In Hell

saying that chatgpt endangers your livelihood as a creative is like saying pig slop endangers your career as a chef

i think for this analogy to be really correct we'd have to live in a world where a very significant % of trained chefs are already professional 9-5 pig slop makers

I've been in an abusive relationship and have had many friends who also have survived abuse, including many times in which the abuse is ongoing during our friendship. (of course, I also had friends while I was being abused too).

And there's a dynamic sometimes, where an abused person will hear someone validate their emotions or encourage their autonomy and desires, and react to that by repeating all the things their abuser would say if they tried to express their emotions or assert their autonomy.

This can feel very discouraging for friends, because it can feel like the survivor is relentlessly defending their abuser. However, there is usually a deeply practical thing happening from the survivor's point of view.

If any time you express an emotion or assert autonomy you are flooded with a million reasons why those things are unacceptable, it is too overwhelming to defend. But, if you find another person who agrees with your right to express emotions and assert autonomy, and seems to hold their belief in your right to do so very strongly, it reasons that they might be able to argue this point in ways you haven't thought of.

So you end up almost instinctively testing out how their reasoning might hold up against your abuser, or trying to see how their reasoning might hold up against your own doubts in your right to autonomy that emerge after gaslighting. It's almost trial run to see if you can use these arguments later to defend yourself.

Something I've been thinking about recently is that I believe a similar dynamic happens with trans people around transition related care. Earlier on, I remember asking people who were on testosterone about all the fearmongering things I'd heard, because I needed to hear from someone who had done the punished thing and, from what I could tell, seemed much more comfortable and happy than I was. I cringe remembering some of these conversations, because yikes--no one needs another trans person coming over and pouring internalized transphobia at them. But I also am extremely grateful that people I spoke to seemed to read my sincerity and admiration for them and gently dispelled worries I had.

I don't have a real point I'm making here, other than just... even if someone you love seems to have really internalized their own oppression, even if they argue with you to the last detail, if they are deliberately pursuing conversations with you about avenues to their own autonomy, they may be listening much more closely to your words than it seems. Even if they leave acting completely unconvinced, you may have offered them genuine tools they will be able to use later. You didn't waste your time.

while i still can't decide on what the funniest part of disco elysium is i think the whole bit with the alphabet book is up there. describing it doesn't even do it justice but like. it's the way harry goes "let's do this" "mmhm" "yeah!" while slowly and thoughtfully reading the alphabet in his head. how every letter is represented by some obscure fuckass discoelysiumey word like AZIMUTH or PERIHELION even though it's a kids book but X is still for xylophone because of course it is. how you can immediately go tell kim you know the alphabet now and he goes "good. i also know the alphabet." and the fucking esprit the corps check going "it is a very useful skill to have, he thinks. for all sorts of life activities. like reading, and..." and that's the end of the scene and it doesn't even give you exp or anything but at least you can sleep well tonight knowing you taught harry du bois the alphabet. congratulations

TITUS HARDIE - "Don't think I forgot how I specifically let you know how I felt about her arrest either." He says shaking his head. "Now what do you want?"

EMPATHY - His tone is friendly now and the last words are actually accompanied with a little smile.

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - Titus's posture is more relaxed than when you first met him. He is relieved that this Klaasje-business is finally over.

awareness of "the abused can become the abuser" is useless without the knowledge that abuse is a choice anyone makes that is made for self-benefit. recently I watched an interview on the psychology of domestic abuse and the woman who interviewed those who inflicted the abuse always made sure to ask "why didn't you take it further?" because the answer would always show the abuser hadn't simply lost control. for example one man said he pushed over his girlfriend but didn't kick her once she was down because he didn't want any noticeable bruising that caused suspicion. human psychology is much less poetic than you think. too many psychology enjoyers only enjoy the poetic

average "dark psychology" enjoyer discovering the perpetrator literally just hated women and minorities

Before the TMA/TME dichotomy was put in those terms, people found issue with the fact that in order to discuss transmisogyny without talking over transfems they had to reveal some combination of their ASAB, gender or trans status in some way. TMA/TME is a gesture at a solution that allows people to locate themselves in relation to structural transmisogyny while revealing only the absolute minimum information required to do so. It is also a terminology that allows for discussing transmisogyny without making any extraneous assertions or assumptions pertaining to the subjects of discussion.

The fact that this is the most minimal possible terminology for discussing transmisogyny in terms of group relationships makes it seem like our last line of defense against saying "it's not a problem to speak over transfems" and that seems to be precisely what some people are aiming for: The accusation that we just want to dismiss the views of everyone who isn't transfem is made openly with the implication being that wanting to prioritize the perspectives of transfems in discussions about the oppression of transfems is indicative of something akin to transfem-supremacy.

I don't see what we can take away or add or change to address the criticisms made of TMA/TME to the satisfaction of the critics. Informally we could just say transfem and non-transfem but by doing that we have to include all TMA people under the label "transfem". We are already constantly forced to do this for the sake of communication, but it is flattening the possibility space allotted to our identities considerably and it is misleading.

Would any of the criticisms actually be assuaged by us changing the terms to more closely reflect the literal meaning we intend? If we chose terms that precisely conveyed a meaning like "primary target of structural transmisogyny" and "not a primary target of structural transmisogyny" would anyone at all actually be satisfied? Or would the goalposts be moved once again?

I see questions like "Should we perhaps make a binary like this for other forms of oppression too? Should we say ableism-applicable and ableism-exempt?" put forward as an argument against these terms and I just don't think this would be a big deal. The reason we don't usually need to do that is that it's generally understood how purposefully obfuscating your your own relationship to a form of oppression in controversial discussions of it is suspect. Have we abandoned standpoint epistemology altogether at this point, or is ours a special case?

We are told that we are creating a new binary by using TMA/TME terminology but that is presupposing that that this binary didn't already exist before we put it into language. The criticism simply assumes its desired conclusion. It makes the brute assertion that TMA people aren't affected by transmisogyny qualitatively differently from TME people to being with (and we're not allowed to litigate this assertion). It denies outright that transmisogyny is what we mean by it and tells us that we shouldn't mean by transmisogyny what we do mean by it. We are told that we are reinforcing or even creating the arbitrary, inconsistent, socially constructed systems on the basis of which we are oppressed by acknowledging the arbitrary, inconsistent, socially constructed systems on the basis of which we are oppressed in our analysis.

"You just want to know what's in people's pants" I do not, and you know it. "You just want to know people's ASAB" I do not, and you know it. Keep your words out of my mouth. What I want is for people to not try to pull the wool over our eyes and stealthily define transmisogyny out of existence by, without acknowledging it, introducing the non-existence of transmisogyny as a settled matter in the premises on the basis of which they criticize our terminology.

If transfems attempting to insist on their ability to not be talked over about their own oppression seems to you like they are engaging in the epistemic marginalization of everyone else then you are a transmiosgynist and deserve to be identified as such. It is because of our epistemic marginalization even in LGBT and trans spaces that we need terms like these. Stripping us of the tools to even attempt to counterbalance our epistemic marginalization by acknowledging it will simply allow for our epistemic marginalization to go unacknowledged once again, to let others speak for us and over us, to re-enshrine the absolute moral right to never have to listen to us.

once you start thinking "idk if I want [transition related surgery] but if I could magically just have the results from it I would agree to it in a heartbeat"

then you gotta acknowledge that you actually do know that you want that surgery. the thing you're not sure about is whether or not you can endure the process of getting and recovering from the surgery.

and you'll never know the answer to that actual question unless you start seriously looking into it and researching what that process is like and what things you'd need to do in order to make it happen.

i have to defend fictional women who aren't good people because if i don't who else will

the two flavours of this feeling are "i think she is flawed and going through it and figuring her shit out and that's a very human quality that i appreciate seeing in a female character" and "i think it's good she killed and ate those people and i think it's really hot that she didn't feel bad about it because confidence is attractive"

It’s ok you can undress in front of me I’m a pervert ^_^

trying to conceptualize the immense human costs of the US imperial rampage around the world is something that feels like it stretches the boundaries of comprehension. like it's possible to read the numbers and know from personal experience or read accounts or what have you. but a single human life can only hold so much grief. how can any individual human comprehend the worlds upon worlds which Capital and its supplicants have tragedied day in and day out for decades? take a single human life, utterly and completely saturated with tragedy, grief, and heartbreak. magnify and multiply that life across countless millions. every individual grief itself a soul-tearing, monolithic, cosmological cataclysm. imagine every single person you hold dear murdered in cold blood in front of you. imagine being tortured, alone, with no hope of salvation, for years. now imagine that experience and multiply it by the populations of entire nations over entire decades. how can we begin to grasp the scale of this atrocity? how can any person who wishes to remain human hold anything but a seething, blinding hatred of this empire? it is a miracle of humanity that so much of the world chooses to stand up against this level of atrocity, that so many millions have been broken on this wheel and still millions more continue and will continue to fight for the cause of humanity. it is a horror, it is a sorrow unknowable, it is a miracle of miracles of resistance. the US empire must end and the world must be afforded the beginning of a long process of healing and grieving. there will be a day after all of this has passed. there will be a world after this, at all costs, because it is the only path towards a world after this. the US empire is an existential threat to not only all of humanity but to the essence of humanity itself.

Moreover, the United States Empire must be destroyed.

oh also speaking of overwatch and teamwork any game with a voice chat de facto mechanically disadvantages female players (& any player with a voice that reads as feminine) because one of the most effective ways to rank up is to consistently communicate and it is really hard to take advantage of that advice when it leads to being sexually harassed nonstop. Which is obviously not to say that games should never have voice chats or whatever but is i think something to keep in mind whenever the perennial Women in Esports discourse rolls aorund

I'm gonna be honest scanlation team, i am not purchasing the official release on amazon