if a sims movie is truly being made, i want it to be a horror movie where they do not acknowledge being sims and there is no evidence of them being sims except that they speak simlish and have plumbobs. i want ladders disappearing from pools and strangers breaking into houses and random basement prisons and people catching on fire while making macaroni. the whole thing must be in simlish with subtitles like a foreign film. that’s the only way you’ll get me to watch it.
The gynecologist was surprised to learn I wanted an IUD because apparently another trans guy just recently told her, very confidently, that he can’t get pregnant because T makes you infertile.
Guys. Boys. Dudes. Folks… Don’t play with fire.
Testosterone can inhibit some of the other hormonal levels that trigger ovulation, making ovulation less predictable. Many peoples’ ovaries will release eggs less frequently, if at all. However, this doesn’t mean that ovulation entirely stops if someone is taking testosterone. This means that a person on T can still be fertile and get pregnant while on testosterone.
Same goes for my girlies out there. You’re not shooting blanks. Not 100%. HRT is not birth control.
Worth knowing that “infertile” does not mean “sterile.” A couple are considered infertile if they have not made a baby in over a year despite trying. That is not birth control. A person who has been open with you about struggling with infertility may turn up to the next function with a baby, because infertile people frequently and cheerfully go on to have children. A common cause of infertility in cis men trying to conceive is “low sperm production” - this does not mean NO sperm production, and most people understand that it only takes one sperm!
Infertile in a medical context means that you’d struggle to conceive without assistance, that you’ve taken longer than expected to conceive, that you have a reduced ability to conceive a child, or that you cannot carry a pregnancy to term resulting in a healthy baby. None of these are birth control, but the last one is especially not birth control: “constant miscarriages” is an aspect of infertility that is perfectly well covered under the label of infertility.
Two more things about infertility: infertile uteruses are considered more of magical bags of black magic than testicles, so “infertility” can more often be applied inaccurately to them. And another is that “infertile” is often used from the orientation/intention of “wanting to conceive but cannot,” and often, people who use the term are a bit sad about it. So as an aspect of politeness, if you really want to say something more like “neutered” or “can’t have kids” or “who will rid me of this turbulent womb” or “birth control,” then it’s a kindness to consider using clearer, more appropriate language. Finally: Infertility is not birth control even for people who are infertile.
“Sterile” is the term that means what people think “infertile” means. A sterile person does not have the ability to conceive. This is the equivalent of a spayed or neutered person, someone who has had the explicit removal or disruption of the reproductive organs, and usually involves having removed an organ or tied something off. With the exception of medical violence, it is usually something that the person is highly aware of - they were probably icing SOME part of their body for a few days afterward. Most of the time, in most countries, for most people, it is difficult to become sterile without careful consideration and (at the very least) picking up the phone to make an appointment with a doctor. If the Sterility Fairy has not personally had this discussion with you, you are vastly unlikely to actually be sterile.
Just something to keep in mind and something that the gynae in the OP should have chased after, loudly, honking like a goose
worth noting that some intersex conditions can render you sterile without your knowledge (if, for instance, all your doctors and your parents tried to “fix” you instead of being open with you about your intersex existence - which happens a lot), and i think that’s an important facet of the conversation because a lot of people don’t realize how different intersex conditions impact fertility, but it’s still gonna be wasaaaay rarer than medical infertility for sure.
and yea i really fucking hope the gyno in the OP never repeated that to other patients, goddamn
Various things that are called some variation of “pepper” in various languages:
“Pepper,” seeds of the plant Piper nigrum, a.k.a. black pepper, used as a spice.
“Peppermint,” a hybrid of watermint and spearmint.
The edible fruits of the plants of the genus Capsicum, known collectively as “peppers,” which includes bell peppers, chili peppers, etc. (some European languages make a distinction between peppers and capsicums by using the word “paprika” for the latter. A word that is a direct cognate with pepper.)
Allspice, also known as “Jamaica pepper,” “myrtle pepper,” but also as “spice pepper” in Finnish and Swedish (I suppose as opposed to the kind of peppers that aren’t used as spices?), the dried fruits of the plant Pimenta dioica. More closely related to myrtle, guava, and eucalyptus than pepper.
Horseradish, a plant of the family Brassicaceae, thus making it a relative of mustard, cabbage, and radish, known in some European languages as “pepper root.”
Ginger snaps, biscuits flavored with ginger, known as “pepper cake” in many European languages.
“Sichuan peppers,” the dried fruits of the genus Zanthoxylum. Related to neither black peppers nor capsicums, but part of the same family as citrus.
Undoubtedly forgetting at least some but anyway. Forgot why I was doing this.
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This user’s kitty cat, a domestic feline of the species Felis catus
All jokes aside, it’s possible that JD Vance killed the pope.
When an elderly person comes down with a serious illness, for the sake of their recovery, indeed their survival, they are supposed to avoid anything that may strain their weakened systems.
They are meant to avoid stress.
Which is probably at least part of the reason why Pope Francis sent his second to speak to JD Vance instead of doing it himself.
And Then… JD VANCE INSISTED TO SPEAK TO THE POPE HIMSELF.
Knowing that the pope was still recovering from PNEUMONIA at his advanced age.
Still, like an entitled american, he demanded to speak to the pope himself. Despite having been met by his political equal in status, it wasn’t good enough for JD Vance.
It just might have been the final straw for an elderly man who was fighting off a serious infection to have to take the time out of his already busy schedule.
The complete lack of empathy that JD Vance brought to the Vatican, that he had already been scolded for by the leadership of the religion he claims to follow, can very easily be considered a contributing factor at the very least.
It’s not a stretch to theorize the pope might have survived had JD Vance not come calling.
do not forget the patron saint of these weeks that we celebrate ourselves proudly and openly in the streets
her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.
remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.
in absolute tears about the pride module at my work
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
The slur songSLRSLR
Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work…
Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you’re the only big account I know who might share (sorry).
I was listening to this at low volume on my phone while at my parents’ place and it got my mum and dad roaming the house looking for whoever’s phone had an alarm going off
Me, starting a video that says it’s going to explain how Victorian poorhouses fucked up the concept of charity forever: ok, show me what you’ve got
Video: it starts with the ideas of the Christian philosopher –
Me: DON’T SAY IT DON’T FUCKING SAY IT
Video: – John Calvin
Me:
Who (he asks, half to piss you off and half because he genuinely doesn’t know)
You can’t piss me off with that question, because unless you were raised like I was - deeply religiously and within an Evangelical Protestant family - you will probably have never heard of John Calvin.
In short: John Calvin was a French theologian during the Protestant Reformation. He was a philosopher in the same way that ebola is a living thing, or the same way that C4 on a bridge revitalizes a riverfront. If you’re familiar with the way that many people say that Reagan is to blame for everything shitty about modern American politics, well, they’re half right.
A lot of it is actually John Calvin’s fault, but that’s just because his shit philosophies are responsible for ~90% of the shit you hate about American life, period.
I’m British but wow
Good (actually terrible, but) news: John Calvin is also responsible for fucking up where you live!
Anglicanism’s major tenets were formed largely by Thomas Cranmer attempting to negotiate a “middle way” between Lutheranism & Calvinism. Many aspects of Calvinism were adopted into the Reformed traditions central to Anglican theology & the via media, or middle way, is unfortunately basically just two shitty people playing tug-of-war over the exact way in which Anglicanism would be terrible. This is so foundational to the Church of England that it is addressed in the 3rd paragraph of the opening section of the Wikipedia page on Anglicanism.
Sorry to be the bearer of shitty news! John Calvin is the Worst!
Calvinism, in brief, for those unaware:
Free will isn’t real. God makes literally everything happen, and if you complain about it you’re complaining about God.
Why does God let bad things happen to good people? Fuck you, that’s why. Are you questioning God?
God already decided if you’re going to Heaven or Hell, probably before you were born. There’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t matter if you try to be a good person, or if you accept Jesus, or if you go to confession, or if you saved five thousand orphans from a burning building. If God ~mysteriously~ decides “fuck you, burn forever”, that’s your fate.
However, God likes to show little signs of who he likes. Say, having lots of money, or being hot, or not having horrible illnesses. Good things happen to “the elect”, who are people God likes. Bad things happen to everyone else.
Rich people are probably going to Heaven, and they’re just better than you, because that’s God’s secret sign that he likes them more than you. Why? Because fuck you.
If bad things happen to you, it’s probably because you deserve it and you’re going to Hell. Likewise, if you’re poor, ugly, or disabled, you’re probably going to Hell.
All of this bullshit has of course had a heavy influence on:
Capitalism, because having money isn’t a sign that you’re exploiting people, it’s a sign that God mysteriously wants you to have nice things. Nothing you can do about it, free will isn’t real!
Imperialism, because if you succeed in taking over a place and stealing all their stuff, that’s a sign that God likes you. If God liked them, it wouldn’t have happened, so you’re really following God’s plan. And torturing people who are already going to Hell barely even counts, they probably deserve it!
American exceptionalism specifically. Consider the above, and mysteriously, all the native people start dying, leaving vast tracts of land for your people to settle. Well, gosh! God genocided a continent to show that it was secretly always ours! He must really like us!
Witch trials, debtors prisons, insane asylums, &c. They aren’t hot or rich, so by definition, they’re probably evil and deserve for bad things to happen to them!
… and half of the other shitty things that happen in our society, basically. Calvinism is horrific and it underlies a lot - especially in the US and UK, because the Puritans and Roundheads were mostly Calvinists.
(This was the religious freedom that the Pilgrims were seeking. The freedom to be horrible antisocial creeps.)
This is a pretty good basic summary, yep.
This is Netherlands erasure. Our entire literary tradition is about how Calvinism wil mess you up. Every year there is a new memoir or film about having been traumatised by Calvinism.
There’s a line of a song about a calvinistic childhood that goes:
“I know one thing, if God exists, He is not a Calvinist.”
At no time did I say Calvin only fucked up the US or the US/UK. He’s responsible for fucking up an awful lot of countries on at least 3 continents.
I have a motto, and that motto is “if there is something wrong in America, an early modern motherfucker is at fault.”
That motherfucker is frequently John Calvin
Like genuinely about 90% of what’s wrong in the US rn is either down to John Calvin or Ronald Reagan.
me, every single time i see people (especially women) talking about the divine feminine energy, or the sacredness of the womb or whatever it is now:
[image description: a two-panel photo of a person dialling a number and then placing the phone to their ear. the contact is saved as ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’ /end ID]
context is this quote by her:
But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
so this European clothing retailer decided to advertise their jean cuts on youtube and it’s unintentionally the funniest shit I’ve seen today. why? well.
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now important context here: in German, die (pronounced ‘dee’) is just a feminine article, it literally means “the”.
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but if an ad gets placed in the middle of an English video and doesn’t use a single explicitly German word for most of the ad, even a native speaker is gonna think “they want me to die how?” it keeps getting funnier.
You know what I’ve never really seen realistically depicted in fiction? The way that people in places that get a huge amount of snow deal with said snow. Specifically in the cities. I get that it’s probably not exactly an intuitive thing to think about if you’ve never lived in a place that gets a lot of snow, and even if you do, you probably figure that they must have some really sophisticated infrastructure systems specifically for this purpose. It’s not like they’ll just scoop the snow off the streets and gather it into huge piles, and then just climb over the progressively larger and larger snow piles every single year for months while waiting for the piles to melt in the spring.
We do. There’s no point in planning more sophisticated systems to get rid of something that’ll eventually just go away on its own. So they just pile the snow into randomly designated spaces that cars or people aren’t supposed to go through, and let it pile up. There’s significantly less street parking available in the winter because some spots where you could otherwise park a car are currently the parking spot of a snow pile three times taller than a car.
You get used to it. And if you grow up around here, it never even occurs to you to think of it as something strange in the first place.
Now thinking about how badly british-style colonialism would’ve fared here. Local natives telling them “you can’t build things that closely together, you’ve got to leave enough space for the huge snow piles in the winter”, being told that that’s nonsense, you people are just too lazy to be efficient with space. And then having the colonial town of New Shitterton or something get fucked over the first year because there’s no efficient way to clear out the waist-deep layer of snow on the streets.
Except rather than admitting they were wrong, they would build a huge, space-wasting, coal-burning Snow Furnace that all the snow gets dumped into (at the newly minted taxpayers’ expense, obviously) and melted in a tremendously inefficient and polluting way. Years later, the ash-blackened area surrounding the Snow Furnace would become the poorest neighborhood of the city and people living there would be the subject of much invasive scrutiny from colonial government officials trying to figure out why their district has such low standardized test scores. The conclusion would be something racist.
Like…ok. my job is to clean up the parks. Fine. I have no problem with this.
There is a difference between leaving things behind and leaving the parks a mess.
Someone left an array of condiments and a full tray of barbecue chicken out in the parks overnight and trash all over the lawn. Like they were raptured.
Just because I’m paid to clean up the parks doesn’t mean it’s okay to leave a huge mess. Wtf. And it’s like… I saw the group that was setting up- they were old enough to know better.
Real “the help will get it” attitude from this group. Like yes, I’m obligated to get this, but I also have 6 more parks that I need to clean.
You know what I’ve never really seen realistically depicted in fiction? The way that people in places that get a huge amount of snow deal with said snow. Specifically in the cities. I get that it’s probably not exactly an intuitive thing to think about if you’ve never lived in a place that gets a lot of snow, and even if you do, you probably figure that they must have some really sophisticated infrastructure systems specifically for this purpose. It’s not like they’ll just scoop the snow off the streets and gather it into huge piles, and then just climb over the progressively larger and larger snow piles every single year for months while waiting for the piles to melt in the spring.
We do. There’s no point in planning more sophisticated systems to get rid of something that’ll eventually just go away on its own. So they just pile the snow into randomly designated spaces that cars or people aren’t supposed to go through, and let it pile up. There’s significantly less street parking available in the winter because some spots where you could otherwise park a car are currently the parking spot of a snow pile three times taller than a car.
You get used to it. And if you grow up around here, it never even occurs to you to think of it as something strange in the first place.
Now thinking about how badly british-style colonialism would’ve fared here. Local natives telling them “you can’t build things that closely together, you’ve got to leave enough space for the huge snow piles in the winter”, being told that that’s nonsense, you people are just too lazy to be efficient with space. And then having the colonial town of New Shitterton or something get fucked over the first year because there’s no efficient way to clear out the waist-deep layer of snow on the streets.
Except rather than admitting they were wrong, they would build a huge, space-wasting, coal-burning Snow Furnace that all the snow gets dumped into (at the newly minted taxpayers’ expense, obviously) and melted in a tremendously inefficient and polluting way. Years later, the ash-blackened area surrounding the Snow Furnace would become the poorest neighborhood of the city and people living there would be the subject of much invasive scrutiny from colonial government officials trying to figure out why their district has such low standardized test scores. The conclusion would be something racist.
I should maybe make an effort post about it but I think Tumblr would be really amused to hear about the whole Sig P320 fiasco. Where the handgun that replaced the Beretta M9 in military service is just randomly going off for no reason, cops all over the country are banning it from duty, and the company that makes it posted a bizarre message about it on Twitter that desperately tries to hide behind the shield of vague online conservative culture. They ultimately changed the manual to say you shouldn’t carry it loaded after getting involved in at least one wrongful death lawsuit over this issue. The other thing that’s interesting is SIG only won the contract because they offered an insanely low per-unit cost, just around $200, so they skipped the actual trials that would compare its durability and performance to a competing Glock design, and would catch if it did something like going off completely randomly.
This is also the company that developed the XM7, which is a horrific clusterfuck of a rifle that itself is having bizarre issues. Initially the issue was that the barrels could be pushed around, causing the first shot in a string to be off-zero. Now the barrels are getting insane wear within a couple thousand rounds because the cartridge is so high-pressure and fucking stupid. And the whole idea about this cartridge was to be able to penetrate armor that no other nation in the world currently fields, by firing armor piercing bullets that cost $20 per round. For some reason the army thinks this should be the new service rifle. It is basically going back to an idea that led to the shortest-lived service rifle the US has ever used, because it was so heavy and had so much recoil and sucked so much. This is because the army is still trying to win their invasion of Afghanistan, as this kind of rifle would have been really handy there.
Everything is the F-35 program now. It’s all corruption and bribery. SIG has won every contract they’ve entered over the last few years, even for shit they’ve never made and don’t even produce themselves, like scopes. This is what the final stages of the American Imperial Military-Industrial Complex look like.
“the current system of criminal justice/imprisonment is inhumane and should be replaced” okay cool I’m with you
“and the best way to do this is by letting the public exact violent justice on anyone it believes has committed a crime” I am begging you to learn literally anything about the history of lynching in the united states
like its always been a joke but those girls rlly truly donot gaf what happens or whats said to other women they supposedly care about protecting, half the support ive seen from terfs on here for jkr isn’t even related to her books just the fact that she doesnt like trans women but if u mention she very openly is racist to people of color including women of color (shocker) all of a sudden that doesnt matter or is a acceptable mark as long as xyz tgirl gets run out of a pilates class, like u bunch r so unserious, never beating the hate group allegations when yall cant even hold the line on anti racism 😭
there’s some people in this website who will add an inane comment on your post and then you go to their blog and you realize with growing horror that they add inane comments to everyone’s post. and i just want to know. what in god’s green earth is wrong with them
Currently playing this one weird old text-based J&H game on Internet Archive, and wow, this game is so damn hard and weird. But also lmao, Jekyll is such a mood
Every time I keep trying to give him a command he doesn’t understand, he just goes all “my thoughts are confused”, like yeah bro, they sure are
I’M LOSING MY MIND, WHY IS THIS GAME (AND ITS JEKYLL) SO FUNNY
This game rules honestly, too bad that Jekyll is just so stupid, lmao
It’s a text-based game, so it’s really really hard to navigate in it. But just exit rooms a lot and there’ll be explanations as to which room is where.
Sometimes I read nonfiction and go “Yay, it’s the person I’ve heard of, they’re showing up!” and then “Wait, no, this is a bad person, I shouldn’t be cheering for them to show up!”
Anyway, under no circumstances do you “have to hand it to” Mathew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General.
something that you have to understand about me—that it’s crucial to understand about me—is that in real life I do not say penus penos very often. in fact never will you catch me using such obscenities in public. everywhere its own mask and so on. neither this nor that are the true max, but both and neither are max.
but here is the realm of penus penos and so I say penus penos.
My undergrad modern history class introduced me to a lot of really fascinating primary sources, many of which individually changed my perspective on the world in big ways. I don’t remember all the sources we read, but the three that I’ve thought about most often since then (and which I really recommend people read) are:
In Defense of the Indians by Bartolomé de las Casas
Galeote Pereira’s report on Ming China
The diary of Antera Duke
One of the the really important take-aways from this class, and something that actually I think each of these sources illustrates, is just how new racism as we know it today is. Obviously the people of the past were plenty ethnocentric, plenty parochial and often dealt with other societies with contempt. But the ideas that undergird racism today, ideas about the inherent biological superiority of some races to others, and the dichotomy of cultures into “civilized” (Western) and “uncivilized”, really only emerge in a significant way in the 17th and 18th centuries.
You see this in each of these sources. In In Defense of the Indians, you see this debate where the cultural institutions of early modern Europe were deciding what they thought about these newly-encountered people of the Americas. Far from showing up and immediately going “these people are primitive savages”, which is what most narratives would have you believe, the 16th century Spanish didn’t know what to think of the people of this new world. And their most immediate ideological concern was that these people were not Christian. In the famous Valladolid debate, Las Casas argued not just for the humanity and the civilized nature of the Indians, but also for their legal rights. His opponents, of course, did believe that the Indians were like animals, not really human. But what strikes me is that they had to defend this view! We’re used to engaging with European perspectives on colonialism from, say, the 19th century, where the utter superiority of Europeans was taken absolutely for granted.
What’s striking to me about about Las Casas is that unlike later Europeans to sympathize with colonized people, whose writings often still drip with a kind of paternalistic sense of superiority, Las Casas finds it reasonable to say “the Indians are plenty civilized already” in straightforward terms, and expects that his interlocutors’ ideology is capable of accommodating this, even if they disagree. It’s an interesting perspective.
Then you have Pereira’s report on Ming China. Pereira was a Portuguese sailor captured by Ming officials in an anti-smuggling campaign, who then spent several years in China and wrote a travelogue about his experiences. One of the notable things again here is that there are, as far as I can recall, basically no racial undertones. Pereira is quite impressed with the Ming government, he finds Chinese society astonishingly orderly compared to his European home. He of course does not like that the Chinese are not Christian. But by and large he simply engages with Ming China as a society equal to his own. And why wouldn’t he? In terms of wealth and political power, 16th century China was a society equal to his own, and in fact probably one surpassing it.
The last one of these is the diary of Antera Duke. Antera Duke was an 18th century Efik slave trader from Old Calabar (in what is now Nigeria). He acted as a middle-man, acquiring slaves from farther inland (sometimes even catching them himself) and selling them to Europeans. His diary, written in Nigerian pidgin, mostly acts as a record of his sales. But what’s really interesting to me is the way he talks about his interactions with the Europeans he sells to. It’s clear that Duke views himself as their equal, and assumes that they deal with him as an equal too. At this point in time much of West Africa is controlled by extremely wealthy states that make their money selling slaves into the Atlantic salve trade. In Europe and the Americas white supremacy is a reality, but for a guy like Antera Duke it couldn’t be farther from the experience we see in his diary.
Of course, Duke’s apparent perception here seems in some sense out of time. The period in which he’s writing is near the end of the age in which these slave trading states are successful and prosperous. And there’s something fascinating about how we, as modern readers, know that his European contemporaries did not see him as an equal; by the 18th century, ideas about white racial superiority were well developed. But Africa was still 100 years from being colonized, and these ideas had not spread everywhere.
It’s an interesting perspective to observe.
Of course it’s not like we should be sympathetic to Duke here: he was a rich guy who made his money buying and selling other human beings. But not the sort of rich guy who made his money buying and selling other human beings that we usually hear from in the historical record!
No state has a “right to exist”. The purpose of institutions is to serve human beings, and if your institution is slaughtering human beings en masse then it must be stopped. The survival of the institution itself in this scenario is of almost no import.
In the crudest terms, yes, that is the take, but I consider this a very misleading way to describe my view.
In particular, my view is that authorities are beholden to allthose they have authority over, no more and no fewer. Obviously, drawing the boundary between who is and is not subject to a given authority can be tricky, but in order to create a just world we have to do our best. In any case, if a group of Jewish people (or people of any other ethnicity) want to, you know, gather together somewhere and establish a government which only has authority in their community, whose members are all represented fairly, etc., then that’s absolutely fine by me. In this sense, I consider all people to have the right to self-governance. The problem is that the state of Israel has authority over people who are not fairly represented in its processes of government, and therefore to whom it is not in practice beholden—namely, the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank, and, since the 2007 blockade of Gaza and especially with the current war in Gaza, the Palestinians of Gaza. These are people that the state of Israel is exercising its authority over, and therefore, they become part of the constituency whose needs, just treatment, and fair representation it is responsible for. And currently, it is not making good on that responsibility. There are many names for this arrangement—apartheid, colonialism, etc.—but they all describe the same thing in slightly different permutations.
What I want to stress is that, not just rhetorically but descriptively, when the Israeli state starts exercising itself as a state over Palestinians, it ceases to merely be an example of “Jewish self-government”. It is, especially so long as Jews remains structurally the Israeli ruling class, an example of Jewish government of Palestinians at the expense of Palestinian self-government. That is what I object to.
In simpler terms: among those people that a state in fact governs, one does not get to pick and choose which among them the state has a responsibility to represent. You do not get to look at a state like Israel, which in fact exercises authority over everyone living in Palestine, and describe it as “Jewish self-governance”. That’s not what it is! The entirety of Israel/Palestine is either part of Israeli territory or under Israeli occupation, i.e. subject to the authority of Israel!
Of course, Israel apologists assert that this wholesale occupation, the until-future-notice exercise of Israeli authority over Palestinians without representation, is necessary to maintain the existence of Jewish self-government at all. But, if that’s true (which in fact I don’t think it is), all they’ve done is argue that Jewish self-government can’t exist in a just world. That would be unfortunate: I would like to see a world in which any community of people, with mutual bonds of whatever sort, can establish institutions that serve them and are responsive to their desires according to some fair process. If those people are Jewish and those institutions are state-like, then such an arrangement has a fair claim to be called “Jewish self-governance”. But if those institutions come at the cost of other people being able to do the same, if they “require” the exercise of authority over millions of other people, without equal and fair representation, for a seemingly indefinite period of time, then no, they cannot justly exist.
Institutions are beholden to everyone over whom they exercise authority. They do not get to pick and choose who among these people they must represent the interests of.
To some, “X is bad” means “after all ethical calculations are complete, the existence of X is a net negative”.
To some, “X is bad” means “when doing our ethical calculations, the existence of X contributes a negative term”.
Under the second reading, immediately removing X might still be harmful, because the map from possible worlds to ethical valuations isn’t continuous. Nearby worlds do not necessarily have nearby ethical valuations. The nearest world which lacks X may in fact be worse than our world for various reasons, even if X itself is contributing negatively to our world-valuation.
socialist reformism in the age of artificial intelligence –
all human knowledge belongs to the public commons, and so does ai trained on it. all companies forced to open source both model weights and training logs. ai companies can only sell support and expertise.
fingerprinting model output, with penalties for not disclosing model use.
public logs and public deliberation for any time on medium university sized gpu clusters.
any personal data (~GDPR definition) in any ai model (ie, by default most LLMs) confers a degree of ownership over said model. the right to delete myself from ai models should be granted, necessitating retraining. we bury really large public facing models in hell.
I think this sounds great; it’s approximately what I would expect to fall out of applying ideas about stakeholder-centric government and cooperative economics to the issue of AI-as-it-currently-exists. Unfortunately I think AI-as-it-currently-exists is not going to exist for very long, I think it’s going to fairly quickly evolve into something different (probably a succession of somethings-different) over the next few decades, and since reformism is by definition not an immediate process I think this is probably important to plan for. We don’t live in a cooperative, stakeholder-centric economy right now, and by the time (if we’re lucky) we live under that or any other analogous form of socialism I think the view of AI that this is working off of will likely be obsolete. So I’m not sure how much space there is for policies like these, even if they would be desirable.
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