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@scienceraccoon
This is a blog for serious posts.
My personal blog is @scienceexclamationmark. Come follow me if we're mutuals.

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The reason a boss says "we're like a family here" is to de-emphasize all the formalities of the employer/employee relationship. The expectations of good management, the rules and regulations around employment, etc. And the main reason a boss might want to downplay these standards is because they feel as though they chafe against them. The boss who wants to be "family" is a boss who does not respect that employment is formally a contract agreement. They would also probably like you to forget about all those standards and let them get away with breaking them.
You know. "All that legal stuff is just technicalities. We know each other, right? We trust each other? Surely you can all trust me when I say I just want the best for the company?"
"You wouldn't act like such a stickler for the rules if you were talking to your family, would you?"
can we stop pretending liberal politicians actually have a strategy involving gaining conservative voters? it's just an excuse to not go further left to protect their pockets.

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y'know i don't really love how people use "butch" interchangeably with "handy"
*north american approaching lesbian couple* so which one of you is useful and which one of you is the woman
Inability to cope with humiliation (personal humiliation, gendered humiliation, cultural/historical humiliation, etc) is pretty much the tipping point for when you become an unhinged freak incapable of experiencing positive emotions, strong relationships, and proportional responses to anything. You become hopelessly fixated on correcting the humiliation, except you can't really do that without a time machine, so it just becomes an endless, borderline Sisyphean obsession as the more decoupled you become from consensus reality and norms of polite behavior the more humiliations you experience. The only other people who understand you enough to tolerate you are other lunatic people with similar chips on their shoulder who tell you you're doing a great job, funneling you further down this path until you can't so much as see like, clipart on a flyer without deriving a nightmarish Rorschach interpretation involving wholly imagined political implications, all the while convinced you're a Warrior For Your Kind
Guys I'm not saying the answer is "become immune to humiliation," "become impossible to humiliate" etc., this is a natural thing that will happen to everybody at some point in their lives, I'm saying learn to handle your bad feelings and discomfort instead of stewing over it until you let resentment consume you
Without fail, every time a woman is talking about how she does not want to have children and never wants to be pregnant and how medical professionals, romantic interests and family members keep trying to bulldoze her decision and keep expecting her to change her mind because motherhood is something that is expected of all women and it is abhorrent to think a woman could not desire it, a random mother spawns in the comments to be like “Well, actually, you never know! I didn’t want children and then I got pregnant and I realized I love being a mama and I have five little babies now! Could happen to you! 🥰”
Sister, keep that to yourself or make your own goddamn post, you are ignoring that woman’s central concern and belittling her, you don’t even think you’re doing it. Formerly childfree women who ended up having children and loving it are like detransitioners in the sense that there is nothing inherently wrong with changing your mind about having children or realizing you were mistaken about your gender identity but immediately weaponizing your indecision to tell people that the barriers to healthcare and the violations of their bodily autonomy and the way society ignores that person’s wishes is actually okay because you were wrong. Some people do know themselves.
it also makes me doubt how happy they actually are with having the kids why do you feel the need to broadcast you've changed your mind and are happy now just be happy no need to be a missionary for making more babies those are not yours chill
If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules
Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u

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Post-political
THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."
Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
"Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines
Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/
"Horseshoe theory" (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement
The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.
Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.
I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated
This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"
Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me
This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:
https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins
But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:
"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp
That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."
If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo
recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.
Realistically I know the reason conservative politics is dominated by people who are so old they're making campaign speeches while actively dying is because they don't value or believe in anything other than personal power and thus won't cede even a millimetre of influence as long as they're alive to wield it, but sometimes I like to imagine that part of it is that they're legitimately running out of people who are big enough assholes to replace them.
“How does one hate a country, or love one?… I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love for one’s country; is it hate for one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

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the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.
actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:
abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.
i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.
a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.