Obsidian Musings

she was talking about like, gender diversity and the ways in which that fits into liberation and the ways it hasn't always been included, and she was positioning herself in that space as someone who did a lot of EXTREMELY important work that made a huge impact, but she did not imply that that meant that those coming after her owed her writing and perspective deference on every level. which was such a wonderful thing to hear as someone who read some of her early statements about things like queerness many decades ago and felt disappointed and hurt by what she said about it. she said "we are all building on the work done by those who came before us. we all stand on their shoulders. many people stand on my shoulders, and often those people know more than I do about certain subjects, and it's important to me that I am able to learn from them." she was saying like, "yeah, my work often benefits people who come after me and who have more knowledge than I do about a component of what I am discussing, and their perspectives in turn enrich my own frameworks," and I found that really encouraging as a way to look at this. not "this activist's work was imperfect and that means it is bad," and also not "you young people don't understand what it was like, and your perspective that I have overlooked things or gotten things wrong is a threat to my work and my legacy," but "this is a collaborative effort between countless individuals over a long span of time, and we all enrich each other's frameworks with our knowledge and experience"

no one person can outline All Oppression in one perfectly informed way -- we are all cobbling together a big picture based on all of our personal experiences and our perspectives that are based on those experiences. many people stand on her shoulders, and some of them know more about some things than she does, and she values what they add to what she has done. she thinks it's important to learn from them like they have learned from her.

Especially if we're dealing with country-level shit. There's not one totally good country on the planet. Not one. Okay? So if you respond to a victory in the US or something cool that Norway did or positive news out of Germany with "yeah but [country] is a nightmare actually because [things that are happening]," you are not doing anybody any favors.

You're just being a tar pit.

And don't fucking turn this into apologia for the bad shit countries do. That's not what I'm fucking saying.

All Systems Red

...Mensah had offered to let me hang out in the hub with the humans like I was an actual person or something.

Artificial Condition

Even when I was still in armor, once my PreservationAux clients had seen my human face, they had wanted to treat me like a person.

I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this.

It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.

Since I wasn’t a person and I didn’t have an employment voucher, I would have to hack my way into one of the supply shuttles …

Rogue Protocol:

You would think the person they knew as a security consultant slamming in and disarming one of them would cause everyone to stop and reassess their priorities in this situation, but oh, you would be wrong.

Exit Strategy

“It’s the first one I saw. When I hacked my governor module and picked up the entertainment feed. It made me feel like a person.”

[...]

A roving drone cam showed me she was frowning. “You are a person.”

Oh, that we can’t talk about. “Not legally.”

Fugitive Telemetry

But I wasn’t a citizen and also technically not actually a person, which made it more difficult.

Network Effect

Mensah Murderbot March | Prompt: matching clothes

book 7 broke me and my sense of humor