Oh my God, this is so cool. It's one of the coolest things I've seen this year. I love things like this that are both technically impressive and also beautiful. It's unfortunate that it requires more effort from you to keep it watered, but the effort seems worth it by far (if you're able to keep on top of it, that is)
AnarchistArtificer
joined 2 years ago
I would interpret "demonizing" something as meaning misrepresenting it in a hyperbolically negative manner that may even involve completely constructed criticism.
I don't think that highlighting authoritarianism in past social experiments constitutes demonising them. You're right that there were significant successes in these projects, and also that they weren't perfect. If we don't properly acknowledge the ways in which they went wrong, can we really hope to do better in the future?
I don't see any way in which the people you're replying to are being at all revisionist.
Seconding your thoughts on nonstick and cast iron. I haven't used other kinds of pans, but I like cast iron enough that I'd consider having at least one of them to be essential.
Getting a good sear is pretty helpful towards avoiding something sticking.
Stuff like this is pretty context dependent, and vibes based. Did it feel like this happened because people recognised that you belonged to a marginalised group, and were earnestly making an attempt to subvert systemic oppression you may face as a researcher by raising you up? Or did it feel like you were being instrumentalised, boiled down to a 2D representation of who you are in order to further the aims of that conference and/or research group?
I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.
Something that I'm especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She's doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn't allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.
I expected there'd be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.
I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there's almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.
As one might be able to gather from the name, that's not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn't already know Python, she was keen to learn — "what's a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?".
I found it quite affirming because I don't know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I'm very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I'm a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I've known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I've "diluted" my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It's nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.
Any noun's a verb if you noun hard enough
I feel like I just got goatsed by Saturn
I think a key distinction is that the religious rhetoric is often precisely that — rhetoric. Specifically, it's rhetoric aimed at an international audience, because conflating Judaism with the Israeli state is essential to how Israel frames itself and its genocide. It allows them to denounce all criticism of zionism as antisemitism, even if those critiques are coming from Jewish antizionists. Meanwhile, Israel's actions have been helping drive an increase in actual antisemitism, which is also useful for Israel, because it helps them to justify the existence of Israel as necessary for Jewish safety.
That might seem like splitting hairs, but it's important if we want to understand what's happening. Many of the most vehement pro-genocide voices in Israel are secular Jews, as is a decent proportion of Jews in Israel. Judaism is more than just a religion, but an ethnoreligious group, and that distinction is important because Israel cares more about the "ethno-" part of that than the religious part (because like I say, there are many people who identify as secular Jews).
It's somewhat analogous to how Trump performs a particular kind of conservative Christian rhetoric that's more about white nationalism than any Christian ideals. The religious component is important to acknowledge, because many prominent MAGAs aren't doing it performatively in the way that Trump and some others do, but rather their Christian faith is tightly intertwined with their white nationalism. However, to see this purely as a religious issue would lose crucial nuance of the issue.
"Historically patriarchal" — there are contemporary Japanese politicians who argue that the job of women is literally just to be baby making machines. I struggle to imagine how a "hardliner conservative" female politician could fit into that without being extremely hypocritical.
Edit: Yup, as I expected (source: Associated Press)
"Takaichi has been seen as opposed to all the reforms that advocate for better representation and the position of women in society. The soon-to-be Japanese PM has supported the LDP’s view that women should serve as good mothers and wives. She opposes same-sex marriage, male-only imperial succession reforms, and legal changes allowing married couples to keep separate surnames."
Edit 2: Though I suppose that's very on brand, given that she apparently idolises Margaret Thatcher
I think it's plausible that there are more people here that are neurodivergent. However, even more significant than this is a culture where neurodivergent people are more visible. At Reddit, calling someone or something autistic would usually be an insult. Here, it's more often that we are recognising each other and existing in solidarity.
This is how I think about my own anarchism.
I don't disagree with you that class distinctions would naturally arise from the systems of production and distribution, but I don't see that as a problem really. There are some features of human society that feel analogous to gravity, in that they exist as functionally immutable forces that we must learn to navigate around and through. Even if we somehow achieved what we would consider to be a utopia, it's realistically not going to stay that way — there would inevitably be some event or new development that would disrupt the balance of things. Such change isn't necessarily bad, especially if we respond to it properly. It is inevitable though, which is why I find it useful to think of it as a process. I can't remember who I heard this from, but a phrase I like is "my goal isn't to make anarchism, but to make more anarchists"
I don't consider myself a communist, but I like your comment because it highlights how much we have in common. A communist society wouldn't necessarily be non-anarchist, and vice versa.
For now though, I find myself happy to shelve most ideological disputes with communists, because we're so far away from either an anarchist or communist society that it seems more productive to use our common ground to strive towards a world that both of us would agree is better.