theorigamiphoenix

QUEER IS NOT A SLUR

We reclaimed it way back in the 1980's. It is the accepted term used in academia, in colleges and universities ALL OVER THE PLACE.

it was not.

We began with the US case, and the problem that the electoral system causes the politics of a diverse and pluralistic electorate to collapse to binarism. We "solve" that problem by looking e.g. to Europe, with its multiparty democracies, but again we see a kind of collapse to binarism, just at the level of legislative coalitions rather than overt political parties. But the effect is quite similar! In the United States, most voters don't feel like their values and interests are faithfully represented by either of the two political parties. We vote for candidates of one or the other based on some kind of calculus of which of the two coalitions will deviate less terribly. In multiparty parliamentary democracies, we vote for parties that do more clearly express an allegiance to values and interests close to our own. But we understand that in practice their behavior will be governed by coalitional dynamics that are difficult to predict. In both systems, we have learned that our values and interests will often be betrayed. In both systems, politicians discipline voters, rather than the other way around, by pointing out how much stronger their differences are with members of the other coalition than with the politicians whom they must hold their noses to support. The fact that the coalitions are so diverse internally — the Democrats and Republicans in the United States, the flock of governing parties in parliamentary democracies — cedes in practice to politicians in power tremendous freedom to pursue their own interests at the expense of the values and interests of those who elect them. After all, almost everything they do will please part and displease part of their coalition's voters. This freedom creates space for electeds to treat politics as an incumbency and seniority machine, or worse. It encourages them to pursue their personal interests, which are at best orthogonal to, and sometimes directly opposed to, the interests and values of the diverse factions that elect them. This case can be overstated. The electorate does still impose some constraint. In the US, politicians can't consistently make decisions that nearly all subfactions of their party would consider betrayal and expect to be reelected. In Europe, voters can credibly threaten to switch to parties that typically work in coalition with the party they would abandon, or else to an outside party whose ideology is so in sync with their own that they are sure a reorganization of the coalitions to bring the party in would constitute an improvement, without risk of ceding power to parties they find terrifying. The binarism into which both systems collapse loosens the constraint that voters can impose upon their electeds, but does not entirely eliminate it.

Little girl teaching her cats how to draw a flower 

*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”

Thank you so much for the excellent question!! I've been meaning to answer this one for a while, so here goes.

My favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology is PocketMail! It wasn't that ridiculous at the time, but it's definitely something that could have only existed in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I actually have a PocketMail device, an Oregon Scientific PM-32 that I found on the side of the road in a box full of broken landline telephones!

PocketMail devices were essentially very basic Personal Digital Assistants that allowed you to access your emails without having to use a computer with an internet connection! Here you can see the basic screen and buttons for composing, sending and receiving emails.

But remember, this thing doesn't have Wi-Fi - so how exactly can it access your emails? If you flip the device over, you'll see a strange little speaker thing that flips out...

That's an acoustic coupler! You had to hold the device up to the handset of a landline telephone! So if you had a PocketMail account (with a special email address ending in @pocketmail.com) and were away from your computer/office, you could simply dial the phone number for the PocketMail service on the nearest landline telephone, then hold the device up to the handset so that it can send and receive email data with the email server in the form of audio - and presto! You have just sent an angry last-minute email to your intern for neglecting to look after your Tamagotchi while you were on a business trip to sell Y2K survival kits.

But... what did it sound like? The phone service has long since been shut down after the rise of more capable and portable internet-connected devices, but if you press the little 'Mail' button on the top of the device, you can still hear the sounds of this poor, obsolete little thing trying to reach out and communicate in the only way it knows how to:

AUDIO WARNING: LOUD