Names are hard

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

Source is Instagram user thatmodernlife. Per Reddit, this post was deleted quickly, and was captioned:

"secret wizards control the government" > "[wizard equivalent] are an oppressed visible minority"

white British monoculture > Star Trek style multicultural pluralism that treats "being Black" and "being an elf" as basically interchangeable

Like worstie, I can barely promote my own published book without wanting to curl up and die.

They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it's marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).

And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.

I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.

They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it's on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.

It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.

They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.

This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.

It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.

Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.

So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.

These type of undeclared sellers are relying on you believing that Tumblr is different from other social media platforms where the advertising is usually more blatant. They are also relying on your trust in your community not to put undisclosed ads onto your dash.

After all, everyone knows Tumblr is a sinkhole where profit goes to die and everyone hates ads. Why would anyone waste time doing that here… unless they can adapt what they’re doing to make you think you’re not being marketed to, because Tumblr as a user base would never allow that kind of thing. Right?

Turns out, not so much.

Some people might say, “well that’s just obvious! You’d have to be really silly not to realize it!”

And maybe it was obvious to them.

I know it was obvious to me. But I also know I have enough online experience to play “spot the affiliate link” and enough knowledge as a indie author about how those links are supposed to be disclosed by law, to know when someone is being dishonest and trying to make a post seem organic and not like an ad.

But not everyone has the same knowledge or life experiences to put the context clues together, and that’s why I wrote the above post because many, many, many people on here are unaware they are reblogging ads—usually while talking about how much they hate ads!

Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.

[…]

One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.

[…]

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.

Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

The most jarring thing was, the apes are completely unable to learn grammar, and would say things like "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you" (actual quote by Nim Chimpsky), which their handlers would interpret as a sentence, when in reality the apes are simply mimicking signs in hopes of getting a reward. Those hearing handlers would see things like "Nim eat" and "eat Nim" and intepret those as equally meaning "Nim wants to eat".

More damning, the lack of understanding of ASL by the hearing scientists meant that most of what Koko and Nim Chimpsky "spoke" was purely the scientists just seeing what they wanted to see. A Deaf person was brought in to interact with Nim, and they were instructed to not give him any food until he signed "food". They spent hours with an increasingly distressed chimp who did not sign anything, but Nim's hearing handlers would see him move his hand close to his mouth and go "oh! there it is! he signed it!", and while they spent the whole day signing, they didnt see Nim signing back.

With Koko, her handler would claim Koko would sometimes mix up signs like "need/knee", "I/eye", "people/nipple" because they "sound alike/rhyme" but... they don't. Those words rhyme in spoken English. They don't rhyme at all in ASL. Koko wouldn't know those words rhymed in english because she DIDN'T speak english, she "spoke" modified ASL. Of course, as the scientists did not speak ASL either, they didn't realize it, and just assumed random movements Koko meant were signs, and tried to think what she "could have meant instead" by thinking of what words sounded like the ones equivalent to what she had just "signed", even though an ASL speaker would not make a mistake like that.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that almost all of what those apes signed was due to direct prompting from scientists, the fact that they did not use language when alone, or the fact that most of what they answered was complete gibberish (which resulted in videos like Koko's climate address (yes, really) having to be heavily edited and cut to make it seem like she was actually speaking anything that made sense).

One really nasty side effect of this was like. The amount of hearing people who decided to try learning ASL and other sign languages because of the vague possibility of being able to communicate with apes, instead of, you know, the ACTUAL possibility of communicating with and appreciating Deaf people. (one person even said that Koko inspired them to learn ASL so they could communicate with their deaf friend, like... why the fuck did your FRIEND not inspire you to learn ASL??? did you really have to wait for a fucking gorilla failing to learn sign language to think "hmm, maybe talking to my friend would be nice!"??????)

Additionally, while I'm not a scientist of any kind, based on what I've seen on posts about this and in the video, while non-human animals like apes and dogs or cats or lizards even can learn to associate specific sounds with an action or item—like your dog knowing when you say outside or walk they get to go outside or on a walk, or that ball means you have a ball to throw for them, or that lady on tiktok who trained her bearded dragon to follow simple commands—they can't actually comprehend language or communicate with it, so I don't know that baby sign would have really helped.

Unlike human babies, who around two understand their native language fairly well internally even if they struggle with communicating their own needs and thoughts, apes fundamentally can't fully understand and utilize human language. A two year old deaf human using baby sign has a better understanding of their native language than an ape literally ever could of english or any other language. If you actually taught the apes and monkeys baby sign, and they could sign it with their very limited (afaik much more limited than even a two y/o human would be), and left them to their devices...they would only use the signs when they're interacting with humans to get something they want like food or a toy. There's never been any documented private speech, nor attempts for one gorilla to talk to another in sign, or the ape/monkey ever starting a conversation with a human without being prompted, and that shows they haven't learned anything other than the hand motions that make the humans give them what they want. That's it. A more coherent form of sign wouldn't magically make them able to hold a conversation, because the signs being bullshit isn't the reason the apes can't use language, it's just because they can't.

(Legit if you actually watch the head scientist at the Gorilla Foundation when she was talking to Koko, she legit had to ask Koko questions dozens of times before Koko responded in a way that made even a little sense and most of the time the scientist just gave up and made a joke about it. It's extremely obvious when you watch that Koko knew basically nothing and her handlers were making everything up.)

There's also a reason the Gorilla Foundation never hired any deaf workers. The Nim project did, but from what I've heard the Foundation was deeply opposed to hiring deaf people fluent in ASL, likely because they knew those people, like the ones in the Nim study, would instantly be able to tell that this is all bullshit and call them on it/go to the news. Abled folks with no background in sign, however, would have no way of knowing what they were being told was wrong.

So, Koko probably knew her name at the very least, and recognized words/signs for food, but she, like most non-human animals, could not actually understand or utilize language in the way a human can. We don't know why exactly, but overall there is something different about humans that lets us use language in a way no other animals can. And while some will debate this, language is far more complex than just word association.

I do reccomend the video, at the end the essayist says that it's silly to think animals need our language to communicate with us, because we've always been able to communicate without it. Your dog can't say the word outside or walk, but you and your dog both know what your dog wants when it sits by the door or sniffs at the leash hanging in the entryway. I can't explain to my cat that she needs to let me clean out her ear so she chills out about it, which sucks, but after a while she realized it feels better clean and now will "fake" scratch her ears in front of me and my fiancé to signal that she wants us to help her not be itchy. We've always found ways of communicating with animals that never involve them learning to speak a human language. I don't need my cat to be able to say she loves me because after being in the hospital for 2 weeks she wouldn't leave my side for days. And she knows I love her because I take care of her, buy her toys, play with her, cuddle with her, make sure her food and water bowls stay clean and full, all that. Neither of us needs to say it.

I remember the fight for mixed gender sports, but now we’re fighting for trans people’s rights to be included in gendered sports. The only justification for gendered sports that exists is Those Men Will Crush Our Weak Little Women. It’s sexist. Segregation is always a means of oppression.

Both of which, if youll note, are species that we race in non-sexgender-segregated sports. There's not one derby for boy horses and another one for girl ones.

The majority of the dimorphism that we *see* is social and cultural. Women are discouraged from sports from a much earlier age than men. Women who are naturally tall and muscular may choose not to pursue body building because of social pressures for women to be small and dainty. Women who have broad shoulders, double jointed ankles and webbed toes (the things that make Michael Phelps such a good swimmer) may never touch a swimming pool in their life because of similar stigma surrounding women's bodies that men are not subject to.