cool-yubari reblogged
Final three hours! If you want a “noncompliance is a social skill” blog shirt, order by midnight Eastern time. (Thursday, April 14th)
Signal boost.
cool-yubari reblogged
The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis and end of their power. Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free.
Willie Osterweil (via mediaexposed)
cool-yubari reblogged
Which is why I will place no restrictions on my personal library when my kids learn how to read. With nearly a thousand physical books and scores of e-books, our house is almost groaning under the weight of all those words. Poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama, anthologies: they’re all there on my bookshelves (and floors, and futons). They tell stories that are uplifting, disturbing, gruesome, inspiring, and hilarious. They reveal the kaleidoscopic diversity of human experience. They will show my kids that the world is an infinitely fascinating place.
But, some might say, you’d let your 8-year-old read Lolita? You’d let your 10-year-old read Lady Chatterley’s Lover? And anything by Emile Zola???
Yes, yes I would. You know why? Because I believe that you connect with books that you’re meant to connect with at a specific time. Reading Thomas Hardy, for instance, informed how I read Salinger and Faulkner, Morrison and Mann. I read voraciously, and my parents, who didn’t read much fiction themselves, left me alone with my literary choices. My mom listened for hours as I told her about the books I was reading, and while she lifted eyebrows and asked questions, she never told me I wasn’t allowed to read something. For that I’m eternally grateful.
Rachel Cordasco, Bookriot
[x]
(via leeandlow)
The federal and state governments of the United States exercise some degree of overlapping control over their territory, but not to such an extent that the various [law enforcement agencies] arrest any but a small minority of residents who violate the law. This is just as well, since the law requires that the tens of millions of Americans who use drugs or gamble or involve themselves in prostitution be imprisoned — and that’s not even counting federal law, which, as convincingly estimated by civil liberties attorney Harvey Silvergate in his book Three Felonies a Day, the average American unwittingly violates every day. And thus it is that the U.S. can continue to exist above the level of an unprecedented gulag state only to the extent that its laws are not actually enforced — an extraordinary and fundamental fact of American life that one might hope in vain to see rise to the level of an election issue, but which is at least worth keeping in mind when it comes to the debate over whether or not we should keep granting the state ever more powerful methods of surveillance until it becomes the All-Seeing God Against Whose Laws We All Have Sinned.
--Excerpted from Barrett Brown’s essay, The Rule of Law Enforcement
Source: party9999999.deviantart.com
What I hear when someone who has a mental illness – but for whom violence and aggression have never been issues – says things like [The mentally ill are no more likely to commit violence than the rest of the population], is "My being identified as mentally ill threatens the social privilege I am entitled to as a member of my sex/race/class/etc. I want to maintain that privilege at any cost, and I don't care whom I have to throw under the bus to do so. I will wash the stigma of being mentally ill off with the blood of the less fortunate."
The disavowal of violence, and more generally aggression, as a symptom of mental illness in the name of decreasing stigma for the mentally ill only makes that stigma worse for the mentally ill who have aggressive or violent symptoms. It attempts to buy the favor of the larger society by ruthlessly marginalizing the already marginalized. And it doesn't work.
--Excerpt from Siderea’s essay, Claiming That Mental Illness Has Nothing To Do With Committing Violence Actually Is Terrible and Counterproductive
cool-yubari reblogged
You can tell a lot about how sincere people are in their comittment to ”social justice” in the manner they talk about three specific things: drug addicts, sex workers, and the homeless
cool-yubari reblogged
I am the monster tumblr thinks it is fighting right now.
I have no survivor cred to flash, I’m tumblr!old, and I like writing noncon because abusive dynamics are hot and hurting people is fun. Here are some things I know to be true:
- Other sadists have gotten off to my porn. - Tumblr!old cis males have gotten off to my porn. (I didn’t ask about their sexuality, they could have even been the full mandude cishet!!!) - People have been triggered by disregarding my warnings and reading my fic anyway. - People have been upset just by reading those warnings.
and….
- People, including survivors, have been helped by what I’ve written. (Including some who were also triggered by it!)
I don’t fully get why. Though I have a theory that, at least for some, part of recovery is facing down the monster that has hurt you. And a side effect of being a sadist is that I can understand - and write - some convincing monsters.
This isn’t a justification. I don’t believe anything I’ve said is “bad” in and of itself. I’m submitting this for perspective: vulnerable people are being attacked and shamed for far less severe thoughtcrimes than mine, but even mine?
Have helped people. I know that I have helped exactly the sort of people the tumblr crusade machine claims it is defending from exactly the sort of people I am, by doing exactly the sort of thing it claims hurts them, for exactly the wrong sort of reasons.
So if MY fandom presence has been a net good, the kids making up rules about which of YOUR kinks/ships are morally acceptable only after you fill out a special dispensation form outlining the details of your personal history for their approval sure are peddling you so much bullshit.
PS. What writing these stories has done for ME or other non-tumblr-approved sorts of people is not, I think, relevant to the current Discourse.
PPS. I considered adding context disclaimers about why I am not actually satan incarnate, but I decided there’s no point.
So much this.
And this seems as good a place as any to note that the self-described sadists I’ve met in fandom spaces tend to be one hell of a lot more careful about not violating real people than your average, overzealous SJW.
cool-yubari reblogged
Self-described activist creator of Cell 411 app weirdly refuses to discuss its closed source tech because of anti-racist Twitter handle of the person asking
About a week ago I published a post cautiously praising the work of Boulder, Colorado based SafeArx, the company behind a smartphone app called Cell 411 claiming to cut down on the need for police:
Let me be clear that I love the idea of a decentralized emergency alerting response platform. I think it’s incredibly important for such a tool to exist. […] I want to see a project with Cell 411’s claims succeed and be a part of abolishing the police and the State altogether. I think there’s real potential there to make headway on an important social good (abolishing the police, dismantling the prison industrial complex, among other social goods) and I want to offer whatever supportive resources I can to further a project with these goals.
In the post, I raised some basic questions about Cell 411 that seemed to have gone unasked by reporters covering it. Chief among them is that the app claims to be a de-centralized alternative to 9-1-1, except that it’s not decentralized at all. I described this discrepancy as follows:
On the Google Play store, Cell 411 describes itself like this:
Cell 411 is a De-centralized, micro-social platform that allows users to issue emergency alerts, and respond to alerts issued by their friends.
The problem is in the very first adjective: de-centralized. To a technologist, “decentralization” is the characteristic of having no single endpoint with which a given user must communicate in order to make use of the service. Think trackerless BitTorrent, BitCoin, Tor, or Diaspora. These are all examples of “decentralized” networks or services because if any given computer running the software goes down, the network stays up. One of the characteristics inherent in decentralized networks is an inability of the network or service creator from unilaterally barring access to the network by a given end-user. In other words, there is no one who can “ban” your account from using BitTorrent. That’s not how “piracy” works, duh.
Unfortunately, many of the people I’ve spoken to about Cell 411 seem to believe that “decentralized” simply means “many users in geographically diverse locations.” But this is obviously ignorant. If that were what decentralized meant, then Facebook and Twitter and Google could all be meaningfully described as “decentralized services.” That’s clearly ridiculous. This image shows the difference between centralization and decentralization:
As you can see, what matters is not where the end users are located, but that there is more than one hub for a given end user to connect to in order to access the rest of the network.
Armed with that knowledge, have a look at the very first clause of Cell 411’s Terms of Service legalese, which reads, and I quote:
1. We may terminate or suspend your account immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever, including without limitation if you breach the Terms.
This is immediately suspect. If they are able to actually enforce such a claim, then it is a claim that directly contradicts a claim made by their own description. In a truly decentralized network or service, the ability for the network creator to unilaterlly “terminate or suspend your account immediately, without prior notice or liability” is not technically possible. If Cell 411 truly is decentralized, this is an unenforceable clause, and they know it. On the other hand, if Cell 411 is centralized (and this clause is enforceable), other, more troubling concerns immediately come to mind. Why should activists trade one centralized emergency dispatch tool run by the government (namely, 9-1-1), for another centralized one run by a company? Isn’t this just replacing one monopoly with another? And why bill a centralized service as a decentralized one in the first place?
Despite this, I was hopeful that Cell 411’s creator, Virgil Vaduva, and his team would be willing to at least address the point, perhaps by discussing their development roadmap. Maybe it’s not decentralized yet, but they intend to decentralize it later on? That would be awesome, and important. Moreover, I asked if they would be interested in combining efforts with me or others with whom I’ve worked, since we’ve been developing an actually decentralized, free software tool with the same goal in mind called Buoy for a few months now. I said as much in my earlier post:
I want to see Cell 411 and Buoy both get better. Buoy could become better if it had Cell 411’s mobile app features. Cell 411 could become better if its server could be run by anyone with a WordPress blog, like Buoy can be.
I sent Virgil Vaduva an email last week, and tweeted at him before writing my post. (My previous post includes a copy of the email I sent him.) I was ignored. So I started tweeting at others who were tweeting about Cell 411, linking them to my questions. It seems that’s what got Mr. Vaduva’s attention, since today I finally got a response from him. And that response is extremely concerning for Cell 411’s supposed target audience: activists. Here’s how Mr. Vaduva “answered” my technical questions:
@maymaymx Seriously dude, I am not interested in cooperating or even discussing any topic with anyone using the handle “Kill White America”
— Virgil Vaduva (@VirgilVaduva) March 5, 2016
I’m not entirely sure why technical questions like these were answered by a hyper-focus on the militantly anti-racist Twitter handle I happen to be using right now (it’s actually “Kill White Amerikkka”), unless of course if Vaduva is having some kind of trigger reaction caused by (evidently not-so-latent) internalized white supremacy. Later, he called my original post, which, again, included outright praise for Cell 411 a “shitty hit piece.” I even offered to change my Twitter handle (as if that has any bearing at all on the technical matters?) for the duration of a discussion with him, but again, the only replies were, well, have a look:
@maymaymx Did you tweet that on your $3k Mac built by a white capitalist running a closed source OS?
— Virgil Vaduva (@VirgilVaduva) March 6, 2016
@maymaymx Right now the main reason is you and your white, arrogant, entitled millennial ass.
— Virgil Vaduva (@VirgilVaduva) March 6, 2016
The full thread is…well, classic Twitter.
I don’t know about you, but the idea of installing a closed-source app that reports my location to a centralized database controlled by a company whose founder actively deflects legitimate technical questions by objecting to a militantly anti-racist Twitter handle and making immature pro-capitalist statements when asked technical questions doesn’t sit well with me. But even if that were something I could tolerate, it raises even more concerning questions when that very same app is one touted as being built for anti-police brutality activists.
Last week, I would have told my friends, “Go ahead and try Cell 411, but be careful.” With this new information, my advice is: “Don’t trust anything created by SafeArx, including Cell 411, until and unless the technical issues are addressed, the source is released as free software, and its creators make clear that anti-racism and anti-capitalism is a core intention of their development process.”
In my personal opinion, tools like Cell 411 that purport to be “made for activists, by activists” need to be comfortable materially advancing the destruction of whiteness and white identity, as well as standing in solidarity with militant resistance to white supremacy. But even putting aside concerns over Vaduva’s discomfort with anti-racist Twitter handles, any technologist worth his salt who wants his closed-source technology to be trusted should be able to answer some basic questions about it if he’s indeed unwilling to release the source code itself.
Mr. Vaduva and Cell 411 fall short on both counts. The sad thing is that any potentially latent racism in Cell 411’s creator wouldn’t be a technical concern if Cell 411 itself were actually decentralized free software, since the intentions or social beliefs of an app’s creator can’t change how the already-written code works. As I said in the conclusion to my previous post:
It’s obvious, at least to anyone who understands that the purpose of cops is to protect and uphold white supremacy and oppress the working class, why cops would hate a free decentralized emergency response service. Again, I want to use such an app so badly that I began building one myself.
But if Cell 411 is centralized, then it becomes a much more useful tool for law enforcement than it does for a private individual, for exactly the same reason as Facebook presents a much more useful tool for the NSA than it does for your local reading group, despite offering benefits to both.
[…]
As long as Cell 411 remains a proprietary, closed-source, centralized tool, all the hype about it being a decentralized app that cops hate will remain hype. And there are few things agents of the State like more than activists who are unable to see the reality of a situation for what it is.
ALT
If you think having a free software, anarchist infrastructural alternative to the police and other State-sponsored emergency services is important and want to see it happen, we need your help making Buoy better. You can find instructions for hacking on Buoy on our wiki.
Source: maymay.net
Indoctrination is child abuse.
--Caption and picture taken from this post by @godlessutopia.
I’d add that trying to force someone else’s spirituality to conform to your religion, particularly when you have power over them, is also spiritual abuse.
(Note: some of their posts on Islam are conspicuously incorrect.)
cool-yubari reblogged
jeebus-was-a-liberal-deactivate
People like this don’t seem holy to atheists at all. But it’s a good reminder that personality manicuring isn’t limited to SJW circles.
cool-yubari reblogged
I honestly think relationships in general would be healthier, in general, if we didn’t believe they should last forever.
When the default is “forever” and shorter relationships are seen as a failure, we miss out on a lot. We stay in relationships that don’t work because they’re not “bad enough” to leave, as though not wanting the relationship anymore isn’t a good enough reason. We deny ourselves happy memories, saying “If it doesn’t work now, our love then wasn’t real.” We pass on relationships we know would be short, because if it doesn’t last forever, what’s the point in joy in the moment?
An ending isn’t a failure. It’s an ending. Most relationships have them. What would our relationships be like if we stopped focusing on our fear of endings and started focusing on what we - and our friends, partners, and family - need right now?
Signal boost.
Interesting when people say communism is “taking it too far” cause personally I think letting people starve and die because they can’t or won’t work under existing conditions is taking it a little too far
cool-yubari reblogged
The intersection between class warfare and fascism
mediamattersforamerica:
Cannot believe this just happened. The conservative kingmaker who regularly hosts major GOP presidential candidates just asked—100% seriously—"What’s wrong with slavery?“
Specifically in the context of suggesting - in detail - that it would be great if undocumented Latin@ migrants who won’t leave the US could be enslaved.
It’s easy to look at this (and other recent examples of politicians inciting racism) and have a completely justified fit of rage. But I’m seeing a cynical pattern of manipulation: they’re trying to get Americans worked up and worn out fighting each other, over proposals that are so ridiculously unjust that all the liberals are drowning in feelings about how terrible this would be if it were implemented, and all the conservatives are drowning in feelings about how much they hate the idea of white people “subsidizing the existence” of brown people.
Everywhere that companies have the option of using slave labor, their treatment of free laborers and the amount they’re willing to pay them gets worse. So the only real beneficiaries of a measure like this would be corporations, because they could now openly justify stealing 100% of the wealth generated by immigrant workers. Without needing the current excuse of throwing them in jail, first.
I very much appreciate this, because the bulk of the blue-tribe directed anti racism is very much predicated on the assumption that being anti-racist is contrary to the best interests of White people, but they ought to do it because of ethics. Perhaps I’m just not that ethical a person deep down, or perhaps its due to being an ex Christian and very leery of ethics based arguments from that, but I’m much more moved by arguments of how anti-racism is in my own best interest than arguments in favor of romantic martyrdom.
I think you're right to trust your instinct about this. “Giving them more would mean we’d have less“ is exactly the argument racists make, and it’s factually incorrect. Just appending “but we SHOULD“ does not turn that into a forward-thinking argument.
The whole edifice of “anti-racism as helping the less fortunate” is predicated on benevolent dominance. It’s predicated on white people continuing to imagine they’re infinitely powerful, but more enlightened than before. In other words, it’s patronizing, savior fantasy bullshit.
However. I also don’t blame anyone who fell for this, because it’s generally a case of a good impulse being taken in a bad direction by society, which has a lot to gain from misdirecting activists. White people who are willing to can the theories and use their own eyes and brains are in a position to realize that the ways they’re being screwed and the ways PoC are being screwed affect each other and overlap. And that most of their so-called privilege is not good for them. And that they’d be happier and better off in a world where they weren’t helping the 1% loot and pillage. They’re getting the crumbs from the oligarchs’ table, while other people get nothing, and being told this means they actually have an ownership stake in keeping the world as it is. All lies to keep them from identifying (and challenging) the ones who do own everything.
University students are wising up as a result of resenting the indentured servitude contract better known as student loan obligations. There is nothing that’s being taught there today that’s worth the way tuition has ballooned since their parents and grandparents got degrees. On the contrary, the quality of education has gotten markedly worse as universities outsource teaching to (underpaid, exploited) TAs and adjunct professors. And these are the white people who used to have it reasonably good - their standards of living are coming down too.
But what I’m really saying is that any identity that tries to convince you that you’re all aggressor or all transgressed-against is lying. And the shape of that lie makes you vulnerable to manipulation. Even - especially - when you’re being pushed to think you’re stronger and in a more invulnerable position than you actually are.
cool-yubari reblogged
RT @Pray4Pal: Can you listen to all Israel war crimes against Palestine and still love it? #ICC4Israel http://t.co/QswS6HT9qA
Liberals have panic buttons too, and this is one of the biggest.
Freethinker protip
I keep seeing posts going around talking about fandom as a religion. They have it backwards. Religion is a fandom.
In fact, religion is arguably the ur-example of intentionally blurring fantasy with reality. Perceiving it as a fandom that enjoys widespread social approval, and abuses that social license to bully people, strips it of pretensions and puts things in perspective.
I did most of my “dealing with trauma-reactions from forcible attempts to Christianize me as a kid“ before I found Tumblr, and describing how that worked would really take its own post. But if you need an example of how to apply the lens of fandom to religion, this is toying with such a thing:
There are roughly five and a half fucktillion extracanonical gospels out there. For the first couple centuries after Jesus bit it, his followers wrote a ridiculous amount of fanfic. There were a gajillion different headcanons floating around about exactly who and what he even was (God pretending to be human? human who got possessed by God at his baptism? human who got promoted to demigod after his death? simultaneously God and human all along??) and lots of early Christian communities ~conveniently~ discovered a Totally 100% Authentic Eyewitness Account that supported their pet theory (and also, proved that their fave disciple was clearly the best).
Big Name Fans argued about all the major disagreements, periodically throwing conventions specifically to bicker until they reached some sort of consensus (more or less – sometimes the hold-outs ended up saying “screw you guys, we’re gonna go form our own church!”) Toward the end of the second century, a guy named Irenaeus wrote a meta arguing that there were four fics worth reading – no more, no less – and they were ones that folks somewhere along the line started to claim were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This idea caught on as a popular bit of fanon, and over the next couple of centuries it gained so much support that it was declared canon.
The one thing I’d add is that it’s a lot easier to make your ideas “catch on“ when you can send armed men to rape, torture, and murder everyone who disagrees with you. Even when - as Christianity was - you’re displacing well loved previous stories and trying to destroy all trace of them aside from your asinine misrepresentations.
Everywhere on earth, Christian missionaries were the shock troops of Western empires. And to this day, they are still used that way. So, as far as I’m concerned, people going “the greatest story for me, right now, is [some contemporary fandom]“ is a necessary exercise of personal autonomy. And one of the best things about religion taking its proper place in the fiction section is that it really can’t compete at all. My fandoms aren’t being shored up by umpteen centuries of people being forced to study one source and show appropriate enthusiasm for it.
Though I’m still more into the stories people write for free, for each other, than marketable canons. Fandom is where all the real magic happens.
2 cents on villains and heroes from the peanut gallery
The following is a response that I wrote and posted last July. I can’t remember if this made it onto my Tumblr, but I think it didn’t. The article I was responding to is here.
Mainstream storytelling represents a history where normality and privilege were conflated and glorified, and everything that didn't fit that was relegated to the villains. Which is how all the diversity that wasn't welcome in the spotlight was cast on the antagonists - how we got so many crippled, mentally ill, racially varied, sexually nonstandard, irreligious, and otherwise not-the-accepted-way-to-exist villains. And there's also the fact that society has always sort of had a guilty conscience about how it mistreats its outgroups - it knows those people have reasons to be angry and resentful, even if they don't, in real life, generally seek revenge. All of that forms the character foundation for modern villains.