In Fluent Shadow

click on superfund proximity to see how close you are to a superfund site (location contaminated with hazardous material)

heres Niagra Falls NY! google love canal!

its a good tool to see what environmental factors could be harming your health that you may not know about. this is not limited to toxic waste so look around at it

my favorite is looking at roads. there are some interesting correlations. Here is a map of Buffalo NY with traffic proximity

here it is again but with where people are getting asthma :P

crazy

heres where the people of color live in Buffalo btw

in case you where wondering what the explanatory factor here is, its the 6-lane expressway that they ran through a residential community in the 50s. a redlined neighborhood btw. the road used to be beautiful parkway. thank you Urban Renewal, thank you Robert Moses, and thank you Kensington Expressway

here are some other mapping resources from the notes. this is not everything, but it is a start.

Check the quality of your tap water here:https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/

Check your climate vulnerability here: https://climatevulnerabilityindex.org/

explore historical redlining maps here: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining

this is just the wikipedia page of current superfund sites, take a look and see where your state has hazardous waste sites.

When really it's more like: "My boundary is that if you do this thing that I've told you I don't like then I will remove myself from the situation"

I actually very much remember 9/11.

I was 8 years old. My dad flew around the country for work a whole fuck of a lot. He happened to be home that week and thank fuck for that.

But yeah, I remember 9/11. I remember watching people jumping out of the World Trade Center. I remember the estimated death toll of 10,000 dead.

I remember all of it.

I also remember a great deal of life before 9/11. My family flew a lot, and we used to go to O'Hare to pick my dad up from the gate when he came back from work trips.

Basically, I remember enough of pre-9/11 life in America to have been fully cognizant of this country's full-throated descent into willing paranoia, which is why I make jokes about it. I don't think people realize how fucking weird it is, historically, for the whole "never forgor" phenomenon to be as strong as it is.

It's been 2 decades and everyone still gets their nuts in a twist about it. Pearl Harbor didn't remain a political touchstone in 1963. People were making Kennedy Assassination jokes in 1985.

Things got INCREDIBLY stupid for a while after 9/11. Freedom Fries and "free speech zones" and a lot of precursors to the nationalist bullshit we're all suffering through now. There was a period of several years where it didn't seem like you could go anywhere without fucking God Bless The USA playing. There were flags fucking everywhere. You could IMMEDIATELY buy scads of 9/11 Commemorative Merchandise, often of the dumbest possible shit, something that continues to this day.

It sucks for the loved ones of people who died, but I also kinda feel like if we, as a country, actually gave a shit then maybe, perhaps, the first responders - many of whom got all kinds of terrible cancers - wouldn't have such a terrible time trying to access benefits and healthcare? We won't take care of you while you're still alive, but once you die we'll put your name on a plaque or some shit!

It's also kind of hard to take 9/11 seriously as The One Big Tragic Thing when we were losing a 9/11's worth of people every week to COVID for ages and damn we don't hear about THEM very often. People gripe nonstop about being asked to mask around vulnerable people and get really angry if you remind them that people can still die and become disabled from COVID. Over a million people died in the US alone, but if you bring that up you're apparently just some kind of weirdo who's just paranoid about COVID.

Let's say you read '4% of Americans are currently behind on their mortgages'... What exactly does that mean? What can you infer about the state of loans in general?

One might ask themselves: Is that of all Americans or mortgage holders? What about couples that have both their names on it? What's the typical delinquency rate? High or lower than 4%? Has this rate changed rapidly? Are foreclosures included? Foreclosures within the past how many months?

I ended up taking an $85,000/yr job as an optical research scientist at Corning instead.

It is an odd feeling, having a price put on your soul. I'd be a millionaire with a house by my mid-30s if I'd accepted that. And the offer is still open, in fact I'd have an even more generous one waiting for me with the skills I have now.

In all seriousness, if you have the right skillset, you can actually sell your soul. This very week. You will live in comfort and moderate luxury for all your days. Two of my family members did that work decades ago, until they couldn't stomach it any longer, and it set up the rest of their lives.

But I promise you, it's not worth it. It's been almost 50 years for one of them and it still haunts him. He says the worst part was the way they (him included) talked about human lives as things. Numbers on a spreadsheet, sterile corporate jargon in meetings. A lifetime later and you can still see it in his eyes when he talks about it.

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.