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cprprofessionalsco · 1 month

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On-Site CPR/AED & First Aid: Essential for Industrial Safety

On-Site CPR/AED & First Aid Training:

Essential for Industrial Safety

Safety is paramount in the fast-paced world of industrial industries like construction, manufacturing, utilities, and contracting. Amidst heavy machinery, hazardous materials, and unpredictable environments, having employees equipped with CPR/AED and first aid training can be the difference between life and death. That's where CPR-Professionals LLC steps in, offering convenient on-site training tailored to the specific needs of industrial workplaces.

Importance of On-Site CPR/AED and First Aid Training

In high-risk industries, accidents can happen in the blink of an eye. From falls and equipment malfunctions to cardiac emergencies, being prepared is non-negotiable. Here's why on-site CPR/AED and first aid training are crucial:

Rapid Response Saves Lives: In emergencies such as cardiac arrest, every second counts. Trained employees can initiate immediate CPR and effectively use an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) while awaiting professional medical help, significantly increasing the chances of survival.

Minimizing Injuries: Quick and appropriate first aid can prevent minor injuries from escalating into major ones, reducing the severity of accidents and promoting faster recovery times for employees.

Compliance with Regulations: Many regulatory bodies mandate CPR/AED and first aid training in industrial workplaces to ensure the safety and well-being of employees. Failure to comply can result in hefty fines and legal liabilities.

Boosting Employee Confidence: Training empowers employees to respond confidently and effectively during emergencies, fostering a culture of safety and preparedness within the organization.

Why Choose CPR-Professionals LLC?

CPR-Professionals LLC understands the unique challenges faced by industrial industries and offers tailored on-site training solutions to meet their specific needs. Here's why they stand out:

Expert Instructors: Our instructors are certified professionals with extensive experience in industrial safety protocols, ensuring high-quality training that aligns with industry standards.

Flexible Scheduling: We work around your operational hours, offering training sessions at times convenient for your workforce to minimize disruptions to production schedules.

Customized Curriculum: Our training programs are customized to address the unique risks and scenarios encountered in industrial workplaces, providing practical knowledge that employees can immediately apply.

Hands-On Practice: We prioritize hands-on practice to enhance retention and confidence among participants, simulating real-life scenarios to prepare them for emergencies effectively.

Prioritizing Safety and Well-being with On-Site CPR/AED and First Aid Training

Ensuring your team members' safety and well-being is a legal responsibility and a moral commitment. Investing in on-site CPR/AED and first aid training demonstrates your dedication to protecting your employees in industrial settings. With CPR-Professionals LLC, you can rely on customized expert instruction to fit your workplace, empowering your staff to handle emergencies confidently and effectively. Don't wait - schedule your training session today and pave the way for a safer tomorrow for your entire team.

#cpr training colorado #cpr training #cpr courses #cpr online courses #cardiopulmonary resuscitation training #Cpr classes #first aid training #BLS Classes #first aid training colorado #online cpr training

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rtddsw2qqq · 2 months

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On-Site CPR/AED & First Aid Training: Essential for Industrial Safety

Contractor Site

Importance of On-Site CPR/AED and First Aid Training

Minimizing Injuries: Quick and appropriate first aid can prevent minor injuries from escalating into major ones, reducing the severity of accidents and promoting faster recovery times for employees.

Boosting Employee Confidence: Training empowers employees to respond confidently and effectively during emergencies, fostering a culture of safety and preparedness within the organization.

LEARN MORE

Why Choose CPR-Professionals LLC?

CPR-Professionals LLC understands the unique challenges faced by industrial industries and offers tailored on-site training solutions to meet their specific needs. Here's why they stand out:

Expert Instructors: Our instructors are certified professionals with extensive experience in industrial safety protocols, ensuring high-quality training that aligns with industry standards.

Flexible Scheduling: We work around your operational hours, offering training sessions at times convenient for your workforce to minimize disruptions to production schedules.

Hands-On Practice: We prioritize hands-on practice to enhance retention and confidence among participants, simulating real-life scenarios to prepare them for emergencies effectively.

LEARN MORE

Prioritizing Safety and Well-being with On-Site CPR/AED and First Aid Training

#cpr training colorado

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iamhemantgiri · 7 months

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How Business Process Automation Software Boosts Productivity

Staying competitive often comes down to efficiency and productivity in the fast-paced world of business. Companies are constantly seeking ways to streamline operations and eliminate time-consuming, repetitive tasks. One solution that has gained immense popularity in recent years is Business Process Automation (BPA) software. In this blog, we will explore how BPA software can significantly boost productivity in your organization.

Elimination of Repetitive Tasks

BPA stands for Business Process Automation Software, but one of the largest advantages is removing repetitive and manpower-intensive tasks from the table. These are time-consuming activities like data entry, documenting routing & validation of data. However, the way this happened was very odd! This leads to higher efficiency and decreases the odds of mistakes from manually processed data.

Improved Efficiency

Using BPA software means that every task will be carried out using the best available method. Sequence tasks, assign them to people for the correct task, and even set deadlines. With this level of workflow automation, things move ahead on time, and nothing breaks because deadlines get met and bottlenecks are minimized. Which leads to better overall operations and productivity improvements.

Enhanced Accuracy

With manual data entry and processing, there is an increased likelihood of mistakes that can result in extra costs and significant delays when needing to correct them. Validation by BPA Software eliminates many opportunities for human error at its source via data validation, performing calculations, and handling documents. This doesn’t just improve the precision of the process but also eliminates the need for tedious post-correction work.

Speedier Decision-Making

With BPA software, data and information are at hand when required. This allows decision-makers the ability to access live data and make faster decisions based on their analysis of that specific time. When you have real-time reporting and insights, the impact could transform sectors like Health Care, Manufacturing, or Finance, where every second matters.

Enhanced Employee Satisfaction

Employees who are forced to repeatedly work on boring tasks will become burnt out and unhappy. Employees are able to focus on more pleasurable and task-rich tasks on the job by automating these responsibilities through BPA software. Not only does this give employees a good feeling and enhance morale, but you’ll also reap the benefits of staff retention because happy employees tend to stick around.

Scalability

Increasing in numbers are your processes and workflow once you expand your business. BPA software scales highly, meaning additional load will not require many manual actions to handle. Scale means that whatever increase in efficiency you achieve is sustainable over an increased number of team members.

Compliance and Audit Trail

Because in regulated industries, compliance matters. With the use of BPA software, you will be in a good position to make certain that processes flow smoothly according to protocols while maintaining regulatory compliance. It also produces extensive audit trials that will be very handy when you need to prove the audits and inspections to save time and avoid stressing your company.

Integration with Existing Systems

Nearly all BPA software packages, such as CRM and ERP, can easily interface or integrate with your current software and systems. That translates into being able to take advantage of the existing technology investments and enhance your procedures through the use of automation.

Conclusion

Business Process Automation (BPA) software is a powerful tool that can significantly boost productivity within your organization. By automating repetitive tasks, improving efficiency, enhancing accuracy, and providing real-time data access, BPA software empowers your employees to focus on strategic work, make quicker decisions, and contribute to your organization's growth and success. If you're looking to stay competitive and make the most of your resources, BPA software is a solution worth considering.

#business process automation software

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uglyspoon · 3 years

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It isn't fair that what you need to live is so hard to get. From aids and supports, to accomodations, to medications. From cost, to moral arguments in the culture around you, you're not imagining how challenging this can be.

You should be able to get whatever you need, medication, supports, and quality of life convenience like plastic bags.

#actually disabled #medication #you are not morally responsible for where the products you need to live are manufactured #you are not morally responsible for purchasing from a company with a monopoly on what you need #q #us insurance being whay it is you may not have a choice even if other options are available #and you shouldnt be made to choose between food and meds

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scope-dogg · 3 years

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Knight’s and Magic: Final Thoughts

Isekai anime have been very popular in recent years, and 2017′s Knight’s and Magic was one of many cashing in on that trend, with the added twist of being a mecha series. However, what many may not realise is that the Isekai genre of anime was originally born out of the mecha genre, with the first Isekai anime arguably being the 1983 classic Aura Battler Dunbine by Yoshiyuki Tomino. While Isekai has split off and diversified into its own extremely prolific and popular genre, mecha has kept a foothold within it, and subsequently some of the greatest mecha shows have been fantasy-themed, with great titles like Magic Knight Rayearth and The Vision of Escaflowne following in Dunbine’s footsteps over the years, so really Knight’s and Magic should be viewed rather as the continuation of a fairly long tradition of fantasy mecha rather than Isekai but with robots. Adapted from the early volumes of a currently ongoing manga by the same name, it’s a short series, but one with high production values, superb mechanical design and entertaining action. It’s also a series that I ultimately simply cannot stand.

The plot setup is that Tsubasa Kurata is an unassuming but highly talented programmer working in contemporary Japan - or at least he is until he’s killed in a road traffic accident. As he dies, he has but one regret - that he’ll no longer be able to live with his hobby of building plastic model kits of giant anime robots. As is often the case with such a setup, he finds himself reborn into a fantasy kingdom called Fremevilla as the son of nobles called Ernesti Echavalier. However, to his joy, he finds out that the main weapon for fighting back against these monsters is the Silhouette Knight, a kind of gigantic magic-powered mecha. Thus, he devotes himself to the art of learning everything there is about these machines and one day building and piloting one of his very own.

There’s nothing really wrong with this premise, but Knight’s and Magic is flawed in how one-track it is. The show’s really only about one thing - how robots are cool. Of course, I agree that robots are cool. Knight’s and Magic’s lineup of robots in particular is very cool, both in their form and unique functions. However, anyone who’s actually a fan of the mecha genre knows that just having cool robots isn’t enough to carry a show - you have to have compelling characters and interesting narratives. The all-too-frequently trotted-out line of “[x mecha show] is actually good, unlike the rest of the genre, because it focuses on the characters instead of just the robots” is probably the single most effective thing you can say if you want to piss off a mecha fan, because that sentence describes literally every mecha show that was ever worth a damn, even going back to the genre’s roots in the 70s. However, it arguably doesn’t really describe Knight’s and Magic. The series’ creators come off as just as obsessed with robots as its main character, and it comes at the expense of the characters and setting. Each new episode comes with a cool new robot or a cool upgrade for an existing one, but practically none of them feature development of the setting or its characters. Fremevilla and its neighbours never come off as anything more than “generic fantasy kingdom”, the supporting cast are all cut from extremely generic-feeling moulds, and Ernesti never undergoes any growth or exhibits any notable character traits beyond “likes robots.”

Now, there have been several characters in mecha anime who are in large part defined by their dedication to giant robots as an ideal, or simply to their aesthetic, and some of these are truly excellent characters. For instance, Gai Daigoji from Nadesico, Akagi Shunsuke from Dai-Guard, Noa Izumi from Patlabor, Sei Iori from Gundam Build Fighters, or the Super Robot Wars Original character Ryusei Date. The difference between all of these and Ernesti is that being fans of robots isn’t the only thing that makes them relatable or endearing characters, whereas in Ernesti’s case it’s basically the only thing that defines his personality. It also doesn’t help that he’s perhaps the biggest Mary Sue main character that I’ve seen in a mecha anime. His gimmick is that his past-life experience as a programmer also makes him profoundly adept at magic, and that he’s a genius Silhouette Knight designer. He’s always totally successful at everything he tries and everyone loves and respects him for his accomplishments. Ironically, it’s this that makes him an unlikable character for the viewer, because, again, he has no real admirable qualities beyond liking robots and being good at making and using them. It’s a character’s struggles and tribulations that ultimately make them truly sympathetic, and Ernesti is never really challenged until right at the very end of the series, and ultimately that challenge only feels like a mild speed bump for him. This results in a series that despite all its cool robots and flashy battles is fundamentally dead as a story at its core.

However, all of this simply describes a series that I would find boring and mediocre rather than one I actively disliked in a serious way. However, this is arguably the first series I’ve watched since Gundam Seed Destiny that really ground my gears quite badly, and it all boils down to one specific moment in the show’s narrative. To explain why, I need to diverge from my usual review format and spoil not only this show, but also it’s forefather, the original mecha Isekai, Aura Battler Dunbine. I really don’t think spoilers for the former is anything to worry about but spoiling the latter is probably more of an offense. As such, the remainder of this review is below this spoiler cut:

Dunbine is not everyone’s cut of tea. It’s old, has bad animation, it’s long-winded and has a sometimes confused and scrambled narrative in accordance with some of Tomino’s worst habits. However, it was also a work of great imagination that really delivered on communicating a valuable message in some engaging ways. It’s a message that Knight’s and Magic cheerfully and infuriatingly tramples all over. Let me explain.

In Knight’s and Magic, the show’s hero is an outsider who enters into a fantasy world and uses his real-world knowledge to bring about a revolution in technology. This also happens to be the chief descriptor for a major character in Dunbine too.

However, this isn’t the description of the show’s protagonist, Show Zama.

It’s the description of the show’s villain, Shot Weapon.

Shot Weapon is the creator of the Aura Convertor, the technology that powers the show’s mecha, the Aura Battlers, and other weapons besides. The introduction of this technology destroys the peace of Dunbine’s world, Byston Well, and causes it to descend into anarchy and bloodshed. However, the real devastation doesn’t occur until Shot’s creations are transported back into our world, where they inflict destruction almost beyond imagining. Ultimately, Shot Weapon’s actions condemn him to a punishment of being forced to live forever in Byston Well in a state of eternal suffering, like Cain after murdering his brother Abel. Dunbine’s ultimate, most crucial message is that those who manufacture weapons and spread death are to be condemned.

Knight’s and Magic gave itself the exact same opportunity to deal with this exact same theme. The show’s final arc is that a kingdom called Zaloudek has accumulated vast military power and used it to invade its neighours. We get to see as they descend into a neighbouring kingdom, slaughter its just and rightful rulers and install themselves as tyrants. Now, enter Ernesti and his friends at the conquered kingdom’s borders. At this point he’s achieved his aim of creating his own unique robot called the Ikaruga, and in its first battle effortlessly dispatches the Zaloudek soldiers guarding the border. In the aftermath, he examines the wreckage of a destroyed Zaloudek Silhouette Knight. He and everyone else see the obvious - this machine, the Tyranto is based on Ernesti’s designs. Previously, one of the prototype Knights he’d constructed in an earlier arc was stolen by a mysterious foreign agent, and now it’s become clear what happened to it. The source of the military strength that’s fuelling Zaloudek’s ambitions of conquest are the new technologies that he created, reverse engineered from the stolen mecha. As he looks upon the wreck of the Tyranto, the show is presented with a unique opportunity to do something that it’s thus far not done - challenge its protagonist with the consequences of his actions. Sure, Ernesti is not exactly the same as Shot Weapon - he only wanted to create robots because he thought they were cool, while Shot Weapon wanted power. However, in this case the end result has been the same - death, destruction and oppression. Ernesti has a chance to think about whether the things he’s done are right and acknowledge that he’s at least somewhat responsible for the disaster that’s played out, even if it’s just to acknowledge that he has a duty to set things right by beating Zaloudek. This is an opportunity for him to grow as a character for the first time.

The show swerves this opportunity without flinching.

Sure, Ernesti does liberate the kingdom in the end, but it’s clear that it’s not as a result of any real moral calling. He just wanted to build more robots and fight with them. His motivation in the final battle is that he wants to destroy the enemy’s flying battleship because he’s worried that battleships might replace Silhouette Knights if he doesn’t. He remains a totally one-dimensional character right to the end.

As I said before, Ernesti’s obsession with cool robots arguably mirrors that of the creators of this show, if its myopic focus on them is anything to go by. Perhaps this seems extremely out of character for me to say, but this is an infantile obsession. Yes, I like giant robots, but I don’t like them so much that I miss the point. The core of not only the real robot genre that both Knight’s and Magic and Aura Battle Dunbine belong to despite the fantasy trappings of the show, but arguably of the mecha genre as a whole, is that technology can be a force of destruction and great evil when not used responsibly. Yes, the protagonist mecha in these shows are meant to be heroic, but only in their opposition to those who’d use technology as a tool of death and oppression. This is the core of the soul that makes mecha as a genre compelling. It’s a point that Knight’s and Magic completely misses and why it’s fundamentally a failure. It’s as if it’s trying to be what the mecha genre’s detractors try to paint it as.

That said, despite my misgivings there is entertainment to be found if you only want dumb action. But I’d highly encourage you to check out any alternative. If you want a fantasy mecha series, Dunbine, Escaflowne and Rayearth are all much more compelling stories than this - even ones I’m not so keen on like Panzer World Galient and Ryu Knight are fundamentally more interesting as stories than this. If you want a story with a mecha fanatic in the lead role, you’re much better off watching Patlabor or the chronically underrated Dai-Guard instead.

#knight's and magic #mecha #respect the robot

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astrowithkaro · 2 years

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Hiii can you please do 14th of November for language of birthdays ask game (´∩｡• ᵕ •｡∩`) ty❤

Btw your blog is very informative I love it

Language Of Birthdays: November 14 - Scorpio

The Day Of The Investigator

Those born on November 14 manifest an urge to explore their environment down to the last detail. Though they are intensely curious about their surroundings in general, they are highly selective in their interests and have a well-defined point of view. Their ideas of social responsibility, whether conservative or liberal, are usually perfectly clear to themselves and to others and moral in nature.

November 14 people are often involved in guiding the lives of others. They readily see those areas that need improvement, and indeed those deficits they target may be objectively lacking. However, they must remember that they are nonetheless operating from their own subjective viewpoint and their input may not always be appreciated. In particular, they may have to hold their tongue where their love relationship is concerned. Also, because they are so quick to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of a given situation, they may not allow others a chance to discover for themselves.

It is a strength of November 14 people that they have little need for gratuitous praise of their achievements or abilities. Both men and women born on this day are capable of subjugating themselves to a cause and avoiding ego trips. Because of such self-reliance they can easily recognize flatterers and those who harbour ulterior motives.More highly evolved November 14 people, whether they be artists, scientists, manufacturers, business people, or involved in providing a service, always do their homework on any project in which they are engaged—probing, testing, examining the object of their saidy with minute exactitude. They are both ruthless and honest in putting their own theories to the test and discarding those products or elements which do not work. Thus their objectivity is well preserved.

Just as November 14 people are highly observant in regard to the external world, they should develop a greater ability to perceive inner truths, including the emotional and spiritual state of themselves and others. Such a sense of understanding can make them more effective when dealing with human and social matters that impact on their career and work. Because those born on this day make a point of following through on their endeavours, investing much of themselves in realising their goals, they must also be sure to chart the proper course from the outset.It is imperative that November 14 people strengthen their integration with friends, family and society in general. Those born on this day who do so greatly lighten their burden and enjoy a firmer sense of purpose that insures their success. As they are often quite ambitious and powerful people, they need to seek consensus and cultivate their ability to compromise. By finding a middle way and perhaps moderating their more extreme tendencies they can be highly effective and ultimately achieve more lasting results.

Strengths:

Involved

Thorough

Observant

Weaknesses:

Controlling

Meddling

Overly critical

Advice

November 14 people must beware of becoming obsessed with all sorts of real or imagined ailments. Some born on this day tend to be worry-warts when it comes to illness, and may seek medical advice much too often. Developing a greater faith in the healing abilities of the body and natural remedies is thus important. If November 14 people take an active interest in diet and cooking they can be superb with food. However, excessive concern about weight must not be allowed to reach neurotic proportions; sexual and athletic activities should be kept within healthy self-imposed limits.

Keep your moral and judgmental tendencies under control

Learn to leave others in peace and respect their values

Everything is not available for your scrutiny, so observe privacy

#scorpio sign #scorpio horoscope #scorpio astrology #scorpio #scorpio sun #scorpio aesthetic #scorpio love #scorpio trait #scorpio tarot reading #scorpio season #scorpio placements #escorpio #water signs

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lligkv · 3 years

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what the world will look like when it’s over

Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the first Adam Curtis documentary I’ve seen. I gather it’s not the most successful demonstration of his method; it sounds like Hypernormalization or The Century of the Self are tighter in their construction, less effortful (count how many times Curtis says something like “But then it started to run out of control” in this one), and perhaps less frustrating in their narration. In the early episodes of this documentary in particular, it feels like Curtis is constantly presenting what’s being covered as the turn, the decisive shift in his narrative—the emergence of the American counterculture, the revolution of the “unit of One” led by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing to help her break the stalemate with the other revolutionaries in China into which Zedong had fallen in the 1960s, George Boole’s development of Boolean logic to describe human thought. And the whole thing feels longer and baggier than it needs to be. The early episodes devote much time to interesting individual narratives, like that of the Trinidadian British activist or sorts named Michael Freitas (or Michael X) or a trans woman named Julie in 1960s Britain; they also sprawl in a way that makes the overall argument a bit hard to divine. It’s not until the fourth episode that the shape of Curtis’s narrative becomes clear—that our age is the product of a struggle between a new, broadly liberal-democratic and capitalist image of individualism, a dying era of collectivist struggle, and older, more vicious systems of power, derived from the control of capital and expressed through the middle classes’ suspicion and viciousness toward the subaltern and toward each other, even as they remain subject to the power of oligarchs and billionaires.

Curtis also seems to play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. When he presents Médecins Sans Frontières’s founder Bernard Kouchner as an avatar of a theory of the “one world” of liberal democracy—the idea that we’re basically one world of individuals, enjoying certain human rights regardless of political orientations or ideologies, and that Western nations are duty-bound by virtue of their prosperity to intervene when other nations violate people’s rights—it seems a distortion of what Kouchner actually says in the footage Curtis includes: “We don’t care on leftist or rightist countries [sic]; there is no leftist and rightist suffering, and there is no possibility to split the world in[to] ‘good’ people or ‘bad’ people, ‘good’ dead and ‘bad’ dead.” Which isn’t to say Kouchner didn’t believe in liberal-democratic ideas—he may well have—but what he’s shown as saying has to do with the consideration of suffering as suffering regardless of a person’s identity or allegiance, which is a different matter.

This is just one of several moments when I stopped to wonder how secure I actually was in Curtis’s hands. But ultimately, I find the emotional history he lays out resonant. The age we’re living through now, in the 2020s, is indeed the product of certain fantasies of individualism and of a post-end-of-history, neoliberal “one world”—with no ideologies but capitalism and putative democracy—meeting age-old systems of power, acquisition, and control, and age-old features of the human mind and heart: resentment, prejudice, betrayal, jealousy, the need to be prosperous, the need to be free.

And Curtis’s work appeals to me for the same reason the writer Pankaj Mishra’s work does. He historicizes our underhistoricized time. What’s more, he does so in a way that’s especially rare to see in any mainstream media venue. Usually, when you want to understand the connections between, say, colonial-era empires and post-war welfare states, or if you want to understand what happened to turn Western societies as they were post-war to Western societies as they are post-financialization, you have to seek the information out on your own. It’s valuable to have someone in a place like the BBC willing to put the pieces of these narratives together. And willing to remind us of the events that are so incredibly easy to forget even in one’s own lifetime. Abu Ghraib, for instance, which pops up in part 6 of the documentary. That shit happened while I was alive. How often do I remember it? How many American sins get drowned out in the new ones that emerge every day of every month of every year? Or in the stasis that sets in when what was once novel, like the War on Terror or the invasion into our privacy represented by the Patriot Act, fades into regular life?

I was jotting down copious notes while watching the doc, as is my wont. The questions and thoughts that came up, in no particular order:

How do the elites of a given era impose their preferred ideologies? How are the structures of power we grow up with constructed, and how do those go on to shape our behavior?

Control, as it’s practiced by societies in the 21st century, often comes down to the recognition of patterns in human behavior—and their manipulation.

The loss of power, like that which was suffered after the collapse of Britain’s empire or in the slow hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing industry in the 20th century, leads to anger and melancholy that people can’t be expected to abandon. Does doing what you’re supposed to do bring you the happiness you were promised—or anything even resembling that happiness? When we’re living in a historical moment in which the answer is no, as is often the case today, we’ll need to watch out. It’s a sign people are being manipulated and abused.

Over time, the tech industry has come to understand that you can manage people en masse by collecting their data and manipulating the messages they receive in social media activity feeds and advertising—and you can make them feel like sovereign individuals at the same time through the very same means. In light of all this, will there ever be a revolution that actually changes the structure of power we’re currently stuck in? Is there a chance to alter this extreme individualism. on the part of people who are surrounded by political systems so enervated, by the supra-governmental system that is global finance capital—which politicians can’t control, and must appease and palliate—that they can’t respond to phenomena like climate change or meaningfully punish atrocities like wars prosecuted on false pretenses? Or are we stuck where we are, in a world that’s corrupt and exhausted? In nations whose governments depend on technologies of surveillance and myths of consumerist abundance or nationalist glory to maintain power, in the absence of any real vision for the future?

It all leads to some interesting takeaways. For one, the way culture reacts to politics and vice versa. As I was watching Can’t Get You Out of My Head, I was reminded of a conversation folks on the Discord server for the Relentless Picnic podcast had had recently about the strange things Richard Dawkins posts on his Twitter account. And it led me to think: when religious “caring conservatism” was in the White House, Richard Dawkins and his New Atheism, this brash repudiation of religion and its pieties, grew as a counterweight. When Obama and his technocratic regime were in power, with social media bringing on a wave of progressivism in popular culture and algorithms presenting us a fantasy of endless choice—much of which was a thin veneer over the same old shit: banks getting bailed out, forever wars going on, productivity rising while wages stagnated—we also got Jordan Peterson-types who claimed to speak to a human need for narrative, even in this point of stability we had seemed to reach, this recovery of sanity after the chaos that was the Iraq War and the financial crisis; who claimed we needed ideas and myths to animate and drive our lives, because they sensed there was something hollow and mendacious driving all this consumer choice, for all it seemed a symbol of our freedom and progress.

Of course, both Peterson and Dawkins are provocateurs, not intellectuals; I don’t mean to dignify the movements they led much, since in both the appearance of intellectual rigor or moral clarity often covered the indulgence of the worst instincts: immaturity, obstinacy, provocation for provocation’s sake, contempt for women and trans people. The New Atheists had a point, and could be absolute assholes about it; they ultimately could be as fundamentalist and dogmatic as any religious people. As for Jordan Peterson, his actual work, in the way of so many grand theorists, uses the appearance of profundity to cover something ultimately pretty banal. And he’s most known for grandstanding in the public sphere—refusing to use people’s pronouns, the usual conservative shit. But these movements do seem to reflect a countercultural response no less than 1960s counterculture reflects a reaction to the staid culture of 1950s America and the sins it covered up.

Which leads me to the question: what was the culture’s response to Trump’s administration? Maybe QAnon and Russiagate, as conspiracies—that is, actual narratives people inhabit to explain the world’s evils, and not just a vague need for them that they satisfied with Jordan Peterson’s light form of Stoicism or his theories of Light and Dark or whatever the fuck. And in that way, perhaps, once a countercultural movement—namely nationalism and Trumpian populism—actually seemed to have overthrown a regime, of Obama-era liberal technocratic management, culture and politics came to mirror each other, rather than standing in opposition to each other. Both became equally conspiratorial and unhinged; in fact, they merged. All the ruling myths and conspiracies mutate in kind these days: Trump’s garbage about draining the swamp, a cover for Trump and his family enriching themselves and Stephen Miller’s like getting to fashion the state they wanted, becomes QAnon’s garbage about rings of child trafficking and pedophilia and Trump, of all people, being their savior—all while actual trafficking and abuse perpetuated by Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk goes unpunished, Epstein’s death swallowed up by the state without a sound—becomes the liberal pundit class’s screaming about Russia: connections between Trump and Putin that were always conjectural to me, because no one who pled them seemed to feel much need to substantiate them.

Here again I feel like what were once centrifugal forces in our culture—between mainstream and the independent media, for example; between people in power and their critics, either in the media or at society’s margins—have collapsed into a single morass. We’re all in hell and there’s no way out.

In all this, what does Biden’s administration represent? Little more than an interregnum, to my mind. How disappointing to see not even a gesture toward forgiving student debt or raising the minimum wage in these first 100 days of his presidency. There’s been some progress in climate legislation, and progress in putting Stephen Miller’s deportation machine to a halt (though they’re also reopening several emergency shelters to accommodate more minors already being held past the mandated limits for keeping them in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement). But there’s also been such triangulation on policy by the administration and its supporters and such complacency on the part of the media covering the administration, refusing to call them out on or even cover this. And how can the average voter respond but with resignation?

Ever since I read Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus near the start of lockdown, absorbing the picture of the world pre-World War II that’s presented in that book, I’ve thought we’re in the same sort of moment that Mann’s protagonist Zeitblom was in. There’s a crisis that’s passing over this whole planet like a wave or a seismic event, and no human intervention can interrupt it. We can only wait for it to pass—holding on to whatever’s to hand, waiting to see what the world will look like when it’s over.

#adam curtis #documentaries #thomas mann #jordan peterson #richard dawkins #pankaj mishra #the relentless picnic #conspiracy

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acti-veg · 3 years

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(Part 1) Hi Acti, what's your opinion on potentially vegan products that went through tertiary food processing, but don't come with a vegan label? Especially if such products include additives like unspecified amino acids, refined sugar, hydrolised proteins, coagulants, glycerine, possible traces of animal products from cross-contamination and so on?

(Part 2) I'm not asking from a health perspective but rather should we stay away from those products altogether or is this more of a personal choice, and are there exceptions? For example, when you're traveling or living in a country where there are looser food labeling laws, can't read ingredient lists reliably due to lack of language skills, can not self-cater and/or are unable to reach out directly to the manufacturer of the product? Thanks in advance!

Cross-contamination is a question of personal comfort levels, it is not a level issue. It makes no moral difference if a product is made in a factory that handles milk products, which is what 'may contain milk' warnings mean. In terms of items of unknown original, such as glycerine, a little research is usually all that is required.

For example, we can find out that most glycerine in food is vegetable based because it's cheaper, so even though we can't be sure, we can know that it is highly likely that it will be vegan. For true confirmation and certainty, you just need to contact the company directly - they are often well used to these enquiries and have a template response they fire back to you pretty quickly.

When you're travelling, again the key is research. You can usually find good resources in english of products that are safe in other countries, and I always recommend people learn the very basic terms of where they're going, the words for meat, fish, milk, how to say 'I don't eat x, y, z - what can I eat?' etc. You may never be able to be 100% certain in some scenarios, but a little work will give you a higher degree of confidence than you would otherwise have.

#ask #vegan #vegan food #.

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Other possible Holocausts: why pro-lifers are lying to us, and why thats a good thing

…

Ive had a running argument over the past few years that the raw lack of anti-abortion terrorist action proves no one really thinks abortion is murder, ie. intentional 1st degree murder of a life equal to yours or mine.

Ive always gotten pushback to quote WillyWang:

The "revealed preference" of those that oppose abortion but don't firebomb clinics and kill doctors? It won't help, you'll be made an example of in the negative sense, and civilized norms are more important than a useless symbolic point. One clinic destroyed won't end abortion, after all.

From which this Effort-post got its Genesis:

Would you say the same about those who participated in the french resistance or Warsaw Ghetto rising to Nazi Germany?

Everyone of those claims applies there: they were likely to be made examples of, they were damaging civilized norms, and any given action had relatively little to no impact.

Yet the same people who insist abortion is murder, and thus that America is committing a holocaust, yet denounce any of the people who employed violence against abortion doctors or clinics, and can’t distance themselves fast enough from any call for violence... none of those people apply the same logic to the first holocaust. None of them say the frenchmen who bombed german police stations where dangerous terrorists who deserved their executions, none of them denounce the Warsaw ghetto rising as an attack on civilization.

…

If anti-abortion advocated genuinely believed a fetus was a equivalent human life to yours or mine or the little kids they see walk to school, and that this was an ongoing holocaust of American Children at a scale possibly 10x or more what was done to the jews... they wouldn’t need to come up with ad hoc reasons why they don’t resort to violence, their mind would be screaming at them to take bloody vengeance 24/7 in righteous outrage, demanding that oceans of blood and fire be unleashed that it might wash clean the horror, that nuclear fire would be be an acceptable emergency shut off to end such wanton and cruel slaughter... and if thinking through all the logic they concluded that no violence wouldn’t help and they must pursue some peaceful negotiation to stop the slaughter, then their minds recoil and call themselves cowards and the moment of coming to that conclusion would be an ongoing trauma they’d carry with them for the rest of their life, even if they knew they were 100% right. They would meet the “pro-choice” and barely be able to conceal their desire to see them dead or imprisoned... they would meet women who had had abortions and scream bloody murder at them and tell them they deserve the death penalty, the way many of the same people react when presented with women who’d murdered their children, but after their children had left the womb.

The people who were jailed for assassinating abortionists, or fire-bombing clinics would be folk heroes lionized in songs and crowd funded hagiographic documentaries and folk traditions, like John Brown, or John Wilkes Booth, or Louis Reil, or Saco and Vancety, or Huey Newton, or Malcolm X, or David Koresh, or Levoy Finecolm... or hell even just Jesse James, or Killdozer.

Americans abort on average 1 million plus babies a year... that means if abortion is murder and those are human lives, then the 50 years since Roe vs.Wade has been a worse crime than the holocaust, slavery, or the crimes of Stalin, and we’d have to consult a historian to see if they were worse than Mao (on a per capita basis, certainly)...

This would be the worse crime ever commited, the greatest mass slaughter ever perpetrated in human history, and 50 years later our society would remain committed to repeating it in the next 50 years.

If that does not demand violence, then nothing in human history ever has, no even defensive war has ever been justified, and only Jainists and Jehovah’s witnesses are morally acceptable actors. An extreme unexceedable pascifism we know the vast majority of anti-abortion advocates do not endorse, since they overwhelming supported or at-least did not conspicuously oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (over a mere 3000 Americans dead, and a less than a years abortions worth of Iraqis killed by Saddam) and continue to conspicuously “Support our troops” troops that exist to carry out violence, despite their moral commitments saying they can apparently never in human history be justified.

When i say this proves “Pro-lifers” clearly do not believe a fetus is an equal human life, thats me being incredibly charitable. That is me extending a overwhelming large olive branch, that is me expressing a stupendous care and concern and sympathy and brotherly love to rival the best 19th century dinner host, the dearest of friends, a benevolent older sibling, a lover, a parent, a mother who on hearing the taped confession of her son to serial murder, doesn’t hesitate once before screaming “you monsters you’ve drugged and tortured him! What threats have you made to my grandchild! He would only say such things to save his daughter’s life!”

My claiming they are full of shit and lying to themselves, to you, and to me, is an expression of love and faith in my fellow man which until now I did not realized I possessed nor was capable of...

Because if I merely took them at their word? If I believed that they believed what they say they believe? They would be monsters.

Lets play a game called “Other Possible Holocausts”. Approximately 800,000 babies where aborted this year.

Lets imagine the US government has just announced that crime has gotten to cumbersome and that over the next 3 years it plans to execute every single one of the 2.4 million people in US prisons jails and Jeuvenile detention centres.

Lets imagine that to reform education, the US resolves to kill the bottom 1% of all 80 million students in the country based on an age adjusted standardized test every year.

Lets imagine hatred of the obese takes off, and a policy is passed to resolve America’s 30% obesity rate by the mass instituting of bounties on hunting and killing the obese... that every year 800,000 to 1.5 million tags will be issued for a fee to allow the hunting of the obese in return for monetary rewards on successful hunts and getting to keep the carcasses for meat base animal foods and the manufacture of fuel, or fat based household products. These bounty hunters become known a “whalers”.

Lets imagine the US announces its done with African Americans... if the problem hasn’t been solved since 1619, its not going to be... and so they’re going to genocide all 40 million African Americans at a rate of 2% a year, for the next 50 years.

Lets imagine opposing extremists get in charge and decide the racists rednecks have to go, and so they’ll be forming death squads to roam the South, Appalachia, and the rust belt, with the objective of killing 800,000 poor whites a year, “until the problem is solved”... with many happily stating 50 years of this would be acceptable, while others state it’d be perfectly fine to renew it another 50 years after that.

…

These are all American lives, and according to pro-lifers of equal moral value to the babies aborted every day, no better, no worse.

By saying this and by saying violence is not and cannot be justified to resist it, they are saying that their reactions to any one of the above eventualities would be to continue to live their lives as they have lived the past 50 years.

I do not know how to respond to that. Even if Abortion is truly murder of an ensouled equal human life... The Pro-choicers committing the murders don’t think it is... hell the Nazis murdered 6 million jews and a further 5 million undesirables, but they didn’t think of them as human, they thought they were monstrous and “life unworthy of life”, like a burning man begging you to shoot him so he doesn’t suffer or hurt his fellows... a mercy in a way.

Pro-lifers on the other hand claim these are equal viable human lives of equal status to yours or mine or perhaps even greater.... They’re Children.

And their reaction to the greatest mass slaughter in human history, the reaction of almost half the electorate, who regularly talk about the need to resist tyrrany and defend the weak (as both left and right in the US do, in their way), their reaction is to vote every 4 years, and have it perhaps not even be the #1 issue if the economy seems bad, they have the opportunity to vote for the first black president, or the Orangeman says something crude about Mexicans... they won’t be single issue voters even when it comes to the greatest crime ever committed in human history?

I refuse to believe it. Even I, cynical as I am, have to believe we are not that far gone, and the age of men has not come crashing down... i would believe the US capable of such a crime, but to believe that a double digit percentage of Americans could look at that, recognize the victims as their fellow humans,recognize their state and society as committing mass murder of their neighbours, future friends, and relatives...to recognize that they have a moral imperative to act on this... and then just go “welp them’s the breaks, gotta be civilized” because 9 people in black robes said it wasn’t murder?

Holy fuck. No that is not how people work, that is not how humans behave, I cannot accept that, and leftists who spent the summer rioting in response to fewer than a thousand police killings of black men a year, who remember the civil rights and anti-war movements, who kinda vaguely recall that they’re supposed to remember Huey Newton, or Saco and Vanseti, or those Rossen...something people... who like to imagine they’d have been abolitionists in the 19th century. They’re right to call bullshit.

They’re right to call the pro-lifers liars who don’t believe their own messaging, and instead just want to control women’s bodies, after a lie like that to their face, they’re right to treat them with scorn.

…

Pro-life is rescuable as a sentiment and an activist movement...

But not while it claims a Holocaust is going on and somehow magically no violence could ever be justified to resist it, thus lining up all the arguments that will allow the next holocaust to be committed without resistance.

There have been a double digit, perhaps even a triple digit number of mass murders and genocides in the hundreds of thousands or millions of people, since the 20th century. America is enabling its ally Saudi Arabia to commit one against the Yemenis right fucking now.

We need to be very fucking clear about what it is justified to do to members of a regime that commits such a crime, and what it is definitely justified to do to the immediate perpetrators of the murder. And That we will back violent resistance to such a horrible crime by the state even if it serves only to make the resister a martyr we’ll praise, or it degrades “civilization” (what civilization could remain in such a regime?), or it ultimately has no effect (it is on the survivor to try harder)... The major members of the House of Saud deserve the Gallows under international law for what they’re doing in Yemen , as do their American attaches and core enablers... and if that comes from a Judge in the Hauge or from a convoy of irregulars in pickup trucks, or from lone assassins who manage to get through to them, It is justice, and i will praise it.

What we cannot do is pretend that genocides and mass slaughter on unconscionable scales are occurring and then come up with excuses for why we should do nothing and anyone who does resist is a criminal. Or else those excuses will be the ones that allow the next real genocide in the west or on US soil to actually happen.

If there is a genocide or democide or whatever you want to call mass slaughter. You must recognize the justice the violent resistance to it, even if you personally do not participate, or you must admit you were lying about there being such a crime... to say otherwise, to say a state can commit such a crime and still retain its right to your loyalty, to say a people up to and including its victims must obey such a thing, a creature made of bureaucracy that has set its sights on massacring humans by the thousands if not millions... it is to side against the human race in a war of extermination.

And as someone whose pro-choice as they come, I’d much rather, if the pro-lifers really believe its murder, I’d much rather they start a bloody civil war, than for it to become the norm that that is ethically acceptable.

#kulakrevolt #reddit #the motte #food for thought

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princeescaluswords · 3 years

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Fandom *still* thinks that Deaton and Morrell are "sitting on their hands" because they refuse to accept the only reason Jennifer was capable of all those flashy feats was due to killing people for sacrifices and thus throwing the Balance outta whack. Deaton is supposed to I guess be cutting up Derek's food for him and wiping his ass when not playing archmage. But ya know, they KNOW that Jennifer was only capable of those things through murdering innocents. Yet how often do they portray "druid" Stiles able to do the same things and more overnight? And portray him as sneering at Deaton for "doing nothing"? I read a fic where Stiles demanded to learn magic from Deaton while thinking that Deaton is "privileged" to "stay in his clinic" while he's out fighting and surviving

The glib answer is, they’ve watched too many episodes of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

The more serious answer is that they’ve missed several key themes in Teen Wolf. The most important of those themes today is Balance, of which Deaton and Morrell serve as the primary examples: power must be balanced with responsibility to others.

Every single villain in Teen Wolf neglects that balance. They’re not antagonists because they have power; they’re antagonists because they use that power without regard to how it effects other people, especially those without power.

Peter wants his revenge for his pain and he needs power to achieve it, even if it means deceiving and killing his own niece, even if it means deceiving and abusing his own nephew. He kills allies (Nurse Jennifer), he kills innocents (the janitor), he terrorizes teenagers who just happened to stumble across him, and he even seeks to kill Allison, who had nothing to do with the Hale fire. He does not allow himself to be bound by anything but his own desire; he barely treats his targets like individuals.

Derek wants to rebuild his family so he can feel safe and loved again, which sounds like a nice pleasant idea, except he does it by dishonesty, manipulation, and violence. He wants a pack, but he knows from Omega (2x01), that giving the Bite to teenagers puts them in danger from Gerard and then the Alpha Pack, which he knew was coming. He treated Jackson abysmally because the teen annoyed him, yet everyone else reaped the consequences of Derek’s pettiness and disregard. Season 1 and 2 Derek consistently put his own wants and needs above other people.

Deucalion and Jennifer are two sides of the same coin. Deucalion was deceived and betrayed, so he essentially decided to burn the werewolf world to the ground to prove he was right. Jennifer was deceived and betrayed, so she murders innocents in order to gain power in order to make it right. See the pattern?

Now let’s look at Deaton. Incurious viewers may believe that Deaton is ‘vague’ and ‘cryptic’ but what they’re really upset about is that he doesn’t pretend to have all the answers and he doesn’t feel obligated to share everything he knows. On the other hand, when he does decide to help, it never ‘comes with a price.’ He never demands payment or even changes in behavior from those he helps, though he reserves the right not to act if he is morally unsatisfied, such as when he made it clear in Raving (2x08) that he wasn’t going to help Derek execute Jackson. This doesn’t mean he’s weak or incapable. It means he has set boundaries for himself and he keeps them, and those boundaries always involve respecting other people. I always enjoy his behavior in two different scenes -- treating the de-aged Derek in 117 (4x02) and examining the chimera Tracy in Parasomnia (5x03). You can notice that he doesn’t give orders to the people helping him in those scenes, always asking if they’re comfortable with what he’s doing and focused on his patients.

Teen Wolf believed that maintaining the Balance didn’t have to mean that the character was nice. Morrell played a dangerous game of trying to keep the Alpha Pack in check, working behind the scenes when any one of them could kill her. Yet she also understood that she can’t manipulate them without having to sometimes ‘get her hands dirty.’ When Stiles is in Eichen house, she gives him amphetamines to help keep him awake -- something that could get her in trouble -- but she also makes it clear she’s not going to let the Nogitsune run rampant if a solution can’t be found. People may not like her, but they have to admit she took action to limit the damage to innocent people and she doesn’t seem to get anything out of it.

Scott learned those lessons well. He didn’t use his status as a True Alpha to get what he wanted. He pursued his responsibility as Protector of Beacon Hills to protect everyone which included holding others responsible for their behavior and included standing up for people he might not like, such as Donovan Donati. He couldn’t fulfill that duty if he let anyone -- no matter who it was -- do as they please.

If we put aside the idea that without supernatural transformation, people like Deaton, Morrell, Jennifer and even the Doctors had to study for years and years and years for whatever power and knowledge they had, whereas Fanon Stiles frequently gets his power overnight, knowing ancient magics by chosen-one osmosis. He doesn’t earn the power and he doesn’t respect the need for balance. Indeed, if we go by fanfiction, fanon Stiles would immediately join the ranks of Peter, Derek, Deucalion and Jennifer, using his power without regard to other people if they weren’t important to him.

How many times have you read a story where Stiles kills, beats, or rips Scott’s power away from him because he doesn’t think Scott was using it right? How many times has he tortured Deaton to death for not doing more? How many times had he murdered the entire Argent family? Theo? Deucalion? To these people, what’s the point of power if you can’t use it to destroy the people who made you unhappy?

Fanon Stiles would be the best villain for Season 7.

Now, on the other hand, how many times in fandom, when the story has Scott or Deaton be the villain, have they possessed overwhelming power? So seldom it’s hilarious. In these stories, they never kill or hurt anyone important. They are villains and they get destroyed, not because they hurt others for power, but because they deny a variety of good looking white men their deserved place as the rulers of the land, and it hurts the white men’s feelings a great deal.

Come on, find more than a handful of stories where Evil Dark Villain Scott isn’t painted that way without actually inconveniencing or even hurting a single white person? He did make them feel sad, and for that he must be punished. Their Evil Mastermind Deaton constantly schemes to deny the Hales their rightful place (why? None of these writers seem to care). Their motivations and actions are always just as incongruous as Archmage Stiles, and they never actually pose a real threat because they never really have any power -- Scott impedes people with moral authority (the fiend!) and Deaton does terrible, horrible things like not healing Peter while he was in the hospital and hiding Stiles’s Unlimited Powah until he doesn’t.

Teen Wolf proposed that villainy comes from the use of power for one’s own needs and wants without any recognition of its affects on other people, especially people that you don’t care about. Privilege and connections and wealth and family doesn’t make someone more worthy of life than the people who audience didn’t care about or people who didn’t care about the main characters. To the production, nameless extras have the right to live, too, which was the entire point behind Monroe’s plotline.

Scott’s a hero precisely because he didn’t execute Peter, Derek or Gerard even though it would make his life easier, and because he cared about people like Donovan, people like the list of names on the Dead Pool, and people like those two children in the woods.

Fandom missed it, like they missed so much of the story while trying to manufacture Sterek and/or Steter out of the ether. Fanon Archmage Stiles is the ultimate expression of the power fantasy that what Stiles wants is more important than anything else.

#teen wolf meta #teen wolf racism #anti stiles stans #russianspacegeckosexparty

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seymour-butz-stuff · 3 years

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A Democratic president just entered the White House, so it’s time for Republican state officials to start discussing secession once again. After Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, disaffected conservatives flooded the White House petition site with calls to leave the Union. (They were predictably denied.) Now a smattering of state party leaders and lawmakers are once again raising the question: Should we stay or should we go?

“We need to focus on the fundamentals,” Wyoming GOP chairman Frank Eathorne said in an interview with Steve Bannon last week, according to The Casper Star-Tribune. “We are straight talking, focused on the global scene, but we’re also focused at home. Many of these Western states have the ability to be self-reliant, and we’re keeping eyes on Texas too, and their consideration of possible secession. They have a different state constitution than we do as far as wording, but it’s something we’re all paying attention to.”

Kyle Biedermann, a Republican state lawmaker in Texas, recently claimed that he plans to introduce a bill to hold a referendum on leaving the United States. “The federal government is out of control & doesn’t represent the values of Texans,” he wrote on Twitter last month. “That is why I am committing to file legislation that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the State of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation.” Allen West, the Texas GOP chair, said after the Supreme Court refused to overturn Biden’s lawful victory that “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution.” Many took this as a reference to secession.

I’ve previously tried to make a moral and democratic case for the Union. Balkanizing ourselves over transitory political differences is short-sighted and anti-democratic. But as this feeble specter rears its head once more, it’s also worth also considering the practical and economic case for the Union. And to truly understand that, we need look no further than those responsible for the Union’s existence in the first place: the British.

Four and a half years ago, Britons narrowly voted to leave the European Union, the economic and political bloc that tore down borders and barriers across the continent. Brexiteers sold the country’s departure as a way for the U.K. to take back control of those borders and build new trade relationships outside Europe. It was a fantastical exercise in populism that spent little time grappling with the hard reality of how Britain would extract itself from a 40-year governance relationship, let alone with the rocky roads that a United Kingdom would traverse once it was disunited from the continent. Four years of bargaining and two toppled governments later, Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally signed an exit deal with EU leaders last month.

How have Britain’s first few weeks of “independence” gone? Not great. Goods and services used to flow nearly frictionlessly across British soil and the rest of the continent. Now they’re ensnared in a complex system of border controls and customs checks. Perishable goods are hardest hit. Scottish seafood is struggling to get into continental Europe; Northern Ireland is experiencing food shortages because goods can’t easily cross over from the south. The Bank of England warned that the country’s gross domestic product could drop by 2 to 4 percent because of Britain’s withdrawal, largely as a result of the added paperwork and regulation.

And then there’s the long-term damage. Nostalgic Brexiteers sold the referendum as a potential boon for Britain’s once-dominant manufacturing sector. But roughly four-fifths of the modern British economy is actually driven by its service industries, which were largely left uncovered by the exit agreement with the EU. London is unlikely to lose its status as a world financial hub any time soon, but firms are already relocating jobs and accounts to Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, and other European capitals—the better to retain smooth access to the EU financial sector. Britain is also forsaking its role in the EU’s Erasmus program, cutting off British students from study opportunities across Europe—and blocking European students from easily studying at British universities. That sort of lost potential is hard to quantify but easy to mourn.

But in many ways, the U.K. leaving the European Union is easy compared to Texas Texiting the U.S. Britain was already an independent country, despite what the pro-Brexit enthusiasts liked to suggest, with a highly skilled civil service and a world-class diplomatic corps. It already possessed all the trappings and organs of a modern developed country. The economic tumult it’s experienced over the past few weeks—and negotiated over the past four years—largely comes down to a mismatch of paperwork between two different regulatory systems.

Extracting oneself from the U.S. would be far more complicated. For starters, Texas would have to fund and staff something resembling a modern regulatory state. Some of this framework already exists at the state level, but not all of it. There would need to be a Texas Food and Drug Administration, a Texas Environmental Protection Agency, a Texas Securities and Exchange Commission, and much more. Texas would have to buy property to build embassies in foreign capitals and hire diplomats to staff them. It would have to build its own army, navy, air force, intelligence service, and postal system. That costs a lot of money. Texas doesn’t even have a state income tax; one-third of its budget comes from the federal government.

Would Texas use its own currency? It would have to create its own central bank and monetary policy if it did. Since Britain never adopted the euro, this is one major complication of leaving the EU that never came up. When Scotland weighed leaving the rest of the U.K. in 2014, Scottish independence leaders proposed that they would keep the pound sterling and maintain some sort of currency union with the rest of their former country. But London itself wasn’t keen on the idea, and the Scottish National Party now favors adopting the euro in a post-Brexit world. Texas could always take the route adopted by El Salvador and adopt the U.S. dollar outright as its currency. So much for national sovereignty if it did, though.

Free movement would be another issue. It’s virtually impossible to denaturalize a U.S. citizen against their will, so most Texans would retain their American citizenship unless they voluntarily renounce it. And even though birthright citizenship would obviously not apply within a foreign country, the children of those U.S. citizens could still be eligible for citizenship under existing federal laws. Texas’s Republican leaders often brag about how its growth is fueled by businesses and residents leaving other states for lower taxes and lighter regulations. But that formula would invert itself after independence: Most of Texas’s population would easily be able to decamp back to the U.S., while residents of the other 49 states would have to go through some sort of immigration process to live in Texas.

And then there’s the problem of trade barriers. The Constitution forbids one state from imposing tariffs or taxes on goods from another state. It’s also virtually impossible for states to lawfully block Americans from entering or exiting them. (The current system of “travel restrictions” due to the pandemic is one of the only exceptions to that rule.) Indeed, the entire American economy is built around the free flow of goods and most services between California, Texas, New York, Florida, and everywhere in between. Without that freedom, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of Nafta-like deal between itself and the rest of the U.S. to carry out basic economic functions without significant difficulty.

That’s where the #Texit dreams really fall apart. Why would Texas and the U.S. need to create some sort of trade deal? Again, look no further than Brexit. If Britain had not reached an accord with the EU before the legal deadline of December 31, 2020, it would have crashed out of the union in what was called a hard, no-deal Brexit. Trade between the U.K. and the EU would have defaulted to World Trade Organization rules, raising all manner of tariffs and duties on everyday goods. The resulting economic fallout spurred leaders on both sides to strike a bargain. While Europe is not as dependent on British trade as Britain is on EU trade, enough of its businesses would have been affected that few leaders truly wanted to see a no-deal break happen.

So, in addition to funding and creating all of the features of modern nationhood, Texas would have to negotiate some sort of trade agreement with the U.S. to actually survive. Like Britain, it would be somewhat at the mercy of the much larger trading partner. But the U.S. also has no interest in making it easier for states to leave the Union, so it would have no incentive to play as nicely as the Europeans did with the British. At minimum, Texas would almost certainly have to compensate the U.S. for the loss of all sorts of federal property: Fort Hood and other military bases, Johnson Space Center and other NASA facilities, various post offices, courthouses, prisons, and so on. It would likely also have to play by rules set by U.S. regulatory agencies and conduct most of its business on terms set by U.S. trade negotiators. Texas, like Britain, could easily end up in a much worse position than the status quo it enjoys now.

All of this assumes that Texas peacefully leaves the Union with Congress’s assent. That’s the only constitutionally valid scenario suggested by the Supreme Court’s ruling in, ironically, Texas v. White in 1869, in which the justices held that states can’t unilaterally secede and the so-called Confederacy never lawfully existed. We’ll set aside the unlikelihood of a peaceful departure for now, and instead ponder its alternative. Secession was a gambit at best in 1860 when almost a dozen rebel-led states tried to withdraw by force. It took the U.S. five years and 600,000 dead to force the Confederate armies to surrender in the Civil War. The asymmetry between the modern U.S. military and whatever state militia Texas could muster is so great that putting down a rebellion this time might only take five weeks.

But let’s go back to the peaceful option once again. If the Texas legislature voted to secede tomorrow, there is zero chance that a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president would support its departure. And if a Republican president and a Republican Congress held power—as they did not but two years ago—Texas, Wyoming, or any other Republican-led state wouldn’t want to secede in the first place. Why would Donald Trump or any future Republican president want to let their biggest batch of electoral votes walk out the door? Secession’s greatest challenge isn’t that it’s a bad idea but that the incentives make it all but impossible to carry out.

Finally, notice that I used Texas as the example here instead of Wyoming. That’s because Texas stands a better chance of actually surviving as an independent country than any other state, except perhaps California. It would be among the largest economies in the world if it became a sovereign country tomorrow—and it would immediately struggle to maintain anything resembling its current standard of living. Wyoming, despite the dreams of its state GOP chair, would be doomed to failure if it seceded. That’s one reason why the Union is so great in the first place, of course. Everything may be bigger in Texas, but everything is ultimately better in the U.S.

#secession #2

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imjustawerido · 3 years

Text

Just read it i u want to

The change it is in oneself

Hi, I'm basically no one or someone that can tell you what's going in the world right now... Well I can tho, violence, lack of education, pollution and climate crisis, mistreat to all and all of us, and the list goes and goes further. I mean I just did it, I just mention some of the issues of our society and I’m just a common person, I can't go deeper in this problems cause I don't know much of them but some people do and they are pretty common too, and they blame a lot of people and say a principal cause of what they society is "fucked" (that sounds kind of rude, doesn't it?) some people say the internet is the major factor others that "God" is not in their lives and also others that society is on a rapid downfall or even freefall event, other some that society have lost it sanity or it faith or it intelligence (I mean if society have lost it intelligence you wouldn't make that kind of comments, would you?). Sounds like disaster, people blaming on everything and everyone from everything and everyone also blaming them cause if you blame society your blaming you cause you are part of it and blaming literally everyone, cause everyone is part of our society, so the scenario it's people blaming the entire society for problems or things that some groups of people might haven't met or think about those things. Beside you are religious or if you use Internet or not despite you have any impediment or just if you haven't seen those things. Such a messy world.

An example to make clearer the situation. Imagine that you are a villager around somewhere, you have a family, you have friends who live a couple of kilometers from where you live, you have some ways to communicate worldwide not all of them (pretty much news) you don’t have social media, but you're happy. On a day like any other you are going to hunt an animal to have food but you meet some activist who fight against animal mistreat and they ask you and beg you not to do it because for people like you animals have lost rights and died in a horrible way, you say that you have to feed your family and they tell you that are options in the supermarket a company in where animals die without any kind of violence, abuse or mistreat, you say “ok I'm going to give a chance, to change”, you take a portion of your time to travel far away but the closest supermarket around your area, you get inside, get the exact brand, paid, walk out from the supermarket while an activist of climate change stop you and gives you an information, the company that manufacture that meat does it without any violence or abuse but the animals can only be within a certain area doing irreparable damage to the ground in addition to the fact that the level of greenhouse gases emissions is enormous and she asks you try to do something else because for people like you who still choosing these kinds of products, the environment it's not gonna change, but being vegetarian it's not an option, some vegetables and meat substitutes are pretty expensive in your region. So you are confuse, you feel bad, you don't have as good information as you could get. What would you do? Which is the bad option here? Where is the evil option here? It is buying the meat you need and directly promoted pollution, or just killing the dear without mercy, or just buying expensive alternatives until your money runs out, or just stop eating???

Being unaware it's not being ignorant, like the example I just said, there are lot more of them, like something recent from years now, let's mention the climate crisis debate. The information is real. right now China is the biggest greenhouse gases emitter with 16.2 percent of global methane emissions (around 1.6 billion tons), 14.5 of N2O emissions (around 410 million tons) in 2018 and right now China must be producing around 30% of global C2O emissions, having and counting information of 2017 in which China produced 9.8 billion metric tons of C2O. so having that in count blame should go on China despite the US being in second place India in third Russia in fourth, etc. and of course being much more less emissions than China, but we are not seeing the whole picture, historically the U.S is on the top with more than 400 billion tons of C2O and is responsible for 25% historical emissions and right behind is the European union with 22% is about double China's historically gases emissions and digging more deeper the emissions of the U.S were more drastically in the XX century along with the European Union and this made them very rich and develop countries, so within they can cost the expensive alternatives and stop burning fossil fuel and stop emitting other gases, and the other countries don't have another way to avoid poverty but burn fossil fuel and start more emission, like the case of China, China's emissions rise drastically in this few years but it poverty levels also drastically decrease in a shocking way and for some countries their emissions could be just lifestyle emissions like going to hang in a car and for other life important emissions. Of course covid 19 effects reduce this emission, but covid wasn’t threatening us years ago, So knowing these facts is worth to find someone to blame? Is China bad? Is the U.S bad? is worth to blame someone about it in this big society?

Blaming can be discussing and obviously discuss it worth too, but in this big society with a lot of epistemic groups along with it, it is? Let me gather this topic, when we talk about epistemic communities we are referring to communities, of course I’m not referring to the large international scale ones, is a group of people, can be large, small, very large, very small, that thinks, search or aim some ideas of home and some other related topics, and gets information in the same relative way, for example, this example is more about internal relationships and authority but it can let you get the idea in your mind better. a mother tells her child that there is some eggs in the fridge the child may (must) believe it but an uncle or aunt may be more difficult, now imagine a cousin and know even a stranger, levels of confidence differ by epistemic group, another examples, some tourist come to your countries and talks about your Independence Day, or some religious people knocking your door and give some talk, the level of testimony must be more higher than someone from your epistemic community because the level of testimony from someone from your epistemic community is relative as the same way that you get information so it's easier for someone from your epistemic group transmit knowledge than someone from outside. And also that means that all epistemic groups don't have the same evidence they always are goanna lack in some facts for example non-religious people or people unaware of an Ebola outbreak and it's ok there is nothing bad with it and that's why blaming all society for an issue or another is stupid.

So how can we help, I mean is that the right word? Does really everyone want to help the whole society. You know, I think society works as a clock, with along 8 billion engines, some engines being in the opposite direction, some others need some oil, etc. and when you ask, request, a society change the difficult part it's that i can't check 8 billion engines to see which one might need oil and I can't just replace it, unless you can tell me where I can buy a freaking 8 billion engines clock. It would be easier if every single engine could have conscious and correct itself, like a person, and for that I'm glad that society is made out people and no freaking engines because people have the ability to adapt and that is awesome, make a change for the goal to make things better. The change it is in oneself, a lot, but I really mean a lot people said that is incorrect, congrats, you are wrong, the phrase is correct I think is not really working cause is bad formulated.

To make things spicier from here, remember if you don't take that phrase seriously you aren't a better person, congrats your part of the problem about everyone is blaming on everything and everyone requesting a whole change. Whole change, it is really correct? the basis is "let’s do some change together as a society" yeah not gonna work, an 8 billion group session therapy for change is not goanna make the trick, all the society can't make the same change for the same good lead by the simple fact that all people are completely different from another In uncountable ways, everyone needs different goods different changes and that's ok, that's why you have to change depending on what you could do better. And right you might begin defending yourself "nooo but I'm being good" and you know I can trust, but I don't care, the one who cares should be you, ask yourself if you are lying to yourself because the smallest action like ignoring a red light (and you know there are other much more common and much more worst) and then careering about the phrase “the change it is in oneself, wow that is like the biggest example of double moral is ever gonna be. It not worth it for being a good person, but for being a person.

You might be thinking this is utopia, I'm not trying to achieve that, utopia is perfect and humans are not, there is phrase that says, “humans are perfectly imperfect, like the phrase itself”. Actually there is an experiment "mice utopia" which tries to achieve this, a utopia for mice, unlimited resources but limited space, even though in real life we don't have unlimited resources, in the end the experiment went pretty bad and yes obviously I can't compare humans with mice but what I'm trying to say is that if with mice went to basically through hell imagine it with so complex humans’ beings, mice are basic, you can't have denied that. What I’m trying achieve is not utopia but awareness, conscious.

So, change for make things better, why? Why would you do that, I can leave a reason, do it for you, love yourself, for your world, and that is the things you love, your planet, your pets, whatever, the ones you love, your friends, your lovers, just you, make your world better without harming anyone, is possible.

So the change it is in oneself, yes... If you stop hugging a victim role... If you stop doing the less... If you stop thinking that you can't do anything by yourself. I hope you do so. Thanks.

(if u wanna find me somewhere else here's my ig: @juan0_rr)

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cremadesignpractice · 3 years

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Blog Post 3 (Summary)

The chapter we read from ReNourish this week left me feeling hopeless and destructive at first, so much so I had to take a break in the middle of reading. What really stuck out for me is that they went much deeper than just mentioning the obvious environmental impacts of design - packaging and paper waste etc. The writing opened my eyes to the other unintended consequences, such as the amount of water it takes to manufacture a single computer (not to mention the shipping and packaging on the parts and products), or the environmental impact of running web servers.

The next subject they touched on was much further explored through writing and visual examples in Do Good Design; the issues surrounding advertising in and out of the beauty industry and the objectification of women. Admittedly this was a touchy topic for me, and has been on my mind a lot in the recent weeks outside of class. A lot of advertising (and therefore design) has turned into a race to highlight and amplify people’s insecurities, and to then push a product intended to “solve” all of these “issues”. We’ve become “a society caught up in seeking more rather than enjoying what we have; a society that often celebrates success by what we can acquire rather than what we do.” This quote feels especially relevant to me, we’re often not focused on what we have and what’s happening now, but what we COULD have and what MIGHT happen.

Should designers take responsibility for the ethics of their clients?

My first reaction to this title-question is YES. However what I really mean is that as designers we should be aware. Know your own values, and know enough about your client and the people you work with to decide whether their values and actions line up well enough with your own. No, we should not be responsible for the actions of anyone else. But we are responsible for knowing how they act, for knowing how we want to act, and deciding if those values align before taking on a project.

While the issues highlighted in the reading this week are things that are often on my mind, this has forced me to take a well needed deeper look at them. While it was extremely uncomfortable I think that they are necessary issues to have at the forefront of our thoughts and actions as visual communicators.

These ideas also bring more depth to the question of who the audience you're designing for is. It’s more than where they live, how old they are, and how they spend their time. What are their values and morals? How, if at all, are their feelings and thoughts exploited by current advertising? Are there any potential negative effects your design could have on their mental state?

Take away statements:

Design is immoral, impactful, important

We can design a sustainable future

You can choose how you impact the future

Who are you designing for?

Visual communication is our most powerful tool

Remember your values

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somnilogical · 4 years

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<<Over the past year, however, Google has appeared to clamp down. It has gradually scaled back opportunities for employees to grill their bosses and imposed a set of workplace guidelines that forbid “a raging debate over politics or the latest news story.” It has tried to prevent workers from discussing their labor rights with outsiders at a Google facility and even hired a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions. Then, in November, came the firing of the four activists. The escalation sent tremors through the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., and its offices in cities like New York and Seattle, prompting many employees — whether or not they had openly supported the activists — to wonder if the company’s culture of friendly debate was now gone for good.

(A Google spokeswoman would not confirm the names of the people fired on Nov. 25. “We dismissed four individuals who were engaged in intentional and often repeated violations of our longstanding data-security policies,” the spokeswoman said. “No one has been dismissed for raising concerns or debating the company’s activities.” Without naming Berland, Google disputed that investigators pressured him.)>>

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/18/magazine/google-revolt.html

<<“Of the five people that were fired, three of us are trans women,” Spiers said. “That is either an unbelievable coincidence or Google is targeting the most vulnerable.”

“Trans Googlers make up a very small percentage of Googlers,” she added. “They make up a slightly larger percentage of organizers, but not 60%.”>>

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/17/fifth-google-worker-activist-fired-in-a-month-says-company-is-targeting-the-vulnerable

i too am transfem and would "violate longstanding data-security policies" if my organization were being unjust. i wouldnt say that unless it were already obvious by what bits ive leaked to people about my life, because otherwise i could suppress this information and whistleblow more.

if you were an evil corp at this point youd probably try to avoid hiring any trans women in the first place because given this happens to you, its likely done by a transfem. not that this saved CFAR, who never hired a trans woman, from having a bunch of transfems whistleblow on them despite not being employees.

from what ive read from transfem google employees who are or were involved in activism, the degredation of google's culture. their complicity with ICE and weapons manufacturing mirrors CFAR's with OpenAI and DeepMind; authoritarianism and expulsion of transfems who object to this among a myriad of wrongs. to protect the territory of injustice and complicity with organizations like ICE, google needs to import "a consulting firm that specializes in blocking unions", CFAR needs to violate their whistleblower policy. if you once protect injustice, justice is ever after your enemy. morality isnt some modular thing such that you can be comitted to protecting injustice and not have this choice spiral into also invoking and protecting systems that protect injustice and invoking further things to protect those, recursively. all the way down to doing really dumb and obvious unjust things like transmisogyny (lots of future posts), changing your fundraiser after its clear its losing money, announcing that this year you got way below your donation target and claim to have no idea why.

well *i* know the compact generator for all of these things, and that makes me strong. unlike MIRI/CFAR who like the CDC rely on gaslighting the populace for myopic gains. i also wore a particle mask during the time that the CDC claimed that they were useless to preventing spread of disease, so it was really important to give them to doctors and nurses.

after so much gaslighting, *i* have built up general capabilities at arbitraging the difference between what agents claim and the truth. people who say:

<<Edit: This is a type of post that should have been vetted with someone for infohazards and harms before being posted, and (Further edit) I think it should have been removed by the authors., though censorship is obviously counterproductive at this point.

Infohazards are a real thing, as is the Unilateralists’s curse. (Edit to add: No, infohazards and unilateralist’s curse are not about existential or global catastrophic risk. Read the papers.) And right now, overall, reduced trust in CDC will almost certainly kill people. Yes, their currently political leadership is crappy, and blameworthy for a number of bad decisions—but it doesn’t change the fact that undermining them now is a very bad idea.

Yes, the CDC has screwed up many times, but publicly blaming them for things that were non-obvious (like failing to delay sending out lab kits for further testing,) or that they screwed up, and everyone paying attention including them now realizes they got wrong (like being slow to allow outside testing,) in the middle of a pandemic seems like exactly the kind of consequence-blind action that lesswrongers should know better than to engage in.

Disclaimer: I know lots of people at CDC, including some in infectious diseases, and have friends there. They are human, and get things wrong under pressure—and perhaps there are people who would do better, but that’s not the question at hand.>>

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/h4vWsBBjASgiQ2pn6/credibility-of-the-cdc-on-sars-cov-2/comment/uDYbgf3QtEQirbsJk

havent. its easy to see how peoples minds are warped when its someone elses glowy thing, when its someone elses friends working for an institution that that someone else routed their hopes through.

its easier to recognize betrayal and see knowledge beyond the veil when its happening to someone else, instead of you.

until you build up general skills for recognizing it, this sort of betrayal isnt infinitely powerful. and like how you might expect that smart people who live for predation would do anti-inductive smart predatory things, but they end up converging on child sex rings; institutions that betray you, because justice is their enemy will start doing dumb unjust things like banning two people from speaking about their irl experiences with anna salamon, saying their first-hand accounts werent evidence and then citing anna salamon's first-hand account of the meeting as evidence. when i objected that this was a fucked up self-serving ontology of "evidence" they acted like i was objecting to "beliefs flow from evidence" and they acted as if what i was saying was obscure and beyond their ability to comprehend. their "incomprehension" was fake, downstream of a fear to dynamically compute things in front of other people that might end up outside the orthodoxy. the result of which is they display a blue screen of death and say “i just dont understand and aaa dont explain this to me!!!”. and then people agree that it "seems like it could be an infohazard" because when your goal is the preservation of the matrix, everything that tears it down looks like hazardous information.

or a cfar employee, in response to claims that anna's transmisogyny influences CFAR's hiring choices, claiming that anna salamon, head of CFAR, is not involved in CFAR's hiring. until i post proof from another CFAR employee pursuing personal vengeance against the org for hiring their rapist where its tangentially mentioned and they suddenly "realize" that anna salamon, head of CFAR, is involved in CFAR's hiring process.

or a thousand other injustices that have burned themselves into my brain during my months of talking with people under the assumption that they were simply mistaken in their path to saving the world. when they were actually un-mistaken in their path to having babies and a low chance of personal death. hoping and expecting someone else will take heroic responsibility for the planet.

like when you drill down to the base of injustice, it bottoms out in dumb and petty injustice. like the structure doesnt go infinitely high and complex, if you go down to the base level, you just need a bit of courage to not flinch away from what you see even if it seems that it means the ruin of something you ran your hopes and dreams through.

"isnt this a little... extreme?" i hear some people ask. ""dont protect regions of injustice?" that sounds like the end product of obsessive compulsive fixation on virtue at the expense of practicality."

well, assuming the algorithm seeding this response is a systemic reasoning tool, it should forkbomb when you consider if youd output ""dont protect regions of untruth?" that sounds like the end product of obsessive compulsive fixation on virtue at the expense of practicality." in response to eliezers essay. the principle behind both is the same such that if you hold by one you should hold by the other.

all of these things have parallels. if you want to see what is happening with MIRI/CFAR, theres a lot of mutual information with whats happening with Google.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/2354471001?__twitter_impression=true

A Heart-stopping School Shooting Ad: No child should have to text last words to mom.

The new Sandy Hook public service announcement is brutal but not gratuitous. It tells us we must not accept gun violence in our schools as inevitable.

SHARON BROUS AND JACQUI J. LEWIS, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS | Published September 18, 2019 11:30 AM EDT | USA TODAY | Posted September 18, 2019 PM ET |

One of the great travesties of the gun violence culture in America is that after a mass shooting, once the news cycle moves on, it is those whose lives have been shattered, the survivors and victims’ family and friends, who are left to lead the fight to prevent future gun atrocities.

The standard-bearers for turning tragedy into transformation are the families who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who have repeatedly emerged as voices of moral courage and clarity. Together, they created Sandy Hook Promise (SHP), dedicated to preventing gun violence and doing whatever they can to awaken the nation to the insanity of our gun addiction and the real toll it takes on real people, including too many real children.

Their new public service announcement is penetrating and unforgiving. It will make you profoundly uncomfortable — and it should. By mocking the ubiquitous back-to-school ads that characterize this time of year, they show the real face of gun violence in a country that last year had 110 school shootings, with 61 deaths. Think of that: Dozens of children who went to school to learn did not make it home at the end of the day. More than 228,000 students in the United States have lived through gun violence at school since Columbine in 1999.

School supplies as literal lifesavers

The PSA is a heart-stopping twist on this “new normal,” where common back-to-school items, like new shoes, pencils and skateboards, become life-saving tools during a school shooting. It closes with a young girl crouched in a closet, weeping and trembling as she texts “I love you mom” into her new bedazzled phone, the shooter’s footsteps ominously approaching.

It’s brutal. But it’s not gratuitous. Their message: We must not accept that gun violence in our schools is simply inevitable. “Preventing school shootings and violence is the real ‘Back-to-School Essential’,” says Nicole Hockley, co-founder and managing director of SHP, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed in the 2012 massacre.

SHP has trained 7.5 million people from Los Angeles to Miami-Dade County in its Know the Signs program, which has successfully averted multiple planned school shootings, teen suicides and other types of violence afflicting students across the country. These efforts have saved lives.

A depraved moral calculcus

Of course, it’s not only our schools under fire. Guns are used in murders, assaults, gender-based violence, unintentional shootings and suicide. The problem is rural and urban. Gun violence happens at home (living in a home with guns raises the risk of homicide by 40% to 170% and the risk of suicide by 90% to 460%). It happens at the mall, in the movie theater, at church and in synagogue.

Gun violence in America is a public health crisis.

Watch the PSA. It is vital that we — and our children — know the signs. That would go a long way in stopping many types of gun injuries and deaths, especially suicides, which are at epidemic proportions among teens. And at the same time, let’s not dare pretend that it’s the responsibility of our children, or their teachers, to keep themselves safe from gun violence.

After the Sandy Hook massacre, the whole world witnessed the National Rifle Association and its congressional allies manipulate the massacre into a commitment to loosen gun laws. They laid blame on mental illness, video games, broken families — everywhere but on the AR-15 and magazines used to murder those kids and teachers. They claimed that protecting gun ownership is more inviolate than protecting human life — a depraved moral calculus.

We need an assault weapons ban

You need a license to drive a car and get married. It’s long past time for a federal gun licensing program that would require not only comprehensive universal background checks but also that all guns be sold through licensed dealers. The Senate Background Checks Expansion Act, introduced back in January, sits stalled because Republican leadership refuses to bring it to the floor for a vote. No matter our political affiliation, we must all insist this bill move through the process immediately.

Assault weapons and high-capacity magazines serve no purpose other than to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. They must be banned. Gun manufacturers must be held accountable for injuries resulting from use of firearms, just like automakers, tobacco companies and manufacturers of other consumer products made in the United States. And we need federal funding to support community-based violence intervention programs, like Operation Ceasefire in Oakland, California.

These actions will make all of us, and our children, safer.

We are faith leaders, driven by the often difficult work of manifesting the divine dream in the midst of the violent realities all around us. We see the toll that gun violence takes on our communities, the sense of fear that pervades our streets and our institutions. We’re tired — we have been fighting this battle for decades already. But we will never abandon the brave families of the victims and the survivors, to do this work alone. We stand together so that no child ever has to hide in a supply closet, texting home “I love you mom.”

Share the Sandy Hook PSA.

Rabbi Sharon Brous is senior and founding rabbi of IKAR in Los Angeles. The Rev. Dr. Jacqui J. Lewis is Senior Minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City. They are senior fellows at Auburn Seminary. Follow them on Twitter: @SharonBrous and @RevJacquiLewis

#nonprofits #back to school #sandy hook #gun violence #guns #gun control #boycott nra #the nra is a terrorist organization #nra #politics #us politics #politics and government #republican politics #u.s. politics #mass murder #mass shooting #u.s. news

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myfriendpokey · 5 years

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Morality Play

What does it mean to have a videogame tell you you're a good person? It doesn't know me, can't see me. I don't know if you can be *immoral* in a single player game outside of some very inventive custom controls. Why should I care what a game says? Any inner moral life that a videogame or a painting might possess would be more alien to me than that of a bug or a starfish. Of course videogames and paintings are made by humans, and shaped by the moral opinion of humans.. but we might make a distinction between what the human says and the object says, we might still feel the latter is more important, somehow.

The moral authority of an artwork or object comes from the fact that it's not quite human, that it comes to us from outside humanity to an extent, is distinguished from the unreliable back and forth of human consciousness in motion. But this distance is exactly why you might expect those moral verdicts to be unintelligible to us, or at the very best, to be untrustworthy, an imitation. So what's the appeal – that of having a human voice which speaks with the gravitas of an immortal object? The pleasant conceit that the general shape of our minds is universal, like all those Star Trek aliens that are just regular guys with slightly weirder ears or foreheads? The void speaks, and turns out to sound like a computer engineer.

But maybe not necessarily, maybe in fact it's sometimes not universal authority and moral support that we seek from the object: maybe a certain jankiness of verdict around the way these things communicate in human terms is itself part of the appeal. I think of paper fortune tellers, magic eight-balls, "love tester" machines that return a romantic prognosis based on palm temperature. The entrancing bathos of the chance-driven or mechanistic judgement that still speaks with a human voice: I’m sorry, I cannot answer right now. Please shake me, so I may try again. How different is that to the widely beloved and magnificently broken romance system in Dragon's Dogma, where, spoilers: your "soulmate" is not a matter of direct moral choice, but of variables being tracked over the course of the game including who you talked to and what sidequests you completed - which means it could arbitrarily turn out to be the weapons merchant, or a grandpa npc you found a potion for. Which is goofy, but only in a slightly more blatant way than "accidentally unlocking the romantic option in a dialogue tree from just clicking around" or "having your morality score drop 5 points because you pressed the wrong button and accidentally hurled a rock at someone's head while trying to equip shoes".

I think something I appreciate about videogames is the kind of insectlike moral life that they tend to portray, the sense of value systems which are in some way recognisable but which have mutated in conversion to something alien and horrifying. Lara Croft shooting a wild eagle is unfortunate, Lara Croft shooting a thousand wild eagles is bizarre – but really those thousand eagles are just the one eagle, the one self-contained pulp encounter fantasy, which has been extended, extrapolated, systemised as result of being placed in this machine. The latter may be more egregious but it’s still composed of repeated incidents of the original encounter - and part of the strangeness in these games is just the uncomprehending machine effort to systemise the half-formed gunk substance of our terrible fantasy lives, which only bear a vague and halfhearted relation to any notion of ethics in any case.. We can contemplate with envy and excitement the possibilities of running more realistic, recognisable emotional and moral situations through the meatgrinderof the format in this way. How about a solemn middlebrow videogame about divorcing 50 different wives, each one larger and more powerful than the last (excluding sprite recolours)?

All this is not to say that the casual political and moral stupidity already in videogames should simply be excused or exist outside of critique. But in addition to the body of discourse around "moral commodities" - commodities invested with moral or political meaning independent of any brutal labour practices they might entail or monopolistic accumulation of private wealth they might support – I think it's also worth considering the purpose of the "moral object" itself. The alienation intrinsic to the object form can be a way to think, and also a way to avoid thinking. To project moral beliefs away from the specific context of a creaturely human existence can be a way of expanding that existence, but also of denying it. The paltriness of the human can itself be problematic next to the splendour of the object, and the reflected moral superiority of those with the means of producing such objects.

*****

There's a famous line in the Spiderman comics that with great power comes great responsibility. But it's also kind of a weird line because, while obviously applicable to Spiderman, the person it's actually delivered to is Peter Parker - who is, for all his uncle knows, still a physically awkward and friendless nerd with no immediately visible "great power" to speak of. He does like nuclear physics, though - maybe the advice was intended as a friendly intervention to keep him from turning into the next Edward Teller? Or possibly it's just a kind of unconscious, pulp-writer-trance-appropriation of the muscular liberal rhetoric of the then-current Kennedy administration. Or maybe, and stretching a bit, it's a line that relates more to the conditions of pulp culture manufacturing itself, to the awareness that the stuff you make will be printed thousands of times and sold to kids around the country, poured raw into the national subconsicous. With great sales figures comes great responsiblity.

I mention it because I think it connects to an issue with the kind of cultural criticism that emerged, like it or not, from the specific context of an age of mass media. With great power comes great responsibility - but conversely, to execute your great responsibility you also need great power. And what are you meant to do if you don't have it? Does no power mean having no responsibility? It's possible, but i feel like most people would be dubious about this as a moral lesson - and the inescapability of heavily-financed blockbusters in the culture means that an assumption of already "having great power" sometimes becomes a critical starting point. If you don't have power you should get it, so that you can then have great responsibility and contribute to the discourse. The effect can sometimes be like climbing a mountain of corpses to get a better platform for your speech about world peace.

A good essay on jrpgsaredead.fyi points out the way that certain industry conversations on "accessibility" revolve specifically around access to whatever mainstream AAA action games are currently dominating the news cycle. And the related effect where both problems and proposed solutions are particular to these games, the audience they have, and the resources they can bring bear: More consultants! More characters! More romance options! Better character creators! If you're speaking to an (essentially captive, given the marketing monies involved) audience of five million people you'd better be sure your ideas are, at least, not actively harmful, and in fact should ideally be improving - - fine. How about an audience of 50 people? Or an audience of 0? Does that mean this work is less moral than what speaks to a larger crowd - in effect, that it's worse? And what about the relationship to audience that this kind of teaching implies? i can think of several occasions where people from different subcultures or minority groups were reprimanded because something in their own experience might read differently, or problematically, when presented to a presumably white/cis/affluent etc audience - which is of course the audience that matters, because what's the value of presenting work from an alternative perspective to an audience already familiar with that perspective, to whom it has no automatic moral significance (might, in fact, merely be 'aesthetic')? Compare the complexity of a specific local audience which can think for itself to the easy win of the alternative: a phantasm audience of moral blanks to whom rote lessons in hypothetical empathy can be tastefully and profitably imparted over and over, forever.

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If the ethical act is that which we'd be willing to posit as universal law, perhaps we could say: the ethical artwork is that which we'd be willing to mass produce. Small or hobbyist developers are encouraged to work from the perspective of a mass-productive capacity they do not in fact possess; their successes and inevitable failures are hoovered up alike by the industry proper for later deployment in the form of cute dating sim or inspirational narrative with similar but sanitized tone or aesthetic. In essence a kind of moral QA testing, with all the job security and recompense that this implies.

The hobbyist is, by definition, not universal: they are enclosed within the local and the material. What time do you get off work? What materials do you have to hand? Are those materials always legal? The entire western RPG Maker community exists as result of widespread bootlegging; the entirety of videogame history and preservation essentially depends on stolen copies; we find out about it through ROMs, videos and screenshots which mostly depend for their continued existence on copyright holders either not finding out or choosing not to pursue these debateable violations. It's a complicated discussion whether this stuff can be justified on a general, universal level - but also I'm not sure we can do without it. When Fortnite uses dances from TV and music videos of living memory they're considered to be in the public domain; but Fortnite itself is not in the public domain, even though it's so inescapable that even I have a pretty good idea of what it looks and plays like despite having made a pretty determined effort to not find out anything about it. It's "public culture" in that sense, and it includes public culture within it, but both game and imagery are privately owned and aggressively policed (suing teenage hackers, etc). What does it mean for art to emerge from an ever more privatized sense of public life?

In 2007 the RPG Maker game Super Columbine Massacre RPG was added to, then removed from, the Slamdance festival following complaints; it was a minor cause celebre at the time following concerns about censorship and the lack of protections for expression in the videogame format specifically following the Jack Thompson media crusade in the United States. In 2019 the same festival retrospectively changed their reasoning: now the game had no longer been removed on the basis of questionable taste, but on the basis of questionable compliance with copyright law, since it included music from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins without paying for licensing fees (and also because the author generally "hadn’t created several of its elements" - asset flips!!!). There's some humour in the fact that a benign-sounding concern with "artist's rights" could just be swapped in as a more respectable-sounding surrogate for general prudery with exactly the same result. But also, in this instance, what does it mean about the game? As facile as SCMR is, the bootleg use of graphics and music was its most interesting element: the game was a bricolage of American pop culture at a specific point in time, as were the killers, as are we. The nearness and recognisability of that culture, the sense of not being able to get enough distance from it to properly fictionalise or think about what happened, is what stands out. An "ethical" version of the same game which used original music - Nirvanalikes, some tastefully copyright-adjacent Marilyn Manson clones - would not just be diminished, it would be actively insulting in the false distance it implied.

I don't mean this at all as a request for more edgelord-ism. But it's worth remembering that videogames themselves are not ethical; are, in fact, colonized materials assembled with exploitative labour and dumped aimlessly into public life by electronics corporations looking to make a buck. The bizarre and haphazard ways this long dump of poor decisions has manifested, warped, been adjusted into culture is part of what's worth attending to about the format – I think it's worth looking closer into all these pools of murkiness, before ethical landlords can come drape a tarp over them as part of the process of divvying up the property.

(image credits: youkai douchuuki, quiz nanairo dreams, trauma center: under the knife, espial)

#gamechat #games criticism #moral

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