Nonflamable Ink

Things that I have actually struggled to deal with in my 2 years as a public defender so far (non-exhaustive list):

Having to put the criminal records and self-esteem and livelihoods of clients I believed were factually innocent, people I'd developed relationships with and knew how much they had to lose if something went wrong, in the hands of a group of strangers who I'd had no more than 20 minutes to question about their knowledge and beliefs and biases.

Worrying those strangers would favor the young, handsome white male prosecutors' arguments over my innocent clients who've had rough lives and it shows on their faces, because of whose voice sounds "authoritative" and who "looks like a criminal".

Never feeling like I had enough time to prepare a case for trial because I also had over 100 other cases pending at the same time.

Put simply, it is harder to represent a factually innocent person than a factually guilty person. I think basically all defense attorneys agree on this. It's more emotionally taxing because of the stakes. There are always material stakes for all of our clients, but for a factually innocent person there are also moral stakes.

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.

Them: I have a work of literary cyberpunk that seriously explores the impact of ubiquitous cybernetic enhancement upon bodily autonomy.

Me: Does it really seriously explore the impact of ubiquitous cybernetic enhancement upon bodily autonomy, or does it employ bodily autonomy as a metaphor for the artist's loss of intellectual freedom under the corporate state?

Them: It definitely seriously explores the impact of ubiquitous cybernetic enhancement upon bodily autonomy.

Me: All right – show me your work of literary cyberpunk that seriously explores the impact of ubiquitous cybernetic enhancement upon bodily autonomy.

Me: *looks inside*

I was trying to track down a non-soundcloud version of Chords of Humanity, the song he wrote that when he was 17 was used by Doctors Without Borders, and instead found that it was used in a Fallout New Vegas mod that he may also have made at 17?

which is a sequel to another mod that's also credited to a Dylan Hollis, which I'm not necessarily assuming is him. Could have been a different Dylan Hollis who happened to have found the song by searching his name--oh, wait, there's a video of game play (with the song as background), and there's a tiny bit of voice acting...yeah, that's him.

However, it's almost 100 years old, and there are other treatments out there that work better. We aren't using 100 year old medicines for cancer, or pneumonia, or even arthritis, so why is the court MANDATING 100 year old treatments for addiction? (Why aren't there enough spaces in modern treatment facilities also?)

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.

We’re raising funds to print a brand new book of compiled SMBC comics on Kickstarter right now! check out our project for Parenting - An SMBC Collection

"Why?" is one of the comics that will be included!

Original comic : www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-is-the-sky-blue

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Also they're normally natural enemies in the wild but sometimes they occasionally hybridize?

depends on the wolf! for this exercise we'll assume a median coyote size of 30 lbs.

while all north american wolves are technically grey wolves (except the mexican red wolf!) there are more than twenty subspecies of the damn things, all of which can differ significantly in size and appearance! (many now displaced with some extinct)

for example, the mexican wolf is only barely bigger than a large coyote, with adults reaching the 50-90 lb range.

whereas the northern rocky mountain wolf has any coyote massively outclassed, ranging between 80-150 lbs!

most other north american wolves range somewhere in between. but this is why we don't say "the size of a wolf" much as a figure of speech, because they come in so many different sizes!

and when wolves and coyotes hybridize, it's generally because there's no other potential partners in the area for either animal, so they start being willing to look a little farther up the family tree, so to speak!