One of the quiet ones

This train is really bumpy. Diabolical. #procreate #Mermay #mermay2018

From archangelsteel.com

O NI by Kev Chan

“wouldn’t you rather earn something than have it just handed to you?”

Yeah when it comes to actual awards and fancy goods, but when it comes to basic needs, basic human decency, and accomodations, those things should always be handed to people. No one should have to “earn” those things.Value people as people, not base it on how much they produce. 

yeah but that creates a severe dependency that could be exploited easily, and creates a slippery slope @musical-clarity

Actually studies show that people who live in places with universal income (who are given money with no strings attached just for being citizens) do far better work than those who don’t and are more enthusiastic to do work.

This is because they still want nice things and will work for those but the part of their energy that was devoted to worrying about if they have enough money to pay the rent and bills this month is now freed up to do other things.

Some people will always be lazy and take advantage of the system, but they are always a tiny percentage and it seems ridiculous to me to punish the majority and severly hamstring their abilities just because a handful of people will simply live of basic income rather than work.

Do you have sources? I’m trying to convince a friend

Providing Personalised Support to Rough Sleepers. An Evaluation of the City of London Pilot by Juliette Hough and Becky Rice (2010)  - This is a study on what happens when you just give homeless people money instead of setting up expensive bureaucratic programs. Spoilers: the vast majority of people get off the streets.

Policy Brief: Impacts of Unconditional Cash Transfers by Johannes Haushofery and Jeremy Shapiroz - A look at the new trend of charities just giving people in need money and letting them get on with it. (Case study is a charity called GiveDirectly)

Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods. A review of Global Evidence by the World Bank Policy Research Working Group - This study shows that poor people who are just given money do not spend any more than they usually would on luxury goods such as alcohol and tobacco and in some cases the spending on these items actually decreases.

“Cash Transfers for Children. Investing into the Future” An Editorial article in The Lancet - This is the study that out and out says giving people money makes them less lazy and less dependant on the state. Direct quote:

The Town With No Poverty by Evelyn Forget - A look at the case study of Dauphin Manitoba that introduced “mincome” to the poorest citizens to bring everyone above the poverty line.

Why Not Guarantee Everyone a Job? Why Negative Income Tax Experiments of the 1970s Were Successful by Allan Sheahen (warning this link is a download link, not a webpage) - Study of a similar “mincome” experiment in Denver that found that when people did stop working as many hours as they had done before the money it was because they were furthering their education or working hours better suited to raising their children. One woman who had dropped out of High School to get a job in order to provide for her children went back into education and ended up with a psychology degree and a job as a researcher.

“Daniel Moynihan and President-Elect Nixon: How Charity Didn’t Begin at Home” by Peter Passell and Leonard Ross for The New York Times - This is a look at how President Richard Nixon (Yes, that Richard Nixon) wanted to introduce basic income to the USA and was defeated by ignorant congressmen and senators that trusted their gut over the clear evidence. 

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend: An Experiment in Wealth Distribution by Scott Goldsmith - This is a look at Alaska’s policy of using the State oil revenue to give every single citizen $1000 a year.

Relationships Between poverty and Psychopathology - A study that outlines how growing up poor exposes children to a myriad of psychological problems and mental illnesses.

Assessing the Economic and Non-Economic Impacts of Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, North Carolina - The Harrah Cherokee Casino is widely studied and a resounding success as a case study for Basic Income.

An Estimate of the cost of child poverty in 2013 by Donald Hirsch - This is a British study that estimates child poverty costs £29 billion (£44 Billion-ish). Basically child poverty is massively expensive for governments and Basic Income could essentially pay for itself by removing these expenses.

When Pundits Blamed White People for a Culture of Poverty by Matt Bruenig - Article that discusses how the idea that poor people are lazy and deserve to suffer is racist, classist and morally dangerous.

Rediscovering Poverty: How We Cured ‘The Culture of Poverty’ Not Poverty Itself by Barbara Ehrenreich - An article on how trying to improve the morals of the poor so they can work harder and get themselves out of poverty is a ridiculous waste of time and money and quite frankly an insult to the people we force into these programs. My favourite waste of money that Ehrenreich points out is the $250 million dollars that President Clinton set aside for ‘Chastity Training’ for impoverished single mothers, the US government in the 90s simply assuming that poor women were too stupid to understand where babies came from and that’s why they were poor, rather than, you know, having no money, no support structures and no affordable child care and healthcare.

In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law by Fred Block and Margaret Somers - Speenhamland was a town in the UK where a Universal Income was introduced at the end of the 18th Century. After a few years it was declared a terrible failure and proof that poor people are evil and lazy and should be punished for being poor not helped out of poverty. Speenhamland led to the creation of Workhouses and the abolition of the Poor Laws that had worked as a form of social welfare up to that point. For 150 years Speenhamland was used by politicians and academics all over the world as proof that poor people were almost pathologically incapable of being trusted with their own money. Except the whole thing was a lie. The man sent to study Speenhamland hated the project and was unable to correctly interpret the data or factor in cultural issues that were also affecting the town. Modern researchers almost unanimously agree that Speenhamland was a success but the damage that 150 years of ignorance has done is deep and long lasting.

All of these examples and hundreds more can be found in Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman which lays out the argument for this issue far better than I ever could and also discusses issues such as raising the minimum wage and drastically cutting working hours. 

@keep-counting-stars have fun debating your friend. 

politicians will always be against universal income, because people who are anxious and exhausted are easier to control.

don’t wait for politicians to take the initiative. they won’t. it’s not in their best interests.

I remember the 2010 study being reported on in The Economist. Who have basically been spending quite a while saying “yes, yes, we should reduce dependency and make things more efficient and governments should be more efficient, it turns out also that people who aren’t starving and terrified work harder and better and pay more taxes, get with the program”.

when ‘the economist’ is saying it, you can be pretty sure it’s not a lefty pipe dream.

@oneofthequietones

you wanted sources about this, or something like this 

@kaysinkacei

Sweet, thank you!

CRYING

@kaysinkacei

banette’s grudge.

I feel like there’s not much Recognition that gender socialization within progressive communities/families is a thing. Like, whenever I talk about gender socialization it’s totally based around How Gender Works Under Patriarchy.

But this - isn’t quite my experience at all.

What I got out of being male-socialized wasn’t “I get everything and everyone should listen to me and I’m totally great”. Or, “I should get to vote and women shouldn’t because they’re precious flowers”. It was more like “you need to shut up so that women can talk”. It was “pay attention to how much you’re talking and try to make it so that you’re making space for other people and not dominating the conversation”. It was “if you explain something to someone else that they happened to already know, it’s probably because you felt entitled and like you were better than them, which you aren’t”.

I also think that I was socialized to despise a certain stereotype of masculine boys, “fuckboys”, bros who were racists and alcohol-obsessed and rapists and who played football. There are definitely bros like this out there but I also feel like this was not a very healthy thing for me to have internalized?

I was also taught to hate toxic masculinity, which was where men didn’t share their feelings and kept them repressed. So I would go around asking people about their feelings and if they didn’t tell me I would assume that they were toxically masculine and worry about them a lot?

And masculinity stood for competitiveness and individuality and ambition, and femininity stood for cooperativeness and community and selfgiving, and the former was bad and Western and the latter was good and progressive. And masculinity was industrial and femininity was Natural; and industry was bad, it was killing Mother Earth.

I can’t find this one slam poem on the internet, but it was about man caves, and about how man caves are a symbol for how men swell and women shrink and men take up too much space and how man caves are a way for men to cut out a portion of the house which is a traditional female space, and to dominate women even there. Maybe it actually had a good point - in fact it probably did - but it’s unwatchable for me.

And I- kind of think that I ended up internalizing that men and masculinity were bad? And I felt like I needed to minimize my existence?

And this was a majority of how I learnt how to interact with others, trying not to take over too much of their space, being very aware of my power to hurt them and dominate them. I-

I think that this is really bad.

I felt like I had something meaningful to say in response to this but after writing it I feel like maybe I just sort of talked a lot and it’s not super relevant? I’m going to post it anyway, because I’m That Sort of Person, but I felt like I should sort of preemptively apologize because I’m kind of using your experiences as a jumping off point to blather about loosely-related stuff. For what it’s worth, you had to put up with some serious bullshit and I think you’ve handled it admirably.

It seems to me that one of the core issues with modern prog-left culture is that it attempted to centre itself around the concept of hegemony/systemic oppression but lacks the patience or nuance to recognize how complicated those concepts are.

The basic thesis I guess is that there’s a “systemic” level and an “individual” level and it’s mainly patterns at the systemic level that matter and you can summarize those patterns on the back of a business card if your handwriting is small. But of course in reality there isn’t a single “system”, only a million different nested and interlocking systems, and the prog tendency is to pick one of these – usually vaguely defined and semi-mythological – as the one that “really matters” and ignore all the others.

Like, I’ll be a killjoy here and say I that I do think patriarchy is a real thing and it’s very important and bad. But within that framework there are large, powerful, influential systems that go in completely the opposite direction, which is what you’re dealing with here, and those and other subsystems have a huge effect on people’s lives. The normal way to rebut that point is to argue that even when those subsystems hurt people for stupid reasons, it’s still basically a good thing because when you sum everything up across the entire universe they’re still the losing team. This is usually dressed up in a way that implies that people’s overall quality of life is determined by their team’s “sum total” score, but that doesn’t even loosely resemble reality at the level of people with names and experiences.

There isn’t really a satisfying way to resolve this, which is why people go for bad easy answers. I do think that on some level you need to be able to talk about stuff in terms of broad statistical tendencies or you can’t see the forest for the trees, but when you round people and environments off to such a broad degree you risk losing the connection to individual experiences that’s supposed to be justifying the concern about hegemonic patterns in the first place. If someone really believes that these local, lower-level initiatives have a chance to make a difference then I think they have to acknowledge that they’re powerful enough to seriously hurt people in or near them, and that if they really think that stuff matters then they have a responsibility to try to minimize that. People don’t want to do this because it turns a straightforward situation into a hopeless quagmire, but this is where that gets us. It seems to me that if it was really a quagmire all along then not that much has been lost.

A slightly less verbose take:

Things that might make sense as a counterbalance to an opposite prevailing culture become harmful in isolation. I get the impression that @silver-and-ivory ‘s parents must have been thinking “society socializes men to be X, we need to push in the direction of not-X”.  But what “society” is young s&i actually exposed to?  Their extremely identity politics-left family and their extremely identity politics-left school.  I’m betting that their mothers had a say in what media s&i was allowed to consume, too.  There is no patriarchal socialization to push back against here, so what might have been a well-intentioned endeavor ends up far overshooting the mark.

As someone who identifies with wanting to limit their maleness so as not to be an arsehole, I’m going to go through the messages @silver-and-ivory says are very bad:

This is too situational to draw general conclusions from. If you’re making small talk about the weather it’s a stupid message; if you’re debating the struggles women face in modern society it’s a very sensible one.

Good advice for anyone regardless of gender. That’s not to say you shouldn’t talk a lot - I love listening to my loved ones infodump about things they’re interested in, for example - but I feel that putting in some effort so that people in the conversation don’t feel pushed out is basic politeness. Which leads to...

Fair enough; this is bollocks. That said, there is such a thing as condescendingly assuming someone doesn’t know something when common sense should tell you they probably do.

Well done, you’ve worked out that you should dislike dickheads. The football thing does tie into a pet peeve of mine where smug pricks assume that liking sports automatically subtracts from your Morality Points simply because they don’t like them, but that’s another discussion for another time.

Then that’s on you for jumping to ridiculous conclusions.

Fair enough, this is classic tumblr-y black & white thinking (aka horseshit).

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting a space to call yours and yours alone; I reckon a lot of people who don’t have one would benefit from it. However, thinking of it in gendered terms is a sign of someone who would also benefit from a minor kicking.

The harsh truth of the matter is that everyone, regardless of gender, has the capacity to accidentally hurt other people. As such, I think everyone should be aware of this and try to avoid it - men more so since they have fewer external incentives to do so. It’s definitely possible to take this too far and end up in a bad place, but that doesn’t mean the core lesson is wrong.

TL;DR - IMHO, the fact that some people take a good thing too far doesn’t mean it’s not a good thing.

Prince Stolas - by Centradragon

What if the sun doesn’t actually hurt vampires?

Vampires are just nocturnal, the same way we are diurnal. A vampire could go out during the day, but they would just rather be sleeping.

Vampires are just afraid of the light, the same way we are afraid of the dark. Their eyes are meant to see in the dark, so they just can’t see very well in the light. It hurts their eyes and they can’t see what’s around them, so it’s just scary.

Some vampire was probably too afraid to admit that he was afraid of the light, so he made up a fake allergy to the sun. Word got out to mortals, so we just assumed that all vampires are allergic to the sun. You know how mortals like to stereotype and whatnot.

But imagine pop, sunny vampires that are the vampire version of goth, dark humans. They like to go out in the sun and wear bright clothes, and the other vampires think it’s metal as fuck. “Oh, you know Victoria Anne III? Yeah she’s totally pop. Her friends call her Susan.”

I fucking love this

join tumblr

When someone disagrees with you online and demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a complete and logically sound defense including citations, you can save a lot of time by not doing that.

Bro, I’ve known you for twelve seconds and enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.

This got a lot of responses from people pointing out that evidence is a key part of intellectual inquiry, discourse, and debate.  That being able to support your beliefs is a key critical thinking skill.  Which is 100% true.

Except that you don’t actually have to participate in intellectual discourse any time some fucko on the Internet tells you to.

There’s a big difference between “this is an important thing to be able to do,” and “this is a thing that you must be continuously available to perform in public for any stranger who asks.”

Agreed. But on the flipside, if someone makes an argument backed up with zero evidence, they forfeit the right to complain if it results in people not taking their argument seriously.

You don’t have to participate in intellectual discourse any time someone tells you to, but if you steam in trying to start it then it’s not unreasonable for people to expect you to back your argument up with something.

how society/history remembers Cpt James T Kirk: omg always tryin to fuck the ladies fucks all the alien ladies lmao space don juan amirite

how Cpt James T Kirk actually is in canon:

I’m going to assume this is about old Star Trek, since he watched a lady undress without her consent in both of the new Star Trek movies I’ve seen...  

Imagine if you were a Christian medieval person from a small village and you had a feud with your neighbour… how annoying would it be to see them in church every Sunday? Not only are you obliged to be in the same space with them every week but you’d have to watch them receive the sacrament and have their sins forgiven even though you know damn well they don’t deserve it… and on top of that you get the priest preaching “love thy neighbour” from the pulpit, I think the fuck not, I’ll not love an unneighbourly misbegotten churl such as he, preach though thou might, father

I think I just got possessed by the ghost of a man who’s still really upset about his neighbour’s pigs eating his cabbages

Jun Chiu  -  https://junchiu.tumblr.com  -  https://drawcrowd.com/junchiu  -  https://es-es.facebook.com/junchiuarts

why his nose take up almost half his face