the situation with harry potter is kind of unprecedented in some ways imo because it is maybe the largest media franchise in history to be created & owned by a single person who still has direct creative control over it. who is also a billionaire with significant cultural/political influence. like the usual "no ethical consumption under capitalism" type excuses shatter on impact when the bigoted author in question is logging onto twitter every day saying explicitly that when you buy the tim hortons ravenclaw donut she is using your donut money to fund the genocide of trans people. like with big franchises usually there's at least a little more diffusion of responsibility than this
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racist white canadians and europeans want you to believe the slave trade worked like this
it did not. it is public knowledge the slave trade worked like this
and in fighting antiblackness within canada and europe it is so so so important to acknowledge these places's participation in and benefit from the transantlantic slave trade. Slavery is not just the US's dirty past, it is a triangular industry lasting centuries that white people in the united states, canada, and europe benefitted from and continue to benefit from to this day. Slavery was good for white canadians and white europeans. They liked it. they encouraged it. they had slaves, they profited from the slave trade, and they used products grown from US slave labour in every day life. The slavery of Black people would not have been possible on the sheer scale at which it happened if it were not for active, consistent participation from europe and canada.
there are a NUMBER of folktale Woman-Creatures like selkies who exist to make the inherently coercive nature of heterosexual marriage explicit and to externalize male anxiety about how if your wife had actual autonomy she very well might disappear and you might never fucking hear from her again
which is a FASCINATING category of Woman-Creature imo
someone said it's also a cautionary tale about mistreating your wife and I think that's spot on especially for other related types of stories e.g. the crane wife. like I think these stories are very much Husband Anxiety Stories. the Woman-Creatures are black boxes whose interior experience it is impossible to know and who have strange and often seemingly arbitrary rules that you must follow or else they will disappear. idk. like. that's why I think that any empowering-to-women-ness qualities of these stories is incidental. I think they're externalized anxiety about coercive societal heterosexuality and the inability to truly Know one's wife in such circumstances.
you also see a variant of this formula a lot (generally at the more literary end of the fairy tale space) where it's not a creature you capture, but a magical lady who picks you for seemingly arbitrary reasons, bettering your fortune enormously with her magic and wealth and second-hand status.
and then, for reasons usually at least slightly less arbitrary, fucks off again.
the husbandly anxiety here is more about not having access to coercion as an option.
was just talking to Story about this and he told me about one folktale where a guy meets a beautiful woman at a lake and she brings a bountiful dowry of like one million fat cows and such and she is of course a fairy so she's like "my one requirement in our bargain is that if you strike me three times I will leave" and in many versions of the story the husband doesn't ""actually"" strike her -- each time it's something like, one 'strike' involves her forgetting her gloves inside and he walks out and taps her on the shoulder with her gloves, but she tells him that counts as striking her. this sort of thing. which is TRANSPARENTLY like "whoa wouldn't it be fucked up if your wife could enforce consequences for behavior she said was harmful, even if according to your cultural norms it was fine, and you didn't see it as a big deal?" like... lol. what if women could actually be the ones who decided whether or not any given action their husbands took against them was harmful? IMAGINE... PREDEY SCARY....
the whole "insulting someone based on their appearance is bad because it could indirectly hurt people you like who share that feature" is a good start for unlearning body shaming but i do think we need to go further and remind people that even if there was some physical trait that was magically 10000% exclusive to conservatives and creeps and nobody else ever had it, we still shouldnt be insulting them based on that. because the problem with them is not their appearance its their ideology and actions. by insulting their appearance you arent just indirectly insulting others who look like that, youre literally not making the correct point. stay on topic ya know.
If you are in WASHINGTON this is not yet law, this initiative will be on the ballot Nov 3 THIS YEAR. VOTE NO. You have the ability to prevent this from becoming law.
Not only is this invasive as fuck, it also serves to discourage/exclude student athletes who are too poor to see a doctor regularly (or have unstable home lives). Who are some of the kids who need sports most.
Who tf is paying for all that genetic screening anyways? I expect it'll cost less than the $600 I paid for my health screening but how is this not an excessive burden on families who happen to have daughters instead of sons who want to play a sport?
Looking at this from a more broad scope than just Washington, this shows the potential for a dystopian future. These barriers in the name of "stopping males in female sports" will obviously drive many girls away from sports in general, and this is what the Heritage Foundation wants.
They're seeking to get rid of Title IX, which prevents sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools. Their logic goes that this would allow boy's sports to be funded more if they're not kept to the same level as girls' sports. If they're not hindered by equality, then boy's sports will have the chance to become bigger and help more young men. At the cost of women, of course.
This push of girls from sports is good to them as they believe it will "increase fertility" and "encourage feminine values". As the Heritage Foundation puts it:
"Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes....... High-intensity exercise increases infertility; moderate exercise assists fertility more than any other approach to exercise assists it.
Many women are drawn to activities that emphasize rhythm, coordination, community, and graceful exertion. A small but significant number thrive in highly competitive environments, and we are a better country for making those opportunities available (which might well have happened even without Title IX). Our goal, however, should be virtue and health grounded in reality and freedom, not the imposition of a male-oriented competitive ideal.".
As always, this isn't about helping boys, it's about controlling girls. But let's see what they say about boy's sports:
"Nor should we forget what happens when we ignore the effects of Title IX on men. Competition is much more central to male identity and sports are a main avenue for the safe but real expression of male competitive drive. Sports are also central to male friendships, which generally are more about doing things in common and less about saying things. Of course, men still compete and still form friendships, but both competitive drive and male friendship have suffered under the weaponized application of Title IXâand limiting the growth of male sports cannot be irrelevant to such inimical developments."
While girls are encouraged to do gentle ladylike activities, boys should not worry about "saying things" and have friendships based around only common activities. We don't live in a world where boys' sports are constantly sacrificed like they claim Title IX does. Looking at the top sports teams in the US, you can see it's not the case immediately.
There's a lot of things I skimmed over/neglected, so I implore you to please read this article by Transitics covering this. It's infinitely more tolerable than reading what the Heritage Foundation wrote, though I advise you read that too.
Turns out it was about womenâs sports all alongâif getting rid of women's sports counts, that is.
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In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.
Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.
âWhy did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?â
âIt insists sheâs the mafia.â
âIt thinks sheâs in the mafia?â
âNo. It thinks sheâs an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.â
I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) donât quite get: âDeep Reinforcement Learningâ AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the âlineâ is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the âcriteriaâ the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.
This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet weâre relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and weâd like to think the AI is âmaking decisionsâ or âthinking,â but the truth is that what itâs doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesnât know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you canât understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.
There, I even caught myself using the word âconfusedâ to describe it. Thatâs not right, because âconfusedâ is a human word. Whatâs happening with the AI is something we donât have the language to describe.
Anyway whatâs more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldnât be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think itâs actually something else. Itâll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is whatâs known as a âsingle pixel attack.â I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.
TL;DR bots are illogical because theyâre actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we donât know how to stop them or how they got here, send help
I understand what many girlies are trying to say when they describe trans women as âwomen you can freely abuse in publicâ but cis women also very much get abused in public with no recourse. A theoretical sympathizer might exist where there may be less for trans women, but cis women do in fact get abused in public without people stepping in.
Letâs be specific and detailed in our criticisms of transmisogyny. Cisness doesnât protect you from public abuse but transmisogyny does ensure less general public sympathy. Thatâs a lot less loaded and nuanced than âtrans women experience public abuse that cis women never do because everyone values the safety and wellbeing of cis women.â Thatâs clearly not true whereas âtrans women receive less general public sympathy for the abuse they experience in private and in publicâ is 100% true.
fun fact one of the world champions in pepper-eating contests is a trans woman and she actually faced significant backlash because people somehow thought she had a biological advantage. to eating spicy pepper
update bc i went back and checked: her name is brianna âthe chilli queenâ skinner and she set a record in 2017 by slamming back 23 carolina reapers consecutively. she only stopped when told to by the referees, and the next year she stepped down out of boredom. queen
The championship, it should be noted, is unisex. Apparently being a trans woman gives you an innate biological advantage over both cis men and cis women.
Every year Dracula daily revamps interest in the novel and every year I have to be reminded of the utter buffoonery and misogyny that pervades every modern adaptation that romanticizes Dracula and his predation of women in the name of being âsubversiveâ while completely cutting out or sidelining his predation of men (namely Jonathan) because all of a sudden when heâs assaulting and robbing men of their agency itâs not sexy or sympathetic anymore and we canât include Jonathan (one of the most interesting and unique and ACTUALLY subversive male characters in gothic literature) because heâs not âmanlyâ enough
And letâs go into this further. Because what also pisses me off is people do this and defend it by claiming it gives the female characters (chiefly Mina) empowerment and agency where they didnât before. But they DID! Thatâs the whole thing!!!! They had an astounding degree of agency and respect and happiness BEFORE Dracula came into their lives and robbed them of it.
Lucy lived happily with her loving mother, had her pick of three lovely suitors, was given full freedom to choose whom she would spend her life with and has that decision respected by all the men involved, who all admire and care for her so much that they remain devoted friends to her (and I mean REALLY genuine friends) up to and past the point of her death where they risk their lives to avenge her and put her soul to rest.
Mina is in an unusually healthy, loving, devoted marriage to a man she completely adores, again with a bright future ahead of them both. Jonathan constantly thinks of Mina, compares almost all women against her, and is absolutely utterly in love with her. Mina and Jonathan regularly subvert Victorian expectations of a married couple in that they deeply love and respect one another to the point of flouting âproperâ Victorian customs by being affectionate out in public. In fact, the one time Jonathan decides to play the traditional man and ignores Minaâs wishes to leave her at home while he goes hunting vampires w the other men, he is IMMEDIATELY punished by the narrative! Draculas predation of Mina starts that night because she was left behind, and in response Jonathan affirms and reaffirms his total devotion to Mina above the other men for the rest of the story. In the third act of the novel while the team is trying to stop Minaâs slow turn to vampirism, Jonathan not only explicitly tells us the reader through his private journal entires that he will LITERALLY go against god if Mina is turned and damn himself to be by her side in hell rather than kill her if she becomes a vampire, he is unsubtle enough about it that the other men genuinely worry about where Jonathanâs loyalties will lie if they fail in killing Dracula and saving Mina.
So when adaptations pose that either of these women were just your typical trapped, bored, sexually frustrated poor Victorian traditional ladies looking for an out until bad boy Dracula comes to sexually liberate themâŚ. Motherfucker they were ALREADY about as liberated as female characters written by a man in the 1800s could get. Lucy is introduced to us as a young woman flush with bright and happy futures and her pick of the litter for the life she wants to lead until Dracula kills her and takes that from her. Mina marries her childhood sweetheart who literally prioritizes her over God and is building a business with him before Dracula nearly ruins her life permanently.
Not only is claiming that dracula is an agent of the female characters agency just completely antithetical to his role in the original narrative as a blatant serial THEIF of womenâs freedom, from the brides to the peasant mother to Lucy to Mina, itâs literally less subversive than the fucking source material
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okay, like, listen. imagine if animals formed a support group for people who aren't human. and all the resources were like "for creatures with four legs" and the birds went "hey, we don't have four legs? can we be included please?" and the other animals went "oh my GOD stop making things about you. humans have two legs so you can't possibly be oppressed for having two legs." and also no one is even talking about insects or arachnids.
Instead of leeching off all the hard work of the four legged animals, why don't the birds make their own support group? Especially since animals like the mice really don't want to be in the same group as the hawks and eagles and owls.
And if the raptors insist on invading the space that was previously the mice's safe space, it endangers the mice and makes them not come at all to what was their support group.
hi! i have a couple quick questions. what do you think the birds represent in my post? and which group of creatures do you think i intended to be the central focus of the post?
A fascinating thing about this response (which is just as absurd in the metaphor as it is in reality) is the idea that a support group for people with a demographic feature in common would automatically be a safe space free of predators.
Because sure mice wouldn't feel safe around owls, but why on earth would they feel safe around stoats and foxes?
This idea that danger always comes from outside your demographic group and never from inside it is bonkers. Even if your demographic group is defined by being oppressed.
i really thought the point of "being lgbt+ doesn't absolve you of racism as a white person" was that white people arent absolved of racism by being marginalized but it really seems like people think other marginalizations make it okay. no being disabled doesn't do it. no being poor doesnt do it. we need to fight against racism actively no matter what.
Every day tumblr users get closer and closer to saying you can only be trans in a god honouring way.
Edit: my problem is with the comparison and trying to rate people's transness and who's more transgressive. If you attempt to turn this into a trans guys vs trans girls post you are missing the point.
This is what white supremacy looks like in the trans community. Genuinely.
These screenshots are literally just white supremacist, right wing talking points about conformity to the status quo being more "transgressive" than people who actually transgress social norms. It's quite literally no different than Christians, MAGA, the right wing, etc. thinking they're the ones who are actually oppressed despite engaging with ideas, values, and presentations that have actually been the ruling class status quo for centuries. It's all taken from the same self victimization playbook.
It's especially clear with the 4chan language mixed in that is just white supremacist incel shit, "gigastacy", "mog", "aura" â that's incel forum channer language that's infiltrated broader internet vernacular and it doesn't matter if the OOPs here are actually explicitly 4chan using white supremacists. They're still engaging with 4chan white supremacist language, behavior, and beliefs.
like i know venezuela is going through a huge humanitarian crisis right now and their political regime is low in the list of priorities when tallinmg about it obviously it's just it shocked me to read trump congratulating his secretary of energy on how well he's running what used to be a sovereign country until a few months back you know
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Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.
Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.
There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.
i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.
I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case
âThis month, Finland launched the worldâs largest sand battery, enabling residents to remove oil from their district heating network and reduce emissions by nearly 70 percent, as reported by Euro News. If it continues to operate as efficiently and affordably as expected, sand batteries could become common worldwide. Developed by Finnish company Polar Night Energy, this battery uses excess clean electricity to heat sand to high temperatures, storing thermal energy that can later be released to heat homes and power local industries. This is not Finlandâs first sand battery, but it is significantly larger. The facility in Pornainen is an insulated silo that stands 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, containing 2,000 tonnes of crushed soapstone. The sand retains heat remarkably well, losing only 10 to 15 percent during storage and recovery, according to The Cool Down.â
â
Sand batteries are a significant advancement in clean energy technology.
Holy shit, this is incredible.
âThis new facility can hold 100 MWh for about a month in summer and a week in winter. Â Thatâs enough for the town of 5000 local residents.
TechCrunch estimates the Finnish batteryâs costs are under $25 per kilowatt-hour, compared to around $115 for leading lithium-ion batteries.90% efficiency.It doesnât use any ârare earthsâ or critical materials. Â Instead using locally sourced, recyclable materials.Units are scalable and modular to fit different needs and uses.
Suits small towns (like the current facility) and large scale industrial uses.
13 meters tall and 15 meters wide. Independent of geography. Â
No supply issues due to any geo-political problems.
Designed to store energy when itâs cheap and plentiful and supply when itâs expensive.â
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