2. they have 0 concept of disability as a tragedy or something pitiable.
I’ve watched kids get into an argument with a teacher bc they thought wheelchairs were cool. I told a kid that I can’t stand for too long sometimes and they replied, “That’s okay, I can’t do cartwheels sometimes, but I just do other stuff then. You can sit down with me if you want”. Today a girl asked me what the headphones on a classmate’s desk were for and I told her that headphones are important for some kids because noises bother them, and she said she wished she had headphones at home, because her baby brothers make a lot of noise and it makes it hard to think. The idea that different people could use tools at different times is intuitive and simple and when accessibility aids are explained neutrally, kids don’t see them as bad or unfortunate, they’re just things that are useful.
Even mental disability!! In Kindergarten the other day one of the kids asked me why his table partner got stickers when nobody else did. I started off by saying, “Well, when you do your work well, it feels good, right? That’s your brain giving you a reward,” and the kid just right away went, “Oh, and the stickers are like his reward?” YES! You are 5 and have a better grasp on ADHD than most adults! Kids blow me away every day.
so i took out the trash today like the good house husband i am not, leaving behind the rank smell of long forgotten noodles and the regrets of two people with memory issues
i, like any good tumblr citizen, remember the tales of the person who put two cups of vanilla extract in their oven so i did the sensible thing to get out two Caps of extract
just then, inspiration struck. a bolt of lightning straight from the muses themselves, if i could use vanilla extract…. who’s to say i couldn’t use other extracts?
i scoured the cabinets, i knew my partner had secreted away some illicit non-vanilla type extracts for baking, and i found it.
hidden in the back of the cabinet was a lone bottle of mint extract
i emptied my two caps with abandon into an (oven safe) glass dish and gleefully set the oven for 300 for an hour
all that was left now was to wait for the sins of the mind to be purged by the mighty mint leaf
ten minutes in… starting to smell kinda like a thin mint
fifteen minutes in, i take a nice deep breath of lovely scented air and i am greeted by searing burning minty pain
i launch myself towards the kitchen, every step closer to mint hell, every orifice on my face burning with the freezing righteous flame of menthol
im fumbling for the oven mitt to rid my home of this foul demon, i pry the oven open and am hit with a blast unlike anything else
i feel what that vine kid taking shots of mouthwash feels, i was seared raw, my tits were blown clean off, and it was just me and that devilish beguiling minty fresh taste
quickly dumping the rest into the sink i ran towards the door, begging for the sweet sweet smell of un-minted air
learning nothing from this encounter, i dare to try once more, with the tumblr-approved extract this time
wish me luck
update: the vanilla has finished cooking, it now very much smells like the pillsberry doughboy fucked a thin mint
it takes quite a bit of social intelligence for a creature to understand:
I know what I am doing is wrong
I know there is an activity that looks similar that is not wrong
If I am quick I can plausibly pass one off as the other
these cats are displaying remarkable theory of mind skills by not only registering that the humans can perceive them but actively trying to manipulate that perception! that requires one to be aware that other individuals have complicated interior thoughts of their own, to know that those thoughts are not always based on truth, and to quickly decide on the best possible “lie” for the situation. this is why I despise animal intelligence tasks based on obedience— some of the most clever moments stem from intelligent disobedience.
Ah, okay, so it’s because he’s nervous, right? Or because the shivering is kinda like stimming? Bit stereotypical I guess, but it’s true a lot of autistic people do have issues with anxie–
Adding this amazing “Sinners Syllabus” too for further resources to educate yourself. The books above are ones I have in my personal library, but some very cool people put together an entire webpage of information. Check it out HERE.
Making a modern Jurassic World movie, where it’s nothing but scientists desperately trying to get like a single viable zygote. And the horror is how every day they have to be in meetings with shareholders who talk the whole time about the giant dinosaurs they’ll make, and setting opening deadlines while no one else in the room knows if they’re even gonna get a cluster of cells to last more than a day. The shareholders keep firing scientists and engineers for poor performance, slashing the laboratory budget, and spending millions of dollars on marketing and efficiency consultants.
Even incremental progress is terrifying because if you tell the bosses there’s progress, they assume an alive fully grown dinosaur will be ready for the public in one week. Every executive does literally nothing but play solitaire and complain what a waste of money dinosaurs are.
“Can’t we use AI to make the dinosaurs?”
“… wh…”
“We’ve got a six million dollar contract from OpenAI standing by if we give them exclusive rights to 3D models of the dinosaurs to use as chatbot avatars.”
“…”
“ChatGPT says we can make dinosaurs with frog DNA and water. Also three chicken eggs, twenty cups of sugar, and one cigarette. And I don’t think we need an entire lab for something a single commercial kitchen can do, soooooooo…”
“…”
“ChatGPT, write a letter to fire these people, but in a way that sounds like we’re really sad about it or whatever.”
Kiandria Demone has successfully disrupted a white woman’s attempts to profit from her recent racist attack on a 5 year-old Black boy. While many online are celebrating and even sharing Kiandra's work, they are not crediting her.
A Minnesota woman seen using a racial slur against a child in a video posted on social media has raised over $300,000 through a crowdfunding campaign, saying she and her family need to relocate for their safety.
The incident, which occurred at Soldiers Field Memorial Park in Rochester, shows a woman, identified as Shiloh Hendrix, using the n-word in an argument with a man who confronted her about her language toward a Black child. The video, which circulated across social media platforms including X and TikTok, shows Hendrix repeating the slur and defending her actions by claiming the child stole from her toddler’s diaper bag.
I was thinking about this on and off before this story even broke the news but by and large it doesn’t matter what consequences white supremacists who harass black people, on camera, in public, actually have to deal with because legions of fellow white supremacists are in the wings ensuring that they’ll be fine throughout the ordeal.
Good news!
this is still ongoing & people can support Kiandria Demone’s—she’s updating a guide for what company to contact (including templates)
I had a straight up delightful moment at work yesterday when a new member of the management team asked me how we were tracking warranties and I explained that we kind of aren’t and he asked why we aren’t and that meant he got a 30-minute rundown of how top-to-bottom fucked the procurement process is here.
First I explained the process for sending a quote (i am assigned a ticket in system A1, I create an opportunity in system A2, from the opportunity i can generate a quote in system B - if I start with the quote I can’t associate it back to the opportunity or the ticket, if we need to change the quote after it was approved we need to generate a new quote from the opportunity to overwrite the old one - and send the quote from system B.)
Then I explained the process of getting approval (system B sends the quote and receives the approvals but does not communicate that to system A, so until it is manually updated system A sends a daily reminder about the quote to the client and after three days with no response will close the ticket even if the client approved the quote in system B. System B will send an email if a quote is approved but it comes from our generic support email so to make sure that I don’t miss approvals I have filtering rules set up and a folder I check twice a day. Because there are 4 people who use this system I also check twice daily in system B to see if anyone else’s quotes were approved).
Then I explained how I place the orders (easy! I’m a pro! We have a standardized PO pattern that tracks date, vendor and client, it’s handy)
Then I explained how I document the orders (neither system A nor B has a way of storing information about orders in progress, only orders that are complete; as such I have created a PO Documentation spreadsheet that lists the PO number, vendor, line of business, client, items ordered, order total, order date, ETA, tracking numbers, serial numbers, delivery confirmation, ticket number for install, ticket title for install, shippong cost, and close confirmation, which all have to be entered individually and which require a minimum of three visits to the spreadsheet per order: entering initial info, entering tracking and SN info, then once more to get that info to close the opportunity)
Then I explained how we close an order (confirm hardware delivery or activate software, use system A2 to code hardware/software/non-taxable products appropriately, run wizard to add charges from A2 to ticket in A1; because the A2 charges were locked by approval in system B, use system A3 to add shipping or other fees or to remove any parts that were approved but not actually needed or ordered - THIS WEEK I got permission to do this bit on my initial A1 procurement ticket instead of generating an A1 post-procurement ticket for fees and shipping. Once all of that is done it’s moved into system A4 and is no longer my problem).
If there is a warranty involved it *should* automatically have the expiration tracked in system C, but system C doesn’t have any way to pull order info so there’s no way it can track warranty *start* dates without somebody manually entering it or without using API data from the manufacturer, which some manufacturers don’t provide (fuck you, Apple).
But me and my trainee are happy to add the start date to the configuration once a tech tells us that the device is enrolled in system C. If the techs will tell us that we can add that info no problem.
Until then, I have unfortunately been forced to start a spreadsheet.
The manager was appalled, it was great. I got to say the words “part of the reason things sometimes fall through the cracks is because we have so many cracks” and his response was “no shit.” I’m talking to vendors about a procurement system now :) :) :) :)
Intel’s Q1 2025 earnings press release talked up their new AI-enabled chips. But these are not selling. [Intel]
In the earnings call, CFO Dave Zinsner mentioned they had “capacity constraints in Intel 7 which we expect to persist for the foreseeable future.” Asked for more detail, Zinsner said: “Pretty simply, we’re doing better on Raptor Lake and Intel 7 parts.” [Intel, video; transcript]
“Intel 7” is the production line where Intel is still making its previous two generations of CPUs. But its new AI-enabled CPUs are made out at TSMC, not in-house. [Tom’s Hardware]
Zinsner assured the analysts:
Ultimately, though, we do want to see these AI PC products. gain more traction in the market, and we’re optimistic that happens for the year.
That is: AI CPU sales are not happening in the present. But maybe in the fabulous future.
Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs are not doing well either. The Copilot+ machines are too expensive. There’s no compelling applications that do anything with AI. The Snapdragon-based laptops have really good battery life — but a lot of applications just won’t run, because the PC emulator isn’t that great. They cut prices by 10% at the end of 2024, but that didn’t help. [Tom’s Hardware; Android Authority; Register; Register]
More and more PCs will have AI coprocessors in them just because that’s what the manufacturers are doing now. That doesn’t make anyone care.
Microsoft has just released new Surface laptops. They’re talking up the price and the battery life — and not the AI. Because nobody cares. [CNBC]
The way my jaw dropped when I saw that video where Darshen said he’s like a younger brother to Samuel..
that is literally not even factual 💀 that is fully a rumor. like can yall not. so many people were bothering them about this random misinfo.
Now that we’ve cancelled out the additional lore we can return to contemplating Darshen, and how no combination of existing emoji could recapitulate his specific fixed smile.
by Michael Cameron, PhD Candidate of English, Dalhousie University
During his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk levelled a critique at empathy, calling it “the fundamental weakness of western civilization.”
A diverse coalition of figures have taken up this “war on empathy,” including pastor Joe Rigney, conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and marketing professor Gad Saad.
Doesn’t this moment call out for more empathy rather than less?
What is empathy anyway?
But first, we need to know what we are talking about.
Some recent criticisms of empathy have been premised on bad definitions. For instance, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently claimed that empathy is “destructive” for immigration policy because “empathy means never having to say no.” This definition is not accurate.
With the discovery of “mirror neurons,” modern neuroscience has in a sense validated Smith’s theories. As neuroscientist Christian Keysers explains: “The mirror system builds a bridge between the minds of two people,” showing that our brains are not only “deeply social” but also “magically connected to each other.”
Put simply, we are hardwired for empathy.
Sympathy and social contagion
In our research, we have explored literary depictions of self-destructive, suicidal and monstrous sympathies. We recognize some parallels between MAGA’s war on empathy and conceptual debates of the past, parallels at times interesting and worrisome.
During his appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Saad criticized Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s appeal to Trump for mercy on behalf of undocumented immigrants and those in the LGBTQIA+ community, suggesting it was indicative of the “parasitic idea” of open borders and an example of “suicidal empathy.”
A few months later, Canadian pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson echoed Saad and told Rogan that today’s political left is vulnerable to those who “parasitize empathy.”
This association between empathy and parasitic contagion is not at all new.
As literary scholar Mary Fairclough explains, in the 18th and 19th centuries, sympathy was “understood as a disruptive social phenomenon which functioned to spread disorder and unrest between individuals and even across nations like a ‘contagion.’”
As an example, Fairclough quotes the author Thomas De Quincey, who opined that “many a man has been drawn, by the contagion of sympathy with his own class acting as a mob, into outrages of destruction.”
The writer Mary Shelley literalized this notion of contagious sympathy in her 1826 novel The Last Man, which depicts a (perhaps uncomfortably familiar) plague pandemic. The novel paints sympathy as a method of mass control and societal dissolution just as contagious as the plague.
But unlike De Quincey, Shelley also celebrates sympathy as our most valuable and effective collective resource in times of crisis. This celebration is most notable in the character of Adrian, who devotes his life to “bring[ing] patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease.’”
The uses and abuses of empathy
Much as Shelley suggests for sympathy, research shows that empathy must be properly channelled so it isn’t used to divide and manipulate.
For example, research shows that empathy is not impartial. People tend to empathize more easily with those who share their racial or social background, and less with those who are perceived as different. In other words, racial prejudices may bias our instinctive empathetic responses.
But MAGA’s approach to empathy is less a well-meaning critique than an all-out war and comes at the issues with a far less benevolent set of assumptions and goals. As Wong noted: “We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale.”
Consider what Musk said to Rogan regarding immigration:
“I believe in empathy, like I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”
This comment is strikingly similar to the idea of “racial suicide” endorsed by eugenicist thinkers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Racial suicide was a concept rooted in the xenophobic fear that one’s own ethnic population would be replaced by another racialized population that happened to have a higher birth rate.
As the historian Rob Boddice notes, “eugenic morality” was “to be guided by sympathy construed as sympathy for the whole of society” rather than towards individuals. For the eugenicists, this ideology justified extreme measures, such as forced sterilizations and racial segregation. The horrors of eugenics and its influence on the Nazi Holocaust are well documented.
Despite these history lessons, Musk and his ilk, however, seem unperturbed and even enthusiastic about repeating history.
Much can be said about empathy’s potential limitations alongside its many virtues. But while MAGA supporters may have balked at her speech and her call for empathy, we would do well to remember the words of Bishop Budde:
“We should be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.”
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
McMansion Hell on Trump’s gaudy “dictator chic”. “This ruling class nostalgia for times of absolute domination over the populace and its use as a conservative signifier is a defining characteristic of Rococo Revivalism…”
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