nut free zone

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

CeCe Rogers on Facebook writes: "Two Black Tennessee lawmakers were physically escorted out of chambers this week while Republicans quietly held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the state's only majority-Black congressional district.

No referendum. No special election. No public vote.

Because they know what happens when voters actually get a say — just look at Virginia, where the people spoke so loudly that Republicans had to drag the courts in to override them.

This isn't new. During Reconstruction, Black Americans held more congressional seats than at any point in the prior 90 years of American history. And white supremacists spent the next several decades tearing that down, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, and voter intimidation.

150 years later, the same tools. Different suits.

The audacity of escorting Black lawmakers out of their own chambers while dismantling Black political representation, and then telling us the courts aren't political, is breathtaking. These are the same courts they're counting on to make it stick.

The measures introduced in agriculture do not strike at the root of feudal land tenure, which took shape in the colonial period, and consequently do not free the poorest sections of the peasants from a semi-feudal exploitation by big landed proprietors, merchants and moneylenders. As regards the Government's efforts to develop new lands and build settlements on them, they involve only an insignificant section of the population and consequently cannot solve the problem of land hunger, or of the latent agrarian overpopulation.

While in the first years of its independent development Malaysia received high prices for its raw material exports, in the following years they became subject to considerable fluctuations which slowed down economic growth rates. In the period from 1965 to 1968, the average annual growth rate of West Malaysia's gross product was 5 per cent.

A backward step has been taken in education. The introduction of fees for secondary education since 1966, which had been free in the first years of West Malaysia's independence, has put secondary schools almost beyond the reach of children from low income families.

it was printed in the ussr in 1972 and translated to english by david fidlon. the chapters on malaya and singapore were written by i.s. latysheva (win for women) i haven't looked for it online yet but if i find a pdf i'll share it here

My parents threw away all of these things (even the vacuum cleaners and the dryer) when they got too dirty to function, because no one even told them THAT they could be cleaned. Cost them thousands of dollars over the years.

All I'm saying is that cleaning is not intuitive, and not knowing how to clean is not a moral failing, but it is something you can learn.

I like this video because it does a great job of introducing the basic foundations of house cleaning (and because he doesn't use bleach, which is a common allergy in addition to being awful to inhale). He also talks a little about how to clean a vacuum. And why you shouldn't put grease from your pots and pans down the sink drain. I also love that he mentions that different houses and different people have different needs and different versions of what clean and cleaning looks like.

This is another video from the same guy about cleaning and depression. This advice, especially at the beginning, can feel really really difficult and oppressive to hear. However, I find that it's generally pretty solid. But I'm autistic and so is he, so that gets a massive Your Mileage May Vary stamp on it.

I have a favorite part of this video. It's from 10:52 to 12:36. I think we could all use to hear that. There's a HEFTY pause after that one. I promise the narration does come back.

This is a pair of videos about how to correctly load and use a dish washer.

The first one is a quick 1 minute 30 second overview on loading. I can't find the exact video I'm looking for, so consider this a substitute for that. If I can find the one I'm looking for, I'll swap it in.

Here's a blog post about scrubbing brushes and how to clean them.

And a video for all cleaning tools, including scrub brushes. This video does use bleach. I'll try to find some alternatives to that.

How to clean a top loader (without the removable agitator thing). This should be done every 1-3 months depending on you unit, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

How to clean a top loader (with the removable agitator thing). This should be done every month, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

This video is for pet owners.

These carpet brushes are a LIFE SAVER if you have dogs. This thing allows me to go from vacuuming about 4 square feet before my vacuum is full to vacuuming half the living room (I don't vacuum often enough. You should vacuum weekly, and I just can't.). I have to unclog the vacuum less often. It fluffs up some of the flat spots in the carpet. And I also use the brush to shampoo my rugs in the spring.

A spot cleaner (or a carpet cleaner with a spot cleaner attachment) is another life saver, ESPECIALLY if you can afford to splurge on a heated one. I see them at Goodwill or at yard sales occasionally, and they're worth picking up. The shark one in the video is great too.

It's America's Housekeeping Book (1941). Available for free download on the Internet Archive. (Large PDF file at the link here).

The LISTS y'all. The step by step lists. The emphasis on efficiency and arranging spaces for the least resistance possible. The basic concept of "take a tray or basket into a room when you are tidying up so you can put things that belong elsewhere on it and take them out LATER in ONE GO".

tbh i don’t have the energy rn to write up an explanation myself, but here are some sources to get you started:

hindutva’s ties to fascism, nazism, & white supremacy broadly

hindu fascism 101: what is hindutva?, by the alliance for justice & accountability

why white nationalists are working with hindu supremacists, by safa ahmed at progressive

why white supremacists and hindu nationalists are so alike, by audita chaudhery at al jazeera

white and hindu supremacists are a match made in heaven, by amardeep singh dhillion at novara media

when hindu nationalism and white nationalism meet, by thomas crowley at jacobin

hindutva & zionism specifically

united in hate: the similarities and solidarities between hindutva and zionism, by ananya ray at feminism in india

the hindu nationalists using the pro-israel playbook, by aparna gopalan at jewish currents

why zionism rules the hearts of hindutva acolytes, by shreevatsa navatia at frontline (a magazine of the hindu)

in state repression and its justification, india and israel have much in common, by achin vanaik at the wire

violent majorities: indian and israeli ethnonationalism, a discussion between balmurli natrajan, lori allen, and ajantha subramanian at recall this book podcast

how hindu nationalists became best friends with israel, by goldie osuri at jacobin

Recently, I've been writing a great deal about Nationalism as a lens through which we can synthesize our understandings of racism, misogyny, and queer oppression as interlinked mechanisms that advance a state's reproductive agenda, in the pursuit of reproducing its hierarchies.

'Irreversible Damage' typifies this synthesis more readily than any succinct theory of intersectional transfeminism. It's why paying attention to how reactionaries construct their arguments and understanding their worldview is so vital to producing cogent feminist and leftist analyses.

By making explicit how the position of the child under patriarchy is simply a parental investment, one that owes its parents heterosexuality and reproductive labor, we arrive at the logics underlying queer oppression, revealed as a kind of reproductive monomania fixated on preserving the in-group.

Queerness is a betrayal—of the family, community, and Nation, a desertion of the imperative to "secure a future" for white or Hindu or Russian or any hegemonic demographic of children. Giving citizens the freedom to exist outside of heterosexuality is tantamount to legalizing treason.

This understanding of why, precisely, the global reactionary wave is so fixated on trans people and trans womanhood particularly, is incredibly lacking amongst even many feminist commentators. Trans women are being made the face of a worldwide right-wing "common enemy" to retrench Nationalism.

The Robinson episode, meanwhile, shows how the language of queer liberation and feminism can be perverted to these ends, and how the specter of transition as "medical mutilation" and patriarchal capitulation is advanced to further transmisogyny on putatively feminist grounds. Robinson talks---in their own terms---about how the cisfatalist idea of never being able to escape reproductive exploitation led them to join a "detransition cult" that tried to produce a sequel to Transsexual Empire and ran "psyops" on Tumblr to convince transmasc people to detransition and attack trans women.

Together, these episodes are a thesis on why we must strive to actually comprehend our ideological opponents and interrogate the consistency of our own principles. The Nationalist and patriarchal view of society is endemic everywhere---are you certain you've sufficiently unpacked them?

When the sky still felt close enough to touch,

and gods were simply neighbors we carved into stone so we wouldn’t forget them.

and I feel pretty confident saying that at least as late as 2009, when I came out, at least in the midwestern US the vast majority of cis people (even too many cis queers) were completely oblivious to the possibility that "being a trans man" was a type of human that could be real. like truly it had never even crossed their minds. in the time before I realized I was trans, I can recall seeing two examples of trans men (Chaz Bono and Thomas Beattie). the closest next thing I had was a very small number of stories about women passing as men to fight, like Mulan and Alanna the Lionness, but I never even connected that to my own experiences despite enjoying the books.

it IS something that is fucked up and it fucks you up to go through the process of realizing that you are something you didn't know could exist and nobody else around you knows could exist. HOWEVER, a big issue comes when trans men try to theorize this without considering other trans (i.e. transfem) people's experiences. as many people have pointed out, it's a different but related kind of fucked up to realize you are a type of person that everyone sees as a monster who is a threat and a joke at the same time. and also, positing transmasc "erasure" as a unique experience obscures the fact that many trans women also don't realize that being a trans woman is something you can do (though I think it's perhaps less common--I may be wrong ofc). (and also in relation to Mulan/Alanna, as has been discussed recently, there were almost zero examples of positive depictions of trans women pre-2009, but there were lots of terrible negative depictions to make you FEAR being that kind of human.)

this is like, my big problem with most attempts to explain transmasc-related oppression: usually, the thing that happens to trans men is something that also happens to trans women, or at least there are major similarities, but trans women ALSO deal with another layer of horrifying transmisogynist abjection that is generally not experienced by transmascs. so that's (one reason) why these attempts to theorize a "uniquely transmasc oppression" always fail.

and yet. I do think we gotta find a way to talk about the suckiness of trans men's experiences of oppression via transphobia. without tipping over down the transmisogyny rollercoaster or whatever. again, to use some analogies: I think Indigenous men should talk about how they are targets for violence--but they gotta do it without implying that doesn't happen to Indigenous women, plus worse. Gay men should talk about how their sexuality is demonized and has been frequently targeted for criminalization--but they should not use that to say lesbians are somehow privileged because "straight men think two girls having sex is hot," or to ignore the fact that lesbians were less targeted via sodomy laws because they were women and therefore already subject to a wide range of patriarchal legal strictures that affected them in not just misogynist but also lesbophobic ways.