#thelearningcat rants

And like... I had to wake up at 6am to get here for the class I'm teaching. So I'm exhausted. Usually I just go straight home after class and sleep for 2 more hours. (It's my last day having to do this luckily)

So I'm just laying on the floor of my office looking at Tumblr. Because I don't want to work. I should be napping.

But even with the pillow I brought, the floor is cold. And hard. And questionable in cleanness.

There's really no content here. I just feel like complaining. Because I don't want to work in my office. And I'm tired. And I'm not at home.

One of my biggest sources of exhaustion is old white men who appear to make really well-thought arguments about why the "left" is wrong in the facts they cite from scientists, is the fact if you actually know the facts, you realize how vapid and empty their arguements are. They say a lot of things, in long form, but never add anything new to the debate. They've just reiterated old arguments in a new, usually confusing way. If I've given you a whole bunch of sources to educate yourself, don't come back after reading the first section of one and act like you can dispute it. Books are books usually for a reason (albeit sometimes they really should be edited to be shorter and more concise)- because all they need to get across cannot be summarized in one article fully.

Not everyone in the U.S. has access to internet at home.

Particularly in rural areas, a lot of individuals don't even have the option, even if they had the money to afford it.

This is particularly important to remember during quarantine. It really helps explain why, particularly, people in rural areas don't feel that they can just stay at home all the time. The internet enables you to access many services that would enable you to stay at home- from tutorials on how to cut your own hair to ordering groceries online.

I have friends back home in rural America who couldnt get cell reception at their house, much less a internet provider above dial-up speeds to their house. I had friends whose only internet in town was on their pay to use phone because that's all they could afford. I still have friends who just didnt want to spend the money on because the monopolies of internet providers in the area were just too high to justify it. The latter had to spend the money to pay for internet to work from home, and since they didnt have a computer at home either, they had to go themselves to pack up their work computer and take it home.

They aren't. They are keeping money in their circle of luxury. Those things don't use the same materials and people that make up most of the economy. You can't put regular gas in it, you can't go to John Doe Mechanic, etc. The money stays in a bubble above the rest of us. There is no trickle down effect. Trickle down effects have been scientifically disproven, at least in the purest, free-market capitalist version of it.

So yeah, I'm going to judge you and put you on trial for spending money of luxury items like that. I don't care if you've always liked cars. The people who would take a lambo or something like that out and use it in the ways that made all that expansiveness and speed useful are a minority, even in the small group of rich. I'm not saying those items shouldn't be made (although you should take a hard look and ask what that intelligence and money could be spent on, like better, cheaper, environmentally friendly transportation for the masses), but I am saying 99.9999% of people have no business buying them.

The sort of spending money that actually feeds back into the economy and helps?

Travel. Not to expensive resorts but just to cities. Eat with the regular people. Travel with the regular people. With all your cash, you'll still be able to pay for conveniences most of us could never dream of. But just go places instead of buying luxury objects.

Nonfamous craftsman. Support the arts, not your high end shit, but the local artists who are just trying to make it. The ones who put their heart into their work as well as the little time they have between their real job. Go to food trucks and local restuarants who are struggle to share their passion of food. Go to geeky conventions and fairs and pay for the amazing work that fans and geeks do. Better yet, you offer them enough money and they will make you whatever you want, especially if you're willing to front the bill so they can get materials. You have the money, give it to those who still need to make it.

sure, there are exceptions, weird cases where the research or knowledge just doesn’t give the right answer.

Sometimes like there are bad doctors, there are bad political scientists.

Sometimes research is done poorly or just doesn’t exist on an area, just like there are diseases that are not well known or prescriptions that incorrectly given. 

But.

There’s a reason political scientists, real political scientists with that Ph.D behind their name, get to call themselves doctors.

They have to spend just as many years in school (sometimes longer, depending on the job market competition). 

They have peer-review processes where other people who know just as much as them check their work (which can’t be said all the time for Doctors once they go out in the field)

The field is strong enough at this point that it’s very rare for a bad article that somehow slipped through the cracks to not get crushed. 

Both often study aspects where you have your own unique perspective and experiences, which may lend you to understand certain things. I get the temptation to question some things that seem personal. But there are opinions. And then there are facts. Political scientists work off facts.

I've known it for awhile. I found out when I tried to send my friends and family who don't have tumblr, posts that I had reblogged, and they told me they couldn't see it. I had never really bothered looking, because whatever, even if they flag me, I can still post whatever. It was probably just the historical pictures with (non-gratiuous) nudity and any discussion of female genitalia or orgasm, because the world still is filled with sexist pigs who call sex and femininity a sin.

Except for with this whole new controversy coming up, I saw a post(reblogged last night) where someone went back and found many of their innocuous (and feminist) fanart had been flagged.

So I was curious. Curious enough to start scanning through my 1000+ posts(seriously, I haven't even been on here long. I need to narrow down my topic range).

The feminist posts anger me, but okay, not surprising.

@staff What was surprising was the absolutely RANDOM FLAGGED CAT PICTURES. One of the first ones I had tagged with "petting cats", so I figured, okay, maybe tumblr was just being dumb about tags, since nothing in my text was anything but innocuous. Except for I kept going, and more and more of my cat pictures had been flagged, some of them with the briefest text and only the tags I use on a regular basis for my own categorization. Wtf Tumblr. If you had flagged all of them, I'd just think you had added something that accidentally considered all cats explicit. But no, it was an absolute random barrage of my cat posts that were flagged.

The sexism is unsurprising (if not infuriating). But my cats??