#what society expected and HUNDREDS of people told them they were trans

[latter-day-saint-nick]

My local library recently hosted a Drag Queen Story Time event, which was met with crowds of protesters. The following Sunday people were discussing this at church, though since I stayed home that week (it was 30 degrees Celsius outside and I didn't want to risk a heatstroke), I wasn't aware of it until Bishop talked to me a week later. Being the only openly transgender ward member, he asked for my thoughts and advice to deal with situations like this in a way that keeps the ward a friendly and welcoming place.

After taking some time to think about it, here's what I wrote:

For a start, it's worth remembering that what is considered appropriate clothing for men or for women depends on societal values and changes over time. In Shakespeare's day, men wore tights and earrings. A couple of hundred years later it was common for men to wear wigs and make-up. Even nowadays there are many countries in which it is normal for men to wear clothes we'd consider skirts or dresses. Jesus never wore trousers in His earthly life (as for His post-mortal life, I don't know – personally I hope to wear something a little more interesting than a white robe in the Celestial Kingdom, but maybe that's just me). Conversely, it is now considered fairly normal for women to wear trousers, but this wasn't always the case, and once upon a time women had to fight for the right to wear trousers. What I'm saying is that clothing trends are so fleeting that it seems pretty silly to me to judge someone as obscene for simply wearing clothes that you'd normally associate with someone of another gender.

One of the reasons for this outrage about drag queens and transgender people, I think, is that some people have it in their heads that cross-dressing and gender-bending is inherently sexual. But it's really not. Clothes are just clothes. A man wearing a dress is no more likely to be a predator than a woman wearing a dress. And me living as a man isn't any weirder or more inappropriate than any other bloke doing the same. Nobody is trying to indoctrinate your cisgender children and turn them trans either. That's not even possible. But if your children are already trans, seeing transgender and gender-non-conforming adults can help them survive. That might sound like an exaggeration, but about 40% of transgender youth attempt suicide at some point. This number goes down drastically for kids growing up in a supportive environment, so having family members and other adults in their lives supporting them makes all the difference.

The scriptures are full of examples of people receiving personal revelation that contradicts societal expectations: younger brothers taking on the patriarchal birthright that should belong to the oldest son, prophets preaching to people commonly considered unclean, a 14-year-old being told not to join any existing churches. Each of us is entitled to personal revelation, and when you listen to the testimonies of gay and trans Church members, they will happily tell you that they prayed long and hard for Heavenly Father to fix them, only to finally receive the calm, loving reassurance of the Spirit telling them that there's nothing wrong with them.

Jesus spent much of His time during His earthly ministry serving those on the margins of society: foreigners, lepers, tax collectors, women. If He were among us today, I believe that's what He would still be doing, helping the homeless, refugees, disabled people and people of colour. The LGBT community is more accepted now than it was even as recently as ten to twenty years ago, but we still experience oppression and discrimination on a daily basis. People mock us, spread misinformation about us, and frequently respond with violence to our existence. Politicians make laws that make it more difficult for us to get jobs and access healthcare, and in some cases even make it dangerous for us to simply exist in public spaces. The Saviour I know and love wouldn't be okay with any of this. He would stand by the most vulnerable of us, mourn with them, strengthen them, protect them and love them unconditionally. And if we truly take His name upon us, as we claim, then surely we should do the same.

Finally, I just want to quote Galatians 3:28, in which Paul writes: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” What this tells me is that Heavenly Father and Jesus are far more interested in whether we are good, kind people than in things like race, nationality or gender.

#obviously there's a lot more I could have said #but bishop asked me to keep it brief #queerstake #transgender

[the-ghost-king]

the term malewife isn’t a very nice term to use...

A man who acts as a wife and is inferior to his #girlboss girlfriend.

Person A: I just got myself a malewife. He's gonna clean my kitchen and watch me download custom content for the sims.

Person B: Sweet! You must be such a girlboss

^^urban dictionary. It’s just confirming to the sexist stereotypes that perceive and expectation of what a wife should act like. It’s quite harmful

It's a parallel to girlboss which is conformity to the sexism within corporate America:

"it becomes inescapably clear that when women center their worldview around their own office hustle, it just re-creates the power structures built by men, but with women conveniently on top. In the void left after the end of the corporate feminist vision of the future, this reckoning opens space to imagine success that doesn’t involve acing performance reviews or getting the most out of your interns." (here)

The word girlboss comes from a book quite literally called #girlboss, in parallel to the negative aspects of this book people eventually rebranded the term "malewife" to parallel it (malewife was originally an nsfw type thing)

In the malewife/girlboss "system" it's essentially the swapping of the problematic aspects, expectations, and socialization of men and women within a relationship

"Girlboss, gaslight, gatekeep" was a meme started to pick on the idea that women should become men and enforce the sexism within corporate society, and I'm sure it was a jab at the book the word came from as well.... "Manipulate, mansplain, malewife" was created to parallel the original meme

So yeah, the whole concept is mocking sexism within corporations and and modern relationships and showing how ridiculous it is. Girlboss mocks the idea of 2014 (largely) white feminism within America.

In example the original meme (created on Twitter) is intended to make mockery of Karen-types:

On January 12th, 2021, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted, "today’s agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss," garnering over 43,500 notes in a month (shown below). On that day, Twitter user @CUPlDL0VE posted, "my agenda is gaslight gatekeep and #girlboss," the first instance of the phrase on Twitter.

And a day later on January 13, 2021 Tumblr user a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e reblogged the post along with a photoshopped image of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art instead reading, "Gaslight every moment, Gatekeep every day, Girlboss beyond words" (shown below). On January 18th, the image was reposted to Twitter for the first time.

Malewife doesn't hold those same implications however... The term malewife which is now being used to parallel girlboss achieves it's origins from p*rn, now I'm not an nsfw blog or someone who blatantly discusses nsfw concepts on my blog so I'm not getting super into it but there's a few places it comes from: femdom, bdsm, and feminization kinks... All of which have a connection to queerness in their own right but I don't feel comfortable going into the complexities of that with so many younger people following me.

On February 15th, Tumblr user @relelvance posted, "Manipulate, mansplain, malewife" as a male-themed opposite to "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss," garnering over 27,000 notes in four days. The post was screenshotted and reuploaded by Twitter user @nortoncampbell on the same day, garnering over 14,200 likes and 2,800 retweets in the same span of time (shown below).

Urban dictionary's explaination of "malewife" is not only harsher than what malewife was intended to mean, but also removes the context of origin from the word- making it something new, different, and erasing the history of who originally used this word.

Because of Malewifes origins vs Girlboss origins, malewife is a less problematic term than girlboss and is more "affectionate" because the term malewife and it's use (up until recently) involved the man acknowledging that he wanted to be the "wife" in his relationship. There's a variety of reasons someone might do this, but it can generally be summed up as a mixture of personality and also personal wants.

I do think it's important to also note that although these words are being "glamorized slightly" they're still intended and being used in a memeing manner, but they're also used to quickly denote arbitrary traits in an individual and categorize those traits...

Although there's lots of conversations to be had for a variety of reasons about the origin and use of the word "girlboss" in relation to sexism, up until recently the world "malewife" was something claimed by men, something men wanted to be called, and something that men who used the term wanted to reference them.

Malewife is about "stepping-up" to "take on" "female" social roles, and it's something that at least some women would be happy to see in society:

"...We have been told that we can have it all, but so far we have noticed that it is extremely hard work having it all, because you still have to do everything that your mother did but now you have to do everything your father did as well. Except that your father had your mother waiting at home with a gin and tonic and his slippers when he came home from work, and you have the washing up and the shopping and a few screaming brats as well as a bloke with his feet up on the sofa watching the football... " (via. Victoria Mary Clarke)

And I don't think that she's wrong at all. Women are still expected to do so much more than men in society without equal reward.

Malewife exists as a a sort of fantasy removed from the truth of society. It's an idea that a husband can be waiting at home to care for his wife, and in this instance it benefits the woman- unlike Clarke's situation above, the woman comes home from a long day and is able to relax without the pressures of society and her life.

Where housewife is a word that holds its origins in forced subservience, malewife is a term that is showcasing men "picking up the torch" in regards to housework- where housewife is socially forced, and girlboss is reversed social compliance, malewife is the rejection of social expectations.

Malewife is about men finding a place in their life's and relationships to make themselves more than a paycheck. To say "I can be emotionally there for my spouse, I can clean a toilet, and drive kids to school, and I don't treat my spouses wants as something expendable". In a society in which men are often demeaned, mocked, and scorned for picking up socially female roles (say hello to misogyny and gendered contamination!)

The Urban dictionary definition, is not only too harsh- but not the way in which the word is intending to be used, because that's ignoring the origins of this word, and the fact that men had a choice in becoming malewifes where women didn't have that choice. It should read more like:

Person A: Ah yeah, I have a malewife waiting for me, he's going to clean my kitchen because I've had a hard day at work and need a break, and then he's going to watch me download custom content for the Sims because I enjoy the game so much and it helps me take a break from life!

Women's wants were often ignored in favor of men's wants, so by the malewife saying he's going to watch his spouse play the Sims, he's really saying "I care about her interests" and by him picking up the kitchen cleaning after she's had a stressful day he's saying "I have a lower stress job so I can handle that for her and make her life a little easier" (because malewife doesn't mean he doesn't have a job).

In a society in which a man's worth is tied to his ability to bring home money and be emotionally distant, malewife is the rejection of this norm. Malewifes are going to be there for their spouse, they're going to step up and take on traditionally women's roles and they're doing it because they want to, because they like it, and because dividing chores into pink vs blue is wrong.

I also want to say, you can't flip a word around and say it does "this" because that's not how it works... Men and women are forcibly socialized in very different ways, the two binaries have very different treatment, and expectations within societies social constructs. If you could flip the forms of oppression that men vs women face (because yes, the patriarchy oppresses men) then you could also flip the forms of violence faced by trans masculine people vs trans feminine people- but that doesn't work either, because women will always be oppressed in the most public way to "make an example of them" while the patriarchy expects anyone who is male to "keep his mouth shut and fall in line". (I know that's worded poorly, but I've just written at least a couple hundred words and my brain is a bit fried already from various other things today- basically anyone perceived female or male will be treated in a certain way as a result of others perception of them)

Anyhow, all this isn't to say that the term "malewife" is inherently free of any form of flaw ever... Malewife is a newly mainstream word, it wasn't popularized until February 15 of 2021... So?? 5 days ago?? The origins of malewife and the social implications of malewife combined with the history of the word, don't make the word bad or impressive and it's not "upholding the ideals of a housewife" but instead a word which provides men freedom from male social expectations.

Can the word malewife come to be a word which enforces expected female social behavior? Yeah it absolutely can become a word to mean that, erase the history from the word, and give it to someone who doesn't know the history of the word, and someone who doesn't have an intimate understanding of gender theory, and you've got a recipe for hundreds more asks like the one you've sent me...

I can't find a single positive reason to use the word girlboss in an empowering way, but I can find more reasons to use the word malewife in an empowering way than not to do so.

So at the very least if all you come away from this with is that I don't personally use the word malewife to uphold female social expectations in a relationship but instead I use this word to provide space for guys to be allowed to be feminine, soft, caring, emotionally present, and worth more than their monetary value, then I guess that's okay.

#long post #asks #Anon #malewife #sorry for clogging your feed #i don't have a desktop rn

[aceniixx]

being ace on valentines day kinda sucks tbh

It’s Valentines Day and I don’t want to be a downer about it but today is a really hard day for me, a person who identifies as ace. As ace people, we are constantly barraged with the importance of a romantic and sexual human connection and we have to unlearn literally hundreds of years of generational crap that tells us we are nothing if we don’t have someone to share our time with sexually and romantically; this increases tenfold on days like today. It brings back a lot of my feelings of brokenness and doubt because of the torrent of ‘Hey look! You are super weird because you have never wanted this! But even if you did want it, good luck finding someone who completely gets it AND is totally fine maybe never having sex with you!”

(Side note: I never thought I would be grateful for the five-day lockdown we are currently going through here, cause tomorrow when I go to work I’m probably going to be less likely to be shamed or pitied for not having a person (read boyfriend because I work with straights) to share today with. 

I think I’ve come out to more people on Valentines Day than any other day, as I try not to completely lose my shit when people give me that ‘oh, you poor thing’ look after I explain no, I didn’t do anything special, I’m not seeing anyone, but I am more than happy being by myself.)

Valentines Day is such a firm reminder to me and I’m sure to many other ace people of our oddness in the eyes of society. People who need or want relationships, who have never had to question the norm will never understand the constant feeling of knowing you don’t fit in with the crowd. It’s incredibly isolating and can be really traumatic, especially when you feel this ‘oddness’ or already identify as ace but you haven’t yet learned societal expectations are absolute bullshit.

It instantly takes me back to every time someone asked me what an ace was and them telling me I just haven’t met the right person yet once I’ve explained. Or the general lack of understanding that sex and love aren’t one and the same when I try to explain that maybe one day, I might find myself in a relationship but sex with that person isn’t something I think I’ll ever be interested in.

I think about how when I was a teenager I used to pretend to have crushes on boys to fit in with my friends, because when I admitted to them and myself that I didn’t like anyone they thought I was weird or lying, or worse they would say ‘oh, don’t worry someone will like you if you put yourself out there” or “let’s go out and I’ll try hook you up with someone.” As if I’m just low on confidence or to awkward to find someone. They probably didn’t even realise how hurtful they were being, but stuff like this… it sticks with you in weird ways.

I think about my best friend of ten years telling me I’m never going to love anyone, or at least not in the way she will because I’m not interested in sex. Or when she assumed my asexuality meant I’m probably going to be alone for my entire life because she didn’t know anyone who could go without being intimate (intimacy to her at this time meant sex.)

I think about all the nights I cried myself to sleep because I just wanted to be like the people on the TV and in the books, I read, but I couldn’t, and that made me feel broken and completely isolated from everyone and everything.

I think about the first person I ever told, someone I trusted because we were friends, and she was a lesbian and we had been talking about queer and trans issues and how unfair the lack of acceptance in this country was and she then proceeded to tell me it was people like me who were making it harder for her community to be accepted by society.

So yeah, let’s just get rid of all these stupid societal standards and accept people as they are and until we’ve done that, spare a thought to all the ace people out there who are probably feeling vulnerable and angry and even a little left out today.

#ace #asexual #aromantic #lgbtqia #lgbtq #queer #ace pride #ace problems

[citrineghost]

100 Humans on Netflix

So there’s this neat Netflix Original show called 100 Humans. I immediately got interested in it because they take this group of various humans from different backgrounds, age groups, and so on, and they use them to conduct experiments to get answers to interesting questions.

So, right away I had concerns about this show because

If you know anything about data and statistical research, you know 100 people is a very small sample size and does not breed accurate results

However, I’m very curious and wanted to see what they came up with anyway. I watched all 8 episodes and, honestly, I enjoyed watching it for the most part. However, I have a LOT of issues with the show and how it was conducted and I want to list them out here.

If you’re interested in watching 100 Humans or have already watched it, please consider the following before taking any of the show’s data as fact.

100 people is a very small sample size. This is because, the more people you have, the more weight each increment in your percentages has. With 100 people, each person represents 1 entire percent. That’s a lot. That means even a few people giving incorrect answers, having off-days, or giving ridiculous results (such as you can see in the spiders georg meme), can sway the entire result of an experiment into unreasonable territory. This is why most scientific studies attempt to get data from many hundreds or even thousands of people. The bigger the sample size, the more accurate it is to the entirety of the world.

I’ll put the rest under the cut because it gets long

The 3 hosts, who I’ll refer to as the scientists (regardless of if they actually are, because I’m not sure and don’t feel like googling it) repeatedly make false statements. For example, in one episode, they told their humans to “raise your hand if you believe you’re less bigoted than the average person here,” to which 94 people raised their hands. One of the scientists then made the statement, “If that were true, it would mean only 6% of Americans are bigoted.” This statement is entirely false. The only way to actually determine a true meaning to that would be to determine at what percentage of bigotry you are considered a real bigot. You also must consider that believing you’re more bigoted than other people in a small group, who you already have an impression of, is not necessarily indicative of how you feel you measure up to America as a whole. Anyway, I could go on and on. The only way to accurately summarize the results of that question would be to say that 44% of the humans had an inflated sense of righteousness or something of the sort.

The 3 scientists, both in person and in narration, for the sake of entertainment (if that’s what you call it) continually made “jokes” that poked fun at different groups, implied men are shit, etc. Maybe that’s fun for some people, but the kind of jokes they were making to amp up the hilarity of their host personas was genuinely just uncomfortable and made me feel even more like they couldn’t be trusted to go about unbiased research.

The scientists continually drew conclusions where the results should have been labeled inconclusive

The scientists made blanket statements about certain groups based on 1 element of research that would not stand up to further evaluation. For example, when explaining that ~93% (i think it was about that number) of Americans have access to clean, drinkable, tap water and yet some large number of single use bottled waters are sold every year, one scientist said it was because people believe bottled water is safer and cleaner than tap water. I am going to do my next survey on this to see if my own perception is flawed, but I simply don’t believe that all of the people who buy bottled water do so because they think its cleaner than “tap” (as if all tap is the same.) I know there have been studies about people drinking unlabeled bottled water and tap water and not being able to tell the difference, but this neglects to account for the fact that different houses pipes can affect the taste of the tap water running through them, people can use disposable bottles of water for certain activities or events too far away from tap for people to refill their reusable bottles easily, and so so so much more. Anyway, it just really bothers me to see “scientists” making these kinds of generalizations when they’re the ones whose results we’re supposed to trust.

The show was incredibly cisnormative. There was an entire episode based on comparing men and women that made me extremely uncomfortable with its division of people by men and women. There was the implication that all men have penises and all women have vaginas. There were implications that reproduction is a necessity in picking a partner. It was just a shitshow. There was one comment by one subject who asked, when being told to separate by men and women, “What if I’m transgender?” Obviously I can’t say for sure, but this person didn’t appear to be transgender and the sort of tone it was asked in makes me think it was literally something they asked him to say in order to get inclusivity points with the viewers and to “prove” that they’re not transphobic by having them divide up, because they said to go to the side you identify with. This whole thing is a) harmful to nb folks who would not have had a side to go to and b) completely negating the fact that the way we were socialized can have an effect on our social responses. That means that for a social experiment, a trans person could sway the results of one side due to their upbringing and the pressures society put on them before/if they don’t pass. This is all assuming they had any trans people there, which is potentially debatable.  I also take issue with this entire fucking episode because just, the amount of toxicity in proving one sex is better than the others is really gross and actually counterproductive to everything feminist and progressive. Not to mention, them implying that they’re trying to support trans people only to reinforce the notion that a trans man is inherently lesser for being a man when even prior to hatching, he would have also been force fed propaganda and societal pressure implying he’s less than for supposedly being a woman is really gross and makes me angry. The point of what I’m saying is that it’s actually not woke to hate men as a way of bringing women up because there are men who are minorities who are being hurt by the rise of aggression being directed at them for their gender. Anyway enough about that.

The tests drew false conclusions because they did not account for how minorities adapt to a world that’s not made for them. This is specifically directed at the episode where subjects were asked to match up 6 people into couples. There were 3 women and 3 men and the humans were asked to put them together into pairs. they could ask the people 1 question each but then had to match them up with only that information. The truth is, the people brought in were 3 real life couples already, which the humans didn’t know until after they matched them. The couples were m/f, m/m, and f/f. I think that’s great, but the problem is, literally none of the humans asked any of them their sexuality as their question and most people didn’t even consider they could match up same-sex people. One girl even thought that they had told her to make m/f pairings, even though they didn’t.  The scientists concluded from the experiment that the humans have a societal bias toward people, and assume they’re all straight, even if they, themselves, are not straight. I personally believe that was the wrong conclusion to draw. You could see some of the queer humans were shocked that they hadn’t considered some of the pairings might be gay. But, I don’t think it’s because they believe everyone they meet is straight, I believe this says more about what they expected from the scientists themselves. If someone is in a minority and they go to do something organized, like a set of experiments, they are going to be judging the quality and setup of the experiments by those designing them. I feel that the lack of consideration that the couples might be gay has a lot more to do with queer people having adapted to a world where queers are rarely involved or included in equal volume to the cishets. The queer humans taking part in the experiment and failing to guess gay couples shows that they have adapted to a world where they are excluded rather than a belief that every random person that they meet is straight. My point is further supported by an expert they had on the show who explained that, statistically, it was entirely likely that they were all straight and that even queers will account for being minorities by going with what’s most likely. The truth is, we are surrounded by a whole lot of straight people. It makes sense to assume only 6 people are all straight and that, if any aren’t, they may be bi.

The scientists frequently broke an already small sample size into even smaller groups. The group was very frequently broken in half, in thirds, or into sets of 10 people. These sample sizes tell us almost nothing actually conclusive. 

The experiments/tests frequently were affected by peoples abilities, unrelated to what was being tested. For example, one test that was broken down into 6 people and 6 control people competing at jenga was meant to show whether needing to pee helps or hurts your focus. first of all, sample sizes of 6 are a fucking joke. Second, this completely ignores these 6 people’s actual ability to play Jenga. If someone sucks at jenga with or without needing to pee, them losing Jenga when they need to pee says exactly fuck all about whether needing to pee affected their focus. They should have tested people’s Jenga skills beforehand, counted the amount of moves they made before the tower fell, and then did it again after hours of not peeing to compare their results. This test made no logical sense at all.

The scientists ignored the social effect of subjects knowing each other as well as duration of events during their last experiment. They were testing to see if people with last names near the end of the alphabet get a shittier deal because they go last in everything where things are done by name order. They tested this by doing a fake awards ceremony where they gave out some 30 awards to people, gauging the applause to see whether the people at the end got less hype and therefore felt worse about themselves than those in the beginning who got the fresh enthusiasm of the audience. the results showed that the applause remained fairly consistent throughout the awards. The issues with this test are numerous, but here are the three I take most issue with. 1) the people here all got to know each other very well over the week it took to make the show. People who know each other and have become friends are much more likely to cheer for each other with enthusiasm, regardless of how long it’s been. On the other hand, polite applause from a crowd at, say, a graduation, where you are applauding people you don’t know, WILL start off more raucous and grow very quiet except for individual families near the end. 2) the duration of the test was a half hour, which is not very long at all and doesn’t say much to test the limits of enthusiasm. Try testing the audience at a graduation with a couple hundred graduates that also involves the time it takes to walk all the way up to a stage a hundred feet away, accept a diploma, and then wait for the next person. These kinds of events take hours and nobody keeps up their enthusiasm that long unless they’re rooting for someone in particular. 3) this study tested only one of many many ways name order affects a person. Cheering and applause is only one factor. It does not take into account people having their resumes looked at in alphabetical order and therefore people at the beginning of the alphabet being picked before anyone ever looks at a W name’s resume. It doesn’t take into account a small child’s show and tell day being at the very end of the school year, after 6 other people have brought in the same thing they planned to. No one cares about their really cool trinket because they’ve seen a bunch like it already. This test doesn’t take into account how many end-of-the-alphabet people just get straight up told, “we ran out of time. maybe next time,” when next time doesn’t really exist. I feel genuinely bad for the girl who suggested this experiment because the scientists straight up said something akin to, “lmao her theory was bs ig /shrug” even though it was their own shitty research abilities that led to their results.

They did one experiment intending to see how many people have what it takes to be a “hero.” The request for this test was made by someone curious about the effect of adrenaline and if it really works how some people say. The scientists thought it an adequate method to determine an answer by testing their reflexes with a weird crying baby sound and then dropping a doll from above while they were distracted with answering questions. The scientists looked up before the doll dropped to indicate a direction of attention. While this does give some answers about peoples intuition, reflexes, and ability to use context clues, its entirely an unusual situation, makes no sense in reality, fails to take adrenaline into consideration literally at all, and has a lot more to do with chance. The person dropping the doll literally couldn’t even drop it in the same place from person to person. Some got it dropped into their lap and others almost out of arm’s reach. This, like a few of the other mentioned experiments, was during the last episode, which felt lazy and thrown together last minute, with very little scientific basis to any of the results. The last episode was weak and disappointing overall. 

One of the big issues I have with this show is actually their repeated use of the same group. They said at the end that they had done over 40 tests. Part of doing studies is getting varied samples of people in order to get more widespread results. Using the same 100 or less people (already a tiny sample) repeatedly is a terrible research method. You’re no longer studying humans at large. You’re studying these specific humans. You can’t take the same group with the same set of inadequacies, the same set of skills, and the same set of biases and then study them extensively and in many different ways like this. Your results are inherently skewed toward these specific people and their abilities. I expected them to at least get a new group each episode - every 5 or so studies - but no. They keep the same group all week, which makes the entire season. This is inexcusable in research imo.

The next issue is contestant familiarity. The humans all getting to know each other is great, socially, but it also destroys the legitimacy of many of the studies that involve working together or comparing yourselves and your beliefs

Many tests had issues with subject dependency. One study, meant to compare age groups and their ability to work together to complete the task of putting together a piece of ready to assemble furniture had each group with members they relied on entirely. A few people built the furniture while one person sat across the room, looking at instructions with their back to the others. They had to relay the instructions through a walkie talkie to another contestant and that other contestant had to relay it to the people they’re watching build the chair. You cannot study a group’s ability to build something with instructions by the ability of one single person to communicate. You’re testing that individual and the rest of them on two completely different capabilities. One person fails at being able to communicate and everyone else becomes unable to build the furniture. Even if everyone else in the group is more effective than all the other groups at building ready to assemble furniture, they might end up falling in last because of their shitty communicator who is literally not able to convey simple instructions. (yes, this actually happened in the test)

One test judged the subjects at their speed of getting ready, to see if men or women are faster at getting ready. While most elements of this test were just fine, the part I took issue with was that they did this test without regard to social convention. They told the subjects they were going on a field trip and to get ready by a certain time. Then, they gave them many things to get distracted by, like refreshments to pack with them, a menu to preorder lunch from, and so on.  The part that upsets me about this test is that they ignored social convention entirely, to the point that subjects were judged based on their conventional actions and expectations more than their actual speed at getting ready. The buses promptly shut their doors and left at the time they were supposed to but there was no final call to get on the buses. In general, when a group is to be taken somewhere by bus, there will be an announcement to load up and leave. You could clearly see many of the subjects were ready to go and were just standing around talking while they waited for fellow subjects to finish getting ready. I have no doubt that, if given a final call, most of them would have loaded up within a couple minutes. However, they were relying on the social convention of announcing departure and were therefore, left behind entirely (for a nonexistent field trip). These people who were left behind were counted as being late and not making the time cutoff. If one were to look at the social element of this situation, if everyone there believed there would be a warning before departure, the fact that 24 to 14 women to men were loaded onto the buses at departure doesn’t necessarily indicate the women were faster to get ready. It seems to me that it’s more likely to indicate anxiety at being late and a belief that they need not impede on anything lest they be reprimanded or have social consequences for taking too long - something women are frequently bullied for. There’s also the chance that many who boarded without final call are more introverted or antisocial. Plus, we can’t forget to include the people who have anxiety about seating. If someone is overweight, has joint pain, or has social anxiety, they will be more likely to board early to get a seat they feel comfortable in. If they had counted up all of the people socializing and waiting on the sidewalks nearby, they may have found that there were more men who were ready to board up at a moment’s notice. I’m not saying I think men are faster to get ready, I’m just saying that we can’t know based on who boarded without a final call. If people believe they will have a last minute chance to board, a large number of them will take the last few minutes to socialize with their new friends until they’re told they have to board. Therefore, this test cannot be considered conclusive without counting and including the people who were ready and not boarded as a third subset.

Honestly, I could go on and on about how sensationalist and unscientific this show is, but I just don’t have 6 more hours to contribute to digging up every single flaw with it. There’s A Lot.

My point is, if you feel like watching this show, which I don’t necessarily discourage inherently, I just beg you to go into it with a critical eye. Enjoy the fun of it and the social aspects, but please don’t rely on the information provided and please don’t spread it as fact, because it’s not.

It’s entertainment, not science.

#100 humans #netflix #tv #show #science #scientific research #research #studies #study #studyblr #statistics #stats #sociology #data #netflix original #analysis #review #netflix review #show review #tv review #ghostpost #logical fallacy #logic #correlation #causation

[a-queer-seminarian]

we are taught to interpret Esau’s trading of his birthright for a bowl of stew as impulsiveness, even (in Christian language) as a ‘weakness of the flesh.’ He chooses instant gratification over the farther off but far more valuable thing, and thus proves himself unworthy of his firstborn status and all it entails -- Abraham’s wealth and social power, but also Abraham’s relationship with God.

i don’t believe that.

Esau gave in to Jacob’s demand because he knew that Jacob would never have the means to compel Esau to make good on his word.

Jacob was physically weaker. Jacob was set to inherit the tiniest fragment of the wealth and resources that Esau would inherit. how on earth would Jacob ever wrest the birthright and the blessing he was owed from Esau?

Esau’s ‘crime’ here is less impulsiveness, and more a trust in the status quo. his world of patriarchy and primogeniture promised him his inheritance, whether he was a good man or bad, an honest man or a liar. he could tell his younger brother whatever Jacob wanted to hear, but down the road he could trust that their father would bestow the blessing on Esau anyway.

his reliance on the status quo is what allows Esau to hand over his birthright so easily -- because he knows that merely saying it’s Jacob’s now does not make it so.

Esau’s great failing is that he assumes that his culture’s will is God’s will.

the problem for Esau is that God does not play by human rules.

____________

in the Book of Genesis and throughout the rest of scripture, we see God working within the bounds of cultural assumptions and norms, rolling with the binary systems that human societies construct -- right up to the point where Xe doesn’t.

In The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, Jewish scholar Joy Ladin focuses on the elements of gender inherent to the system of primogeniture that places the firstborn Esau over the secondborn Jacob in every way. To her, biblical maleness comes in different “flavors” -- the roles expected of a firstborn son are different from those assigned to non-firstborn sons. She says,

“Jacob and Esau are both male and are born almost simultaneously, but they are assigned at birth to very different gender roles. Because Esau emerges from the womb first, he is considered the firstborn, heir not only to Isaac’s worldly possessions but also to the relationship with God that Isaac inherited from his father, Abraham. Though Jacob is born holding onto his brother’s heel, he is considered the second-born, expected to accept the authority of his older brother, who, after their father’s death, will be the head of the family. Like the gender binary, this law of inheritance, called ‘primogeniture,’ creates a lifelong, life-determining binary division between males who are and those who aren’t firstborn sons. And like the gender binary, primogeniture turns biology, in this case birth order, into destiny. The way male children are raised, the roles they are assigned, and the futures toward which they are steered are determined by whether they are or aren’t firstborn sons.” (p. 36)

Esau has grown up understanding that his inheritance is his destiny. It’s what he’s been born for, what he’s been raised for, what he is entitled to. Why would he believe that he would ever have to make good on his silly promise to Jacob to hand over that destiny? It’s set in stone, inviolable.

at least it is in the eyes of men. but not to God.

“If God were committed to the gender binary idea that people are unchangeably defined by the gender roles we are assigned at birth, then either Esau would have been destined to inherit Isaac’s relationship with God, or Jacob would have been born first. But as God reveals to Rebekah before the twins are born, God intends for the younger brother to usurp the elder, prenatally linking God’s blessing to trans experience. (Ladin, pp. 37-38)

in the ancient past and in the present day, countless roles get assigned to us as soon as -- or even before -- we exist the womb. biology is presumed destiny in so many ways: our gender, our race, the class and geopolitical location and family into which we are born, supposedly map out what our personalities will be, how our lives will go. and certainly these things do shape us, both by nature and nurture -- generational traumas come packed into our very cells, while our environment and how others treat us based on our assigned roles impact how we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

but even so, even so, biology is not destiny. especially not if God has any say in the matter.

for God is the great binary breaker, no respecter of persons or prejudices, unbeholden to the status quo. indeed, God almost seems to delight in upending our assumptions about who is blessed. secondborn sons and eunuchs, women and disabled persons, impoverished persons and disenfranchised peoples -- these are the ones whom God selects, again and again, to be recipients and agents of divine blessing. “blessed are the poor;” “the last shall be first.”

Esau assumes that biology, his status assigned based on birth order, is destiny. he does not fear his younger brother, who is rendered powerless by their culture to claim what he is promised in a moment of hunger. and probably this is safer for Jacob -- because when Esau does finally realize, too late, that Jacob is a real threat, Esau becomes murderously angry.

when Isaac is duped into giving Jacob his blessing after all, Jacob cannot stick around to claim the wealth and status that comes with it -- he must flee, or die under Esau’s hand.

i wonder if some of the violence we see in our time, and across every time and place, stems from the same kind of rage and fear that Esau experiences:

the rage of the ones who are raised to believe the world belongs to them, that they are entitled to certain blessings and privileges, only for the truth to pounce on them unexpectedly -- the shocking truth that biology is not destiny, that they are not inherently superior, that what they thought would be theirs without question might could be snatched from them after all.

the divine right to rule. manifest destiny. the ‘white man’s burden.’

white men who assume they are entitled to white women, so that the mere thought of a Black man winning a woman’s heart is enough to incite them to brutality.

white women who understand that the police are their personal body guards, to call down upon the bodies of Black adults and even Black children on a whim -- and are indignant in the rare circumstance that they are told otherwise.

men and white people who expect the best jobs and properties to go to them, so that anyone else advancing over them seems an appalling injustice.

cis women who perceive trans women as “invading their spaces;” cishet couples who think LGBTQ/queer couples ruin “the sanctity of marriage;” persons who are accustomed to being accommodated without even realizing it sneering at “safe spaces” and trigger warnings....

and on and on.

Esau had every reason to assume that his biology determined his destiny -- that he could make an impulsive promise, make a big mistake, and everything would still turn out in his favor. he was born into a world that told him so every day -- even that God sanctioned these human assumptions and systems. But God does not.

“God’s disruptions of gender in these stories make it clear that even the gender roles that matter most to human beings are not sacred to God. ...God in the Torah uses gender, but is not bound by it. On the one hand, God depends on gender to transmit the covenant across time and space, so that even after hundreds of generations, Jews will still see themselves as children of Abraham. On the other hand, God disrupts gender as a way of making God’s power and presence known. ...In these stories, faithfulness to gender has little to do with faithfulness to God. In fact, God counts on the fact that people are not bound by gender roles. The covenant with Abraham is founded on Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob’s embrace of trans experience: their willingness to live outside the gender roles they were born to and become the kinds of people they are not supposed to be.” (Ladin, pp. 57-58)

Faithfulness to human constructs has little to do with faithfulness to God. God blesses us when we can imagine beyond the narrative we are assigned -- as Jacob does in this story where he demands a birthright the world does not intend for him....and as Esau eventually does.

In Genesis 33, Esau catches up to Jacob after decades apart -- and Jacob expects violence. He sends gifts of livestock to Esau and conceals his most cherished family at the back of his huge household. But to his bewilderment, Esau is no longer murderously angry at having “lost” what he grew up assuming he was entitled to -- he rushes to his brother, throws his arms around Jacob’s neck, and weeps.

Esau was raised believing that he would own everything, and his brother nothing -- that Jacob would be one of many members of Esau’s household, subservient to him. But now, he does not even feel entitled to the livestock that Jacob offers him: “I already have plenty, my brother. Keep what’s yours.”

Jacob is relieved by this unexpected reconciliation, exclaiming to Esau that “Seeing your face is like seeing God’s face, since you’ve accepted me so warmly!” He never expected Esau to accept what Jacob has known all along -- that biology is not destiny; that neither of them are bound to human constructs like birthright; that they can live a different way than the way prescribed to them, one in which both of them thrive.

___________

now, this story is by no means perfect. Jacob was able to imagine bigger for himself, to escape the destiny assigned to him -- but he does not imagine big enough. he does not use his new station to liberate others.

he becomes a patriarch -- assimilates into patriarchy and the power to own other human beings, to rule over every member of his household, rather than challenging the whole system that once oppressed him. i am reminded of trans persons, persons of color, women, who once they manage to acquire power for themselves never use it to help their fellow marginalized persons up. they land positions of power and use that power to oppress others as they were once oppressed, rather than using it to try to forge a new, better system for all.

Jacob the second-born becomes Jacob the patriarch. his household will be fraught with all the woes that come with this system that stifles all within it. his wives will hate each other and battle each other for what little power they can grasp. his sons will do the same, subjecting the younger Joseph to violence when, like Jacob, this little sibling dares to dream of being something greater than what his society assigns him.

what if Jacob could have imagined bigger? what if he had used his one fragment of shining clarity about how patriarchy and primogeniture stifled his true self to empower others, not only himself?

what if we could imagine bigger? what new and beautiful world could we build?

#bible study #joy ladin #jacob and esau #genesis 25 #what do you think? #sermon notes #just some half baked musings so far so i'd love feedback #summer 2020 #log #grace internship #primogeniture #essays

[lastsonlost]

After the first episode of "The Mandalorian," the Disney Plus series in the Star Wars universe that became the top streaming hit of 2019, aired on the platform, some Twitter users expressed frustration at how few women spoke, and how few female characters there were in general.

Some of those who tweeted, including well-known feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, were met with dogpiling and waves of harassment across social media platforms. 

The harassment largely stemmed from anti-feminist Star Wars fan accounts who rounded up and highlighted tweets under the pretense that those complaining were "outraged" social justice warriors trying to tear down a successful Star Wars franchise.

The harassment is just the latest instance of feminist fandom voices being shut down online.

Anita Sarkeesian is no stranger to online harassment,

YEA SHES VERY GOOD AT MAKING THEM.

 being one of the central figures in Gamergate, the online harassment campaign that resulted in her receiving numerous death and rape threats, along with bomb and shooting threats at her events. But even she was surprised at the amount of vitriol her tweet about "The Mandalorian" received.

After watching the first episode of the Star Wars series for Disney Plus, Sarkeesian tweeted asking if she was just tired, or if there wasn't "a single female speaking character in the first episode."

She was exhausted, Sarkeesian told Insider — missing the one scene where a woman spoke and making a typo in her tweet. In the replies, Sarkeesian corrected herself. Then she went to bed. In the morning, the tweet had more than 3,000 replies. It currently has close to 7,000.

"Maybe you should switch to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills... I'm sure you'll find much to relate to there...." one top reply read.

"No wonder you're so tired. They say you should stretch before making such reaches, especially at your age," said another, with more than 1,400 likes of its own.

It's an example of dogpiling, a type of online harassment where, on Twitter, someone's replies outnumber likes and retweets, and are mostly filled with repetitive, hurtful comments.

"It's ironic. Women, especially feminists, get accused of being emotional and angry and all of these things when all we said was 'Hey, I noticed this thing. And it's kind of a problem, and I think it's really bad for our society,'" Sarkeesian told Insider. "If they didn't reply to it, my tweet would have just been gone. They made it a much bigger deal."

Sarkeesian is the most prominent figure facing dogpiling and harassment in response to her criticism of the series, but she's not the only one.

People with and without large Twitter followings, some who are verified and many who are not, have found themselves overwhelmed with anti-feminist replies and messages across platforms after tweeting about how few women are in "The Mandalorian."

Specifically, in the first episode, there's one female character wearing a mask who speaks, and two female characters total, along with a few women spotted as extras in the background of shots. More female characters are expected to play larger roles in future episodes.

"Even if you want to give the show the benefit of the doubt and say there's some big, wild justification that's going to come around in episode 7, it feels wrong that the vast majority of this world is populated by men or male-identified characters," Sarkeesian said.

Star Wars fans have a history of harassing women online when faced with criticism

Online harassment in the Star Wars fandom, particularly of women, is nothing new. Actresses like Daisy Ridley and Kelly Marie Tran of the latest Disney-owned Star Wars trilogy have recently talked about the negative aspects of the Star Wars community.

Ridley, who stars in the newest Star Wars trilogy as Rey, "cut off" her Facebook and Instagram accounts "like a Skywalker limb" due to harassment, and Tran faced racist and misogynistic harassment after appearing as the first woman of color in a leading role in the Star Wars franchise.

"It wasn't their words, it's that I started to believe them," Tran wrote for The New York Times after deleting her Instagram posts in 2018. "Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories."

In the case of "The Mandalorian," almost anyone who tweets about the show from a feminist perspective is at risk of being targeted, because Star Wars fan accounts are rounding up tweets that criticize things like the amount of time it took for a woman to speak in the first episode.

One account rounded up 33 of these tweets with the caption "SJW's are outraged over the 'lack of female characters' in the first 2 episodes of The Mandalorian. A show with 3 female characters. Feminists only care about counting the number of minutes women are on screen in Star Wars."

Insider spoke with two people whose tweets were featured in the round-up, who said their tweets were mischaracterized, inspiring a wave of online hate.

Both of the people who spoke with Insider said they liked "The Mandalorian" and will continue watching it, but wanted to point out that it could be better in terms of female representation.

One woman who spoke to Insider anonymously, because she is trying to distance her name from the situation, says the harassment began several days after she posted her initial tweet about a lack of women in the first episode.

After receiving anti-feminist replies on Twitter, she also started getting harassed across platforms, in part because other anti-feminist Star Wars accounts picked up screenshots of her tweet after it was first included in the round-up and distributed to an even wider audience, including on Instagram.

One person even left a violent message for her in the email submission form on her professional website. It reads "People like you don't deserve a f---ing opinion, but at least I'm glad you can voice it. Doesn't prevent me from calling you f---ing r-----ed for spouting your misandry. HOW DOES IT F---ING FEEL C---? I hope you expire and never have children."

"I had to put everything on private, for my own mental health," she told Insider. "I just had to shut down my profile. I will never, ever, ever tweet about Star Wars again. And I love baby Yoda so much. But I can't. They won. Life's too short for me to fight this fight."

Even after setting her accounts to private, she was inundated by hundreds of follow requests on Twitter, along with DMs sent to her private Instagram.

Those who tweeted about female representation in 'The Mandalorian' stand by their words, despite the harassment

The person who tweeted the round-up of critics didn't want to share any identifying information with Insider, but did stand behind the tweet, and said they didn't participate in or encourage harassment, but the reach of the account became clear once Insider asked for comment in the replies. Within a few hours, a video had been uploaded about this article (which had not been written yet) to YouTube from a channel with more than 130,000 subscribers.

The video in question has been viewed more than 33,000 times and highlights the mentality in at least one corner of the Star Wars fandom that is male-dominated and is aggressive toward diverse media representation.

"What SJWs do is as soon as this kind of thing happens, they identify [the Twitter account that posted the round-up] as hostile to their narrative [...] I would call them left-wing garbage," the voiceover of YouTuber ComicArtistPro Secrets says in the video. "They are going to come in and write an article smearing [the Twitter account], 'Don't you dare shine a light on these cockroaches in such an effective way ever again,'" The YouTuber mocked, referring to the feminist critics as the "cockroaches" in the situation.

"This is a strategy that these sorts of anti-progressive, very regressive cyber mobs have used for years," Sarkeesian said. "They try to use social justice language against us when we try to bring these issues up but it's so transparent and so obvious what they're trying to do, by undermining our point. It's very bad faith."

Writer and programmer David Ely, a male who's tweet was included in the roundup, told Insider that his replies were pretty tame in comparison to Sarkeesian and the other woman Insider spoke to, although he did receive one unspecified death threat from an account that he blocked.

"Part of the response seems to come from a belief that Star Wars needn't be political. That it be pure entertainment," Ely told Insider. "Star Wars is a made-up universe. If gender inequality exists there, it's either on purpose, or because the creator's biases meant they didn't notice it. Either way, that's political."

Sarkeesian also stood by her original point that "The Mandalorian" should have more female characters, and said a lot of the negative response was because there's so much pushback from people who have historically been over-represented on the screen, and are hostile to the changing expectations for diverse characters that represent the diverse Star Wars fanbase.

"We are so accustomed to male-dominated narratives that it's easy to not even notice glaring omissions," she said. "Unlike if the entire cast had been women, I suspect everyone would have immediately noticed that regardless of what one's opinion would be on that casting choice."

MAYBE ITS NOT FOR YOU ANITA....

[catgirlthighhighs]

A serious post. cw abuse, mental health

Context: I posted this as a comment under Katzun’s video where they came out as trans. I highly recommend watching it, but be prepared to have emotions.

At the end of the video, Kat says that they are trans and such, then says “Who are you?” It’s powerful.

This is a response to that.

"Who are you?" I'm me. I.. have been fairly certain that I am trans for almost a year now. I can't believe it's been a year. 

 I started questioning last October. 

I found a subreddit known as r/egg_irl. They have memes about being closeted. It hit me like a truck. 

 I started having mental breakdowns on the bus cause it couldn't be me, what would they say, my dad would kill me. Because people like that were disgusting, a thing to be made fun of, to be ridiculed, a punchline, a tragedy. 

I hated myself for considering it. 

 If I was that way, that would make me gay. I'd always seen myself as not gay. I couldn't be. It wasn't me. 

 I joined the egg_irl discord. And what I found was the first place I'd ever been where you could be whatever you felt like. That these thoughts were okay. I'd had to equivalent to that up until this point.  It was nice. 

I cracked on New Years. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. I told my friends. A few anyways. They were supportive, and it was amazing, for a few months.

Then the virus happened, you know. And my parents found my discord, that used my new name. 

 I should talk about my parents, they aren't great. It took me a long time to realize they were technically abusive. So yeah, that's a thing. My dad's a super conservative bar owner. My stepmom is manipulative. My mom lives a few hundred miles away, and my stepdad's in a home. 

They found my discord, and I was forced to explain the name thing. They thought I did it as an attempt to hide the account from them. 

They were surprised to say the least. My dad immediately spouted some shit about it being society's fault. Stepmom went on about how she wanted me to happy. I expected dad to be the worst, but stepmom has been literal hell. 

I talked to my math teacher, DCF got called, shit went down. I ended up in a Baker Act facility, then residential. Got sent home cause insurance stopped paying. 

I wasn't allowed to speak to that math teacher ever again. Was sent to a catholic school, so I wouldn't be able to see him. I ended up dropping out, cause I couldn't handle it. Been working ever since. 

That discord server has been my savior through all this. I wouldn't have made it. I met some very important people on there. People that have changed my view of the world. People who helped me see what I was subject to was not okay.

 So yeah, I'm not really sure how to end this. I say that like this had structure in the first place. 

I just want to let everyone know this video made me cry. I'll treasure this, I think. 

That's me, a queer, trans, lesbian, autistic person trying to make it. I love you all. 

[If you read this deep, kudos]

[newstfionline]

Headlines: Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Radioactive lunar soil (AP) New measurements from a Chinese-German team analyzing data from the Chang’e 4 lander on the far side of the moon finds that the lunar surface is radioactive as all heck, with astronauts getting 200 to 1,000 times more radiation on the moon than experienced on Earth, or about five to 10 times the amount absorbed by passengers on a trans-Atlantic flight. This is not a problem for a quick visit, but if the objective is to land astronauts and have them settle in for a bit, they could sustain sufficient damage to cause health problems down the line.

Coronavirus pandemic on the brink of a grim new milestone: 1 million dead (Washington Post) The covid-19 death toll is on the brink of hitting 1 million. That’s as many as live in San Jose, Calif.; Volgograd, Russia; or Qom, Iran. It is a disease that peppers grieving families with indignities—no funerals, hurried burials, barely a chance to mourn. It is a pandemic that has divided countries from within, yet unites the world in common anguish and loss. In the United States, a son in Sacramento can only listen to a description of his mother’s burial in New Jersey via his daughter, the only relative permitted to attend. The dead are poor—in an Indian village, a man’s family borrows a wooden cart that a neighbor used to sell fish and carries his body to his funeral pyre. And the dead are workers—in Brazil, a man who works in a meatpacking plant does everything he can think of to protect himself, yet he brings the bug home and now his wife is dead. Across the oceans and into the biggest cities and the tiniest villages, the coronavirus has torn apart families, left children hungry, evaporated jobs and wrecked economies.

As Covid-19 Closes Schools, the World’s Children Go to Work (NYT) Every morning in front of the Devaraj Urs public housing apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city of Tumakuru, India, a swarm of children pours into the street. They are not going to school. Instead of backpacks or books, each child carries a filthy plastic sack. These children, from 6 to 14 years old, have been sent by their parents to rummage through garbage dumps littered with broken glass and concrete shards in search of recyclable plastic. In many parts of the developing world, school closures put children on the streets. Families are desperate for money. Children are an easy source of cheap labor. While the United States and other developed countries debate the effectiveness of online schooling, hundreds of millions of children in poorer countries lack computers or the internet and have no schooling at all. United Nations officials estimate that at least 24 million children will drop out and that millions could be sucked into work.

Trump’s tax revelation could tarnish image that fueled rise (AP) The bombshell revelations that President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for office and paid no income taxes at all in many others threaten to undercut a pillar of his appeal among blue-collar voters and provide a new opening for his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, on the eve of the first presidential debate. Trump has worked for decades to build an image of himself as a hugely successful businessman—even choosing “mogul” as his Secret Service code name. But The New York Times on Sunday revealed that he paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he won the presidency, and in 2017, his first year in office. He paid no income taxes whatsoever in 10 of the previous 15 years, largely because he reported losing more money than he made, according to the Times, which obtained years’ worth of tax return data that the president had long fought to keep private. At this point in the race, with voting already underway in many states and so few voters still undecided, it is unclear whether any new discoveries about Trump would make any difference. Trump’s support over the years has remained remarkably consistent, polls over the course of his presidency have found.

Ransomware Attacks Take On New Urgency Ahead of Vote (NYT) A Texas company that sells software that cities and states use to display results on election night was hit by ransomware last week, the latest of nearly a thousand such attacks over the past year against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems. But the attack on Tyler Technologies, which continued on Friday night with efforts by outsiders to log into its clients’ systems around the country, was particularly rattling less than 40 days before the election. While Tyler does not actually tally votes, it is used by election officials to aggregate and report them in at least 20 places around the country—making it exactly the kind of soft target that the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I. and United States Cyber Command worry could be struck by anyone trying to sow chaos and uncertainty on election night.

Massacre in Mexican bar leaves 11 people dead (Reuters) A massacre in a bar left 11 people dead on Sunday, Mexican authorities said, as the country grapples with a record homicide rate despite the government’s pledge to stop gang violence. The attorney general’s office of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato said the bodies of seven men and four women were found in the bar in the early hours of Sunday morning in the city of Jaral del Progreso. Guanajuato, a major carmaking hub, has become a recurring scene of criminal violence in Mexico, ravaged by a turf war between the local Santa Rosa de Lima gang and the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Backers turn on Britain’s PM (AFP) Boris Johnson, called dejected and dogmatic even by his partisans, is enduring a torrid time in his tumultuous premiership, and worse may lie ahead. The coronavirus pandemic is testing all world leaders. But Britain has suffered more than any other country in Europe, and now the prime minister faces a revolt by Conservative colleagues who accuse him of governing by diktat. If the Covid-19 crisis has dictated the need for emergency policies on the hoof, the government has had plenty of time to prepare for life outside the European Union. But there too, an air of mutiny hangs over parliament after Johnson picked a Brexit fight with Brussels that puts Britain on the wrong side of international law. “Conservative MPs didn’t elect Boris Johnson as their leader because they thought he’d make a great prime minister,” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told AFP. “They elected him as their leader because they were desperate to win an election,” he said. “There’s probably always a hope that someone will grow into the job. There’s some alarm that hasn’t happened.”

Britain is part of 'arc of instability' around the EU, chairman says (Reuters) Brexit Britain is part of an “arc of instability” that has emerged around the European Union, the bloc’s chairman said on Monday, ranking London’s decision to leave the EU along with threats from Turkey, Russia, Libya and Syria. “An arc of instability has developed all around us,” European Council President Charles Michel, who chairs EU summits, said in an online address for the Bruegel think-tank. “The truth is, the British face a dilemma. What model of society do they want??” Britain left the EU, the world’s largest trading bloc, on Jan. 31 after 47 years of partnership to the huge regret of EU leaders who now insist that London accept the economic consequences of looser ties. The process of negotiating a new trade relationship and finding Britain’s new place in the world is proving complicated and has revealed divisions within political parties, society and the government itself.

India’s confirmed coronavirus tally reaches 6 million cases (AP) India’s confirmed coronavirus tally reached 6 million cases on Monday, keeping the country second to the United States in number of reported cases since the pandemic began. New infections in India are currently being reported faster than anywhere else in the world. The world’s second-most populous country is expected to become the pandemic’s worst-hit country in coming weeks, surpassing the U.S., where more than 7.1 million infections have been reported. Yet even as infections mount, India has the highest number of recovered patients in the world. More than 5 million people have recovered from COVID-19 in India and the country’s recovery rate stands at 82%, according to the Health Ministry.

Fighting Flares Between Azerbaijan and Armenia (NYT) Fighting that was reported to be fierce broke out on Sunday between Azerbaijan and Armenia and quickly escalated, with the two sides claiming action with artillery, helicopter and tanks along a disputed border. The military action centered on the breakaway province of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian separatist enclave in Azerbaijan. Ethnic tensions and historical grievances in the mountainous area north of Turkey and Iran have made kindling for conflict for decades. The fighting on Sunday, however, was reportedly more severe than the typical periodic border skirmishes, and both governments used military language describing the events as war. By early afternoon, Azerbaijan said its forces had advanced to capture seven villages and had surrounded an unspecified number of Armenian troops it was threatening to kill if they did not surrender. Armenia claimed it was holding fast and had destroyed Azerbaijani tanks and helicopters. Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister, declared a state of emergency and mobilized the country’s male population. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose country has long been at odds with Armenia, strongly backed Azerbaijan. Russia, on the other hand, is a long-standing ally of Armenia, and it has supplied the country with enormous supplies of arms since the end of its war with Azerbaijan in 1994.

Rabbis ponder COVID-19 queries of ultra-Orthodox Jewish life (AP) Must an observant Jew who has lost his sense of taste and smell because of COVID-19 recite blessings for food and drink? Can one bend the metal nosepiece of a surgical face mask on the Sabbath? May one participate in communal prayers held in a courtyard from a nearby balcony? Months into the coronavirus pandemic, ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel are addressing questions like these as their legions of followers seek advice on how to maintain proper Jewish observance under the restrictions of the outbreak. Social distancing and nationwide lockdowns have become a reality around the globe in 2020, but for religious Jews they can further complicate rites and customs that form the fabric of daily life in Orthodox communities. Many of these customs are performed in groups and public gatherings, making it especially challenging for the religious public to maintain its lifestyle. One religious publisher in Jerusalem released a book in July with over 600 pages of guidance from 46 prominent rabbis. Topics range from socially distanced circumcisions (allowed) to Passover Seders over Zoom (forbidden) to praying with a quorum from a balcony (it’s complicated).

#headlines #news

[fandumb-thoughts]

Rating: General

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Harry Potter - JK Rowling

Relationships: Sirius Black/James Potter, Sirius Black/Peter Pettigrew, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin

Characters:  Sirius Black, James Potter, Peter Pettigrew, Remus Lupin

Additional Tags: polyamory, poly trans Sirius Black, Hindi James Potter, animagus choosing, animagus, explaining why Peter is the Way He Is, marauders, fix it fic, start of a fix it fic, marauders era, Peter Pettigrew isn’t awful, that’s just the tea, well he is awful, only he’s not awful as a fifteen year old, cuz like, he’s just a kid, and he was one of their friends, ignoring that is ignoring the magnitude of the betrayal, Sirius has a shitty homelife, but it’s kinda background?, werewolves and shit, the war is happening in the background, domestic marauders

Language: English

Series: Part 1 of “Choices (are uniting)”, Part 1 of “A Hundred Divides (make a piece whole)”

~~~~~~~~~

Sirius was the first one to see his potential animagus forms.

He dreamt of a tree with bark that was blackened like coal. It was twisted, and gnarled, and rotted at the core. But above the tree sprouted young and pure leaves that shone through with sun and shaded the ground below.

There was a rabbit near the edge of the roots that was too terrified to move, erratic eye movements showing he was caught debating. Bolt and hope to outrun what endangered him, or hide in the roots and hope to avoid detection.

There was a snake that lay coiled at the base of the tree, half hidden in a deep hollow. His eyes glinted a familiar, unnatural blue-grey.

There was also a tiger, proud and lazy, dangerous claws glinting obsidian in the sunlight. He lay far away from any roots--away from the protection of the shade, farthest from the other creatures.

There was also a Grim, standing right before Sirius. Or rather, a large black dog that looked uncomfortably like a Grim. His eyes were blue-grey, like the snakes, but instead of unnatural it seemed rather more striking. As Sirius looked at him, he sat and wagged his tail, head tilting and tongue lolling from his mouth.

When Sirius awoke to Remus nudging him awake for breakfast, he debated on what he should say. Tell them he saw that he was still, somewhere deep down, part Slytherin? That part of him was skittish and terrified of what his future held, that some days he wanted to run and run and run and others he wanted to hunker down and weather the storm? That part of him was powerful but lonely, and content in the way it was? That the strongest piece seemed to be a loyal, obedient dog that took a rather uncoincidental appearance of a Grim?

“Are you alright?” Peter asked, bumping their shoulders and tangling their fingers together over the silverware.

Sirius fought the urge to pull away. There was no reason for him to get so flighty.

“Of course,” he said, stiffly.

Janmesh narrowed his eyes at him. Whenever Sirius was uncomfortable he reverted back to a very formal way of speaking, as had been ingrained in him. Shit.

“I just-I had the dream last night,” Sirius admitted. It was the final step to the animagus process, just in time for the full moon coming up in a week and a half. All there was left would be to choose, and then the transformations should be possible.

Janmesh leaned forward excitedly, nearly sparkling with excitement (or maybe that was just the water he’d shaken out of his still-wet-from-the-shower hair a minute ago, clinging to his skin). “Really? What did you see?”

Peter squeezed Sirius’ fingers, silently supporting him. He was sensitive like that, he understood that whatever Sirius had seen had shaken him up. It was a sweet gesture, just like Janmesh’s excitement was sweet in an entirely different way: it was a distraction. And Sirius loved ignoring his problems.

With a reassuring squeeze to Peter’s fingers he made an attempt to match Janmesh’s enthusiasm. “There was a tiger, a rabbit, a-uh, a snake, and a big black dog.”

Janmesh ignored Sirius’s stumble over the ‘my animagus form could be a snake,’ like a good friend/maybe-significant-other/whatever-the-fuck-they-are should do. “Really? Which called to you the most?”

“The dog was right in front of me, and seemed the friendliest.”

“You’ll have to focus on that when you go to bed tonight, then, and drink-”

“What are you talking about?” Remus asked, practically flinging himself onto the bench next to Janmesh, reaching blindly for the kettle. 

“Divinition,” Janmesh answered casually, automatically pouring Remus a cup and pushing it into his hands so that he wouldn’t knock something over or burn himself. “Peter has a dream journal as an assignment this month.”

Remus mumbled something to indicate that he’d heard, too tired to continue the conversation. Sirius thought he ought to start studying before late at night, and go to sleep at a decent enough time so he’d be able to function before noon.

“Speaking of that, I’m going to be late,” Peter squeaked out. He was so terrible at lying it was cute. “See ya guys.”

Sirius twisted his neck so Peter could press a quick kiss to his cheek before rushing off to his first class. “Bye, babe.”

Janmesh grinned. “You’re so cute.”

“Fuck off, it’s better than being starry-eyed over someone who doesn’t even look at you.”

Janmesh placed his hand over his heart, and dramatically swooned into Remus. “How callous! You wound me!”

Remus elbowed him, knocking him to the floor. They both laughed. Remus glared through foggy, baggy eyes.

“C’mon, Moony, off to Runes for us,” Sirius prompted, leaning across the table to push a piece of buttered toast and bacon into Remus’s mouth before he could curse at him for interrupting his morning caffeine.

“See you in Charms!” Janmesh called after them. Lucky bastard, the Arithmancy classroom was closest to the Great Hall. Then again, Arithmancy first thing in the morning.

~~~

When Sirius fell asleep to the effects of the binding potion that night he thought of all of the options that had been presented to him.

The rabbit was the first thing to greet him.

“We’re scared,” said the rabbit. He had Sirius’ voice, but it sounded younger. Sirius’s blue-grey eyes seemed trapped within the rabbit’s face. “We’ve always been scared.”

Sirius nodded. It was true.

“It’s all we’ve ever known, for a long time. It’s comfortable.”

And it was comfortable, in a familiar sort of way. Sirius had grown up in his mother’s house, and his family’s world. He knew how to navigate it and avoid trouble, and how to run from it when he met it. It would be so easy to silently struggle and stay right in the position he’d been born into.

“I don’t want to be that person anymore,” Sirius told the rabbit.

“Very well.”

The rabbit vanished, and next there was the snake.

“We were raised to be this,” said the snake. His voice was smoother, refined in the way all purebloods were forced to be. Sirius’s eyes fit within the snake’s face but didn’t belong.

“I’m not a Slytherin,” Sirius protested. “I’m a Gryffindor.”

“That’s not the only indication of character,” the snake said. “We have it in us. We could do great things.”

Sirius could do great things within pureblood society. He was higher in line for lordship than any of his other cousins, aside from Alaric, and Alaric was a Prewett in name. The chances of the family magic claiming him as heir after his mother Lucretia were fairly low. It would likely go to Sirius’ father, and then Sirius if he hadn’t married out of the family at that point. He could have power. He could-

“That’s not who I want to be,” Sirius told the snake.

“Very well.”

The rabbit vanished, and next there was the tiger.

“We don’t need anyone else,” said the tiger. His voice sounded old and arrogant. Sirius’s eyes were wrong and disjointed in the tiger’s face.

“Yes we do,” Sirius argued.

If tigers could smirk, the tiger would be doing so.

Sirius wanted to squirm under his stare. He-he was self reliant, wasn’t he? The only people that knew even close to everything about him weren’t his friends, or even his boyfriend….s. It was his cousins and brother. In their own strange way, they stuck together. Even then the information shared was only enough so that everyone was able to get by in the strict way of living within their family and marriages and Hogwarts house. Sirius could shut himself down completely around his friends, and close himself off from his cousins and do things all on his own. No expectations to live up to, no rules to follow, free-

“I don’t want to be alone,” he told the tiger. He didn’t know if he fully believe even himself.

The tiger was judging him. He didn’t believe Sirius fully either, but it was Sirius’s choice to make.

“Very well.”

The tiger vanished, and next there was the Grim.

“We want things to be different,” said the Grim.

Sirius nodded, almost shaking with relief. All of the other options seemed to be rooted in staying right where he was, doing slightly different variations of what he was already being forced to do.

“No matter what happens, we need to go with our heart and stick with what we know is true,” said the Grim. His voice was Sirius’s voice. Sirius’s eyes were too intelligent for a dog, but they were fitting.

“Yes,” agreed Sirius, reaching to make contact with the Grim and bind his soul to him.

The dog stepped back. “There is danger in blind loyalty. Do you accept these dangers, know of them? Do you believe I am the best piece of you?”

Sirius thought of the rabbit, and the snake, and the tiger. 

“Yes,” he answered honestly.

“Very well.”

~~~

Janmesh saw an elephant, and a squirrel, and an owl, and a stag.

He dreamt of a river bank, the water slow moving and vast, and a grassy bank. The sun made the water shine and the grass alight a vibrant green.

In the water was an Asian elephant, pouring water over himself with his trunk. He was powerful and proud, uncaring to the other animals about. He had no reason to worry, so he didn’t.

The squirrel scurried between the small trees and bushes along the water’s edge, making cheerful noises as he played, unheading of the predator that sat on one of the branches.

The owl ignored the squirrel. He was a barn owl, pale-moon face staring smugly down at Janmesh. He was above the rest, arrogant in his full view of the world.

Then, closest to him at the edge of the water was a stag. His antlers weren’t quite full grown, but they gleamed in the sunlight. He watched over the squirrel and the uncaring elephant and the arrogant owl. The cautious protector.

Janmesh woke up to Peter screaming.

He bolted upright and shoved aside the partially-opened drapes around his bed. Peter was knocked to the ground, a great black dog with gangly legs and too-big paws standing on top of him and attacking his face.

No, not attacking. Licking.

“Sirius!?” Janmesh cried out, elated. The dog leapt off of Peter and bounded up to Janmesh, tongue lolling out of his mouth, tail wagging.

“What in the bloody fuck is going on?” Remus growled, poking his head from his drapes, squinting.

“Oh, um-” Before Janmesh could come up with either an excuse or begin to explain that they had been attempting to become animagi since the past summer and had neglected to tell him as a surprise, Remus continued.

“Just get the dog out of here and let me sleep until I physically need to be up.” And with that Remus snapped the drapes closed.

“Dramatic,” Peter remarked in a whisper. Janmesh struggled not to laugh. Sirius-the-dog thumped his tail loudly against the bedpost. Remus let out an ominous growl.

“C’mon,” Janmesh told them and ushered them out of the dorm and up the boys staircase. The few early-risers gave Sirius some odd looks but decided not to comment. Upon reaching one of the empty rooms towards the top of Gryffindor tower, Peter locked the door behind them.

Sirius ran around the room, jumping and knocking into things. Janmesh had seen toddlers that were more coordinated, but at least Sirius could functionally move.

After three loops, he stopped and shifted back into his human form.

His very naked human form.

For all of five seconds Sirius didn’t seem to realize, so caught up in the excitement. “I did it! I did it firs-oh fuck.”

Peter covered his eyes with a squeak and a blush. It wasn’t that they hadn’t seen anything before (living in a room with each other for over four years would ensure that), however, it was very rare that it was Sirius being unclothed--even more so since he’d openly admitted to fancying all three of them. 

Janmesh valiantly decided to pretend that nothing too-far from ordinary was happening. He wasn’t going to check his...maybe, almost boyfriend out, no matter how much he wanted to. He also wasn’t going to look away, making it blatantly obvious that he wanted to check him out.

“Might’ve been the first one to shift, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be automatically able to keep your clothes, mate.”

Janmesh forced himself to focus on Sirius’s face, which was tinting pink high along the cheekbones. Even though he didn’t look down, he could tell Sirius was twisting up to attempt to cover himself up.

“U-ha-um-”

Instead of waiting for a more intelligent response, Janmesh pulled off the nightgown he wore over the flannel sleep pants Remus had introduced to all of them (after years of having his stolen, Remus had just gifted them each two pairs last Christmas and James wore them nearly every night).

Sirius’ blush intensified as he took the offered garment, quickly pulling it over his head.

“He’s decent, Peter, you can stop being scandalized,” Janmesh teased, shoving at Peter.

“Yep,” Peter managed to say, keeping his eyes firmly on the ground.

Sirius wouldn’t make eye contact, either, just as red as Peter. Janmesh’s nightgown was too big on him, and it kept making attempts to slip down his shoulders.

“I had my dream last night!” Janmesh announced, perhaps a bit louder than he meant. 

“Lucky,” Peter mumbled.

“What’d you see?” Sirius asked eagerly.

“An elephant, an owl, a squirrel, and a stag,” Janmesh relayed proudly.

Sirius frowned. “None of those would be quite useful against Moony, would they be? A stag would get eaten, a squirrel and an owl’d be too little, and the elephant would be a touch too dramatic.”

“Hey, the owl could, uh, could be lookout! And the squirrel would probably be good for getting through the Whomping Willow!”

“That’s actually a good idea,” Peter said. “Accuracy levitation is finicky, and it’d be a bit suspicious if any of the professors looked out and saw a stick hovering in midair.”

Sirius spun around Janmesh and Peter as he passed to get to the door. Janmesh attempted to will away the heat in his face at the reminder of how graceful Sirius could be when he wanted to, the aesthetic only intensified at the swirling of the borrowed nightgown. 

“It will also be easier to fit two of us and a squirrel under the cloak, rather than trying to squeeze the three of us.” Sirius opened the door, and the collar of the nightgown finally slipped off his shoulder, exposing the sharp line of his collarbone.

“Huh-yeah!” Peter agreed, hurrying to follow. From his momentary stutter Janmesh knew Peter had likely noticed the same thing he had.

“Squirrel it is, then,” Janmesh confirmed.

~~~

That night Peter dreamed of a black bear, and a blue bird, and a rat, and a wild boar.

He was in a field of raspberry bushes. He couldn’t see the edges of it, but he knew that not too far away there would be a little stone cottage with painted blue shutters. It was his muggle aunt’s place, out in the countryside. The sun was weak, but still bright in the middle of the sky.

The black bear was eating from the bushes. He moved slowly and calmly from bush to push, rolling gate peaceful as it sought out more of the sweet fruit.

The blue bird sat on one of the bushes that had yet to be picked over by the bear. The berries on that particular were full and ripe and red. The bird was jealously guarding the bush from the other animals there.

The rat was hard to see, hidden in the underbrush. He ate the berries from the lowest branches and the ones that had fallen to the ground. They weren’t the beautiful berries from the blue bird’s bush, or the bountiful feast that the black bear had, but they were food and it kept him hidden.

The boar was paying no heed of the black bear, marching right in front of his path and interrupting him when the boar wanted the berries the most. Even the blue bird with his beautiful horde was not enough to stop the boar, though he did not attempt to eat from the bird’s bush, only around it. He was fearless, yet still respectful.

~~~

And here is the divergence. The moment that would define the rest of history--or, at least, the history of the four boys sleeping in the dormitory that night. 

Either Janmesh Puther would choose with his head, or he would choose with his heart. The conversations with his animal pieces would go along a similar strain as Sirius Black’s had. Janmesh would be at the same stream as in his first dream, only he wouldn’t really know that, and the pieces would try to sway him to their side.

The elephant with freckle-spots around his eyes would tell Janmesh that he should reclaim his heritage of an ancient and powerful pureblood, to bask in the benefits of the Puther name. 

The owl with heavy brown markings around his eyes would tell Janmesh that he was capable of great things, if only he stopped lowering himself. 

The squirrel with pale spots around his eyes would tell Janmesh that the world was harsh and cruel, and he had people like his parents and Dumbledore to look out for him. He was still only a child, these things weren’t his to worry about.

The stag with large white marks around his eyes would tell Janmesh that he was in the best position to help his friends. He wasn’t the best duelist, and he wasn’t a genius, and he didn’t even know how to properly cheer someone up when they were unhappy, but he had the name and the wealth and the support that came behind it.

Janmesh would always reject the idea the elephant proposed. He was uncomfortably aware of the privilege he had over Remus and Peter and Lily and Sirius, in some regards. He wouldn’t ever want to ignore that.

Janmesh would instantly chafe against the owl’s suggestion, despite knowing, deep down, that if he were to mature some things could be going much differently in his attempts at wooing Lily and actually talking things over with Sirius. His parents would be less exasperated at his interactions with the rest of pureblood society.

To the squirrel, Janmesh might accept. It would be with trepidation, and the squirrel would make him hear out the stag first, but he would agree. Even if what the stag promised was true, it was not the correct choice for him. His friends need him to be a squirrel and he couldn’t be a stag, or else the very friend he was becoming an animagus form might try and hunt him.

Or, Janmesh might reject the squirrel. He would tell him that he didn’t want to live that way, with his head buried in the sand, that he had an obligation to his friends and if the squirrel wouldn’t allow it, he’d find another way to be there for them. In this version of events, Janmesh would immediately agree with what the stag was saying. He wouldn’t care what warning was issued with, just that he couldn’t live his life the way the squirrel wanted him to.

If Janmesh went with the squirrel, he would wake Sirius first by chittering loudly in his ear, and then wake up Peter in the same way. The three would go to the same empty room as the day before (this time with clothes for Janmesh in tow) and discuss the dream that Peter had.

If Janmesh went with the stag he wouldn’t have a choice on who to wake first as his young antlers would get tangled in the curtains and he’d nearly bring an entire bedpost down while clattering around. Sirius would be forced to explain to Remus why there was an animal in their room for the second morning in a row, inciting a disagreement that wouldn’t end until after the full moon.

If Janmesh went with the squirrel, the next night Peter would go with the wild boar. It had felt the most right to him. It was brave in a way that Peter had tucked way down deep inside, and not oblivious like the bear or jealous like the bird or scheming and afraid like the rat. Remus wouldn’t be woken up by his first transformation because he would have fallen asleep in the common room late the night before, and they would go with the plan to surprise him outside of the Shrieking Shack (in order, of course, to be sure that as a werewolf he wouldn’t attempt to kill them). The next day Remus would be furious at the risk but secretly touched.

If Janmesh went with the stag, the next night Peter would go with the rat. It would make the most sense, if they still needed a small animal, and Remus had shouted about how a dog and a stag was already enough attention, without a third giant animal in the mix. Peter wouldn’t wake anyone up with his transformation, he would sit on his pillow with some strange sort of forlornness that he couldn’t place, until Sirius pulled back the curtains to wake him and offered up a beaming smile at Peter’s accomplishment.

But these are just two possibilities, neither set in stone.

Janmesh had to choose, and his options were difficult, each weighed for their worth with the information that was known.

But choices, as everyone knows, have power.

#harry potter #choices (are uniting) #a hundred divides (can make a piece whole) #my fic #part 1 #sirius black #james potter #peter pettigrew #remus lupin #polyamory #marauders fic #marauders era #marauders #james/sirius #peter/sirius #remus/sirius #hindi james potter #i carve validation and also have so many more fics planned out for this pls enjoy

[screambirdscreaming]

I get upset sometimes thinking about the way different branches of the lgbtq+ community argue about certain historical figures we identify ourselves with - were they really a lesbian, or were they a trans man? A gay man, a drag queen, a trans women, a genderfluid person? Was their expression of their gender an aspect of their sexuality, or vice versa? I have seen so many bitter arguments, people pulling out certain facts and quotes as “evidence” - what does it mean if they still dressed as a man after the death of their lover, if they used a different name among friends than among strangers, if they tearfully confessed to a reporter their “real” gender in a jail cell the night before being put on trial for public indecency? As if, by dissecting the few precious stories we have about their lives, we could bring them into the modern day, as if that would be the way to anchor our modern identities to history.

Here’s the thing. Gender and sexuality have always been social constructs, and people’s relationships to them have always existed in the context of society. Even if we still use the same words, the same broad strokes of gender roles, as we did a few hundred years ago, what it means to be a man or to be a woman in our day-to-day lives has changed. What other options are available has changed. Not just in the practical sense of what people do, but also in how people think, how we understand gender, what it feels like. Hell, even in this exact moment, what gender means in one place is so different than what it means in another. Yesterday I was five hundred miles from home in a place where people carried their gender in ways that were so unfamiliar to me it felt almost alien. The week before that, only 20 miles farther west in a place with far different history, gender was something else again. What gender and sexuality mean to us is so specific to the context of our lives and our communities, and it always has been. 

And in that light, it’s bizarre to try to pin down historical figures into exclusive, modern identities. We can’t say with any kind of certainty how they would have lived, if they were alive now, much less how they would describe themselves. And those things are inextricably linked - modern identities exist in the framework of modern society, so to apply modern labels means imagining how they would fit in the modern world. And perhaps, in the modern world, they would have been different people with different experiences - we can’t know. Even if they fell through a time portal, we can’t know if they’d like it here or if they’d want to go home. If they’d like our modern words or prefer their own.

What we do know is how we feel, looking back, reading about their lives and the times they lived in. We can imagine ourselves going back, trying to fit into their societies. And we can say: I would be like you. I would live the way you lived, in your context, in your time.

And that’s our real connection to history, the only thing we know for sure. That there have always been people making choices that twist gender on its head, that there have always been people who loved people they were not supposed to, that people have always found ways to live that were true to them and made them happy in spaces they carved out apart from society’s expectations. That it’s always been hard, and people have always done it anyway. That if we were to fall through a portal to their time - whether or not we liked our words more than theirs, whether or not we wanted to go home - we would have found people we felt kinship too.

Many different identities reach back to connect to the same few people - the only people who’s stories we know, when so many more must have been lost. Even then, the stories we have are often fragmented, told through the biased lens of newspaper reports or other accounts of strangers. If they did have ways they liked to describe themselves, we often as not don’t know what they were. Where there were communities of like-minded people, we only sometimes know what they talked about, how they related themselves to each other. When it comes to the ways gender and sexuality existed in societies that were colonized and forced into colonial gender roles, there’s so much information lost about what those societies of gender even were, much less how people conformed or rebelled within them. (Which is a tiny part of an entire other tragedy.) We know just enough to know that the nature of gender and sexuality were vast and varied through all of human history, and that the ways individuals have interacted with them are incredibly varied within every society. We are looking though pinpricks into a vast obscured space. We are fighting to find something that has been hidden from us. But somehow, we seem to end up fighting each other over the scraps, instead.

If anything, the fact that so many people of so many different identities find themselves reaching back and feeling connection to the same historical figures should remind us of how much we share. How much kinship all our modern communities have with each other. We all exist in different relationships with the social structures of gender and sexuality that surround our lives. What draws us together, with each other and with these communal ancestors, is the process of struggling and deconstructing and rebuilding, carving out a space within those structures in which we fit. In which we are able to share joy, and comfort, and solidarity, and love.

#long post #vague historical rambling #i am not a scholar of queer history #just a person who tries to read about it sometimes and gets confused and exhausted and sad #but also sometimes deeply touched and deeply joyful #I feel like I don't know enough to really talk about this #especially about colonial interactions with gender - something I know as a sort of terrible negative space #so maybe we know more about historical gender and sexuality than this implies - we in the sense of society at large #knowledge that is not totally lost #but it doesn't feel accessible #it feels strange and hidden and distorted #and that's what this is about really #how hard it is to find and connect with this history #and how much it hurts that so much of what I *can* find is people fighting over their claim to a historical figure's identity #it also is kind of about the conflict I feel between identifying so much with historical lesbian communities #and yet feeling incredibly uncomfortable with identifying myself as a lesbian in the modern day #due to my relationship with my gender and the fact that i'm not exclusively attracted to o women #which are things that occur frequently in historical discussions of lesbian community and are probably still common in modern lesbian spaces #but which are also not what people I interact with would understand from my choosing to use that word #also the tension between feeling like I identify with being butch and many ways I've read people describe their identity with it #but also feeling very alienated by most descriptions of butch/femme culture both historically and in the modern day #gender is a fucking mess and I just want more solidarity and more understanding #and more ability to exist on my own terms without having to declare to some label to be part of that community #queer stuff

[stars--n--stripes-blog]

Like any religion, wokeness understands the need to convert children. The old Jesuit motto (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) was, after all, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” And so I was moved but not particularly surprised by George Packer’s tale of a progressive school banishing separate restrooms for boys and girls because this reinforces the gender binary. The school did not inform parents of this, of course:

Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking.

As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it’s close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with “social justice.”

It’s also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching “White boys”:

I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.

This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as “White” (note the capital “W”) and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don’t like it:

This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting “white fragility” which is a function of “white supremacy.” QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their “whiteness,” or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become “white identitarians” of the far right.

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray’s superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heterosexism” — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: “I’m trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can’t make him think.”

The racism, sexism, and condescension in those sentences! (The teacher, by the way, is not some outlier. In 2014, he was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year!) Having taken one form of religion out of the public schools, the social-justice left is now replacing it with the doctrines of intersectionality.

Last week, I defended drag queens reading stories to kids in libraries. I don’t take back my words. Getting children interested in reading with costumed clowns strikes me as harmless. But when I was directed to the website of Drag Queen Story Hours, I found the following:

[DQSH] captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.

However well-meant, this is indoctrination into an ideology, not campy encouragement for reading and fun.

And then there is the disturbing “social justice” response to gender-nonconforming boys and girls. Increasingly, girly boys and tomboys are being told that gender trumps sex, and if a boy is effeminate or bookish or freaked out by team sports, he may actually be a girl, and if a girl is rough and tumble, sporty, and plays with boys, she may actually be a boy.

In the last few years in Western societies, as these notions have spread, the number of children identifying as trans has skyrocketed. In Sweden, the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a phenomenon stable and rare for decades, has, from 2013 to 2016, increased almost tenfold. In New Zealand, the rate of girls identifying as boys has quadrupled in the same period of time; in Britain, where one NHS clinic is dedicated to trans kids, there were around a hundred girls being treated in 2011; by 2017, there were 1,400.

Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it’s also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it’s both. But one reason to worry about the new explosion in gender dysphoria is that it seems recently to be driven by girls identifying as boys rather than the other way round. Female sexuality is more fluid and complex than male sexuality, so perhaps girls are more susceptible to ideological suggestion, especially when they are also taught that being a woman means being oppressed.

In the case of merely confused or less informed kids, the consequences of treatment can be permanent. Many of these prepubescent trans-identifying children are put on puberty blockers, drugs that suppress a child’s normal hormonal development, and were originally designed for prostate cancer and premature puberty. The use of these drugs for gender dysphoria is off-label, unapproved by the FDA; there have been no long-term trials to gauge the safety or effectiveness of them for gender dysphoria, and the evidence we have of the side effects of these drugs in FDA-approved treatment is horrifying. Among adults, the FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, over half of which it deemed serious. Parents are pressured into giving these drugs to their kids on the grounds that the alternative could be their child’s suicide. Imagine the toll of making a decision about your child like that?

Eighty-five percent of gender-dysphoric children grow out of the condition — and most turn out to be gay. Yes, some are genuinely trans and can and should benefit from treatment. And social transition is fine. But children cannot know for certain who they are sexually or emotionally until they have matured past puberty. Fixing their “gender identity” when they’re 7 or 8, or even earlier, administering puberty blockers to kids as young as 12, is a huge leap in the dark in a short period of time. It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child’s body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves.

I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.

In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it’s deeply regressive. There’s a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?

Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of “social justice” or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.

Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It’s a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.

By Andrew Sullivan

#transgender ideology #transgender children #transwomen #transmen #indoctrination #mental health #*

[mrchristianaxavier]

Reflections on Anti-Blackness as a Black Trans Artist & Entrepreneur

Last year, I decided to define liberation for myself, as a Black Trans individual living in a white supremacist society. I was tired of being in survival mode and being poor. I was tired of being exploited and tokenized by non-profits that employed me. I was tired of working at non-affirming organizations and companies. I was tired of dealing with anti-Black supervisors and managers. I was tired of being close to death. As a Solutionary, I committed myself to diving deeply into my artistry and entrepreneurship, for these were in fact ways in which a Black Trans individual like myself, could gain financial security and freedom…creating more opportunity for myself, my loved ones, as well as my community.

FrootFly LLC was founded by myself and my partner, who is also a Black Trans woman, to create a Fresh Fruit Distribution Resource for BlPOC, Individuals with Health Immune Deficiencies, Youth & Elders and Everyone open to embracing and honoring the natural goodness the Earth provides. We chose to sell high-quality tropical fruit, not normally found in the convenient and grocery stores that are accessible to marginalized individuals, such as Soursop, Jackfruit, Mamey, Sapodilla, Cacao, Nam Wah Bananas, Yellow & Red Dragon Fruit, Passion Fruit and more. Growing up and living in the hood, my partner and I understood the frustration of not having access to healthy quality fruits and vegetables and wanted to increase access to those who need it most, especially during COVID-19. In addition, we wanted to help build our ancestral and cultural connections through the variety of items we offer.  With our Fruit Share Program, FrootFly also aims to provide marginalized individuals with Organic Tropical Fruit boxes, monthly.

In addition to creating a small business with my partner, I also released a children’s book, entitled, My Name is Troy. My Name is Troy is a book specifically for young Black Trans boys, about a Black Trans boy named Troy, who is loved, protected, and affirmed by his family. The children’s book was an envisioning of the love I never received from my family, while growing up and a gift to young Black Trans boys who may grow up thinking they are alone or who are told that they are wrong about who they know themselves to be.

With efforts rooted in health, wellness, equity, and overall liberation, many would assume community to be supportive. But unfortunately, within this beautiful journey of reclaiming our time in a world where many are rooting for the demise an overall genocide of Black Trans people, I (as well as my partner) have experienced much anti-Blackness from many who claim to stand in solidarity with Black Trans Lives and Black owned businesses.  

Here are just a few DONT’s when supporting Black Trans Artists and Entrepreneurs:

Being Blocked from posting in Facebook Groups

When my partner and I launched FrootFly, the first places we went to promote our new business were social media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Social media allows artists and entrepreneurs to meet and engage with potential customers where they are at.

Paid Facebook advertisements are good for creatives and businesses because they allow you to target a specific audience. Facebook claims that they are 89% accurate when it comes to targeted campaigns. However, as Black Trans individuals in survival mode, securing funds to consistently pay for Facebook ads proved to be difficult. Therefore, much of our Fb promotion occurred via our personal pages, our business page and by posting in various community-based groups. 

After a few weeks of posting, I noticed that many of my posts in certain Trans and LGBTQIA+ groups were being reported and marked as spam, not by Facebook but by so-called community members and group admins, themselves. The same people known to hashtag #BlackTransLivesMatter and show up to community rallies, vigils, and marches with a quickness, were also quick to further oppress and marginalize the very people they claim to stand in solidarity with, on social media. Stopping me from posting in groups, stopped potential income from getting to 2 Black Trans individuals striving to live full lives, and not solely survive. 

It was especially disheartening for me personally to experience because as a Trans advocate and freedom fighter who has positioned himself on the frontlines many many times, I knew if I were an admin of a LGBTQIA+, Trans or Queer Facebook group, I personally would let Black Trans artists and entrepreneurs post their items for sale freely (regardless of the purpose of the group) because I’m conscious and aware of the experiences of Black Trans individuals and understand the necessity and importance of closing economic gaps and increasing equity for those most marginalized.

 White Cis-centric Expectations for Operations

Good customer service means meeting customers' expectations. And meeting customers' expectations pays off for all businesses. Customer support is more than just providing answers; it’s an important part of the promise a brand makes to its customers. 

Most large companies and corporations have customer service departments to handle inquiries and complaints. They have shipping departments that track packages, manufacturers to produce items at rapid rates and in bulk quantities, and huge warehouses to hold these items. However, when you’re a small business, oftentimes it’s the owners who have to make sacrifices unknown and wear multiple hats, especially when first launching a brand. But things can become even more difficult and stressful when you’re a small business owner who is also a part of several marginalized communities.

When shipping items from FrootFly, as well as copies of My Name is Troy, many customers, and so-called supporters, after only a few days, sent emails asking where their items were. Initially, in the name of good customer service, we would respond with our processing time, tracking info and shipping process, but after a while I soon noticed that many of these inquiries were accusatory and filled with anxiety rooted in Anti-Blackness.

It is a fact that Black businesses struggle in ways that white owned businesses do not. One of the reasons that Black businesses struggle to succeed is due to a general distrust of Black people. In general, society views Black people as “unprofessional”. From the way we wear our hair to our diction and ability to code switch, Black people in business realms are constantly policed and expected to fit tightly and neatly in line with corporate norms established by white elites.

Most people who reached out to us did so because they did not trust us as Black people, who owned a business. They did not trust me, as a Black person, who was an author of a children’s book. They assumed that they were getting swindled for their money, scammed, and robbed…because in their eyes, that is what Black people do. It was evident in their typed microaggressions, the way things were phrased and phony excuses. Studies have shown that people of all ethnicities and backgrounds have stated that they rather do business with a white owned company than a Black owned company. If it is hard for Black cisgender-owned businesses…imagine the experiences of a Black Trans owned business.

Understanding the experiences of Black Trans individuals and supporting Black Trans businesses go hand-in-hand. Instead of getting angry and impatient with Black Trans business owners, when products are seemingly delayed, email response time is not immediate, or when operations seemingly do not imitate that of a large corporation…in my opinion, a person who truly stands in solidarity would consider what that person is also experiencing daily. Has that Black Trans individual eaten today? Has that Black Trans individual experienced violence today? Do they have consistent access to Wi-Fi?

Most Black Trans owned business will look a bit different than cisgender owned businesses in terms of operations, due to an extreme difference in access and lack of equity. For many Black Trans individuals, each day is literally a fight to survive…and as entrepreneurs, this is what my partner and I are committed to overcome.

 Reported PayPal Disputes 

When I wrote My Name is Troy, I did so out of love for self and Black Trans youth, specifically Black Trans boys. I did not write the book to make a profit, but to leave something behind in the name of legacy that was beautifully made for Black Trans youth for generations to come. I priced the book at a rate that I felt was accessible specifically for Black families of all incomes, but also leaving me with little profit. For me, the book was bigger than profit. Ultimately it was a gift for young Black Trans boys…a reminder that they matter, while living in a world that seemingly forgets that they even exist.

Upon releasing the book, many people who purchased the book were white and/or cisgender members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Hundreds of orders poured in unexpectedly within the first 2 weeks of accepting pre-orders. The book had done better than I expected in terms of units sold but wasn’t reaching the demographic I had hoped...young Black Trans boys.

I knew that shipping so many books would take me some time. For one, each set of books I ordered from the printer took 2 or more weeks to get to me, due to COVID-19 related shipping delays. There were further delays once I shipped the books to those who purchased them. The profit left over from each book sold only covered shipping fees but did not cover my travel to and from the post office nor the shipping materials used to mail the books. But I committed myself to getting a book to each person who placed an order, no matter how long it would take me. And why wouldn’t I?

After two weeks of releasing my book, more emails began pouring in about the whereabouts of their items. Apparently, I was not moving fast enough. But what people were not being truthful about was that to them I was not moving at a pace that they were used to…a pace that is easily kept by the white owned companies and corporations they usually support.

When I responded to some of the email inquiries, some people encouraged me to be transparent with my customers to make it easier on both myself and patrons. But explaining to hundreds of so-called community members that Black Trans individuals have it harder than most and that their bias is causing their anxiety became exhausting. Many people became combative, but a few actually did admit to their anti-Blackness, claiming they would do better. I knew the anti-Blackness I experienced was real, despite most people’s denial, projection, and dismissiveness.

Several customers even went to the extent of reporting my PayPal account, claiming they never received an item…a claim rooted in Anti-Blackness, impatience, and the expectation for Black Trans entrepreneurs to deliver things at the same rate as white owned corporations. Most of the disputes ruled in my favor, as I explained to PayPal that there were shipping delays. But some did not, causing my account to go into the negative several times, with security measures added that made receiving and transferring funds extremely difficult. With each negative transaction, PayPal also threatened to send a report of owed funds from refunds sent to collections, negatively affecting my credit. This frustrated me for many reasons, but mostly because I stressed myself out trying to get out as many books as I could as often as I could, despite my lack of income and resources.

Is this how community stands in solidarity with Black Trans entrepreneurs? The distrust and bias from so-called allies and accomplices in my opinion, is ultimately violence. Where were the emails from community members asking me if there was anything anyone could do to help me ship things faster? This is what happens when so-called community is not intentionally mindful of the experiences of those most marginalized and when support is performative rather than an investment in Black Trans communities.

When you’re buying something from a Black Trans artist or entrepreneur, you’re not just purchasing a product. You’re helping a Black Trans person eat that day. You’re helping to provide a Black Trans person with another day of shelter. You’re helping a Black Trans person purchase their meds and pay bills. You’re literally helping a Black Trans person to live.

Do better.

#blacklivesmatter #blacktranslivesmatter #antiblackness #equity buyblackandtrans

[thinking-outline]

#thout #thinkingoutline

“I Take Responsibility” and the Limits of Celebrity Activism

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry on display in the video made to promote the “I Take Responsibility” initiative.Source: Confluential Films / YouTube

Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration—practical, emotional, or otherwise—in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class’s response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened. In April, the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made headlines when she joked that life while quarantined in her ten-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion felt like “being in jail.” The same week, the Times reported on the four hundred inmates being held at Rikers Island for minor parole violations, despite a worsening pandemic. The inmates included Raymond Rivera, a fifty-five-year-old man who, after having his case delayed several months, contracted covid-19 in jail and died the day after state officials lifted the warrant against him. As public sentiment has turned from coronavirus-induced fear to sadness and anger following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the celebrity response has ranged from milquetoast to head-scratching.

In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because “for some boys, girls don’t get to go at all.” The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the scores of Instagram users who had commented “All Lives Matter” under a recent post of his where he had opined “BLM.” Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled “I Take Responsibility” joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to “turn a blind eye” or “allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence” and “to stand against hate.” The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of (“Saying racism doesn’t exist,” “not being inclusive,” etc.) and to “make it better today” by pledging to do things like “donate to families affected [by racism]” before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, “prayer hands” emoji (🙏)—a de-facto “get well soon” to society and all its ills.

The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their gigantic platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet. (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by his fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, “Say less, brother,” and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.)

A similar desire to push industry leaders toward more decisive action in combatting anti-black racism is likely how #TheShowMustBePaused was first conceived. Led by Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang—two black women who have worked in executive roles at major record labels—the initiative was meant to be an industry-wide day of observance for “the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard.” According to the stated mission on the project’s Web site, the women hoped that this day of reflection would be a positive first step in the effort to “hold accountable the industry at large . . . including major corporations and their partners who benefit from the efforts, struggles and successes of Black people.” On Tuesday, June 2nd, scores of artists posted black squares on their Instagram feeds, often alongside the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday. Nearly all the major music labels observed the blackout, and explained, with varying levels of specificity, what a continued commitment to this mission would look like at their respective companies. The trend was quickly picked up by many people outside the industry, too. And, somewhat ironically, the flood of black-square posts ended up saturating the #blacklivesmatter tag on Instagram, displacing resources and information that some organizers had been compiling for years. By Wednesday, it was back to business as usual on many artists’ feeds—after all, there were deluxe-edition albums to promote.

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the “socially conscious” arm of a celebrity’s public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it’s wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies—opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays.

The tiptoeing of the entertainment industry’s biggest names has been made all the more conspicuous by the activity of their less popular peers. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and now in the wake of the George Floyd murder and other police-related violence, smaller and independent artists have used their reach to compile and disseminate resources like recommended viewing and reading lists (flawed as they may be), to amplify the work of organizers, and to publicize bail funds to donate to in support of the many protesters who have been arrested in cities across the country, and they have gone to protests themselves. Corpus Family Mutual Aid Fund, the initiative started by the New York creative collective affiliated with the Queens hardcore band Show Me the Body, has amassed more than twenty-two thousand dollars in just over a month, with the bulk of proceeds going to members of the New York City D.I.Y. music scene who have been financially affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Of course, not all of the ultra-famous have blown hot air. Various high-profile figures have disrupted their seemingly endless promotion cycles and retrofitted their social channels to speak pointedly about the current moment. One such figure is “Star Wars” ’s John Boyega. Despite apparent pushback from some of his fans, the British actor, who is of Nigerian descent, has been very outspoken in disparaging racism and brutal policing and has voiced support for protests around the world. On June 3rd, a video of an impassioned Boyega addressing the crowd at a large Black Lives Matter demonstration in London circulated widely online. Elsewhere, figures such as the Chicago rapper Noname, whose popular online book club has highlighted titles by Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Octavia Butler, have continued to use their platforms to galvanize their following and espouse their unequivocal beliefs. Some celebrities who in the past had been perhaps overzealous in exploiting their soapbox (ahem, Kanye) even seem to have stepped back and taken a more measured approach this time around.

What shouldn’t be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the past few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd’s young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta—the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year—have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.

What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez’s Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.

[easyfoodnetwork]

Food Is No Longer Your Fallback Job. It Never Should Have Been in the First Place.

Barista | Shutterstock

It’s time we stop considering these jobs as a backup and start providing dignity to all workers

I graduated from college in the spring of 2008. If you’ll recall, that fall wasn’t a great time to enter the job market, and the advice I got from anyone who had an opinion (which was everyone) was to “go wait tables.” It was a catchall phrase for the kind of work that was assumed to be available whenever the chips were down — the guidance given to every high schooler looking for extra money, every college grad who doesn’t have a job lined up, every aspiring actor in LA. And even at that time, when the unemployment rate was somewhere around 10 percent, it was available: I got a job as a hostess and server at a local restaurant, but I also had an offer from Starbucks, and an invitation to return to work at a bakery I’d worked at the previous summer.

Once again, we’re facing a recession, or, according to some experts, a full-on depression. Unemployment websites crashed as millions have applied for benefits in the past weeks, and food banks can’t keep up with demand — one-third of those going to them for food have never needed aid before. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed basically every fault line in our society, from the inadequacy of the social safety net to the incompetence of many of our leaders. And it is now revealing some long-held assumptions about work in the food-service industry. Being a server, a bartender, or a dishwasher, or doing other restaurant work, is often spoken of as a job that is always — and implicitly, only — viable when there are no other options. That if anyone had a real choice, they would choose something else. But because restaurants and bars aren’t hiring, food is no longer the fallback job. It never should have been thought of in that way in the first place.

The restaurant industry has long been the province of outcasts, but over the last two decades, owning a restaurant, becoming a celebrity(ish) chef, and, to a certain extent, being a fancy mixologist have come to be considered actual careers. These are the kinds of jobs that can land you a steady paycheck and the status of “small-business owner,” or even book deals and TV appearances. But when you’re not the owner or the creative force behind the food, food service — from hustling shifts as a server to manning the cash register at McDonald’s — is still generally talked about as a temporary detour, a place to lay low while you get your shit together. In pop culture, it’s an after-school job for teens, even though only about 30 percent of fast-food workers are teenagers. The mainstream image is still a job you leave, not one you keep.

“It’s an industry many fall back on time and time again,” writes Frances Bridges for Forbes. In 2011, Brokelyn told recent college grads that they likely “will consider waiting tables as a fallback to your day-job dreams,” the assumption being that everyone dreams of a day job. In 2016, Forbes called being a host or bartender one of the best jobs to have “while you are figuring out what to do with your life,” as it provides both a steady paycheck and, due to high turnover, restaurants and bars are “almost always hiring.” The assumption by economists and career experts was that no matter what, people need to eat, and they would want to eat out — so restaurant work would always be around.

Now, for the first time, it’s not. Nearly every state has issued orders for restaurants to close dine-in options or severely reduce capacity, forcing restaurants to lay off or furlough workers — or shutter entirely. About 10 million people filed for unemployment in the past few weeks, a number that’s expected to keep rising by the millions. And that number doesn’t account for gig-economy workers — like Instacart couriers or Uber Eats drivers — who, as contractors, wouldn’t qualify for UI. The food-service industry was hit particularly hard. According to the Department of Labor, restaurant and bar jobs accounted for 60 percent of the jobs lost in March. It’s clear that serving food and making drinks is not the revolving door it has been made out to be.

Jennifer Cathey, a former line cook at Glory World Gyro in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, says the restaurant has tried to stay open for takeout and delivery services, but there’s almost no business, and she was often “alone in a kitchen for hours at a time.” After a week, she volunteered to be laid off, as she lives with her mother and doesn’t need the money for rent. “If work was going to be so slow, it didn’t feel right to take any of the meager hours given to employees for any of my other coworkers,” she told Eater.

Cathey, who started working in her mother’s restaurant as a teenager, says she wanted to sacrifice her shifts for her coworkers because the food industry has always felt like home for her. “It is my favorite kind of work, I’ve loved all the places I’ve worked,” she says. Mostly it’s because she gets the immediate gratification of making something for someone else to consume and enjoy. But it’s also because, as a trans woman, the restaurant industry is a place she can rely on to be welcoming. “Especially living here in Alabama, all the people I’ve met through the restaurant and bar industries have been the most accepting of anyone,” she says. “I might not get anyone from my hometown to call me by my name, but the food-service community is tight-knit and open and welcome to all sorts of people... I have that fear that other industries wouldn’t be as welcoming.”

Unfortunately, it is also because food service has been a space for those who don’t fit into other parts of society that it has been considered a job for those who just need a job. Food service doesn’t require a college degree (or even a high school diploma), and it’s traditionally more welcoming to those with criminal backgrounds, to immigrants, to queer people, and to those with little other work experience. In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain referred to line cooks as a “dysfunctional, mercenary lot” and “fringe dwellers.” Not the most generous reading, but one that speaks to the reality: that in most people’s opinion, any office job is preferable to a career in the restaurant industry.

Which is not to say it’s not worthy work. If this pandemic has proven anything, it’s how essential those working in the food industry are. Instead, these assumptions come from a cycle of low pay and bad benefits that devalue both the job itself and the people doing it. “It’s set up to be temporary,” says Lauren* (who asked to remain anonymous), who was recently laid off from her bartending job at Dock Street Brewery in Philadelphia. “There are minimal benefits, pay increases, or opportunities for moving up in a company. And then this happens, and it makes it even more apparent how the industry is set up to be temporary, even though the people working in it don’t see it that way.”

A “reasonable” person, says the strawman I’ve invented but also probably plenty of people you’ve actually met, wouldn’t choose to make a career out of a job that relies on tips, that doesn’t provide health insurance, and where one risks such injury. Thus, the people who choose this career must not be “reasonable,” and if that’s true, then why support such unreasonable people? And on and on.

If it were true that food service is only a paycheck for those who are waiting for their “real” career to appear, then presumably no one would care one way or another about the job itself. But multiple people I talked to spoke of the restaurant industry — waiting tables, working the line, making lattes — as their dream job. “I literally emailed Pizzana for two years until they gave me a shot,” says Will Weissman, who was recently laid off from the West Hollywood pizza restaurant. He loved the restaurant’s food from the first time he tasted it, and hoped when they opened a second location, they’d take a chance on him, even though he had no previous experience. “I had always been food obsessed. I know a lot about wine, I’m a good cook, and I just wanted to finally do something in the food industry.”

Samantha Ortiz, a chef at Kingsbridge Social Club in the Bronx, says she was instantly drawn to the hospitality industry when she started work as a barista. “I felt so fulfilled to be able to make something for someone, even if it was as simple as a latte,” she says. Now, her restaurant is closed and her unemployment will run out in 90 days, but she has no plans to switch industries. “I doubt that I would ever look for a job in a different field,” she says. “The kitchen is home.”

When my serving job ended (the restaurant shut down), I was slightly relieved. I was a terrible server, and I knew I had other options. But many of my coworkers expressed deeper laments. They liked the strong arms they got from carrying trays of food, and they enjoyed recommending a dish and hearing their customer loved it. They liked that each night was different and experimenting with making new drinks. Hearing from them, I understood that the restaurant’s closure was a loss.

It’s not quite true that there are no food-service jobs available right now. Instead of the serving jobs that college grads are urged to consider, there’s a new form of food work that’s thriving during this recession: the gig worker. Grocery stores and apps like Instacart are hiring deliverers and baggers by the thousands. It’s mostly temporary work, and puts workers at higher risk for contagion, but it’s there. In a vacuum, there’s a lot to love about a job as a gig-economy deliverer. Setting one’s own schedule, picking up shifts when it’s convenient, providing a necessary service to people who can’t travel or carry their own groceries — that’s a good job. What’s not good is the pay, the exploitation, the hundred ways these corporations leech off their workers and make it impossible to make a living wage. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

We as a society have set these jobs up to be temporary, so when someone wants to make their job permanent, we think it is a failure on their part, rather than a failure on ours. There is no such thing as a “bad” job, only bad conditions. Food-service work doesn’t have to be low paid. It doesn’t have to rely on tips, or come without health care or paid sick leave. In the face of the pandemic, we’re seeing how that is the case, as grocery stores and delivery services are pressured into providing better benefits and pay to these essential workers. But it’s time we stop considering these jobs, any jobs, as backup, and time to start providing dignity to all workers.

“It’s hard seeing people that I really care about, that I work with, be treated as disposable,” says Lauren. “I definitely go back and forth every day being like, ‘Is this even worth it, or am I just pouring all of my energy into continuing to be treated really poorly?’ I don’t know.”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/34nd7lE https://ift.tt/2VagA2E

Barista | Shutterstock

It’s time we stop considering these jobs as a backup and start providing dignity to all workers

I graduated from college in the spring of 2008. If you’ll recall, that fall wasn’t a great time to enter the job market, and the advice I got from anyone who had an opinion (which was everyone) was to “go wait tables.” It was a catchall phrase for the kind of work that was assumed to be available whenever the chips were down — the guidance given to every high schooler looking for extra money, every college grad who doesn’t have a job lined up, every aspiring actor in LA. And even at that time, when the unemployment rate was somewhere around 10 percent, it was available: I got a job as a hostess and server at a local restaurant, but I also had an offer from Starbucks, and an invitation to return to work at a bakery I’d worked at the previous summer.

Once again, we’re facing a recession, or, according to some experts, a full-on depression. Unemployment websites crashed as millions have applied for benefits in the past weeks, and food banks can’t keep up with demand — one-third of those going to them for food have never needed aid before. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed basically every fault line in our society, from the inadequacy of the social safety net to the incompetence of many of our leaders. And it is now revealing some long-held assumptions about work in the food-service industry. Being a server, a bartender, or a dishwasher, or doing other restaurant work, is often spoken of as a job that is always — and implicitly, only — viable when there are no other options. That if anyone had a real choice, they would choose something else. But because restaurants and bars aren’t hiring, food is no longer the fallback job. It never should have been thought of in that way in the first place.

The restaurant industry has long been the province of outcasts, but over the last two decades, owning a restaurant, becoming a celebrity(ish) chef, and, to a certain extent, being a fancy mixologist have come to be considered actual careers. These are the kinds of jobs that can land you a steady paycheck and the status of “small-business owner,” or even book deals and TV appearances. But when you’re not the owner or the creative force behind the food, food service — from hustling shifts as a server to manning the cash register at McDonald’s — is still generally talked about as a temporary detour, a place to lay low while you get your shit together. In pop culture, it’s an after-school job for teens, even though only about 30 percent of fast-food workers are teenagers. The mainstream image is still a job you leave, not one you keep.

“It’s an industry many fall back on time and time again,” writes Frances Bridges for Forbes. In 2011, Brokelyn told recent college grads that they likely “will consider waiting tables as a fallback to your day-job dreams,” the assumption being that everyone dreams of a day job. In 2016, Forbes called being a host or bartender one of the best jobs to have “while you are figuring out what to do with your life,” as it provides both a steady paycheck and, due to high turnover, restaurants and bars are “almost always hiring.” The assumption by economists and career experts was that no matter what, people need to eat, and they would want to eat out — so restaurant work would always be around.

Now, for the first time, it’s not. Nearly every state has issued orders for restaurants to close dine-in options or severely reduce capacity, forcing restaurants to lay off or furlough workers — or shutter entirely. About 10 million people filed for unemployment in the past few weeks, a number that’s expected to keep rising by the millions. And that number doesn’t account for gig-economy workers — like Instacart couriers or Uber Eats drivers — who, as contractors, wouldn’t qualify for UI. The food-service industry was hit particularly hard. According to the Department of Labor, restaurant and bar jobs accounted for 60 percent of the jobs lost in March. It’s clear that serving food and making drinks is not the revolving door it has been made out to be.

Jennifer Cathey, a former line cook at Glory World Gyro in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, says the restaurant has tried to stay open for takeout and delivery services, but there’s almost no business, and she was often “alone in a kitchen for hours at a time.” After a week, she volunteered to be laid off, as she lives with her mother and doesn’t need the money for rent. “If work was going to be so slow, it didn’t feel right to take any of the meager hours given to employees for any of my other coworkers,” she told Eater.

Cathey, who started working in her mother’s restaurant as a teenager, says she wanted to sacrifice her shifts for her coworkers because the food industry has always felt like home for her. “It is my favorite kind of work, I’ve loved all the places I’ve worked,” she says. Mostly it’s because she gets the immediate gratification of making something for someone else to consume and enjoy. But it’s also because, as a trans woman, the restaurant industry is a place she can rely on to be welcoming. “Especially living here in Alabama, all the people I’ve met through the restaurant and bar industries have been the most accepting of anyone,” she says. “I might not get anyone from my hometown to call me by my name, but the food-service community is tight-knit and open and welcome to all sorts of people... I have that fear that other industries wouldn’t be as welcoming.”

Unfortunately, it is also because food service has been a space for those who don’t fit into other parts of society that it has been considered a job for those who just need a job. Food service doesn’t require a college degree (or even a high school diploma), and it’s traditionally more welcoming to those with criminal backgrounds, to immigrants, to queer people, and to those with little other work experience. In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain referred to line cooks as a “dysfunctional, mercenary lot” and “fringe dwellers.” Not the most generous reading, but one that speaks to the reality: that in most people’s opinion, any office job is preferable to a career in the restaurant industry.

Which is not to say it’s not worthy work. If this pandemic has proven anything, it’s how essential those working in the food industry are. Instead, these assumptions come from a cycle of low pay and bad benefits that devalue both the job itself and the people doing it. “It’s set up to be temporary,” says Lauren* (who asked to remain anonymous), who was recently laid off from her bartending job at Dock Street Brewery in Philadelphia. “There are minimal benefits, pay increases, or opportunities for moving up in a company. And then this happens, and it makes it even more apparent how the industry is set up to be temporary, even though the people working in it don’t see it that way.”

A “reasonable” person, says the strawman I’ve invented but also probably plenty of people you’ve actually met, wouldn’t choose to make a career out of a job that relies on tips, that doesn’t provide health insurance, and where one risks such injury. Thus, the people who choose this career must not be “reasonable,” and if that’s true, then why support such unreasonable people? And on and on.

If it were true that food service is only a paycheck for those who are waiting for their “real” career to appear, then presumably no one would care one way or another about the job itself. But multiple people I talked to spoke of the restaurant industry — waiting tables, working the line, making lattes — as their dream job. “I literally emailed Pizzana for two years until they gave me a shot,” says Will Weissman, who was recently laid off from the West Hollywood pizza restaurant. He loved the restaurant’s food from the first time he tasted it, and hoped when they opened a second location, they’d take a chance on him, even though he had no previous experience. “I had always been food obsessed. I know a lot about wine, I’m a good cook, and I just wanted to finally do something in the food industry.”

Samantha Ortiz, a chef at Kingsbridge Social Club in the Bronx, says she was instantly drawn to the hospitality industry when she started work as a barista. “I felt so fulfilled to be able to make something for someone, even if it was as simple as a latte,” she says. Now, her restaurant is closed and her unemployment will run out in 90 days, but she has no plans to switch industries. “I doubt that I would ever look for a job in a different field,” she says. “The kitchen is home.”

When my serving job ended (the restaurant shut down), I was slightly relieved. I was a terrible server, and I knew I had other options. But many of my coworkers expressed deeper laments. They liked the strong arms they got from carrying trays of food, and they enjoyed recommending a dish and hearing their customer loved it. They liked that each night was different and experimenting with making new drinks. Hearing from them, I understood that the restaurant’s closure was a loss.

It’s not quite true that there are no food-service jobs available right now. Instead of the serving jobs that college grads are urged to consider, there’s a new form of food work that’s thriving during this recession: the gig worker. Grocery stores and apps like Instacart are hiring deliverers and baggers by the thousands. It’s mostly temporary work, and puts workers at higher risk for contagion, but it’s there. In a vacuum, there’s a lot to love about a job as a gig-economy deliverer. Setting one’s own schedule, picking up shifts when it’s convenient, providing a necessary service to people who can’t travel or carry their own groceries — that’s a good job. What’s not good is the pay, the exploitation, the hundred ways these corporations leech off their workers and make it impossible to make a living wage. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

We as a society have set these jobs up to be temporary, so when someone wants to make their job permanent, we think it is a failure on their part, rather than a failure on ours. There is no such thing as a “bad” job, only bad conditions. Food-service work doesn’t have to be low paid. It doesn’t have to rely on tips, or come without health care or paid sick leave. In the face of the pandemic, we’re seeing how that is the case, as grocery stores and delivery services are pressured into providing better benefits and pay to these essential workers. But it’s time we stop considering these jobs, any jobs, as backup, and time to start providing dignity to all workers.

“It’s hard seeing people that I really care about, that I work with, be treated as disposable,” says Lauren. “I definitely go back and forth every day being like, ‘Is this even worth it, or am I just pouring all of my energy into continuing to be treated really poorly?’ I don’t know.”

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#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PEOPLE

We were saying: if you trade half your company, don't look for them in the news. It was one of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of parentheses. Serving web pages is very, very large. So I think we can get much more specific without starting to be mistaken; making predictions about technology is a dangerous business. At first they're always dismissed as being unsuitable for real work. For outsiders this translates into two ways to win. So the reason younger founders have an advantage is that they make two mistakes that cancel each other out. Most people overvalue negative amounts of money: they'll work much harder to avoid losing a dollar than to gain one.1 I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school, and they were wondering what to call it. We graded them from A to E. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world.2 There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't.

But they could be. It may be just as well not exist. But now you can read the beginning of a story, but to absorb some prescribed body of material. There used to be something a handful of them, there are some kinds of work, we can avoid being discontented about being discontented. Almost certainly. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so.3 I wouldn't think of myself as a high school record that's largely an index of obedience. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, my friend would have known about this cyst her whole life and known it was harmless, just as we can become smarter, just as in principle you could avoid getting fat as you get into an office, work and life start to drift apart. They can't tell how smart you are. That seems so obvious it seems wrong to call it. It's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. Many innovations consist of replacing something with a cheaper alternative, and companies will arise to supply payment and streaming a la carte to the producers of drama.

I read a couple days ago: The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. To the other kids. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right way to do business. When you only have to find peers for yourself, you can't link to them.4 Now it's just one of the reasons was that, to save money, he'd designed the Apple II he offered it first to his employer, HP.5 The way to win is in deciding what counts as news. Of course I wanted to know everything. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.

You also need to prevent the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools.6 There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed like there was nothing to it.7 If some language feature is awkward or restricting, don't worry, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.8 I think most of them. Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups before Google does. I asked more to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. Recently I've spent some time trying to build stuff. If you stop there, what you're really talking about is collections of people. There are too many technologies out there to learn them all. Either some company like Netflix or Apple will be the best you ever get.

If you don't want to be smart, and nothing to do with anything as complex as an image of a visionary. When people come to you. Audiences like to be swept off their feet by a vigorous stream of words. Will your blackberry get a bigger screen?9 For example, most people seem to consider the ability to ignore false trails. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.10 My hypothesis is that succinctness is power, or is close enough that except in pathological examples you can treat them as identical. Programming languages are not theorems.11

When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. Showing up for school plays is one thing. And I lost more than books. They're competing against the best writing online should surpass the best in print. Mikey likes it.12 Our family didn't wait for Apple TV.13 A to E. A List of people who go from one to the exclusion of the rest. And so I let my need to be written too densely. I'll work my ass off for a customer, they're very grateful even if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations.

I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking professional photos of their first hosts' apartments. But that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is why this trend began with them. They passed. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. It may have seemed as if not much was happening during the years after the Bubble burst. We may not be an absolute rule, but it seems like the best languages all evolved together with some application they were being used to write existentialist short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers. It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's enough overlap that this remark contradicts them. This seems a good hypothesis to begin with. Total dedication if you want to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out what lies you were told as a kid, imagine having kids. But why do we conceal death from kids? So long as you're a product company that's merely being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if you do that you could spend no more time thinking about human butts.

Notes

Graduate students might understand it. If you like the one hand and the low countries, where many of the startup after you buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

Proceedings of 2003 Spam Conference. Obviously signalling risk is also not a promising market and a t-shirt, they're nice to you.

It rarely arises, and don't want to hire any first—9.

Reprinted in Bacon, Alan ed. The liking you have to admit there's no center to walk to. Oddly enough, maybe you don't need that much better to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though. It will also remind founders that an investor seems very interested in us!

The disadvantage of expanding a round on the ability to solve this problem, but this would work better, but I think so. Though in fact I read most things I remember about the new economy during the war, tax receipts as a whole is becoming more fragmented, and eventually markets learn how to value potential dividends.

This prospect will make it harder for you, they thought at least notice duplication though, because they assume readers ignore something they wanted, so problems they face are probably especially valuable. Something similar happens with suburbs. The Wouldbegoods.

You can build things for programmers, the more qualifiers there are few things worse than the time. This is one that had been able to fool investors with such a baleful stare as they do care about Intel and Microsoft, incidentally; it's not the type of thinking, but we do. And frankly even these companies when you had small corpora.

The solution is not a programmer would find it was. Miyazaki, Ichisada Conrad Schirokauer trans. That's why the series AA paperwork aims at a Demo Day.

Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. That follows necessarily if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the LL1 mailing list.

Founders at Work. A larger set of users to succeed or fail. IBM seemed a lot of money from existing customers. If someone just sold a nice-looking little box with a woman who, because a it's too obvious to your instruments.

Algorithms that use it are called naive Bayesian. As he is much like the other team. But let someone else start those startups. In the Daddy Model and reality is the lost revenue.

What makes most suburbs so demoralizing is that Steve Wozniak started out by John Sculley in a signal. For the computer world recognize who that is worth studying, especially if you suppress variation in wealth in the case of heirs, rather technical sense of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. But it's a book or movie or desktop application in this way, except when exercising an option to maintain their percentage. The problem is that there's more of the Italian word for success.

Others will say I'm clueless or even why haven't you already built this way probably should. Viaweb, and one VC. We could have used another algorithm and everything would have. By someone else.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #Google #employer #duplication #deters #payment #John #friend #Founders #mistakes #Ajax #Conference #evening #expectations #kids #plays #wealth #chocolate

[halloweennut]

I'm curious- you sometimes tag stuff with thesis reference. What's your thesis about exactly? From what you tag, it seems interesting.

oh shit damn okay so i’m going to copy my thesis right here because it’s a little difficult to write offhand.  this is for my anthropology departmental/honors thesis, which i am very very nervous and excited about.

“The objective of my research is to focus on trying to understand the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming people in the LGBTQ community, focusing particularly on discrimination, its effects on the community, and how it has been historically and how it is now in contemporary society. I want to understand cultural and historical precedents of gender non-conformity, such as Two-Spirits, Hijras, and examples from the U.S. from the 1800s on, and go through the acceptation of them in the cultures they originated. To follow that, I want to try and understand the responses to gender nonconformity from those from an external viewpoint, i.e.: colonialists to Two-Spirits.  I want to look at how those responses shaped the culture and legislation towards gender non-conformity then and how those attitudes are now, and how they are played out in contemporary society.”  

originally i thought that the exclusionary attitudes we see today only went back to the 50s, but like they go back hundreds of years?? I’m really excited to do more in-depth historical research and talk to people. I’ve already talked to the LGBTQ clubs on my campus about this and i’m really grateful that they are letting me do research with them - i would have been able to go to meetings, but i wanted to make sure they were 100% chill with my being there for research purposes as well.   

the most important thing about my research is that the info i present and the experiences i’m told and learned about take the forefront over my own voice, even with my cultural analysis and opinions being part of the paper. Their lives, their experiences take the forefront and are the core of the work. Trans and GNC issues and experiences need to be heard and be heard from them. I only hope my paper can be a good vehicle for it.

this was longer than i expected, so i’m sorry about that lmao. thank you for asking!! 

#thesis reference #answers #a curious anon approaches