— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”
Dino Mommy Summer
i love graffiti. "comics and jazz are the only american art forms" you forgot graffiti. did you remember graffiti? That art form birthed in Philly and NYC in the early 70s by poor Black kids. that art form that spread all over the world and influenced so many. that's used without irony in commercials when they're trying to appeal to a "young urban" customer.
did you forget graffiti? that racism broken windows theory victim? that reach the establishment takes claiming that it's exclusively violent gang members throwing up those full-color pieces and wildstyle tags in the middle of the night outsmarting fifty security cameras because the billboard was ugly anyway. as if, even if it was, it wouldn't be impressive as all hell. risking brutality and fall damage so your art can occupy the space a gentrified condo named something like "Coluumna" took away from you. proving that despite only assholes affording to live here anymore there's still a soul beneath it. an animal with dripping stripes and teeth that go clack-clack tsssss
i certainly wasn't happy before my attempt. the pain was all i could really think about at the time. suicide is a desperate attempt to escape when you don't see other options. in the long run, those other options will eventually lead to happiness.
it got better very slowly for me, but a lot faster once i found people like me making really good art that i could have a cathartic cry to.
i hope you start feeling better soon. i can't really know you as we're just internet strangers but i think you're a pretty cool fox with a good sense of humor.
i hear that many people are happy before they kill themselves because they realize their pain is ending soon. so im trying to convince myself that maybe i should die in hopes that it'll create some kind of happiness burst and i can maybe ride that and feel better. but so far it just makes me want to die instead
At least once a month someone will write “anarchism isn’t about no hierarchies, anarchism is about no UNJUST hierarchies” and will then name the most extremely fucked up hierarchy as their example of a ‘just’ hierarchy.
Like, no, comrade, the doctor-patient relationship is NOT a just hierarchy. The power that doctors have to not just give advice but to decide for us which care we get and which care we don’t get is deeply fucked up. Speak to a woman and you will get on average like 4 stories about medical abuse by sexist doctors who didn’t want to google ‘endometriosis’. Then speak to trans people. Then speak to fat people. Then speak to people of color. Then speak to a disabled person. I promise you will be horrified by what marginalized people endure under the doctor-patient hierarchy. Our bodies should definitely be ours to control.
Compare the way gymbros/bodybuilding enthusiasts/etc. talk about the influence of genetics on success to the way rationalist/more general social optimizationist IQ enthusiasts talk about the influence of genetics on success.
Every gymbro on the planet will acknowledge that good genetics play a role, often a pretty large role, in how much muscle you can expect to gain—especially if you're a natural lifter (as opposed to enhanced). But this is virtually always said merely as a caveat, never the centerpiece of discussion. The centerpiece of the discussion is always effort and training methodology. Why? Because the assumption is that if you're here, listening to a gymbro talk about gym shit, you want to get jacked. Your genetics are what they are, so why dwell on them? The point is, what can you do, with whatever genetics you happen to have, to get as jacked as possible. And the answer is ultimately "yeah, some people are gonna have a higher natural ceiling than others, but you won't know where yours is until you try—apply yourself as if you have a chance to be the best in the world, and even if you don't reach those heights, you'll probably end up pretty fucking jacked". And this is true. And as far as I'm concerned, it's the best way to think about the notion of natural talent.
IQ enthusiasts are always talking about how we should be testing IQ early and sorting people into social roles based on their scores. I despise this kind of thinking. I'm not Terence Tao, I have no desire to pretend I'm Terence Tao. But I like math, and I'm gonna try to get as good at math as I can possibly be. If someone had tested me at a young age, decided I wasn't cut out for math, and filtered me into a different social role, I would regard that as an injustice (a grave injustice) against me. People should be empowered to pursue their own ends, that's my eternal mantra when it comes to politics. Maybe society would achieve more net productive capacity if we filtered the people with natural math talent into math roles or whatever. I cannot underscore enough the degree to which I do not fucking care.
I have no sympathy for people who want to tell others who to be.
obsessed with how fixable society is, on a structural level.
obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.
obsessed with how easy it all becomes, if we can just figure out how to wrench the wealth out of the hands of the hoarders.
criminal profiling is just astrology for cops
deeply unserious set of images made in ten minutes
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