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silveradeptHello. goss would like you to tick a poll to indicate if you are BIPOC and are in Fandom.
Fandom, like many other spaces, is not the best about being a space for BIPOC to inhabit. A three-part interview with Rukmini Pande points out fandom was never immune from constructing itself to privilege whiteness, fandom tends to situate the problem as residing in the people objecting, rather than in the structure that causes the problem, (doesn't that sound familiar) and a fandom that is willing to engage with culture it doesn't know on one facet (queer culture) and not on another (race) betrays the discomfort it has and the unwillingness it shows to address the issue. Which is another spot where the maxims of "One must be willing to do the work, even when that means one will screw it up and be brought to account on it" applies. And at least in U.S. media, that means needing to both have more non-white characters into the mix and also being willing to write fanworks about non-white characters, even when it means that the portrayals will not be good. Like, sensitivity readers are a thing. I used one when writing a Spider-verse story that was a series of conversations between Miles and Aaron (in an AU where Aaron lived and went to prison after being shot instead of dying) and that necessarily meant navigating things like how Black bodies are policed, how they're viewed in society, about mentorship and role-modeling, about having a cop as a dad and an uncle who's a criminal. The first draft of it didn't do well at all, and my sensitivity reader helped shape it and refine it to be more than what I could have done with it myself. And I sought that reading out because I didn't have the lived experience. I could have been defensive about it, but ultimately, I want to give a gift that someone is going to enjoy, and so that's on me to make it that way, rather than back away from the prompt because I'm worried I'm going to get it wrong.
In this time and place, where focus has come very sharply on the ways in which we look at the structures of things and see what they so and don't support, the Archive of Our Own, as a prominent entity with regard to fanworks, has also come under increased scrutiny in its construction. AO3 lacks appropriate tools for curation of experience, should expand the required warnings list, and the OTW should have someone paid to look at themselves and the structure of their products to make improvements.
naye succinctly captures how the Our Own part of the Archive's name is specific to a certain set of people, and not for everybody, as well as providing useful reading lists on fandom and racism, with the necessary bit that thinking about making changes as zero-sum is a terrible idea (protect the most vulnerable, and it will almost always have a kerb cut effect for everyone else, no really), and several twitter threads about the structural issues of AO3. (As well as the lack of response from the OTW when these issues are brought up.)
It's also true, as I have seen around, (and is mentioned in some of the linked resources) that making changes and thinking about changes also means thinking about how those changes or new features might be abused and used by bad actors as well. Because it would not be helpful to implement a change meant to fix one bad thing to have it sprout three worse things. All the same, a block feature seems to be a useful one to add with very few downsides from its existence, so that would be a good start.
The lack of response in the face of people detailing what they think are simple and immediate steps to help be less racist and less structurally racist is very familiar to me, because it's the same discussion that is happening in libraryland, with a lot of the same results of organizations putting their heads in the sand, or discussing things endlessly but not doing anything, or soliciting input but not actually committing to anything concrete, or even a timeline where they will let everyone know what they are doing. And it's frustrating to a lot of staffers because this is all things they have heard and talked about before and likely been blown off by the administration before about. Now that there's an increased focus, this is an opportunity to put into place all the plans that presumably have already been in the works, but it looks like a lot of organizations (OTW included) have been caught without a plan, and even worse, without even having started the discussion on how to make a plan, despite all the work that's already been done and posted to have one.
I'd like for both OTW and libraryland to skip over the "we feel guilty and bad and must process our feelings in public" phase and get to the "okay, we need to do something about this, what are the low-hanging fruit that we can set in motion now while we have a go at the harder, more structurally complex things to put in place" phase, and to be transparent that this is what you are doing. Because, as you can trace from the OTW issue, if there's no communication, then the assumption is that nothing is being done, and that's exceedingly damaging. Let's get going. For OTW, we can probably start with a block function and go from there.
A care package from the Smithsonian's Asian Pacific American Center, with meditations, poetry, dancing and drawing exercises, and more.
Insight into how several different possible lines were collapsed into a single one when translating Final Fantasy VIII into English, and what that did for the resulting characterization of Squall Leonheart.
A Twitter Thread excerpting from Until We Reckon, a book with many examples of how both police and the prison system fail to do the job they are charged with and what a justice system that can heal victims and make meaningful change in perpetrators might look like. Which means there are now plenty of resources for examining and grappling seriously with the idea of abolishing the police and prisons.
The electronic form of The End of Policing is, as of when I last looked at this link, gratis. Which might be the only way you can get a hold of it!
London is conducting a systematic review of their statuary, street names, and other landmarks, with an eye toward getting rid of the egregious examples of slavers and others who are not worthy of the laurels and statues that have had in the past. Which is good, since more than a few people demonstrated they either did not understand or did not care about why monuments to slavers and other reprobates should be toppled and discarded. And at least one of them reacted by vandalizing the headstone of Scipio Africanus in petty retaliation. Which, admittedly, is far better than the lynchings happening in the States that the police keep ruling aren't murders (because the police are behaving like petulant smalls having a tantrum about not getting their way).
Also, the United Kingdom supplies some of the "less lethal" weaponry that is completely misnamed to the United States, which Teen Vogue has a guide on what to do if you get hit by one. (Get to medical care as soon as possible.)
Minneapolis intends to disband their police department. And there are enough of them to do it that it doesn't matter that the mayor of the city opposes the disbanding.
Proposals upon proposals to reduce the share of city budgets police and policing get and reinvest those dollars in building the community and providing services. We have a word for that, even though it's basically been used as a dirty word in the United States - socialism. Although, practical solutions of what that world looks like may not be part of our local discourse yet, because nonprofits, philanthropists, and cultural organizations have been reluctant to be bold about their proposals and actions, because there's a fear that taking those steps will destroy the organization rather than make it powerful. Because if you rely on donations, or tax revenues, or budget allocations, you are often limited by what your funders think is appropriate. And those funders tend not to want to rush forward into a world where what little power they have because of structural inequality is removed and redistributed. Because the people above them, who have far more power, have refused to give theirs up and routinely squash or buy off the people who do have the nominal power to make them participate in the social contract again.
Eight steps to abolition. A different eight steps, 8 can't wait, proclaims to be able to reduce killings by 72%, except that there are still plenty of police departments with many of the 8 can't wait proposals that are still behaving like armed thugs and organized crime members. So, instead, move toward abolition rather than reform. Because of the ways cops have been trained to see everyone but other cops as a threat or a sheep, and because police are doing jobs poorly that others could do way better, abolishing the police is the way to go. (And those that have observed police at work will also confirm this.)
Because people who have been systematically abused by people who hold power over them have a lot of trauma, often related to being unheard, unbelieved, and unable to figure out what actually works. As I am reminded, however, to reduce someone or an an entire people solely to tragedy and loss does them a disservice, for while racism is a terrible thing to be fought and decried everywhere, being black is not. (As should be reasonably obvious to all the people who enjoy black music, black dance, and black culture, whether they come by it respectfully or appropriatively. Also, three musicians who are doing what Dr. Nnedi Okorafor might term Africanfuturism with their music and their look, because it's specific, about African roots and rhythms, not just Afro-.)
A profile of Layla F. Saad. currently most known for the book called Me and White Supremacy, but who also has been writing on the topic for some time, especially for white women who profess to be spiritual in one way or another, and who developed a challenge for white people to be public about their own role in allowing and perpetuating white supremacy and to get practice in speaking out, even when it's uncomfortable. Not speaking out as leaders was never an option, but it's even less of one now, and it's important to be able to say something constructive, and then get out of the way. If that doesn't sound like a good idea, then there's a lot of work to do to build an organization where it is possible for a leader to feel comfortable saying their piece in support and then open up the floor for the staff to take over.
If there is crying to be done, do the crying somewhere out of sight, with your friends, and then go do the work anyway. (This brought to you by many tears and apologies made by high management in front of cohorts that included many of our miniscule percentage of staff of color.)
A Black Liberation reading list from the Schomburg Center, with a whole lot more Black women on it than we have come to expect on reading lists about the subject.
Whether or not a BIPOC lives or dies in an encounter with a white person depends on whether or not the white person believes them not sufficiently a threat, because the structural power that being white gives someone allows them to make that decision and then leverage institutions like the police to destroy the person they perceive as threatening.
And one thing leads to another, such as an entire snarl of people doing blackface and paying the white people and not the brown people at Bon Appetit and two separate tea companies taking the piss on a racist who wanted nothing to do with a tea company that was at least nominally in favor of Black Lives Mattering, CrossFit getting thrown over for silence and then bad remarks, the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing banning the ensign of the treasonous at all of their events,
There's also ways of monetizing YouTube advertisements to make donations to various groups, so long as, of course, some copyright robot doesn't make a claim against the video and claim that it deserves the revenue instead for all of the ads. (Which it will, eventually.) Or, until YouTube gets wise and starts queuing up hours-long advertisements in cycle...
Satire and poking fun at racists is a time-honored tradition, but very few racists have seen the humor in it.
Riot Medicine, a work written by someone who has a lot of experience with riots and picked up some street medicine. And then was edited and reviewed by people who have more advanced medical knowledge, at least according to the FAQ. And graphics for many causes and protests, collected by Justseeds, with the suggestion that people who can afford to support the artists do so with donations and direct support to the creators of the graphics.
A contradiction is asked of people, to believe in their ability to build justice and make change, while also understanding they do not have all the answers to the problems. So that when good answers appear, they can be adopted, rather than resisted because they didn't come from Us.
Because actors are not going to set or locations to do their work, there's a lot more of family members getting involved in their productions, intentionally or no. For families of actors, it's probably not that much of an issue, but for others, it might be a big thing. Or, as some of them find out, their relatives are better at the job than they are.
A particular children's author continued to give voice and space to trans-exclusionary viewpoints on her social media feed. Several of the actors involved in playing her characters on screen have had responses, some of which were disappointingly equivocal, many much less so, with the gold star examples coming from Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe, who posted his response on the Trevor Project website. And who especially takes care to note that the experiences a person had with the books are sacred, regardless of what kind of person the author ends up being afterward.
A 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court of the United States says that the pathway the current administration used to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was unlawful, keeping the program alive for the moment but not making any decision on the matter about whether the program itself should be allowed to continue on its own merits. Chief Justice Roberts was the deciding vote in this particular ruling.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3 that gender identity and sexual orientation are protected under Title VII. The majority's opinion finds that firing an employee for behavior or traits that would be accepted or tolerated from a person of a different sex constitutes sex discrimination. and therefore is not permitted under the law. Which means, if you can prove your case, you can win it. Given how good employers are at not making it look like they fired you over a protected characteristic, though...but still, it's nice to see the opinion rendered all the same. Roberts and Gorsuch joined with Kagan, Sotomayor, Bader Ginsburg, and Breyer. The opinion of the court was written by Gorsuch. Alto, Kavanaugh, and Thomas dissented, claiming that the Court was interpreting far beyond what the original intent of the law was. The Court's ruling may also be the final nail needed to overturn the ban on trans people serving in the military.
On queerphobia and weirdmisia, words to describe an experience that is altogether too depressingly common, regardless of what dimension or axis of weird a person sits on that attracts the attention of bullies and haters. And on how having the more open space for identity and expression has made someone feel much more themselves instead of what came with trying to pretend to be something else.
Being disabled or neurodivergent and trans is a headache full of people thinking they know better than you about what decisions you can and can't make, which leads to a lot more gatekeeping bullshit than there already is. Being cis doesn't mean you escape the bullshit, however, because being a person with a vagina in a system that doesn't care about you unless you have insurance that's willing to pay all the money it's going to take before you find someone who actually does know what they're talking about is a depressingly common problem. (While we're getting rid of things, for-profit insurance is definitely on the list.)
And, because keeping plates spinning is the world we live in, there's also the figuring out of what to do to make the planet sustainable in the next few years, because all crises are happening at once, and many of them require long-term solutions.
Mongolia's response to SARS-CoV-2 seemed like an overreaction to everyone else at the time, but it turned out to be the most prudent and correct course of action, to treat the disease for what it was when they saw it elsewhere.
The thing to remember is the best we can do is reduce risks to as low as we can get them to go. Which involves things like not being close enough to other people to smell their farts if you don't live with them, and wearing masks.
People very much worry about infecting others because it looks like there's always going to be people who are infected, and successfully fighting the infection to the point where they never have any symptoms, who are still absolutely contagious. It's a small percentage of people who don't show symptoms, but it's obviously scary.
If SARS-CoV-2 is a disease that enters through the lungs and then attacks the blood vessels, a possible way to reduce danger and risk of damage is through drugs and treatments for managing blood clot and blood vessel damage. One possibility for those most seriously affected by the coronavirus, in that it appears to cut the mortality rate, is an inexpensive steroid. Inexpensive if you live in a place with socialized medicine, anyway.
The conditions of work for people that prepare meat for the table and take care of elders are far more alike than different, which makes them both perfect places for the pandemic to spread. If you force people to work because they don't have sick leave and you don't pay them enough to be able to build any sort of cushion, you get people coming to work sick, who even know they're sick and are coming, anyway. A possibly solution to help with that is a community currency, like the one currently printed on wood and in circulation in Tenino, Washington, as a way of keeping economic activity in the locality and giving a lift to those that need some extra dollars to get by.
Musicians playing on the rooftops, because distancing requirements make it impossible to congregate and make music in the same space, insights and artwork about what life continues to be like in the new reality, a story of black cowboys, a smile in an early photograph where smiling to have it captured would have meant holding it for a long time, an indictment of foodie culture as yet another way for people to be snobby at each other, which does all right on the foodie bit but also feels like it has to take a swipe at people who rightfully are chasing someone out over more than just a costume choice, lightning above a rainbow and a red rainbow (happy Wrath, everyone),
A pair of dachshunds accompanying someone on the rounds as a delivery driver, cheetahs and cheetah cubs photographed.
In the technology realm, someone compares the 2020 MacBook Pro to the 2013 version and finds it wanting in most ways. Which have to do with an expanded touchpad, a less than good webcamera, and many of the decisions that Apple made toward making the Pro more accessible to casual users, belying the "Pro" in the title.
Using a key remapping tool and/or launch shortcuts to make a keyboard's keys all be useful to do the things you would like the computer to do.
A company offering stock photographs of models that are not actually pictures of real people, but generated by artificial intelligence networks. They started with an actual photograph, but made something different enough to not be them. Because, apparently, there's a small obsession with making sure that the people who are promoting the products are wholesome and live up to the artificial standards of being idols. Makes me think that between the vocaloids and the AI model pictures, you could have an entire digital spokesperson soon enough. (After all, Lightning modeled for Armani.)
Last for tonight, Fifty-one items in a list of fifty, many of which I suspect are the applications of logic and knowledge of cognitive biases. Which is not to say they can't be utilized very effectively. (After all, one of them in that list is that secrets are often in plain sight, instead of hidden.) What it does say is there's a good chance that people looking for this kind of wisdom have not been taught (or grasp) some of the "basics", which says terrible things about their education.
goss would like you to tick a poll to indicate if you are BIPOC and are in Fandom. Fandom, like many other spaces, is not the best about being a space for BIPOC to inhabit. A three-part interview with Rukmini Pande points out fandom was never immune from constructing itself to privilege whiteness, fandom tends to situate the problem as residing in the people objecting, rather than in the structure that causes the problem, (doesn't that sound familiar) and a fandom that is willing to engage with culture it doesn't know on one facet (queer culture) and not on another (race) betrays the discomfort it has and the unwillingness it shows to address the issue. Which is another spot where the maxims of "One must be willing to do the work, even when that means one will screw it up and be brought to account on it" applies. And at least in U.S. media, that means needing to both have more non-white characters into the mix and also being willing to write fanworks about non-white characters, even when it means that the portrayals will not be good. Like, sensitivity readers are a thing. I used one when writing a Spider-verse story that was a series of conversations between Miles and Aaron (in an AU where Aaron lived and went to prison after being shot instead of dying) and that necessarily meant navigating things like how Black bodies are policed, how they're viewed in society, about mentorship and role-modeling, about having a cop as a dad and an uncle who's a criminal. The first draft of it didn't do well at all, and my sensitivity reader helped shape it and refine it to be more than what I could have done with it myself. And I sought that reading out because I didn't have the lived experience. I could have been defensive about it, but ultimately, I want to give a gift that someone is going to enjoy, and so that's on me to make it that way, rather than back away from the prompt because I'm worried I'm going to get it wrong.
In this time and place, where focus has come very sharply on the ways in which we look at the structures of things and see what they so and don't support, the Archive of Our Own, as a prominent entity with regard to fanworks, has also come under increased scrutiny in its construction. AO3 lacks appropriate tools for curation of experience, should expand the required warnings list, and the OTW should have someone paid to look at themselves and the structure of their products to make improvements.
naye succinctly captures how the Our Own part of the Archive's name is specific to a certain set of people, and not for everybody, as well as providing useful reading lists on fandom and racism, with the necessary bit that thinking about making changes as zero-sum is a terrible idea (protect the most vulnerable, and it will almost always have a kerb cut effect for everyone else, no really), and several twitter threads about the structural issues of AO3. (As well as the lack of response from the OTW when these issues are brought up.) It's also true, as I have seen around, (and is mentioned in some of the linked resources) that making changes and thinking about changes also means thinking about how those changes or new features might be abused and used by bad actors as well. Because it would not be helpful to implement a change meant to fix one bad thing to have it sprout three worse things. All the same, a block feature seems to be a useful one to add with very few downsides from its existence, so that would be a good start.
The lack of response in the face of people detailing what they think are simple and immediate steps to help be less racist and less structurally racist is very familiar to me, because it's the same discussion that is happening in libraryland, with a lot of the same results of organizations putting their heads in the sand, or discussing things endlessly but not doing anything, or soliciting input but not actually committing to anything concrete, or even a timeline where they will let everyone know what they are doing. And it's frustrating to a lot of staffers because this is all things they have heard and talked about before and likely been blown off by the administration before about. Now that there's an increased focus, this is an opportunity to put into place all the plans that presumably have already been in the works, but it looks like a lot of organizations (OTW included) have been caught without a plan, and even worse, without even having started the discussion on how to make a plan, despite all the work that's already been done and posted to have one.
I'd like for both OTW and libraryland to skip over the "we feel guilty and bad and must process our feelings in public" phase and get to the "okay, we need to do something about this, what are the low-hanging fruit that we can set in motion now while we have a go at the harder, more structurally complex things to put in place" phase, and to be transparent that this is what you are doing. Because, as you can trace from the OTW issue, if there's no communication, then the assumption is that nothing is being done, and that's exceedingly damaging. Let's get going. For OTW, we can probably start with a block function and go from there.
A care package from the Smithsonian's Asian Pacific American Center, with meditations, poetry, dancing and drawing exercises, and more.
Insight into how several different possible lines were collapsed into a single one when translating Final Fantasy VIII into English, and what that did for the resulting characterization of Squall Leonheart.
A Twitter Thread excerpting from Until We Reckon, a book with many examples of how both police and the prison system fail to do the job they are charged with and what a justice system that can heal victims and make meaningful change in perpetrators might look like. Which means there are now plenty of resources for examining and grappling seriously with the idea of abolishing the police and prisons.
The electronic form of The End of Policing is, as of when I last looked at this link, gratis. Which might be the only way you can get a hold of it!
London is conducting a systematic review of their statuary, street names, and other landmarks, with an eye toward getting rid of the egregious examples of slavers and others who are not worthy of the laurels and statues that have had in the past. Which is good, since more than a few people demonstrated they either did not understand or did not care about why monuments to slavers and other reprobates should be toppled and discarded. And at least one of them reacted by vandalizing the headstone of Scipio Africanus in petty retaliation. Which, admittedly, is far better than the lynchings happening in the States that the police keep ruling aren't murders (because the police are behaving like petulant smalls having a tantrum about not getting their way).
Also, the United Kingdom supplies some of the "less lethal" weaponry that is completely misnamed to the United States, which Teen Vogue has a guide on what to do if you get hit by one. (Get to medical care as soon as possible.)
Minneapolis intends to disband their police department. And there are enough of them to do it that it doesn't matter that the mayor of the city opposes the disbanding.
Proposals upon proposals to reduce the share of city budgets police and policing get and reinvest those dollars in building the community and providing services. We have a word for that, even though it's basically been used as a dirty word in the United States - socialism. Although, practical solutions of what that world looks like may not be part of our local discourse yet, because nonprofits, philanthropists, and cultural organizations have been reluctant to be bold about their proposals and actions, because there's a fear that taking those steps will destroy the organization rather than make it powerful. Because if you rely on donations, or tax revenues, or budget allocations, you are often limited by what your funders think is appropriate. And those funders tend not to want to rush forward into a world where what little power they have because of structural inequality is removed and redistributed. Because the people above them, who have far more power, have refused to give theirs up and routinely squash or buy off the people who do have the nominal power to make them participate in the social contract again.
Eight steps to abolition. A different eight steps, 8 can't wait, proclaims to be able to reduce killings by 72%, except that there are still plenty of police departments with many of the 8 can't wait proposals that are still behaving like armed thugs and organized crime members. So, instead, move toward abolition rather than reform. Because of the ways cops have been trained to see everyone but other cops as a threat or a sheep, and because police are doing jobs poorly that others could do way better, abolishing the police is the way to go. (And those that have observed police at work will also confirm this.)
Because people who have been systematically abused by people who hold power over them have a lot of trauma, often related to being unheard, unbelieved, and unable to figure out what actually works. As I am reminded, however, to reduce someone or an an entire people solely to tragedy and loss does them a disservice, for while racism is a terrible thing to be fought and decried everywhere, being black is not. (As should be reasonably obvious to all the people who enjoy black music, black dance, and black culture, whether they come by it respectfully or appropriatively. Also, three musicians who are doing what Dr. Nnedi Okorafor might term Africanfuturism with their music and their look, because it's specific, about African roots and rhythms, not just Afro-.)
A profile of Layla F. Saad. currently most known for the book called Me and White Supremacy, but who also has been writing on the topic for some time, especially for white women who profess to be spiritual in one way or another, and who developed a challenge for white people to be public about their own role in allowing and perpetuating white supremacy and to get practice in speaking out, even when it's uncomfortable. Not speaking out as leaders was never an option, but it's even less of one now, and it's important to be able to say something constructive, and then get out of the way. If that doesn't sound like a good idea, then there's a lot of work to do to build an organization where it is possible for a leader to feel comfortable saying their piece in support and then open up the floor for the staff to take over.
If there is crying to be done, do the crying somewhere out of sight, with your friends, and then go do the work anyway. (This brought to you by many tears and apologies made by high management in front of cohorts that included many of our miniscule percentage of staff of color.)
A Black Liberation reading list from the Schomburg Center, with a whole lot more Black women on it than we have come to expect on reading lists about the subject.
Whether or not a BIPOC lives or dies in an encounter with a white person depends on whether or not the white person believes them not sufficiently a threat, because the structural power that being white gives someone allows them to make that decision and then leverage institutions like the police to destroy the person they perceive as threatening.
And one thing leads to another, such as an entire snarl of people doing blackface and paying the white people and not the brown people at Bon Appetit and two separate tea companies taking the piss on a racist who wanted nothing to do with a tea company that was at least nominally in favor of Black Lives Mattering, CrossFit getting thrown over for silence and then bad remarks, the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing banning the ensign of the treasonous at all of their events,
There's also ways of monetizing YouTube advertisements to make donations to various groups, so long as, of course, some copyright robot doesn't make a claim against the video and claim that it deserves the revenue instead for all of the ads. (Which it will, eventually.) Or, until YouTube gets wise and starts queuing up hours-long advertisements in cycle...
Satire and poking fun at racists is a time-honored tradition, but very few racists have seen the humor in it.
Riot Medicine, a work written by someone who has a lot of experience with riots and picked up some street medicine. And then was edited and reviewed by people who have more advanced medical knowledge, at least according to the FAQ. And graphics for many causes and protests, collected by Justseeds, with the suggestion that people who can afford to support the artists do so with donations and direct support to the creators of the graphics.
A contradiction is asked of people, to believe in their ability to build justice and make change, while also understanding they do not have all the answers to the problems. So that when good answers appear, they can be adopted, rather than resisted because they didn't come from Us.
Because actors are not going to set or locations to do their work, there's a lot more of family members getting involved in their productions, intentionally or no. For families of actors, it's probably not that much of an issue, but for others, it might be a big thing. Or, as some of them find out, their relatives are better at the job than they are.
A particular children's author continued to give voice and space to trans-exclusionary viewpoints on her social media feed. Several of the actors involved in playing her characters on screen have had responses, some of which were disappointingly equivocal, many much less so, with the gold star examples coming from Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe, who posted his response on the Trevor Project website. And who especially takes care to note that the experiences a person had with the books are sacred, regardless of what kind of person the author ends up being afterward.
A 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court of the United States says that the pathway the current administration used to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was unlawful, keeping the program alive for the moment but not making any decision on the matter about whether the program itself should be allowed to continue on its own merits. Chief Justice Roberts was the deciding vote in this particular ruling.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3 that gender identity and sexual orientation are protected under Title VII. The majority's opinion finds that firing an employee for behavior or traits that would be accepted or tolerated from a person of a different sex constitutes sex discrimination. and therefore is not permitted under the law. Which means, if you can prove your case, you can win it. Given how good employers are at not making it look like they fired you over a protected characteristic, though...but still, it's nice to see the opinion rendered all the same. Roberts and Gorsuch joined with Kagan, Sotomayor, Bader Ginsburg, and Breyer. The opinion of the court was written by Gorsuch. Alto, Kavanaugh, and Thomas dissented, claiming that the Court was interpreting far beyond what the original intent of the law was. The Court's ruling may also be the final nail needed to overturn the ban on trans people serving in the military.
On queerphobia and weirdmisia, words to describe an experience that is altogether too depressingly common, regardless of what dimension or axis of weird a person sits on that attracts the attention of bullies and haters. And on how having the more open space for identity and expression has made someone feel much more themselves instead of what came with trying to pretend to be something else.
Being disabled or neurodivergent and trans is a headache full of people thinking they know better than you about what decisions you can and can't make, which leads to a lot more gatekeeping bullshit than there already is. Being cis doesn't mean you escape the bullshit, however, because being a person with a vagina in a system that doesn't care about you unless you have insurance that's willing to pay all the money it's going to take before you find someone who actually does know what they're talking about is a depressingly common problem. (While we're getting rid of things, for-profit insurance is definitely on the list.)
And, because keeping plates spinning is the world we live in, there's also the figuring out of what to do to make the planet sustainable in the next few years, because all crises are happening at once, and many of them require long-term solutions.
Mongolia's response to SARS-CoV-2 seemed like an overreaction to everyone else at the time, but it turned out to be the most prudent and correct course of action, to treat the disease for what it was when they saw it elsewhere.
The thing to remember is the best we can do is reduce risks to as low as we can get them to go. Which involves things like not being close enough to other people to smell their farts if you don't live with them, and wearing masks.
People very much worry about infecting others because it looks like there's always going to be people who are infected, and successfully fighting the infection to the point where they never have any symptoms, who are still absolutely contagious. It's a small percentage of people who don't show symptoms, but it's obviously scary.
If SARS-CoV-2 is a disease that enters through the lungs and then attacks the blood vessels, a possible way to reduce danger and risk of damage is through drugs and treatments for managing blood clot and blood vessel damage. One possibility for those most seriously affected by the coronavirus, in that it appears to cut the mortality rate, is an inexpensive steroid. Inexpensive if you live in a place with socialized medicine, anyway.
The conditions of work for people that prepare meat for the table and take care of elders are far more alike than different, which makes them both perfect places for the pandemic to spread. If you force people to work because they don't have sick leave and you don't pay them enough to be able to build any sort of cushion, you get people coming to work sick, who even know they're sick and are coming, anyway. A possibly solution to help with that is a community currency, like the one currently printed on wood and in circulation in Tenino, Washington, as a way of keeping economic activity in the locality and giving a lift to those that need some extra dollars to get by.
Musicians playing on the rooftops, because distancing requirements make it impossible to congregate and make music in the same space, insights and artwork about what life continues to be like in the new reality, a story of black cowboys, a smile in an early photograph where smiling to have it captured would have meant holding it for a long time, an indictment of foodie culture as yet another way for people to be snobby at each other, which does all right on the foodie bit but also feels like it has to take a swipe at people who rightfully are chasing someone out over more than just a costume choice, lightning above a rainbow and a red rainbow (happy Wrath, everyone),
A pair of dachshunds accompanying someone on the rounds as a delivery driver, cheetahs and cheetah cubs photographed.
In the technology realm, someone compares the 2020 MacBook Pro to the 2013 version and finds it wanting in most ways. Which have to do with an expanded touchpad, a less than good webcamera, and many of the decisions that Apple made toward making the Pro more accessible to casual users, belying the "Pro" in the title.
Using a key remapping tool and/or launch shortcuts to make a keyboard's keys all be useful to do the things you would like the computer to do.
A company offering stock photographs of models that are not actually pictures of real people, but generated by artificial intelligence networks. They started with an actual photograph, but made something different enough to not be them. Because, apparently, there's a small obsession with making sure that the people who are promoting the products are wholesome and live up to the artificial standards of being idols. Makes me think that between the vocaloids and the AI model pictures, you could have an entire digital spokesperson soon enough. (After all, Lightning modeled for Armani.)
Last for tonight, Fifty-one items in a list of fifty, many of which I suspect are the applications of logic and knowledge of cognitive biases. Which is not to say they can't be utilized very effectively. (After all, one of them in that list is that secrets are often in plain sight, instead of hidden.) What it does say is there's a good chance that people looking for this kind of wisdom have not been taught (or grasp) some of the "basics", which says terrible things about their education.
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Date: 2020-06-21 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-21 02:15 am (UTC)…and either someone would have invented a way to get around the expense or I would get to communicate with approximately nobody.
(this link is also talking about the horseshoe model of political alignment, and fuck that too)
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Date: 2020-06-21 02:57 am (UTC)But yes, the horseshoe theory isn't really all that good, either.
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Date: 2020-06-21 03:08 am (UTC)how would this affect, say, Dreamwidth? how would this affect people who don't trust the big email providers with their data?
who would this money be getting paid to?
no subject
Date: 2020-06-21 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-21 04:31 am (UTC)All of this, of course, still wouldn't prevent the creation of disposable e-mails with small deposits in them so they could send spam and then deactivate themselves for nonpayment.
What they're getting at is that behavior changes when there is risk involved, especially when it's personal risk. At least for entities that could be ruined by taking that course of action. For corporations that could pay the spam fees and any fines they might get slapped with for spamming, it probably wouldn't change a thing.