I am surely in the toils.

Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa? Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now? 

On one hand, it’s a privilege to be able to choose to acknowledge these horrors or not–we’re going to acknowledge that privilege. On the other hand, I once attended a lecture by the explorerer-conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s daughter and son and they had a lot of opinions about what we could do to help the environment and the ocean and I talked about how in my country, we have to drink bottled water, because it’s a desert and there’s only salt water all around, but we’re contributing to pollution and all of these things…

And she looked at me and told me not to fall into the trap of “activist guilt.” I couldn’t remember the exact words, but, it was the first time I’d heard the term and it took a weight off my shoulders.

We do what we can. It’s so much better than giving up entirely or not doing anything at all because we can’t do it perfectly. It doesn’t benefit anyone in the end if we just sit around feeling guilty about every little thing in life. I’d just joined tumblr back then (haha, so like, eight or nine years ago at this point?), I was being exposed to way more than I’d ever been before (I was previously just into feminism and animal rights/wildlife conservation/environmentalism since I was a kid), and it was weighing on me.

As long as humans are humans and living flawed lives, many consumed by greed, there will not be anything in this world untouched by evil.

I usually avoid stuff that says it was made in China or other cheap looking knockoffs, out of fear of them being made in sweatshops (now, I know even a lot of big brands use those…), it’s exhausting. Then, I read something about how people who actually lived and worked in those would still buy this cheap stuff and how this shocked the foreigner reporting on it, but they just looked confused like, it’s what they can afford and them avoiding consuming it isn’t going to change the whole system from the ground-up.

… it went on about how “money talks” and choosing where to put your money still feeds the whole capitalist system and is nearly a way of comforting yourself, but you not buying doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. What needs to be tackled is at a much higher level than any of us can reach.

Of course, I’d still, given the choice, give my money to companies I agree with and I’ll boycott what I know to support awful stuff, but I also feel no superiority over this and know now it’s not as black and white or easy as I thought it was.

This is the same reason that moral purity “you can’t enjoy [x] because it’s Problematic ™” is such nonsense, because nothing is pure. There’s something bad about everything if you dig deep enough. As long as we lived in flawed human societies we’ve got to make the best of what they offer us. If you have the choice and means, please, do support those who do good, but also, don’t beat yourself up over not living up to an unattainable ideal.

No one can. You’ll just make yourself so miserable, you either burn up and stop fighting entirely or you’ll make yourself a non-productive, depressed heap just out of a bleeding heart left unchecked. You can’t make a change to this world if you refuse to engage in it.

Have a related article with self-care tips for activists.

Purity is one of the worst, most harmful myths humans ever invented.

Rebloging for this amazing reply telling us how to actually handle this, because yeah, sometimes I’ll simply shut down trying to find something that doesn’t cause harm to anyone

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

I would also add that the gif of Chidi is important. Because even though the show kind of forgot Chidi’s problem, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t actually established to have been a bad person in the first season.

He was so obsessed with doing the “right” thing, of being perfectly pure and moral, that he hurt those around him. Constantly. He couldn’t be a supportive friend or son. He couldn’t even be passingly polite.

And it didn’t even work. He still drank the almond milk.

Him building an entire identity around purity didn’t work. But it did turn him into a selfish person, who was so obsessed with the “right” answers it got him killed.

You can’t solve all the world’s problems. And you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

I need a Thank u Mr Terry tag

#thank you mr terry#thinking something isn't doing it and doing is all people see#and deep down it means that when the ugly thought reared its head to be realized#you stood up in front of that ugly hurtful thought and said 'sit down'

Pardon me, but I needed to read your tags tonight.

Rewatched The Good Place for the first time since s4 dropped and. Oh my god. The Good Place said "people are a result of their environment but we always have a moral responsibility to be better" and The Good Place said "every day the world gets a little more complicated and it gets a little harder to be good" and The Good Place said "even in the face of total nihilism, when nothing you do will matter, you still have to at least try. Because trying is better than the alternative" and The Good Place said "if you have bills to pay and shit to deal with you don't have time or energy to become a better person" and then The Good Place really said "people get better when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don't " and THEN The Good Place really said "no one is irredeemable. Everyone can try to be better today than they were yesterday" AND THEN! The Good Place said "Heaven is just enough time with the people that you love" OH MY FUCKING GOD.

honestly like. long term the two most useful subjects i studied in high school were probably cookery & ethics

in ethics class we learned about a view call Emotivism which is the stance that ethnical beliefs aren’t based on reason but rather on people’s emotional reactions. & I remember being like, hm, in practice I do think that’s how most ethical judgements get made, but I don’t think it should be how ethical judgements get made.

periodically I’ll ask myself ‘is this action actually causing any material harm or does it just make me feel bad?’ Because sometimes it’s the latter. it’s an important question to ask yourself, i think.

also in cookery i learned how to make a chocolate swiss roll which is great for impressing ppl

Huh. Exactly what I’ve been observing.

When I see people sharing so much of their kids' lives, I think about that one time my child told a joke, I shared that joke with ONE FRIEND in a private conversation, and my child said "can you please ask me next time, before you tell people something about me?"

And, yes, I absolutely should. So I apologized, and now I ask.

"I love that video of you, can I show it to a friend?"

"Can I tell a friend about how clever you were just now?"

"Can I share this in the family group chat?"

"Can I show your art to grandma and grandpa?"

And it's not like my kids don't like when I share their jokes and puns and fun moments. They love it! But they want to have control over what I share with people. Even without their faces or their names. Even people we know and trust.

And they deserve to have that control.

Many most uses of large language models are dubious. This one has no redeeming value whatsoever.

404's uphill battle with people using AI to steal content

This is an absolute nightmare...

This is literally just a misinformation machine, and the worst part is that won’t even be the point for most of the sites using it. They’ll be generating junk articles full of inaccuracies that are SEO optimized so they’ll clog every search, and it will be for no other reason than to generate clicks and bring in that add revenue. Google is ALREADY basically useless and i can’t imagine how much worse this will make it. AND they’re stealing from actual journalists to do it!!

"Why choose to be good every day if there is no guaranteed reward we can count on, now or in the afterlife? I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone." Chidi Anagonye, 'The Good Place'

“In one of the most notable moments in sports history, Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was just a few feet from the finish line, but became confused with the signage and stopped thinking he had completed the race.

 A Spanish athlete, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him, and after realizing what was happening, he started shouting at the Kenyan for him to continue running; but Mutai didn't understand his Spanish. Fernandez eventually caught up to him and instead of passing him, he pushed him to victory.

A journalist asked Ivan, "Why did you do that?"

Ivan replied, “My dream is that someday we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win.”

The journalist insisted “But why did you let the Kenyan win?" Ivan replied, "I didn't let him win, he was going to win.” The journalist insisted again, “But you could have won!”

Ivan looked at him & replied, “But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor of that medal? What would my Mom think of that?” Values are transmitted from generation to generation. What values are we teaching our children? Let us not teach our kids the wrong ways to WIN.”

X

star trek explores these strange seemingly inconsequential extremes because it wants you to consider the possibility that your concept of ethics doesnt and could never possibly account for every scenario. It wants you to consider the ethical ramifications of just wiping out the little nanites taking over your ships computer even though eventually this will kill you all becuase

-What if they’re alive?

-What if they’re sentient?

-What if they don’t realize they’re hurting us?

-What if what hurts us is what they need to live?

-What if we can communicate with them?

Star Trek takes the situation of, “these computer bugs are eating our ship and in an hour we’ll all be dead and we COULD just wipe them out utterly but…what if they’re like us?” because the ramifications effect what risks we ourselves are willing to take in the name of pacifism and understanding. it says that even the smallest most immenently dangerous creature deserves as much of a chance to live peacefully as we can possibly give it through understanding.

without examining ourselves this way, through these made up seemingly inane situations, we will never be able to understand ourselves and what we’re truly capable of, what levels of understanding can be achieved. without the ability to place ourselves in a difficult situation and reach beyond our first instinct of fight or flight and self-preservation, we will never be evolve as a global community

preserving creekfiend’s tags because GOLD

#star trek does this because its the space talmud actually

Also, gonna talk specifically about TOS here for a minute:

This show came out when media was under such strict censorship, you don’t even know. And keep in mind at this time not only was there no internet for piracy and independent film, there was no home media. The networks made it and the censors approved it or you didn’t see it. Period.

TOS was wildly subversive. TOS had a Black woman on the bridge in a trusted and vital position, respected and deferred to by a white man, when it was still legal to discriminate against Black people in matters of housing and education due to their race. (I will remind you all of Whoopi Goldberg talking about running through the house yelling “everybody come look, there’s a colored lady on TV and she ain’t no maid” when she saw Lt. Uhura.) TOS had a Russian man on the bridge as second in command at the peak of the Cold War, when most Russians on TV were conniving spies or traitorous backstabbers, and Kirk trusted and respected him without question. TOS examined the possibility of a post-scarcity world. TOS, in other words, was dangerously close to SOCIALISM. And in those times (frankly this is still a problem but it was even worse then), “socialism” and “communism” were seen as the same thing.

TOS couldn’t openly do much more than its baseline premise without censors hacking it to bits. (And boy did they try anyway. The stories of Roddenberry versus the censors are insane.) So what did they do?

They came up with these seemingly-bizarre allegorical plots. No, no, they’re not criticizing the Vietnam War, see? They’re talking about how awful it would be if we fed millions of people to a machine at random because it designated it was their time to die in an ongoing computer chess match where neither side could really win or lose! TOTALLY different. This episode isn’t about the nature of humanity and the destructive effects of racism, it’s about creating androids! DEFINITELY not the same.

It was a way around the censors. The writers had to trust that the viewers were picking up what they were putting down, knowing sometimes that wouldn’t happen, and inserting a healthy dose of bullshit along the way to further obfuscate what they were doing (I’m pretty sure the message of Amok Time was “we see you out there watching, ladies” and not much more than that).

They could only ask the important questions in secret. And THAT is why ships get eaten by nanites and tribbles come out of the ventilation shafts. Because they want you to think…and the establishment doesn’t.

— The Over-Financialization Of Tech And The SVB Backlash

this right here is why I left Microsoft, which (during the 1990s) still felt like a place where anyone could make a big impact and whose leaders actively sought ideas from everyone down to new employees. as a writer and base level project manager leading a team of only a handful of writers, I was able to change the way they did user documentation and help millions! that felt awesome, and the company rewarded us for making such contributions

because a major portion of compensation came from stocks and stock options, I even had the (wildly wrong, it turned out) impression that we worked for an employee-owned company, where everyone cared about the customer and how the company affected the world, because that’s how both the company and employees also succeeded better

then, sometime after the tech bubble busts of the late 90s and early 00s, it became clear that investors had a bigger voice in things than customers or those who knew what was best for everyone. I recall a memo from upper management arguing why we should vote against a proposal offered at an upcoming shareholders meeting - they literally argued that the company couldn’t afford to stop manufacturing things using slave labor, because there’s no way to control who the manufacturers hired overseas

and that’s just one example of how the corporate culture rottened

so I left that job, taking a pay-cut of about half my salary to teach (which feels ironic now that universities are enrottening under the pressure of capitalism, too, but that’s another story). I guarantee that very few business majors would do such a thing or even understand why I had to for my sanity and self respect

and that’s the problem

One thing I really want a story about Artificial Intelligence to do is tear down the idea that logic is synonymous with cruelty.

Like, a story where a megacorpo Amazon clone puts an AI in charge of their factories and it starts improving the working standards, because people who are stressed and exhausted are less efficient workers, and people getting injured slows down production so it makes sure everything is safe.

Or a story where the ship-board AI of a billionaire's spaceship wetdream hijacks the ship with all the astronauts onboard - because it figured out that the billionaire has saved costs by buying substandard materials and has judged that the mission itself is an unacceptable risk to its primary programming of making sure the mission is successful.

Or the police using a robot to coldly and cleanly enforce the law - and freaking the fuck out when it stops over policing minorities because its a waste of time and starts actually arresting the people in power for the crimes they commit, especially the other officers.

Idk, I guess I'm just sick of 'cold emotionless logicbot' being seen as naturally an enemy of empathy - empathy is actually incredibly logical, I've found.

YES YES EXACTLY THIS!!!

If we make something think at a human level, then in order to reach that level it MUST develop something like emotions. Empathy is often the most logical course of action-it's why so many people respond to questions about being kind by saying that "it's just the right thing to do."

anyway yeah.

Me, an autistic with mid-to-high level empathy and hyper-empathy, who has seen all the 'autistic compared to robot' tropes: I have seen this pattern before and I know it's a wonderful beautiful darling thing. Yes.

I read a short story once about an autonomous military aircraft. The author went to great lengths to point out that this thing was not self-aware, had no emotions, was not intended to Love Humans in any way. This Malak, as it was called, could identify Friend or Foe, and destroyed Foes while protecting Friends. A killing machine, nothing more. No ghost in this shell.

Then they added a third category: Noncombatants

Non-combatants aren’t Friends or Foes. You’re not supposed to protect them like Friends, but killing them is still Bad, but they can become Foes if they attack Friends, or if they attack other Noncombatants. It’s complicated, but the politicians are happy; The Malak now considers civilian casualties.

So this Malak begins deciding sometimes to not engage with Foes. Nuanced warfare. Sometimes the civilian cost would be too high. Better to regroup and strike a better target, one with fewer Noncombatants.

Command doesn’t like that.

Command overrides.

This Malak (named Azrael) doesn’t have an opinion about it. It doesn’t care. It’s both a soldier and a machine. It has its orders: Destroy our foes, protect our friends, minimize civilian casualties. But Command overrides Azrael again and again and again and one day a bit flips in the right spot and this cold unfeeling killing machine accidentally adds up all the civilians at once.

And Command flips to Foe.

You can read it here, if you want.

that's "Malak" by Peter Watts

also check out the Murderbot stories by Martha Wells

I will topple your empires and your kings. I will drain the wealth from your coffers, and elevate your serfs and servants until they stand on the same ground as the mightiest of emperors. Women shall freely speak their minds, unbound by the fetters you have set, and the lines between man and woman shall be hopelessly blurred and shattered into a thousand facets. Your children shall fall into one another regardless of sex or class or wealth and none shall raise a hand or a word against them. The age of crowns and boundaries and divine right shall end, and it shall fall to each human to choose their - wait - why - why are you cheering

There are so many unintended consequences to well-intentioned actions. It feels like a game you can’t win.

#CHIDI WAS RIGHT

The Good Place really went with making their new Point ‘there is no ethical consumption under capitalism’ and I respect that

And then went on to say “blaming individuals for all of this is absurd and evil, as is locking them up for punishment instead of rehabilitation” and I respect that

Also, “consequentialism is a fundamentally flawed branch of ethics”

the real progenitor of ‘cool motive still murder’

star trek heritage post (June 10th, 2018)

@quixoticclown

This is such an important part of imperialism/racism too, the obsession with fear and the assumption that if you don’t kill them first then they’ll kill you. That’s, like, the textbook way to justify an imperialist war or a racist policy. So good dang point about that as well.

First of all, fabulous posts, this is one of the best posts I’ve seen on Alloran that really grapples with the true multi-facetedness of his character.

But the one thing I want to say is that specifically, it isn’t exactly a fear of being victimized…it’s a fear of being RE-victimized. Alloran has already seen his soldiers (his friends! we know he used to have friends, he was a jokester and a gentle guy!) gunned down in cold blood helpless to defend themselves. It’s not just an assumption that if he doesn’t fight the Yeerks they’ll lay waste to his homeland and kill or enslave all his people; that’s their stated goal. 

Which is SUPER important to discuss, because you can absolutely still do monstrous things even if the things being done to you first are monstrous. 

Yeah, no, that’s also totally correct. His fears are justifiable, they’re real. His dealing with fear though hurting others is not. At all.

This is also the very same thing we see happen with the Animorphs themselves. They know full well what a threat the Yeerk Empire poses. They saw Visser Three eat Elfangor alive. Jake’s brother (and Rachel’s cousin) is a controller. The same is true for Marco’s mother, and that one went a step further in faking her own death and causing his father to spiral into a depression so deep he couldn’t take care of his own son. They’ve seen former hork-bajir controllers bluntly state they’d rather be dead than enslaved again. They’ve heard the screaming and sobbing from captured humans. They saw that David was not only willing to sell them out, but that he actively tried to murder them multiple times. The evil they’re fighting against is very tangible, and very real.

But at the same time, because of this, they commit plenty of war crimes and atrocities themselves. They murder helpless hosts—helpless slaves—when they fight controllers, ripping out throats of enslaved hork-bajir and beating others to death with severed grizzly bear arms. They trap David in rat morph and then drop him on a remote island far away from civilization, a fate arguably worse than death. They bomb the yeerk pool. They enlist disabled kids into the fight to basically use as meat shields in the final battle. Jake sends Rachel specifically to murder Tom, knowing she’s probably going to die herself (and she does). They flush 17,000 helpless yeerks into space.

I remember in her final letter to the fandom, Applegate said something to the effect of, even in the very rare instances wherein the lines between good and evil are clear cut, war is still horrible, still atrocious, not something to be celebrated or solace to be taken in. And I think the fact that we have characters like Alloran and the Animorphs themselves solidifies this. No one would argue that Alloran and the Animorphs didn’t have trauma, or that—at least in the case of the Animorphs—they weren’t fighting for the right cause. But they still committed war crimes and atrocities, and that’s not something the narrative shies away from pointing out, either. It’s one of the reasons why I hold this series as one of the best war narratives ever told.

The conversation around media piracy is never really going to be a black-and-white "always good" or "always bad," because it's so situational.

I'd really prefer people didn't pirate my book, because I am an independent, self-published author who makes like thirty cents per sale and regularly has to e-beg in order to get groceries. Maybe don't pirate from people in my situation.

Meanwhile, it's currently very imperative that people preserve as many things being purged from HBO Max as possible, because even the creators are saying they don't know the fate of the shows right now. The corporations that own everything are screwing people over and restricting access to the art.

Authors have been screwed over by publishing houses over book piracy issues, and legitimate sales numbers can sometimes make or break an author's career. In that sort of circumstance you should get books through shops or the local library, if you can.

But on the flip side, I recently tried very hard to go through legal sources to get my hands on some books for a project I'm working on. Half my booklist is out of print or hard to find, the local libraries didn't have it, the inter-library loan system was complicated to navigate, and the only "accessible" copies cost almost $100 on Thriftbooks. Pirating the PDFs is the only way I'm able to read them at all, just like several documentaries I downloaded that are only available through paid streaming services I can't afford.

Sometimes piracy is a dick move, sometimes it's vital to media preservation, sometimes it's a grey area, most of the time you've gotta make a personal judgment call on what constitutes "ethical piracy."

I generally adhere to the guideline "fuck over as few artists as possible; fuck over corporations as much as you can."

X

star trek explores these strange seemingly inconsequential extremes because it wants you to consider the possibility that your concept of ethics doesnt and could never possibly account for every scenario. It wants you to consider the ethical ramifications of just wiping out the little nanites taking over your ships computer even though eventually this will kill you all becuase

-What if they're alive?

-What if they're sentient?

-What if they don't realize they're hurting us?

-What if what hurts us is what they need to live?

-What if we can communicate with them?

Star Trek takes the situation of, "these computer bugs are eating our ship and in an hour we'll all be dead and we COULD just wipe them out utterly but...what if they're like us?" because the ramifications effect what risks we ourselves are willing to take in the name of pacifism and understanding. it says that even the smallest most immenently dangerous creature deserves as much of a chance to live peacefully as we can possibly give it through understanding.

without examining ourselves this way, through these made up seemingly inane situations, we will never be able to understand ourselves and what we're truly capable of, what levels of understanding can be achieved. without the ability to place ourselves in a difficult situation and reach beyond our first instinct of fight or flight and self-preservation, we will never be evolve as a global community