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the hubristic violence, the megalomaniacal dreams of the hairless ape, our language and our medicine, our petty handfuls of recorded history, it all pales in the face of the great black abyss of the memory of the herpes virus

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i know a george who dated a georgia and then cheated on her with jorge

would y’all ever date someone with the same name as you?

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under medical neoliberalism, there are only two acceptable "causes" for illness/variation/behavior: an immutable, measurable, essential feature of biology- or things which are your fault.

so you end up with most "progressive" medical approaches striving to bioessentialize things like addiction, poverty, sexuality, gender, crime, suffering, anger, etc because they can't move outside of this paradigm. further, any attempt to assert that something is NOT an inherently biological phenomenon is perceived as saying "this is all your fault and is a moral flaw". we have to move past our obsession with using biology to justify our experiences- it will never be a path to liberation and just reinforces the idea that anything that is not "biological fact" is a moral wrong.

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Do you have the time to elaborate a little on "collectivism vs individualism is a false dichotomy?"

I think this explains it well

Click Here

But, I guess if I were to try to rephrase it, the slavishness of my comrades enslaves me; I cannot be free, not truly, if I cannot meet another on equal terms, if I am predispositions as lesser or greater, then I am bound to these roles, defined by them, defining others, rather than free from these fetters.

The enslavement of others, their material and mental degradation and stunted development, disallows them from engaging me in fruitful competition; I can't learn from them if they can't teach me, if they can't develop themselves to the fullest extent possible, then they can't challenge me in meaningful discourse;

My individuality is possible through the past and present efforts of others, this is why the anti-abortionist critique fails when it talks about "The Next Einstein" or whatever, because there's people now, in poverty, now, who due to systemic conditions are disallowed from developing their powers; in a sense, depriving me from their example.

MLK hit it on the head when he said an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere, though this is probably more for the whole "first they came for the communist" facet of the argument, still holds tho.

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you can actually do passably well in (pre-university level) math without learning much of anything a lot of the time - for example, if you think of a derivative as "thing that has this effect on a function in this case" and then just memorize a bunch of derivative rules, you can do well on an exam without ever thinking of a derivative as a rate of change, as long as your algebra is decent.

i think this is a pretty big failure mode of pre-university math education. in tutoring, i used to encounter people who knew how to do certain operations but not why, because they were tested on the "how" and not the "why", and for one reason or another they lacked the natural interest in math to seek out the "why".

sidenote: i think one of the major reasons people lose interest in math, stop asking about the "why", and start treating doing math as a chore is precisely this style of teaching.

proof-based math tends to be the opposite of this. symbolic manipulation is still useful and essential, but finding the correct manipulations requires a certain level of deeper understanding.

as many engineers will point out, proof-based math isn't really essential for many people, even people who use math frequently in their jobs! you can get away with just knowing a few rules most of the time. but i think deeper understanding is useful, both because it gives you greater flexibility (you can adapt a limited toolset more ably) and as a failsafe (detecting errors by noticing your answers run against your intuition).

edit: oh and people forget the "how" a lot, but if you know the "why", you can often spot-rederive the "how", especially if you remember some of it but just need to patch up the gaps. also important.

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some eldritch blasts

#art #these pretty....

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Good news: math is completely made up

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When you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

William Saroyan (b. 31 August 1908) Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer (via macrolit)

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What Do You Think You’re Doing? by Kaiser Caimo

Part 3 of 4.

(Part 1 here)

An aggressively ugly digital zine about making art. Available in full as a pdf for free/pay what you want here: https://gum.co/lUpii

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— Sunrise, by Louise Glück

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u can just rock back and forth if u want. its free

#you literally CAN... and you can also run up and down the hallway and the feds can't do fuck all about it

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i’m glad there’s more happy lgbt stories out there but like whoever decided that the “good” reaction to coming out should be “haha we already knew you silly goose” is insane like how is that not terrifying the whole fucking reason i was not out before was because i didn’t want you to know

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the whole point of girls doing the not like other girls thing is basically them believing that the girls around them lack an interior life. they were raised on depictions of women as shallow caricatures and they recognize themselves to be actual people with thoughts and feelings, but instead of drawing the conclusion that these depictions of women are incorrect, they draw the conclusion that those depictions of women are correct and that must mean they're smarter and have more substance than the "average" woman. to exit the not like other girls phase means recognizing that all real life women have the same level of interiority as you do, and that depictions of women in the media as consistently empty headed and frivolous are misogynistic stereotypes not grounded in reality.

i say all this to say that to exit a not like other girls phase does not necessitate taking an interest in "traditionally feminine" ways of dress and makeup, nor does it mean never saying anything negative about the beauty industry

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“x lives in my head rent free” yah everything lives in my head rent free because i’m not some little landlord bitch

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A lot of people seem to implicitly believe (or desperately want to believe) something to the effect of "the facts of the world make my value system convenient."

For example, anarchists tend to have a value system which says that hierarchies and systems of domination are inherently unethical. This is something I agree with very strongly, and is why I often describe myself as an anarchist. A common question then posed to anarchists is how, without hierarchy, bureaucracy, or other such systems of social control/management, it would be possible to achieve the large-scale coordination needed to accomplish certain tasks that are considered necessary for human flourishing: industrial-scale production of antibiotics and vaccines, management of carbon emissions, maintenance of a power grid, and basically anything else that requires a sustained, large-scale and legible set of social processes. Rather than addressing these (in my view) very valid concerns, most anarchists respond by dismissing the question. They claim, for example, that without capitalism we would have no need to manage carbon emissions, because the market incentives to emit would be gone. Or that industrial production of medical supplies isn't really necessary, because sufficient quantities could easily be made by small-scale local producers, etc.

And I'm always tempted to say "wow, how incredibly convenient". We don't even have enough understanding of human psychology to successfully model human behavior in our own society, and yet you're absolutely sure that in your hypothetical future society, humanity would just... no longer have any desire to engage in high-emission activities? You're absolutely sure that the physics and biology and chemistry and engineering involved in medical production all just happen to work out to make small-scale manufacture consistently doable? You're absolutely sure that all these problems people are posing just happen to be non-problems?

You may be right, certainly. It would be lovely if these things all worked out to be non-problems. But that's not something that can be determined through political theory. It's something that can only be determined through rigorous empirical study and technical work, and the conclusions that work comes to might just not turn out to be very convenient ones. This is why I sometimes don't call myself an anarchist.

But either way, my values stay unchanged. No matter what the answers to these technical questions are, I remain absolutely steadfast in my belief that systems of hierarchy and control are deeply unjust things. Either way, I will continue (as much as I can) to work towards a society in which these things can be done away with to the greatest degree possible, and their deleterious effects can be mitigated wherever they remain. And I think that I'm far more able to actually do that for being honest with myself about what the challenges of this project really are.

I want to be clear, this is not just a tendency I find with anarchists. I've encountered people of basically every political ideology engaging in this sort of dismissive optimism, insisting that the questions raised by their value system in fact demand no answers. But ultimately, it's not intellectually honest to insist that the universe has conspired to make your value system an easy one to hold. And that kind of intellectual dishonesty actually gets in the way of successfully working towards realization of the values you have.

Which is why, in my view, the most effective way to approach your social values is not as positions to be defended but as goals to be achieved. Inconvenient facts are not points against you, they are obstacles in your way. Perhaps they're insurmountable obstacles (that really would be, I think, a point against you), but perhaps they're not. The only way to find out is to acknowledge them as genuine obstacles and to try to find solutions. The inability to acknowledge the challenges in front of oneself has been the downfall of many, many movements, and the solution is as simple as having a little intellectual humility. And personally, I'd rather not let my ego get in the way of building a better world.

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one reason why learning body respect is so powerful–and so discouraged by the mechanism of social control that is diet culture–is that when we learn to honor our bodies’ rights, needs, and wisdom, we become much more aware and less tolerant of violations in other areas of life. 

when we are attuned to our body’s need for rest, we are much more aware of the violence of even the 40 hour work week (ofc work is far more violent than that)

when we carve out our own permission to accept our body’s natural weight set point, demands that we shrink our personality, our voice, or our emotions in order not to cause social offense feel like much less acceptable constrictions

when we learn to value our natural hair and skin, and give up harmful rituals like chemical straightening or lightening (or the beliefs that underlie them), other ways in which we are required to harm ourselves–from a coerced gender presentation to living with the consequences of environmental racism–come into clearer focus as specifically targeted violence 

when we have compassion for our bodies and their vulnerability, we are more sensitive to mistreatment in personal relationships

the systems that make us sick and self-hating are political projects, enacted in ways that can be analyzed, understood, and changed. this movement is inward and outward, with the former supporting the latter (and vice versa). when our healing is rooted in wisdom and compassion and self respect, we inevitably turn those values outward, take them up against the structures which would strip them from us.