an unreliable narrator

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

Of course it is not good that people are using AI unquestioningly and accepting whatever answers it gives them.

It is also very fucking bad that people are not double checking ragebait news headlines, are lamenting "trends" that are a single deranged twitter user on a rant, or are seeing something third-hand in a post that drastically misinterpreted the source material and using that as the foundation for their reactionary viewpoints.

As somebody who is critical of AI it is crazy-making to see so many people talking about how AI kills your critical thinking abilities while citing points from a tumblr post of a screenshot of a news article that overasserted a claim made in a paper they didn't read that circulated and picked up tens of thousands of notes from people being confidently wrong about water use and power consumption (based on numbers from 2021-2022) IN ADDITION to using language that the authors of the paper explicitly begged people not to use when discussing their research (which, of course, the rebloggers never saw because they read a reblog of a screenshot of a news article that overstated a claim, not the paper that made the claim).

For instance, in the paper that everyone loves to talk about when they say that AI is making people stupider (the cognitive offloading one), nobody ever brings up the fact that the group that used their brain only for the first few instances of the task had higher overall performance than the AI-using group and the search engine using group and then had higher performance over their own previous metrics when using AI in an optional instance at the end of the study.

At no point in history did everyone read the studies. People have been skimming headlines and then telling each other about it on the bus since the invention of headlines. Ordinary ancient Romans could not fact check the Acta Diurna. "outsourcing your thinking" is normal-ass human behavior across time. It doesn't 'cause brain rot', it's not going to bring about the end of humanity.

It does make us vulnerable to misinformation and to moral panics. Witch hunts and race riots and the war on Dungeons & Dragons all relied partly on bad actors seeking to maintain their own power and partly on large numbers of people believing information without fact checking and uncritically accepting the framing in which that information was presented.

Protocols for Common Injuries from Police Weapons—for street medics and medical professionals treating demonstrators

https:/:cwc.im/TreatingPoliceViolence

This is drawn from our experience in years of struggle at the #ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France. It is not an introductory guide. If you are interested in learning about how to be a street medic, we have included some introductory resources at the beginning.

also you are never going to be safe for people for whom english is their second language. if someone clarifies their meaning and apologises and you can't accept that over the original wording then don't bother pretending to be autism friendly.

and like part of my autism is that i become convinced that the way i interpret words is the way that they're meant. my autism is disabling to my communication abilities. i have poor emotional regulation, i jump to conclusions. a lot of my reactions are informed by prior negative experiences. i can and probably have been overly defensive in the past.

and i've been misinterpreted so much and had my words picked over and mocked for saying the wrong things and mocked for being unable to say anything at all and it always feels devastating. it's ironic that the same disability that has me treated poorly would have me react poorly to a similar situation, but that's just how it is.

A year or two ago, someone accused me of 'using the language of the enemy' when I said, "so-and-so identifies as [insert gender]." Keep in mind, this is someone who I'd known online for a few years, and who was fully aware that I'm queer as well as autistic. To add to the grassless thinking going on there, everyone else in the conversation was just like, "Yup, if someone says that, I don't trust them."

Are you fucking kidding me?? No wonder the queer community (and the left in general) is paralyzed by infighting—because everyone belittles and alienates anyone who uses anything other than The Correct Terminology of the Week!

Needless to say, I got the hell away from all of those people not long after that.

I've also had someone block me on Discord when I admitted that I really, really struggle to remember how neopronouns all change cases in different ways (I literally have to go find charts to refer to, but some pronouns are so niche that they don't even have case charts), and how that makes me nervous to interact with people who exclusively use neopronouns because I don't want to cause offense. And of course, not wanting to cause offense caused offense 🙄

2026 - 2025 - 2024 - 2023

in spite of it all, happy 2026 pride.

you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads

you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride

these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.

So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.

They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.

And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.

Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.