i come to (k)no(w) conclusions

Bruh. Do you know what would happen if you were to destroy the system?

Millions and millions of people will die, starting with the most marginalized and the most vulnerable.

Do you know why? Because the power vacuum left behind by a collapsed government will not stay unoccupied. It will rapidly be filled by whoever is the biggest, nastiest, bloodthirstiest bully on the block.

Why do you think Project 2025 is all about destroying the system? Because the system, again, is the only thing preventing the alt-right from going on an ethnic cleansing spree, killing everyone who doesn't fit their vision of a white ethno-nation.

You will not herald in a golden age of equity by destroying a system that has working checks and balances. You will get a lifetime of stress and living from moment to harrowing moment. You will have to sacrifice getting to be who you are in exchange for becoming a machine for survival.

Anarchy is a beautiful dream, because it's a dream that'll do whatever you want in your mind. It is Intriguing. It is New. It is Different. It looks like a fresh start, a blank canvas...but the error lies in assuming you'll get ANY SAY in how that canvas will get painted. Life is not something we get to shape like that, because it's not something we can control no matter how we organize ourselves. All we can do is figure out how we want to co-habit and co-operate within the ecosystem of all things.

There will always be "bad people" participating in the system, yes, but that's because "bad people" is a construct—bad is a thing we made it up. What's bad in one worldview is good in another. Not only that, everyone is capable of being bad and good, regardless of the morals and values they hold, system or no system.

Additionally, those same bigots who participate in the system now? They will GLADLY participate in a non-system.

I'm saying this because I've already experienced a sample of what anarchy brings.

You see, the day George Floyd was murdered, I was living in the next neighborhood over. In a manner of 48 hours, I watched my city spiral into chaos all around me.

Let me tell you.

You don't know what these structures do for us, until you cannot cross the burning streets to extract a vulnerable acquaintance from danger, and all you can do is pray they'll be okay.

You don't know what these structures do for us, until you have Boogaloos and Proud Boys driving in from out-of-state for the opportunity to gun down your neighbors with impunity.

You don't know what these structures do for us, until your pharmacies are ransacked and people's critical life-sustaining medications are gone.

There is a feeling you experience when anarchy befalls you. Yes, you feel fear, but something else as well, something worse—

You feel useless. Profoundly fucking useless.

You find yourself in a reality where there's no guarantee that anything you do will be successful, no matter what you try and no matter how skilled you are at navigating a chaotic landscape, because your survival is now in the hands of pure luck. And luck? Is random.

The structures of our system, despite all their imperfections and flaws and problems, are what give us a chance to be successful at what we try to do, when we try to do them.

Anarchy isn't a catalyst for building a better community. It's a catalyst for chaos. The community you saw rallying in George Floyd Square didn't emerge out of becoming an autonomous zone. It already existed. It was already there. The grief of Floyd's murder just brought it out in the open.

It has taken us millennia to create a system like the one we have today, one that's designed to be changed by the people it serves through a careful mechanism of due process, that additionally doesn't succumb easily to hostile takeover. Voting is ultimately how it's changed.

The idea that anarchy is somehow better is laughable.

now I don't think it should be EASILY accessible. I don't think it should be legal for adults they know in real life to deliberately show it to them. I don't think it should be advertised where they can see without deliberately seeking it out. I think it should be tucked away politely in much the same way we all poop, but don't generally do this in public

but I do think a 12 year old who just learned what sex is should be able to google "porn" and find the dedicated websites for it. I think they should see the "pinky promise you're 18" screen and be able to make a choice for themselves on whether to lie. I think they should then be able to leave the website when they want without leaving a single digital trace on it, no stored email address let alone any more identifying information. I think there should be anonymous adult chat rooms available that kids can peek into then drop without a single consequence to their lives from that point on. I think all that separates them from adult fic should be a single click to confirm that yes, they are aware that this is not something society considers appropriate and they're choosing to view it deliberately.

like I think you can and should keep those mandatory click-through screens and checkmarks. For websites that have a lot of adult content, maybe you should even be able to make an account that stores your claimed age. (It should be illegal for them to ask for any verification, though. Your private information is private, and lying on the internet about who you are is a sacred right)

There should definitely be safe search and it should even be default and it should perhaps even take a lot of effort to find where to turn it off in the settings. (But an easy checkmark right on the screen to turn it back on, perhaps, for those who manage to do it accidentally anyway)

There should be tagging and there should be the Shroud of Separation letting people avoid that which is nsfw for all the possible reasons for it. (Prudishness, trauma, being literally at work where your boss can look over your shoulder at any time, being too young, just looking for things that aren't porn at this time)

If someone tells you that there's a secret conspiracy to [do a thing you don't like] and that it's unique to Biden, you better fucking look that thing up, because chances are you're going to find that it's been happening under every administration for the last 50 years. Is that good? No! Should you want to change it? Probably! Is it a unique crime to Biden? Nope!

"Biden said [bad thing] [X] years ago." Well, this bad thing he said happens to be true, but it looks like it was 45 years ago, and he changed his stance 40 years ago. "Biden said [other bad thing] [Y] years ago." What's the source on that? So there's one person who says he said it? And nobody else who was there has corroborated that account? Who posted the story?

These are all random examples of things I've seen over the last couple of weeks, with the details slightly changed from the Tumblr posts and news articles I've seen, because the point isn't the details of the particular story, so I don't want to get bogged down in particulars that don't matter to the point I'm making.

The point of this post isn't the specific things I'm referencing but the fact that in each of these cases, the reality was not what was initially presented. Either the reality was wildly different, or this story can't be corroborated and was told by someone with a clear and very well-known agenda of their own, which means that at the very least, the story should be treated with extreme suspicion.

And on that note, please don't believe that because you're a leftist that you can't be radicalized in the same way that right-wingers are. You aren't immune to propaganda either. I'm not saying you have to like, or should like, any particular politician or political entity. I am saying, however, that you should view a lot of the news with a gimlet eye, and that goes double for anything that makes you real fucking mad.

You need - need - to stop and read the whole article and ask yourself if you can verify the claims and who benefits from this making you mad.

I'm sure they weren't aware that CRT is short for Critical Race Theory, i.e., the idea that racism exists. But they didn't even look up this acronym that was cited at least three or four separate times as the titular reason schools are so evil; the post said a bunch of stuff they thought they agreed with, so they reblogged it.

And the other thing I need to be clear about is that there is shitty "leftist" propaganda and right wing propaganda, and you can be radicalized out of sense along any axis of political thought.

Leftists tend to think they're "too smart" to fall prey to cult-like thinking or radicalization. That is absolutely not true & there is plenty of weird fringe left, unfuckingfortunately. Thinking you couldn't possibly be radicalized makes you more vulnerable.

Despite its current dominance, the single-income household has never been viable on a mass scale, outside of a few decades in the West, due largely to imperialism extracting massive amounts of wealth from the rest of the world combined with technological monopolies which have since lapsed.

Historically, in households where there was one 'breadwinner' and one 'homemaker,' it was because child labor allowed it to be so, because the industry of the household (the breadwinning) was linked into the domesticity: if you were a freeholder farmer, growing your food, farming, what we would now think of as a job, was in the same class of labor as cooking and cleaning, it was all part of the same system, we did not think of one as a job and the other as not. So, as children are often expected to help out around the house today, children back then would be expected to help out in the other productive endeavors of the household, like farming, or other forms of work. And children didn't typically go to school. They started working with their parents from a very young age.

So you hear a lot of complaints about how difficult it is to maintain a single income household, it's because when children are present, they are being freeloaders, generally; all of the labor they would have done to contribute to the household is offloaded solely onto the parents. And when they are not present, well, that was never very achievable in the first place with one person not earning bread, right?

We switched to a system where children do not work but we did not accomodate the switch to that system by altering the family structure to include a higher amount of laborers per household, which would necessitate a higher amount of adults living together for the family unit than just one man one woman. And we got away with it for a long time because of competitive advantages provided by imperialism, the industrial revolution, and so on.

That is coming to an end, and people are finding out that having kids is now a miserable experience that often makes your life worse, because of the financial and time burdens now associated with shepherding someone through the legal and social structures constraining and defining 'childhood.'

It doesn't have to be, though. We can envision alternative household and family structures that make that burden much less intensive. For instance, instead of marriage, some alternative structure in which a group of best friends bind themselves together and agree to live with each other in a shared household, which future spouses and children are incorporated into. (repping Terra Ignota here)

Such a structure could have one homemaker and three breadwinners because the duties typically assigned to homemakers have been made much easier than previous by technology. After spouses are incorporated in, you could even have a division between homemaker and educator, with one person whose sole job in the household of ~8 adults + however many kids is cleaning, and one person who is solely dedicated to day to day parenting and schooling. And in this structure it doesn't really matter how many people in society are gay or trans or in relationships that will otherwise not produce children because every household will probably have at least one straight couple and they can have as many kids as the household can bear if they want, which is the same amount of kids as a household with 4 straight couples.

I think this is interesting because, conceptually, sex is actually pretty tame. It is (or at least should be) pleasurable for both parties, it's connected with both romantic love and the creation of new life (things which people generally valorize), etc. Obviously I understand the practical reasons why cultures might frown on unrestrained expression of sexuality in a world without birth control, but on a purely conceptual level sex seems pretty wholesome all around.

On the other hand, eating is rather disturbing as an idea, isn't it? Eating necessarily involves killing—even eating plants. As heterotrophs we literally cannot eat anything without ending life in order to do it. And of course most people now and throughout history have eaten meat, which means that eating involves slaughter. It's a gruesome thing; the pleasure we take from food is intimately and inherently tied to death. Eating is an act of destruction which is necessary to nourish the physical body. Surely this should be regarded, by the sorts of people inclined to the idea, as the greatest symbol of the fallen nature of the material world as compared to the spiritual. Surely it is hunger and not lust that should be the archetype of sinful material desire.

While ascetics of various backgrounds do seem to have mentioned gluttony (it is after all one of the seven deadly sins), my impression is that usually lust is a much greater concern for them. Why? Because lust is more tempting, a greater threat? I don't think so. I think it's because food is more tempting. Because you can go a lifetime without sex if you actually decide to, but a few days without food and your brain will basically shut down your capacity for higher reasoning and make you eat. Even when desire for food is railed against, it is generally merely excessive desire (gluttony), and not, as with lust, desire-at-all (hunger). I think only the most hardcore Buddhist monks take umbrage with hunger. Because lust is small potatoes; hunger has us all in its thrall. No matter how pacifistic we think ourselves to be, hunger drives us to kill and kill and kill. Isn't there a little more inherent horror in that than in, uh, people having sex?

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

every time I remember that incest between consenting adults is like, literally a criminal offense in the US that you can go to jail for blows my mind

The situation was, roughly (and removing/changing minor details to prevent any potential identification even from mutuals who know me irl and know where I was working at this time):

Two half-siblings had been given up for adoption, one as a young child and one from birth; they'd never lived in the same household for any part of their life. As adults, they ended up in the same area, met, hit it off, and started dating. They learned that they were siblings, but continued to date – gross, and I probably wouldn't in their shoes, but given that they'd never even known each other beforehand, there clearly wasn't any sort of familial abuse component, so my reaction here is solidly a squick and a squick only.

However, things broke bad – extremely bad. The couple split and there were a series of petty-but-nasty back-and-forth squabbles (think in the same vein as egging a house or keying a car), and one of them finally texted the other saying that as "payback" for the latest of these, they'd claim that they'd been raped, unless their ex paid for a number of assorted things, including both property damage from the aforementioned petty squabbles, and a handful of other entirely unrelated things. Their ex called their bluff, and so they filed a complaint.

Now, here's the thing: people talk about "pressing charges", but that's not actually how criminal law works. Once the government has evidence of the crime, they can pursue it regardless of what the "victim" actually wants. The victim in this case recanted almost immediately, presumably because a) I genuinely don't think that they wanted to get their ex prosecuted for rape; they just wanted to scare them with the threat of it, and b) they probably realized that once we at the public defender's office got their phone, we'd see the long string of texts where they explicitly threatened to file a fake rape complaint unless the were paid money, and that's what's known as "extortion", and it's a crime. But this didn't end up mattering, because as soon as it came out that they and their ex were siblings, the prosecution decided that they could proceed regardless of whether the "victim" in the original rape complaint was onboard with it – incest in this jurisdiction was classed as the same level of sexual offense as rape, and the incest was completely and totally indisputable.

I wasn't first chair on this case, but I sat in on plea negotiations, and the public defender handling it was pretty blunt. He said, in essence, look: false rape accusations are rare as hell, but this is one of the only cases that I've ever worked on with a true smoking gun – it is completely obvious that the rape accusation is fake, because we have a long string on texts where the complaining witness explicitly said that they would fake a rape accusation if they weren't paid money – and additionally, they have repeatedly tried to stop the case from proceeding; how can you possibly justify not dropping charges here? And the prosecutor's answer, which I will literally never forget was, and I'm not kidding: that forcible rape and consensual incest were "equivalent", and so while yes, it was completely obvious that the rape accusation was bogus, since they had enough to get the ex on incest, they wouldn't settle for anything less than a felony sex crime "on principle".