Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Climate updates

Tweets I've seen this week:

April 2023: "Remember last year's floods in Pakistan? This is how they're affecting people now" (CNN video)

Pakistan province calls for ‘climate diplomacy’ with India as record smog chokes major city, Lex Harvey and Sophia Saifi, CNN, November 4, 2024

India's Capital Chokes As Air Pollution Levels Hit 50 Times The Safe Limit: Authorities in India’s capital have shut schools, halted construction and banned non-essential trucks from entering the city. Manish Swarup and Rishi Lekhi, AP, Nov 18, 2024

City skylines need an upgrade in the face of climate stress, Mohamed Shaheen, The Conversation, February 4, 2026

earth seen from space
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Music recommendations (crowdsourced on Twitter)

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Monday, October 10, 2022

It doesn't matter if you're 'modern' or 'classic' -- or if you're 'artificial' or 'natural'

Consumer culture has two existing dominant categories:

(1) stuff we get that's not supposed to be tweaked because it is God-given or for whatever reason someone isn't giving us authority to change it.

(2) stuff we get on the consumer treadmill that we're constantly paying to replace, because we're taught that dissatisfaction and regret need to be managed. The treadmill needs us to feel this dissatisfaction so we continue to pay into it to get rid of the dissatisfaction, although we're supposed to claim outwardly that the thing we just bought has cured the dissatisfaction, because that's part of the game.

Gender transition isn’t in either category. We originally come into our bodies and gender presentations through non-consumer channels (nature, culture), but though the dominant culture doesn't explicitly give us authority or permission to change them, we can change them. We're buying something that isn't a disposable consumer product and it isn't for a purpose legible under consumerism like "looking better."

They try to socialize us as girls or boys, and for some of us, it doesn't work:

so like we are socialized into our assigned gender roles its just that in trans people it failed. making it some unserious bullshit to say trans women are socialized male— that socialization failed!!! clearly!!!! it didnt work!!

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— ­­　­　­　­　­　­　­　­　­　­　　­the　­　­　­　­　­　­　　­　­　­postes (@rem.bsky.lol) July 15, 2024 at 10:33 AM

"Cissexism says that I’m unnatural because my gender doesn’t match my body according to cissexist standards of binary sex, and transphobia says I should be treated as less than because of it." — Kaylin Hamilton

Risk: If you're seen as artificial, you can't get healthcare

They will not let you see a doctor for anything if they can argue that it's related to your being trans or that your body is somehow fake. This is "trans broken arm syndrome."

In this example, no doctors were willing to scren a trans woman for breast cancer when she was having chest pain. "Interestingly," someone says on Bluesky, "the British Times found the time to write an entire article about it, the time to investigate whether the patient had had bottom surgery, the time to interview anti-feminist activists about it, but did NOT find the time to write in that she was there for a breast cancer screening."

Can you feel pain?

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Growth of what, for what?

"For GDP, producing $1bn of private jets is worth exactly the same as $1bn of affordable housing." — Jason Hickel

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Saturday, October 8, 2022

Matt Walsh latest scandal

Matt Walsh once said 17–24 is a girl/woman's age of max fertility
Alejandra Caraballo, February 2, 2023 tweet: When Matt Walsh is openly stating that providers of gender affirming care should be executed, it's no wonder his followers call in bomb threats to children's hospitals and threaten to murder doctors. Matt Walsh is stoking and inciting violence. There are two images in this tweet: One of a Matt Walsh tweet saying that doctors should be executed, and a Vice News screenshot saying that others are threatening hospitals.

In February 2023, Walsh brags about wanting to be crowned Transphobe of the Year.

In April 2023, Walsh approvingly retweeted a video of Ron DeSantis saying gender transition is "a lie" and no one should recognize a trans person's gender.

I am not interested in any Republican who isn't this direct and honest about the trans agenda

April 20, 2023: Matt Walsh saying it's cool that Elon Musk's rocket blew up because science works by trial and error. For whatever reason (sexism. patriarchy. transphobia.), he doesn't apply this wisdom to people's right to take hormones even if there's some uncertainty what they'll do to anyone's individual body.

Matt Walsh tweeting about how real science involves trial and error, so it's OK that Elon Musk's rocket blew up
June 1, 2023 tweet by Jessie Earl @jessiegender: So Musk was going to let Matt Walsh/The Daily Wire stream his shitty, TOS-breaking, antitrans hate film 'What is A Woman' on Twitter, but it was hit with a TOS violation for Hateful conduct, possibly related to Twitter's VP of Trust & Safety resigning. And all I can do is laugh.

The same day, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned.

Regarding Walsh's favorite question "What is a woman?":

"Any attempt to define woman in a way that excludes trans and intersex women is not only futile, it’s inherently malicious. It doesn’t come from a place of following the evidence and understanding the science, nor from a place of wanting to end sexism, it is an attempted ad hoc justification for the premise 'trans women are men'. Trans women being women is a conclusion of the evidence, not a premise. Please don’t fall for it." — " Why What JK Rowling Said is Transphobic," Katy Montgomerie, Medium, June 7, 2020

See also these articles by Allison Wiltz on Medium:
What is a Woman, and Why Does That Matter to So Many Americans? (July 5, 2022)
Why Black Women Are Accused of Being “Manly” As an Insult (Aug 4, 2023)

This is still going on. In an August 15, 2024 interview:

“You know what, you know what’s disgusting to women is her disrespect of women,” [Nancy] Mace said. “She doesn’t know what a woman is. And 25 years ago—”

“White women don’t have the ability to tell Black women who paid the price of blood to make this country what it is to tell them they’re not real women,” [Michael Eric] Dyson said. (Ben Blanchet, HuffPost, Aug 16, 2024)

samememe tweets June 18, 2023: Just fyi if someone tells you that you can't possibly define something like 'chair' so what even *is* a chair anyway they're trying to lead you down a midwit garden path, so all you need to do is tell them you know what a chair is and that they can kindly fuck off. The only purpose of these kinds of word games is to obliterate your sense of intuition and 'gut instinct' and thereby leave you open to their various insane ideological beliefs like 'a woman is someone who says she's a woman'... just say no!
Qualia (MK) tweets: But yes, philosophy talks about how hard it is to define a category, math does, linguistics does... it's almost as if... stay with me... this is not a conspiracy to make that guy look stupid. He's literally just very stupid. They're frothing incoherently about how unfair it is that a woman made them feel and look stupid and that this is somehow cheating because they were born superior.* (* they were absolutely not)
This is such a famous problem that it's a joke format. (Quote: Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely)
ALSO also, my username (qualia) is a quasi-famous attempt at trying to explain how we can POSSIBLY communicate to one another when literally, we cannot explain to one another what 'red' or 'pain' is, but we can recognize each concept. Like... LITERALLY how? Like, entire branches of philosophy and terms invented about the problem of: 1) It's ALMOST impossible to define a word. 2) Yet we, somehow, manage to communicate. 2a) Wait... DO we manage to communicate? 2b) What if it just looks like we do??? WHAT??? 3) LITERALLY how???
Carrow tweets: 'What exactly is a(n) x?' is the exact rhetoric used by the smartest people I know (including people working to build AI models) to explain why AI is still so far from really being a facsimile of human intelligence (a computer cannot *conceptualize* what a chair is, for example)

Intuition turns out to be complex. It isn't the same as knowing a dictionary definition, or else computers would be intelligent — heck, the dictionary would be intelligent.

Oh the whole thread is about gender, and the OP decries any analysis of semantics and the slipperiness of categories as 'midwit' while appealing to 'gut instinct' and 'intuition'. Some real brain trusts on this website

After Dell Cameron wrote this story for Wired — The Hacker Who Hijacked Matt Walsh’s Twitter Was Just ‘Bored’ The breach of the right-wing provocateur was simply a way of “stirring up some drama,” the attacker tells WIRED. But the damage could have been much worse. (April 19, 2023) — and tweeted it, Musk permanently suspended Cameron's Twitter account.

Feb 11, 2024: Reacting to a statement that "Jesus washed the feet of friends and enemies," Matt Walsh calls it "heretical bullshit."

HeGetsUs tweets on Feb 11, 2024 that 'Jesus washed the feet of friends and enemies.' Matt Walsh tweets that it's 'heretical bullshit.' Blake Tapper screenshots it on Bluesky and says: Yeah, zero stories in the Bible about this at all. brendelbored on Bluesky says: Matt, please no, do not uncover the funders of this dark money anti-trans group, I don’t know if wokeism could ever recover

Matt Walsh in late 2024, outside the U.S. v. Skrmetti oral arguments at the Supreme Court: “We are not gonna rest...until trans ideology is entirely erased from the earth. That’s what we’re fighting for, and we will not stop until we achieve it.”

Matt Walsh outside the Supreme Court: "This case is just the beginning of the fight. It is not the end. We are not gonna rest ... until trans ideology is entirely erased from the earth. That's what we're fighting for, and we will not stop until we achieve it."

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— Ari Drennen (@aridrennen.bsky.social) December 4, 2024 at 1:24 PM

Previously, I wrote about how the Daily Wire has lots of cash. But, oh, did the Daily Wire have layoffs?

Orban was pretty load-bearing for the global right wing media ecosystem huh

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— Micah (@rincewind.run) May 1, 2026 at 8:58 PM

Speaking of Trump, Jesus, and "doctors"...

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Friday, October 7, 2022

Jon Stewart arguing against transphobia

For more on this topic, please read: "It’s Easy for This Guy to Challenge Transphobia." It's a 5-minute read on Medium.

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Thursday, October 6, 2022

Poems

"make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came"
Wendell Berry, "How to Be a Poet"

Poems I've seen shared on Twittter in the last month or so.

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