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or what's a heaven for?

@jiskblr / jiskblr.tumblr.com

“WHAT IS THE CORRECT LEVEL OF INJUSTICE AT WHICH TO DECLARE YOURSELF IN REBELLION AGAINST THE POWER METING OUT JUDGMENT IN THE UNIVERSE?”

> It’s nonsensical to speak about preserving the freedom of a psychotic person! A psychotic person cannot be free because psychosis obliterates true freedom through the imposition of delusion and hallucination. […] This destroys every argument about personal freedom and choice, permanently and totally.

This is like a passage ripped from a monologue from the fascist villain of some dystopian horror story. “There is no need to preserve the freedom of the [neologistic slur for fictional underclass demographic], bc in their debasement they have no freedom to preserve in the first place.” Aristotle holding forth on the fitting position of natural slaves isn’t this blunt.

I don’t really it’s dignified to respond to this sort of statement. Once you’ve blinded yourself this totally to the natural human desire not to writhe in restless agony or lose your power of abstract thought or be restricted to life in a cage imo you’ve more or less outed yourself as an enemy of all ppl of good will; “he shows a corrupt mind.” All that’s fitting is to point and mock

It’s worth noting that Freddie De Boer is schizophrenic

He’s not saying “we need to cage up Those People” he’s saying “I would like it if I was put in cage & not let out till I’ve taken my meds, should I stop taking my meds”. 

Personally, I disagree with him, but he’s not making the argument that you’re acting like he’s making.

what? yes he is, he’s simply applying it to everyone including himself

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No, it’s clearly different.

“I have experienced this. From experience, psychosis takes away all the good things that being involuntarily committed takes away, and then some. Therefore, involuntary commitment is an improvement.” is a completely reasonable argument. Not fascist, not blind, not corrupt.

If you think he’s wrong, find other medicated psychotics to survey, and determine whether this is a common view of psychosis.

Because if he’s right about the experience, he’s right about the conclusion.

Well, he is by his own admission psychotic and therefore cannot be trusted to evaluate his circumstances or experiences rationally. Given that as a psychotic individual he is taking to the public square to incite acts of extrajudicial imprisonment and violence, he should probably be forcibly prevented from accessing the internet or speaking his mind

This is not an incursion on his freedom. He already has no freedom on which to incur

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Okay, now you’re just lying, pointlessly, about what other people believe and say. Cut it out.

> It’s nonsensical to speak about preserving the freedom of a psychotic person! A psychotic person cannot be free because psychosis obliterates true freedom through the imposition of delusion and hallucination. […] This destroys every argument about personal freedom and choice, permanently and totally.

This is like a passage ripped from a monologue from the fascist villain of some dystopian horror story. “There is no need to preserve the freedom of the [neologistic slur for fictional underclass demographic], bc in their debasement they have no freedom to preserve in the first place.” Aristotle holding forth on the fitting position of natural slaves isn’t this blunt.

I don’t really it’s dignified to respond to this sort of statement. Once you’ve blinded yourself this totally to the natural human desire not to writhe in restless agony or lose your power of abstract thought or be restricted to life in a cage imo you’ve more or less outed yourself as an enemy of all ppl of good will; “he shows a corrupt mind.” All that’s fitting is to point and mock

It’s worth noting that Freddie De Boer is schizophrenic

He’s not saying “we need to cage up Those People” he’s saying “I would like it if I was put in cage & not let out till I’ve taken my meds, should I stop taking my meds”. 

Personally, I disagree with him, but he’s not making the argument that you’re acting like he’s making.

what? yes he is, he’s simply applying it to everyone including himself

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No, it’s clearly different.

“I have experienced this. From experience, psychosis takes away all the good things that being involuntarily committed takes away, and then some. Therefore, involuntary commitment is an improvement.” is a completely reasonable argument. Not fascist, not blind, not corrupt.

If you think he’s wrong, find other medicated psychotics to survey, and determine whether this is a common view of psychosis.

Because if he’s right about the experience, he’s right about the conclusion.

Hey do you have identifying information on the constant US:UK crime ratio statistic on hand? I tried googling it, but I didn't find anything going back more than like 3 decades

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It's somewhere in the depths of my blog archive, probably over a decade ago now. I don't remember the precise sources.

For the most part you have to focus on murder, because if you go back before about 1900 murder's the only crime that's reliably tracked with enough precision to reasonably believe that you're capturing a predictable fraction of it. So if you're looking for sources directly, you'll probably want to search for comparative murder rates rather than comparative crime rates per se.

(We can be pretty sure we recorded around 90% of murders committed even in the 1600s, and the difference between 90% and 100% (or 80%) is not too bad. For a lot of other crimes we can model the problem and predict that, say, 30% of it was caught and recorded, but we don't know whether we really caught 10% or 50% or 80%, and the difference there is enough to drown out any possible signal. Murder was significant enough to be investigated reliably and recorded in judicial records almost always, so the noise is much less.)

I love it when characters are immune to psychic attacks/emotional manipulation magic/psychoactive drugs or whatever, but for DEEPLY mentally ill reasons.

Fear gas? I already have an anxiety disorder. Also you don't know the meaning of fear until you have a category 5 autism event in the middle of a social scene and know you'll get severely punished if you act out

Depression aura? Bitch I live an economically productive, nutritionally balanced and physically active life that other people rely on like this.

Haunted? How would my ADHD ass even know?

Pain machine? Hm. If your machine's "10/10" is my "4", I should probably talk to my doctor about better meds.

Oh, we're all mutually unintelligible? This is Tuesday with Autism and Audio Processing issues.

There's something very cathartic about a character facing down the horrors and laughing because the antagonist can't even get close to what they already live with.

It’s the darkly funny version of the “love potion doesn’t work on the person who’s already in love” trope.

Self-loathing potion doesn’t work on someone who beat you to it, villain! HA!

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wow pluto reclassification discourse is exhausting. here I thought doing a poll that highlights some of pluto's cool lesser known dwarf planet friends would put things in a context where it can't possibly go in that direction but nope a bunch people really do just hold a hard stance against a classification system entirely out of a sense of nostalgia

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"the planets" aren't this exclusive club where all the astronomers' favorite celestial bodies go. the definitions used in astronomy are descriptive, they refer to the dynamics between objects and the properties they have. if you feel bad that pluto isn't considered a planet anymore and think it should be an honorary planet anyway, good news! that is literally the reason why the category "dwarf planet" was created. it's for things that don't have the same type of role in the dynamics of the solar system as the eight major planets, but are still physically a lot like little planets

>>"the planets" aren't this exclusive club where all the astronomers' favorite celestial bodies go.

that's exactly what they are, and my favourite rock deserves to be counted amongst them.

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see what I'm talking about.

the set of celestial bodies the average astronomer thinks are cool is significantly larger than the nine planets you memorized in elementary school. if this were literally how it worked, there's no way the moon or europa or titan or ixion would have been excluded.

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A large fraction of astronomers don’t even agree with the reclassification. Biology, which is known for having extensive long-running arguments about classification, doesn’t change names on a narrow vote of the people who chose to show up to a conference. If there isn’t a comfortable supermajority on one side, they refer to it as disputed, as is right and proper, until such time as they reach agreement. Also, if you look at the history of astronomy (also here), until the 1920s moons and asteroids were classed as planets.

So, no, it’s pretty reasonable to stick with the old definition and still claim Pluto as a planet. It’s no more arbitrary than the official basis for judgment.

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Personally, I favor splitting it into (at least) two words - planets and worlds.

Worlds are celestial bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium - they include the major planets, the Moon, Ceres, Pluto, Eris and friends, the major moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Triton, and also the major moons of Uranus though apparently we’re not 100% sure of that. (NASA really ought to send a probe to Uranus. And I couldn’t keep a straight face while I wrote that, which is hopefully not why they haven’t yet.) This could add some other riders if that makes sense, and it might actually make sense to exclude gas giants here and have world defined such that it’s effectively equivalent to “the things that planetary geologists are interested in”. This is approximately equivalent to the Copernican-era definition of planet, and more or less matches common usage; see Wikipedia, emphasis added:

A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit of the Sun, smaller than any of the eight classical planets but still a world in its own right. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto.

Planets are bodies which orbit the Sun. This is the place to put the orbit-clearing condition, to filter out asteroids.

  • Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury are both planets and worlds.
  • The Moon, Io, Europa, Ceres, Pluto, Makemake, etc., are worlds but not planets.
  • Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are definitely planets but (depending on choices for defining ‘world’) may not be worlds.
  • Comets and asteroids are neither.

It would further be convenient to have a term for Sun-orbiting but non-clearing objects. ‘Planetoid’ seems most apt; ‘minor planet’ ought intuitively to be a subset of planets, and the point here is that they are not planets despite some planet-like characteristics. If so, then worlds can then be nicely divided into planetary/planet worlds, planetoid worlds, and moon worlds.

  • Things currently classified as planets are planetary worlds.
  • Things currently classified as dwarf planets are planetoid worlds.
  • The Moon, Io, Europa, etc. are world moons. Or moon worlds. I think the former sounds better, but the latter is more consistent. (Phobos, Deimos, and similar moons are nonworld moons.)

Comets and asteroids, including Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects we don’t know much about, are planetoids and nothing else.

These are grokkable, fairly crisp categories.

They all admit of easy modification to discuss exoplanets - exoworlds, exoplanetoids, exomoons, exoplanetoid worlds, etc.

They make it easy to describe changes of state over astronomical time - planetoids may become planets and vice versa (e.g. Neptune was large enough to clear its orbit for many millennia but had not actually done so; if we observed it at this time, we would call it a planetoid but might also say it is a “future planet”), and planetoids or even planets may be captured and become moons. Worlds do not, outside exceptional circumstances, cease to be worlds, nor become worlds except during formation. (The formation of our Moon was an exceptional circumstance.)

This captures most of the common intuitions about celestial bodies, preserves a category for The Big Ones (planet), includes a category for Ones Cool Enough For Us To Care (worlds), and seems frankly much easier to teach to children.

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wow pluto reclassification discourse is exhausting. here I thought doing a poll that highlights some of pluto's cool lesser known dwarf planet friends would put things in a context where it can't possibly go in that direction but nope a bunch people really do just hold a hard stance against a classification system entirely out of a sense of nostalgia

Avatar

"the planets" aren't this exclusive club where all the astronomers' favorite celestial bodies go. the definitions used in astronomy are descriptive, they refer to the dynamics between objects and the properties they have. if you feel bad that pluto isn't considered a planet anymore and think it should be an honorary planet anyway, good news! that is literally the reason why the category "dwarf planet" was created. it's for things that don't have the same type of role in the dynamics of the solar system as the eight major planets, but are still physically a lot like little planets

>>"the planets" aren't this exclusive club where all the astronomers' favorite celestial bodies go.

that's exactly what they are, and my favourite rock deserves to be counted amongst them.

Avatar

see what I'm talking about.

the set of celestial bodies the average astronomer thinks are cool is significantly larger than the nine planets you memorized in elementary school. if this were literally how it worked, there's no way the moon or europa or titan or ixion would have been excluded.

Avatar

A large fraction of astronomers don’t even agree with the reclassification. Biology, which is known for having extensive long-running arguments about classification, doesn’t change names on a narrow vote of the people who chose to show up to a conference. If there isn’t a comfortable supermajority on one side, they refer to it as disputed, as is right and proper, until such time as they reach agreement. Also, if you look at the history of astronomy (also here), until the 1920s moons and asteroids were classed as planets.

So, no, it’s pretty reasonable to stick with the old definition and still claim Pluto as a planet. It’s no more arbitrary than the official basis for judgment.

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If you want your elites to behave like gentlemen, you have to give them the status and the security of gentlemen.

If you make a project of keeping your elites scared and on their toes -- if you work to convince them that they have to scrabble for every advantage and that they're always in danger of falling into the abyss -- then you will have elites who act like frightened, grasping strivers. Which is what you have. Do you like it?

I've made this point like a dozen different ways by now. Perhaps someday I'll actually write the essay, instead of tossing off yet another few frustrated paragraphs.

Who is the audience for this post?

If you grant the existence and importance of an 'elite' class, then surely the people with direct influence over the social patterns and institutions that contribute to this situation are... elites. That's what 'elite' means in context! It's the only thing it can mean!

This post would only make sense if non-elites had the ability to dictate the terms of the elites' day-to-day experience, in some kind of agentic way that could be altered by convincing people of things and reasoning with them. In other words, if the relationship between the two groups was symmetrical. But if it was symmetrical, society would be egalitarian, not stratified, and there would be no basis for the distinction in the first place.

Exactly who are the elites supposed to be the victims of?

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Journalists, mostly.

I mean, social media has made us all journalists in this sense. But the answer is clearly journalists.

This might be something everyone already knows but me, but you can send silent DMs on Discord, which do not trigger notifications, by typing @silent at the very beginning of the message. It's nice if you want to get a message to someone but don't want to e.g. wake them up if they're asleep.

The bots are starting to come up with good Tumblr usernames, and it almost makes me feel bad about nuking them on sight

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Do the names return to circulation once nuked?

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Names do normally, though after some amount of waiting period, so probably.

Cleveland's service as sheriff was unremarkable; biographer Rexford Tugwell described the time in office as a waste for Cleveland politically. Cleveland was aware of graft in the sheriff's office during his tenure and chose not to confront it.[45] A notable incident of his term took place on September 6, 1872, when Patrick Morrissey was executed. He had been convicted of murdering his mother.[46] As sheriff, Cleveland was responsible for either personally carrying out the execution or paying a deputy $10 to perform the task.[46] In spite of reservations about the hanging, Cleveland executed Morrissey himself.[46] He hanged another murderer, John Gaffney, on February 14, 1873.[47]

What on earth is going on with every "which president was most likely to have done X?" having Grover Cleveland as a surprise strong contender?

Anyways, Washington, Jackson, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower all had military careers with battles and such, so like, I think all of them are solid contenders.

For folks unfamiliar with American history, George Washington basically started the Seven Years War, Grant was The Big General of the American Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt fought in the Spanish American War, and Eisenhower was The Big General of WW2. Jackson was notable in the War of 1812, which was a Napoleonic wars sideshow/American Revolutionary War 2.0 from the British being short on sailors to fight Napoleon and being like, "American sailors are basically British sailors, so it's cool for us to impress them into the Royal Navy, right?" and the Americans objecting to their citizens being kidnapped by the Royal Navy.

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There is, like, zero chance Jackson and Teddy didn't each have a personal bodycount.

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I'd bet against Eisenhower having a personal body count, probably 3:1 against. (See Wiki.) He wasn't particularly distinguished as a soldier - he was primarily an administrator. He had no combat experience prior to WWII (and was frequently politely insulted about it). He was in high demand as an XO and chief of staff - Macarthur infamously described him, when asked about him commanding D-Day, as "the best clerk I ever had". He struggled to get given command of anything for most of his career.

Jackson is known to have killed a man in a duel at least once.

In plant biology, Vavilovian mimicry (also crop mimicry or weed mimicry[1][a]) is a form of mimicry in plants where a weed evolves to share one or more characteristics with a domesticated plant through generations of artificial selection.[2] It is named after Nikolai Vavilov, a prominent Russian plant geneticist.[2] Selection against the weed may occur by killing a young or adult weed, separating its seeds from those of the crop (winnowing), or both. This has been done manually since Neolithic times, and in more recent years by agricultural machinery.
Vavilovian mimicry is a good illustration of unintentional selection by humans. Although the human selective agents might be conscious of their impact on the local weed gene pool, such effects go against the goals of those growing crops. Weeders do not want to select for weeds that are increasingly similar to the cultivated plant, yet the only other option is to let the weeds grow and compete with crops for sunlight and nutrients. Similar situations include antibiotic resistance and, also in agricultural crops, herbicide resistance. Having acquired many desirable qualities by being subjected to similar selective pressures, Vavilovian mimics may eventually be domesticated themselves. Vavilov called these weeds-become-crops secondary crops.

Another example is rye (Secale cereale), a grass which is derived from wild rye (Secale montanum), a widely distributed Mediterranean species. Rye was originally just a weed growing with wheat and barley, but came under similar selective pressures to the crops. Like wheat, it came to have larger seeds and more rigid spindles to which the seeds are attached. However, wheat is an annual plant, while wild rye is a perennial. At the end of each growing season wheat produces seeds, while wild rye does not and is thus destroyed as the post-harvest soil is tilled. However, there are occasional mutants that do set seed. These have been protected from destruction, and rye has thus evolved to become an annual plant.[5]
Rye is a hardier plant than wheat, surviving in harsher conditions. Having become preadapted as a crop through wheat mimicry, rye was then positioned to become a cultivated plant in areas where soil and climatic conditions favored its production, such as mountainous terrain.[4]
This fate is shared by oats (Avena sativa and Avena byzantina), which also tolerate poorer conditions, and like rye, grow as a weed alongside wheat and barley. Derived from a wild species (Avena sterilis), it has thus come to be a crop in its own right. Once again paralleling wheat, rye and other cereals, oats have developed tough spindles which prevent seeds from easily dropping off, and other characteristics which also help in natural dispersal have become vestigial, including the awns which allow them to self bury.[4]

Huh, I never considered that. Evolution wins yet again

This is what the porn bots are currently in the process of doing

A-are the porn bots becoming fertile?

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Do you want to check?

When you're dead will you miss us

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No, because I am the first posthuman to figure out the true nature of life after death and ascend to a higher plane of existence. This sounds soooo much cooler when I say it

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Hell yeah Frank! Good luck on your gnostic ascension. I’ll see you there eventually!

I’ll send a post-ascension update to everyone at Tumblr so we can have a club party in Heaven or whatever, I’ll tell you that much

(When I ascend, I’ll probably get so good at predicting the Iliad that I get recruited by the Greek pantheon, and then eventually I’ll advise them to get a better poet or something and it’ll be like a BigLaw experience, so maybe that could involve a sort of celestial Tumblr party)

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Can't let British people have air conditioning because first they'd call it something twee like "the climate fixer" and then in 20 years they'll call it "the climb" or "the climmy"

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French kids would call it "le climot", frustrating language officials who would prefer they call it "machine pour le contrôle du climat froide à l'interieure de l'édifice"

Tell me that "robot pâtissier" is not a better term than "stand mixer"

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No, that’s true, L’Académie got it right for once.

I know it’s too late to ask but would you have allowed my favourite English-sounding non-English arguably-a-word Prisencolinensinainciusol to participate in the tournament if it got submitted?

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Hmmm, that's tricky, but I think I'm gonna have to say no. Since it doesn't really have a meaning and isn't really used outside the song, i dont know if i would. Its a very uncanny song though (meant to sound like English, but its gibberish). Y'all should watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQDY3HFkh_Y Thanks for asking though! That was a tricky one. (Also if you can give me a good enough reason to include it I might change my mind.)

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Oll raigh!