Zephyr Dear

A lot of moral philosophies lead to strange, counterintuitive, and often demanding conclusions. Utilitarians think you should donate as much money as you possibly can to charity. Kantians think you should never tell even little white lies. Catholics think you shouldn’t jerk off. Et cetera.

Let’s say you believe in moral progress: that there are moral questions we as a culture get right now that we didn’t get right two hundred years ago. This argument requires a very weak form of moral progress– you don’t have to believe that our culture is right about everything, or even most things, just that there is at least one issue that the nineteenth century got wrong and we got right. For instance, two issues which spring obviously to mind for me are “should we sentence people to prison for engaging in consensual homosexual sex?” and “should women have the right to vote?”

Now, if a moral philosophy with no obvious relation to homosexuality or feminism happened to get both of those questions right, back in the nineteenth century, that seems to me to be a strong argument in favor of that philosophy. If their strange, counterintuitive, and demanding conclusions turned out, several hundred years later, to be a good idea, then probably the current strange, counterintuitive, and demanding conclusions which it’s peddling are good ideas too.

Virtue ethics was, unfortunately, not very popular during the nineteenth century, so one cannot check how well it holds up. However, Kant (characterized as “central to deontological moral theories” by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) does not come across very well at all. He said that homosexuality was an unmentionable vice. Not only did he believe that women should not vote for “natural reasons“, he believed that wives were owned much as one would own property, very much reflecting the prejudices of his time, but perhaps not what a reasonable person would conclude from “treat people as ends and not means”.

The position of Christians on homosexuality is well-known, and I direct the interested reader to the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on women:

The third branch of the woman question, the social legal position of woman, can, as shown from what has been said, only be decided by Catholics in accordance with the organic conception of society, but not in accordance with disintegrating individualism. Therefore the political activity of man is and remains different from that of woman, as has been shown above. It is difficult to unite the direct participation of woman in the political and parliamentary life of the present time with her predominate duty as a mother. If it should be desired to exclude married women or to grant women only the actual vote, the equality sought for would not be attained. On the other hand, the indirect influence of women, which in a well-ordered state makes for the stability of the moral order, would suffer severe injury by political equality.

On the other hand, by this criterion, the nineteenth-century utilitarians do very very well. Jeremy Bentham supported women’s full equal rights, while John Stuart Mill went so far as to write a groundbreaking feminist text, The Subjection of Women. Jeremy Bentham concluded that homosexuality is morally fine, while John Stuart Mill was silent on the topic.

In conclusion: don’t eat meat, give money to the Schistosomiasis Control Institute, and a hundred and fifty years from now someone might be writing a blog post about how great your moral system is.

Newspapers used to use the word “souls” in headlines. “43 Souls Lost at Sea,” or “11 Souls Perish in Mine Collapse.”

This was a long time ago, of course, a century or so back. We don’t use that word “souls” in headlines any more — just as we rarely use the verb “perish.” Talk of “souls” is both too religious and too Platonic — suggesting the notion of a duality between mortal flesh and immortal spirit.

That idea of the “soul” — going all the way back to Plato and haunting us ever since — remains inescapable and unavoidable, even if we now avoid it in our headlines about shipwrecks and other disasters. For all the many challenges to the idea from philosophers and theologians and scientists, this dualism of body and soul persists and pervades our thinking like a kind of background noise.

To be clear, I do not believe in that idea of the “soul.” I think it is profoundly, dangerously misleading to think of our selves as souls inhabiting physical bodies. But I still believe that talk of souls matters — that it attempts to articulate something important and vital and essential.

“Do you believe you have a soul?” someone asked me recently. And what I wanted to say was, “No. I don’t believe I have a soul, I believe I am a soul.”  But the ghost of Plato makes it almost impossible to say that without suggesting that if I am a soul, then I must merely have a body. And I don’t believe that either.

This is what fascinates me about those old newspaper headlines. They employ the word “souls,” and we bring to that word all of our Platonic, dualistic baggage and assumptions about what that word means. But their use of the word suggests something wholly incompatible with those dualistic ideas. Their use of the word — their appeal to the concept — is quite the opposite of what we expect when we approach that word with all of the connotations we’ve absorbed from Plato and Augustine and revivalist altar-call soteriology. Plato and Augustine and Billy Graham have all trained us to think of immortal souls dwelling, temporarily, within mortal bodies.

But those old headlines didn’t say “1,800 Bodies Lost at Sea.” They spoke of souls dying — of souls perishing.

Whatever it was those headlines meant by “souls,” it wasn’t the same as the Platonic/Augustinian dualism that colors so much of our speaking and thinking about souls. The word here was used interchangeably with simpler, less fraught, words like “people” or “lives.” It was chosen, in part, because those words can seem inadequate to the reporting of tragedy. These weren’t just any lives — they were humans. They weren’t just faceless, nameless people, but unique individuals. And reaching for some way to convey all of that, these old-timey headline writers sometimes latched onto the word we’ve long used to attempt to articulate this ineffable aspect of our humanity. Souls.

Despite the long shadows of Plato and Augustine, this too is something — something else — that we humans have long meant or tried to communicate with our talk of souls or of the soul.

I think this half-grasped, inadequately articulated idea is important because I think it is true. And I think it’s worth the hard work it requires to separate this from the old dualisms and to preserve the language here — to save our “souls.” This is likely a case where the connotations of the word bear more meaning than any attempted denotation — a word more useful for what it suggests than what it defines, for what it points toward more than what it pins down.

All of which is to say, in response to that question I was asked, “Yes, I believe in souls.”

What do I mean by that, exactly? Well, that’s a bit more complicated. It’s probably easier to say what I do not mean by that than what I do. But here’s part of it: I believe that being soulful is good and being soulless is bad. I believe in whatever it is that the music of Al Green or Aretha Franklin comes from, and whatever it is that receives it. I believe that The Powers That Be will sometimes make you an offer at a crossroads, asking, in return, for something that is both seemingly unsubstantial and essential.

I believe that souls — whatever that means — can be saved, and shaped, and starved, and stunted, lost and found and born again.

theinturnetexplorer:

Live Tweeting a Bad Date.

You can almost taste the excruciating martyrdom of his life

It goes without saying that it's probably not good politics to say your plan to move the country forward is that everyone needs to work longer hours. It approaches 47% level toxicity. Even more damning is that it makes zero sense in policy terms. Indeed, Jeb's 'work harder' prescription provides harrowing look at the level of derp that can be produced when you take a guy who isn't all that bright and push him to the head of the national leadership line without ever having put in an honest day's work or support himself in his life.

Thom Parkin made a great point in the comments of an earlier article of mine:

Great advice. But you missed one very important [final] point. Since this is Open Source, once you have figured out the details of that feature/function where the documentation is a bit light, YOU SHOULD UPDATE THE DOCS AND SUBMIT A PULL REQUEST. In that way the entire community benefits, and you can even gain some “coder cred” for your participation!

I’m happy Thom mentioned this, because it’s so important. Fixing documentation is the easiest way to start contributing back to the projects you use and love.

My first contributions to projects like Rails, Rubinius, and Elixir have all been doc fixes. I’ve made small tweaks to make things clearer, explained some things that you could only discover by reading the code, even just fixed broken formatting. These have all been quick, easy ways to help out some big open source projects. Even when they’re my only contributions to a project, they’ve still helped future users, and Future Me. And that’s what open source is all about.

Why documentation fixes are such a great way to get started

Doc fixes are the least intimidating way to contribute to a big project like Rails:

• You don’t have to set up the project in order to fix the bug. Since you’re just updating the documentation, you don’t have to get the tests or the app running. Sometimes, you won’t even have to clone the project to your machine – you can make your change right on GitHub!

• If the maintainer asks you to make changes to your pull request, they’re usually a matter of wording or taste. Those kind of changes can be easier to stomach than criticism of your code. And it’s easier for you to make those changes, because you don’t have to update tests or code, just words.

• Documentation is hard for a project maintainer, so updates are appreciated. Often, authors are too close to the code to understand where the confusing parts are. They need other, newer developers to tell them where the docs need help. It takes practice to see your project as a beginner would, and not everyone has built that skill.

• Finally, you’re starting to build a relationship with the maintainer, with a low-impact change. You’re not changing the direction of the project, like you would if you were contributing an entire feature. So your change is easier for a maintainer to review, and they’ll usually respond to you more quickly. Your merge request won’t get stuck in the “Is this a good idea?” phase.

As you keep building that relationship, you’ll start to be seen as a reliable contributor. Your pull requests will get reviewed faster, and it’ll be easier for both of you to talk through more complicated feature requests and bug fixes.

They’re easier to start, they’re easier to do, and they tend to get merged more quickly. So why wouldn’t your first contribution be a doc fix?

How to start contributing back updated documentation

There’s an important way contributing doc updates is like fixing bugs: They both rely on being sensitive to things that feel wrong. You have to pay attention.

When you run into behavior you didn’t expect, it might be time to update the docs. If you have to dive into the code to solve a problem, you might also want to tell other people about it. You should even be sensitive to broken formatting and typos in the documentation you read. If you’re not going to fix it, who will?

Once you have a good idea of where to make the change and how you want to word it, make your change and send a pull request through GitHub.

If you’re still trying to decide on the best way to update the docs, open an issue on GitHub. It can be something like this:

“Hey, this was confusing to me. I was thinking of updating it to look something like this: … What do you think? Anything else I should mention?” Together, you can come up with wording that satisfies everyone.

Finally, don’t be discouraged if you don’t get a response. Big projects have a lot going on, so it’s easy for your contribution to fall through the cracks. In a week or so, if you still don’t hear from anyone, ask the maintainer again.

Documentation is often the first thing you encounter when you work with a library, so it’s important that it’s detailed and clear.

So when you’re confused about the code you use, or have to dive into the source, make it easier for the next person. Write a quick update, and contribute it back. It’s the easiest way I know of to become an open source contributor.

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The conventional wisdom on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is that he’s a charming if impractical dreamer, a pie-in-the-sky socialist who’s good at inspiring young people and aging hippies, but hopeless at the knife fighting that real-life politics requires.

Despite the inherent limitations of a self-described democratic socialist who eschews the norms of Beltway fundraising, the Democratic presidential candidate from Vermont has won legislative victory after victory on an issue that has been dear to him since his days as Burlington’s mayor.

That issue is the simultaneously benign and revolutionary expansion of federally qualified community health clinics.

Over the years, Sanders has tucked away funding for health centers in appropriation bills signed by George W. Bush, into Barack Obama’s stimulus program, and through the earmarking process. But his biggest achievement came in 2010 through the Affordable Care Act. In a series of high-stakes legislative maneuvers, Sanders struck a deal to include $11 billion for health clinics in the law.

The result has made an indelible mark on American health care, extending the number of people served by clinics from 18 million before the ACA to an expected 28 million next year.

As one would expect, the program was largely met with plaudits from patients and public health experts, but it has also won praise from even the biggest Obamacare critics on Capitol Hill. In letters I obtained through multiple record requests, dozens of Republican lawmakers, including members of the House and Senate leadership, have privately praised the ACA clinic funding, calling health centers a vital provider in both rural and urban communities.

To Sanders, the clinics have served as an alternative to his preferred single-payer system. Community health centers accept anyone regardless of health, insurance status or ability to pay. They are founded and managed by a board composed of patients and local residents, so each center is customized to fit the needs of a community. No two health centers are alike.

In rural North Carolina, ACA-backed health centers now provide dental and nutrition services, while in San Francisco, the clinics provide translation services and outreach for immigrant families. In other areas, they provide mental health counseling, low-cost prescription drugs, and serve as the primary care doctors for entire counties. They have also served as a platform for innovation, introducing electronic medical record systems and paving the way with new methods for tracking those most susceptible for heart disease and diabetes.

Author John Dittmer, in The Good Doctors, traces the history of the modern health center to the civil rights activists who ventured into the South during the early 1960s. The activists were seen as outside agitators, and local doctors refused to treat them. As a solution, volunteer bands of physicians were organized by a group called the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

Beyond treating the civil rights workers, the MCHR physicians were struck by the stark disparity in health services, encountering many African-Americans who had never seen a doctor before in their lives. The activist physicians returned to the South after the “Freedom Rides” to found a small clinic in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and by doing so, began a movement to launch health clinics across the country in underserved areas. Winning support from President Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the clinics became part of Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”

Over the years, health centers have gained support on a bipartisan basis. Health centers secured critical funding from the efforts of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and both George W. Bush and John McCain campaigned on pledges to expand them.

Sanders’s place in health clinic history will be remembered for his forceful role in the winter of the health reform debate. In December 2009, tensions ran high as Congress inched closer to a final health reform deal. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., tapped Sanders to help win support from liberals who thought the bill was too weak as well as from Democrats from rural states who were facing mounting pressure. More funding for community health centers, Sanders argued, was a win-win solution for both camps, since the program would ensure access to health care for even the most remote areas of the country while also helping those without insurance. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., among others, held out to the very last moment.

Two days before the Senate voted to break a Republican filibuster of the bill, Reid called on Sanders to make his case on the Senate floor. Sanders, in typical fashion, said the legislation was far from perfect, but thundered about the common-sense need for health centers, citing the acute demand for more primary care doctors, the cost-savings from patients who would otherwise use the emergency room for the common cold, the patient-centered model of clinics, and so on. Senate Democrats rallied and overcame the Republican filibuster.

Another turning point came several weeks later, when Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won a special election in an upset victory, ending the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. Brown’s election brought Democrats close to despair, because lawmakers could only use a procedure called reconciliation to pass the law. Such a move would keep chances for passage alive while foreclosing any chance of enacting the much stronger legislation that originated in the House of Representatives through a conference committee. For progressives, it was a painful blow that not only sealed the defeat of the Public Option insurance program but also removed many robust provisions they had worked hard to include. Again called upon to work out a solution with House liberals, with whom Sanders enjoys a strong working relationship, the Vermont senator forged a deal to build support for the bill by focusing on health clinics.

Daniel Hawkins, vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers, recalls that in the end Sanders was able to negotiate with Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., to increase health clinic funding through a special technical amendment that could modify the reconciliation Senate bill through a simple majority vote. The technical amendment passed, with $9.5 billion targeted for health center operations and $1.5 billion for construction and renovation projects. The House passed the final Senate bill, and President Obama signed the legislation with $11 billion in health clinic funding into law on March 23, 2010.

“There was no one who played a more important role than Senator Sanders,” Hawkins says, remembering Sanders’s constant lobbying of other lawmakers to support the funding.

Although the health reform has transformed the funding of local health clinics, few patients even realize that the changes have occurred as a result of the law, because few aspects of the health reform are explicitly branded as being part of the ACA.

That relative invisibility has shielded health clinic funding from the hyper-partisan attacks faced by other provisions of the law. But it has also allowed Republican opponents of Obamacare to play a two-faced game. Every single congressional Republican has voted to repeal the entire bill, health center funding included. But many have taken credit for popular local health clinic programs funded by the ACA, without disclosing the source of the funds. Others have written letters expressing their support for the money.

As I reported previously for The Nation, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., among other Republicans, authored letters to the Obama administration to recommend ACA funding for local health clinics. Now, a new batch of letters, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows other requests by GOP leaders.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House Republican whip, for instance, signed onto a letter with other members of the Louisiana congressional delegation to ask the Obama administration for health center funding in New Orleans. The proposed clinic, the letter noted, would build a graduate medical training program, a proposal that “will attract not only more citizens back to our community but provide critical training opportunities for our region’s future healthcare workforce.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the number two leader in the Senate, wrote at least 17 letters to the administration asking for funding, in cities such as Lubbock and Houston, for a wide range of programs, including clinics devoted to low-income rural residents and Asian-Americans in Texas. Senators Mark Kirk, R-Ill., Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., David Vitter, R-La., Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., made similar requests.

It’s no wonder that politicians from rural states such as Texas would seek community health centers to better serve their constituents. A recent report from the Texas A&M School of Public Health found that only 9 percent of physicians practice in rural areas. Many rural Texans live in areas that are more than 30 minutes from the nearest hospital, which dramatically raises mortality rates in cases of medical emergencies.

Still, press releases from GOP officials have lashed out at the Affordable Care Act’s health center funding as some sort of “slush fund.”

Regardless of the politics, the success of health centers has been particularly satisfying for Sanders, who can simply point to his own state as a reminder of its impact. One in four Vermonters are now served by more than 50 health centers throughout the state, according to the senator’s office. Just last month, a new federally qualified health clinic opened in Shoreham, Vermont, to provide dental care, physicals and medication for common diseases.

Though his own role in securing the funds for the ACA is barely mentioned on his Senate website, the image gallery is adorned with pictures of Sanders beaming a smile as he breaks ground and cuts ribbons for various health clinic openings in Vermont.

Photo: Bernie Sanders, during a news conference on June 25, 2015. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP)

The post GOP Officials Publicly Denounce Bernie Sanders’ Obamacare Expansion, Quietly Request Funding appeared first on The Intercept.

cryptia:

cryptia:

Because I have been too lazy to type this all up.

Quartz:

• If your quartz has teeny air bubbles it’s glass.
• If it’s got a fruit name it’s dyed. End of story. (strawberry, cherry, lemon, pineapple, blueberry) yes there may be some very rare exceptions-fire quartz being dubbed strawberry- but due to the rise in fakes with that name it’s generally called fire quartz now.
• Aura quartz is a regular quartz that’s been bonded with another material. (man made)
• Cinnabar Infused Quartz usually reconstituted and mixed together to make a red crystal.
  
• Green quartz can be grown in a lab and anything that forrest green color is

Turquoise:

• Magnesite and howlite look very very similar to turquoise when they’ve been dyed, magnesite will have very deep cracks in it though.
  
• No there is no white turquoise. 
• You can do a uv test to see if it’s real
  

Amber

• Often faked with Copal. They look nearly identical.
  
• Amber will float in salt water-copal will not.

Irradiated/dyed stones:

• Very vibrant colors!!
  

Irradiated: (they irradiate the crystals to get a deeper or more vibrant color)

• deeply pigmented topaz or kunzite
• dark (almost black) smokey quartz 
• very deep pink or red tourmaline 
• colored diamonds 
• some cultured pearls 
• vibrant yellow heliodor 
  

Dyed:

• Pearls
  
• Agate
• coral
• other stones may be dyed as well, generally if it looks fake..it is.

Heat treated stones: (really not a bad thing but if you’re going for natural)

• Amethyst-lighten color+remove brown
  
• Citrine-heat treated amethyst.
• Aquamarine-remove green
  
• Ruby-clearer stone 
• Sapphire-clearer stone

Rainbow Cal-Silica

• Nope, completely fake 100%
  
• Literally just car paint layered with calcite and resin.

Citrine: (im so sorry)

• Much of the citrine on the market is lab made.
  
• If it’s lab made it’s usually amethyst that’s been heated until it changes color
• The bottom of these stones will be white with more color at the tips.
• srry

Lapis Lazuli:

• High quality is vibrant blue, hard to come by, and very expensive.
  
• Low quality howlite, jasper or sodalite is dyed blue, and passed off as lapis.
  
• Acetone will remove the dye but damage the stone.

Obsidian:

• The clear green obsidian you see all over ebay is slag glass.
  
• Natural green obsidian has been found but it is opaque and is more gray than green.
• there is red obsidian as well but again, it’s not a vibrant red and is more brick colored.
• Wikipedia is not always right.

Goldstone:

• it’s glass it’s legitimately just glass

Opalite:

• also glass. 
• real opalite exists but it’s green and not commonly found
• once again, don’t believe everything on wikipedia.

Bismuth:

• Doesn’t naturally form in the crystals, lab made!!!
• rlly pretty though

Hematite:

• Not naturally magnetic!
• Magnetic hematite is 100% man made!

I’ll add more as I come across them~

Jade:

• Real jade is p. heavy! A way to tell if it is real is that it’ll be heavier than it looks.
• Jade is faked with the following:
• Serpentine “New Jade” or “Olive Jade”
• Prehnite
• Aventurine quartz
• Grossular garnet “Transvaal jade”
• Chrysoprase “Australian jade”
• Malaysia Jade- dyed quartz that may be called by its color – Red Jade, Yellow Jade, Blue Jade
• Opaque dolomite marble “Mountain Jade” (usually dyed)

Dragon vein agate: 

• Quench cracked, bleached, and dyed agate and some is quench cracked, and dyed glass.

Snowflake obsidian:

• Being faked with a very low grade cheap dalmatian jasper.!
  
• Snowflake will be gray while Dalmatian should have a lighter color

Hollow galena:

• A lot of pieces have been proven to have been faked through sand blasting + similar techniques (but there may be real ones I’m not 100%)

Charoite:

• Chinese Charoite doesn’t exist.
• If it’s called that then it’s not real, real charoite isn’t banded and is more swirly.

Moldavite:

• Very very commonly faked!!
• Biggest giveaway is the ‘wet’ look a faked piece has due to the molding process
• White moldavite doesn’t exist!!

Sunspar:

• It’s really just yellow Labradorite, which isn’t a v rare gem

Spotted in an old project of mine, a meditation on the fleeting nature of truth in code comments.

# A template for declaring a rule, for use in ($eval ...)
#
# Note: The semicolon is important!
define DECLARE_ASSET_DEP
$1: $(call FIND_ASSET,$(patsubst $(CURDIR)/%,%,$1))
endef

assgod:

fuckregularlife:

assgod:

can’t hang with str8 men because I’m too clumsy to be around things as fragile as their masculinity

This is pathetic lol

so fragile 

[epistemic status: trolling]

So, let’s assume there is some percentage of the population (call them “obligate mono”) who really, really want a monogamous relationship. And let’s say there’s some percentage of the population (call them “obligate poly”) who really, really want a poly relationship. There are probably more obligate mono people than obligate poly people, on account of they managed to get the entirety of society to agree to make their relationship goals mandatory. Call it three times more obligate mono.

However, there is a much larger percentage of the population (call them “undetermined”) who can be happy in either a polyamorous relationship or a monogamous relationship. This group is probably larger than the obligate monos and the obligate polys put together. This is based on my own experiences: before I was in the rationalist community, I found new partners by hitting on people who, in their past relationships, had been happily monogamous; not only did I only once get turned down because someone preferred monogamy (despite its obvious advantage as a face-saving tool), I also never experienced any problems from accidentally dating a mono person. I might be subconsciously selecting for poly-open people, but I’m not that good.

So let’s say sixty percent undetermined, thirty percent monogamous, ten percent poly.

The interesting thing is that undetermined people aren’t really undetermined- not most of them, anyway. Shifting an undetermined person from mono to poly, or from poly to mono, involves breaking up all of their current relationships– a hefty price to pay, particularly on the first date. And cowboying and cheating are both considered pretty bad behavior in their respective communities– not to mention being pretty unappealing gambles for the person considering them.

Therefore, obligate poly and (single) obligate mono people inevitably find themselves with competing interests: fighting for the pool of undetermined people. We can see this in the number of monogamous people who complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being poly, and the number of poly people who would complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being mono, except that you can’t do that because then you’re Saying Polyamory Is Superior To Monogamy and Don’t You Know You’re Not Allowed To Do That, Only Monogamous People Are Allowed To Say That Their Preferred Relationship Style Is Superior. Usually, this winds up soundly in favor of the obligate mono people, since there are far more of them.

But if a community (let’s call it, just as an example, the “rationalist community”) happens by chance to have a higher number of poly members– even as small a minority as twenty or thirty percent– they get a chance to take over and grab all the undetermined people.

This is, obviously, unfortunate for obligate mono people. But the situation of an obligate mono person in a highly poly community is worse than the situation of an obligate poly person in a highly mono community, for two reasons. First, currently monogamous people have the grace to remove themselves from the dating pool: the poly person in a highly mono dating community finds themselves with poly people (both obligate and undetermined), undetermined people, and the odd single obligate mono person. Currently poly people are not nearly so polite, and the obligate mono person finds himself picking through poly person after poly person.

Second, the poly network is self-perpetuating. If an undetermined person breaks up with their monogamous partner, they’re back on the market and can be poly or mono. If an undetermined person breaks up with their poly partner, they… probably have two or three other partners that mean they’re going to stay poly. A poly network can stay poly even if no one in the network is obligate poly. A community that has more obligate mono people than obligate poly people can stay primarily polyamorous because of quirks of the community’s founders. This is, to put it lightly, suboptimal.

Is the solution, then, stigmatizing polyamory?

The problem with stigmatizing polyamory is that obligate mono people really, really don’t want obligate poly people in their dating pool. Obligate mono people are so distressed by their partners cheating on them that some of them have murdered their partners over it. Since many people who cheat want multiple partners, if all the obligate poly people date each other, the obligate mono people are at much lower risk of experiencing this pain. Stigma is a blunt instrument; what we need is something that separates the obligate poly people from the undetermined people.

The solution is obvious.

Baby, we were born this way.

Present polyamory as something genetic, something set before you’re born. We managed to do it for homosexuality despite it being literally less genetic than how nice a person you are, so the facts won’t get in the way. Present obligate poly people as a tiny minority who discover who they are in adolescence. The people who don’t discover that they’re poly will assume they were just born monogamous, like everyone else, and become happy monogamous people.

Some undetermined people may notice that they can be happy in both mono and poly relationships. It might be wise to stigmatize being undetermined. The stigma against bisexuals is instructive here. Teach everyone to consider them fakers, unable to make up their minds, just trying out polyamory for some sexy thrills before they leave you for their real monogamous relationship. Undetermined people might have their own stereotypes: for instance, mono people might stigmatize them as cheaters, and poly people as having crappy communication skills because they can get away with that in monogamous relationships.

But even if being undetermined is destigmatized, most people don’t notice that they can be happy in a poly relationship until they try it and like it. The most important thing is to hide that fact: to tell people that you have to know you’re poly, that you can’t try it out. The relatively few people who are self-aware to notice are no threat compared to the number of people who might like it if they tried it. As long as that happens, poly people will be a minority in all communities not specifically aimed at us, and both obligate mono and obligate poly people will be happy.

falconcloaked:

The Raven-God’s Friend by SceithAilm

bertb0t:

bishopinblue:

surasshu:

From Keeping It Together!

NOOOPPPEEE THIS IS TOO CREEPY CAUSE AT ONE POINT IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMEONE IS SAYING ‘HELP US’!!

Steven Universe has a lot of emphasis on music. Each character has their own sort of melody in a style of music that represents them, and when they fuse, those melodies reach a kind of harmony. The cluster is in a very apparent disharmony. It’s upsetting and eerie, parts break off abruptly or are interrupted. There are parts that seem like a badly edited tape, where parts of a song arent there, cracks in the music, and some hints of radio static where somethings not quite coming through like it should. This is fantastic music for the Cluster, and you can sorta hear the individual gems music within it, but it’s also very clear that this is not a good experience. It’s very very wrong. when it finally reaches a coherent musical level at the end, it gives off a feeling of malice, something angry. What great music

new interview on killscreen bwa!

Basically, all software is broken, and it's magical that anything works ever. http://t.co/8BjiTBbF4G

— Tony Dewan (@tonydewan) July 1, 2015

Which is to say: software is in it's infancy as a discipline, and we're all making it up as we go along - and most of the time, we mess up.

— Tony Dewan (@tonydewan) July 1, 2015

a gleaming chrome pink latex rubber spidersilk holographic bikini, stretched taut over 

dragging you down to the bottom of the pool, heavy as iron, drowning and beautifully broadcast across 12,000 galactic satellite networks, masturbated to by rampant fuck-clusters of AIs that think in orgasms

severnayazemlya:

“Do not speak to the infant loudly or it will lose its bla (soul),” is commonly heard in Siyuewu. There are no specific symptoms associated with bla loss, nor are there rituals to call back the bla. ji refers to the visible soul whereas bla is invisible. Lost ji must be found and put back in the body, but nothing can be done to call back the ji. Those who lose their ji become ill or progressively weaker until they eventually die. In the same way that bla can be lost, the ji can be lost from a sudden fright, or when alone, afraid, and thinking that something bad will happen. The accounts below are of ji loss: 

Account One. Gnas pos (b. 1947), a retiree of the county electricity management office:

It has been almost thirty-five years since I saw someone’s ji. It was during the time of the Commune System in the 1970s, when we attended meetings almost every night, walking five kilometers to the meetings and returning at night. I was a boy and represented my family. As usual, Bso pa, some neighboring villagers, and I went to the meetings together. We were on our way home after a meeting, swapping stories about bears and leopards all the way. Bso pa led us holding a firebrand to light the rugged path. A dim moon shone on old tree-stumps. Dbang rgyal was walking behind us and called, “Look, is this yours? Take it quickly!” I turned and saw a sky-colored thing swinging left to right. It seemed alive. It could be held in one cupped hand and was shiny. I had heard my father say we could lose our ji and if we did, we needed to go back to the place where we were frightened, otherwise we would go mad or have hallucinations of ghosts and evil spirits. I picked that shiny thing up and rubbed it on my chest but it spilled everywhere, sticking on my hands and chest. This time it was brighter than before, like the shining stars. It felt cool. I called out to Bso pa, because I thought it must be his. He stretched his hand out and the ji became like beads. It went into his hands and disappeared, including what had been stuck on my hands and chest. I told this to my mother and she told me that I had seen ji, and that Bso pa would be fine and not become sick, since he got his ji back.

Account Two. Bai Yun (b. 1966):

When we were younger, some villagers and I went to watch movies in the neighboring village. 46 There were about ten of us and we needed to walk through a dense forest where people believed the ghost of a woman murdered by robbers still wandered. We finished watching movies and returned home on that path. Suddenly, Smon lam cried out, “What is this?” “It’s ji. My mother told me about it. You can lose your ji if you are frightened,” I said, walking to the front of our group. I asked, “Is this yours, Smon lam? Try to pick it up.” “Maybe it’s mine,” said Smon lam trying to take it, but it went right through his hand. Then, I picked up the ji and it entered my hand as soon as I touched it. 

Account Three. Yid bzhin lo (b. 1920):

I stayed in my aunt’s home for some days. One day I was helping my uncle feed livestock on the ground floor. A notched log led to the second floor. The first floor was very dark. I had finished feeding the livestock and was going up to the second floor, holding a wood feeding pail in my hand. It was really dark. I could feel someone staring at me. Uncle shouted worriedly when I had just about reached the second floor. “You’ve lost your ji . You must have been afraid of something. Come take it, otherwise you’ll get seriously sick!” He told me he had tried to take it but it had slipped between his fingers. I could see a bright thing moving back and forth. I was a bit afraid, wondering if it was mine or a ghost’s. Finally, I closed my eyes and stretched out my left hand. I felt I had touched butter that had just been taken out from milk. It had vanished when I opened my eyes. I was thinking about what it was and could not sleep the whole night. It seemed I could still feel that ji in my hand. I felt OK after that night.

ji loss stories are common. Locals say you can get your ji  back if you lose it. Once, however, a man lost his ji and did not notice. He went mad, and spoke a language that no one understood. After three years of madness, he killed himself  by plunging a sword into his stomach. He smiled as he died.

– http://www.academia.edu/8184849/AHP13_Warming_Your_Hands_With_Moonlight_Lavrung_Tibetan_Oral_Traditions_and_Culture

So my new friend @ian-is-oliver and I were chatting a lil about how i was finding the trans community since arriving in Seattle, and the subject drifted to my plans to visit the Wildrose, Seattle’s local lesbian bar. They mentioned that they’d be reticient to go there on account of not being a woman.

They were pretty surprised to hear that lesbian bars were generally more accomidating of AFAB trans people, including trans men, than of trans women:

I’m sorry, but that makes no sense to me! Why the fuck would they have a problem with WOMEN being at a lesbian bar?? I would understand not wanting male presenting or even nb before denying a trans woman her right to go flirt with cute girls. >:(

So, here’s my answer to that question, since it’s too long for an ask and it’s something a lot of people will probably be interested in.

Back in the 1970′s, the gay and lesbian liberation movements were launching hot on the heels of the Stonewall riots. This was a catalyzing event that was contributed to by people of all races, genders, and sexualities, including the historic leadership of trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson. And for a time, the movement was inclusive as well, but things began to break apart fairly quickly.

Transgender identity was still somewhat embryonic at the time, despite some important developments in Germany prior to the rise of the Third Reich. There wasn’t a clear conception of gender, sex, and sexuality as distinct axes of expression and experience. The gay rights movement, which was greatly spurned into actions by the leadership of transgender women, quickly decided that due to their perceived garishness and obtrusive appearance that they were a liability to the movement, which was being redefined from gay liberation to gay rights, and intent on pursuing legal recognition rather than simply the outright abolition of government control over people’s love lives and the breaking down of society’s bigotry against LGBT people.

And feminism at the time was especially fixated on sex an immutable, defining characteristic. Though the lesbian movement was initially accepting of transgender women, and involved us in it’s organizing, there was a swift and terrible backlash coming into the late 1970′s, in which it was declared that we were “male infiltrators” attempting to invade women’s space and to trick lesbians into having sex with us. Though we had defenders, most trans women involved in the movement voluntarily resigned their positions within advocacy organizations and the rest were witch-hunted out of the community.

But that doesn’t entirely explain the phenomenon of how trans men have been so attached to lesbian communities and spaces, and that has to do with the surge in self-advocacy by trans men and other AFAB transgender people in the 90′s and 2000′s. Many of the people who eventually came to their transgender identities during this time had spent many years identifying as butch lesbians, and had become part of lesbian communities across the US in that time of their lives. But as they came out, due in part to already having relationships in those communities, cis lesbians were highly sympathetic and supportive of this process in a way they weren’t and still frequently aren’t in the case of trans women. Yet, as a consequence of that close connection between cis lesbian communities and modern trans mens’ communities, it’s trans men who remain welcome in lesbian bars and so-called “womyn-born-womyn” events such as the infamous Michigan Womyns Music Festival.

And that also tells much of the story of why transgender women have essentially gone without any advocacy in the 40+ years since Stonewall despite the monumental shift in public sentiment regarding gay and lesbian people: we weren’t respectable enough for the gay men, and we were too repulsive for the lesbians. As a consequence, trans womens’ advocacy has been virtually nonexistent before the internet-aided resurgence in the last 15 years, and it’s still beleaguered by frequent ostracization from cis queer communities.

athrelon:

Seems trivial to do better than public school, if you have the time/energy to put into it.  Teacher friends agree that Gatto Said Nothing Wrong.  Obvious improvements include fractally personalized tutoring and advancement, getting to complete projects rather than sit on the academic conveyor belt (agency training), and removing school-imposed legibility requirements eg. showing up on time.  Social interaction requires clever planning because suburbs are dead zones by default, but quite overcomeable.

The best case against homeschooling, though, is that the most important thing to get out of schooling is precisely the institutional learned helplessness and artificial social interactions.  These school-induced mindsets are so common that all the other important institutions of life, such as work (and to a lesser extent college) are set up to cater to exactly those traits.  Even if homeschooled kids know more content, they don’t have the kind of traits (”damage” if you like) that are necessary to climb the ladder in these institutions.

I mean, med school and residency are a great deal like high school, much more so than college.  You memorize a bunch of stuff, much of which is not practically useful.  You’re expected to show up to a bunch of things, on time.  Your social life is mostly restricted to a bunch of same-age peers.  And you have to be okay with doing lots of pointless things for years and years.

I don’t know many homeschoolers personally, but the ideology I get from homeschooling is explicitly against producing these sorts of robots - you want to produce agenty smart virtue-seeking people free of these pathologies.  And in practice, well, the high-status careers I see are all basically made on the mold of high school.  And the few agenty smart virtue-seeking people I know aren’t obviously finding a way of monetizing their psychology.

tl;dr the really cynical argument is “Don’t homeschool, not because institutional schooling doesn’t suck, but because the rest of life “sucks” in exactly the same way.”

wirehead-wannabe:

So there’s a post going around about how shaming people for their executive dysfunction is ineffective, and it got me thinking about why people do it. I wonder if there’s a difference in how well shaming works for simpler tasks versus complex ones. I saw a video a while back which claimed that paying people more only resulted in increased performance for relatively simple tasks. For more complex, creative, or intellectual tasks, people performed best when they were paid enough that they didn’t have to worry about money, and paying more actually make them perform worse.

I wonder if there isn’t a similar split in how well shame works as a motivator. Maybe it works really well if someone just needs to get out there, grit their teeth, and dig some ditches, but it’s counterproductive if they’re trying to write a term paper. I think this might actually go a long way in explaining the difference in conservative vs. liberal attitudes around work. If they tend to work different sorts of jobs, then they’ll come to very different conclusions on what makes people work best.

severnayazemlya:

Here’s an interview with a professor who wrote a book on the history of romantic love. From a podcast about romance novels, but you take what you can get.

Dr. Reddy:  I teach history at Duke University, where I’ve been for a long time, and I also have a secondary appointment in anthropology there, and I tend to what I’ve, I try do kind of the anthropology of the past, you know.  I work as an ethnographer looking at the past.  Very common for historians to work that way these days.  My field is French history.  Up until about ten years ago, I worked mostly on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then ten years ago I went out in search of the, trying to understand where romantic love came from, and I ended up working, doing a book on the twelfth century.  The reason I did that is because I have, for about twenty years now, been working on the history of emotions, and it’s kind of a new field for historians.  We didn’t realize before that emotions change over time, and I think not just the way people talk about emotions or think about them, but also the way people experience their own responses to the world change over time.  I became interested in romantic love because it seemed to me the, the, a way of getting at the relation between emotions and sexuality.  To look at that history a little more closely struck me as something really exciting, and as soon as I started looking at it, I realized that a huge change had occurred in the twelfth century, and that was really where the action was in, in, in the history of romantic love, so –

Sarah:  So –

Dr. Reddy:  – that’s why I wrote a book about it.

Sarah:  Well, I think that’s a perfectly adequate response to finding something:  write a book about it.  I mean, that –

Dr. Reddy:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – that’s totally what you should do.  I think that’s in your professional mandate, actually.  As a professor, you have, you kind of have to.  Sorry, dude!  You’ve got to write a book!  So –

Dr. Reddy:  I thought it was rather quixotic of me to switch from the eighteenth to the twelfth century.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, it’s not that big of a jump!  You know, it’s just a couple years.  So I have two questions:  one, how do you trace the history of emotions?  Are you looking at what people are writing down?   Are you looking at poetry?  Are you looking at diaries or personal accounts?  Because, as I understand the difference between history and anthropology, history is, well, these people went here at this date, and at this time, these people were located here, and at that time, these people were located here, whereas anthropology is, okay, so all you dudes were in this place.  How did that affect random farmer dude who’s lived here for fifty years?

Dr. Reddy:  Hmm, yeah.

Sarah:  Is that, is that about right?  So, like, history is the dates of when people did stuff, and anthropology is how the individual, nameless, forgotten, non-historical figure experienced that time.

Dr. Reddy:  Oh, well, we historians have been really trying to catch up and study the forgotten people in the last couple of, oh, in the last fifty years or so.

Sarah:  Right, exactly.

Dr. Reddy:  And we are very interested in how people’s understanding of the world changes and how their everyday practice change, practices change across time.

Sarah:  And emotions are part of that.

Dr. Reddy:  Yeah, yeah.  So, we tend to, a lot of people do now what’s called cultural history, which is to study the history of what the anthropologists study in the present.  Everyday habits of mind, everyday practices, rituals, language.  It includes literature and diaries and anything else that people might engage in, but as historians we need, we prefer to have some texts so we can, some documents so we can understand more, better, what, what people were, were saying and thinking.

Sarah:  So what types of texts do you use to trace the history of emotions?

Dr. Reddy:  Well, it’s interesting that if you look at moral literature, conduct manuals, polite, manuals of politeness and so on, they have a lot to say about emotions, so there’s a long history of, a long tradition of literature telling you how to feel.  Then there are works of art and of literature which show us characters feeling things. Then there are diaries, there are journals, there are private letters. Account books sometimes can be useful, which tell us how private people actually express their emotions, at least in writing.  In all these ways, we get information about emotions that, you know, that allow us to piece together, you know, make good guesses about what people were actually feeling at a given time.

Sarah:  So what brought you to the twelfth century?

Dr. Reddy:  Well, apparently everyone agrees that in the twelfth century the way in which love was written about in literature changed drastically.  But there’s a lot, there’s a huge debate that’s been going on for decades about why this happened.  Before the twelfth century, romantic love is regarded as a weakness.  This is true of the ancient Greeks and Romans and of the Christians who came along af-, in their wake.  Romantic love, if you see literary treatments of it from the ancient world, it’s something that interferes with the performance of one’s duty.  And so, you know, example would be in the Iliad.   Paris, who has been given Helen by Aphrodite in gratitude for his judging her as the most beautiful goddess, Paris is a really bad warrior, and when he’s about to be defeated, Aphrodite saves him from the battlefield and whisks him off to Troy where, into Helen’s bedchamber, where he can do what he does better, which is make love.   And another wonderful text that, that kind of exemplifies this attitude is the Life of Marcus Antonius by, by Plutarch, in which Mark Antony, as he’s sometimes known to English speakers, falls in love with Cleopatra, and as soon as he does, he becomes a bad general, timid, he runs from battle and loses the empire to Octavian, so –

Sarah:  Oh, dear.

Dr. Reddy:  – these are just examples of how being in love, in the ancient world, was regarded as something that would result in poor behavior, a lack of moral fiber.

Sarah:  So falling in love turned you into a giant wuss who ran battle –

Dr. Reddy:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – and completely decimated your army?

Dr. Reddy:  [Laughs] Exactly.  But then, starting in the twelfth century, we suddenly have the image of the knight in shining armor who rescues his belo-, who becomes a better warrior because he is in love.   Rescues his beloved, saves the kingdom – being in love becomes a, a, with a, with a refined lady becomes a, something that’s expected of knights by the, in the code of chivalry that, that reigned over the behavior of the military elite for three or four centuries there, and since that time, in literature, romantic love is often treated, perhaps predominantly treated, as something that inspires heroism, something that can make us better.  I mean, there’s a wonderful, wonderful hip-hop tune of 2007 by Fabolous called “Make Me Better,” and it’s all about how his woman makes him a better man.  That is the theme, that is a theme that’s central to treatments of romantic love in literature and the arts since the twelfth century, but not before.  So that was the question that, why that happened, that was the question that, that really got me interested in the twelfth century.

Sarah:  What did you find?  What, what do you see as the cause of elevating the idea of emotional love and heroism through being in love?

Dr. Reddy:  I became convinced that the, the, this, this shift in love literature reflected a shift in practices as well and that both of these shifts were kind of a, a resistance to or rebellion against the teachings of the church.  You know, this is, this is something – a lot of people would dismiss this and say, well, the church had been teaching that sex was bad for 800 years at that point, which is true.  Well, I’ve got a quote for you.  Do you want to hear what Saint Jerome said about, about sexuality?

Sarah:  Bring it!

Dr. Reddy:  He said, “The wise man loves his wife with judgment, not with affection.  Let not the impulse of pleasure reign in him, nor the proclivity toward intercourse.  Nothing is more foul than to love a wife as an adulteress.”  [Laughs]

Sarah:  DUDE!  Oh, no.

Dr. Reddy:  Yeah.

Sarah:  You know, a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are romance authors, and I think they’re all yelling in unison right now.

Dr. Reddy:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  NO!  No, no, no!

Dr. Reddy:  Jerome went on to say the generation of children is conceited in matrimony, but pleasures which are seized in the embraces of prostitutes are condemned in wives.

Sarah:  Oh, dear Lord.  Poor wives!

Dr. Reddy:  So he, he was making these pronouncements, and other theologians were agreeing, in the fourth century.

Sarah:  Oh, Lordy.

Dr. Reddy:  But what happened in the twelfth century is that the church actually tried to enforce this view of sexual pleasure by making, by issuing a whole set of new rules, which had the force of law –

Sarah:  Yikes.

Dr. Reddy:  – about marriage and sexuality.  They began to preach in the twelfth century that any consent to sexual pleasure was sinful, period.  It didn’t matter if you were married or not; to enjoy sex was sinful.  The only debate was whether it was bad, really sinful, or just slightly sinful when you’re married.

Sarah:  Wow.

Dr. Reddy:  And of course there was only one position, and that was the position, the only position allowed was the one that would promote reproduction, ‘cause that was the only reason to, to do it.  You know, anyone who felt enthusiastic about a sexual partner, according to twelfth century theologians, was just someone who was in the grip of a temptation, driven by an appetite of the body, an appetite for sexual pleasure.  They think that’s a wonderful person, but they’re just fooling themselves.  It’s not, they’re not really out to have a relationship; they’re just out to get in bed, whether they know it or not.  This is where I see the, the new celebration of love coming in, because what you see in stories, love stories of the twelfth century, you see figures who prove that they are not motivated by mere desire.   They prove it by selfless acts of heroism, loyalty, self-denial, and then once they have proven it, they, you know, in effect, render their relationship, they demonstrate that their relationship is innocent and good, and then sex is okay.

Sarah:  So the emotional establishment of a healthy and loving ardor for someone comes before the sexual intercourse.

Dr. Reddy:  Yes, in, in, in twelfth century, and generally in, in medieval, in medieval literature, if it’s, if it’s, you know, what’s called courtly love literature, that is, literature that celebrates romantic love – there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of satire also that’s written which, which doesn’t, which really sides with the church –

[Laughter]

Dr. Reddy:  It just made fun of people’s pretensions – but in the literature that celebrates romantic love, the lovers generally, yeah, have to prove their devotion prior to getting into bed.

Sarah:  So you have to earn it.

Dr. Reddy:  Yes, exact-

Sarah:  All right, all the romance authors are cheering again, so we’re good.

…

Dr. Reddy:  So this posed a real problem for aristocratic women preserving the kinds of political power they had had before, and I think this too helped to feed a general underground sense of resistance to the new doctrines or the new rules about marriage.  The typical lovers of the twelfth century are a younger aristocratic male in love with a female lady who is his superior, and this love relationship is, that, that is celebrated is adulterous.

Sarah:  So one of them is cheating, and she is –

Dr. Reddy:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – higher than him in status.

Dr. Reddy:  Exactly.

Sarah:  So this is like the, this is sort of the origin story of Super Mario, who has to go and, go rescue a princess.

Dr. Reddy:  Yeah!  Perfect!

Sarah:  All of these patterns of someone who is working class going after some-, a female who is higher class.

Dr. Reddy:  Sure, yeah.

Sarah:  They, they sort of have their origins in the twelfth century.

Dr. Reddy:  Absolutely.  It’s –

Sarah:  Well, that’s cool!

Dr. Reddy:  The, the, the Lancelot/Guinevere relationship is –

Sarah:  Right.

Dr. Reddy:  – is the kind of archetype of this.  Lancelot is a loyal knight of King Arthur.  He’s in love with the queen.  King Arthur being a good twelfth-century literary figure, you know, is not jealous.   Jealousy is condemned in the most uncertain terms in twelfth-century literature.  King Arthur is not jealous; he doesn’t pay much attention to what his queen does.  She’s kidnapped, Lancelot goes to save her, once he has saved her and also proven he will be a loyal, a loyal and submissive lover to her, she permits him to have a tryst with her.

Sarah:  Whoa.

Dr. Reddy:  Yeah.  I see the Lancelot plot echoed in many, many contemporary love stories.  I’m thinking of Casablanca or Pretty Woman.  These are all variations on the Lancelot story, to my eyes, now that I’ve studied all this stuff.

Sarah:  [Laughs] You see it everywhere, and you can’t unsee it?

Dr. Reddy:  I see it everywhere, yeah.

Sarah:  I can’t unsee it!  It’s everywhere!

Dr. Reddy:  You know, something like the movie, what’s it called, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Here we have a guy who heroically tries to save his memories of his girlfriend from the onslaught of this neuroscientific memory-erasing machine – [laughs] – and just barely manages to do so, end up giving it another try.  That’s a good example, to me, of twelfth century conception, that you prove your love is true by some kind of heroic effort, and then that ensures that the relationship is a spiritual or holy one.

By a 5-4 majority, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that laws denying same-sex couples the right to marry violate the “due process” and “equal protection” guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. With or without the court ruling, full-scale marriage equality was an inevitability thanks to rapid trans-ideological generational change in how this issue was perceived; today’s decision simply accelerated the outcome.

All the legal debates over the ruling are predictable and banal. Most people proclaim — in the words of Justice Scalia’s bizarre and somewhat deranged dissent — that it is a “threat to democracy” and a “judicial putsch” whenever laws they like are judicially invalidated, but a profound vindication for freedom when laws they dislike are nullified. That’s how people like Scalia can, on one day, demand that campaign finance laws enacted by Congress and supported by large majorities of citizens be struck down (Citizens United), but the next day declare that judicial invalidation of a democratically enacted law “robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”

Far more interesting than that sort of naked hypocrisy masquerading as lofty intellectual principles are the historical and cultural aspects of today’s decision. Although the result was expected on a rational level, today’s ruling is still viscerally shocking for any LGBT citizen who grew up in the U.S., or their family members and close friends. It’s almost hard to believe that same-sex marriage is now legal in all 50 states. Just consider how embedded, pervasive and recent anti-gay sentiment has been in the fabric of American life.

In the 1970s — just 40 years ago — the existence of gay people was all but unmentionable, particularly outside of small enclaves in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. If your first inkling of a gay identity took place in that decade, as mine did, you necessarily assumed that you were alone, that you were plagued with some sort of rare, aberrational disease, since there was no way even to know gayness existed except from the most malicious and casual mockery of it. It simply wasn’t meaningfully discussed: anywhere. It was so unmentionable that Liberace, of all people, long insisted to his fans that he was a “bachelor” due to his inability to recover from his tragic break-up with his fianceé, the Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie. With exceedingly few exceptions, openly gay figures in politics, sports, or entertainment were nonexistent (that is one reason why one of my childhood heroes was Martina Navratilova, who in the early 1980s came out as a lesbian despite being a young female immigrant from the Soviet bloc to the U.S., faced with the certainty of losing enormous amounts by being one of the few public figures to do so: she even had a trans woman as her coach).

In the 1980s — just 30 years ago — the U.S. held its first-ever sustained, serious public discussion of homosexuality. But that discussion was forced by the advent of a hideous, terrorizing, mysterious disease, which — in the public mind and the mind of many young LGBTs — came to define what it meant to be gay. Even then, as thousands of Americans were dying, the taboo against public discussions of homosexuality was so potent that politicians like Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch were petrified even of discussing this public health crisis, allowing it to grow and metastasize for years with almost no governmental mobilizing against it. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states such as Georgia to criminalize gay sex and arrest and prosecute those who engaged it, on the ground — in the words of Chief Justice Berger — that “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy” and that “condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards.”

In the 1990s — just 20 years ago — anti-gay sentiment was so widespread that Bill Clinton signed two grotesquely bigoted and damaging laws: “the Defense of Marriage Act,” which barred the federal government from offering any benefits to same-sex couples (including crucial immigration and survivor rights), and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which codified the ban on LGBTs serving in the military. DOMA passed the Senate on September 10, 1996 — less than 20 years ago — by a vote of 85-14, with the support of every Republican as well as people like Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Pat Leahy, Patty Murray and Paul Wellstone. In 1992, the state of Colorado actually enacted a constitutional amendment — Amendment 2 — overturning all existing local laws and banning all future ones that outlawed anti-gay discrimination. Gallup never polled on same-sex marriage until 1996, and when it did, found that Americans opposed it by a whopping 68-27 percent majority.

In the 2000s — just 10 years ago — opposition to gay marriage was so pervasive that every state referendum on the question rejected it. Putting it on the ballot became a vital GOP strategy for winning elections, a tactic engineered by then-closeted gay GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman, who later came out and apologized. It was only in 2003 — exactly 12 years ago today — when the Supreme Court reversed its 1986 ruling and held that the criminalization of gay sex is unconstitutional (and even then, only by a 5-4 majority) — meaning that it’s only been 12 years that gay people have had the right to have sex in America without being prosecuted for it. In both the 2004 and 2008 election, the presidential nominees for both parties were adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage.

In 2008 — just seven years ago — Barack Obama said at an event at Rick Warren’s church: “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix. . . . I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage, but I do believe in civil unions.” In November of that year, Obama told MTV: “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.” The same year, the people of California passed a referendum nullifying the state’s same-sex marriage law, instantly invalidating the marriage of thousands of their fellow gay citizens.

In June 2011 — just four years ago — Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer told a gathering of liberal bloggers: “The president has never favored same-sex marriage. He is against it.”

It was only in May 2012 — just three years ago — that Joe Biden went on Meet the Press and, by all accounts, surprised everyone by announcing that he had changed his mind and now favored same-sex marriage. That announcement, along with rapidly changing poll numbers (majorities favored marriage equality when Biden made his announcement), caused numerous national Democratic leaders (and ultimately Obama himself), for the first time, to announce their support for marriage equality. So up until three years ago –– even as numerous other countries on multiple continents around the world enacted it — almost every national American political figure opposed same-sex marriage.

Now, as of today, same-sex marriage is legal in all states. That is massive, fundamental change in an amount of time so short as to be dizzying. As the great LGBT activist Michelangelo Signorile warns in his new book, It’s Not Over, the advent of gay marriage no more means an end to harmful anti-gay bigotry than the end of Jim Crow laws (or the election of a black president) ended racism. Particularly for poorer LGBT citizens, ones who live outside of coastal cities, and transsexuals, discrimination remains potent (which is why the image of establishment, Democrat-loyal LGBT leaders jeering a Latina immigrant trans activist this week for interrupting President Obama, for whom they obsequiously swooned, was simultaneously so ugly and revealing). And the broader lessons to be drawn for political activism from acceptance of marriage equality are limited by the issue’s irrelevance to the nation’s financial elite (who, to the extent they care at all, largely support it) and the hard-core neutering of establishment gay organizations as the price for acceptance.

Still, that the Supreme Court has now ruled that the Constitution bars discrimination even in marriage laws is a remarkable development for a country that has for centuries imposed untold ostracization, misery and legal punishment on its citizens for the crime of being gay. It demonstrates that real political change typically comes from citizens, not leaders. It highlights how difficult it is to demonize and Otherize people when they’re not invisible. And it exposes the myth of defeatism: that people are incapable of undermining and subverting entrenched institutional injustices.

It’s breathtaking to consider the amount of courage and human suffering that led to today’s decision. In the late 1940s, Harry Hay created the Mattachine Society, which combined highly progressive politics with a campaign for gay rights in an indescribably hostile and oppressive climate. The Stonewall Riots of 1969, driven by outrage over endless police harassment, were led by the most marginalized members of the community, and sparked the modern LGBT movement. In the late 1980s and 1990s, ACT UP — driven primarily by sick gay men and their lesbian allies — pioneered political activism with a union of defiance, dissent, shrewd expertise and strategizing that unquestionably saved countless lives around the world and emboldened an entire generation of gay people (passively attending ACT UP meetings at Cooper Union during my law school years was incredibly formative).

The experience of being gay in the U.S. has long been one of intense stigma, condemnation and exclusion; for many, it was worse than that. The tragically conclusive empirical data on the highly disproportionate suicide rates for gay adolescents, by itself, tells much of that story. To witness the arrival of full-scale legal equality is something many never expected to see in their lifetime, and now that it has happened, still seems surreal.

Photo: 1988 ACT UP protest at FDA headquarters (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

The post Today’s Court Ruling, Though Expected, is Still Shocking — Especially for Those Who Grew Up LGBT in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

I’ve recently read this paper by Bryan Caplan, which argues that many neurodivergences can be understood, from a microeconomic standpoint, as very unusual sets of preferences.

I think Caplan does seriously overstate his case. In particular, his argument for why delusions should be viewed as extreme preferences fails. There is no reason to believe that people with fixed false beliefs should not be responsive to incentives. I have a fixed true belief that two plus two is four, but if I were involuntarily imprisoned and drugged unless I said that two plus two is five, I would certainly do so. That doesn’t mean that I “really” believe that two plus two is five, or that my belief in basic addition is any less fixed. In addition, the fact that some people can reason their way out of delusions does not make their impairment any less real. It is possible to believe things on one level but not another. Most people discard the hypothesis “all my friends are secretly conspiring to hurt me” without even thinking about it; having to carefully gather the pros and cons of that belief and laboriously work out whether it’s true is, in fact, believing “all my friends are secretly conspiring to hurt me” far more than is warranted.

Similarly, his “gun to the head test” for telling apart impairments and preferences does not make very much sense. If you put a gun to the head of someone with a migraine and said “dance or I’ll kill you,” most people with migraines would manage to dance. But it would be very strange to think that migraines are actually the desire to lie under a blanket with a bottle of painkillers and moan “owwwwwwww”. Being able to overcome one’s constraints if one’s life is at stake is not the same thing as not having constraints.

However, I think it’s interesting to think about how many neurodivergences are actually unusual preferences.

Some neurodivergences are just odd preference sets. Transness, for instance, is the unusual preference to be a different gender than the one you were assigned at birth. Bodily identity integrity disorder is the unusual preference to have one of your limbs removed. Paraphilias (which are still in the DSM!) are unusual sexual preferences.

Some neurodivergences seem to be pure impairment. Caplan’s protests aside, delusions seem to be clearly in this territory. Similarly, depression is perhaps the most crippling impairment that exists; other impairments are bad when they make it harder to be happy, but depression is literally an impairment in one’s ability to feel happiness.

On the other hand, a lot of neurodivergences seem to be a combination of impairment and unusual preferences. Consider autism. An autistic person has certain impairments: for instance, they may lose the ability to speak under stress, or not be able to tell people’s emotions from their faces. An autistic person also has unusual preferences: they might only want to eat certain foods, or like flapping their hands when they’re happy, or collect lots of information about a special interest, or play by lining their cars up in a row.

Similarly, borderline personality disorder comes with certain impairments: for instance, I do not have an instinctive understanding that when people leave the house they continue to exist, and I’ve been known to have fixed false beliefs (although more “cognitive distortions” than “delusions”). BPD has less unusual preferences and more unusual strength of preferences: as best I can figure out, I’m some sort of mild utility monster who gets much, much happier from some stimuli and much, much sadder from others.

Probably most of you have figured out by this point that yesterday’s post was not entirely motivated by abstract concern about tiling the universe with things. Basically: many solutions to the tiling problem– average utilitarianism aside– make eliminating unusual preferences at least morally problematic. On the other hand, I think this lines up pretty well with my intuitions about eugenics: eliminating BPD and autism– much less paraphilias and transness– seems to be wrong in a way that eliminating depression or delusions does not. So that is useful.

According to Rule 34, someone is getting off on this.

Today’s opening act is a left-over I forgot to include in that last post: a bit of flesh sculpture I was not allowed to show off in “Pones & Bones” because it would have risked  spoiling a yet-to-be-aired episode of “Hannibal”. That episode recently aired, though, so the embargo is lifted. Behold: the hoofed, flayed, and headless wonder that I have christened Hoofnibal, both under construction at Mindwarp workshop (right) and during its formal debut during the episode “Primavera” (below) .

I would like to emphasize that there is no CGI in the sequence: Will’s hallucination is a puppet, moving in real time on the set. Let’s hear it for Practical FX.

*

More to the point, though: Let’s also hear it for The BUG!

A wee bit of background. Early in our courtship, Caitlin Sweet referred to me as “A DOOFUS” (the caps are hers). Stung, I could only reply “That’s Dr. Doofus to you, Unicorn Girl“— which was a not-too-subtle reminder that I write hard-as-nails SF while she writes fluffy rainbow fantasy.

The thing is, though, Caitlin does not write fluffy rainbow fantasy. The only rainbows you’re likely to see in her novels are those that swirl across the oily film on an open sewer. The Pattern Scars begins with its protagonist, a young girl called Nola, going into a trance at the sight of a bloodstain; the next day her mother sells her to the local brothel as a seer. It gets worse from there. (Oh, it seems to get better for a little while. It seems to get suspiciously, unbelievably better, even. But no. Way worse.) I like to think of myself as Captain Stoneface when it comes to my emotional vulnerability to most fiction; I literally teared up at the end of The Pattern Scars.

Caitlin turns tropes inside out. The Pattern Scars, at its heart, is an inversion of the Cassandra myth: instead of a seer whose truthful prophecies are never believed, Caitlin gives us one doomed to prophesy lies which are always accepted as gospel. The Door in the Mountain— part one of a two-parter which concludes with the imminent The Flame in the Maze— retells the Theseus myth through the eyes of an Ariadne who (in a bizarro twist on the sweet hapless innocence of her archetype) is a manipulative sadist driven by rage and jealousy. The supporting cast might best be described as the twisted love-children of Davids Lynch and Cronenberg (Icarus and Daedalus are two personal favorites). Caitlin is way closer to Martin than to Tolkien; the last thing you can call her is “Unicorn Girl”.

Is this not exactly the face that comes to mind when you imagine a female George RR Martin? (Photo: Martin Springett)

Which is, of course, exactly why she enthusiastically embraced the term the moment she saw it (although the official acronym is BUG— Beloved Unicorn Girl— because “UG” lacks the appropriate resonance. Also: Bed BUG).

My point is: Caitlin’s stuff is gritty, gorgeous, and unsentimental. If it contains anything even approaching cliché, you can be assured that that element exists only to be subverted or blown from the water at a later date. She does not do happy endings; the most you’ll get is an ambiguous one.

Did I mention that Erik Mohr’s cover art is also up for an Aurora?

All of which means she’s not the kind of fantasy author the YA market is likely to swoon over. I think we’ve both lost count of the agents and publishers who’ve turned her down with some variant of You’re a brilliant, brilliant writer but your protagonist is so unlikeable: can’t you make her more like Hermione from Harry Potter?

No. No she can’t, you fucking idiots. She does not write to market. She has never once said I’m going to add a perky sidekick so the popcorn set doesn’t get away. All that matters to the BUG, when she’s writing, is whether the story works the way it’s supposed to. Whether it meets her standards.

And so her stuff gets ignored. Teenyboppers who stumble across it in search of the latest medieval fantasy with a plucky female protagonist scratch their heads and leave, their stomachs vaguely unsettled. When critics find it, they rave; but that doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should.

So I am very glad to point out that Caitlin Sweet’s The Door in the Mountain is a finalist for the Sunburst Award, YA category. That category, I think, is misplaced; but the recognition is not. It is, to put not too fine a point on it, About Fucking Time. And I can say this without fear of vote-skewing, because the award is juried.

Yeah, of course I’m biased. Of course she’s my wife. But she wasn’t always.

Why do you think I fell in love with her in the first place?

quadzilla-rising:

nikolaecuza:

danosaurs-and-philions:

im a bad person who thinks bad thoughts like ‘ew what is that girl wearing’ and then remember that im supposed to be positive about all things and then think ‘no she can wear what she wants, fuck what other people say damn girl u look fabulous’ and im just a teeny bit hypocritical tbh

I was always taught by my mother, That the first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think. What you think next defines who you are.

READ THIS THEN READ IT AGAIN

The minerals Lapis Lazuli and Malachite both dissolve into a toxic mess when submerged in water and if that doesn’t make you worried about the current plot of Steven Universe I don’t know what to tell you.