tjw – A dumping ground for my rants not suitable for proper publication

The Normal People Understanders

Prior to the 2024 US presidential election, I was one of many people who made the obvious prediction that if Trump wins, there will be Democrats who blame trans issues for Harris’ loss. I even briefly mentioned that in my previous blog post. It was predictable because at least some of them did this back in 2016 and because Trump’s focus on anti-trans ads would make it look like this bigotry sells, whether or not there really was a positive causal relationship. I noted before that this was probably deliberately set up as a strategy to advance transphobia. Elon Musk is pursuing a long game of using his immense wealth to make the world worse for his first child.

Elections Are Hell, We Can Do Better

Election season always pulls me in two directions at the same time – I get more frustrated with radicals who refuse to acknowledge important differences in degree of evil. But I’m also yet more convinced that the state as such is evil. I’m thinking like a liberal Karl Rove, knowing exactly how the electoral politics sausage gets made and taking on the psychopathic mentality it takes to pull that lever in this trolley problem. And I’m also thinking who keeps tying people to tracks? Why are we as a population that will say por que no los dos about having both a cinnamon bun and a breakfast burrito for breakfast not stopping to think that maybe we can care about all persons everywhere without any exceptions or qualifications?

I’m a Tourist And Everything Revolves Around Me

(Old Facebook post from 2021-08-25)

I am a tourist and everything revolves around me. If I don’t sloppily park in your downtown to buy kitchy knick-knacks at the local business that’s more of a hobby than a real business and that barely pays their employees, your economy will COLLAPSE. Non-retail businesses and schools? People working remotely? They don’t exist! The narrow, tourist-oriented strip I visit is all that there is. Homes? Those are clearly decorations put there for my entertainment. And if there’s snow in the yard, that means I can play in it. No one actually lives here. This whole place is a budget resort set up just for me.

Musk’s Tentacles

Stockton Rush was the CEO of a privately held business that employed less than 50 people. He certainly had delusions of grandeur, and fancied himself a cross between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. His net worth was about $25 million. He wasn’t a billionaire and it wasn’t his plan to murder-suicide ocean explorers.

St. Patrick’s Day Memes

It’s a tradition on Christian holidays for memes containing crackpot history to show up. And also for the backlash to said which also often gets things wrong. No one knows what St. Patrick driving snakes out of Ireland is an allegory for, nor even if it really is an allegory or more of the kinds of folk tales that tend to be made about important people.

Seuss’ Estate Pulling Books

This was a rant I originally posted on Facebook on March 3rd, 2021

Dr. Seuss was incredibly jingoistic and made political cartoons reflecting that. He hated the Nazis but unfortunately he also hated “the Japanese” and as such made political cartoons about Japanese immigrants every bit as vile as something you’d see in the daily stormer about Muslim immigrants. He was pro Japanese internment until a Japanese friend of his talked him out of that years after the fact. He made holy shit anti-black racist ads. He also saw racism as an evil that needed to be exorcised from society and mocked the hardcore racists of his day even while he continued to use racial stereotypes in his books. His cartoon remarking “there’s a racist in the woodpile” captured his silliness, his opposition to hardcore racism and his willingness to reuse racist memes all in one panel. There are other children’s books of similar or even older vintage that don’t have the stereotypes his did. So who cares what he wanted, it’s bad to publish something portraying Asian humans as bright yellow and stereotypically orientalist. But also you don’t respect a dead racist anti-racist by defending them at their worst.

When Space Geeks Sound Like Conspiracy Theorists

Consider this the first of a little series – bad solutions to the Fermi Paradox. I have issues with the idea of that framework but as it’s the way most people think about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, I’ll just go with the flow for now until I get to the end of this series and into what I think.

What I’m criticizing here is the classic zoo hypothesis, the idea that intelligent, high-tech aliens are purposely avoiding humans and the planet earth. Any species that is capable of fast traveling to Earth must be populous and diverse enough that total, 100% compliance with no-contact rules or the Prime Directive is impossible. But it gets even worse the more other species or star systems are involved.

Two Women

Two fictional individuals, not based on any specific real people:

Ciara is a trans woman who begun medically transitioning in her early 20s. This means she had one endogenous testosterone-dominant puberty in her teens, then a medically induced secondary puberty in her 20s to adjust her secondary sexual characteristics so that she can feel more comfortable in her body. She has to fight against the permanent effects of the first puberty that can’t be undone by the secondary puberty. If she wishes to have a cisnormative woman’s voice, that is, the sort of vocal qualities typical of women’s voices, she must train herself. It’s the same sort of difficulty as mastering a musical instrument. She may have other issues as well, such as the early stages of androgenic alopecia (male-pattern baldness).

Self-Promotion on Social Media

In the great migration happening from twitter to fediverse (mastodon, akkoma, et al) one group who understandably has been slow to do so, artists, has met with a major cultural difference they might not have expected, norms or explicit rules against self-promotion on many fediverse instances.