#applied ethics center

[fairfieldthinkspace]

The Climate Crisis

By Richard E. Hyman

Distinguished Visiting Professional and Adjunct Professor, Waide Center for Applied Ethics, Fairfield University

“The biggest threat to our future is thinking that someone else will lead, that someone else will solve the climate crisis.”

Last year, Fairfield University’s Waide Center for Applied Ethics sponsored a multidisciplinary faculty panel for a university-wide and community discussion about how their respective areas of study addresses issues of climate change and justice.

This event was part of the Worldwide Climate and Justice Education Week, a global initiative led by Bard College, promoting dialogue on climate and justice on campuses and in communities around the world. 

Too often climate conversations are restricted to sustainability and climate science programs. To truly solve the climate crisis, we need everyone who is concerned about climate change and our future to talk about climate, and to act: academics, activists, artists, businesses, community members, faith leaders, governments, innovators, nonprofits, students, writers and more. 

In 2023, 58,000 people in 61 countries participated in 285 events. Fairfield University was one of them, focused on the critical work ahead, and our shared resilient future. The thinking is that although we cannot stop today’s climate change, if we talk about it and take action, we can better deal with it, mitigate the impact, and importantly take measures to prevent it in the future. 

Making climate an event helps students understand that they can make a positive difference with their life’s work. By engaging students in creative, interdisciplinary ways, we can help them explore how climate applies to their respective areas of study and personal interests, so they can learn how to favorably impact climate solutions, both as students and in their careers or avocations.

The following is a selection from each professor’s comments, in the order in which they were presented. Science, business, mental health and ethics will be followed by my concluding remarks. 

Dr. Kraig Steffen, PhD, associate professor of Chemistry, framed the conversation with the statement that “sustainability is the defining challenge of our current age.” He reflected on an image of earth as a miniscule, fragile blue dot within a vast universe. 

Dr. Steffen noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s decade-over-decade, increasingly definitive language about the human influence on global climate change. In 2007, the panel said it “is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropocentric greenhouse gas concentrations”. In 2021: “…human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020. Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals.” 

Dr. Steffen attributed humankind’s sluggish response to societal, commercial and political inertia.  He then offered some ways that we might respond, e.g., make informed choices, engage, vote and, instead of despairing, act.

Dr. Robert Nazarian, PhD, associate professor of Physics, commented that the first climate model in 1967 predicted a change in global mean temperature that is still consistent with the most recent climate models. 

Dr. Nazarian stated that within the scientific community, warming based on human emissions is a settled matter, and that attention is now on the study and ramifications of extremes such as heat waves and the frequency and severity of storms.

Dr. Nazarian mentioned that research being conducted at Fairfield University, using climate model output, has contributed to the scientific community’s understanding of changes in extreme precipitation. For example, this research has recently shown that if emissions continue unchecked, the Northeast U.S. may experience a four-to-five-fold increase in the frequency of the strongest storms. He added that it’s important for scientific research to consider climate data equity. Most studies consider developed regions and neglect developing regions, which are often the regions that receive the worst impacts of climate change. 

Dr. Noradeen Farlekas, PhD, CFA, assistant professor of the practice at Fairfield University’s Dolan School of Business, started with a question: Is business the problem or is business part of the solution to climate injustice…or both? Relative to this question, she posed another: Is it more impactful to divest from companies or invest for change?

Dr. Farlekas first focused on health inequity, referencing Harvard studies, which found  significant evidence that economically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities were suffering adverse health effects related to long-term exposure to air pollution, unhealthy housing and other social determinants. Indeed, unequal exposure is environmental injustice, contributing to educational, racial, income, wealth, and housing inequity.

Dr. Farlekas also spoke about the cause and impacts of two of the largest corporate-induced climate catastrophes: the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Volkswagen emissions scandal.

The British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill was one of the largest environmental disasters in world history. In 2014, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that because of ethics and governance lapses involving gross negligence and reckless conduct, BP was primarily responsible for the spill. The disaster inflicted immense harm on the environment, public health, and the company, which paid almost $21 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in U.S. history.

Like the BP oil spill, the Volkswagen emissions scandal involved ethics and governance lapses. Volkswagen admitted to cheating on U.S. emissions tests by using a software designed to measure emissions in an inaccurate, company-favorable way. The engines emitted nitrogen oxide pollutants up to 40 times above what is allowed in the U.S. Another ethics and governance issue. The result: significant harmful health and environmental impacts. Volkswagen paid a settlement of more than $35 billion.

Dr. Farlekas suggested that while companies, governments, and policies still cause negative impacts, there is a way for positive change to occur. She encouraged, voting (local, state, federal) and noted that laws and policies have a direct impact on the actions of both private and public companies (what, where, and how companies can conduct business). 

She also mentioned that municipal bonds (state and local) are investable and can be the source of environmental and climate injustice—reminding the audience that it matters who is making decisions, for example the Flint water crisis.

Dr. Farlekas stated that another form of voting is at the corporate level, as proxy voting and shareholder proposals can influence corporate decisions, board composition, and transparency – issues that can influence workers’ rights, pay disparity, and a company’s direction. She provided two examples. First, in 1971, a coalition of faith-based investors filed a shareholder proposal requesting that General Motors (and later other companies) cease doing business in South Africa until apartheid was ended. The second example was how a small hedge fund, Engine No. 1, worked with the largest passive investment managers to change the composition of Exxon Mobil’s board in an effort to increase long-term shareholder value through a lower-carbon future.

Lastly, asset owners (for example, pension funds and endowment funds) can be part of the solution, particularly if they hire investment managers who incorporate analysis of environmental, social, and governance frameworks, and invest in ways that reduce the associated risks. Companies should consider all of their stakeholders and make decisions to create long-term shareholder value instead of focusing on short-term (i.e., quarterly) objectives.

Dr. Dilani Perera, PhD, professor, counselor education, addressed ecological grief, or climate grief, relatively new terms in the mental health field. This grief brings about fear of imminent, yet unknown loss, and apprehension about an unpredictable future. Although we can adapt to change, change often brings strong mental and emotional responses.

Grief is a natural human response to loss. But ecological grief may be unique. 

When you're grieving for something specific, whether a person, a dog, a lifestyle, it's already gone. Climate change is intangible, relentless and ubiquitous, and it is an ongoing process. It's not over yet—so you can't come to terms with it, and you don't know exactly what's going to happen. This uncertainty makes ecological grief different. 

When it comes to climate change, people tend to avoid speaking about their feelings. One reason is perhaps a fear of being judged. Fear combined with uncertainty leads to anxiety. 

Climate grief can manifest itself in many ways, including:

Relationship conflict, such as when partners have difficulty deciding whether to have children. 

Consumption choices, as when one struggles, wondering if something is a sustainable product. 

Trauma, if family has been directly affected by climate change.

Also, there are those who do not believe in climate change. This denial makes grieving more complicated and even confusing at times, and it can also bring a sense of loneliness.

Dr. Perera, mentioned groups who are likely to most deeply feel climate grief:

Land stewards, such as indigenous communities, people who make their living off the land, climate scientists and activists, and those who enjoy the outdoors.

Younger people, as opposed to older people, who have more time on earth remaining, and want to enjoy that time.

Solutions include reminding yourself that you are not alone. Other people feel similarly. The developmental model of grief indicates that you go through three stages. 

The first stage is "reacting," which you may already be doing. This is when you experience feelings. 

The second and third stages are "reconstructing" and "reorienting." These two stages are related to how you process the climate changes. 

Each person may need a different way to process, but feeling, talking, uniting, and acting are the broader categories of things to try. Finding other people who have similar concerns and feelings, and connecting with them, helps with isolation and loneliness. It also helps with the disenfranchisement one may feel due to the lack of cultural practices or family rituals for grieving this type of loss, and also the lack of social acknowledgement about ecological grief. 

Becoming more informed about the specifics of how climate change is likely to impact in the near future also helps to put things in perspective. 

If one has a religious orientation, faith is also a good place to talk, unite, and act. Non-religious spiritual practices can also help with grieving. Engaging in these practices with intentional focus on ecological grief may be helpful.

Finally, spending time in nature, appreciating, and connecting is important. Most people who lose a loved one regret not spending enough time with them. There is evidence that nature is good for your mental health. Nature is not only a source of anxiety, but also a source of strength for humans. She shows her ability to adapt, which is a lesson for all of us.

Dr. David Schmidt, PhD, associate professor and director of the Waide Center for Applied Ethics, noted that the problems of climate change include many ethics issues, and there is no shortage of ethical arguments about them. The arguments persist because they fail to persuade people or change their behavior. He said that one reason might be that ethics principles and theories are highly abstract and theoretical.  We grasp these principles and theories at an intellectual level, but they fail to move us at a deeper level. We are left unchanged and continue to act as we did before. If we want to actually make a difference, ethically, we need to shift our perspective to a relational ethic of care, meaning that we are not isolated individuals. Rather, we exist in webs of relationships with others, ranging from people or groups that we’re very close to, to more distant connections, to people across the globe. Our ethical duties of responsibility and care for others are grounded in these relationships.

The key point for ethics of climate change, is that we need to re-examine our understanding of our relationship to our planet. With the rise of industrialization, we came to view nature as an elaborate machine.  We developed an impersonal relationship with nature that made it easier to manipulate our environment without much regard for our impact on it. But it wasn’t always this way.  For long periods of human history, it was not uncommon for humans to view nature in kinship terms, sometimes perceiving the world as a nurturing mother. Dr. Schmidt cited professor and author Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, in which she writes, “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.” Kimmerer observes, “It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.”  Further, Kimmerer speaks of “animacy,” expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. She writes:

“The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction-not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’ If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.” 

Dr. Schmidt said that many dismiss kinship terms for nature as mere poetry or pretty fiction, but that we need language that reawakens ancient feelings of closeness to the earth.  He thinks that the biggest ethics challenge today is to develop a relational ethic of care for the earth, that will not only persuade us about what is the right thing to do regarding climate change but also compel us to act.

Conclusion: In my Environmental Ethics class, we look at the local, national and global environment through an ethics lens. Students learn and think about topics they may have never been exposed to. Together, we contemplate what, if any, moral obligations we have to future generations and nature, including non-humans.  

Many topics relate to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and virtually every topic is impacted by climate change:

Conservation of natural resources and habitats

Biodiversity, species survival and extinction

Pollution of air, water and soil 

Sound, light and plastic pollution                                                                               

Vulnerable populations and mass migrations due to sea level rise, food supply and starvation

Indigenous peoples including island nations and Native Americans 

Government, politics and public policy

Business and technology solutions, including innovation related to renewable clean energy

Laudato Si, “Care for Our Common Home”

The objectives of the class include developing students’ ability to:

Understand, analyze and critically evaluate environmental matters through an ethics lens. By marrying the academic nomenclature and theories of ethics, with real-life dilemmas associated with climate change, students are stimulated to think in new ways.

Communicate one’s personal view and listen to other views. Students are challenged to think, and to communicate, both verbally and in writing. By articulating their feelings and new knowledge, as well as, importantly, the potential opposition’s position, they are being better equipped for civil discourse.  That is to say, students are being prepared to have respectful conversation aimed at fostering understanding and constructive communication, where individuals within a group share different perspectives. 

Fairfield students are smart, sincere, well-mannered and concerned. But their generation is also justifiably angry. Anger is a key driver of climate crisis engagement, particularly for collective action. When angered, rather than fearful or saddened, young people are more likely to see opportunities for action and engage with determination.

That is why the Waide Center sponsored participation in this 2023 global event and will do so again at the Dolan School of Business on April 4, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. For more information, please contact [email protected].

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Richard Hyman collaborates with the Dolan School of Business’ Entrepreneurship Center as a mentor for Fairfield StartUp. His career in business includes leadership positions at GE Capital, Verizon and Xerox, plus entrepreneurial ventures. Today he is Chairman of GreenIRR, Inc., a company founded by a Fairfield alumna, and focused on mitigating climate change. He also founded a nonprofit organization and public charity that fosters future leaders to protect the ocean. He authored FROGMEN, his personal account of diving aboard Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s ship Calypso. Richard is a public speaker, with keynotes including MIT Water. He led Connecticut’s delegation to the Blue Vision Summit in Washington D.C., joining ocean conservation leaders, scientists and explorers to discuss with Congress offshore oil drilling, ocean pollution, and coastal resilience. He collaborates on curriculum development and speaks to students worldwide on projects including SDG-focused climate action and innovation, a collaboration with Dr. Jane Goodall. A graduate of Furman University, he has also studied at Fairfield University, Georgetown and Yale. 

#Richard Hyman #Dolan School of Business #Fairfield University #climate change #Waide Center for Applied Ethics

[dailyadventureprompts]

Monsters Reimagined: Bandits

As a game of heroic fantasy that centers so primarily on combat, D&D  is more often than not a game about righteous violence, which is why I spend so much time thinking about the targets of that violence. Every piece of media made by humans is a thing created from conscious or unconscious design, it’s saying something whether or not its creators intended it to do so. 

Tolkien made his characters peaceloving and pastoral, and coded his embodiment of evil as powerhungry, warlike, and industrial. When d&d directly cribbed from Tolkien's work it purposely changed those enemies to be primitive tribespeople who were resentful of the riches the “civilized” races possessed. Was this intentional? None can say, but as a text d&d says something decidedly different than Tolkien. 

That's why today I want to talk about bandits, the historical concept of being an “outlaw”, and how media uses crime to “un-person” certain classes of people in order to give heroes a target to beat up. 

Tldr: despite presenting bandits as a generic threat, most d&d scenarios never go into detail about what causes bandits to exist, merely presuming the existence of outlaws up to no good that the heroes should feel no qualms about slaughtering. If your story is going to stand up to the scrutiny of your players however, you need to be aware of WHY these individuals have been driven to banditry, rather than defaulting to “they broke the law so they deserve what’s coming to them.”

I got to thinking about writing this post when playing a modded version of fallout 4, an npc offhndedly mentioned to me that raiders (the postapoc bandit rebrand) were too lazy to do any farming and it was good that I’d offed them by the dozens so that they wouldn’t make trouble for those that did. 

That gave me pause, fallout takes place in an irradiated wasteland where folks struggle to survive but this mod was specifically about rebuilding infrastructure like farms and ensuring people had enough to get by. Lack of resources to go around was a specific justification for why raiders existed in the first place, but as the setting became more arable the mod-author had to create an excuse why the bandit’s didn’t give up their violent ways and start a nice little coop, settling on them being inherently lazy , dumb, and psychopathic.   

This is exactly how d&d has historically painted most of its “monstrous humanoid” enemies. Because the game is ostensibly about combat the authors need to give you reasons why a peaceful solution is impossible, why the orcs, goblins, gnolls (and yes, bandits), can’t just integrate with the local town or find a nice stretch of wilderness to build their own settlement on and manage in accordance with their needs. They go so far in this justification that they end up (accidently or not) recreating a lot of IRL arguments for persecution and genocide.

Bandits are interesting because much like cultists, it’s a descriptor that’s used to unperson groups of characters who would traditionally be inside the “not ontologically evil” bubble that’s applied to d&d’s protagonists.   Break the law or worship the wrong god says d&d and you’re just as worth killing as the mindless minions of darkness, your only purpose to serve as a target of the protagonist’s righteous violence.  

The way we get around this self-justification pitfall and get back to our cool fantasy action game is to relentlessly question authority, not only inside the game but the authors too. We have to interrogate anyone who'd show us evil and direct our outrage a certain way because if we don't we end up with crusades, pogroms, and Qanon.

With that ethical pill out of the way, I thought I’d dive into a listing of different historical groups that we might call “Bandits” at one time or another and what worldbuilding conceits their existence necessitates. 

Brigands: By and large the most common sort of “bandit” you’re going to see are former soldiers left over from wars, often with a social gap between them and the people they’re raiding that prevents reintegration ( IE: They’re from a foreign land and can’t speak the local tongue, their side lost and now they’re considered outlaws, they’re mercenaries who have been stiffed on their contract).  Justifying why brigands are out brigading is as easy as asking yourself “What were the most recent conflicts in this region and who was fighting them?”. There’s also something to say about how a life of trauma and violence can be hard to leave even after the battle is over, which is why you historically tend to see lots of gangs and paramilitary groups pop up in the wake of conflict. 

Raiders:  fundamentally the thing that has caused cultures to raid eachother since the dawn of time is sacristy. When the threat of starvation looms it’s far easier to justify potentially throwing your life away if it means securing enough food to last you and those close to you through the next year/season/day. Raider cultures develop in biomes that don’t support steady agriculture, or in times where famine, war, climate change, or disease make the harvests unreliable. They tend to target neighboring cultures that DO have reliable harvests which is why you frequently see raiders emerging from “the barbaric frontier” to raid “civilization” that just so happens to occupy the space of a reliably fertile river valley. When thinking about including raiders in your story, consider what environmental forces have caused this most recent and previous raids, as well as consider how frequent raiding has shaped the targeted society. Frequent attacks by raiders is how we get walled palaces and warrior classes after all, so this shit is important. 

Slavers: Just like raiding, most cultures have engaged in slavery at one point or another, which is a matter I get into here. While raiders taking captives is not uncommon, actively attacking people for slaves is something that starts occurring once you have a built up slave market, necessitating the existence of at least one or more hierarchical societies that need more disposable workers than then their lower class is capable of providing. The roman legion and its constant campaigns was the apparatus by which the imperium fed its insatiable need for cheap slave labor. Subsistence raiders generally don’t take slaves en masse unless they know somewhere to sell them, because if you’re having trouble feeding your own people you’re not going to capture more ( this is what d&d gets wrong about monstrous humanoids most of the time). 

Tax Farmers: special mention to this underused classic, where gangs of toughs would bid to see who could collect money for government officials, and then proceed to ransack the realm looking to squeeze as much money out of the people as possible. This tends to happen in areas where the state apparatus is stretched too thin or is too lighthanded to have established enduring means of funding.  Tax farmers are a great one-two punch for campaigns where you want your party to be set up against a corrupt authority: our heroes defeat the marauding bandits and then oh-no, turns out they were not only sanctioned by the government but backed by an influential political figure who you’ve just punched in the coinpurse.  If tax farming exists it means the government is strong enough to need a yearly budget but not so established (at least in the local region) that it’s developed a reliably peaceful method of maintaining it.  

Robber Baron: Though the term is now synonymous with ruthless industrialists, it originated from the practice of shortmidned petty gentry (barons and knights and counts and the like) going out to extort and even rob THEIR OWN LANDS out of a desire for personal enrichment/boredom. Schemes can range from using their troops to shake down those who pass through their domain to outright murdering their own peasants for sport because you haven’t gotten to fight in a war for a while.  Just as any greed or violence minded noble can be a robber baron so it doesn’t take that much of a storytelling leap but I encourage you to channel all your landlord hate into this one. 

Rebels: More than just simple outlaws, rebels have a particular cause they’re a part of (just or otherwise) that puts them at odds with the reigning authority. They could violently support a disfavoured political faction, be acting out against a law they think is unjust, or hoping to break away from the authority entirely. Though attacks against those figures of authority are to be expected, it’s all too common for rebels to go onto praying on common folk for the sake of the cause.  To make a group of rebels worth having in your campaign pinpoint an issue that two groups of people with their own distinct interests could disagree on, and then ratchet up the tension. Rebels have to be able to beleive in a cause, so they have to have an argument that supports them.

Remnants: Like a hybrid of brigands, rebels, and taxfarmers, Remnants represent a previously legitimate system of authority that has since been replaced but not yet fully disappeared. This can happen either because the local authority has been replaced by something new (feudal nobles left out after a monarchy toppling revolution) or because it has faded entirely ( Colonial forces of an empire left to their own devices after the empire collapses). Remnants often sat at the top of social structures that had endured for generations and so still hold onto the ghost of power ( and the violence it can command) and the traditions that support it.  Think about big changes that have happened in your world of late, are the remnants looking to overturn it? Win new privilege for themselves? Go overlooked by their new overlords?

Art

#monsters reimagined #bandits #dnd #dungeons and dragons #d&d #ttprg #pathfinder #heavy topics #monsters reimagined

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real AI fight

Tonight (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Last week's spectacular OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between "Effective Altruism" (doomers) and "Effective Accelerationism" (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama.

Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.

Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine."

Once-and-future OpenAI CEO Altman is said to be an accelerationists who was forced out of the company by the Altruists, who were subsequently bested, ousted, and replaced by Larry fucking Summers. This, we're told, is the ideological battle over AI: should cautiously progress our LLMs into superintelligences with safety in mind, or go full speed ahead and trust to market forces to tame and harness the superintelligences to come?

This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As Molly White writes, this isn't much of a debate. The "two sides" of this debate are as similar as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Yes, they're arrayed against each other in battle, so furious with each other that they're tearing their hair out. But for people who don't take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they've split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation

White points out that there's another, much more distinct side in this AI debate – as different and distant from Dee and Dum as a Beamish Boy and a Jabberwork. This is the side of AI Ethics – the side that worries about "today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others." As White says, shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence "is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI."

After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic "decision support" systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor – like the claims-evaluation engine that Cigna uses to deny insurance claims:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

On a graph that plots the various positions on AI, the two groups of weirdos who disagree about how to create the inevitable superintelligence are effectively standing on the same spot, and the people who worry about the actual way that AI harms actual people right now are about a million miles away from that spot.

There's that old programmer joke, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't." But of course, that joke could just as well be, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't understand either":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/11/the-ten-types-of-people/

What's more, the joke could be, "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand hexadecenary, those who understand pentadecenary, those who understand tetradecenary [und so weiter] those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't." That is to say, a "polarized" debate often has people who hold positions so far from the ones everyone is talking about that those belligerents' concerns are basically indistinguishable from one another.

The act of identifying these distant positions is a radical opening up of possibilities. Take the indigenous philosopher chief Red Jacket's response to the Christian missionaries who sought permission to proselytize to Red Jacket's people:

https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5790/

Red Jacket's whole rebuttal is a superb dunk, but it gets especially interesting where he points to the sectarian differences among Christians as evidence against the missionary's claim to having a single true faith, and in favor of the idea that his own people's traditional faith could be co-equal among Christian doctrines.

The split that White identifies isn't a split about whether AI tools can be useful. Plenty of us AI skeptics are happy to stipulate that there are good uses for AI. For example, I'm 100% in favor of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group using an LLM to classify and extract information from the Innocence Project New Orleans' wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

Automating "extracting officer information from documents – specifically, the officer's name and the role the officer played in the wrongful conviction" was a key step to freeing innocent people from prison, and an LLM allowed HRDAG – a tiny, cash-strapped, excellent nonprofit – to make a giant leap forward in a vital project. I'm a donor to HRDAG and you should donate to them too:

https://hrdag.networkforgood.com/

Good data-analysis is key to addressing many of our thorniest, most pressing problems. As Ben Goldacre recounts in his inaugural Oxford lecture, it is both possible and desirable to build ethical, privacy-preserving systems for analyzing the most sensitive personal data (NHS patient records) that yield scores of solid, ground-breaking medical and scientific insights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eaV8SWdjQ

The difference between this kind of work – HRDAG's exoneration work and Goldacre's medical research – and the approach that OpenAI and its competitors take boils down to how they treat humans. The former treats all humans as worthy of respect and consideration. The latter treats humans as instruments – for profit in the short term, and for creating a hypothetical superintelligence in the (very) long term.

As Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax reminds us, this is the root of all sin: "sin is when you treat people like things":

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

So much of the criticism of AI misses this distinction – instead, this criticism starts by accepting the self-serving marketing claim of the "AI safety" crowd – that their software is on the verge of becoming self-aware, and is thus valuable, a good investment, and a good product to purchase. This is Lee Vinsel's "Criti-Hype": "taking press releases from startups and covering them with hellscapes":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Criti-hype and AI were made for each other. Emily M Bender is a tireless cataloger of criti-hypeists, like the newspaper reporters who breathlessly repeat " completely unsubstantiated claims (marketing)…sourced to Altman":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464030855880383

Bender, like White, is at pains to point out that the real debate isn't doomers vs accelerationists. That's just "billionaires throwing money at the hope of bringing about the speculative fiction stories they grew up reading – and philosophers and others feeling important by dressing these same silly ideas up in fancy words":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464024432217299

All of this is just a distraction from real and important scientific questions about how (and whether) to make automation tools that steer clear of Granny Weatherwax's sin of "treating people like things." Bender – a computational linguist – isn't a reactionary who hates automation for its own sake. On Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 – the excellent podcast she co-hosts with Alex Hanna – there is a machine-generated transcript:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417

There is a serious, meaty debate to be had about the costs and possibilities of different forms of automation. But the superintelligence true-believers and their criti-hyping critics keep dragging us away from these important questions and into fanciful and pointless discussions of whether and how to appease the godlike computers we will create when we disassemble the solar system and turn it into computronium.

The question of machine intelligence isn't intrinsically unserious. As a materialist, I believe that whatever makes me "me" is the result of the physics and chemistry of processes inside and around my body. My disbelief in the existence of a soul means that I'm prepared to think that it might be possible for something made by humans to replicate something like whatever process makes me "me."

Ironically, the AI doomers and accelerationists claim that they, too, are materialists – and that's why they're so consumed with the idea of machine superintelligence. But it's precisely because I'm a materialist that I understand these hypotheticals about self-aware software are less important and less urgent than the material lives of people today.

It's because I'm a materialist that my primary concerns about AI are things like the climate impact of AI data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems – not science fiction-inspired, self-induced panics over the human race being enslaved by our robot overlords.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #criti-hype #ai doomers #doomers #eacc #effective acceleration #effective altruism #materialism #ai #10 types of people #data science #llms #large language models #patrick ball #ben goldacre #trusted research environments #science #hrdag #human rights data analysis group #red jacket #religion #emily bender #emily m bender #molly white

[orcinus-veterinarius]

When horses end up with severe leg/hip injuries, they are almost always put to sleep. The odds of recovering full mobility from such injuries are slim and the odds of reinjury are high, so even if the horse is perfectly healthy in all other aspects, it is generally recognized to be more humane to put them down than to keep them alive just to live the rest of their lives limping around a small paddock or stall. A life for a horse in which s/he cannot gallop, leap, explore and play is no life at all. Why not apply the same logic to cetaceans? A life for a cetacean in which they can’t dive hundreds of meters, make meaningful autonomous choices (“should I play with the rubber ball or the puzzle feeder today?” is not a meaningful choice; research has shown that autonomy is crucial for animal welfare), echolocate and experience the rich biodiversity of the ocean is no life. I really don’t understand why it’s so horrible to think it more humane to euthanize a confused and sick orca calf if there is no chance of rehab and release than to take her/him permanently into captivity. It’s not disparaging or hateful to cetacean trainers to say so—I know they care about animals—it’s simply a logical ethical stance. Instead of searching in vain for orca conservation organizations that aren’t “radically anti-captivity”, maybe pro-caps should look inwards and ask themselves why all the major orca organizations (Center for Whale Research, Orca Behavior Institute, OrcaLab, Wild Orca, Orca Conservancy, Far East Russia Orca Project, etc.) as well as some cetacean organizations (ex. Whale and Dolphin Conservation, Cetacean Society International) oppose captivity. Is it because all of these esteemed groups, which if you look them up are all staffed by credentialed scientists, have been duped by the “animal rights agenda”, or could it be because maybe, just maybe, they know what they’re talking about? If captive orcas are so different from wild ones that wild orca biologists have no credibility to speak about their welfare, then that’s a clear indictment of captivity already.

Hi. I'm sorry for not answering right away, I was still at my externship when I got your ask, and I wanted to be able to sit down and give you a proper answer. So unfortunately, I don't think what I say will satisfy you. I don't expect to change your mind, nor is that my goal here. I only want to explain why I believe the way I do, so that you or others reading this can at least understand that it's not a position I take lightly, nor do I think it's infallible.

(Long post below the cut):

To start off, as an (almost) veterinarian, there are absolutely plenty of circumstances where I find euthanasia to be the correct decision. Euthanasia is our final gift to our patients, a swift and painless death in the face of prolonged suffering or poor quality of life. A large dog with debilitating osteoarthritis. A cat with terminal lymphoma. A down cow. A raptor with an amputated leg. Or like you mentioned, a horse with a fractured hip. These animals would live in a constant state of pain that they don't understand, and death can rightly be considered a kindness to them.

But an otherwise healthy orca calf? I would consider that a false equivalence. I agree that life in the wild should be prioritized whenever possible, and that captive orcas lead very different lives than their wild counterparts. But if that orca cannot return to the wild (orphaned and unable to be reunited with its pod, habituated to humans, non-painful disability such as deafness), and there is a facility willing to take it on, I do not think euthanasia is an appropriate option. In human care, that calf can still swim, breach, and dive, even if not to the same depths as the ocean (it's also worth noting that these are all costly behavior energetically and are not performed for no reason). It can still socialize and form family bonds with an adopted pod of whales. It can still (theoretically) mate and rear calves. It can still engage its big brain in problem-solving through training and enrichment in the place of hunting. And as a bonus, it will never go hungry and has access to veterinary care if ill or injured.

This is not a wild life. This is not the same life they would've, or should've known. A pool, no matter how well-appointed, is not the ocean, and we should not claim they're comparable. But I don't think it's a fate worse than death. I truly don't. But if it is... if freedom really is worth more than life, then all captive whales need to be euthanized. Even in a sea pen setting, they will not be free. They will not choose their food, their companions, their enrichment, their comings and goings. Those choices will still be made on their behalf by caregivers, and they will still have pretty much the same levels of autonomy as in their tank habitat. They will still be captive. (While some people do advocate for this, I don't think it's a popular outlook. Even SOS Dolfijn, a historically anti-cap organization, recently announced plans to build an aqauarium as a permanent home for non-releasable cetaceans rather than continuing to euthanize them).

Speaking of autonomy, yes, it is very important. But I truly don't think the orcas are distressed by the lack of meaning in choosing between enrichment devices. I think that's why we disagree on this topic... we have different worldviews. We both see orcas as beautiful, intelligent creatures, but I do not see them as people. They are animals, and for all their complexity, I interpret their behavior the same way I do any other species... they are motivated by food, reproduction, and (since they're highly social) companionship. Because of that, I still think we can give them a good life in human care, which is why it frustrates me to see the zoo community throw up their hands and give up rather than trying to improve our current less-than-ideal setups (*shakes my fist at the Blue World project*).

Now, I don't think it's wrong to be emotional about animals. I most definitely am! And it's very clear to me you love orcas and care about their wellbeing deeply. I admire that about you, and I appreciate your passion.

On to the next point... in the cetacean world, I've found that there is an unfortunate divide between researchers and caregivers who work with cetaceans in human care and those who study them exclusively in the wild. And that schism far predates the Blackfish era. Most of those organizations you listed are indeed legitimate, and I fully support their vital work and encourage others to do the same. A few of them, though, share things like this:

I think you can understand why this hurts me. And it's a lie. I've now interned at three aquariums (two of them AZA-accredited) that house various species of cetacean, and it's impossible for me to reconcile what I know and have seen to be true and what Whale and Dolphin Conservation wants the public to believe: that these unbelievably loved, vivacious animals are drugged and tortured by their greedy captors. It's not true, and I do not appreciate WDC for spreading this creepy artwork around. Nor do I think that fighting captivity is a beneficial allocation of resources when there is an overwhelming number of genuine threats to the survival of wild cetaceans.

Anyway, back to the scientists. Personally, I don't consider researchers who work exclusively with wild orcas to be either superior or inferior to those who work with captive whales. And sometimes I wonder how much of their position is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if someone opposes captivity on moral grounds, they won't work with captive whales, so they'll never get to know what their lives and care are like beyond maybe a single tour of the park or memories of how things were done in the 1960s (like Dr. Spong, who worked with some of the very first captive orcas at the Vancouver Aquarium).

I also don't think it diminishes the expertise of wildlife biologists to say that they are not experts on husbandry, training, or medical care... those are very different fields, and ideally, they should all inform each other. And of course, there are folks who work with both wild and captive whales. One of the reasons I linked SR3 in my previous post is they have staff with backgrounds in both managed care and research of free-ranging populations (I actually have no idea what the organization's official stance on captivity is, it's not something they address).

Maybe I'm wrong. I try my best to keep an open mind, but I know I'm also swayed by my own preconceptions and experiences. When I started this blog in December 2020, I was a first year vet student with minimal actual experience outside of domestic animals and some herps, and had only recently adopted the pro-captivity outlook. Now, I'm much more deeply involved in the zoo and aquarium world. These are people I know and respect, people who have written me letters of recommendation and comment on my Facebook posts, people I've had dinner with and showed up with after hours to care for a sick animal. And I recognize that biases me. The zoo world is often resistant to change, especially folks who have been in the industry for many years. And that doesn't do anyone, especially the animals, any good. I don't want to get stuck in an echo chamber, so I make it a point to read anti-captivity literature, even when it upsets me. If there is anything I can do to improve their lives, I want to learn about it, regardless of the source.

I try to adapt to new information. For example, in the past few months alone, I've become a lot more favorable toward the idea of sea pen habitats. My concerns about "sanctuaries" are more logisitical* and philosophical** rather than the idea that artifical habitats are inherently superior to pen habitats (they're not), especially when plenty of traditional facilites already make great use of ocean pens or enclosed lagoons. There are pros and cons to both, and a lot of it depends on the needs of the individual animals.

*funding; maintenance; lack of land-based backup pools and fully-equipped medical facilities; introducing immunologically naive animals to pollutants and infectious agents; disruptions to native wildlife; staffing activists and wildlife biologists rather than those with relevant husbandry experience

**villainizing aquariums; promoting the project as a "release to freedom" to the public when it's really another form of captivity; claiming the animals' lives will be "natural" when they will still require training, artificial enrichment, contraceptives, and social management if done correctly; downplaying or completely denying the very real risks of such a transition and insisting the animals will automatically be better off when Little White and Little Grey have proved that's not the case

If you made it to the bottom, thanks for reading. I wish all the best for you, and I mean that genuinely ❤️ even if we disagree, I hope you can appreciate our shared love for these animals and a desire for their wellbeing. Best of luck in all your endeavors!

#also no hard feelings if you unfollow me #I understand #orcas #killer whales #dolphins #cetaceans #marine mammals #animal welfare #cetacean captivity #pro captivity #anti captivity #aquariums #answered asks #anonymous

[crucipuzzled]

About Loid Forger's therapy in SxF manga chapter 77 (Spoilers ahead)

There's a Freudian text for everything. Today's all about The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), also known as Wild Analysis.

Endo did what I have been planning to do for a comic of my own: depict Loid actually working as a Psychiatrist. While I'm glad he took this path, sadly I can't say he did a good job on it.

As some of you know, I'm a therapist grounded in Psychoanalitic Theory. Yes, I like Freud and Lacan, and no, Oedipus Complex is not what you heard it is. I did a brief analysis of Psychiatry stuff in SxF in the past, and today I feel compelled to repeat that exercise.

Let's go in order.

1. The importance of being a third party

What's the reason for which people ask a therapist for help, and not their families or friends? What do we have that they don't?

The answer is pretty simple: neutrality. We don't have a side other than rationality and ethics. A good therapist should be able to listen to his patient without losing objectivity.

When you and your patient have a shared, unique shared experience, it's preferable, even ethical, to refer him to another therapist, in order to preserve the higher interest of the patient. The more neutrality you can muster, the better for the curing process. Otherwise, it's really hard to listen to someone else without being constantly reminded of yourself. It turns into a blind spot.

Now, there are exceptions to this rule, but you must handle them carefully, and always putting the patient at the center. Loid openly talking here about how close he is to the hijacking incident doesn't help much.

In short, you have to ensure that your position in the therapeutic process remains an impartial, neutral Other, and avoid becoming a fellow. It's good to create trust, but not too much, just enough to work.

2. Chronic condition (?)

The biggest difference between a Psychiatrist and a Psychologist is that the first went to Med School. Hence, chronicity is a term that applies mostly for organic conditions, but it's rare in the field of subjectivity.

In my short experience, I've met cases labeled as "chronic depression" being cured. I, myself, cured a case of "compulsive suicide attempts since 15 years old, chronic depression, started hearing evil voices 2 weeks ago". You might think that I'm a great therapist, but it's not the case; it's just that, in order to tackle subjective problems, you ought to go to the root of the symptoms and deal with the subjectivity you find there. Psychoanalitic therapy has proven to be wonderful to treat many conditions that didn't get a cure in other types of psychotherapy.

Of course, it's not a panacea. There are things that we can't figure out yet. But bear in mind that chronicity, in the field of the mind, is more complex than just the passage of time and only a bunch of mental conditions truly admit it.

Jacques Lacan, the most important psychoanalist after Freud, said that the unconscious's track of time is not chronological, but logical. You don't just jump out of adolescence because you turned 18; other things need to happen for you to finally feel like an adult. It's a logical progression. The same can be said about some "chronic" conditions.

3. Explicit Reason of Consultation vs Latent Reason of Consultation

A.K.A Everybody lies.

Psychotherapy is a really weird thing to learn and master. In Psychology School they teach you that you must trust what your patient tells you, but at the same time, distrust him enough. How to conceal both things?

Well, everything is easier when you take Dr. House's words to heart.

Everyone states a reason for consultation, but that first reason is never the real reason, no matter how reasonable it might sound. The trick to discern what the latent, real reason for consultation is, is to determine what the subjective conflict hiding in plain sight is. Sometimes there isn't any and therefore, a full psychotherapy is not necessary (maybe just assisting someone with some things, being there just in case, etc), but most cases are built upon a conflict.

I'm glad that Loid here decided to act like a good Psychiatrist and took a mental note on the oddities.

WELL SAID MY BOY, I'M PROUD OF YOU

I want to remark this, because it's discouraging how many therapists oversee this to simplify their job to an extreme. Believe it or not, there are therapists out there that act upon what their patients tell them first. "Hi doc. I came here today because I got an accident and I think I have PTSD". "Ok, I'll have you practice these mindfulness excercises and you should be ok within a month, see ya". DUDE.

4. The place of truth in the context of Psychotherapy

Ah, the classic temptation of knowing the 'real' truth. Is this patient in front of me bullshitting his way out? Is he in a delirium? Is she telling the truth, or just embellishing her story to make it more believable?

You don't have this struggle once you are certain of your role as a psychotherapist. And your role is to help your patients to deal with their subjective struggles.

In short: Psychoterapy deals with the patient's truth, not with the 'real' truth.

You know who deals with 'real' truth in the field of Mental Health? Social Workers.

We psychotherapists don't need to ascertain our patient's claims. Confronting them with reality usually proves to be fruitless, just like Loid did here ("But you're a respected educator!"). It's way more useful to open the topic by asking more questions such as "How did you reach that conclussion?" "What made you think that way?", or giving a specular answer ("You speak like someone else said that about you", "You're too hard with yourself. Where does that come from?", "It sounds like you're belittling your fear for what your wife could say", etc etc etc).

Whenever you're with a neurotic patient, their own personal truth is the only truth you need to work with. Leave the 'real' truth for people who actually needs it, like Social Workers, Doctors or Judges. Your role with a patient is to make sure that his personal truth can turn into something less painful. No need to talk with their friends and family for info, unless your patient is a child or a teenager; just ask him and stick to what he says word by word.

There's a huge topic about the place of reality in therapy, specially in the field of Psychoanalysis, but if I start this train of thought I'm afraid I'll go down to Hell. If you're interested, I've reblogged some Lacanian pills on this Tumblr, check them out by searching the tag #lacan.

PS: NO LOID, DON'T DO THAT. DON'T BREAK THE TRUST YOU ACHIEVED WITH MR AUSTIN! CONFIDENTIALITY IS A MUST!!

5. Counceling = Psychotherapy?

Loid is a (fake) Psychiatrist, not a psychotherapist, so I can't be too hard on him. Also I stan this man. I'm painfully well aware that councelling and coaching is an alternative to psychotherapy in other parts of the world, mostly in the US. But let's not forget one thing:

Psychotherapists DON'T GIVE ADVICES.

At least, not the ones that take this job seriously.

Everyone can give advices. Do you want an advice? Ask your family or friends, or post something in social media, or ask a complete stranger in the street what to do. You'll get plenty of answers and advices. Maybe a bunch of them will be really useful. Good!

The thing with advices is that: -They act like a universal recipe for a problem -There's no universal recipe to sort a problem -They don't tackle the subjective root of a problem -They assume that the problem can be solved by something you can do upon your surroundings, when the real struggle stems from subjective problems Some advices do help with real struggles, but when you have a subjective conflict, they barely help; hell, sometimes they make everything worse.

Like Loid here.

Remember when I mentioned that the unconscious mind's track of time is not chronological, but logical? This is a great example. Mr Austin won't be able to properly talk with his wife just because Loid adviced him to; he must solve other issues before that.

I'm glad we're on the same page on this one

6. Your therapist is not your friend

Sad but true.

If your therapist is good enough, you won't know many things about his private life. You won't know about his lover, his hobbies, where does he live, what does he fear.

Why the secretism? Because it's useless for the patient. Also because disclosing personal information has the effect of becoming a model for the patient, who would start to imitate you. And finally, because you need to mantain a semblance of neutrality and not getting emotionally close with the patient more than necessary.

PS: It's kinda cute how aware Loid is about Yor's every movement. Kinda. KISS HER ALREADY, GODDAMNIT

7. Talking cure and (how not to use) the divan

I talked a bit about divans here.

There, I mentioned that you should NEVER PUT A PSYCHOTIC PATIENT IN A DIVAN. NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE. Well, we can amplify this rule a bit and say that you should avoid the divan with any patient that has a risk of getting seriously upset, like in severe trauma.

The divan is not the only thing that could play against you if badly used. There are cases in Psychiatric Hospitals of patients getting upset because their therapists used the same clothes and hairstyle every single day for months. The point here is that, with psychotic patients and fragile psychic structures (like what happens in traumatized people), you can't use methods that require too much projection.

Also, Lottie here is not performing a Talking Cure.

The divan has been used since Freud to facilitate transference through the Free Association Method. You lay down on it and your therapist ask for whatever crosses your mind first. You don't put a content there beforehand.

(On the same line, if you're a therapist, please refrain from decorating your consultation room with motivational phrases. You're putting words in your patient's mouth before he even starts to speak)

So, it's useless to make Mr Austin lay down on a divan, only to ask him to remember a specific memory. I'd advice (Ha! The irony!) against using the divan here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To finish my Two Cents, I'd like to point some positive aspects of this chapter. It's nice that a troubled person decides to seek for help. There's still a huge stigma about men requiring mental health help, and it's a nice example to settle to portray one actually going to a Psychiatrist. Men usually struggle with their problems alone and they have it rough.

It's also nice that, in the end, Loid could help his patient. I wonder how (How?!), but it probably means that, at some point of the process, he changed his methods for the better.

And yes. Sometimes, helping one single person can change many lives. I'm honored to be able to attest to that :D

As everyone, I'd expect the logical sucession of events that could follow this chapter: Loid realizing he's got a heck of a wife compared to other marriages, appreciating Yor more, and giving us heavy smut cute TwiYor moments. But Endo has proven to be an author that doesn't like to follow logic. So, let's brace for whatever will come in two weeks.

Thank you for reading!

#spy x family #loid forger #psychiatry #psychoanalysis #sigmund freud #jacques lacan #psychotherapy #spy x family manga #sxf

[the-joy-of-knowledge]

5 ways to become luckier

The harder you work, the luckier you are to people

Find mutual interests: I met a student on campus and we started a deep conversation about life and meaning. It went so well that she took my number and invited me to a dinner party. At the dinner party, I met other students from my school who are interning at top firms that I want to intern at. The host of the dinner party studied at Harvard and Oxford and even told me she can look over my essays when I apply to business schools. It's been a year since I was invited and I have been introduced to doctors, lawyers, engineers. All they care about is your interest and character.

Define your character and personality: You need to figure out what you want to be know for? The one who is curious? The one who comes to work early? The one who dresses well? The smart one? The funny one? You get to define who you are and it attracts people with similar personalities and before you know it you will attract opportunities.

Take risks: No risk, no reward. You need to put yourself out there. Go out to coffee shops, networking events, introduce yourself, join groups. You may not get what you want immediately but you are learning and making choices based on the people and opportunities you have

Use resources: Use free and paid resources to get you where you want. Connect with your professors, career centers, boss, online experts, podcasts, friends of friends, books. Take advantage of scholarships, professional organizations, mentors etc. What you will realize is that there are many opportunities available to you. Set up coffee chats with alumni, reach out to your Linkedin connections, and take advantage of local small organizations.

Be disciplined: Your work ethic and education wil speak for you. Your degree is not carved on your face so it is your conversations skills that will help you. Getting to Harvard is not a joke, you will ahve to prove yourself through discipline. Getting to work for the Big three is a goal that only a few can achieve. Yet some people get offers from all. Before you call anyone lucky remember people make sacrifices, they study hard, network hard, apply to 50+ jobs. Get ready to do the work.

#self improvement #beauty #self love #growth #mindfulness #self development #education #classy #self care #preppy #educators #emotions #energy #students #smart #school #emotional intelligence #get motivated #mindset #mind control #motivation #meditation

[arbitrarygreay]

So I have this hot take, which is that Utena did nothing wrong during the first arc's Touga episodes. People high on having freshly discovered fictional analysis love to make a lot of hay about Utena not paying attention and ordering Anthy to say what she wants to hear. Implicit is that therefore Utena deserves to have lost, as well as being as complicit as the rest of the Student Council. Such analysis tends to also point to the later 3rd arc moments where Utena admits that she was selfish about her prince self-image. I now find this analysis pretty facile. Per my current Utena post with the most notes, the girl is 14, not even in high school, and an orphan. Holding her to the standards of immortals operating on 5 layers of subtext isn't something we should do to anyone, much less a 14 year old orphan. In fact, I'd think that Utena was showing a higher respect of Anthy's agency to assume that she wouldn't take such obvious rhetoric as a literal command, because Utena was treating her as an equal who is allowed to either disagree with her or might appreciate someone speaking in solidarity for her. What benefit is there to policing Utena's already extremely milquetoast language? (And that doesn't even get into the part where Anthy was lying the whole time about her obligation to obey her "groom". The whole point of the damn show is that she could chose to disobey even Akio. Utena never had any authority over Anthy, and neither did Utena have any evidence of an enforcement mechanism for that obedience, which is why Utena thought that she could dispose of that power dynamic by simply saying "nah, we're not doing that", which is fully reasonable to think!) Watching Star, another aspect comes into play, which is culture clash, particularly as it applies to class dynamics. In Star (which is centered on Atlanta Black culture), people talk over each other and make orders on others' behalf and order each other to do things incessantly. Speaking in the declarative just how they talk. Noticing, much less having or respecting boundaries is for for the people who didn't grow up in the lower class (and so scoffed at by the people in the neighborhood). In fact, not crossing those boundaries is often a limitation on getting ahead, dictated by the need to hustle. Being overly familiar with each other is often cast as a love language. Holding back for dignity is seen as class privilege, and the upper class in turn wrongly sneer at the apparent lack of sensitivity as vulgarity. What does RGU look like if it was set in inner-city America? What does that first Touga arc look like? How should 14 year old orphans speak when defending their friends from bullies? What ethical/moral judgements should be imposed upon their language?

#revolutionary girl utena #shoujo kakumei utena #star (tv) #category: anime #category: tv

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Seto Kaiba

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Every good anime revolving around a game, sport, or competition needs a great rival to antagonize the main character. A rival is a character who helps push the protagonist to their limits, and forces them to apply what they’ve learned in order to beat them. Now, a rival like that typically isn’t someone who is going to get a Psycho Analysis, as most rivals are just garden-variety jerks at worst. For instance, Gary Oak is a bit of a snot, but he’s literally a child and he turns things around and becomes a decent guy relatively quick. Or hell, look at Miles Edgeworth; he spends most of the first Ace Attorney butting heads with Phoenix Wright in court, but he’s pretty quickly shown to be far more concerned with finding the absolute truth than any truly nefarious purpose. Ultimately, most rivals end up being genuinely decent people who just take competition a little too seriously and eventually develop into staunch friends and allies.

But imagine a rival who never changes. A rival dead set on being the most antagonistic douchebag possible, one who is driven solely by the sheer spite and hatred they feel at being second banana to someone else, someone who can’t bear that their massive ego is even slightly bruised. A rival who may help when the chips are on the table, but who is only doing so for their own selfish and self-centered reasons. That’s a character I could reasonably review on Psycho Analysis! And if ever there was a character who fits that bill, it’s Seto freaking Kaiba.

Now, to be clear here, Kaiba isn’t a villain. He’s an antagonist, he’s an anti-hero, but for about 99% of his screentime he’s not technically a villain. But just because the series is called Psycho Analysis doesn’t mean I’m literally only reviewng psychos, and it’s about time I broke out a bit and experimented in this new year by looking at characters who aren’t totally evil, but maybe are a little bit. And as you’ll soon see, no one is a better choice to break the mold than the second best duelist in Domino City.

Motivation/Goals: To put it simply, everything Kaiba does is motivated by his ego or by spite. This is a man who has done genuinely great things, from dismantling his father’s bloodthirsty legacy of profiting off of war to opening theme parks and creating new technology to make Duel Monsters more fun and engaging for all players. All of this on paper makes him look like the most ethical animated billionaire this side of Scrooge McDuck, but there’s one little issue: Nothing he does is out of the goodness of his heart.

Do you think Kaiba actually gives a shit about anyone affected by his father’s business? No, he just dismantled it out of sheer hatred for his adopted father who, to be fair, really was a massive cunt. Do you think he went through all the trouble to make massive strides in Duel Monsters technology just so people could have fun? No, he did it all so he could exploit it in some way to defeat Yugi once and for all.

And that’s one of the biggest things that drives Kaiba: His unquenchable desire to defeat Yugi and be crowned the true king of games. The thing is, every time they have a fair fight, Kaiba gets his ass handed to him; the one time he won was by essentially threatening Yugi with suicide. His sheer petty desire to one-up Yugi extends far into the future, where he names the loser dork house of the academy in GX after Yugi’s Egyptian God card Slifer, while the ultra-cool prestigious house is named after the God he got, Obelisk. And in one possible end of his story, he goes to the most insane and ultimate extreme to try and settle his grudge (but more on that shortly).

Performance: In English, there are two main voice actors of note who have portrayed Kaiba. The first is Eric Staurt, who outside of Kaiba is best known for his Pokemon roles of Brock and James. It leads to a bit of whiplash hearing someone who sounds so similar to the affable yet horny Brock be an absolute arrogant prick, but I definitely think Stuart is able to pull it off.

The other VA of note is Martin “Littlekuriboh” Billany, creator of Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series and the man who voices about 90% of that gag dub’s cast. His take on Kaiba is pretty much what happens if you cross Stuart’s performance with Solid Snake, and it works very well for a Kaiba who’s weirder and wackier yet somehow even more insanely egotistical.

Final Fate: Kaiba, seeing as he’s just a douchebag and not a truly evil person, doesn’t get any sort of major comeuppance save for constantly getting his ass handed to him by Yugi. There are really two possible endings for him, though if you want to be charitable they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first ending is, of course, that he eventually goes on to found the Duel Academy, which means he helps kickstart the events of Yu-Gi-Oh GX in a way. Anyone even partly responsible for the rise of bisexual monsterfucker king Jaden Yuki is getting high marks in my book.

But the much more notable ending for Kaiba comes from Dark Side of Dimensions where, so consumed by his desire to duel Atem one more time despite the pharaoh finally being at rest, he leaves his company in the hands of Mokuba and goes to the fucking afterlife to challenge him. Whatever way you want to read it—that he actually used science to travel to the great beyond, that his tech killed him and he’s not coming back—Kaiba really cements his legacy as the most insane, obsessive rival ever created. If he still feels like he has something to prove by beating you, you ain’t getting your eternal rest; he will bust down the barriers of life and death to have a chance of whooping your ass. Absolute madman.

Evilness: So in this new segment, I’m going to establish how evil any given villain is and rate them on it, separate from how I rate them as a character overall. This score is basically just a reflection of how evil their actions are, with a 1 being “Barely a villain at all” and a 10 being a “Complete and utter monster.”

As we’ve already established a bit, Kaiba is more just an egotistical asshole than anything. In his early appearances in the manga you could definitely say Kaiba was a villain, and his first appearance as the starter villain of the anime definitely paint him as a dick… but after his mind crush, he definitely veers more into anti-hero territory for the rest of the series.

Normally, this would net him a solid 1, but that’s the thing. Despite the fact Kaiba frequently does genuinely good and helpful things and despite constantly aiding the heroes, he only ever does it because he feels like he has something to prove. For instance, look at his handling of the Big Five as he dismantled his father’s legacy; do you think he tore down the military dealings KaibaCorp dealt in out of the goodness of his heart? No, Kaiba did all that out of sheer hatred and spite, negative emotions that motivate just about everything he does no matter how nice it seems. Even if he isn’t actually evil by any stretch and even though he’s undoubtedly bettering the world with what he does, he’s doing it for impure reasons that mainly revolve around reasserting his own superiority. The only genuinely selfless things he does are for the benefit of his beloved brother Mokuba.

So for the first ever Evilness Score, I think Kaiba is going to score a 2/10, which denotes being a huge dick but not neccesarily evil. He’s not actually evil enough to warrant anything higher, but he’s too big of an asshole to get a 1.

Best Scene/Quote: Abridged!Kaiba gave the world “Screw the rules, I have money,” a line that perfectly summarizes a good chunk of Kaiba’s character in both the main and the abridged version of the show. But his best quote (and his very best scene) come during his duel with Ishizu in Battle City, where he decides to give fate the middle finger and beat Miss Ishtar despite her clairvoyance while giving her the following speech (in the dub):

“Hear me now! I won't be controlled! I decide my future! So now, I sacrifice my monsters! Obelisk and Gadget Solider, I send you to the card graveyard! You're so quiet, Ishizu. Where's your magic now? Or have you realized that there's no such thing as destiny? Now observe as I summon my Blue-Eyes! Show yourself!”

And more than anything, this sums up Kaiba: He has the most massive ego in history, the strength and cunning to back that ego up, and a steadfast and stubborn refusal of destiny. He plays by his own rules and follows his own path, and nothing will stand in his way. Not Egyptian gods, not prophecies, not magic or shadow games or what have you. He is unstoppable, implacable, and he won’t be denied that duel with Yugi no matter what anyone says. Not even the barrier of life and death can stop him.

Final Thoughts & Score: Unsurprisingly, as someone who grew up with Yu-Gi-Oh, I fucking love Kaiba.

Going into this, I knew he wasn’t going to be a straight example of a villain, because his evil is mostly relegated to the early parts of the manga and the start of the show, with his post-Mind Crush self being more of an anti-heroic jerkass with a heart of gold. But I think he’s just enough of an asshole to be worth talking about, and talking about antagonistic jerks opens the door to talk about characters like Toy Story’s Sid or the more hostile Pokemon rivals like Silver, Blue, and Bede here. It would have to be Kaiba blazing that trail, though; there’s no jerk more perfect to open the door to discussion of other jerks.

Kaiba is just genuinely fascinating in that, despite being incredibly static as a character, he never really feels shallow. Sure, he steadfastly refuses to change and never really becomes on the best terms with the Yugi squad, but his interactions with them are still fun to watch and he never gets flanderized to the point of being obnoxious. It’s honestly extremely impressive they were able to walk that tightrope of him never really progressing past being an asshole while still remaining a fun, likable character who it’s fun to see in action. I suppose it helps they gave him the most ludicrously badass backstory where he as a plucky little orphan boy manages to beat a businessman in chess to get adopted, fleeces him out of his entire fortune and company, and then dismantles said company’s military division to focus on gaming. And if that’s not enough, they have him do stuff like throw trading cards to jam guns!

Of course, his most appealing aspect is his single-minded obsession with defeating Yugi and proving himself as the superior duelist, a character trait for which there is quite simply no heterosexual explanation for (I’m half kidding). With most rivals, they don’t really get so consumed by their desire to defeat their opponent that they essentially kill themselves just to get another chance at beating them, but most rivals ain’t Kaiba! Really, I think the only rival I’ve seen who’s close to being on his level is Vegeta. Once again, they found a nice balance, keeping Kaiba from being too obnoxious even with his single-minded obsession with one-upping Yugi.

Kaiba is really a character who so easily could have been obnoxious or insufferable, but instead he quite honestly stole the show. Yes, Yugi and Atem’s trials and tribulations are crucial and all, but seeing the insane lengths Kaiba goes to ensure he gets another chance to summon his Blue-Eyes against Yugi’s Dark Magician is just a blast. You’re always wondering what insane rich guy nonsense the man is going to pull off next, and he rarely disappoints. Kaiba may not be evil, he may merely be an antagonistic rival, but I think he still deserves a 10/10 for being the egomaniacal asshole opponent every arch-rival should aspire to be.

#psycho analysis #Seto Kaiba #Eric Stuart #martin billany #littlekuriboh #yu-gi-oh

[path-of-grass-and-leaves]

How I Practice Death Work

Please keep in mind that this is a post about my own practice. My relationship with death work is intertwined with my individual path and is highly personal. What is written here may not apply to everyone.

Through working with "Death Energy"

Death Energy as I define it is simply energy sourced from things associated with Death. Some examples of this include dead leaves, rotting wood, snow, compost, soil taken during winter, ash, and plants associated with Death. I prefer to use the root of the plant because I associate it with the spirit world/underworld.

Some practitioners like to use bones and grave dirt in their workings. This isn't something that I do often because I believe that these things are tied to specific spirits and in my practice it's important to let the dead rest, with some circumstances being an exception. This is by no means true for everyone and I think it's fine to take graveyard dirt or bones as long as they're ethically and respectfully sourced.

I find that death energy works great for transformative magic, for endings and rebirth, and for connecting with certain spirits. I'm sure it could also be used in baneful workings.

Through Mundane Action

From the outside, how I practice death work probably seems very ordinary. I take in roadkill from my street and bury it, remove dead animals from yards and set the corpses somewhere quiet. I compost. I clean for a recent widow and bring her food and gifts, offer support and guidance for grieving loved ones, cook for them. These are expressions of love and forms of veneration, which helps me connect with the dead on a deeper and more intimate level.

Through Veneration and "Safe-Passing"

This includes building altars and leaving offerings for ancestors, passed loved ones, pets, and even local wildlife.

In terms of helping spirits pass on, I have a specific incantation/prayer that I recite for dead animals that I pass while driving. I encounter mostly animal spirits because my practice centers around the local flora and fauna. I will also hold burials and mourning periods, leave offerings, and conduct spirit communication when the situation calls for it. When I'm performing more complicated rituals of this nature, I'll enlist the help of my local/personal spirits.

Through Compassion For The Living

Life and Death are interwoven and are of the same cycle. If I kill bugs and set out glue traps, will the local insect and mouse spirits want to work with me?

Some of the things that I do to show compassion for the living include helping animals in need, growing native plants and rewilding my yard, giving money to strangers when possible, gifting things to my friends and neighbors, cleaning, cooking, or doing favors for loved ones. I believe that what we do in this world reflects how we interact with and are perceived in the spiritworld/otherworld.

Through acknowledging Grief and Fear

Believe it or not, I'm actually terrified of death and dying. My path to deathwork came to me through a time of intense grief and through the acceptance of mortality.

Reflecting on death, talking about it openly with loved ones, and even thinking about what I would want for my own burial and funeral are things that have helped.

For grief, I leaving offerings and create altars, speak fondly to/of passed loved ones, and let myself feel what I need to feel. I don't have much more to say on this matter, but I think it's worth mentioning for those who are apprehensive about death work for these reasons. You're not alone.

I hope this resonated with some people. Once again, all of this is personal and nothing written here is universal. I write because I love to share.

#death work #spirit work #witchcraft community #witchcraft #tw animal death #tw death #personal

[tumblrisweird]

Crash Course on Lancer, the best TTRPG

I've been obsessed with Lancer lately, so I thought I'd put together a quick and dirty crash course on the key aspects of the system so people could see if it interests them.

Basics:

Lancer is a ttrpg system "centered on shared narratives, customizable mechs, and the pilots who crew them"

It is co-created by the author of the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons, who also provides some of the official illustrations

The mech design is primarily inpired by Titanfall, but there is a wide variety and plenty of options available to suit your taste.

Mechanically, it's most similar to D&D 5e, but with major improvements (imho).

The game and community are super inclusive of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people.

Lore:

Lancer takes place in our universe, but several thousand years in the future

in the near future, human society collapses due to all the shit going on. ten generation ships are sent out to colonize space, but contact with them is soon lost as everything on Earth goes tits up and humanity enters a dark age for almost 5000 years

Eventually, humanity on Earth comes back, creates Union, and returns to space and tries to contact those generation ships, a few of which have founded new civilizations in deep space. Relations with these civilizations doesn't go great.

Union also finds a weird super-robot-mind-thing old humanity built on Mars, which lets them predict the future. After about a thousand years, it ends up producing a sort of super-AI called RA (I will get into this later).

The above event also lets Union develop FTL tech (using something called Blinkspace).

In the process of expansion, humanity runs into its first (and so far only) sentient alien race. Things go bad very quickly. The people in charge do very bad things and for this end up being overthrown. This is also when mechs first start getting used for combat.

A new committee in charge of Union takes over and has a strong anti-colonial, humanitarian ethic. This however is harder to reinforce the further you are from Earth (now called Cradle by some)

Some of the still independent civilizations and mega-corporations get in some fights. Union tries to keep the peace. This is where we are now.

AI

So there are two different types of AIs in Lancer.

The first kind are regular AIs which can act human but don't really have free will. They can be found all over the place.

The second kind are called NHPs (Non-Human Persons). These (mostly) came from that super-AI called RA I mentioned above. Their basic consciousness is "paracausal" (i.e. magic), so they have to be "shackled" to be able to even think like a regular human. They can often do really powerful things. They are hard to get and heavily regulated because they become really dangerous if they get unshackled.

Player Characters

Character creation in Lancer is incredibly fun. There's two main aspects of a character: the pilot and the mech

Pilots

The pilot is who you control during narrative scenes. While they can do combat, they generally are not suited for it, especially against mechs.

You can choose a background for your character, but this is purely flavor.

You get some "triggers", which are different skills you get bonuses in to use in narrative scenes. Default triggers include things like "lead or inspire", "read a situation", "apply fists to faces", "hack or fix" and many others. You can also create custom triggers (with your GM's permission). These are what you use for narrative scenes. You start with +2 to 4 different triggers and get another +2 at each level

You also get to choose things like armor, pilot weapons, and three pieces of equipment.

One expansion also adds a mechanic called "Bonds" which are like character archetype powers. These encourage you to roleplay more.

Mechs

You also have a certain number of "Talents" which help in mech combat. Each talent has 3 tiers and focus on things like using certain weapons or fighthing certain ways (e.g. grappling, spotting, hacking, etc.). You start with three tier-1 talents and get another tier each level.

Levels are referred to as "License Levels". You start at LL0, but this doesn't mean you can't do anything. You have access to the starter mech frame, which is a very good all-rounder. You may also have access to two more if you have certain expansions.

Mechs have two main sets of health: actual HP and "Heat". You get heat mostly by being hacked or using heat-generating weapons. Each player mech also has 4 points each of Structure and Stress, which correspond to these two sets of health. When your HP hits zero or your Heat goes above its max, you lose a point of Structure or Stress, respectively. You will also suffer other consequences like status effects or losing parts of your mech. If either hits zero, your mech gets destroyed (though this doesn't necessarily kill your pilot, and you can rebuild your mech). Also having 50% or more of your max heat means you're in the Danger Zone, which may let you do certain things.

Mechs will have a certain number of SP (system points), which you use to add different systems, equipment that gives you abilities and bonuses.

You also get to put points into 4 different "Mech Skills": Hull, which affects HP and physical stability, Agility, which affects speed and evasion (the thing enemies roll against to hit (most of the time)), Systems, which affects hacking ability and SP, and Engineering, which affects Heat management and ammo. You get another point each level.

There's other stats as well like Armor, Sensors, E-Defense, and Save Target, but I won't get into them now.

Mech's also have a certain number of weapon mounts, which determine what kind of weapons you can attach to it. The four weapon sizes are Auxiliary, Main, Heavy, and Superheavy. Most of the mount types match a specific weapon size. The only exception is Flex, which lets you mount one Main or two Aux. Also for a Superheavy, you need a heavy mount plus one other mount.

Player mechs come in 4 sizes: 1/2 (basically a suit of power armor), 1 (just big enough where a person could sit in the chest cockpit), 2 (much bigger than a person, about the size of heavier Titanfall mechs), and 3 (fucking huge, though maybe not quite as big as the mechs in Pacific Rim). NPCs can be even bigger. :)

This set of memes is a great way to get the idea behind several mechs.

While most mechs have a default appearance, they're highly customizable, and there are a couple of exceptions. Most Horus mechs have no default appearance, and the starting mech, the Everest, has no canon appearance, meaning it can look however you want.

EDIT: forgot to mention, every mech has a Core Power that you can use once per mission (usually). It typically gives you access to a really cool weapon or ability or otherwise powers up the mech for the rest of the scene.

Levels/Classes

Ever notice how in 5e, multiclassing kinda sucks unless you have a very specific thing in mind? That's not at all true in Lancer!

In addition to the stuff mentioned above, each LL you get to gain one level in the license for a certain mech! You can think of these as similar to classes.

Each level gets you two specific pieces of equipment from that license, generally either weapons or systems. Additionally, at the second level for a license, you get access to the mech frame.

Each license only has 3 levels to get, so you are very much encouraged to mix and match. Additionally, you gain levels at a more even rate than in 5e. Basically it's a milestone system I will explain later.

There are 4 manufacturers to choose from, each with a default of 7 licenses to choose from (more with expansions). ISP-N mechs are sturdy, reliable, and mundane. Smith-Shimano mechs are sleek, agile, and precise. Harrison Armory mechs are powerful and good at dealing with/using Heat. Horus mechs are extra weird and fucked-up.

Each session will generally consist of a few different "scenes", often including one combat scene. There may also be one "downtime" scene (usually at the beginning or end), which is sorta like a short rest. You can make limited repairs and change out equipment, as well as pursuing personal goals. A few sessions together constitute a "mission". After a mission, you get a level and can do a full repair, which is like a long rest. Get all your resources back and can completely rebuild a destroyed mech (or make a new one).

Action Economy

Each turn the player can take the following actions:

One Protocol (generally granted by a system, only at the beginning of the turn)

A standard movement, which can be taken in part or all at once.

Two Quick Actions or one Full Action

Quick Actions are things like Boost (take another full movement), Skirmish (attack with one weapon mount), Hack, Hide, Grapple, Ram, and Lock On.

Full actions are things like Stabilize (clear all heat or heal HP), Disengage, and Barrage (attack with two mounts or one Superheavy mount).

One Reaction, which can be taken on other characters turns when activated. The two default reactions are Overwatch (skirmish against an enemy that starts a movement in your threat range, which is 1 by default but more with some melee weapons or CQB weapons) and Brace (reduce damage from an incoming attack and be harder to hit, at the cost of losing actions on your next turn).

One Overcharge, where you take increasing amounts of heat to get another quick action.

There may also be certain systems or talents that grant certain Free Actions under certain circumstance

Combat

Combat in general is very fun, though a full round of turns may take half an hour or more. In my experience, most combat scenes are over within 8 rounds.

Using your systems and abilities in cooperation with your teammates is very important to surviving.

Of note is that getting advantage on a roll is much rarer than in 5e.

Much more common is Accuracy or Difficulty. Each point of Accuracy is an extra d6 you roll to add as the accuracy bonus. You pick the highest of your accuracy rolls to add as the bonus. Difficulty is the same except you are subtracting the number from the roll instead of adding it. For example, Lock-On lets you add an accuracy to a roll, but soft and hard cover add 1 and 2 difficulty respectively. Also points of accuracy and difficulty cancel each other out, which reduces the amount of rolling you have to do. So if your weapon has +1 accuracy but your target is behind hard cover, you roll the attack with 1 difficulty.

Resources:

you can get the core rulebook (minus npc info and detailed lore) for free here

here's the official fan-run discord server. it is very helpful for finding games that are looking for players and talking about the game.

You can use the official app called COMP/CON to build and manage characters. I fucking love making character in this. It makes things super easy and fun. You can also download .lcp files for various expansions to play around with the stuff they add as well. These are available for free for the official expansion, meaning players can play with extra stuff from expansions without needing to buy them.

In conclusion, Lancer is a great system that you should give a shot to if any of the above sounds appealing.

#lancer #lancer rpg #lancer ttrpg

[fairfieldthinkspace]

The AI-Education Problem: The Solution’s Right in Front of You

By Conrad Turner Distinguished Visiting Professional, Waide Center for Applied Ethics, Fairfield University

The AI-Education Problem: The Solution's Right in Front of You (revised 2 Jun 2023)

Artificial intelligence will have benefits, I’m told. But having seen lots of dictators and oligarchs use tech to do bad stuff and get away with it, I just want to run for the hills.

I also worry for university educators, who will have a tough time with AI’s effects on academic integrity and learning — just as they’re readying future leaders to deal with such big issues. The way ChatGPT upended writing assignments, for example, must still be a shock to their system. It won’t be the last.

Who will help them? Won’t private industry rescue traditional teaching models from AI?

Big Tech will be glad for the income. We can look forward to a forever duel of education algorithms, where nobody understands what the heck is going on, and pesky issues of ethics and trust are punted to the “cloud” for monitoring and enforcement.

But whenever tech infringes on education, that’s when we need to invest in our finest human qualities. Our enlightened self-interest and yearning for community. Our joy in problem-solving and team endeavors. To rally every soul in collective defense of authentic learning.

Because students have the solution — part of it, anyway: young adults are the untapped foot soldiers and brain trust against non-learning in the AI era.

Wait a minute, aren’t students the problem?

No. I have with my own eyes seen students step up to defend their universities’ quality and reputations by challenging cheating, improper collaboration, and plagiarism in all their forms. Through my work with Central Asian and Ukrainian universities, and during my own U.S. grad and undergrad experiences, I saw them make a difference. In some cases their roles were institutionalized.

How did they do it? They started by knowing what was actually going on in and out of classrooms. And hating it.

Then they took on countless responsibilities, surprising others and themselves with their maturity and impact.

They counseled their peers on the principles and practices of integrity. Some advised their administrations and professors on the (in)adequacy of incentives and control measures.

A few even volunteered for honor councils and adjudicated student infractions in accordance with honor codes they or their predecessors had crafted, amended, and ratified.

Critically, they had fun — were motivated with a sense of meaning and purpose — while doing it. And they learned. For some it was life-changing in the best of possible ways.

In fact, students defending integrity is nothing new. Do a quick online search: at some institutions, they’ve been doing it for decades, even well over a century.

Not all students, of course. Most are busy doing other things. And not equally or in unison. Some actively resist the responsibility that comes hand-in-hand with high-functioning classrooms. (Some professors do, too.)

But within every student collective you will find a core willing and able, in concert with enlightened and supportive faculty and administrators, to support your institution’s integrity. Gradually they will, in one way or another, help bring their peers and community into the present.

How might their role look? A few examples come to mind: frequent social media campaigns, workshops, publications and events with reminders of the principles, rules and measures of the institution’s honor system; grad students briefing incoming grad students; undergrads briefing and mentoring freshmen; international student associations briefing incoming students in their native languages....

And meaningful student representation on academic integrity policy committees.

That’s just for starters. Activities and structures will differ from one school and even department to another. But the objective will be the same: to work in concert with faculty and administrations preparing new generations with the habits and skills they’ll need to thrive and lead with integrity in our increasingly disintegral society.

In most cases those students will need mentoring. But this is key: mentors must not only be committed to the institution’s success but feel safe from the whims of a jittery academic bureaucracy. They and their mentees must be trusted to take on tough issues. Administrations must stand up for them. Universities have long resisted modernizing. AI won’t change that. Only enlightened leadership can.

This will also require deep thought about the purpose of modern education. Is it a digital paper-and-grade chase or way to develop learning skills? Writing one’s own thoughts using one’s own logic based on one’s own experience and research is training the brain to think. Did ChatGPT just make that technique obsolescent? Is the classroom now a place where kids learn to get by or beat the system using the latest AI tools that do the “thinking” for them?

Students will help you find the answer.

You say they already have a role in academic integrity at your college? That’s great. Is it enough? Change has sped past our ability to grasp it.

Some educators will say students aren’t mature enough for such responsibility. By what measure? Students can be articulate. Organized. Prudent. And yes, impassioned. Almost by definition they grasp new tech better than the rest of us. With defined roles and support from above they can work with you and their peers to bring lasting improvements that bring honor to the institution.

Aren’t they already overwhelmed with reading lists and chasing internships and careers while holding down work-study jobs? Aren’t we also too busy to deal with this now?

I’ll leave those questions with you to ponder... But consider this: what better education and credentials are there than the challenging work of strengthening integrity? What better way is there to manage the growing burden of enforcing honesty than to share responsibility for upholding integrity?

Your institution already has an honor code, you say, and the rules are required reading online and repeated in your syllabi? Good. But there are a thousand reasons why that alone has never worked. It’s time to move past legal cover and give life to those codes.

You see, the problem never was the students. Not alone.

Which brings me back to fears and risks. Maybe the biggest of them is that we’ll hear the question, “Why are we still recruiting/teaching/assigning/assessing/enforcing this way?” And we’ll need to respond.

Luckily, much of the hard work is done: we already know, broadly, how to build and defend authentic learning. The trick is in the implementation: integrity must be integrated bit-by-bit into every aspect of higher ed.

To succeed, the higher ed community needs to:

●  move integrity to the very center of learning;

●  educate, not indict;

●  look forward, not back;

●  modernize, not moralize, because academic integrity is a challenge of collaborative engineering;

●  avoid cat-and-mouse or tech-on-tech strategies that fail on day one;

●  respect diverse views; and to

●  institutionalize new responsibilities in a way that accounts for the natural impermanence of a student body.

The antidotes to fear and risk are courage and a good — flexible and collaborative — plan. As for the institutional habits holding everyone back, the solution is to act boldly. Now. Because all heck is going to break loose just as these future leaders graduate and begin to navigate the insecurities and challenges to justice, critical thought and democratic governance that AI is bound to bring.

With any luck, those alumni will be designing policies and safeguards to protect us from bad actors wielding AI against all of us. Let’s make sure they’re prepared.

Will this be some kind of panacea? Of course not.

But when it comes to defending authentic learning in the AI era, the successful campaigns will be those deploying the foot soldiers and brain trust already there in the classroom.

____________

Conrad Turner served 32 years as a career member of the Foreign Service, attaining the rank of Minister-Counselor. A graduate of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, he led the “Academic Honesty

Project” in Kyrgyzstan in 2002-3 and in 2016 was co-initiator, together with the Ukrainian government, American Councils for International Education and Fairfield University, of Strengthening Academic Integrity in Ukraine Project (SAIUP), both funded by the U.S. Department of State. Conrad taught public diplomacy at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism from 2016-18.

#Conrad Turner #Waide Center for Applied Ethics #Fairfield University #Artificial intelligence #AI #ChatGPT

[retrodreamgirl]

fix this | steve harrington x fem!reader

part one | part two | part three

summary: steve does a little soul searching OR a night of many doors [3.3k]

warnings: angst, established relationship, break up, stancy residue, fem!reader, steve's pov, cliff hanger/ambiguous ending, language, not proofed, lmk if i missed anything

that's all folks! anything else i write for this will either be something that comes to me randomly or that someone requests pre or post breakup bc i kinda want you guys to decide whether she/you take(s) him back or not and how he gains her trust

⤜♡→

Routine has a bitter enemy called the unknown. It's the darkness at a distance, inching and inching before it huddles you into a corner, forced to face the purposely avoided. It pokes and prods at the crevices of your brain, basking in the glow of attention unhindered by the attempts to shove it back into its box. It’s a subtlety, sneaking like a many legged creature awaiting the crush of a foot or a heavy hand. 

Heavy handed is the deliverance of the final blow it bestows before slinking off to the shadows once more, biding time for its next significance. 

The unknown is the bitter enemy of routine. A lurker at heart. It waits for the buildup, allowing itself to be the straw, the last word before the inevitable snap. It’s a concept that watches in fascination and lends its expertise at a moment's notice. 

Notice the end result isn’t always crystal, but dependent. It relies on the body of the thing. Housed on stilts with the decision to break or mend. You are the stilts, two legs heavy of burden and free of direction. The unknown is at your door, not knocking but slipping through the back and resting out of sight. 

The direction is yours and the direction is now, nestled atop shoulders careening with the doubt of what’s to come. 

It’s a confusion, really. One that seeps in without warning, digging claws through the thin material of skin draped over the cage containing an organ beating to its contentment. Such a horrible confusion. 

Love, that is. 

It’s these moments of clarity, body moving without the tandem of the perfect partner, that you wonder about the ache that crawls from your center and inches in vain to the veins wrapping pale arms with the thrum of blood run blue and red when it spills over, oxygen threatening to overwhelm with the need for more.

It’s this feeling and more eating at Steve Harrington. 

At present, his failure to cope with the gaping significance in the hollow of his chest has mutated into a poor work ethic. 

"Next time, if you’re not gonna help me with customers you could at least rewind all the tapes! Halfsies doesn’t apply when I’m stuck playing guess that film for forty minutes." Robin’s grip tightens around Steve’s shoulders, emphasis for words wrought with exasperation. He doesn’t mind much that she’s complaining, thankful that she doesn’t actually force him to pick up the slack these days. "I don't care how long we've been doing this, I lose my mind every fucking time."

"Yeah, pretty sure I'm still waiting for the feeling to come back to my fingers from that tape getting stuck." There’s a sudden deflation in his broad shoulders, already wondering what train of thought will do to distract his brain from the muddled ache nesting there currently. 

He would usually plan to stop off at the house with the white front door, a cozy rug left just beyond the threshold to indulge his feet when he slides his shoes to the corner. He would trail upstairs to find the trace of perfume leading right to your bedroom and push forward on his toes to gauge your mood for the evening. He could always tell by the low leakage of music filtering beneath the door, heightened only when his ear pressed into the wood.

He would knock twice, wait, then rap his knuckle a third time. A secret code and a letter of love reserved for the moments before he could shower you with affection up close.

Now he can hardly remember the last time he felt the cool harshness of the door and heard the melodic tune of “come in” only to find you most times splayed on the thickness of your lilac rug. You would reach for him and he would find you with immediacy.

“So, what’ll it be?” Robin pierces the connection of his brain to the warmth of the memory, forcing him back to the frigid emptiness of the parking lot.

“What?” 

“Takeout and a movie? Stopping at the diner? I’m so hungry I don’t even care what we have, your choice...but you’re also buying.” 

Steve’s step is a stutter just before the handle of the car door, concrete propelling him to catch himself on the exterior, glistening in the golden glow of street lamps. Robin’s lips part to comment on his clumsy disposition, but his eyes are steadied on the placement of his feet and his mind resides anywhere but the stick of his sneakers to the night soaked blacktop. 

She waits for him to proceed, but he seems unaware that there was a question meant to be answered, or is rather opposed to partaking in their usual verbal give and take. 

“What?” Steve senses the build in his chest, an impending thing that answers Robin’s confusion before the jumble of Steve’s first failed attempt. It’s rapid and daunting the way it beats against his skin. He wonders if his chilled hand slid past the barrier of his coat and through his polo would he feel the rough outline of the organ turned grotesque in its confusion. 

“Yeah! I just…well the thing is…” He takes his time sliding into the car, twirling his keys between his fingers.

“Oh yeah, I totally get that.” Robin attempts to lighten the mood, but the bright lights of a passing pickup zero in on their pupils focused forward to avoid the oddity occurring in the front seat. Steve’s lips have come to a repetitious open close, his mouth the net that can’t seem to catch the right words. “Listen, if you aren’t gonna spit it out could you at least start the car I’m–” 

Screeching. She was in fact screeching following the dramatic shift of the vehicle when rough hands pushed against the passenger window and the douse of darkness was too much for either of their eyes to adjust to after the previous bright dilation. Steve is quick to catch on, his hands shoving the key into the ignition, rolling Robin’s window down so a head with fiery hair spilling over the shoulder peers in. 

“Can I catch a ride?” Max pokes at the skin of Robin’s cheek. Steve’s sure her scowl managed to trick the muscles when Max’s hands lift to feign defense and she sends Steve a confused glance. “What’s with her?” 

“What are you doing here?” Steve ignores the question, waving Max into the backseat where she happily pokes her head between the front two. 

“I skated here. Was bored.” 

“I’m not an entertainment service, ya know.” 

“Big words from a guy wearing that vest.” She points to the deep green Family Video uniform dressing Steve down in the glaring uncertainty of his minimum wage future. “Anyway, I was actually hoping you would drop me off at Mike’s.”

“And you couldn’t just board the rest of the way there because…?” Robin drones, pawing at the dial on the radio, flipping through stations riddled with static unsure of which tune they’re actually meant to be playing. 

The whole situation is surprisingly irritable, a mean streak that could never be cured entirely, making itself ever present in Steve with the increasing progression of The Breakup. A title bestowed by everyone not involved, certainly one that sets Steve even further to a reason where he remains stood on the cliffside of eternal nothingness.

“Because it’s getting dark and I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not an idiot.” 

“Dude, I don’t wanna take you to Mike’s house.” A stupid thing, but a guilt that clutches at his collar, wondering if its the moment you sidle by, spotting his car in the clutches of your end all. Something he still doesn't entirely understand, if only because he’s convinced himself it’s better not to. A stupid thing, but he’s nothing if not purusuasive to a fault. 

“Because Nancy will be there? You know that avoiding her isn’t gonna make Y/n come back, right? I don’t even know if she’s actually left her house for anything other than school and even then none of us actually see her around.”

“Yeah, didn’t you have to crawl through her window the other night just to talk to her.” Robin adds, settling on Air Supply for a reason Steve thinks is altogether removed from her own tastes. “If you want her to take you back you’re gonna have to do some serious soul searching, Harrington. Do you want her back?”

“What the hell kinda question is that?” 

“It’s a fair one because it’s been weeks, Steve. You think she hasn’t noticed that you’ve seemingly moved on?” Max tilts her head, obscuring Robin and imploring Steve to focus on the candor of her ocean blue. 

“She thinks I’ve moved on?” He mumbles, adjusting himself in his seat, the sash of his seatbelt suddenly suffocating. “Well I haven’t.”

“Funny way of showing it—”

“Look, Mayfield, you don’t get it! You don’t understand how frustrating this whole thing is. I thought we were fine, perfect really. Somehow I’m always the last to know when things aren’t.” The words are sharp, an edge cutting against the buds of his tongue where his teeth dig into the fleshy muscle. “...and this time I don’t even really know why. I’m tired of apologizing when I don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“Just. Take me to Mike’s, please?”  

“Whatever, but you can get someone else to take you home.”

“Whatever.”  

The ride to the Wheeler’s is mostly silent. Mostly, because the deafening pause is too much for Robin who cuts in every so often with commentary about the passing scenery or a tangent that no one is really listening to. 

Steve pulls to the edge of the Wheeler’s drive, not daring to pass the line of the mailbox, and glances back when Max doesn’t move. She has the audacity to look at him riddled with guilt when she nods toward the house. 

“You should talk to her.” 

“What? Max I swear, if you don’t get out of this car right now I will—”

“You’ll what? Not much a man of action these days, Harrington.” She’s taunting, Robin looking between the two of them like she’s stuck deciding whether she should intervene. Max doesn’t make any move to get out of the car, rather she burrows herself further into her hoodie and watches Steve expectantly. She wins either way, a step toward retribution if he gets out of the car and a point proven if he doesn’t. 

It’s the reason he now finds himself stationed outside of the Wheeler’s front door, hoping that anyone but Nancy answers, a last ditch to turn around and pretend he tried his best. He can feel the burning in his chest, the desire to know what good could possibly come from this, if there is a hope for something with Nancy beyond the horrible darkness. 

It’s a sick feeling, one he can’t remember having prior to this moment. A realization burning through the adolescent wandering of a heart unmended.

“Steve.” Nancy falters immediately, sweater bunching up where she wraps her arms around her frame. She glances over his shoulder, noting the glaring headlights of his BMW. “What are you doing here?” 

“I uh…I’m not really positive. But I think we need to talk.” She nods, stepping aside to allow him into the house. He doesn’t proceed, hand swiping at the back of his neck, an accumulation of something always seeming to nag at the exposed piece of skin. “Maybe we could do it out here?” 

“Sure.” She closes the front door, shouldering the frame while Steve stares straight ahead, at the seasonal wreath hanging from it. 

“I don’t think I ever got over you and everything that happened.” He finally manages, the words feeling like tar the way they worked their way up slowly and coated his mouth until he spit them out. A harsh truth buried beneath the guise of friendship, something he never saw the same way as you. “I don’t really know why, well I probably do but I’m never really able to admit it.” 

“What do you want me to say, Steve? I apologized and I’ve moved on…I don’t know what to say.” It irks him, her dismissal of his admission. It’s not an expectation for her to reciprocate, but a hint of empathy would do in a situation altogether unfamiliar. It reminds him of being with her in the beginning and the way it slowly cooled off near the end. Never any intention of hateful brushoffs but it’s certainly how it felt at the time. 

“I want you to say that you know, because I think you do. Maybe you don’t do it on purpose but you do use it to your advantage.” It’s like a glimmer in the underbrush, an opening for him to take and he’s pushing past the thickness with as much grace as possible but he’s bound to get stuck eventually. “We never hung out when Jonathan was here. It’s a fact, and it’s fine but why is it that I’m always the first person you come to when it gets to be too much?”

“Because I know you’ll be there—”

“Because you know I’d do anything for you. Because I’m the idiot who’s still stuck in senior year, with a girl who left me behind when—” He catches himself, that streak pushing against the back of his teeth. He doesn’t mean it all to sound so bitter, but the festering anger at his own desperation is hard to ignore. “The thing is, Nance, I can’t be that person for you anymore. There is a girl who loves me, who loves me more than anyone, probably more than I deserve and she thinks I don’t feel the same because I’ve been too caught up in something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I’m sorry…” She mutters, Steve catching a glimpse of wetness against her cheek before she swipes it away as quickly as it appeared. “You’re right and it’s not fair to you…or Y/n. I guess…I guess I’m just mad that he’s gone and I wanted to go back to junior year when my biggest problem was what I should wear the next time I see you.”

“Nance—” 

“No, you’re right. Whatever we had, it’s not here anymore and it hasn’t been for a long time. You’re such a good friend to me Steve, but that’s it and I have to stop letting you believe it’s anything more than that.” She nods, stepping just a little closer, her hand resting against his cheek with a soft smile. “She loves you more than I ever could, and you deserve it, but she deserves it too. To be loved that way.” 

“Maybe I’m not the guy for her because all I can seem to do is hurt her.” 

“That’s not true. I think you just needed to see things for what they really are, to know everything else was just some stupid desire to chase the past. You should go to her, before it really is some other guy.” She half shoves him, his feet skittering against the concrete.

“Thanks, Nance.”

“Thanks Steve.” 

He jogs back to the car, not a word uttered to either of his passengers before he’s setting off in the direction of your house. The two girls exchange looks, half hopeful with a hint of confusion. 

“What happened?” Max taps at his shoulder, jerking when he makes an especially sharp turn. “Can you maybe drive like a normal person!?”

“Yeah, we’re still in the car, dingus! Both of us live the other way, just in case you were wondering.” 

“I wasn’t, but thanks for the tip.” He counters, coming to a stop in front of your house. He tugs his arms out of his work vest, sliding his hands through his hair giving the strands an unkempt look. Then he just sits.

“Are you gonna go in?” Steve is too far gone to know who said it, every possible scenario of the moment he sees you again swirling in his brain, all of the worst ones popping out like a jack-in-the-box. 

“I think he’s just gonna sit there.” 

“Both of you shut up! I’m going.” This time he does, a foreign feeling walking the length of your driveway. Again, he can’t remember the last time he’d done it, muscle memory saving him from the uneven plate of concrete along the path to your front door. 

He’d stored it in the back of his brain after your third date, he carried you to your room when you twisted your ankle, far too proud to admit how badly it hurt until he peeled your sock from your ankle to see it already angry and swelling. There’s a ghost tugging at the corner of his lips, dusting a smile in place of the lined skin when he lifts his fist to the door. 

“Steve! It’s been a while, I was wondering when I’d see you again.” It’s your mom, the skin around her eyes coming off more tired than usual, but her smile is as radiant as ever when she ushers him into the house. She mentions something about dinner sometime soon and he nods absently before she leaves him to brave the trek upstairs in solitude. 

It’s routine from there, the way he shuffles out of his shoes and wiggles his toes against the fluffy rug as he sets them aside. He’s slower than usual, afraid of what will or won’t happen when he ascends the stares.

He’s suddenly all too aware that he’s empty handed, not that he thinks you’d expect something but it still feels wrong to show up after so much time has passed. He’s aware it’s the longest you’ve been apart since you started seeing each other. He feels even worse.

When he steps onto the landing he can see light filtering beneath your door, but not much. He imagines you must be relying on light by wick again, can picture the array of candles systematically dancing along your dresser. He would periodically advise you against them, the time he found you asleep with them scaring him half to death, but the whole of it was a fondness he couldn’t do without. The warmth of the candles and the soft lighting creating the perfect space to exist as just the two of you. 

He’s outside of your door now, his thoughts distracting him from the gait to the end of the hall. He leans forward on his toes, ear pressing against the door. The vibration is hopeful and he’s sure he catches a lyric or two from some Stevie Nicks song he doesn’t know the name of. His nerves have the better of him, unable to decipher the mood the lyrics or the instrumental are giving off. 

He could turn back now and you would never know. 

He almost laughs at the thought, doesn’t because you’ll hear and the last thing he needs is for you to think he’s mocking you from the other side of your bedroom door. It’s funny because it wasn’t even a thought to come here, it was just something that he knew. Something he knows, the love for you pounding in his chest. Now he’s standing out here, unsure if you wanna see him or if you’ll ignore the gentle singing of his fists.

He knocks twice, waits, then rap his knuckle a third time.

He waits a beat, wondering if you hadn’t heard or if you had and he’s making a fool of himself. His fist is half raised, his right foot turned back toward the stairs, unsure whether to stay or go when he hears it. It’s faint, low beneath the rumbling of your cassette player, but it’s there.

“Come in.” 

#steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x fem!reader #steve harrington x y/n #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington fic #steve harrington fanfic #steve harrington #stranger things fic #stranger things fanfic #stranger things x reader #steve harrington angst #steve harrington scenario

[stupidbeecandle]

the company a family member works at is in hot water for using slave labor but in the most absurd way possible that makes me confused about how the world even works.

because like, they didn't know they were using slave labor. they try to be a rather ethical company, they have awards and shit for this

only what happened is on the other side of the world somewhere a buncha guys got together and started collecting peoples info, social security numbers, green card info, and the like in order to make convincing profiles for a few "people". These "people" both do technically exist somewhere and also never existed at all but are an amalgamation of digital traits purchased and put on resumes to look like real people. Then they made these fake people they made up apply to a bunch of jobs for a ton of distance-based positions at the company my family works at and a bunch of other companies for the USD pay. Then they built a call-center style computer set up and BOUGHT a bunch of people to rotate being these fake people, doing zoom interviews, and outsourcing otherwise splitting up the work to slaves who have had their papers confiscated so they can't leave the "company". This slave business got caught because my family member raised the question "why are you black today, and also you accent has changed" to someone who started crying on zoom and powered down only to come back the next day as a different race and accent again having no memory of the previous day. It turns out that "Akeem" has been a role forcibly played by dozens and dozens of people in an office on the other side of the world, and they rotate between these roles. Its now turning into a huge international incident for them because the company has no idea how many of their distance-based employees are real people and how many are part of this obscene modern botfarm of slaves and everyone is disgusted and horrified and has no idea what to do about it. Its super fucked

[bigboxcar]

Mugshot Monday - "Little Toothpick Guy" coffee cup with Morning Glory Cold Brew by Peace Coffee

I'm in the process of learning how to make decals and put them on my ceramics. This was a recent test.

I made this little 4 ounce stoneware cup way back in 2019 when Jeff Oestreich was teaching me how to make handles in class I took at Northern Clay Center.

I tried making a one-finger handle and it turned out ridiculously HUGE. 😂

But it's a cute little cup and I love how the decal worked out.

I got a lot of help figuring these decals out because I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm testing a black-only decal with the help of Kip O'Krongly, and I'm testing out some full color decals with the help of Isaac Shue.

Each side of this mug has as decal from each artist's decal printer as a test to see if one printer was better for just black artwork. Both turned out awesome.

Kip and Isaac are AMAZING potters and you need to check out their work. They are also amazing people who have been SO helpful as I stumble along and learn how these decals work. Thank you!

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Adam at PX10 Pottery--he showed me how to apply the decals and he fired 'em up. Thanks, Adam! (You need to check out Adam's chicken plates if you have not already.)

If you're curious about the decal artwork for this test, I doodled that "Toothpick guy" stick figure on a syllabus back in the '90s during a Media Ethics lecture at UW Eau Claire.

The little stick figure later became the mascot for a 'zine I did in Eau Claire from 1992 to 1994 called TOOTHPICK. He was on every cover.

I made T-shirts, socks and stickers with Toothpick guy back then. Might as well make a TOOTHPICK coffee mug as well, right?

I hope to do more of these decal tests as I learn what I'm doing, so stay tuned!

See also my 720+ photos from the Mugshot Monday project here: www.MugshotMonday.com– Every Mug Has A Story

#mugshot monday #TOOTHPICK zine #peace coffee #coffee mug

[dipperdesperado]

Notes Towards Anti-Authoritarian Victories: Distributed Resistance

TLDR: Distributed communities are a way to create a more equitable and sustainable society. We should decentralize and distribute power, resources, and decision-making. This comes from an emphasis on cooperation, restorative justice, and dismantling oppressive structures. Part of this process is honestly and earnestly exploring the role (and necessity) of the dialectic between violence and nonviolence in social change. There has to be a genuine embodiment of solidarity and diverse tactics. Two strategic frameworks for organizing resistance to explore and expand upon are encircling campaigns and the Fabian strategy. The overall goal is to build autonomous, resilient, and ethical movements. We have to challenge the status quo to create a more just world.

Distributed Communities

One of my main goals for how I interact with the world is to be a source of joy and hope for myself and others. Part of that is creating spaces for joy and hope. To create those spaces, we have to eradicate institutionalized spaces of despair and sadness. I’m not looking for a world without challenges…I’m just interested in finding realistic utopias, as opposed to the dystopic conditions we currently reside in. So, how do we get there, to a solarpunk world of dreams? First, let’s talk about where we are.

Centralization: The Anti-Life Equation

I’m not sure if you all are into comic books or anything like that, but I’ve always loved animated superhero shows and movies. Back when I was young, there was a DC show with a character called Darksied. His whole villainly motivation is to find the Anti-Life Equation. This is a math proof that essentially is meant to take away free will from living beings. Something about it is to prove the futility of living, therefore saying that people should just be controlled. Sound familiar?

Most people, especially from a Marxian tradition/understanding (so most sociologists and leftists), would say that this describes capitalism. Capitalism, as a reminder, is a system that functions most commonly off of two maxims: Private property rights (most notably towards the means of production, and as opposed to personal property) and wage labor. Many folks have argued, and I’d agree, that this system of withholding access to resources and goods across enforced property lines is bad, and stifles self-actualization. I want to go a bit further, though. I think that the underlying tendency that motivates capitalism, the imaginal cell spurring all of the negative emergent behaviors we see now is centralization.

Centralization is, as it sounds, about bringing “something” towards the center. In our case, that is power and access to resources and decisions. Centralization runs counter to nature. Though we apply our ideas of centralization onto nature, there is no true king of the jungle. Lions don’t “command” gazelle. And even if they did, us, as more conscious beings, can do better. Centralization is deterministic and linear instead of pluralistic and dynamic; it assumes that since people have differences that there have to be power distributions based on those differences. It’s Social Darwinism at its finest. Command-and-control social organization is pyramidal, and, no matter how “representative” the structure is, it inherently reinforces power distribution along lines of difference, creating and reifying social hierarchy.

Decentralization: A Light at the end of the Tunnel

Something that I and other folks struggle with is the pervasive nature of centralization. If it sucks for most people, as we know, then why is the entire world’s levers of power and influence pointed towards that? It seems like it has to be this way, otherwise we would be doing something else, right? Sadly, no. We, as people, are very susceptible to the systems that we interact with. We all live under centralizing systems of domination, coercion, and oppression, so our version of reality is warped by those experiences. But, just because we’re in a bad situation, doesn’t mean things have to stay that way. We’ve grown around these systems, and while they shape our thinking, they also create the fertile ground for their undoing. Subjects tend to not enjoy subjugation.

Decentralization is the antithesis of centralization. Decentralizing radically reorients power and access from a competitive, zero sum game, to a cooperative game. Even if you like competition, and you think it’s a necessary part of human nature (which it isn’t), we’re way past the point where stuff like that is useful. That’s assuming that it ever was, which I am skeptical about. The dog eat dog mentality, if nothing else, is destroying the Earth for profit. That alone, since we all need a functioning biosphere to…function, should be a searing indictment of the logics that underscore nation-states and capitalism.

By operating in a decentralized way, where we reorient our organizations to have power flow from the bottom up, we can enable more agile and resilient communities. It’ll not only give people more power to steer their lives (as opposed to hoping their boss or representative government official is a “nice guy”), but will allow society to continue existing, albeit in a new form.

Distribution: A Strong Network Flexes its Muscles

Decentralization is great, but if we’re not careful, it can just become like ancient times, where little city states have conflicts with each other, acting as little centralized pockets of power, even though they don’t have as much power over society as a whole. We want to be able to have connections with other communities and parts of society, without resorting to domination, coercion, and oppression. This can happen through distributing power across the network of communities, focusing on the goal of giving each individual the maximum autonomy in their lives. It looks like this: each person can live their life however they want, as long as it doesn’t impede others from doing the same. The same can be said on every level, from the block, to the neighborhood, to the city, and beyond.

This necessitates cooperation, as no one can provide all of their needs and wants by themselves. It also necessitates being militantly against domination, oppression, and coercion…people who are looking to cause harm do not get to claim that they are practicing autonomy. We have to do the hard work of practicing restorative and transformative justice. When people violate the autonomy of others, there has to be a victim-led response process, with a goal towards healing the victim, and supporting the betterment of the perpetrator if possible.

How we get there

Now, I haven’t gone in a ton of depth, since I don’t want to be super prescriptive as to what this new space could look like. That might leave a lot to be desired, in terms of a framework from how to get from here (a crumbling, decaying society that is looking to centralize more before it implodes) to there (a decentralized-distributed society where everyone’s needs and wants are met in an ecologically and socially harmonious way). My short answer is…power distribution. If we use this idea as an imaginal cell in our process and as the road on which we travel, we have a chance to create a situation where we can get the benefits of the olden days of city states (if you don’t like a place, you could just dip!), and most of the benefits of modern society, but spread out to each person. We probably won’t be able to see the levels of luxury of billionaires, or maybe even the lower end of the capitalist class, but we will all have a much, much better shot of living our lives in an actualizing way. Who knows what we can discover about ourselves in that kind of space?

Distribution as resilience

One of the great things about moving power away from central nodes is that it makes the system more resilient! A great example would be power grids. Imagine if your power grid for your town or city was centralized in one big plant, and everything was powered from there. If someone wanted to destroy your city’s electricity, they would just have to be able to take out the hub. Then, your city is blacked out, and there’s not a lot of ways to get that kind of critical infrastructure back.

Decentralization is a step better, but it can repeat the same things on a smaller scale. The most resilient option is for there to be a distribution of power generation (in the most sustainable way possible). We should always tend towards distribution—as much as reality would allow us.

What should be distributed, what should be decentralized?

Going back to the question of how we get from here to there, we have to face the reality that social change movements face repression from the status quo. Also, given the history of these movements, there are a lot of cases of co-option, and an incomplete version of the goal. In other words, we may not have the chance to prefigure the world we want to build before it is threatened by the old world. So, how do we uphold our values, while being strong enough to survive?

An important thing is to see this for what it is, a conflict. We have to engage as if we are facing an enemy, because we are. We also have to realize that, especially in a centralizing structure, our ire, in general, should not be for the foot soldiers but for structures and ideologies. We have a chance to win people over. It’s a lot harder for folks who are benefiting from the machine. This is not to say that we don’t acknowledge the harm that they cause. I mean to point out that if we get stuck in conflict with oppressive people and we don’t attack oppressive structures, we lose out on the ability to get decisive victories.

Another important piece is to not be dogmatic. We have to figure out our foundational principles and values, be honest about what we’re doing, and work hard to ensure we orient around short term gains that lead to long term successes, rather than quick fixes that endanger our progress in the long run. We want to know what works, but not be married to something. By thinking systemically, we can approach things in a diversity of effective tactics. This may mean that we occupy multiple parts of the centralization-distribution spectrum, depending on the area of focus.

In general, the more clandestine the operation, the more distributed it should be. Clandestine operations tend to be centralizing, so if we approach them from the opposite end of the spectrum we could potentially avoid the pitfalls. We also probably should never tend towards centralization, because that is a surefire way to destroy anything we create. Powermongers should just go work in the mainstream system if that’s their desire. Places where power tends to centralize, we should distribute, while being open to and welcoming of decentralization where it makes sense. An example could be: instead of every household having a personal car and coordinating sharing with each other (distributed), we could have car libraries that people check cars out from (decentralized). The most important thing to remember with any initiative that the goal is to make sure that power is not centralizing, even if there is a central place where resources exist.

Distributed Resistance

Violence

I want to switch gears and lean more into a side of world-change that people either knee jerk towards (”capital R” revolution) or away from (3.5% nonviolent resistance to social change nonsense). Let’s talk about violence.

Violence, as the state defines it, is something like physical force used to damage or destroy someone or something. That seems…reasonable, maybe, but let’s go a little bit deeper. Is it violent to commit non-physical harm, such as repeated verbal accosting? Is it violence to commit physical harm, when it’s on a time delay? It’s easy to point out immediate violence, like punching someone or burning something. It’s a lot harder when it’s a company putting carbon in the air, causing respiratory issues hundreds of miles away, the symptoms of which don’t show until years after the factory shut down. What about self-defense? How do we define that? Can violence be justified? Should justified violence even be labeled as violence?

There are a lot of questions to answer, but one thing is clear—a diversity of tactics is important. There also has to be solidarity. MLK and Malcom X understood how important each other’s tactics were to the success of the movement as a whole. Even if they didn’t reach the heights of their desires, that is an important lesson we can take away. If we act like nonviolence is unimportant, or act like “violence” is too far no matter what (like saying that hitting a nazi makes you no better), it makes our movements weaker. Like any tactic, it should be used tactically, not wantonly. We shouldn’t encourage fighting if its very unlikely to win (unless we have no other choice), and we shouldn’t encourage pacifism because of some short-sighted and self-defeating moral high-grounding.

An Occupying Force

A way that helps me think of our situation as people who want to help bring about new paradigms that directly conflict of the prevailing ones is framing it as if we are under military occupation. I mean, that’s basically the primary function of the state…that monopoly on violence. In my view, framing it like this makes a lot of the tactical orientation that I was discussing before make sense. When you are an occupied community, you very clearly see the subjugation that’s taking place. How “nice” your occupiers are is of little import; the fact that they’re there is transgression enough. Since we don’t have access to the “legitimate” flows of power (and if we did, we couldn’t use them to liberatory ends), we have to think differently. This is where operating as guerrillas comes in.

OODA Loop

Guerrillas are small groups that fight asymmetrically against a more powerful opponent. With us being tiny right now, it’s worthwhile to figure out how to fight in a way that makes our weaknesses into strengths. One method into this is the OODA loop. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. It’s a method for making strategic decisions in an iterative way. We observe our surrounding, circumstances, and current data. We then orient ourselves to our situation, making judgements based on that information. We decide what to do based on those judgements, and then we act upon those decisions, constantly iterating to make new decisions. The size and structure of decentralized and distributed organizations allows for iteration to happen more quickly, leading to an advantage over slower centralized structures.

Generally, the path I see to success is through operating via a distributed model of autonomous units, coordinating only when necessary, while also keeping the information network alive as is pertinent, and an alignment on vision and values. By any means necessary, but not all means. Especially if the group is operating as a singular organization, a la the ELF or ALF, ideally there would not be people that do tactics that violate that maxim. Means-ends unity is how we create the world we want. We can’t get liberation by exuding oppression.

Formations for Resistance

Before I leave, I want to list a couple strategic frameworks for organizing. The ones I’ll focus on are:

Encircling (i’ve discussed this in another post)

Fabian Strategy and Ethical Guerilla Warfare

Encircling

Encircling is when you surround an enemy in a way that doesn’t allow them to escape. You leave them two options: surrender or defeat. My conception of how this relates to organizing is that you take an issue that you’re trying to respond to (usually a system of oppression), and you encircle it with campaigns running in parallel. A campaign is like a series of actions/tactics, employed over a period of time. Since systems of oppression are…systemic, you would take a systems approach. You would work cross-functionally, looking for leverage points to exploit, and exploit those. My basic outline is that you’d have a campaign that starts off very non-confrontational, making appeals to the system of authority, and as that doesn’t yield “capital S” success (you can’t vote in socialism or decentralization), you ratchet up the confrontation, though only to the level that you can handle. It acts as a radicalization pipeline, strengthened by the results of the other campaigns. There would also be an extreme campaign, where folks are doing as confrontational of actions as they are willing to do. The rest of the campaigns would be in the middle, where they are relatively confrontational, moving towards heightened confrontation. Everything is moving into a more militant direction, where people are learning their power.

Fabian Strategy and Ethical Guerrillas

The Fabian strategy gets its name from Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, a dictator of Rome. His army was fighting against the much more well-equipped army of Carthage, so he opted for fighting a war of attrition. This sounds a lot like the situation social movements are in. It can be easy to think we have to fight might with might, but it’s a senseless and undesirable approach to try to outgun the state. We can use a guerilla orientation to organize in ways that highlight our strengths while exploiting their weaknesses. Building on this strategy will allow us to grow our movements and continue to fight, while simultaneously making it harder to put the movement down.

I also advocate for an ethical approach to this fight. By any means necessary, but not by all means available. There are certain actions that won’t yield us the results we want, and there are other actions that can only be useful in concert with other actions and campaigns. Broadly speaking, we want to minimize the harm caused to folks while maximizing the disruptions to the status quo. Here are some ways we can do this, some of which intersects and overlaps with the encircling framework:

Focus on grassroots organizing and building community power from the ground up. We have to think like stewards and coordinators rather than leaders; our strength comes not from a being a tiny centralized group, but an autonomous network of agents.

We build up our capacity, by creating multiple levels of engagement into the movement. we can combine non-confrontational tactics where we gradually increase disruption as support grows with giving support to more militant segments. This leads to a continual, dynamic (see nonlinear) process of education, advocacy, construction, and disruption.

Think about how to disrupt the status quo in a way that doesn’t target the oppressed. Instead of prevent public transportation or emergency vehicles from being able to travel, maybe focus on lavish events where some really terrible decisions are being made by oppressors at the expense of the oppressed. Actions can simultaneously be symbolic and direct.

Plan targets systemically. Keep the guillotine away. We don’t get our problems solved just by attacking elements within a system. If a leverage point ends up being a specific person… be very sure about understanding how to interact in a way that gets you the results that you want. Tactically and ethically, it becomes very hard to justify targeted attacks.

Uphold solidarity and mutual support among allies while respecting a diversity of tactics. Our analysis should be expansive enough to allow any tactics that could work within our ethical framework to be permissible, even if we personally don’t feel comfortable doing those tactics. As I said before: it’s not “anything goes”, its “we have to be willing to do anything we can that doesn’t violate our ends to achieve our means”.

If people can’t get behind your ideas, then your ideas need to be reexamined. Everyone has a horse in this race. People have to be able to understand that they have power as individuals and collectives, along with how to use it in non-coercive and non-oppressive ways. Meeting people where there at, showing up in real solidarity, and putting your ideas into practice goes way further than an isolated philosophical conversation.

We also have to keep fighting. This doesn’t mean that we are constantly ourselves fighting—through building distributed movements, we can take breaks and be sure that the network still functions. We won’t be able to create a new world in a single move, but through persistence, critical review, and intelligent strategy, we can grow and tend the seeds of change.

I hope this was interesting to ya. It’s a little different topically and format-wise than what I usually do, so let me know if this was interesting or useful. Solidarity forever 🙂

#economics #economy #econ #anti capitalists be like #neoliberal capitalism #late stage capitalism #anti capitalism #capitalism #activism #activist #direct action #solarpunks #solarpunk #praxis #socialism #sociology #social revolution #social justice #social relations #social ecology #organizing #complexity #resist #fight back

[tomorrowusa]

Another crooked far right Republican.

Republicans become outraged at the thought of raising the minimum wage. But the fanatically pro-Trump Republican National Committee committeewoman from California Harmeet Dhillon paid herself $120,000 for a two-hour work week. And that's just the tip of a corrupt iceberg.

Since becoming an RNC committeewoman for California in 2016, she made hundreds of appearances in conservative media, predominantly Fox News. From 2019, these appearances were often based on lawsuits sponsored by that non-profit she helms, the Center for American Liberty (CAL), and aimed at rightwing bugbears like Covid restrictions, leftist street protesters and gender-affirming healthcare. The Guardian has found that at least $1.32m has been transferred from the CAL to her law firm, Dhillon Law Group, in a move one charity expert described as “problematic”. Additionally, state and federal filings show Dhillon takes a $120,000 salary from CAL for a two-hour work week. Meanwhile, the non-profit has entered into a close relationship with a well-heeled rightwing foundation whose financial generosity has been matched by a seat on the non-profit’s board. CAL was founded in 2018, initially under the name Publius Lex, by California lawyers with extensive connections to Republican politics and rightwing legal organizations, according to state and federal filings.

There a variation of "double dipping" going on here.

Dhillon’s position as CEO in a non-profit whose biggest contractor is Dhillon Law Group is a “conflict of interest”, according to Joan Harrington, a fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the Santa Clara University, and an expert on non-profit law and ethics. Harrington added that non-profits can navigate this, and that “the board can accept conflicts of interest if they are brought to the board’s attention annually”. But another ethical problem “the board can’t fix”, Harrington said, is the issue of compensation.

In the world of Trump-style business practices, ethics is for losers.

[Mark] Trammell, the executive director [of CAL], wrote on the extensive use of Dhillon Law that “the organization’s day-to-day legal operations are managed by me, its executive director”, adding, “I select the law firms the Center for American Liberty partners with on its public interest litigation.” Trammell also wrote: “We select law firms based on their expertise, geographical location, and interest in representing our clients at nonprofit legal rates.” But Harrington added that “transparency protects donors, and this is not a transparent situation”. With Dhillon acting as CEO and legal contractor, running cases sponsored by the non-profit, and making Fox News appearances in both guises, Harrington said: “It looks like Dhillon Law and the non-profit are overlapping to the extent that its hard to tell the difference.”

#harmeet dhillon #republican national committee #california #center for american liberty #dhillon law group #joan harrington #non-profits #mark trammell #fox news #republicans