Ben Bros

Saying that a certain group of people is too privileged to complain about the way that things are is its own sort of defense of the status quo

Like if a white person from the American suburbs who had doctors for parents says "the suburbs are set up in a way that's designed to alienate the people within them from their neighbors growing up there can be an incredibly lonely isolating experience" and you respond with "shut up you had everything you ever wanted growing up" you are sort of pretending that this asocial way of living we've set up based on harmful ideas like castle doctrine and individualism is in some way desirable for someone when the reality of the situation is that everyone is miserable.

Oh boy this is popping off. But I just want to put on this post that this isn't just about the example that I used this is also when people get mad at you for complaining about aspects of living in America because other people are getting bombed by America how dare you, or when (usually neurodivergent) white people complain about how wasp monoculture is high key hostile to be raised in, or when people with middle class jobs complain about the shit their boss pulls, or any other number of situations in which a relatively privileged potential ally talks about the unique ways the oppressive systems we're looking to overthrow effects them negatively. Like yes sure if you have a minimum wage job it's annoying to listen to someone with a salary and benefits say "my boss treats me like shit and my company is doing x evil thing" but if you're in that situation and you're actually down for the cause instead of just here to play oppression Olympics, you want to gain allies in this fight by saying "have you considered unionizing" instead of pushing people away by saying "shut up at least you can afford rent"

The argument that people are too privileged too complain about their situation used to be exclusively one said by self identified conservatives, but generations of conservative propaganda has made it so people who call themselves leftists will repeat it word for word.

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

Nobody has ever been capable of writing a scathingly harsh and well formulated satire about the perils of modern capitalism, that doesn't just get immediately one-upped by some random food service worker talking about their actual week.

"shipping and blorbofication are not inherently at odds with understanding a story's deep themes" and "some people can't grasp the themes of a story because they never learned how to engage with stories outside of the lens of shipping and blorbofication" are two statements that can coexist

as an example of blorbofication taken to the extreme without the acknowledgement of the story context to ground it please refer to the thomas jefferson miku binder

just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

I've seen it pointed out a few times that the various toxins mentioned above did technically have the desired effect, given humans started cultivating the plants and thus protected them from predators/insects, and spreading their seeds far and wide. I just like the idea of evolution/DNA in the examples above being like a benevolent Monkey Paw for the plants.

I worked at a small town newspaper at a time we changed our syndicate service so we stopped running ziggy and a woman came in to yell at us about how important ziggy is because it “really has its finger on the pulse of things”