Found While Looking For My Own Tumblr

A lot of people use tumblr for a mix of personal posts and fandom/ aesthetic/ whatever else posts. And the funny thing about that is just, followers can just kinda come and go at random. They have no sense of what the continuity is with these personal posts. They’re joining spontaneously in the middle with no context of what the blogger has been blogging about for years. They just saw a a good piece of Gravity Falls fanart in the tag and hit follow. 

From the blog owner’s perspective the personal posts make up one long coherent narrative about what’s been happening in their life, posts building on older posts, updates about changing schools and jobs and houses, personal threads of drama and conflict. Meanwhile unsuspecting Gravity Falls fan hits follow five years into the blog’s existence and the first thing on their dash is Update, part 47, yes my head is still stuck in the fence. good news is i can now reach the garden hose so i have a steady stream of water to lap up. Jonathon has not returned with the butter

(by @SarcasticRover on Twitter, I think)

The commendable desire to reduce conflict with bears has a long and distinguished pre-history.

Skinsuit mindset, or how Buddhism gets pwned too

1. Identify a respected institution. 2. kill it. 3. gut it. 4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

-@iowahawkblog

(The full tweet in question adds #lefties, but I’ve increasingly come to feel that the left wasn’t the monster itself, just the most prominent suit worn by the Skinsuit Monster at the time.)

Today’s case of skinsuiting comes to us courtesy of the MIT Technology Review, which posted this dumb tweet:

Originally I was just going to share it with my friends on ephemeral media and have a small chuckle about how this was omnicide-bait and MIT Technology Review really should have thought out their phrasing better. No man, no problem, as Rybakov put it. (often attributed to Stalin)

Then I read the full article, “What Buddhism can do for AI ethics”, and had a feeling of [screaming internally] before falling into cynicism. It’s not just the twit who tweeted omnicide-bait. The full article repeatedly tees up the case for omnicide and hardly seems to notice.

Buddhism proposes a way of thinking about ethics based on the assumption that all sentient beings want to avoid pain. Thus, the Buddha teaches that an action is good if it leads to freedom from suffering.

The Buddha also taught a way of thinking about how best for everyone to die and stay dead (not reincarnate), because all life on Earth would inevitably involve suffering. A substantial chunk of Buddhist meditation is oriented to becoming a zombie of sorts: walking dead, not feeling suffering because you’re not feeling life. If you gave an archetypal Buddhist a lasting killswitch for Earth, he’d press it. I contend this would be an important subject to cover in an article on AI ethics – if you gave a fuck about Buddhist teachings rather than being a monster wearing Buddhism as a skinsuit, doubly so when you’re halfway to making the case for the killswitch yourself.

Keep reading

Iridescent (Official Video) - Linkin Park

And in a burst of light that blinded every angel As if the sky had blown the heavens into stars You felt the gravity of tempered grace Falling into empty space No one there to catch you in their arms

Another thing to remember for these next four to eight years of Biden: While the capitol rioters were a bunch of youtubers and lawyers and people cozy enough to afford spontaneous plane tickets, a much larger proportion of Trump’s base were radicalized so easily because they were poor and are still poor. Republicans spent years lying to them about the sources of and solutions to their suffering, scamming them with trickle-down policies and scapegoating “illegals” as more and more jobs just get automated or sent overseas, while a lot of Democrats just kind of focused on the coastal cities and let the rest keep deteriorating. Remember Hillary not even fucking CAMPAIGNING in some entire states??! Just completely snubbing the poorest parts of the entire country??????? Yeah??????????????? Even if you believe that huge swathes of America are populated by nothing but dumb, slovenly racists, which isn’t true and makes you kind of a fucker actually, their poverty and lack of education are symptomatic of problems that affect you too, there are minorities there too, there are little kids who didn’t ask for any of this shit and deserve to eat three full meals a day no matter how they’re being brainwashed by their KKK stereotype dad. That could have been you too. You have to want things to be better for everybody.

The Atlantic

Scolding Beachgoers Isn’t Helping

People complain that going to the shore is a careless act during a pandemic, but the science so far suggests otherwise.

I strongly recommend the entire article.

You call this archaeology?

also I noticed a lot of people (i.e. liberals) framing the discussion around love and violence as if fighting oppression or oppressors (including in immediate self-defense) was somehow antithetical to being a loving person, or to being committed to loving ourselves and other people in our communities, or to recognising love as a revitalising and necessary force in activism and in life in general, such that we need to utterly shun violence as something that’s always morally reprehensible (and thus, to shun people who commit violence in self-defense as morally reprehensible) in order to be capable of love

and I started thinking about how a lot of edgy radicals & leftists essentially agree with this but in the opposite direction–as if we need to utterly shun love as a necessary & revitalising force in order to be capable of revolutionary action or self-defense

in the same way that liberals will say “we must love and see the humanity in our oppressors, so that we cannot use violence against them even if we are ourselves the targets of violence” (or–more likely, since these kinds of people aren’t likely to be people who have ever been seriously targeted by violence–”more immediately & materially marginalised people shouldn’t use violence even if they are themselves the targets of violence”), edgy radicals will say “we must be prepared to use violence against our oppressors, and therefore we must hate and demonise them, as if they are somehow essentially, ontologically evil by virtue of their identities.” & I think that both of these approaches are fundamentally misguided

of course we must be prepared to use violence in self-defense against institutions that commit violence against us–but ultimately, the basis of revolution or whatever cannot be hatred and it cannot be the romanticisation of violence for the sake of violence (and again, a lot of these edgelord-y people have probably never been seriously targeted by violence, don’t have bodies that are marked out for violence–they just like the thrill of it all). it has to be love–love for ourselves & each other & for the future that we have to believe is possible–& that will include love for the people who used to be our oppressors. because otherwise what is the point?

to me “love your oppressor” doesn’t mean that you can’t fight back against violence and it doesn’t mean that you can’t hate the people who hate you or else you’re just as bad as they are and it doesn’t mean that you can’t be angry… what it does mean is that you have to have some kind of fundamental respect & empathy for people’s humanity

it means that, rather than just assuming that all white people are evil by some kind of mystical biological necessity and thus The Revolution requires killing them all or something (I’ve seen this suggested, which is… terrifying), you’ve got to try to understand the material and psychological factors that play into white people behaving in the way that they do (such as, applying class analysis to the racism of poor whites–see, the psychological wage of whiteness, etc.). that attempt at understanding is what I mean by “empathy”

and of course this has a necessary practical function in addition to a theoretical and psychological one–because how can you hope to fight a system that works to fragment and divide the people whom it oppresses without understanding & fighting against the reasons for that fragmentation?

so in all of these ways I see the willingness to empathise & love and the willingness to fight against oppression, not as antithetical, but absolutely necessary to, each other.

American Hippopotamus

A bracing and eccentric epic of espionage and hippos. American Hippopotamus by Jon Mooallem.

The sheer drama of this story