Blue Potato

This kind of response to things I say about sex work, which isn't always phrased like this but almost always focuses on me being male or a man or my pronouns, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why mansplaining is bad.

I am a sex worker. I have been for a decade. The majority of people I know are sex workers and I'm embedded in sex worker community. I started before 18 and have done it in brothels, cars, my own home, clients' homes, saunas, and hotels.

The deadliest infectious disease in human history is cured by the same packet of chewable tabs individually packed in foil. It comes in beef flavor so your dog won't resist taking its meds as much. It's like a hundred bucks for 30 tablets on pretty much any pet pharmacy.

I have absolutely no issues understanding metaphors or idioms. When someone says their heart is on their sleeve they mean they’re emotionally expressive and openly display their feelings, not that they have a chunk of cardiac tissue on their shirt. I very rarely have issues with sarcasm. I sometimes have issues telling when someone who’s said something mean is about to say “just kidding”, but tbh I think that’s more on them than me.

BUT

My grandmother asked me “Do you know when the trash was taken out last?” and I said “I think Eliot took it out yesterday” and a few hours later she yelled at me for “not taking out the trash when I asked you to” and I was like???? You didn’t ask me????

I dread filling out forms and am crap at filling out diagnostic tests or personality quizzes because there are always questions I don’t know the exact answers to (how am I supposed to know what day I got dental surgery seven years ago?) or don’t understand exactly what they’re asking or the wording’s unclear and they could mean this or the wording says this but I’m pretty sure what they actually meant was that and should I answer what they said or what they meant, and how does everyone else just whip through the form? Does everyone else remember the day they got dental surgery seven years ago? Does everyone else somehow understand all these questions?

I get tangled up by bureaucracy because the rules on the website say that for this you need that and for that you need the other and for the other you need something else for which you need the first thing, and I go in circles for hours or days or weeks or months or years because their stated rules say there is no way to get what I need, and when I talk to somebody else they’re like “just call them?” and I’m like “how could that help? the rules say that what I’m trying to do is impossible”

Suffering through bureaucracy is universal, yes.

Being rendered routinely nonfunctional by bureaucracy specifically because one to a completely unquestioning degree believes that rules are accurately stated and does not understand they’re intended to have unspoken wiggle room and exceptions and be interpreted by the people administrating them is a much more narrow and non-universal issue.

The phone call being recommended here is not to get a quick summary of the rules so I don’t have to read them - I’ve read them all! I’ve spent dozens of hours on it, per task! (And would rather do that than call someone on a phone.)

The problem isn’t that I need to call in order to get information on what the rules are, and that’s not why I’m being advised to call. I’m being told to call in order to bypass and dismiss the rules. In order to have a sympathetic person say “oh yeah we don’t really need that, they never actually check” despite the fact that the rules which I have studied exhaustively say that they do. To have someone say “eh, I can email my boss and she’ll probably let you get away with substituting X for the Y you’re supposed to have”. To say “oh we write down that that’s required but it’s more that it’s faster to process stuff if you have it”.

The problem isn’t that I feel less capable because I don’t know things to a T. The problem is that I DO know things to a T. (Often better than the bureaucrats I end up talking to - I’ve learned to have the relevant regulations etc pulled up on my phone or printed out if I know I actually am on the right side of the rules so I can point to the fact that yes, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, they are the ones doing it incorrectly.)

The problem isn’t that I need somebody to tell me the rules - that would be a perfectly ordinary non-autistic issue. The problem is that I believe and trust and accept as immutable the rules that I know (to a T), which is an autistic issue.

edit: people are reblogging without the addition so im putting the extra versions in the base post too

The sexuality of a police officer is cop.

The gender of a police officer is cop.

When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.

MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.

The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.

BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.

The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.

the habitat loss, food source loss, extreme weather, etc caused by climate change are even more deadly to birds than any power plant.

wind turbines unfortunately do kill birds. but not at the numbers worth tearing down all the wind turbines. environmental assessments are always necessary when putting up infrastructure projects like this to mitigate potential harm but climate change itself is worse for all species. and that climate change is almost entirely caused by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas.)