Trans day of invisibility. *waves at impossibly distant propaganda accounts*
Is it visible when the only people who see are the people that go looking.
Maybe you should start a riot? Throw some bricks? Punch a cop? Self-immolate on the steps of a courthouse using those fancy coloured flames? I mean, I'm not really sure that that will actually be visible, but hey, maybe?
(the point of this post is that visibility is not particularly useful in a world that is using children murdering children as justification to murder other different children)
I'm looking for tips on clothes shopping (specifically pants) while disabled and strangely shaped. From the waist down, I'm an inverted cone, so getting anything that fits is next to impossible. I have no idea where to even start looking for robust daily wear pants. Also, international shipping is important.
#clothing #disability #shopping #housebound
Remember to not let the bad shit pass. Someone says "punish the person I don't like for the rest of their life", that person doesn't want justice, they want power. The tankies will try to slip in and infect the discourse. I believe in militant self-defense. I believe in violence as a component of propaganda. I will attack anyone that claims that imprisonment is what a person deserves. If a person is bad enough to need to be /removed/, then putting them in a small box is the opposite of the answer, for two reasons. One, putting someone in a small box will make them a /worse/ person, not a better one. And second, putting them in a small box implies that they will get out later, whether by intent or by failure. Implying that putting someone in a small box, that will make a person worse when they come out, is a good thing is a fascist seeking recruits.
I am not a model of good behaviour. I have hurt people in more ways and for more reasons than social media can support. Everything I say must be considered to come from a traumatized perspective. I believe my perspective is valuable, useful, and valid, but I do not believe it is right. If one were to model their behaviour after my propaganda, the result would be maladaptive. My propaganda /must/ be viewed as a step, not an answer, because that is the explicit function of my propaganda. My opinions are wrong in more ways than they are right, but they are more right than the vast majority of the people who taught me. I want the opinion that you form from my posts to be the same. If you find a flaw, or something that doesn't quite fit, riff. That does not have to be in a reply, though if you think that doing it that way would be valuable, please do. I am a step in the the conversation, not it's end. My propaganda is half-formed, because it exists almost exclusively in a digital space. If someone with boots on the ground tells you my propaganda is bullshit, it's probably a safe bet that my propaganda is bullshit. I am not right, but that's where I'm headed (right as in correct, not The Right).
I'm considering blatant bad faith to be equivalent to trolling. Engaging in bad faith with things is a fast path to toxicity. Sometimes it is hard to maintain good faith internally, but expressing bad faith externally without the acknowledgement that it is expressing a fear (or anger or or or), not stating a belief. And if ones bad faith is not sourced in a reactive emotion, but rather with intent, that is already toxic.
Bad faith means interpreting information in it's worst light. Good faith means interpreting information in it's best light. While acting in good faith makes it easier to get hurt, it also creates a self supporting environment when performed mutually. Bad faith is the antithesis of constructive engagement, because it assumes that the other person is /trying/ to be an asshole.
And I also know that there is no concrete way for anyone to /know/ that someone is acting in bad faith intentionally. There is only one person who can /know/ they are acting in bad faith, and that is the person acting in bad faith. The barrier to plausible deniability is null, which is why it such a frequently used tool of reactionaries. "Just asking questions" after asking "questions" that contain their own answer is a good example of reactionaries using bad faith as a tool. Trolling is using bad faith as a tool.
I just had an interesting thought. I saw a question and answered "the government" and then I was like, no, that's not right, but wanted to understand the why (this was a very rapid set of thoughts, not nearly this conscious or intentional, more practised behaviour than contemplation), and addendized, "The thing that makes government happen", and I had a little brain blast. Government is often treated as a /thing/, something that can be good or bad depending how it's used. But that little phrase completely recontextualized it. Government, as I have experienced it, is not a thing that does stuff independently. It is a distributed department of commercial cartels. The government in colonial North America is like an HR department, if every company used the same HR department. Like, technically, decisions do get made, but each politician is essentially a contractor for multiple interests. They don't take contracts that interfere with each other, and how they get the job done doesn't super matter, so long as it gets done. They don't get fired, but rather their contracts are not renewed. They may attempt to continue under their own company, but if their interests interfere, they are ruthlessly out-competed by other aligned interests. If the contractor performs well, they have the opportunity to gain a permanent position within one of the companies. These contractors compete to be given a job created by a distribution entity based on how well they obfuscate their true goals and how charismatic they are. While they are within the HR department, they work to create policy that will diffuse employee disputes in such a way that nothing actually changes while still looking like everything is changing. The only situations in which real change occurs are those where the interest of both the employer and employee align. I believe in harm reduction, and that voting /can/ be a path to harm reduction on a local level, but regional and national governments are literally just groups of contractors and subcontractors managing regional and national employment concerns. This has been said in different ways at different times, some of them by me, but something about it never stuck. Voting is a customer/employee satisfaction survey intended to improve your experience(exploitation). Strong unions are closer to the spirit of government than the thing named government.
Today, I saw that World Athletic is doubling down on gender essentialism in professional sport, citing "significant advantage" found by a "scientific panel". They claim to be forming a task force chaired by a transgender athlete. Most trans folx have run across at least one trans person that believes the FART(Feminism Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe) logic. This runs counter to every piece of science I have ever encountered about so called "sex differences", being that given the same opportunities and supports, differences in performance between sexes is statistically insignificant. Add to this the fact that the most statistically significant feature is the ratio of hormones, not the concentration, that effects differences but that these variations still full in to the statistically insignificant range, and add to that that variations in the expression of sex characteristics are based on numerous confounding factors both environmental and genetic, and the logic falls apart. But then it never was about science and reality. That's just propaganda to obfuscate the reality that it is an effort by people with power to divide the market. This panel will come to the conclusion that there needs to be new categories for trans athletes to compete in, meaning more athletes being sent to competitions, meaning more products to sell, both in the sense of additional celebrities to mascot, and in the sense that these "new" athletes will have to pay through the nose or be advertised into oblivion to participate. It was never about fairness, it was always about fragmentation.
Transphobia benefits Capitalism, because it creates avenues to generate markets while extolling it's virtues of "inclusivity", as it slowly segregates us into oblivion.
A strange realization just rolled over me. I don't know how to talk. I know how to have conversations, I know how to say words and phrases organized into sentences with inflections, implications, and intent, but I don't know how to talk. How do people say things that matter? How do people express themselves in a fashion that effectively conveys their internal experience? Does anyone actually know how to talk, or is the reason I don't know how because no one knows how? Like, this isn't the thing I want to say, this is the thing about the thing I want to say. But the thing I want to say never fits into words. And I don't mean that I say the thing and then it doesn't make sense, or I say the thing and it means something entirely different from what I want to say. I mean the thing never leaves my head. I start trying to put words to it, and but it misses right at the start but I keep talking like it is the thing I wanted to talk about. The image I had was like trying to put my shoe on, and The toe starts to go in, but as I follow through, instead of going in, it skids out. Every time I think I have the shoe lined up, I miss. Sometimes by a little, most times by a lot, and somehow I manage to move the shoe like it's walking, but I'm still sitting in the chair trying to figure out how to put it on. It's like a conversation just happens and leaves me behind, wondering where everyone has gone. Like they treat the shoe's, walking on their own, as though they are me, and I'm just sitting there in the dark.
There is a thing that I keep thinking about with regards to the concept of life as presented by white scientists. There are many statements of "Carbon is the only viable atom to base chemistry, with water being the only viable solvent for life." And then I think about the fact that humans, entities made of carbon, surrounded by entities made of carbon, are making this assertion. The lack of awareness of that ultimate conformation bias just baffles me. It is easier to work back from a solution than it is to track forward from a problem, and we really only have the barest of grips on how carbon based life came into existence. Like, we know that lots of dynamic chemistry can happen involving lots of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen and small amounts of other stuff. And we know that under earth surface conditions, carbon is the best life base chemical that we have found. But again, that is working back from the solution, us being the solution. When it comes to modelling extreme environments, we have very few observational studies, all of which are small, bounded, and brief. It took humans thousands of years to come to grips with the base concepts of organic chemistry even while immersed in an organic chemical reaction. To believe we can predict the occurrence of life in entirely different energy regimes and time scales is the height of hubris. There was also the idea of species being "space filing", which while technically correct is also very wrong in it's implications and assumptions. While a species may exhibit space filling behaviours, a species in isolation dies. By this simple fact, it becomes obvious that is not that species are space filling, but that systems of life are space filling, which changes the implications drastically. A system of life is just living things interacting. So, if living things not of Earth begin interacting with living things of Earth, that becomes a larger system of living things, which has already necessarily filled all of the space occupied by both previously separate living systems. That humans exhibit destructive space filling tendencies in opposition to the living system that we inhabit is much more likely the reason why an interstellar living system hasn't interacted with us. Earth is under quarantine until the living system has either gotten over it's human illness, or the human illness evolves into an adaptive mechanism.
The Earth is a living thing, as much as a human is a living thing. The organism identified as human has more individual microorganisms necessary for bodily function than differentiated cells necessary for bodily function, and we still call a person an individual organism. The Earth is, literally, an organism in which we are both inhabitant and component. The human species can be defined in this context as an organ (or class of organelle) that can operate in numerous roles, probably most akin to an immune system, but with features of a reproductive system mixed in. Viewed in this context, climate change can be considered a symptom of an auto-immune disorder. The auto-immune response could in fact be considered a transitional phase, where a mutation has resulted in the ability to convert minerals and biomass into proto-gametes, with the negative side effect of producing inflammatory compounds and malignant cysts. If earth can move through this phase such that the malignant cysts become benign orifices and the proto-gametes transition into a viable transmission form, along with a regulating function for the inflammatory response, humanity may very well simply be an expression of the earth reaching sexual maturity. When humanity is engaged with in this frame, the emergent features of our society make more sense. That being said, at present, it seems unlikely that the Earth as we know it will survive this transition. The Earth may survive in a form the is recognizable if radically reorganized, it may become a tun, or it may fully die. Reorganizing the human species so that it can perform it's new function or reorganize back into it's prior function will require the constructive intent of the whole species. It could result in a differentiation, with part of humanity focused on reproduction, and part focused on immune regulation, or fully one or the other, but we have to intentionally move through it as though we are supporting the functioning of an organism that we are included in.
