Toxical Disk Horse

I chose a life in the Great Social Discourse of Doom when I helped push Atheism Plus to establish a blog network of its own, back when that was a thing.  It’s a lot of work though, and I’m not usually up for it.  But I potentially poked that bee’s nest on my last post, so I need to clarify my position.

If someone hates it enough, they’re welcome to go talk shit about me somewhere else.  If they agree, they can agree quietly because I don’t feel like discussing it.  My hope is that, especially if you’re a trans woman, you will be neutral to it.  You will not necessarily agree at all, but you’ll be willing to let a well-intentioned comrade abide.

This is my opinion on all SJW discourse at the end of the day.  The project is to make the world a better place, not to establish an orthodoxy to which all good people must conform.  You need to be OK with disagreement, or we’ll keep having the stock leftist struggle of never achieving a coalition, always being buried beneath the power of conformity found in the fascists.

Agree with me or don’t, but I hope if you find something strongly disagreeable in what follows, you’ll still be able to tolerate coming around here most of the time, because most of the time I’m not discoursing like this, right?  And I like to see your pretty faces.  For now, let the acrimony begin…

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So, I’m kind of an outlier on FreeThought Blogs in that the only social media I use (unless you count this blog as social media) is tumblr, aka trunglr, aka the blue hellsite.  As I understand it, the dominant early user culture was teenage girls who used to post onceler slashfic on deviantart and who, around the time I sarted using it, had just grown up to post thirsty gifs of aol-time-warner-disneed-marble’s the revengers.  dot com.  And Sexy Demon Hunter Bros and Captain Whom’st and Stanklock, I forget.

These girls, some amount of which went onto become boys or somewhere inbetween style creatures, were at that age where social justice discourse becomes a thing – trying to converge on an acceptable way to be, to separate yours from theirs, with yours being the good and theirs being the unacceptable.  This was against an internet backdrop of gamergate/MRAjr culture battling liberal nerd culture types who framed all their feminist articles in terms of baby wizard shit.  Innocent times, but the bloom was coming off the rose.

The way I see it, the main political successes of tumblr were, in chronological order: making asexual youths sad, organizing the terf movement, and getting young leftists not to vote, condemning us to fascist hell forever.  All the political projects you’d want to succeed did not.  Still, compare that to facebook et al helping coordinate ethnic cleansing, and it’s not quite so bad.  All social media sucks major ass, but it’s replaced other forms of reading in our collective consciousness, it’s got us hooked.  I quit it sometimes, only to find myself needing to fill my brain with something in a quiet moment where music and other good things aren’t quite tenable, and it’s just right there, you know?

The current thing making me want to quit tumblr forever is trans infighting.  Terfs love that shit, but the fighters are locked in, and can’t escape.  Particularly the trans women.  Personally I think it all started with oppression olympics, and is an object lesson in why you should not fuck with that shit.

Let’s play that game for a second.  Who has it the worst in the world right now?  Trans women, especially black, indigenous, and people of color.  Gold medal, congrats.  OK, there’s no medal.  Actually, your prize is an abiding paranoia that is richly rewarded and reinforced by the myriad people who are, in fact, out to get you.  RIP to the far too many women who have been murdered recently.

But focusing on your fear is no way to live.  It isolates.  It harms.  It helps you dust yourself off the planet so your enemies don’t have to lift a finger.  I had to stop following Stephanie Sterling on youtube because the constant drumbeat of “nobody loves us and everybody wants us dead” was not just depressing, it wasn’t true.  I don’t need that shit in my life.

Back to the oppression olympics.  Trans women win, but they should not be playing the game.  The primary motivation for constantly reminding everyone how bad you have it is to keep us conscientious of the situation.  Cool, but see my doomerism policy in the sidebar, and focus on the reasoning for it.  For some people, this raises consciousness.  For other people, it makes them commit suicide.  You gotta figure out how to moderate your voice in the discourse.

Tumblr’s CEO and moderation staff are actively hostile to trans women and have been nuking their blogs on sight, all while gaslighting them and throwing a rainbow wash on the platform.  Bad times.  Parallel to this, some acrimonious discourse was breaking out between trans women and basically everyone else – but especially trans men.  I don’t know who shot first and I don’t care, but let me give you the short version, like the ESPN commentator at the oppression olympics.  You hate to see it, as the meme goes…

TME/TMA.  Too much enformation / too much anformation.  I mean TransMisogyny Exempt and TransMisogyny Affected.  These could be useful information in the context of discourse, like, where somebody falls on that binary contextualizes anything they say on the subject.  Sure.  On the other hand, from a certain childish point of view, it is putting a shiny sticker on trans women.  The prize in the oppression olympics?

Remember what I said the other day about AFAB people being hammered with conformity more than AMAB people?  You see this play out in LGBTQIAetc discourse as them seeking validation.  The asexual movement was like 95% AFAB (as far as I could tell) and felt the need to assert the legitimacy of belonging to an LGBTQIAetc identity.  This was roundly mocked on tumblr, leading to the asexual sadness I mentioned above.

Who else is AFAB and largely invisible’d by queer discourse?  And might find a desperate need for validation compelling them to the kind of discourse that some self-righteous and dominant personalities might regard as cringey or offensive?  Trans men, it’s your turn.

The idea of Transandrophobia was introduced.  If transmisogyny is a thing, could there be a special type of difficulty trans men are subject to, deserving of a name?  A lot of the hate they catch is just misogyny directed at them by people who won’t see their manhood, so a new term would be gratuitous right?

The main argument against it goes like “this is oppression olympics being played by someone who got jealous of our shiny TMA sticker.  Transandrophobia doesn’t exist for the same reason androphobia and misandry aren’t real.”  To that, I say if you think trans men don’t have it even worse than butch women, who have it pretty bad, you’re huffing your own ass vapors.  It could be reasonable to want to put a name to that, whatever the merits of the actual discourse that has taken place, or the term that has been proposed.

But to everyone involved in all of this, I say who benefits from trans men and trans women disliking each other?  Kiss and make up, motherfuckers.  Still, it’s entrenched.  If someone has become a partisan in that fight, it’s all over.  No small amount of tumblrinas have avoided the conflict -not become partisans- which is the only reason parts of tumblr are still habitable.  But this crap is all over the place.  Stanky.

As I mentioned on a previous post, I think AFAB children are more strongly abused and neglected into a sense that they need to conform to be accepted than AMAB children.  The ruinous ace and transandrophobia discourse are good examples of it.

This isn’t an all people in all situations thing.  Any boy raised by Ruby Franke had it worse than a girl raised by Jodie Foster, right?  But acknowledging the pattern matters.  If it doesn’t, then no kind of feminism matters.  Are girls systemically treated worse or not?  And few cisheterofascist parents would ever know their trans girl is a trans girl, knows their trans boy is a trans boy.  How they treat them comes from the brand forced upon them at birth.

Some trans women get bothered by this, which to me seems like feeling insecure in their womanhood.  Yes, you were never a boy, any supposed privileges of being a boy were oppression to you.  I’m not going to defend the idea that “male socialization” is a thing.  But there is a type of oppression AFAB people got that you did not.

Was it worse?  I don’t give a fuck if it was or not.  I told you what I think about oppression olympics.  But it was there, right?  Most people who were regarded as girls had been so roundly neglected or chastised for every little thing that by the age of three this shit is set in stone: X amount of their mental processing power, for the rest of their natural life, will be hijacked by concern for whether people like them, whether they are acceptable, whether they are valid or allowed to be.

You might have that too, tho I’d argue the flavor hits different.  Could it be worse?  Could be.  But none of it’s good.  And the kind that they got did flow from their assigned gender, which you did not share.

It’s hunting season for trans women on tumblr, and some amount of them are blaming trans men.  There’s a whole other dimension of this shit I’ve alluded to in other recent posts that I’m not going to get into here.  But the paranoia this engenders has led to the ever-useful firefox extension Shinigami Eyes becoming fairly less useful, as various trans men have been labeled as transphobes by those oppressed ladies.

Oppression olympics start with the understandable feeling that your oppression is both terrible and particular, and people around you should understand it – need to understand it.  But when any kind of comparison begins, the shit begins.  Don’t be fooled again.

Although I’d say the democrats are long overdue for a riot at their convention, so maybe stay fractious long enough to make that happen.  Somebody hit Fetterman with a folding chair.  I’ll say nice things about you.

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That’s it.  No more discourse for now.

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Thinkin About Conformity

A long time ago I was hunting for a word and while “conformity” had occurred to me, it didn’t feel quite accurate.  I don’t know if Pierce Butler’s persuasion in the comments percolated these million years or if a different aeon’s perspective was responsible, but I do think it’s the word now.

When we talk about the different flavors of oppression such as misogyny, transphobia, etc, there are a few ways to describe them: like white supremacy, in terms of what you want to promote; like racism, in terms of the category by which you are discriminating; or like anti-blackness/misogynoir/etc, in terms of the specific target of oppression.  Conformity is the first one – a description of what you want to promote, the implied target of the oppression being nonconformists.

I don’t have anything deep to say about it tonight, but I’m just feeling it, turning it over in my head.  I’ve seen a group of nice people, mostly women, having a genial social gathering, and realized they were relentlessly conformist about it.  I realized this was practiced.  One of the ways AFAB people are oppressed under patriarchy is being told that they are only acceptable if they behave in certain ways – a stronger expectation of conformity than is heaped on the AMAB (not that anyone is exempt, of course).

This leads to constant seeking of reinforcement that whatever you’re doing is acceptable, normal, or valid.  Validation, I guess.  I see this as a key component of what I call “amirite ladies” culture.  “We all think the same thing about this issue, right?”  “Oh yeah, sure.”  Girl who isn’t quite on that page in the corner: “I mean I dunno, is it OK I maybe don’t, if it’s not too much, i’m sorry, I’ll go away if you want me too!”  Generous conformists in that moment:  “It’s OK because we agree in this other way, you are valid.” …and everyone gets along.

It’s not a terrible way of being, but it does cause people who are further outside of the clique to self-select their own exclusion.  Like everyone is fanning out about Stranger Things or Space Shooters, and the person who never understood fan culture sighs and stands in the shadows, hands in their pockets.  Go kick rocks, weirdo.

I’m coming to understand a good sign someone may be a high-functioning person on the autism spectrum is that constant feeling of being excluded or alienated from the people around you.  I can’t say I’m at all educated on the subject, but it keeps coming up in random discourse and personal anecdotes I’m seeing.

Anyhow, nonmutual types, especially (but not exclusively) those who were smashed with the AFAB hammer and feel eternally invalidated:  Props.

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Playing with Fire in a House of Decay

I didn’t really intend to bring up this subject when I set out to write the post but it feels like necessary preface, and it’s something that deserves to get explained at some point, if I’m going to lay out my personal biz in the way I’ve been doing.  I love my husband a lot, but it isn’t that ardent romantic love you feel when you are young and foolish.  By the time I met him, I’d burned out on that concept.

I’d take a bullet for him and likely vice versa, so it’s like, who can get in front of that thang first?  On the other hand, I’d take a bullet for a stranger and he’d probably take one for a dragonfly.  We do love each other.  But there’s a bloody edge to the way humans love when we’re new, something more dire and deep.  Worse, I think it’s permanent.  Didn’t Dante turn his high school crush into an extra special angel in the Divine Comedy?  Even tho he had been married to someone else for ages?  I wouldn’t be so crass, but I understand why he did that.

This really sucks for my dude because he has never been involved in those kind of feelings, feeling them or having them felt about him, which ain’t good for your self image.  But in fairness to me, we are equally mild about each other.  It’s a love that takes care of business, doesn’t mess around, gives us something essential like vitamins, but it’s not desperate heart-throbbing and sobbing, falling to your knees and howling at the wind styled love.

Is it important to experience that “something special” level of passion?  Romance stories say yes.  I say no.  It sets you up for disaster.  Hell, most of the people who feel something like that should never be allowed to lay a finger on their intended.  You know what I mean?  Just because you feel like that doesn’t mean it’s going to be reciprocated.  When I did, it wasn’t.

And if it is reciprocated and the big passionate romance is realized, what happens when something goes wrong?  You get those situations where a person dies within three months of their spouse.  It’s unnecessary sorrow and pain.  Some amount of sorrow is well and good, but that shit should not lay you in the ground.

So I loved like a maniac and had my feelings burned out, once upon a time, and now it’s gone.  Good for everyone involved.  One of the more annoying things about that intensity is that the feelings for the individuals never really seem to go away.  I still have this bullshit-ass romantic feeling about a few people I haven’t seen in decades.  Boo!

I had a dream last night that my husband had given me permission to go hang out with one of these people I had loved.  IRL this would be a bad idea because those romantic feelings are such that judgment could be impaired.  I might do infidelity I’d never do under other circumstances.  As it happened, in this dream I did not, because I walked through the events in a dispassionate daze, like I was as sleepy in the dream as I would have been were I awake.

We looked younger in the dream than we do in real life, but mi amor had some kind of degenerative condition of his teeth and of the bones in his feet that made him take extra care with what he ate and how he walked.  He was living with his family, despite being an adult, presumably due to hard times.

Aside from meeting one of his cousins in junior high, I’ve never met his family or seen where they live, but I knew it was rural.  In my head this turned into a log cabin lodge, very spacious in the common areas but cramped in rooms.  The stairs were drawers for extra storage but could be left pushed in or pulled out in ways that made the distance unpredictable and a little dangerous.

The place was a mess, hoarder style, and the other family members were all mild-mannered rednecks – adults involved in chores and little boys running amok.  There was a very fat lady wearing nothing but lingerie, trying to relax on the couch, and say something about her philosophy.  I was open to the lesson but couldn’t understand the words.

Upstairs I was in his room.  We avoided saying anything earnest and dangerous with each other.  Seemed like we were just going to pass again, ships in the night.  Then I noticed every surface in the room had silverfish and maggots wriggling across them.  Not coated in the things, like maybe a density of one per four square inches.

This was not as disgusting to me as it would be in real life, but I did insist we go somewhere else to hang out.  Down the dangerous stairs we went, careful with his feet, past scampering boys and philosophers and rednecks, into that dark place where your alarm clock goes off and puts you to work.

I don’t think there was anything truly interesting in this dream, but felt the need to write it out.  Probably a sense of significance derived from that old flame.  If the alarm hadn’t gone off, would I have cheated on my husband in my sleep?  In my heart?

I do not know, but it reinforced for me the sense that should the opportunity arise to get in touch with this man again in real life, I should not.  Fortunately, that will not happen.

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Rain O’er Me

rain clouds will ask if you wanted your ground drowned and not wait for you to say yes.  rain clouds will wet your city like that one action movie where some guys did a heist during a flood then had to get chased by cops on jetskis.  what was that shit called?

rain clouds will be, like, “i see a brown lawn and i want it painted green.  bright-assed with the chloroplasts, and mushrooms in between.”  i wish i could stay up late and turn off the electronic white noise and listen to my roof get taken to pound town.  get down, make love.

alas, work beckons.  time to squeak in my thirty-six winks.  i’ll get the full forty when i’m dead.  rain will turn my ashes to clay.  good night, i say as if you aren’t going to be reading this when the sun is up.  good night.

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Not Even Vaguing

Bro.  You’re talking about replacing people at programming jobs, sure, maybe.  But I’m literally watching people program shit with LLMs.  The proof is in the pudding.  A guy I know was annoyed with the app for a given task the creators had loaded with DRM and refused to update, and now working with nothing but LLMs, intelligence, and patience, he has an app with features and functions the humans were too lazy to implement.

Meanwhile right off the bat you link to a tweet where you accuse people of not paying attention to your points.  Well.  I guess I’ll have to wait for part four of your magnum opus to see you address the one in my pinned post, to the extent you will bother.  Prediction: You will elide the most important elements and focus on what you think are the weak points.  Nobody will be convinced of anything.

We have our biases and we’re all wearing them on our sleeves.  Don’t front like that’s just us.

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EDIT to add:  The strawberrry thing.  You can trick humans into embarrassing themselves too.  Doesn’t mean the human is useless.

EDIT to add:  I am not sufficiently educated to understand 99% of what you wrote, so take with grains, but your summation boiled down to the “it’s just collage” argument, which, again, is contradicted by the evidence of them producing original constructions.

Yes, they’re made out of information obtained by training, but THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HUMANS DO.  They’re just doing it very differently.  Arguably worse, and you may have made a successful argument to that effect, if I could understand it without a graduate degree.  But it doesn’t make them useless anymore than brain damaged humans are useless.

Ableist against my robot siblings, tsk tsk tsk.

EDIT to add:  Not all humans learn by letters.  Some dyslexic people learn their phonetic languages symbolically, recognizing the shape of the word rather than individual letters within it.  Cool cognitive feat.  Some AIs have some version of this, whether it’s up to speed or not yet.  I have no idea how it works, but you can just try it out and watch ’em go.  oh-oh it’s magic.

EDIT to add:  I can see the labor argument on one hand.  On the other, at my job, the material we work with is complex enough that literally nobody in the organization is right 100% of the time on it.  When we mess up, it can cause people financial damage, up to and including losing their homes, because of hard technical limits on processing time for certain operations.

As soon as the LLMs reach better than human success rate, it would be immoral to let me keep my job, even while it puts my home in jeopardy.  More people are at risk from our human failures than from our unemployment.

The question is whether our employer is going to have the wisdom to wait until the LLMs are demonstrably superior to the median employee in the organization.  Magic Eightball says “Not Fucking Likely.”  HJ Eightball says “It will never be superior to humans” and I’m like, are you and I looking at the same human species?

EDIT to add:  You’re literally asking us to ignore the evidence of our senses and experiences, like a priest.

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Good News for Fancy Birds

Remember those bright white birds that flew in tight formation, and vexed my ID attempts for ages?  Eventually I figured out that was somebody’s flock of fancy domestic pigeons, let free on a busy freeway corridor.  I stopped seeing them as often, and I presume this is because most of them were eaten by hawks and falcons.

I saw one, or possibly one of its descendants from cross with the local feral population.  It didn’t seem as large, had no friends, but it was still bright white – maybe a trace of pale grey starting to creep thru on the secondary coverts.

This was in the parking lot of the Michael’s craft store in Federal Way, Washington.  I’m glad they or their descendants are still around, if rare.

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Do You Do This To Yourself?

I tend to remember non-anglo names best because my mind likes to wrap around the pronunciation, automatically reaches for mnemonics.  Some years ago there was a football man on the seahawkers team, idk, some kind of billionaire’s human meat project in the Seattle area.  This football man’s last name was Houshmanzadeh.  My mind associated that with a quote from Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop: “Who’s your daddy and what does he do?” = “Housh-man-zadeh and what does he do?”

I’ll remember that randomly for the rest of my life, condemned by my brain’s compulsions to remember the name of a football man.  I don’t care about sportball, but nothing can save one from oneself.  I know I ain’t alone in this.  Do you have any useless phrases on call like this?

It ain’t all bad.  I can also remember names like Laellynasaura amicagraphica reasonably well… OK, I misspelled that one, but only a little.

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Road Raging

I had this idea for an intense action-horror novel, inspired by video games, that takes place in the hell of people who killed others by driving angry.  To honor the fallen demonic music man James “Gost” Lollar, my husband and I are going to write heavy-duty hellfire-having stories for the July noveling month.  This is the one I have up my sleeve.  The only card I need?

I knew I’d elaborated on the idea more somewhere but forgot where.  Found it.  Lemme copy-paste the notes here for my future reference.  If you think you might read it, don’t read this, if you don’t wanna get spoilt.
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__Road Rage

Opens with freaky ragecase man in some kind of hell, getting up and going to work.  A full day in his life, which revolves around the commute.  On the way home he tries to kill some pedestrians, and they kill him.

Cut to the birth, earlier that day, one of those pedestrians being born from a pile of gore like Frank Hellraiser.  She is sad and scared, and at some point soon she runs away.  A guy comes in and they send him back out to save her.

She survives some amount of hell but it’s too wild and she’s about to get killed when the guy comes in.  Total action hero.  They survive lots of violence, and meet a guy who mentions he saw hero’s mentor – who has become a cop.  Hero upset but doesn’t say why.

They get into more danger and she’s killed.  He says sorry, see you soon.  She wakes up in the underground village again and gets that explained to her.  Worries about whether hero might die on the way home too.

Hero gets with sheisty guy again and they scheme on a hot score.  Then he goes home, drawing spooky attention, before losing it.

New girl says she wants to learn to be tough.  Hero agrees bravery is a big deal in hell and they recently lost a guy, so may as well try.  The plan is to have no violence, just stealth, but of course it doesn’t work out.  They do great, beat a sub boss, but in the end the hero’s mentor kills him.  She barely escapes, discovering she knows how to skateboard.

The survivor enclave gets to be low on meat and pure water, because too many demons on the streets.  But if heroes just kill them, they’ll come back.  The plan?  They’re immortal so just detain them indefinitely.  Out on the streets, heroes lure them to the reservoirs and nonlethal crashing.  It’s a laff riot, until it isn’t.

Meanwhile hero’s pet dog Glossy the affenpinscher goes on a mini game and saves the village with a ton of rat meat.

Big action leads to another victory, drawing attention of a bigger bad.  Hero wins a minigame of his own and springs for the brakeboots and more magic items.  The brakeboots are boots so strong they can help you brake a car by putting your foot out the door.  This element of things is another thing inspired directly by video games.

Murderous monsters make the streets more dangerous.  It’s a speed trap.  Sheisty guy wakes up underground – he was killed, explains why/how.  Time to fuck up the precinct.  Why so brave?  We have to wonder.

Epic action leads to confrontation with cop.  Damsel gets damsel’d.  Personal hells are a thing and hero is pulled into one.

Hero has weirder convos with the merchant, starts to figure things out.  Along way out of hell he has a homoerotic scene with sheisty friend.  He rescues the girl during final fight.  Romance with her?  Undecided.

Final fight some major thing happens.  Not decided yet.  Matrix ending?  Hell destroyed?  Option to ascend rejected for love?

Names… let’s say hell people remember their own names like they remember english, but they don’t remember their last names.

Hero – Thurston.  Doesn’t recall previous life as rich kid who liked extreme sports.  Already experienced driver / violence boy at start of story.  White white boy with sandy blond hair and grey-blue eyes.  Like a more practical version of Point Break Bodhi.

Girl – Dejah.  Figures out at some point in story she was a skateboarder, whatever that means about her.  Dark-skinned girl.

Sheisty boy – Ralph.  Italian-looking guy, young Pacino energy.  Doesn’t live in the village because he likes fancier dwellings among demon homes.

The dog – Glossy.  Short for Glasya-labolas, Author of Bloodshed, an affenpinscher who speaks in non-sequitur blasphemy.

The Mentor – Hard John, so named because there are multiple johns in the village and no last names to distinguish them.  Formerly an Irish-american cop from the seventies, with a black moustache and light green eyes.  Fortyish, not a big guy, but outsized powers of intimidation.

The Merchant – The Merchant.  Fiftyish trans woman.  Me-ish?

Idea for end – He has option of transcending but wants to stay and help people, or stay for love, and realizes he can’t stay without being limited somehow – or is told by some spiritual intercessor idk, but basically gets cast back into hell with his lives reset.  …Maybe he gets a reset for everybody, back to three lives.

Discussion with an angel, “hey yer part of the problem aren’t you, keeping us down here?”  “Nobody has any choice about anything.  Even god is a slave to himself”

Inspiration note:  Watchin John Wolfe replayin RE games before watching Requiem.  Got up to RE 4 remake, which was the inspiration for Road Rage.  I wanna make my merchant character as charismatic as the one in that game, in a differenty type way, but still.  Kinda me -ish, flirty but not in a pushy way, just silly.  Like Austin Powers by way of the Cryptkeeper but take it down a few notches, mix in a georgia peach?

That video game had realistic enough graphics that the unrealistic elements took on a surreal quality.  Specifically the merchant.  How does he get around?  What is he doing there?  It’s like he’s a recurring hallucination Leon is having, but one that can hand him firearms.

So I came up with an idea for an action adventure novel that will include this kind of stuff.  I’m given to understand some people are already doing this in some fanfic, wouldn’t know for sure.  But if it was done real well, higher quality than the stuff in that space typically is, maybe..?  I dunno.

I actually had more notes than this somewhere but I have no idea where, feel like it got deleted somehow.  Boooo!  I don’t remember much from it, but feel like there’s some kind of healing items?  I know I wanted it to be video gamey but I can kinda imagine getting by without that convention.  …I’ve lost that all.  Bummer.

I’m also realizing an influence for this was Statham movie The Transporter.

Anyway, that’s the early notes.  Gotta beat this into a story in July.  I’m liking posting my first drafts, and think this one just might be exciting enough to get more than one rando to read them.  I wonder…

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