figure out if East Asians are the next group that will be absorbed by America’s homogeneous Generic White Identity, if it will be some other group instead, or if some other path will happen.)
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
This person seems anything but rational. I’d say start with giving working minors the right to vote because they pay an income tax
“Rationalists” is more of an anthropological label, and one I don’t claim for myself, in part because most of them believe in Open Borders or something similar, but I’m an unironic Nationalist.
Anyhow, I give a more direct/accessible and serious reply later in the thread.
Although the irony that what I said is less impenetrable than certain philosophers or schools is not lost on me. I can provide a close reading if you’d like.
Oh, and I’m not actually a time-travelling supervillain. My blog description does convey real information about my positions, but it isn’t literal.
THE PAST MUST BE DESTROYED
I guess one of the symptoms of this “identity confusion“ is that asking “Where are you from - originally? What are you?“ is sometimes considered a micro-aggression, and sometimes people identify strongly with that place, and sometimes people from the Old Country ask you “Where are you from?“ in exactly the same way, but it can’t be a micro-aggression in that case.
Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when it turns out the waiter is Greek? Is it a grave insult to order a pizza in Italian when *you* are Italian? Is it an insult to ask somebody for directions in Mandarin because that person *looks* Chinese? Does it matter if you are a Mandarin native speaker? Does it matter if you’re a Cantonese native speaker? Does it matter if this happens in the US, or in France, and you don’t speak French?
Does it matter if your family was forced to renounce their heritage in one of the World Wars or by Stalinist resettlement?
If you try hard to keep your identity and culture alive, you will have an answer ready to “Where are you from?“.
Treating “Where are you from, originally?“ as a kind of slight enforces the mainstream US categorisation into back, white, brown, Asian, Latin American, native American.
Sometimes, the question is where *in China* are you from? What place exactly? Are you from the same place *I* am from?
what is your ethnoracial heritage? wait, just spit into this test tube and I’ll send it to 23andme myself.
For what it’s worth, Americans always want me to really specifically say where I’m from, even if they have never heard of the place, and are most satisfied with my answer if I also give the distance to the next NATO base that has marines on it.
Americans also really specifically tell me what state they are from, what the chief export of that state is, and the distance from their home town to the state capital.
My point was that these “microagressions“ are only microagressions if you ask them as a member of the wrong ethnic group. There is something there that gibes me pause. But if you assume we are all members of one nationality, without any subcultural divisions, that is a microagression as well.
Identity politics claims that ethno-cultural divisions are fundamental to our identities, at least until a white person asks about them to understand a person’s identity better, at which point the ethno-cultural divisions become a socially constructed tool of oppression and marginalisation.
I can answer this: it’s polite to ask an African person where they are from, it’s a microaggression to ask an African American person where they are from.
It’s polite to ask where in China a Chinese person is from, it’s a microaggression to ask a Chinese American person where in China they are from, or (worse) where in Asia they are from, or (even worse) where in the world they are from.
What, you can’t tell if someone is Chinese or Chinese American just by looking?
> in which Augmented Reality Zuckerbook™ simultaneously clears up nation of origin, allowing users to instantly disambiguate whether it is polite to ask where someone is from according to their appearance and Zuckerbook™ profile, while simultaneously showing the entire life history of every user hovering above their heads, making the entire line of questioning irrelevant
people in Melbourne regularly ask me where I am from, which causes a slight degree of difficulty if I answer “Melbourne”.
the real question is “tell me your life story and the saga of your ancestors”, but you know I’m just trying to buy socks in this exchange.
Having forgotten his Discourse Keyboard, the owl struggled to explain that the native range of Tyto Alba includes all of Australia and Tasmania, but the nuance of his argument was interpreted as little more than a confusing series of hoots by his interlocutors. After refusing an offer of a small rodent, he retreated to his apartment in frustration, tiny owl socks unpurchased.
People make this assumption at times in the United States as well, depending on accent, frequency of tourists and international students matching the general appearance in the area, local demographics, etc.
I suspect the deeper version will die off as visible race is turned into fashion near the end of the century.
> in which soup is defined as referring to a weighted cluster of objects, both real and uninstantiated, which is socially negotiated between communicators, reaching an overlapping mutual understanding which does not include cereal with milk
I wish there were a conservative party anywhere that was conservative in the sense of ‘it rarely gets the computer working to smash it and also it rarely gets the country working to smash it, our policies will all be reversible and tested before they are scaled up and we will treasure and reinforce stabilizing institutions like the courts and good diplomatic relations with our neighbors’.
“We’re going to test this incrementally” is an admission to the clueless public that you think you might be wrong. It’s a very smart view, because given the history of politics there is a reasonably high probability of being wrong, but the political rivals will jump all over it instantly.
Hey anon, I’m so sorry that that’s a fear you’ve had to live with. I know that trans people are at greater risk of violence and suicide, and I’ve heard people say many times that the life expectancy of trans people (or trans women, or trans women of color, depending on who you ask) is anywhere from 23 to 35. Your ask troubled me, so I’ve dug deep looking for solid evidence of any of these, and I don’t believe that these statistics are true.
A trans woman, Helen, looked into the “23 years” claim and traced it back to someone’s notes on two workshops at a 2007 conference, which stated that trans people’s life expectancy is “believed to be around 23” (emphasis mine) but cites no actual source. This claim has been presented as fact in many news articles since then, but as far as I can tell, no one seems to know where this figure came from.
Another claim is often sourced to an Argentine psychologist quoted in this NPR article:
Psychologist Graciela Balestra, who works closely with the transgender community, says it’s an especially vulnerable population.
“Transgender people have an average life expectancy of about 30 to 32 years,” Balestra says. “They don’t live any longer; I think that statistic alone says so much.”
But again, the article gives no source for this figure.
I found an article claiming that a 2014 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) “concludes the average life expectancy of trans people in the Western Hemisphere is between 30-35 years.” However, when I tracked down the report, An Overview of Violence Against LGBTI Persons (pdf), its only reference to this is (emphasis mine): “[T]he IACHR has received information that the life expectancy of trans women in the Americas is between 30 and 35 years of age.” Again, this is no source.
Someone said on my post that these statistics may have come from the NCTE/NGLTF report Injustice at Every Turn (pdf), but I can’t find any reference to any such claim in the report.
Thinking about these claims, they seem unlikely for some basic reasons. Consider that we simply don’t have a long enough span of data on trans people, and that what data we do have is extremely limited because we can’t always know who is trans and who isn’t. Consider also that, although obviously the murder rates for trans people are extremely high, the number of deaths of 20-something trans people would have to be ENORMOUS to offset the existence of older trans people and bring the average down to 30. Especially since, unlike with racial groups for example, the data on trans people would likely include almost no childhood deaths, simply because it would be much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to identify these children as trans. And since we know that trans women of color are extremely disproportionately affected by violence, statistics that include white people and/or trans men would be especially unlikely to be so low.
And as to your specific situation anon, again given that trans women of color are most at risk, I don’t think we have reason to believe that being non-binary specifically puts a person at anywhere near this level of increased risk of dying young.
I don’t say any of this to question anyone’s experiences or to deny the state of emergency that trans women face with regard to violence. That is very real. But I think it can be harmful, even dangerous to trans people to spread claims like this around, especially without evidence. Expecting to die by 30 would take an extreme emotional toll on anyone, and trans people deserve better.
But don’t take my word for it: FORGE, a national transgender anti-violence organization that works with trans survivors of sexual assault, wrote the following in its 2016 publication “First Do No Harm: 8 Tips for Addressing Violence Against Transgender and Gender Non-Binary People” (pdf) (I have moved two footnotes into the main text and provided links to some endnote sources; italicized emphasis is theirs while bold is mine.):
Promote Hope for the Future
It certainly is not the same as a murder, but publicizing a low “life expectancy” rate for transwomen of color is another way to steal away their future, a “crime” that has been committed repeatedly by trans, LGBQ, and mainstream press. Think about the people you know or have heard of who have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and given a short time to live: how many of them have enrolled in college, undertaken lengthy training for a new occupation, had a new child, or tried to establish a new non-profit? A few do, certainly, but many more focus on their bucket list, arrange for their good-byes, or simply give up entirely, essentially relinquishing whatever time they have left to depression and regrets. When we tell transwomen of color they cannot expect to live very long, we rob them of hope. We rob them of any motivation to invest in themselves, their relationships, and their communities. We rob them, in short, of their lives even while they are still living. (This statement in no way negates the need to systemically work to improve and increase the life expectancy of trans people through working to end transphobia, racism, poverty, pervasive violence, and health and healthcare inequities, and more.)
One trans woman of color was trying to come to grips with an estimated lifespan figure more than ten years shorter than the one that has been published most often. (We are not repeating any of the (incorrect) estimated lifetime figures that are circulating, to avoid even inadvertent reinforcement.) Faced with the report of yet another attack on another trans woman, she wrote:
These days, I look at the latest reports of stabbed, shot, beaten trans women, search myself for tears, and I cannot find a thing. I want to mourn and rage. I want to honor all of our sisters — the hundreds each year who are ripped, namelessly and without fanfare, from this life — who are taken so young before their time. But the grief and anger — even empathy — do not come. I don’t feel anything but numbness and fatigue, and somewhere far below that, fear.
The terrible irony of the life expectancy “fact” is that it is based on an impossibility. The only ways to determine a given population’s life expectancy are to: examine decades or more of death certificates or census data containing the information being studied, or follow a specific set of individuals for around 100 years and record every single death. There is not and never has been a census of transgender people. Our death certificates do not mark us as transgender. There has been no 100-year-long study of a representative group of trans people. So where are the estimated lifespan figures coming from?
FORGE tracked the most commonly-cited figure back to what was most likely the 2014 Philadelphia Transgender Health Conference, where a workshop presenter gave the figure and explained she had calculated it by averaging the age of death for all of those listed on the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) website. This means the figure is actually the average age of those trans people who were both murdered and came to the attention of someone who added them to the TDOR list. Interestingly, this average is very close to the average age of everyone who is murdered in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics. [I’m not seeing an average age given in the cited source but you can see on page 5 of this Bureau of Justice Statistics report (pdf) that the average age of homicide victims in the U.S. was between 30 and 35 from 1980 to 2008.]
But not everyone is murdered.
Despite how many there may appear to be, only a tiny, tiny fraction of transpeople are killed by other people. Most of us, transwomen of color included, live average lifespans and die of the most common U.S. killers — heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and unintentional injuries (accidents).
Please don’t add to fear and hopelessness by spreading inaccurate and profoundly disempowering data.
Since I can’t respond to everyone directly, I’m @ing some people who’ve brought this up on my post and may be interested: (urls removed after posting for their privacy). I appreciate your thoughtfulness in bringing this to my attention. If you or anyone else has a source on any of these figures that can provide specific methodology, I’d be very grateful to see that.
In closing, here are some resources that provide a more hopeful view of trans aging. They are well known but I hope they will be helpful to someone.
It’s very interesting that STEM bros worship men like Einstein, hail him as a god among men, but entirely ignore his economic views … like how he was a socialist … lmao.
Are you suggesting they admire him for his contributions to physics, which is his field, but not his economics, which is not his field? Maybe I should go ask the world’s most cited economists particle physics questions - after all, Hollywood said all scientists are supergenius generalists, and would Hollywood ever lie to us?
As far as advice from right-wing reactionaries goes, “if you’re feeling sad, go work out” is pretty good. Certainly beats “we need to bring back the monarchy”.
“My nation, why would I care for that? I was only born there!”
And raised there. And educated there. And cultured there.
You’ll defend yourself? You and what army?
Oh, you don’t have an army. The country does. Fancy that.
“How ignorant,” you say, to want to defend or identify with the place with people like you, who speak your language, practice your culture, are bound together for the common welfare and common defense. You know, your home.
Not all homes are good homes, but that doesn’t make homes in general bad.
Nazi.
I did warn you, Slart, I am a time-travelling supervillain. There’s no excuse, really. It says so right in my blog description.
I don’t want to hear any complaints about how “it’s unethical” from you when I sell the last remnants of the Alt Right a serum that will enable them to become Entryist Ultranationalist Separatist Yakuts, starting the final break-up of the Russian Federation and the secession of Alaska from the Union. Reviving continent-spanning superstates from the future doesn’t come cheap, you know.
@argumate: “Autism is primarily caused by anime.”
You’re shitposting, but the reverse causality and a selection effect (because anime telegraphs emotions like the landing strip for an aircraft carrier) for unusual neurotypes are entirely possible.
“My nation, why would I care for that? I was only born there!”
And raised there. And educated there. And cultured there.
You’ll defend yourself? You and what army?
Oh, you don’t have an army. The country does. Fancy that.
“How ignorant,” you say, to want to defend or identify with the place with people like you, who speak your language, practice your culture, are bound together for the common welfare and common defense. You know, your home.
Not all homes are good homes, but that doesn’t make homes in general bad.
That doesn’t mean it’s necessary to go to certain extremes, but if you don’t see the appeal of nations, if it looks like only flag-waving to you, you might be a fish breathing water and wondering about the validity of ponds.
Is not, practically, Atomic Individualism the idea that individual with culture X (N+1) behaves identically to individual with culture X (N)?
That proof by induction does not work. Culture is molecular, and what we care about is chemistry, not physics. Metaphorically, of course.
“Well if your culture is so strong it would survive-”
Let me get a baseball bat and smash that guy’s computer. If his computer is so strong, surely it will survive getting hit with a giant metal stick.
What’s that? Computers are complex and expensive and only strong in a sort of economic-utility sense that has nothing to do with physical strength?
Why gee, could it be when Nationalists are talking about the importance of culture, they aren’t talking about pure replicator power, but rather something that’s ‘strong’ more in an economic-utility and social technology sense?
Who would have possibly guessed that?
I’m not entirely against the idea of prisoners working on things - the question is, who benefits?
If exclusively the prisoners benefit and the state/corporations only benefit from a resulting reduction in crime, then it does not encourage high levels of incarceration.
If corporations or the state legislators benefit, it encourages high levels of not only emotionally-punishing but also counter-productive imprisonment that harm not only inmates, but also most everyone else who isn’t a crony.
Or at least have them training rescue dogs or repairing fire-fighting equipment or something that is more like a charitable social good.
I mean, if we had prisoners farming vegetables that were only served to the prisoners at the prison, I don’t know if it would reduce recidivism, but no one would be giving kickbacks for it!
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
Am I a Rationalist? Hmn. Anyhow, Actually, banning the literally demented and the literally delusional from voting would improve voting quality. The reason it isn’t done is because political operatives, who are terrible people, would immediately begin trying to classify all opposition as either senile or demented regardless of whether they actually are. (See also: how ‘gently’ politicals have handled the word “Nazis”.) This does not hold in the case of children, as there is a fairly defensible line which is applied to all children, and thus political operatives cannot race to classify all their enemies as children in order to disqualify them.
So no, don’t let the children vote.
Not even for school board? Schools have basically no incentive to value students’ day-to-day interests and so will do stuff like block every bloglike website even during lunch hours.
Then again, student-elected officials decided to host lunch concerts and put loudspeakers by the library windows close enough to shake them.
Not even for the school board, but gradually increasing levels of democracy, like gradually increasing levels of alcohol, might be appropriate in some way.
When I was a teenager, I campaigned against my high school’s ban on digital audio players, which were not actually a problem. The question is, how do you separate out high schoolers doing away with bad restrictions and high schoolers doing the school equivalent of looting the national treasury (in this case, running at cross-purposes to education)?
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
Am I a Rationalist? Hmn. Anyhow, Actually, banning the literally demented and the literally delusional from voting would improve voting quality. The reason it isn’t done is because political operatives, who are terrible people, would immediately begin trying to classify all opposition as either senile or demented regardless of whether they actually are. (See also: how ‘gently’ politicals have handled the word “Nazis”.) This does not hold in the case of children, as there is a fairly defensible line which is applied to all children, and thus political operatives cannot race to classify all their enemies as children in order to disqualify them.
So no, don’t let the children vote.
It’s not defensible though. Children make up like 25% of the population but get no voice. That undermines the concept of consent of the governed.
Oh right, some people still believe that government is justified by such concepts instead of its effectiveness at delivering benefits to the national population.
It’s “defensible” in the sense that it isn’t going to be constantly moved around by Republicans and Democrats fighting each other.
I’d be more inclined to agree with you if most children were sinesalvatorem as children, but they aren’t. Children are largely ignorant. Often, the part of the brain responsible for evaluating long-term outcomes is literally underdeveloped in children. It isn’t their fault, but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a net reduction in voter quality - and even more constant political brainwashing aimed at children than is currently aimed at them.
Additionally, by the “consent of the governed” logic, children are also not responsible for the government and therefore are not valid targets in war. Let children vote, and this status is lost.
Now you’ll say “but we let incredibly ignorant people vote” as if this weren’t a lesser evil in comparison to having politicals write knowledge tests which exclude only their political enemies, or not letting the conditions of the ignorant in society risk a backlash for politicians so that there is at least some incentive not to destroy them.
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are rationalists so impenetrable?
I’m saying let children vote.
Am I a Rationalist? Hmn. Anyhow, Actually, banning the literally demented and the literally delusional from voting would improve voting quality. The reason it isn’t done is because political operatives, who are terrible people, would immediately begin trying to classify all opposition as either senile or demented regardless of whether they actually are. (See also: how ‘gently’ politicals have handled the word “Nazis”.) This does not hold in the case of children, as there is a fairly defensible line which is applied to all children, and thus political operatives cannot race to classify all their enemies as children in order to disqualify them.
So no, don’t let the children vote.
“Women Less Responsible,” the headline read.
“For what?” She asked, looking over the newspaper.
“Black People More Likely,” the newspaper headlines continued.
so yeah, the period of craziness that lasted from 1900 to 1990 was basically the old empires getting broken down and turned into ethnocentric nation states.
the period of craziness we are in now involves trying to cobble together empires again now that they have a complete lack of popular credibility.
Would you care to expand on this?
WWII ended with all the people that had moved around across Europe and Asia being put back neatly inside the borders of ethnic nation states, so all the Germans pushed out of Poland and Czechwhatever back into Germany, Japanese out of Korea, and of course formation of modern state of Israel.
Shortly afterwards the European empires dissolved and lost their colonies in Africa, India, and Indo-China, although not without another fight.
Then the Soviet Empire fractures and Yugoslavia breaks up into a handful of states with a new one added every few years.
To some extent this process is still continuing, with separatist Kurds and Basques and Catalans and even Scots and Welsh (!) and Cornish (!!!) groups all agitating for their own ethnic states.
At the same time you have clumsy attempts to create a new European empire in the form of the EU, an empire without an emperor, nothing but bureaucrats and technobabble that no one believes in, devoid of any legitimacy.
Britain, France, Germany, Japan, all used to be actual empires, now they are not. The Ottomans had an empire, Turkey does not. Russia and China used to be empires, remained empires under Communism, now they are both ethnic nation states struggling to digest their minority populations.
South Korea exports TV dramas, not an empire. Israel exports weapons, not an empire. France has nuclear weapons, not an empire.
Is Argumate a White Nationalist?
- BuzzHuff News, 2018
00!me: characters in books are made up people
01!me: characters in books work like mathematics with algorithms designed by the author and won’t be as complex or intelligent as actual people
02!me: characters in books are abstractions made by authors to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of readers to extract money and political ends from readers
03!me: characters in books are people-ish; the brain is lazy and actually good at running “people” programs
galactic buddha brain: people are characters in books
The next one is something about tulpas, right?
A decent person recognizes that anti-social behavior – yes, even murder – is a problem stemming from the hierarchical organization of our society, as well as individual relationships between human beings. The solutions to this behavior lie in changing society in such a way that creates an atmosphere of complete freedom in complete solidarity, and attempting to mend relationships between individuals and groups as best as possible.
now I’m an eternal optimist, but.
As yes, complete freedom and complete solidarity at the same time. All we have to do is just presume everyone is identical, and-