references

To 2025:

Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.

They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.

This clip is from 1968 and discussed assassination after Bobby Kennedy died.

is the ability to process these things.

taking away the words for bad things

means when they HAPPEN- and bad things will still happen around us-

WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT THEM without the WORDS.

When the word is accurate, USE THE WORD. Say Death. Say Murder. Say Rape. Say Prison, say Riots, say War, Say Famines and Disease. Say Bigotry. Say Hate crime. Say Racism. Say Fascism. Say Abuse. Say Hurt. Say Pain. Say Grief. Say Fear.

We must not lose the Truth of what a word means.

a lot of people wanted to know what shirley jackson meant with this story. she told all who asked different meanings; it’s about small town life, the holocaust, antisemitism, the myth of the scapegoat… she told one high school student: “if you can’t figure it out, i’m not going to tell you.”

she approved one message to be published in the the new yorker, written by a young kip orr;

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It is a legitimate tactic for defusing a situation that could otherwise escalate to become quite nasty.

 I was invited onto NPR’s Weekend Edition to chat with Ayesha Rascoe about Marriage These Days. She wanted to know if The Discourse on dating and marriage matches up with reality.

My basic take was that, on both the left and the right, there’s been way too much focus on the challenges that highly educated, high earning women are having in finding suitable partners. (See, for example, the WSJ’s piece on The American Women Giving Up On Marriage or the infamous NYT Magazine piece on The Trouble With Wanting Men or this recent piece in The Cut about the economist who Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men). To the extent that there has been a breakdown in gender relations in this country, it is largely playing out at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

In my view, the story isn’t so much “highly educated, ambitious women can’t find men who are up to their standards” or “women have simply had it with men” or “no one wants to marry a girlboss” but "committed partnership is increasingly a privilege.” Male or female, those on the lowest rungs of American society are struggling to partner up. To make my case, I walked them through stuff that I’ve covered in The Atlantic and here at Family Stuff:

The marriage rate among college educated women is broadly stable. It is women without much education that are not getting married anymore.

The marriage rate among high earning women is rising.

It’s true that there is an emerging “shortage,” if you will, of college-educated men, which raises a question about how college-educated women are still managing to find spouses. The answer is that they are increasingly marrying men without college degrees, which I wrote about for The Atlantic (gift link). That said, when you look at the earnings of non-college educated men, those who are marrying highly educated women have fared pretty well. Meanwhile, the earnings of non-college-educated men who aren’t marrying college-educated women have tanked over the years. So highly educated women are dipping into the pool of non-college-educated men and plucking out the highest earners.

For both men and women, higher earnings translate to a greater likelihood of ending up in a relationship.

The less education you have, the more likely you are to be single: “44% of adults ages 25 and older without a high school diploma are unpartnered, whereas 30% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree are.”

It’s not just America: Over in Europe, the likelihood of ever entering a cohabiting union of any sort (married or unmarried) has dropped off more steeply among women and men with the least education than among those with more. As I put it when I first reported on this study, “independence is starting to look less like a privilege of the rich and more like a burden of the poor.”

Oh _lovely_. Everyone go turn this off:

this is such a cute research programme.

Recent evidence suggests that the human brain automatically constructs a rich model of other people’s attention, beyond registering low-level cues such as someone else’s gaze direction. This model is not a physically accurate representation of attention, but instead appears to contain simplifying and physically incoherent features. For example, without explicitly realizing it, people treat the attentive gaze of others as though it exerts a gentle force pushing on objects. Here we specify another aspect of that implicit model of attention. People treat the attentive gaze of an agent as though it were travelling through space, with an implied motion encoded literally enough that it causes a perceptual motion adaptation effect. This implicit model of other people’s attention may facilitate the process of keeping track of who is attending to what, which is essential for reading and predicting the minds and behavior of social agents. This implicit model of attention may also have shaped culturally widespread ideas about mind and spirit.

write insane shit that’s way beyond your perceived ability and skill level even if you don’t finish it even if you think it sucks

something I think we unfortunately need to understand here is that it’s not an echo chamber anymore. if it were an echo chamber, you would not encounter it in every fandom, every comment section, any given subreddit on any conceivable topic, directed at anyone visibly Jewish (from famous people to random Jews on the street), and so on. this is no longer an echo chamber problem, it’s a systemic societal mainstream problem. there was a clip I saw shared from The View today where some of the women had to call one of the others out because they felt she was blaming Jews as a whole for the war with Iran (this woman has been antisemitic on air many times before), and the default response was to defend her. I was reading something else today and someone said they enjoyed getting a push notification from the New York Times that was about gossip and not about “genocidal Zionists,” and this was said by probably some totally normie American woman. a Jewish man running for Congress was banned from a coffee shop in Brooklyn and people are wholly on the side of the coffee shop and delighted he lost. these examples are recent, of course, there are much worse ones to cite (ie: championing murderers when the victims are Jews).

We are currently going through a cost of living crisis, the worst unemployment rate in recent history, gas is even more through the roof than in other countries since we are so far away from other countries. Oh and the UN has published a warning that the government is violating indigenous rights.

Yet disestablishing a country on the other side of the world is this party's main focus. And when you ask yourself why, its because they're likely gearing up to blame all of those issues on Israel, then zionism as a whole, and then jews. And this isn't the slippery slope logical fallacy as some of the people who have joined this new party, have done exactly that. There is one "activist" group local to my city who claimed that the jewish council in Australia was a "zionist lobby group" and were lobbying the Australian government after the terrorist attack in Bondi. However what the truth was, is that after bondi, the Australian government had reached out to the jewish council as part of the inquiry into the attack. That is not lobbying. The NZ government did the same after the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch.