SUPERSTORE ( 2015 - 2021 )

At least show us the bison!

The best update.

wholesome and true - do not mess with the wildlife

She'll fuck me if I cook good enough I know it

#billions of humans have thought this same thing over the course of the species’ history #and they were right

"A world without trans people has never existed and never will"

Poster spotted in Olympia, WA

Pour one out for a real one.

Reading up on him, he was a pretty cool guy. He was one of the first people to stand up to John Money about his theories of gender development and position that intersex infants should receive surgery and never be told about it using his abuse of David Reimer as ‘proof’, asserting that Money didn’t have the evidence and standing his ground even when Money straight up started screaming at him. And then later he was proven right when he got into contact with David Reimer, not only discovering proof that Money was wrong but also how abusive and horrific Money had been. He then went on to write advocating for intersex and trans rights and to avoid unnecessary procedures on intersex people without full informed consent and that intersex people are part of natural human variation and that we deserve acceptance and not to be treated like a disorder.

A quote I really like from him: ‘Nature loves diversity, society hates it’

intense discussion going on at wikipedia

3 components of worldbuilding:

1. The author’s kinks

2. The author’s power fantasy

3. The author’s political agenda

Plot and logic optional

4. The author's formative trauma(s), unrecognized until after they hit post and then reread it for typos, only to blink in shock and say, "Oh. Oh. Oh fuck."

5. The author's personal grievances with other works in the same genre. (May relate to #3 but not always)

@iamthepulta

Some sort of Romantic painting happening outside my window tonight.

The Boeing Whistleblowers Weren't Assassinated

Anyone who looks into this past a few memes and headlines realizes that it's not actually much of a conspiracy.

The first whistleblower, John Barnett, did his whistleblowing back in 2017. The legal proceedings he was in before he died were related to a defamation case against Boeing, who "he claimed deliberately hurt his career and reputation because of allegations he’d made of grave safety breaches on the aircraft company’s production line."

He was suffering from PTSD and Anxiety Attacks from the length of the case, which shows the unjust levels of stress you get form being a whistleblower, but which also are not surprising comorbidities from suicide. Add to the fact that his wife had died a little over a year before, and it's a lot less suspicious that he would kill himself.

He did not tell his family "If I die, it wasn't suicide". The alleged witness was a friend of his mom who claimed he said it. That's not something we should treat as solid evidence.

The second whistleblower, Joshua Dean, got the Flu, then pneumonia from the Flu, then got MRSA in the hospital. These are very common diseases that also have C-grade death rates: Only ~30% of patients die of it, so it hardly makes sense as an assassination weapon.

Boeing has 32 whistleblower complaints, which is shocking but if they're going around killing whistleblowers they sure seem to be behind the fucking curve on it.

In both cases these deaths came long after the initial complaints, such that killing them doesn't get rid of the complaints, and given the 32 other cases it sure doesn't seem like they're trying to scare off new ones.

And beyond that, killing off whistleblowers is a strategy that only makes sense if you think of Boeing as a single organism and not an abstraction made of thousands of people. Yes, it's theoretically better for Boeing's bottom line if whistleblowers die, but the executives responsible for the fuck-ups these whistleblowers are pointing out? Won't go to jail for them. They will go to jail if they're caught hiring an assassin, something they would have zero practice doing and would be highly likely to fuck up like they did the company if they tried, and that risk isn't worth a little extra bonus on your stock options or whatever.

I really do not want this "Boeing killed the whistleblowers OMG" shit to stick around because it's blatantly unsupported and it will scare off future whistleblowers if this becomes common bullshit wisdom.

a collection

I want to believe it's possible to rationally persuade people (it is my job, after all), but experience -- especially on this website -- has not made me optimistic.

I suppose there are people who reject a rationale because they find the reasoning inherently flawed. I think this is usually the minority of cases.

In my experience, most people who cannot be rationally persuaded or who resist the information they are given have unmet emotional needs that prevent them from engaging with the proffered rationale. Usually it's fear or mistrust or emotional attachment to something they will lose if they accept the argument. It's often helpful to address and validate these feelings, and then people do often come around to engaging with the arguments.

If I can find it, there was this great Vox article from a few years ago summarizing some social science research on how to politically persuade people, and it was exactly that: listening to people's feelings, hearing them out, and then explaining why your political position is not a contradiction of but a validation of their feelings. Or if they are talking about something that isn't real that's upsetting them (e.g. trans women predators in bathrooms, gay books in school 'grooming' kids, whatever), hearing them out on it first and validating why that upsets them before gently explaining why that's not a real thing. And then making the position you're advocating similarly personal: like people tend to be convinced on stuff like LGBTQ+ rights by hearing personal stories of how homophobia and transphobia have negatively impacted LGBTQ+ people, or by relating it to what they want out of their own lives. (The gay marriage movement did that really successfully.) That's why there's also a lot of research suggesting that seeing POC and LGBTQ+ characters on TV shows has roughly the same effect on making people more likely to support racial/LGBTQ+ equality as actually knowing someone of those identities irl (no, really! sidenote: this is specifically the study about attitudes about gay and bi people, I've also heard studies referenced that reached the same conclusions re: race and trans people but can't currently find them) - because that effectively involves getting invested in a personal story about those people. It might be fictional, but that doesn't matter when it comes to how much it emotionally grabs you.

Okay, I found the article! The technique is called "deep canvassing."

I also found this one, which suggests that in terms of left-wing and right-wing people arguing, a lot of what people don't understand is that they have fundamentally different moral worldviews, and the best way to persuade someone on the other side is to use their own morals against them rather than your own. Doesn't explain why it's so hard to argue with fellow leftists about this stuff, though (or maybe it does, since I feel like a lot of the people I find hardest to talk with about some of these issues are people whose "leftism" is a lot more based in right-wing outlooks and morality than they realize):

Regardless, though, it's generally not logical arguments that persuade most people.

I also think, ultimately, that people need to be open to being persuaded and also have some degree of respect for whomever is doing so. Neither of which is usually true with anyone who is passionate enough about an issue to get into a long, dragged-out fight with you about it on social media.

happy smallpox eradication day to all who celebrate, which is everyone!

“On December 9, 1979, the disease was confirmed to have been eradicated, with the World Health Assembly making the declaration official five months later.”

“On May 8, 1980, more than two years after the last known case, the World Health Assembly formally declared the world free of smallpox.”

celebrate twice!