Drivebyhaiku
@Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
- Comment on Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much 3 days ago:
I believe what you are referring to is Communism. Let us divorce at least the name of a singular man from a body of work that by your own admission is made up of a number of different writers on the subject just as the elaborations on Newtonian Physics is considered also a part but not whole of Classical Mechanics.
The reductions of bodies of political thought to singular authors is often used to exclude others. Very often on this platform I am told that I am not a Socialist because I am not a Marxist simply because he simply coined a term to a body of thought that predated him and extended far beyond him so why should I extend to Marx the authorial intent by the political realm of thought baring his name? If you said you were a Maoist or a Leninist or a Chavezist would I not conclude that you are in agreement with their very specific realms of their personal philosophy?
- Comment on Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much 3 days ago:
If you are saying gender equality is Marxist then I am guessing you haven’t read much Marx friend. Marx was very about women being relegated to traditional gender roles and was more about whole “seperate spheres of excellence” thing. You are thinking more of the likes of Saint Simone and Robert Owen’s Owenites.
Feminist scholarship has tried to adapt Marx by stripping out the veiws about women and applying his rhetoric more unilaterally but that’s not his text and quite frankly there are other contemporary philosophers and movement leaders which did it better.
There is this habit to slap the name Marxist on a the most idealized reads of the work and call it his because he’s the name people know and the few well known political labels on the far left or because people who have claimed the label of his movement after his death decided to non-canonically add to his work- but I personally wish that people could normalize other schools of leftist philosophy and not treat Marx particularly as the magnet that all of us will inevitably be drawn to or attribute stuff to him that he doesn’t particularly deserve. Marxism as a sort of brand name philosophy is misleading and disappointing to those who read his work and find that their ideals aren’t actually well represented there.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 1 week ago:
Gunna take this as Liberal/Conservative as party brand names rather than strict social ideology and you’re talking about “the left” more generally.
I think the short answer is empathy. When you dig down to the bottom a lot of the discussion on the left talks about different forms of human needs. A need to feel accepted and loved, desires to exist publicly without fear… It is a radical form of empathy that asks you to put yourself in multiple pairs of shoes and see the world through perspectives you aren’t naturally born into. The ultimate aim is to achieve a picture of humanity which is inclusive of the widest possible range of understanding.
In that way “Conservatives” are also people. It is not impossible to empathize with their issues. It takes a lot cognitively to internalize this new data and a lot of the rejection from the right comes not from outright cruelty but a desire for things to be and remain simple and easy. They don’t want to stretch themselves and are scared of a world where that is something they are forced to do. The issue is a lot of the people selling the pitchforks on that side are doing it because it benefits them. That desire to understand encompasses the motives of individual Conservatives and splits them apart. A lot of the issues Conservatives have is that the left is “preachy” that we act like we’re better than them and that does come from somewhere. Some leftists do just want to be the smartest most correct person in the room but others are just waiting for the Conservatives they know to be more understanding of other people who they learned about so they stop being mean. The person who pitties the school bully is often their target because that empathy seems to the bully like condescension.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 week ago:
Uh… Was this in response to the right post? I am not vegan nor do I wish to be and I never mentioned anything about rice and beans…
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 week ago:
Half my social circle has gone vegan at this point and I think a lot of the anti-vegan sentiments is people don’t like modifying their behaviour to give up their own comfort even when they know something is distressing to someone else. Since a lot of vegans see a very real cruelty that they are generally powerless to stop and other people do not understand their reactions to seeing other people participate in cruelty is often to feel very sad. Since so much of human culture surrounds shared meals having a vegan takes a lot of options off the table entirely and alters other people’s options even when they don’t intend to.
Like it’s not a matter of “well we’ll go to your vegetarian restaurant this time and next time we go to a place I’m excited to go” for those of us who care about our friends being upset we basically rarely pick our first choices and more often sacrifice things we are excited for in the name of someone else’s comfort. It can be a love language to find restaurants and eat the things on the menu that don’t exactly thrill you but other times you just want to have that selfish Birthday dinner where you don’t feel compelled to pick a restaurant for someone else.
I think a lot of people reject veganism more forcefully because they don’t want to have to participate in that sort of friction. All it takes is one ethical vegan to completly change a friend groups food culture. Even when they bring their own food and try not to make a big deal and mask it not bothering them when they see meat being consumed people are generally compelled to care for people they know and ignoring someone’s distress isn’t showing care. When people ratchet up the social cost of veganism they are more often than not trying to engineer a social sphere where they do not feel callous, don’t have to give up what they like and don’t have to do any additional research work or social calculations .
- Comment on Boring ass planet 1 week ago:
Really? I was thinking ping pong due to the lack of luster…
- Comment on Choose your difficulty 1 week ago:
Seems to be an all round rubric partially political (more than a little based in Eurocentric standard) partially wilderness in which case Australia does kind of have BC beat. Like yes… We have moose grizzlies and wolverine but those are a pretty rare eldrich horror to stumble across. We don’t really have mouse-pocolypses, or dinnerplate sized crawlies that randomly just show up in our houses… And our critters are all round less venomous.
Like I grew up in a forestry household. Off trail can get spooky as fuck. But for a lot of the main points like exposure and microbial issues which is pretty much a problem everywhere we rank fairly tame. Most of our snakes and bugs are chill with highly survivable bites, our deserts are pretty temperate but in most of the heavily forested areas there’s a lot of foragables if you know what to look for and most of our big predators are easily scared off.
- Comment on Choose your difficulty 1 week ago:
I don’t think we’re talking about wilderness in general… But housing and grocery prices are not particularly easy either.
- Comment on Pick! 4 weeks ago:
Well obviously not then. But one would be enough to gaslight my friends.
- Comment on Pick! 4 weeks ago:
Backflips. Never been the least bit athletic aside from my lifting strength and endurance. Just to surprise the everliving hell out of my friends and then never do so again without ever offering an explanation.
- Comment on Does anyone speak hairdresser? I need help communicating. 5 weeks ago:
There is no true answer to the Tao of hair. I gave up and went around to hair dressers and said "Do whatever you like " until I found the one who made me look good. Now my hair looks amazing like 95% of the time and the remaining 5% is the occasional “just trying a thing” that becomes a temporary conversion piece.
I realized I do not actually know what I want. To believe such was mearly ego. I am going to people who have better trained aesthetic sensibilities, why should I, someone who has no sensibility direct them? I am but a canvas, a scruffy Tabula Rasa.
The DIY though is undoubtedly more cost effective…
- Comment on Dollar stores are shutting down across America. They did this to themselves 5 weeks ago:
Maybe this is an opportunity for the return of the family owned convenience store?
- Comment on The United States of America, but for Trans People 5 weeks ago:
Yeah no… They have bathroom bills that require you to have appropriate sex change documents. It’s one of the spots bathroom gestapo check your papers. Also trans care for youth has been banned and 4 anti trans bills have passed in the 1st quarter of 2024…Utah ain’t safe gov’ner.
- Comment on How many times will I tell you? 2 months ago:
I mean, considerate of you and all but maybe this is just my chaos sitzpinkler enby opinion but if you get into the habit of checking the toilet for a second beforehand because you don’t expect it to be reset for your specific needs this doesn’t happen.
I never expect people to put the seat down for me nor do I expect to put the seat up for them as both require the same amount of effort to rejig the toilet seat and it cannot be counted on who will be using the bathroom next. This feels a little bit “holding the door open for the lady” courtesy. A weird holdover gendered etiquette expectation for folks who stand and pee that just hasn’t been re-examined.
- Comment on Which one are you? 2 months ago:
Okay so weird battery story. Long story short tools were stolen and replaced all my shit with the cheapest garbage I could get away with until I could reinvest peicemeal…
Got a shitty Black and Decker drill. Drill of course was not great but was mostly for drywall and wood at the time so it was enough… That thing’s battery was god tier. Like I know it wasn’t under super heavy load but I used the shit out of that thing and maybe charged it once every 2 months when most batteries in a drill might last me a week if it’s not a heavy use situation. Never seen anything like it.
Eventually the actual drill died like 5 years on the job but right up til the end that battery never quit. I almost miss the thing now even though I caught flack for having such a shit brand. But knowing what is possible made me wonder what the hell was in that thing. Magic? Uranium? Was it the shit drill just ran on damn near nothing? All of the above?
Maybe planned obsolescence is a truth in power tool batteries…
- Comment on Someone help me make a 'transition metals' joke here... 2 months ago:
Come on bud, be a proper alloy!
- Comment on I'm a US citizen, people in other countries, what do you think when you read stories like these about the US health care system? 2 months ago:
I regularly fear for the Americans I have connected to since the days of covid stretched my group of friends more into online spaces.
One got beaten to shit by a bad boss when he tried to retrieve his tips. All at once he had injuries that kept him out of work, mental trauma and legitimate fear for his safety that meant he couldn’t return to his job but also because work and insurance are tied down there he was in an immediate precarity. He couldn’t return to work, the cops showed active disinterest in helping him press charges and his hospital bills blew through his savings… And because he had technically quit there was no EI safety net either.
I was struck so hard by the dystopian nature of it all. There is so much under the Canadian system which is just never a factor. I didn’t realize how free I actually was because I had never tied my considerations of my health to what job I chose or whether I was unemployed. I was used to my medical services bill just being this tiny expense I had set to autopay that was so small I didn’t even have to think about. They don’t even charge that any more.
All I ever had to do to get help was ask and it was freely given. I had no cause to ever question exactly how much of a blessing… How much of a privilege… that actually was.
- Comment on English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense 2 months ago:
He is an interesting literary figure. And in personal opinion quite frankly kind of a hack. You got to appreciate the audacity of someone who tries to use “Dost” nearly two centuries out of date and then just out of the blue makes up wholesale complete words from scratch to fit iambic pentameter.
I love his stuff don’t get me wrong but he wasn’t exactly highbrow entertainment of his day. Still his early modern English is easily legible. Chaucer’s middle english is distinctly more garbled and if you go back to your Old English where these terms originate it’s like trying to read another language entirely. Like this is technically English :
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.
- Comment on English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense 2 months ago:
Shakespeare was known to use archaic language for his plays but by his time this was largely codified into what we would recognize as modern usage. You are thinking of old English. It also goes beyond just man (used more or less like we would use the word human) , other gendered words originally had specific meaning independent of gender. You also got it a bit backwards. Wifman is female, wereman is male. Others include.
Boy : knave or troublemaker
Girl : Neutral word for young child. Basically like “kid”
- Comment on Christians think gay people are trying to convert them to being gay *because Christians try to convert people to being Christian*. 2 months ago:
Your “multiple studies of kids showing that they revert naturally before the age of 18” were all conducted in the 70’s dude. Non acceptance from a community is very good at creating closeted individuals. We do what we do to try and be happy, if we are routinely physically and socially punished for being who we are we do revert to walking the path of least resistance to survive but it is a hard and miserable path. Here’s a study more updated that flips numbers on it’s head. Around 95 percent of trans kids who socially transition these days are consistent in their identities over the 5 years of the study. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9936352/#:~:….
Also you’re treating this healthcare as experimental and new but it’s decently far along. Puberty blockers are the newest addition to the tool kit but they were approved for use after extensive research trials over 30 years ago and principles of their safety of use were based on observations from naturally stalled puberties and endocrinology data of hormonal insensitivity disorders…and we’ve been using them for trans kids pretty much right from the beginning so the first paitents are in their 40’s now. There is data that the puberty blocker process is imperfect but like any medical advancement there are nessisary fine tunings of treatment. It’s not a set it and forget it situation. We know the endocrinologist check ins and scans need to keep coming and the risk assessment for a paused puberty needs to be a carefully routinely updated thing with suspension of treatment being a viable option if things don’t go well…but removing the option from the medical feild entirely and refusing to keep working to develop its safety efficacy further and isn’t going to make overall treatment outcomes better for patients.
This lie that doctors are slapdash and haphazard in trans healthcare is nothing but fabrication. It requires a panel of a psychologist, social worker, pediatrician and endocrinologist the child and the child’s legal guardians to sign off on any medical interventions and they have to do their research first to meet a determined burden of proof that interventions are nessisary and they make it a pretty high bar… At 16 there’s very limited number of things available and any surgeries made available are also available to cis kids. If a 16 year old teen wants a breast reduction it doesn’t matter if their trans or not they just need parental approval. Hormonal transition requires a lot more sign off than that. If a parent doesn’t sign off then the kid can’t make their own medical choices until after 18. The system is designed to mitigate risks and yes a lot of the outcomes for trans paitents are markedly better when they can more effortlessly pass as their gender because you avoid a lot of social shunning and hate when your transness is invisible to the public.
Our society creates a catch 22 senario for trans people where segements of society demand that a person isn’t actually a viable member of their gender unless they can show medical documentation they’ve transitioned… And they treat non-binary trans masc and trans femme non medical coping strategies as being less legitimate. If you are trying to navigate a situation where you require coping strategies to deal with experiencing daily body horror and you deny people the use of mental only coping mechanisms they are not going to veiw mental only coping mechanisms a reasonable solve. Telling us that one option to deal with our problems is self harm and then making fun of or dismissing the other as “social contagion” and treating us as a different kind of problem is basically just telling us that you think permanent misery should be our only option.
If you REALLY want to lessen the pressures on trans people to medically transition your move is not to clamp down on medical options… It’s to make non-binary physical presentations and safe rewarding social transitions a more viable option by offering greater levels of social acceptance. The whole “Well I will never accept you as a ____. Because physically you are not” behavior does nothing but add fuel to a dysphoria and injure a trans person’s ability to exist comfortably in a social sphere. Cis people make an equal fuss about pronouns as they do surgeries. There’s zero empathy. Faced with that we are just going to try harder to physically hide from you so you can’t visually pick us out of a crowd using whatever means we have.
Social contagion and the likes of Abagail Shrier is a discredited myth. At best the very shallow end of non-binary transness might be represented but that is basically “I like it when people make a big assumptions of me based around my sexual characteristics” which is kind of just a reasonable response to sexism. The actual euphoria /dysphoria body and culture related stuff isn’t something you are going to catch… And framing medical transition in terms of self harm is gross. What people feel and ultimately choose to do with their bodies is something individually very cautiously considered. Treating the matter as though they are defacing a public owned good or resource is just projection. Your values regarding your sexual organs and physical characteristics are not universal. You do not have to live their lives, their choices are not your business so please stay in your lane.
Lastly, people tell trans kids they are loved because as people we are routinely framed by hostile cis people as a logistical problem. Telling kids they are a problem tends to drive them inside themselves and creates a sense of isolation. A lot of kids growing up, not just trans kids already generally think that people won’t miss them if they just disappear because they are a burden or a problem. The youngest trans kid I know right now is seven… And they have already had peers their age tell them to their face that they should kill themself. When I was growing up the “weird kid” I wanted to die but I knew my family wouldn’t recover from that so I didn’t. It isn’t that kids are doing this to be lavished with attention. I can tell you that the experience of myself and every trans person I know is that people making any kind of big deal about us based on our genders positive or negative just makes you feel like an outsider. People harping on about how “strong” you are for being visible generally just comes across as pulling more attention to things we just want people to treat as so normal it’s beneath commentary. That young trans person I know today struggles because they are closeted at school not wanting to stick out from the crowd because they fear the potential unwanted fuss and can only be themselves at home. I am partially closeted at work partially because it will negatively impact my hiring chances between gigs and partially because onboarding new people into understanding non-binary transness and using correct pronouns is exhausting. Having everyone take their trans hot takes to you or asking invasive questions about your life experiences while you have shit on the docket to do quite frankly sucks.
Your understanding of trans people isn’t based on first hand or even second hand knowledge of our experience or from empathy towards our situations. It’s in the framework of us being a “problem”.
A problem of your convenience an "I shouldn’t have to change my behaviour to make someone else’s life easier “.
A logistical problem a " we shouldn’t have to make concessions or changes as a society for the benefit of the few”.
A mental problem “They are delusional or mentally ill and we shouldn’t listen to what they say they need.”
A medical problem “Well they shouldn’t have access to the system because they take up resources or are doing themselves harm”.
A visual problem “They are ugly and I should not have to see them”
An authority problem “I as a parent ahould have control of my child at all times”
All of this framework doesn’t hold ANY solutions for us. They hold solutions for you so you just don’t have to interact, think of or see us… and that is no way to live.
- Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content 4 months ago:
Law is a funny beast. Lots of people do things which are illegal all the time and get away with it because you basically have to assert your right to be protected by law to sort of activate it. Like someone yelling at me that they are going to kill me while I am out in public is technically a form of assult. , I can call the authorities and get them to assist me to make sure they don’t follow through and to get them to stay the hell away from me but chances are I am not going to seek restitution in court for something that small because I would have to press charges, seek and pay for legal council, everything would need to be processed to make sure the law is being properly handled at all points of the arrest and the punishment would likely be fairly trifling for all my troubles.
Private entities already basically have the imperitive to determine what is permissible on their platforms. Freedom of speech is not practiced under the auspices of substack. They are allowed to kick you out for whatever the heck they want (some exceptions applying) because they own that space. To remove posts as threats a judge would have to go through each individual one, source it, bring the original commenter into court and go through due process with every single user to check it against their local jurisdiction’s laws for threats and the likely outcome would just be small fines and community service… The juice would not be worth the squeeze.
- Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content 4 months ago:
A lot of the time people have this conversation from the perspective of the person who has no horse in the race. They aren’t a Nazi, nor are a target of Nazis. It ignores the people who are effected.
Imagine you are in a space and someone posts a death threat targeting you. Others rally around that as any censorship is bad censorship. Every time you use that space you get a reminder of how someone particularly wants you dead. Now imagine that becomes just a regular part of your day. Over and over and over again you are exposed to people smugly calling you less than human, a threat to society, a moraless degenerate. You get this nice cold shock whenever you see it and get to remember how vulnerable you are, how gleeful these calls to take your rights away for something you never opted into and can’t opt out of… And you are expected to take whatever anxiety is sown in you as just normal. That burden of people gleefully discussing your death just gets to be a part of your everyday. To others looking at you dealing with that burden it is treated as tolerable level of permanent unhappiness. It’s simply not supposed to be other people’s problem. You may not ask for assistance with managing those burdens because the cost of societies “tolerance” for speech has decided that you must personally pay for everyone’s unrestricted discourse.
Then there’s the other half. Say I create a platform. Maybe I am running a print shop. I maintain it, run it, and think that I am doing society a service for facilitating a means to communicate. I find out someone has been printing death threats at my shop. Maybe they are even death threats towards someone I know. How would I feel knowing someone is taking the resources I manage, using the infrastructure I maintain to specifically terrorize someone? This person printing these death threats made ME complicit in spreading their death threat so that someone in the above example gets to feel unsafe as they go about their day. In fact, spreading death threats is a crime. Should I not be allowed to refuse to take their business?
We as a society have the ability to differentiate between death threats and other political discourse. Calling for a genocide of a group of people - is a death threat. It may not be directed at a singular person but lemme tell you when you are the target it feels like it might as well be calling on you by name.
- Comment on Common Voice - Donate your voice to teach machines how people speak | Mozilla 5 months ago:
Technically there are different dialects and a lot of unique slang, idioms and specific descriptive words.
In the trans and non-binary community for instance there’s a lot of terms regarding how people identify and express themselves that unless you know the actual function of how they work aren’t easily indistinguishable from slurs to outsiders. Take “Femboy” and (please forgive me mods) “Shemale”. The former is a perfectly socially acceptable description of a guy (cis or otherwise) whose gender expression is very feminine…the latter is a slur that places emphasis on the birth sex characteristics of a trans woman and implies heavily they are guys just pretending to be women and the term originates from the porn industry that fetishizes trans women.
You also have the usage of neo-pronouns. In languages with more gendered components than English sometimes what words are chosen either reflects the gender of the speaker or the person being addressed or objects can be given a gendered connotation. Some languages are actually very gendered and the usage non-binary folk using those languages make whole new conventions. English speakers whine a remarkable amount over they/them singular pronouns are confusing but ain’t seen nothing. A lot of places your job title and status has no neutral gendered term or culturally there are sentence structures that differ down entirely binary gender lines. Are you latino or latina? Guess we need a new word… Latinx!
- Comment on Reactionaries have you used the same talking points to shun progress throughout history. 5 months ago:
Conservatism the political stance isn’t exactly compatible with some aspects of “democratic” or egalitarian ideals. It would be more accurate to say that maybe you consider yourself less progressive but the main throughline of “Conservative” political philosophy since it’s establishment as “the right” has been one that has argued that power should not be entirely egalitarian and that the only the “right” people are the only ones who should weild authority. In a monarchist society it’s the nobility, in a post monarchist society it means the wealthy intelligencia or the landlords, in a capitalist society it favors the rich and business elite and in a facist society it favors an “us” as opposed to a “them”. Another feature is that It also tends to attempt to empower select individuals and focuses on expanding the executive command at the top.
While the right constantly apes the language of the left and it’s tactics regularly change when you lay open the very core of the thing it’s always got the same authoritarian objective. I posit that “conservative” meaning ‘not prone to excess’ and “Conservatism” the branch of politics really should stop being conflated at all as everyone and their dog believes that they are rational and not prone to excess and gives the false impression that one endorses the objectives of Conservatism. Since Conservatives thrive on the idea of being a moral majority depriving them of any notion that you actually endorse them is kind of nessisary to combat them.
- Comment on What were your top favorite video games as a kid? 5 months ago:
Played a lot of games… But the NES didn’t really have that many standouts for me. I could write an extensive list of games I played for a lot of hours but out of the raft of games there wasn’t many that particularly were a favorite more like a dichotomy of whether each bit of the list enjoyable and not. The SNES was definitely Super Mario RPG, Donkey Kong Country and Chronotrigger but it was the N64 that got me games that I replayed like crazy.
Zelda Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Super Smash Bros, Harvest Moon 64, Snowboard Kid’s 2 and Diddy Kong Racing made the top of that list. Those were fucking awesome games.
By the time I got a PS2 I was technically an adult and Nintendo never really recaptured my heart like it did when I was a kid. I have been a playstation loyalist since then but that N64 still has a spot in my basement.
- Comment on Why does it seem like women are more wont to make noise in sexual situations while men don't? 5 months ago:
Gender does give some unique insights to things though. When only one sex are the only ones looking at something, particularly something that has an effect in a psychology or physiology based thing it’s way easier to overlook a detail of something that they have never experienced. When science was the domain of almost exclusively men there were a lot of easily provable false things in regards to women and archeological finds that were just taken as gospel because nobody thought to prioritize or consider different perspectives. When you study a sex like they are an animal with no internal perspective, unique cultural expectations or values you make a lot of mistakes.
Like they never bothered mapping the internal structure of the clit until 1998. The internal structure is actually a lot bigger than you’d think.
- Comment on The Peasant Life 6 months ago:
This basically backs up what I have read on the subject. I feel like the disconnect comes from what we categorize as “work” often not counting stuff like making stuff for yourself and your own home, lessons, tasks you could do keeping your hands busy while you socialized or talked, housework and so on. Depending on time and place (mostly pre-enclosure) the time and production one owed their lord was relatively low in most places and did come with minor kickbacks. The church did keep a lot of proper holidays and Sunday as a sabbath was observed but again in a society that doesn’t really have things like regular sit and watch style entertainments a lot of the things you did on your days off did produce something.
There’s also a lot of times of year where one’s work in regards to food production was relatively easy and others that required a lot of physical push. The lack of regular steady illumination after dark due to scarcity of material for rushlights and candles did mean more technical downtime but the trade off is there being less options of entertainments one could do in the dark.
Also the amount of incredibly litigious peasants in England was some evidence that in places there were some protection and recourse for lordly overreach. Peasants had surprising rates of literacy in some places but they really didn’t use it to read or write for entertainment. They used to to fight for access to stuff.
It’s kind of a difficult task to have discussions about how much work a society in time regularly does because of the unstated assumptions everyone has. We are all primed to veiw our modern lives as more convenient where we live better because of all the things we are not on the hook making ourselves which lends to our current hyper specialization… But with that hyper specialization comes an odd stagnation. The way we work with sharp delinineations between what counts as “work appropriate” behaviour and social ones is fairly mentally taxing and not what our ancestors did. The amount of formal interpersonal communication required by our tasks is higher. The diversity of tasks we do regularly is less. The people we are expected to impress regularly with high outputs and not just meeting a fairly low bar quota are relatively new. The amount of time we work is inflexible to the amount of energy we have during different seasons with expectations being that we operate at a steady efficiency over the course of the year. The idea that the amount of hours per day one works is fixed regardless of what actually needs doing before we have free time is different. The amount of time we can do tasks after dark has altered how we as a society operate. Work has changed to be utterly unrecognizable between the eras. There’s definitely some bonuses like to stability of food supply and efficiency of output but there’s a lot we do now that really works against our own needs as creatures so it’s really difficult to compare what counts as “work” and what doesn’t.
- Comment on "Keep the legs closed!" 6 months ago:
Is not murdering someone painlessly before they even have the capacity for a single thought ethically better than forcing them into circumstances where everyone around them essentially wishes they were dead because at one end “They ruined my life by existing” or at the other they “are not my problem?”
It is natural to oppose someone if the option they put forward still has cruel outcomes.
- Comment on Men Overran a Job Fair for Women in Tech 7 months ago:
Oftentimes what these events actually are for is more about solidarity than recruitment. One of the issues with male dominated fields is that oftentimes they are exhausting to participate in when you are treated as an outsider. Having a community space where people can get together and talk shop, ask frank questions about culture from recruiters and gather strength from visibly seeing other people doing the same thing you do can give a sense of not being so alone.
That and a lot of women require a lot more data on how they compare before they feel like they are actually a viable candidate. They are sort of trained into an almost crippling idea of modesty and more social anxiety in general so a lot of them will only apply if they solidly fit the listed requirements. When they utilize a dialogue based recruitment space they can gain confidence that small missing bits of listed experience desired on their resume don’t fully discount them from being a candidate for a job and gets more of them to apply. Women lean on pack tactics more than men do so these sort of events actually fufill a lot of secondary objectives than just on the day hiring.
- Comment on If number of undiagnosed neurodivergent people proves to be significant potion, neurotypical means just people who won the standards war of communication protocol 7 months ago:
Yeah… I wish I could have that ignorance but trust me. These people exist out in the world and while they are more prevalent in some places than others they use that policing of language and the sort of “normalcy privilege” as a weapon. Take my hometown, right now there is a concerted effort by these people to influence the school board and town council decorum insisting the labels cis/hetero/allosexual and allistic should be treated as slurs and make their usage an offence for which one can be ejected from chambers or have their jobs threatened.
I know a lot of people in my community who have been challenged, even yelled at in public, in person by these people because they were overhead them using cis / het to describe either themselves or others in a private conversation that these people picked up on.
What these movements do is enforce a double standard on queer communities. There is a concerted effort to rob us of the language to refer to other states of being other than ours in ways that are judgement neutral. This often causes queer friendly scholarship to have to mince through ridiculous hoops making it much more difficult to sussinctly explain concepts which otherwise become much more arcane without the ability to use adjectives.
Trying to talk to these “cis is a slur” people it becomes very clear that they do not think there should be a word for them. Their existence is assumed correct, unremarkable and beyond the ability to comment on. Our existence however is controversial and thus deserves a derivative label.