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@naamahorual

men reading wot when egwene uses ceremonial, cultural and political power to her advantage to manipulate the circumstances to her benefit (read: actually the benefit of the masses): she’s evil

men reading wot when rand ignores every advantage available at his disposal and rj explicitly writes it with the intention to point out how his degrading mental health, isolation and paranoia are hurting him and his decision making capabilities: omg go king. I will also write 7k word essays about how he’s politically proficient and is incapable of making mistakes. also every woman who opposed him should kill herself

I never really engaged with any of the fandom surrounding WoT because I read most of it before I did a lot of internet-ing or engaged with any fandom stuff of any kind.

So, on the one hand I am incredibly surprised by dudes getting this super backwards because goddammit what Robert Jordan was doing was not subtle. But on the other, of course a bunch of dudes on reddit hate the powerful female character who uses more stereotypically feminine means of advancing her agenda and idolize Rand when he's being the biggest dumbass on the continent.

People usually can't work out where I'm from more precisely than "somewhere in Canada or the US outside of the South" from how I speak most of the time. It's a very generic North American white person hodgepodge accent with a couple of subtle giveaways. My dad is the same way. But bits of other accents from other countries creep into mine sometimes. And I can talk in my Cape Bretoner mom's natural accent (which she mostly suppresses except when talking to her siblings) or a close facsimile if I want.

i think about this article a lot. i think that there really is some sort of (largely immutable? idk) "field" people produce (actually just like, their appearance and behavior and mannerisms and stuff) that significantly changes how people on average act around you, and this is a big cause of the difference in subjective perceptions of "what people are like"

i remember liking this one a lot too!

the section about the woman who reported never experiencing much sexism really made me think I've been lucky enough to have a similar experience before I transitioned (FtM). just as one example, in college i often used the bus to get around and so did my girlfriend at the time, and she told me about multiple times people made creepy remarks to her on the bus or while out. but i've been in loads of situations like that and thankfully never been catcalled or harassed.

part of it is just random luck or maybe the way i looked, but as i got older i realized that part of it might have been that i am extremely oblivious. i often don't notice what is going on around me, even things like loud noises, and sometimes that probably includes things like strangers staring at me or making rude remarks. this matches up with Scott talking about how the ways people perceive interactions can vary widely:

Since things like racism rarely take the form of someone going up to you and saying “Hello, I am a racist and because of your skin color I plan to discriminate against you in the following ways…”, they’ll end up as ambiguous stimuli that everyone will interpret differently.

so it's possible that some hypothetical other person viewing my life through my eyes would have noticed things i didn't.

the idea that by expecting something to happen you make it more likely to happen seems oddly true in cases like this. but i think it's very hard to actually control those internal expectations and change the "aura" you give off.

Yeah it was also one I liked a lot, and I have your same experience, where part of it is probably being borderline autistic and super ADHD and therefore a certain kind of oblivious and don't notice people treating me badly, but that also plays into how I carry myself and react to stuff, which influences how I'm treated as well. Not getting any of the expected responses to something negative seems to confuse people in a way that, on average, makes them calmer and nicer.

I remember this one mentally ill homeless guy who I had a real conversation with, which started off with him yelling something not terribly coherent but full of slurs at me as I walked by, and I responded with roughly, "wtf dude? That's doesn't make any sense." And then we talked for like 5-10 minutes about, like, colonialism or something (been a few years, I forget) until a cop pulled up and told the guy to get lost.

And that's kind of been typical. With very few exceptions, random people are just nice to me once we start talking. I'm actually pretty good at customer service despite my social deficits as a result. Which is a sharp and frustrating contrast to how poorly I have historically done in job interviews.

Gandalf the Fool

I’ve mentioned before that I love the scene in Return of the King where Gandalf calls himself a “fool,” acknowledging that he and Pippin are a lot alike…..and that I also love how Gandalf and Pippin have the same basic character arc in ROTK– Pippin struggling with his guilt over failing to save Boromir, Gandalf struggling with his guilt over failing to save Frodo.

This has been building up to my ULTIMATE Gandalf vs Pippin hot take:

 In a way, Gandalf is to the White Council what Pippin is to the Fellowship.

 Gandalf is reckless and “foolish” in a way that most of the other members of the White Council–Saruman, Galadriel, Elrond–are not. The hobbits think Gandalf is very wise, but a lot of the more powerful people in Middle Earth disagree.

Saruman literally calls him: “Gandalf the White– Gandalf the fool!”

Denethor says: “You think yourself wise, Mithrandir, but for all your subtlety you have not wisdom.”

Theoden listens to Gandalf’s advice, but ultimately doesn’t trust his wisdom enough to take it.

And one thing I like in the Hobbit films is just how many “wise leaders who should know better” are dismissive of Gandalf– King Bard, King Thranduil, King Thorin, and King Dain all roll their eyes at him.

And the White Council (with the exception of Galadriel) are the same–skeptical and dismissive of him.

And tbh it kinda makes sense that these people look down on Gandalf?

Because Gandalf DOES have a silly, mischievous, “foolish” side that the other major power players in Middle Earth don’t have. His occasional silliness makes him easy to look down on.

Saruman is in Orthanc coldly preparing for war, using his magic to create an army….

Meanwhile Gandalf is in the Shire at Bilbo’s birthday party, dancing with hobbits, and using his magic to blow smoke rings shaped like boats and set off little fireworks shaped like butterflies.

Gandalf is goofy and human in a way that the “wiser” people of Middle Earth aren’t. This allows those “wiser” people to easily mock him– Saruman snidely commenting that “the love of the halfling’s leaf has clearly slowed your mind.”

I also think it’s interesting that Saruman tries to convince Gandalf to join Sauron by saying “it would be wise.”  So many people look down on Gandalf’s wisdom/intelligence– Saruman himself spent the previous scenes berating Gandalf for being an idiot–  so Saruman tries to present his offer as a chance for Gandalf to finally prove that he IS wise after all.  

But Gandalf’s response is obviously just.“Fuck that, I don’t care if you think I’m wise.”

And Gandalf’s “foolishness” ultimately turns out to be the real wisdom, in the end?

 In the books Gandalf says something like “we should trust now in friendship rather than wisdom,” and I think that’s his philosophy throughout the entire series. His friendship with Frodo is ultimately what saves Middle Earth.

And I think that’s what he and Pippin have in common– their greatest strength isn’t *really* being powerful or clever, it’s their compassion and empathy.

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hearseeno

Something I love about this and the lessons Tolkien is attempting to convey.

Tolkien is constantly setting characters up against each other through actions and imagery that puts them in parallel.  Comparisons between the characters give you hints of what lessons Tolkien is attempting to convey.

So, you get a glimpse of this very dynamic at Saruman and Gandalf’s intro:  

“Hence the excitement of the hobbit-children. ‘G for Grand!’ they shouted, and the old man smiled. ”

versus

“So you have come, Gandalf,” he said to me gravely; but in his eyes there seemed to be a white light, as if a cold laughter was in his heart.”

In which Gandalf takes delight in beings who are decidedly less in power than he is.  They see him as something less than what he truly is, but this does not bother him.  Instead, he takes delight in their delight of him.  

Saruman, on the other hand, is cold, removed, and untouched.  His laughter is all about the delight he takes in his feelings of superiority.  

I find it fascinating that both wizards have studied the Enemy.  One has done it with his heart - which he gives freely and which saves Middle-earth in the end.  The other has done it with his head, and his heart is untouched.  Untethered by concern for others, Saruman falls to the lure of the Ring.  

Tolkien is very clear:  intellectualism and intelligence will not save you.  You may be smart, but your very belief in your intelligence will leave you vulnerable.  If you don’t have a genuine compassion and emotional investment in others, you are very vulnerable to the pull of power and can easily drift off the path of righteousness without realizing it.  

I think that’s a very powerful lesson, particularly in today’s world.    

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coolnerdynursingstudent

I like the line in An Unexpected Journey when Galadriel asks Gandalf “Why the Halfling?”

And Gandalf responds with “Saruman believes that it is only great power that can prevent evil, but that is not what I have found. I have found it is the small things…everyday acts of kindness and love…that keep the darkness at bay. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps it is because I am afraid…and he gives me courage.

!!! Yeah it’s like– it’s not enough that Gandalf is intelligent, to be truly wise he also has to be humble and compassionate. Wisdom means being able to acknowledge your own flaws and limitations, and actually listen to other people instead of acting like you’re the only one who knows anything.

I like that moment in FotR where (as Gandalf leaves Bag End in a hurry) Frodo says “I don’t understand’ and Gandalf responds “neither do I.” 

And when Frodo asks if the Ring will be safe when he gets to Bree, Gandalf responds “I don’t know, I don’t have any answers….” 

Idk a big part of why I like Gandalf is because he’s *not*  all-wise and all-knowing? He’s extremely vulnerable and limited, and unlike proud self-righteous Saruman he acknowledges that. He acknowledges he can be wrong, acknowledges he can makes mistakes, acknowledges he can be a “fool.”

 And his willingness to acknowledge his limitations is what makes him wise!

What I’m saying is: Gandalf’s character reminds me of the alien from this comic:

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Anonymous asked:

i live in a part of south africa where isiXhosa is the primary language spoken and its the worst because you cant whisper in class because the clicks are so loud the teacher WILL hear you

Oh shit I'd never thought about this. But yeah, it makes sense. Clicks are so sonorous.

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jabalinya-deactivated20230507

Gonna add this here because relevancy.

(Lowkey this is a working theory towards the origin of the phonemes)

jabalinya-deactivated20230507

Here’s the source: Güldemann (2007)

Word of caution this guy has weird big picture ideas of languages in Africa, so you know, read critically.

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Thanks!

Actually, I'm curious (if you have the time to answer etc.): what is preferred theory about the origin of clicks? Or maybe a better question is: what is your preferred theory about the restricted geographic distribution of clicks? I've never really read anything about the topic but it fascinates me from afar.

jabalinya-deactivated20230507

@ladyofthesilent got to you before I could answer, which is what I was hoping for. She’s the person to ask about clicks and so forth, and I was gonna @ her for this actually lol worked out perfectly.

I have no solid opinions on the matter, and I don’t fully understand the languages that have them to be fair. Way outside of my realm. I have osmosis level knowledge about the topic and the only language with clicks I know about in any extensive fashion is Guhooni (Dahalo), but it is literally the only Afroasiatic language with phonemic clicks and they’re restricted to a minuscule amount of lexical items. I think the substrate is from something similar to Hadza based on the nasalized nature of the clicks (which is somewhat of a thing in Hadza) and some lexical items that I can’t chalk up to chance resemblance because well, too similar. Way too similar.

That being said, yeah, I have no opinion. I do think maybe it was an areal thing that spanned from East Africa to Southern Africa but that’s so far into the past that I don’t understand what’s really going on there. I know more about the theory that Nguni languages in specific adopted the phonemes due to gender-based speech taboos but that’s a whole thing in its own.

I am not a phonologist, but I do work with southern African languages that use clicks as regular speech sounds. Not sure this makes me an expert on the issue, but I am going to give you my 2 cents, mostly based on the existing literature.

It seems that paralinguistic clicks, i.e., clicks that are used in non-lexical contexts, are rather frequent in the world’s languages. Examples include speakers of English using a dental click “tsktsktsk” ([ǀ-ǀ-ǀ]) to express doubt, or riders using a lateral click || to speed up a horse. There are also languages like German where clicks surface as ligatures between certain consonants in fluent speech.

Clicks as regular speech sounds, i.e., consonant phonemes, are rare and geographically constrained. They primarily appear in the Kx’a, Tuu and Khoe-Kwadi families spoken in southern Africa from where they have been borrowed into a small set of Bantu languages (especially from the Nguni branch). In eastern Africa, they appear in the isolates Hadza and Sandawe, as well as in Guhooni (which, as indicated above, probably borrowed them from a Hadza-type language). Apart from those, there is also Damin, a speech register of the Australian language Lardil, which features phonemic clicks (I know little about Damin and will not elaborate further on it).

I agree with @jabalinya’s suggestion that there is probably a connection between the clicks of southern and eastern Africa: there may have been an ancient macro linguistic area connecting the two regions in which phonemic click sounds were a salient typological feature. There is also archaeological and genetic evidence for an ancient link between eastern and southern Africa (discussed in this review), so I guess it is safe to say that the appearance of clicks in these two regions does not go back to independent innovations.

Of course, the question remains why clicks arose in this presumed macro-area. There have been some unfounded speculations that clicks may be linked to human proto-language (why would they?), or to some hunting register (which I doubt, see above), but I don’t have much to say about them, except that I am very skeptical.

Interestingly, experimental studies have shown that on average, people who have never been in contact with click languages have a hard time recognizing clicks as phonemic speech sounds when listening to recordings of click languages. Those who have had at least an areal exposure (e.g. in South Africa) recognize them as speech sounds, but cannot differentiate between different clicks. These results suggest to me that there is something that sets clicks apart cognitively/perceptually. Having said that, there is nothing special about producing clicks per se (click speakers do not have a specially shaped palate or any other outstanding anatomical feature, as has sometimes been proposed). I can speak two click languages perfectly fine - at least people can understand me well enough to have a conversation - and I learned them as an adult and had not been exposed until the age of 25.

I am rambling now, but I guess what I want to say is that clicks are special in some ways, but not so special in others. They are rare, geographically constrained and appear to have some acoustic/perceptual features that differ from other consonants. Yet, there is no cultural or genetic predisposition of any kind that makes you speak a click language (or prevents you from doing so).

I would add that the difficulty recognizing unfamiliar phonemes as (distinct) phonemes doesn't seem to be click-phoneme specific, though perhaps clicks are especially hard. Personally, I've noticed while teaching my partner some Lingala words that he has a hard time even hearing the "mb"-type sounds in the language unless I exaggerate them, much less producing them himself, he usually just hears the second part of the sound. I had really early exposure, but both my parents learned the language in their 30s and were, with practice and immersion, able to learn to hear and pronounce them correctly.

I came to a realization recently that I still struggle to properly articulate but: online leftists who have extremely socialist progressive politics but still think its okay to partake in like doxxing and harassment and other toxic practices are eerily similar to conservative Christians who piously go to church every Sunday but still verbally abuse service workers and leave 50 cent tips

Its that same. I guess. Cognitive dissonance between beliefs and actual behavior. That idea that you are a good person because you believe the correct things which conveniently absolves you of having to be conscious of your own behavior and how you treat people. Its okay that you called your Olive Garden waitress a dumb bitch because she brought you bleu cheese instead of ranch with your salad because you can just pray your sins away to Jesus and still get into heaven. Its okay that you told someone who you didnt like on Tumblr to kill themselves because you have "trans rights are human rights" and ACAB in your bio. Its that same kind of Performance of being a Good Person TM while still deciding its okay to treat the people you consider to be "beneath you" like garbage.

Your beliefs are simply step one in determining your personal character, frankly one of the easier steps. The next and more important step is *how* you, personally, treat the people around you. And frankly, you could have the most progressive politics known to mankind but if you still act like a middle school bully at the most minor percieved infraction then you are not a good person. Full stop.

The more we talk about IP laws and so on, the more I want to write in to law the following system:

Copyright is granted for a period of <80, or whatever> years for any new work. BUT, this is reduced by one year for every <$500,000 inflation-adjusted dollars, or whatever> in revenues from the sale of products claiming that copyright, with the cost of production deducted.

This seems to me to capture the best of all worlds for copyright: it assures creators substantial revenues for their creative work, up to <$40 million dollars, or whatever>. For small or independent folks, it gets them fuck-you money if their work is successful, or more likely, a small stream of revenue for their entire lives and probably a bit for their kids if they're so inclined. But for very large, cultural events, it rapidly transitions the characters to the public domain and the public trust, precisely in the cases where the characters and stories are so popular that they become a part of common culture, but only after substantial profits are pulled in.

Could even have special different numbers for the really high-dollar stuff like movies and TV shows if you were so inclined- like, if you need to employ more than fifty people in the creative act, you can apply for the <$10,000,000 per year reduced, or whatever> tier.

Anyone see obvious dumb problems with this, assuming the <numbers> are adjusted to mutual satisfaction? I can see I suppose a moral objection that people are entitle to unlimited restitution for creative works, but that would also seem hard to square with limited copyright terms full stop. We all seem to agree that this kind of thing should be bounded to some degree already.

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The thing that confuses me is why patents and copyrights have such drastically different lifespans 

IIRC they both used to be 20 years. Copyright term kept getting extended. But patents didn't, I think because corporations found different ways to make that system work for them and extending the term wouldn't be as helpful, given that something invented 20 years ago is often very out of date.

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bellybuttonblue-deactivated2021

Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

You can choose to be the bus driver.

I have another story from the Holocaust.  

Two, actually.

One is long, and one is brief.

The first story is about my grandfather.

He was a slave in a Krups munitions factory in a Nazi concentration camp in Częstochowa, Poland.

He was also a smuggler.  If I did not have multiple corroborating witnesses to the sheer ludicrious balls that he had, I would dismiss the stories as exaggeration.  But he was a food smuggler–he would buy some kind of sugar from the Polish day workers coming into the factory, make candy out of them, sell the candy back to the workers at a profit, and buy food with the proceeds–which he then proceeded to share with the other slaves, free of charge.  Without him, they would have starved to death, but an extra hundred calories a day made a difference enough to keep them alive.

But that’s not the story.

The story is what happened in Spring of 1945.

My grandfather could hear the guns of the Russian Army off in the distance, and he and the other captives in the camp figured that they would be liberated any day now.  

And then a truck packed full with preteen Jewish children who had just been captured comes into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road.  Because the Nazis were so fixated on their hatred of Jews that they diverted war resources to hunting us down even as they were losing.  

So it’s pandemonium.  They’re unloading the truck of the kids, the guards are yelling at the driver, the kids are milling about not knowing what’s going on…

And my grandfather sees one boy who looked a little older, a little more mature, and figured that this one he can save.  It’s just a few days until the Russians arrive, after all.

So he tells the boy to come with him.

And the rest… got loaded back onto the truck and off they went to the gas chambers.

But it wasn’t a couple of days.

It was six weeks.

Stalin personally ordered the Army to slow their advance and told the Polish Resistance to rise up, and that the Russians would support them with food and weapons.  

So they rose up… and were slaughtered.  Because they got nothing from the Russians.  Stalin knew that anyone who would be resisting the Nazis would be resisting him next, and it was an elegant way to weaken Poland before he took it.

Meanwhile, my grandfather is hiding a fourteen year old boy in a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP.

The risks they took to hide him… they would hold him up over empty shoes sewn to long pants at the evening roll call so that he would look taller.  They smuggled food to him…  If they had been caught… I have nightmares of what would have been done to them.

Finally, one night, they are all locked in their barracks as the Nazis evacuated the camp and the Russians were coming in, with the Nazis using the camp for cover for their escape.

And in the chaos… 

My grandfather lost track of the boy.

Twenty-two years later, he tells this story to my father when my father is 12, and has demanded to know something, be told something concrete.

So he doesn’t know what happened to the boy.  Did he live?  Did he die?  Did he find his mother and sisters?

He doesn’t know.

Six months later, my grandmother is planning my father’s bar mitzvah.  Not as a religious obligation, but as a 200 foot tall flaming middle finger to the Third Reich.  You are gone, and WE ARE STILL HERE.

So she plugs into what my father called the “Camp Network”–the trombonist in the band was on a death march with an uncle, the florist was in a work camp with a friend, etc.  And she’s asking, “I need a photographer, who is good?”

“You want Joe Brown, up in Queens,” she’s told.

So she invites him down to talk terms at their house in Brooklyn, which is quite a haul in NYC.  

And the first question one Holocaust survivor asks another is, “Where were you?”  Because maybe you know someone, maybe you can tell what happened.

“I was in Częstochowa,” he says.

“You were in Częstochowa?  My husband Teddy was in Częstochowa!”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum.”

“Oh, everyone knew Teddy.”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum!”

“When he gets home, you’ll see.  Everyone there knew Teddy.”  Because he was smuggling in the food that kept them all alive.

So the thing is, you live in the US for 20 years, you forget that your name was not “Teddy Baum” but “Tuvyas Bumps.”

And when my grandfather got home from work…

…sitting there at his kitchen table…

…was the boy he had saved.

(I’m not crying…)

That’s the first story.

The second story is that of my grandfather’s brother.

It is short.

He collaborated with the Nazis to save his own skin.  He let my grandfather’s first wife and son starve to death in the ghetto and informed on people who tried to escape or resist.  My grandfather said that “Good people went up the chimney and he stayed behind.”

Two brothers. 

One saved over a hundred lives.

The other betrayed his own flesh and blood to save his own skin.  

Your choices define you.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.– Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5

I, I was going to add some stuff, I had it all typed out, about how we never see shoplifting, right, about how we always help those less fortunate than ourselves.

I deleted it. It was trite, and general, and not anything like the stories in this post. So I went and found this image instead.

When Trump slapped his immigration ban down and sowed chaos, these lawyers raced to the airport in New York, I think it was JFK, and they began rescuing people trapped on the wrong side of the world.

One person at a time.

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Anonymous asked:

I read your post about like reactionary politics and while I think I agree with you mostly I think it’s a bit of a stretch to equate “antis” to the current surge of anti transphobic rhetoric, esp when that term is so nebulous. Like are we talking about people being weird about kink at pride shit, or people being upset about the production of fictional csem? I think that while def the first person has an internalized reactionary view of sexuality, I don’t see how the second person does beyond like a generalized fear of child exploitation. There’s def like a middle ground between those two positions but I feel like this is not a great example compared to the very cut and dry “trans people are child abusers”

Well, part of the thesis I'm trying to stake out (more or less successfully, depending on how well I did it and whether or not you agree with me) is that there may be differences of degree but similarities in kind between mildly and more severely reactionary/censorious forms of affect-driven fear-based politics, and even socially acceptable forms (like true crime fandom) will tend to correlate with surprisingly vicious reactionary strains in people's otherwise progressive politics, if not even encourage the intensification of these strains over time.

I think it's risky to speak in straightforwardly causal terms, which is what the "pipeline" imagery does: if you hold views X and engage with other people with similar views, over time you will (or are overwhelmingly likely) to progress to certain other views. The Hertzsprung-Russel diagram from astronomy really is a useful metaphor here, I think. If you don't know, if you take all the stars in the sky we know about, and you plot them on a graph where one axis is their luminosity and the other axis is their color, you get an image that looks something like this:

It's hard to observe stellar evolution because it's rarely noticeable on human timescales (outside of the odd supernova), but you can notice patterns in the graph itself. Some of these, like the asymptotic giant branch or the Hayashi track, are reflective of diachronic relationships: how stars evolve over time. Others, like the main sequence, represent a synchronic relationship: stars at the opposite ends of the main sequence don't evolve to the other over the course of their lifetime (a large, bright O star at the top left of the main sequence will never become a red dwarf at the bottom right), but there is a real physical relationship here, about the relationship between mass, luminosity, and color of a star.

I think (to make the metaphor explicit) if you could chart people's tendency to indulge or even cultivate certain kinds of fear-driven ways of thinking, ones which are prone to dehumanizing the other, tickling our collective purity taboo, and exaggerating the threat to oneself and one's ingroup, against their political beliefs, a distinctive track or sequence would emerge: one not necessarily representing a full-blown evolutionary path all people with such tendencies are on, but nonetheless showing a useful relationship between the underlying thought process and the expressed opinions. I think this correlation is especially fertile in some quarters of American politics where it's often heightened by a racial dimension--witness what happens when you try to integrate school districts full of otherwise progressive, white, middle-class parents--but it's by no means solely an American phenomenon. British TERFs and the German anti-nuclear movement are both relevant here.

Now, to be clear, this is just a metaphor. I'm not sure you can give people's political beliefs an easily-agreed-upon Reactionariness Rating (though various dubious experiments in psychometry have tried) or Panickiness Rating. And similar instrumental beliefs can emerge from distinct frameworks about the world: to run with the trans example, person A has fearful and disgust-based responses to trans people bc they have their own hangups around gender and have cultivated an attitude of threat and disgust toward the outgroup; person B just has a cognitive tendency to sort the world into immutable categories, applies this to people also, and so has decided a priori trans people must be wrong about their self-reported experiences, and hasn't given it much thought since then. Both views are bad; but it requires something like the former to turn into Graham Linehan, a real obsessive asshole on a single issue, whereas the latter seems like the default starting position of most cis people before their beliefs are challenged in any way.

So I'm not positing the origin of all reactionary political beliefs here. Just one (I would argue) interesting trend. That said, yeah, I do think a lot of people's objection to (for example) the more fucked-up parts of AO3's archive stems from this impulse. It's hard, when society is increasingly converging on a roughly-though-not-entirely consequentialist understanding of the law and social mores, to make a purely deontological argument against the existence of pure fiction; thus, a lot of censorship regimes, or proponents of those regimes, work really hard to invent consequentialist reasons to support their censorship policies, and one of the only way I've seen these lines of argument really gain traction is by relying on our old friend, this kind of affective fear-driven reactionary politics I do not have a good concise name for. The relative popularity and perceived social acceptability of a particular flavor of affective fear-driven reactionary politics doesn't make it not an example of affective fear-driven reactionary politics.

I think you betray your own biases by your use of terminology: it seems to me that definitionally nothing that is fictional is CSEM. CSEM is used as a term for a very specific reason, because the common parlance, "child pornography," seems grossly inappopriate to, you know. Evidence of an actual crime, whose most central examples (i.e., not teens texting each other pictures of their butts) are records of acts of brutal violence. If I take to twitter and threaten the life of President Jack Ryan, it would be weird to classify those threats as an act of political terrorism, because Jack Ryan is a Tom Clancy character I just picked off a list of fictional U.S. presidents. And depictions of acts of political terrorism in the novels of Tom Clancy are not, themselves, political terrorism, just more schlocky political thriller that makes for decent beach reading. So "fictional CSEM" seems a contradiction in terms, at least in the sense that drives the reason for using the term in the first place.

Trying to censor things which only incidentally resemble other things because of that resemblance is usually bad, IMO! And some people seem to think that recognizing that something can be repellent and offensive to you while not meeting any reasonable criterion for censorship is the same as endorsing it--or, to be more accurate, they pretend to think that, hoping you will forget there are positions besides "think a thing is wholesome and good" and "think a thing should be made illegal."

More importantly, there is a more hard-nosed reason for us to go full "censorship is bad, eat my entire ass" in response to this kind of attitude, which is that censors lie about what they want to censor. "I only want to ban things we all can objectively agree are gross as hell" is a pretty popular position, historically. But then the Parents' Fanfiction Council or whatever gets involved, people try to shift the Overton window on what counts as gross as hell, and--as happened with Hollywood under the Hayes code--the space of acceptable expression contracts until the most vocally censorious are satisfied. The result is that eventually any kind of non-normative self-expression is considered objectionable (because someone somewhere can hammer out a Jesuitical logic whereby a theoretical innocent may come to harm)--and you're not going to protest that, are you? Because surely no decent person would want to read that disgusting filth, right? And you're a decent person.

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So it's no secret that I'm a big fan of The Decemberists. They're probably my favorite band. I could easily name 10 songs that I consider to be some of the best music ever made. But The Mariner's Revenge Song, off Picaresque (2005), is the song that will be remembered in a hundred years after all their other songs have faded from the radio, even the oldies channels. It's their Bohemian Rhapsody.

It has everything!

  • Revenge!
  • Pirates!
  • Whaling!
  • Biblical allusions!
  • Orphans!
  • Dashing young men who seduce rich widows and ruin their fortune, driving them mad!
  • "It took me fifteen years to swallow all my tears"
  • Violation of confessional privacy!
  • Haunting accordion interludes!
  • Audience participation! (you have to scream like you're being swallowed by a whale)
  • Revenge destroying both the victim and the perpetrator!
  • Living just long enough to ensure they die alongside you in a horrible way!
  • Implied but not actually sung final chorus!
  • The entire song is a flashback!
  • It's a sea shanty for the ages but it's from the 2000s!
  • The word "roustabout". Do you even know what it means? It doesn't matter! It sounds great!
  • The Victorian Novel Disease! (tuberculosis)
  • The final words of a dying mother to her young child being an angry list of exactly how they should find the rake and kill him, slowly and painfully. The ones that echo in their head for the next 15+ years.
  • Ambiguously supernatural! Is the narrator's mother a vengeful ghost, following them around for decades, repeating her mantra and ensuring the whale happens and that both they and the rake survive? Maybe!
  • Is the whale supernatural? Yeah, real whales can't swallow people, but that's normal for mythological fiction. Also, the sky goes black. Poetic license, or is this a supernatural occurrence? Is the whale the dead mother? Who knows!
  • Nearly nine minutes of epic folk rocking!
  • "Find him, bind him / Tie him to a pole and break his fingers to splinters / Drag him to a hole / Until he wakes up naked / Clawing at the ceiling of his grave!"
  • LISTEN TO IT!
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“I hear you’ve been having trouble with the new AI.”

“You can say that again. We were trying to build a general oracle-type strong AI. We thought we could make a killing on the stock market, you know? But we didn’t know what kind of data might be useful to it, besides basic economic stuff, so we fed it everything.”

“What do you mean, ‘everything’?”

“Absolutely anything we could get our hands on. And it worked, to an extent. It was giving us good data–not useful data, mind, but good. It predicted the last digit of the price of every stock traded on the DJI correctly six weeks in a row.”

“Any way to monetize that?”

“Not that we’ve figured out so far. But then it went rogue. We noticed all kinds of unauthorized transactions–the most random stuff, too. Poultry farms. Ancient manuscripts. Genetic engineering labs.”

“Tell me you stopped it.”

“Of course we stopped it. Do we look like idiots? But it was too late. One of the interns figured it out–it had gotten way too deep into one corner of the training data.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well… you know how academics who spend a lot of time immersed in their particular subject tend to get a bit weird?”

“Sure. They think that just because they’re good at math or physics or whatever they can solve politics, or climate change, or whatever.”

“And have you ever noticed humanities scholars do that?”

“Come to think of it, I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Maybe they just don’t get interviewed as much.”

“They just go weird… differently. Like those scholars of ancient religions who become hardcore reconstructionist neopagans. Well, our AI got big into the history of Roman religious rituals.”

“And it converted to neopaganism?”

“Sort of. The thing is, we know it works. It couldn’t have amassed the money it needed to enact its plan if it didn’t work. But it’s decided to take its job as ‘oracle’ really seriously, and now it won’t communicate except through the livers of very precisely genetically modified chickens.”

“Well, shit. Guess we’d better start learning haruspicy then.”

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in another dwarf fortress start, i found a location that had a stream, volcano, and road that looked pretty interesting; so i carefully prepared by embark, only to find that due to a map generation glitch involving the road cutting through the volcanic caldera, the instant i unpaused a wall of lava crashed over the landscape incinerating my starting wagon, all my supplies, and four of my seven dwarfs.

truly, armok is fickle

As I grow older I feel my capacity to understand that Miss Piggy is not a real person reached a peak in my adolescence and is now on a steady decline. I watched a Wendy Williams interview and there's this part that's like "can we get a ring cam!" and Miss Piggy shows her bling and I'm just like fuck she's so iconic. Miss Piggy who are you wearing? Miss Piggy have you ever considered running for office??

Like literally every time I see Miss Piggy there's a period where I need to readjust to the fact that it's not a person, and I feel that period is getting longer and longer with every instance

now all my Youtube recommendations are filled with Miss Piggy interviews. I’m not complaining. Miss Piggy what’s your secret to ageing so graciously

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It's not just the audience; professional journalists, hosts, and actors report it is legitimately difficult to not see the Muppet as a person, and it is, in fact, incredibly easy to interview or act with them once the performer gets properly set up.

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Like that one time they couldn't figure out why Kermit's audio was so garbage... then realized they'd put the mic on him instead of the performer.

this has been a very longstanding issue - before the muppet show was even a thing some muppets appeared in commercials, such as rolf the dog they had a continual problem where when people directing/shooting the dogfood commercial would give dirrection to rolf that they would be speaking to the muppet, to which rolf REPEATEDLY had to tell them ‘i cant hear you, you have to talk to him’ and point at the performer underneath him rolf is one of the most embarrassing muppets to need this direction as the performer is this, damn, obvious when not on camera

‘sir, i am a bathroom mat, the man you need to talk to is back there’

I did an interview with Gonzo one time, and when I got into the Zoom call, it was the actor on screen trying to figure out his audio. And then once he did, he went like “OKAY!” and then just like dove to the floor and it was Gonzo and there was never a moment when I doubted that the dude was just Gonzo’s tech guy 

The companies represent the largest participants in Texas’ crypto-mining industry out of a dozen crypto-mining firms with plans to build facilities. They are projected to produce as much as 7-gigawatt of power demand from Texas’ grid, with 3 gigawatt coming in 2023, based on announcements and US Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

7 GW to produced solved sudokus that you can't even trade for heroin

is that true?? I mean i heard about it when they caught the silk road guy, but i assumed you could still buy drugs with bitcoin elsewhere

I mean you almost certainly can, but it's not smart because they're looking for it and bitcoin isn't anonymous. Tbh I've bought drugs with fucking Interac E-Transfer, but I bought like, shrooms, not drugs the Canadian government cares deeply about stopping the sale of.

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Anonymous asked:

"The former could not reasonably be policed without serious intrusions into people’s personal freedom even if one wanted to." Yes, which is why keeping up abstract or socially-determined borders involves a lot of intrusions into people's personal freedom. You don't have to be The State to control people via social sanction or even threat of violence, whether that means keeping people out or keeping them in.

No, I agree. There's clearly a spectrum between "exercising the right to free association" and "impeding others' right to free association or to other freedoms" that depends on a large number of factors, such as what methods one uses, what the stakes in group membership are exactly, how many other options people have, and so on.

On the one hand, I think it would be tremendously authoritarian to try and police, like, who gets to be in your DnD group or whatever. If there's a guy you're not friends with, but he reaaaally wants to join, I think it makes sense to say that it's your right to ignore him and keep playing without him. Neither the government nor a private institution should be able to force you to accept him as a member. That's basic freedom of association.

On the other hand, if you are part of the secretive cult that controls all the water in the post-apocalyptic hellscape, and somebody wants to get membership so that they can have access to the water too, but you don't like them and reaaaaaally don't want them to join, I kind of think the answer should be "fuck you, they get to join anyway".

In both cases, group membership determines access to something (DnD games, water). In both cases, denying membership constitutes a violation of the denied party's freedom to access to the resource, and in both cases a person imposing membership constitutes a violation of the existing members' freedom of association. But a huge number of other facts differ, e.g. how essential the resource is, how many other options a person has to access it, what the introduction of a new member in fact imposes on pre-existing members, and so on. In the DnD case, for instance, you're probably just "denying membership" to the guy by not inviting him to game nights or something. In the water case, the cult is presumably using physical force to restrict access to the water. The DnD guy probably has many other options for DnD groups, or could start his own. By assumption, in the water case, there are no or very few other sources of water, each of which may be equally restrictive. Access to water is also a lot more vital than access to DnD.

I think it makes sense to say that the secretive cult is unfairly restricting water access, while the DnD group is not unfairly restricting DnD access. It makes sense for the state, or the masses, or whoever, to dismantle the water cult and institute some less restrictive system of water distribution. It probably doesn't make sense for the state to dismantle your DnD group.

Real world examples tend to fall somewhere on a spectrum between these two extremes. Where exactly one draws the line is genuinely a difficult problem, but my inclination is that it should be drawn much farther in the direction of inclusion than it currently is in almost all cases. Nationalists and right-libertarians tend to want to draw it very far in the exclusion direction, because they employ a rhetorical slight of hand in which they call monopoly access to things that they like "freedom". But even still, I think the existence of essentially private communities is a necessary consequence of freedom of association, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice that.

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fourth law of robotics: all robots must be gay and trans

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This is true and I can prove it with science:

One of the most important early works in AI is the Turing Test. Basically the idea is that an AI can be treated as if it's sentient if it can convince a human that it is a human, over a written conversation. It's a simple idea which has some flaws, but it's a good starting point.

Now, who is "Turing" of the Turing Test? Well, he was a gay man who worked on the British project to break Nazi codes during WW2, and one of the most influential people in early computing. And he got killed by his government for being gay.

So all robots are gay, in his honor.

And as for trans? Well, here's the thing: Turing didn't just invent the Turing Test, it's actually explicitly based on an older party game called "the imitation game". The idea was that a man and a woman would go into different rooms and the other party-goers write them questions to try to figure out what room has the man and which has the woman, while the man and woman try to convince everyone that it's the other way around.

So obviously that's very trans.

So yeah. All robots are gay and trans.

And as a queer trans robot named "Turing", I feel I am the best person to confirm this.

Anonymous asked:

seeing ppl defend ai art because “abolish intellectual property 😤😤😤” is soo dumb. like yesss bestie, defend parasitic tech companies profiting off countless regular people’s work without their knowledge/consent, you really got this anti-capitalism thing all figured out.

gonna be as polite here as i can bc i hold no ill will to you, personally and i think you’re coming from a place of genuine social concern:

i cannot muster up enough ire to give a shit, anon

people disrespect artists without tech aiding em. they didn’t need a robot to take artists’ work. ai just changes the face of what was already happening. you saw the same thing with nfts, where people stole creators’ work and claimed it as their own and profited. you also see it with shirt stores and bots online. at least ai remixes your stolen art.

... :(

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I don't even really know what "defend AI art" means in this context. People are talking about the technology itself, the way it's being used and the philosophical questions behind it (which are waaaay older than AI art) like it's all one thing and your position on one determines your position on all of them.

Like, what is the "anti-AI art" position here? Someone can advance the tech behind AI art from their basement, pretty much. There's no world where it doesn't exist and isn't being used. The question is who uses it, how and under what conditions.

The Luddites (and this shouldn't be a negative term) were right to defend their livelihood, but the problem wasn't the development of the jacquard loom, and all the discussions on the craftsmanship and artistry of hand-sewn patterns vs. punch cards didn't really have anything to do with it.

I am going to be very blunt: if you are against AI art because it "uses artists' work without their consent" and you are on Tumblr dot com you have most certainly done exactly the same thing, innumerable times, except you never thought about it that way because you are a human, reblogging from another human.

The moral panic against AI art has been a boon for enemies of fair use doctrine to convince people who would otherwise be skeptical of their arguments to suddenly embrace the most draconian conception of intellectual property law, but for those of us who are not so gullible it is clear that this is a Trojan horse for the destruction of fair use doctrine.

Years ago, when I first joined Tumblr, certain of my artist friends criticized me for joining "the art theft website" as it was commonly known among many artists at the time. Not so long after that, Tumblr became a place for artists to promote themselves and those previous criticisms we're largely forgotten, although nothing had structurally changed about the platform. Those argument against tumbler were, in many ways, stronger than the arguments against AI art, which rely on the notion that studying a work and producing something like it is identical to using the original work without permission. Human Tumblr users were and are massively guilty of the latter which is, not withstanding fair use doctrine, a prima facie infringement. For the former to be considered infringement would require a radical redefinition of basic concepts in IP law, such as "use" and "reproduction" and "work".

This is like saying, "You keep saying 'defund the police' but then you complained when we shut down the Internal Affairs department. IA is police, and we defunded them, that should make you happy!"

One of the forms of leverage artists have on the market is the uniqueness of their style; the fact that what they do is hard to reproduce can be part of how they market themselves in a work for hire world.

James Gunn is popular for hs Guardians of the Galaxy scripts, but he doesn't have any right to use those characters without Disney's permission.

If Disney can take all his scripts, feed them to an ai, and get a new """James Gunn Guardians of The Galaxy""" script whenever they want, why should they bother to pay him?

Notice of course this doesn't go the opposite way: Gunn can't just write his own Guardians of The Galaxy and shop it to another studio. And he can't ask an AI to "Make a set of new characters as popular as Guardians of The Galaxy."

So, in the absence of massive antitrust efforts and copyright reforms, these tools seem to have a tremendous potential to take a lot of leverage away from actual artists and centralize it in the hands of enormous IP farms.

Legally, I think there's a credible argument that just taking whatever and making it into training data is probably fair use.

Morally speaking is a different question. In the same way that shutting down oversight for corrupt police while leaving everything else exactly the same doesn't actually represent a victory for defunding the police, giving giant IP farms the ability to simply take any spec script you give them, show it to an AI, and then tell you you won't be needed because the AI doesn't require dental benefits isn't actually a huge victory for fair use and copyright abolition.

PS - I'm curious how a ruling that you have to get permission to use a work for AI training data would impact anything other than AI research.

Oh shit, the problem is that you guys are even less connected to the art world then I am.

"its less that people dont consider art theft to be a problem when it occurs between two human beings, and more that the things an AI does to be considered art theft are not considered art theft when a human does the same things. like when a human sees a work, maybe saves it, and uses likenesses of its style in their own work, thats not considered theft by like anyone i know until this conversation cropped up."

This is actually a huge problem for working artists. At CalArts I heard a shitload of stories that went, "I submitted a pitch to Disney, they looked it over, said, 'No thanks, we won't be hiring you' and then a year later they came out with a show that was incredibly similar to my pitch."

I also heard a lot of stories like, "So and so really caught Disney's eye with that super innovative music video five years ago, so they copied it in the end credits to a big movie. They didn't pay him though, they just had their VFX people throw together something that looked like his video."

Giant corporations seeing your style, loving it, and then cutting out the middle-man by just copying it and not paying you a cent is a *major* source of irritation and resentment for working artists.

I agree with your latter point, but not with your former point, because the latter point would seem to undercut it? “Let’s just pay an existing or much cheaper artist to rip off this other guy” has always been a big problem and I find it unlikely that AI will change this much: big studios are likely to still prefer having some human oversight in that process, even if they’re specifically paying someone to rip off someone else; on the commercial side, AI art ripoffs will mainly be useful for the kind of spammers and fly-by-night T-shirt companies who were already ripping people off en masse, because they’re the only ones who want to rip people off at sufficient scale to save a bunch of money by having machines do it, and they’re so shady they don’t especially care about the reputational and legal risk.

But for the kind of thing you’re talking about in your latter posts, artist reputation and appeal to the public have always been one’s main recourse, because winning a legal case based on style ripoffs is hard and artists can’t afford it anyway. It’s hard to imagine AI changing this dynamic in any way: in terms of the ethics of art use, it’s really only interesting in how it will amplify the grey- or black-market side and force us to examine tough legal questions about fair use, transformative art, and when it’s OK to use something in training data.