phone calls to

here comes the queue again ~ falling weeks ago from memory ~

[modern-politics111]

QAnon's new 'plan'? Run for school board

In the wake of Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat, many QAnon followers have hatched a plan: run for school board or local office, spread the gospel of Q, but don’t call it QAnon.

[lichen-soup-scribe]

This post on r/AmItheAsshole (and the OP’s follow-up responses) have me cry-laughing – please enjoy

[fetus-cakes]

“I will erupt, feral, from the cardigan screaming, pounce over the counter and eat the entire five kilograms of cheese”

[made0ftime0u0]

So i got curious, and this was the only update i could find

[baconcupcake]

Reblogging with the update

[elodieunderglass]

I like the apparent logistical importance of the fluffy cardigan omg

[the-dragongirl]

How to Podfic: A Highly Biased and Incomplete Tutorial

So, a while ago, some of my friends and fellow cast members of the @sansukhpodfic​ asked about how to make and edit podfic on their own. I created this tutorial for them, as a supplement to the resources already posted  by the Sansukh mods. In the wake of the most recent @auralphonic​ episode asking for technical advice on podficcing in Audacity, I thought I would polish this up and post it. This tutorial explains how, once you have permission to record a story, you go about turning it into a podfic using Audacity. It focuses on technical and logistical details, rather than artistic advice, and is cobbled together from my own experience, my knowledge of the mathematics behind signal analysis, and other people’s tutorials. There’s lots of communities and resources out there that give advice on the artistic side (Auralphonic, for example, has an episode for newbies), which I recommend checking out.

Disclaimer: There is no one standard method of doing this! This is the method I have found gives me the best results, personally, but there may be better ways to do this. I strongly recommend checking out other resources for comparison.

Keep reading

[littlealienproducts]

Finch Tea Set by SakurajapanJP

[maaarine]

MBTI & Politicians Stacey Abrams: ENTJ

“Stacey Yvonne Abrams (born December 9, 1973) is an American politician, lawyer, and novelist who served as Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017.

A member of the Democratic Party, she was her party’s nominee in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.

Abrams was the first black female major-party gubernatorial nominee in the history of the United States.

In February 2019, Abrams became the first African-American woman to deliver a State of the Union response, in reaction to President Trump.”

Sources: video, wiki/Stacey_Abrams

[maaarine]

[maaarine]

[bitchesgetriches]

BUY NATIVE LIST

About Native American fashion, clothing, and jewelry.

It’s a beautiful day to buy from Native American businesses.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

chinese culture 舞狮lion dance in guangdong province

[misevolimo]

Ok so just about every summer fast fashion chains bring blouses like these back into rotation:

These particular ones are from h&m and romwe, tho you can find them all over the place, but the thing is that these designs are pretty blatantly lifted from eastern european traditional clothing designs (but poorly made & without a penny going to those eastern european communities). So, if you like these types of designs but hate fast fashion, I’ve decided to compile a list of some alternative places where you can buy them from actual eastern european artisans. Just as a side note, you are more than welcome to wear these designs even if you do not belong to the culture the design is from, the only issue here is with big corporations profiting by ripping off our culture and then doing nothing for our communities.

Also, a heads up that while the fast fashion version of these shirts are generally really cheap, the traditionally made ones are usually start at around US$50 or more, depending on the complexity of the designs & some other factors (but they also last much longer than the cheap ones & are pretty much always made of natural fibers, like cotton or linen). You’ll notice that many of these places make garments to order, so you can often contact them to request a custom size or color.

So, without further ado:

BRS - Here you’ll find a lot of items that are made in the romanian tradition but feel fresh & updated. Gorgeous & ethically made but kind of pricey (with most blouses in the $150-250 range)

De Toujours - This brand is collaborating with romanian artisans on a traditionally made blouse that costs €200

Folklorica - A poland-based etsy shop with some blouses embroidered in the Polish tradition, along with other traditional and tradition-inspired garments (most items are in the $30-50 range)

EtnoSoul - A ukraine-based etsy shop, traditional & tradition-inspired fashion. They have embroidered blouses along with other things, such as dresses & children’s clothing. They also have wedding dresses & men’s embroidered shirts, which both look sick as hell (price range: $90-270)

SvitVyshyvanok - Another Ukraine-based etsy shop, really pretty embroidered dresses!! (price range: $60-200 for most items)

This is ofc an incomplete list, please feel free to add on! Also, if there are local or diaspora artisans of other cultures whose traditional designs resemble that of these types of embroidered shirts, please feel free to add them as well!

[samodivas]

In the spirit of May 24th - a national holiday dedicated to Bulgarian language and culture - I’ve got a bunch of Bulgarian artists with similar motifs to add:

Veze - the High Fashion of the bunch, if you’re feeling fancy. They do tailored dresses and shirts.

Vezba - a wonderfully diverse website with quality material. Not too expensive, particularly by Western standards - about $25 for a t-shirt, more for a hoodie.

Bulgarka - They have several categories you can look through with traditional motifs - be it dresses, scraves or t-shirts.

Rose&Pepper - my personal favourite. Some of the beautiful scraves they have/make are less than 10 euros and worth every penny. Unfortunately, they only have a Facebook store, not a separate website, but they do deliver abroad, too.

Charshia-handmade -  how about a legit old-timey technique used to make whatever you’re shopping for?

Babina Rakla - Literally meaning grandma’s old chest, they offer traditional items and clothing, as well as modern ones with a traditional twist.

If anyone wants to look into a place that does real deal traditional outfits - a bunch of local ones are available for order at Shevitsa - whether it’s a festival or a special event of some sort, you can get a pretty legit outfit. Same goes for Magazin Mluchkov.

[pumpci]

let me add Vidana clothing studio - Ukraine-based, worldwide shipping, designs are pretty and modern-looking

[triptihosmrti]

also ivko, founded and led by a woman. it’s a serbian knitting label started during 80s yugoslavia by danica komnenic as a small family knitting workshop and turned bigger later. the designs and ornaments are based on serbian ethnic costumes and are distributed globally 🖤

[vrabia]

i also recommend bihor couture from romania (the online store is under maintenance at the moment but should be open again at some point). it has an interesting story because it started as a campaign precisely in response to a major fashion brand stealing designs without crediting or compensating the sources.

in 2018 dior launched a collection which clearly copied designs that have been traditional in villages in bihor county for hundreds of years. of course there was no mention of where the design came from. local artisans were never consulted, asked to collaborate or given any remuneration for designs that were quite simply stolen. you can read more about it here.

dior sold some of these for 30,000 euros ($36,500) per piece. in response to this, a romanian fashion magazine called beau monde supported local artisans in opening an online shop where you can buy the same designs for a few hundred dollars instead, knowing that the money is going directly back to the community.

[shrimp-bird]

I just saw a bearded leatherjacket for the first time and I don't think I've seen an actual animal look so close to a ganbreeder creation.

[shrimp-bird]

Eh??

EHkH?

[wintermuteway]

don’t think you can fool me…

[shrimp-bird]

I want to make it clear that the long bit is the chin (it is a bearded leatherjacket after all), the mouth is half way up the face pointing upwards.

I am realizing I always interpreted worms on strings as having sea horse like mouths or shrimp-like rostrums, and the thought of them working like bearded leatherjacket faces is making me dizzy.

[wikwalker]

Oh no

[lavenderek]

hey guys, fyi if you do online shopping - highly recommend fakespot.com

you paste the direct link to the product into the search bar and it analyzes the reviews to determine whether reviews are accurate and how many positive vs negative reviews there are

i found a thing that had a lot of reviews and a 4 star rating and fakespot caught me before i bought it

Image is screenshot of fakespot's analysis:

Overview

How are reviewers describing this item?

easy, great, counter, organized and sturdy.

Our engine has detected that Amazon has altered, modified or removed reviews from this listing. We approximate total reviews altered up to 213.

Previous analysis of this listing was an D grade.

Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is high deception involved.

Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 37.7% of the reviews are reliable.

This product had a total of 1,884 reviews as of our last analysis date on Jan 23 2020.

you can review things on amazon, walmart, best buy, yelp, steam, sephora, and tripadvisor.

[polargeist-deactivated20251013]

while i do sometimes use fakespot in conjunction, i highly recommend using reviewmeta instead

no matter what algorithms used, its bound to make mistakes and flag ordinary things as suspicous, so being able to look at these things helps give the user a better idea of whats going on

fakespot doesnt really give you that information, whereas reviewmeta is completely transparent and lays out the data to let you determine whether somethings really suspicious or not. this blog post goes more into detail on that

and this one describes more features that can be helpful

[plaidadder]

Whose Job Would That Be?

I’m doing my best to inoculate PJ against conspiracy-style thinking. I mention Occam’s Razor every chance I get. I also told her this story from my first years on the job, when I and everyone else at my level was really worried about promotion.

There was a colleague who had come in a year ahead of me who was very nervous about whether she was impressing the higher-ups enough. She absolutely did not need to be; she wound up getting a better job at a better place; but for whatever reason, her thinking about promotion had taken on a paranoid cast. Every year they held a reception for our section which a lot of us blew off. She told me never to blow it off because of the name tags. They made name tags for us, and if you didn’t go, you wouldn’t pick up your name tag, and then when they looked at the name tags left over after the party, they’d know you hadn’t been there, and it would be a held against you later.

I was like, well, she’s been here longer, maybe this could be true…and then I asked myself a question that I think would kill most conspiracy theories if you could get people to ask it:

Whose job would that be?

Someone would have to be in charge of collecting the unsued nametags, making a list, and then either recording that list in some database or transmitting it to someone *else* who would record it. Whose job description would include that? The people who generated the nametags were not the same people who cleared up after the event. Getting the information about who didn’t show from the staff at the event to the people who made the promotion decisions would involve a chain with several links in it. I couldn’t see anyone deciding that it was a good idea to add any of this to anyone’s workload. 

You can try this on any conspiracy theory. For instance, that Bill Gates has somehow implanted individual microchips in COVID vaccine. OK. Whose job would that be? Who’s the Vice President for Universal Vaccine-Enabled Surveillance? Who’s their liaison at Moderna? At Pfizer? At Johnson & Johnson? How do they ensure there’s only one chip in each dose? Do they have to train the people who administer the vaccine on this? Whose job would that be?

I don’t know, I just feel like if people were more aware of the fact that every product they handle had to be created by human labor, maybe they would not buy so much of this bullshit. But then maybe I am preferring a complex solution to a simple one. 

[gahdamnpunk]

AND a race one since the most affected regions will be Africa, Asia and Oceania

[rock-fish-deactivated20201231]

as a friend pointed out, this headline makes it sound like supply will be dwindling. supply is fine. people will be *priced out*.

[trekmemes-deactivated20220205]

this is fucking MURDER.

insulin has been mass produced (from animal extracts) since -1923-. slow acting insulin has existed since the ‘50s, and ‘human’ genetically engineered insulin (derived from E. coli bacteria) has existed since 1982.

insulin treatment for diabetes is not some new or ‘unproven’ treatment. according to beyondtype1, “Humalog rapid-acting insulin came on to the market with a list price of $21 a vial in 1997.” adjusting for inflation, a vial these days should cost about $34 at most. instead, it costs over $300. there is NO reason for it to be steadily gaining in price to the point that diabetics are unable to afford their lifesaving medication, other than the sheer inhuman greed of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

let me reiterate: life without insulin (for Type 1 diabetics in particular) is a slow and painful death sentence. the ability to treat diabetes is a relatively modern phenomenon that has allowed countless people to live full, healthy lives. we should be expanding full covereage and access to insulin to diabetics the world over, and it should be FREE.

[plantyhamchuk]

Have y’all heard about Open Insulin Foundation?

“ We’re a team of biohackers with a variety of backgrounds, and skills, and relationships to insulin and diabetes from many cities and countries around the world, including Oakland, California; Baltimore, Maryland; Paraiba, Brazil; Dakar, Senegal; Yaounde, Cameroon; and Puerto Rico. We’re working to develop the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all. We envision a world in which communities in need have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin, and where people living with diabetes and their communities can own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive. 

What We Do

We are creating an open-source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers on sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open-source alternatives to production. We are developing protocols to produce short-acting (lispro) and long-acting (glargine) insulin, working on developing open-hardware equivalents to traditional production equipment, are researching sustainable regulation pathways to bring our insulin to the public, and are building capacities for local, small-scale manufacturing.

How Do I Participate?

Our work would not be possible without the support of volunteers, interns, and community advisors. We welcome people of all backgrounds from all over the world to bring their enthusiasm, time, connections, and experiences, both in life and in work. Our volunteers promote us on social media, build equipment, run experiments, write reports and blog posts, facilitate meetings, connect with other organizations and groups, meet with experts in the field, run virtual events, and contribute in designing tools, resources, and methods of all sorts.

Potential Partners

We welcome collaboration with other groups that share our mission―community labs, academic institutions, patient advocacy groups, and NGOs.

Donate

Your donation will help us get closer to our goal. With a healthy financial situation, we can pay for lab supplies, acquire lab equipment, recruit scientists, and pay for consultation fees for regulation and manufacturing experts.”

Open Insulin Foundation

[doomedvoyages]

do you have other weird history youtube recommendations?

oh boy do i

most of my favorites are pretty mainstream as far as weird history youtube so if you have any interest you have probably heard of them but! if not then check them out 10/10 they are all very good. also if yall have weird history youtube reccs please add them i spend my youtube hours mostly in weird history youtube

Bernadette Banner: wife and life goals; a fashion historian whose videos mostly feature historical dress projects for the purpose of everyday wear or research or usually both. She works in original practice as much as she can and it’s fascinating to watch! She actually worked on Janet Arnold Patterns of Fashion 5 (i think 5?) which if you are into historical dress you know is The Historical Dress Resource. I recommend checking out this recent video where she purchases a mass manufactured rip off of a 15th century gown she made based on the princess in Saint George Slaying the Dragon, and in the process rips apart fast fashion.

Karolina Żebrowska: our beloved polish meme mom....she makes hilarious meme videos in historical dress that you have probably seen because they are fantastic, critiques of poorly researched and inaccurate fashion history, historical grwms, and informative/Hey What Was It Like Actually Wearing This Stuff videos. 10/10 i shall recommend “send this to an unwanted suitor without context” it is exactly what it sounds like

English Heritage: they have lots of very interesting videos including some with amber buchart, a fashion historian i absolutely adore from her a stitch in time series, but what you really need to know is mrs. crocombe, who we love. she’s a living history actor at audley end house, a national trust site, and she impersonates the headcook in the 1880s, Avis Crocombe. she cooks and we love her. because we love pigeons here we are recommending her “how to make pigeon pie” video:

oof readmore o’clock

Jessica Kellgren-Fozard: she makes a wide variety of videos, not just focused on history, but she’s very into vintage fashion and wears it daily, and makes a lot of vintage fashion videos as well as lots of history videos. also on her channel are videos about disability, gay stuff usually with her wonderful wife claudia, occasionally quakerism, cooking with her dietary restrictions--a wide variety of videos, and all of them very aesthetic and very cheerful. i recommend her “a romantic journey to the british lake district” for a beautiful video with history and Aesthetics and you can meet her and her wife and their wonderful dogs:

Not Your Momma’s History: run by cheyney mcknight, a living historian who specializes in the history of enslaved people in the 18th and 19th century. her channel isn’t active, but the videos she has are excellent and focus on the experiences of a black reenactor; i found her through this racked video where she talks about her work, and she’s featured here in this really fascinating american duchess lecture on 18th century hair. i recommend this vlog at harpers ferry contraband camp with lots of history and historical reenactment:

Angela Clayton: vintage fashion and historical dress sewing channel (if yall couldnt tell im love historical dress) and all of her projects are beautiful and impressive but also she made a full blown robe a la francaise on her own which like. what the fuck. not using historical practice, but still. can you imagine. all those ruffles yourself. all of them. what the fuck. who are these people. i recommend her “following a 1900s blouse pattern” video (tumblr has forbidden me from continuing to add videos rip)

Townsends: a living history brand, family, group? their focus is 18th century American living history and tho they focus on cooking, they have. a little bit of everything, from wax making to historical practice construction to interviews and random questions. I recommend their barbecue cooking video featuring Michael Twitty, a food historian who focuses on the history of enslaved people.

Primitive Technology: idk what to tell yall if you put a monkey at a typewriter and let them type for eternity eventually they’ll write a coherent word and the same goes for guys with horrible beards on reddit recommending youtube videos. sometimes it’s just cool to watch some guy who never speaks clammering around barefoot in cargo shorts in the mud making a hut by hand.

Priorattire: a historical dress brand that also makes very interesting videos getting dressed from the undergarments up and proving repeatedly that no, victorian ladies did not need 3 maids to help them get dressed and no, it did not take 3 hours just to get dressed. 

CrowsEyeProductions: primarily historical dress and hair/makeup videos; they also do a lot of getting dressed from the undergarments up videos as well, these being narrated. I love their “historical styles- ‘gibson girl’ edwardian hair and make-up tutorial” because like genuinely i had no idea how the gibson girl hair was achieved until this video jflksdf

Baumgartner Restoration: you’ve probably seen his very popular asmr art restoration videos before, but recently i discovered that he also makes narrated version of pretty much all of them and i went buckwild. We Love Satisfying Art Conservation With Highly Interesting And Informative Narration. i love this 40 minute video of constant painstaking focused scraping while he tells you about what he’s doing and why and methods of art conservation.

Morgan Donner: Yet Another Historical Dress Channel. i love watching people make historical fashion what can i say it’s fun and satisfying. watch her make 17th century stays because holy fuck

[squeeful]

Samantha Bullat/The Couture Courtesan

Samantha's research and dedication is impeccable holy fuck please give her more follows

SewStine

Christine recreates historic (and cosplay!) embroidery using a modern machine. Her designs are gorgeous and for sale and she's an incredibly kind, talented person

Tasting History with Max Miller

Do you like food? Do you like history? Do you like food history? So does Max.

Claire Zhang

Smaller, newer historical dressmaking channel, but her stuff is beautiful

The Anne Boleyn Files and Tudor Society

16th (to early 17th c) England "on this day in history"

Lee-Am

More historical dress creations, focusing more on the 1830s

UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lectures

Open University lectures, some history, some not. Some weird af history. I like the lecture on German poisoners.

WoolfInstitute

More open university-style lectures.

Flint Institute of Arts

I'm just going to keep adding channels that are university lectures and paper presentations because yes I am that nerd.

PBS Voices

History and history-in-the-making

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

FUCK YEAH NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY AND VOICES

Cher Thomas Designs

The Indigenous Seamstress. Very small channel, does good work, deserves a lot more

Dandy Wellington

Vintage style, not vintage values. Dandy is a jazz musician and vintage suit enthusiast

I have podcasts and Instagram peoples to follow too

[danshive]

In science fiction, AIs tend to malfunction due to some technicality of logic, such as that business with the laws of robotics and an AI reaching a dramatic, ironic conclusion.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

“No. It thinks she’s an entire crime family. It filled out paperwork for multiple separate arrests after bringing her in.”

[dexer-von-dexer]

I have to comment on this because this is touching on something I see a lot of people (including Tumblr staff and everyone else who uses these kind of deep learning systems willy-nilly like this) don’t quite get: “Deep Reinforcement Learning” AI like these engage with reality in a fundamentally different way from humans. I see some people testing the algorithm and seeing where the “line” is, wondering whether it looks for things like color gradients, skin tone pixels, certain shapes, curves, or what have you. All of these attempts to understand the algorithm fail because there is nothing to understand. There is no line, because there is no logic. You will never be able to pin down the “criteria” the algorithm uses to identify content, because the algorithm does not use logic at all to identify anything, only raw statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations on top of statistical correlations. There is no thought, no analysis, no reasoning. It does all its tasks through sheer unconscious intuition. The neural network is a shambling sleepwalker. It is madness incarnate. It knows nothing of human concepts like reason. It will think granny is the mafia.

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

TL;DR bots are illogical because they’re actually unknowable eldritch horrors made of spreadsheets and we don’t know how to stop them or how they got here, send help

[tsunderebot]

Having been to several talks on modern ai I can confirm

[maxofs2d]

I always think of this tweet when I see people praising machine learning and the new kinds of AI as a panacea.

[agoddamn]

I still want to write the fic where an outsider has all these preconceptions about what the Force is and then goes into a room with a bunch of Jedi who are tearing into each other like bitchy old academics.

“Ooh, look at Master Structuralist over here with his ever-so-deep ‘everything is attachment actually’ reading”

“I don’t want to hear that from someone who calls every new opinion ‘new depths of their relationship with the Force’”

“The Jedi Order is a social construct–”

“Could you stuff the po-mo and pick up a book once in a while? These aren’t new ideas! You are not a pioneer because you asked one question!”

“I think you could all benefit on more reflection on how our rooting in the Force is actually deeply sexual–”

“If I have to hear one more word about lightsabers being penis envy you are going to be one with the Force immediately.”

[gershwyndl]

#I’m 100% into this and want annual conferences about the force and what it means to be a jedi#everyone keep asking very passive-aggressive questions after every presentations#at one point a lecturer says ‘I know this because the Force told me so’ instead of listing their sources and the whole room groans#a scholar who isn’t force-sensitive shows up and half of the jedi are like ‘who even is this guy’#a LOT of rage is being released in the force at the same time#the only moment everyone in the room makes an appreciative noise is when the lunch break is announced#a huge debate blows up during the break because someone mentions it could be good to invite a nightsister next year#someone storms off mumbling about heresy and not taking part in this debacle @obiwanobi

yes please I need more jedi symposiums with knights who had different views than consulars who have different views than shadows. Temple-centered jedi versus those who lead frequent diplomatic or medical missions versus exploratory and research jedi who spend most of their time in uninhabited wild space and the outer rim.

There is absolutely no way an organization that large doesn’t have factions that understand the force differently–my 15-person philosophy class couldn’t agree on a single thing we read all term.

[korben600]

Anakin shows up once, pulls up his PowerPoint and it just says “I am the Chosen One.”

The room immediately turns into chaos.

[maulusque]

dear god why would you leave this in the tags

#Obi wan was pissed that his past presentation on Jedi/Mandalorian cultural parallelism was laughed out#so he put Anakin up to it just to send the room into a tailspin#Anakin LOVED it#he got to sword fight an eighty year old snake#and force chuck a dude into a wall#he officially never misses one of these anymore#every year he just goes up and says the most controversial thing he can to get the room to riot#the year after its ‘the more midichlorians you have the closer you are to the force’#he almost got stabbed by an old monk from the far side of dantooine#for that one#the council keeps letting him speak because it’s way less embarrassing to blame the fights on Skywalker#than admit everyone at an academic conference wants to murder each other#they did get a Nightsister to come to the conference btw#it was very enlightening and everyone liked her#the problem was that Anakin’s presentation that year was#‘master/student bonds are no different than lovers bonds in the force’#and#the Nightsister took REAL offense to that#Anakin is like 30% sure he got cursed#totally worth it for the look on Obi-Wan’s face tho#the Nightsister came back the next year#she brought friends!#they’re not sure if she did that because they were interested in the academics or if she wanted backup to beat the shit out of Anakin#but the council likes both cases#so they see this as an absolute win!

[ellie-you-idiot]

Yoda was banned and no one will talk about why

[willowcrowned]

It happened six hundred years ago so no one knows but theories range from “he ate all the snacks” to “he personally instigated a duel meant to settle whether channeling the force through combat meditation is more effective than through regular meditation but the duel got out of hand and everyone but him lost at least one limb”

the truth is that he was never actually banned, he’s just been saying it so he doesn’t have to go. he started all the rumors himself

[tinycosmicangel]

@deadcatwithaflamethrower Jedi discussing the Force, but it’s an academics conference!

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

Looks accurate

[digitaldiscipline]

Luke, aggressively drinking blue milk on Ach-to while muttering to a tree: “These conferences suck. There isn’t even anybody here and I want to stab someone.”

[squeeful]

THE PROJECT: NURSE UNSEEN

A STAGGERING STATISTIC

Nurses of Filipino descent make up roughly 4% of the nursing workforce in the United States yet account for more than 25% of the nation's nurse deaths due to COVID-19, according to the most current study by National Nurses United. Why is the pandemic taking such an outsized toll on Filipino nurses?

ABOUT THE FILM:

Motivated by this alarming study, we immediately set out to understand why this was happening to our community. As we began researching and filming, we soon realized we were witnessing the repercussions of the complex, over-a-century-long history of Filipino nurses playing out in the lives of Filipino nurses and Filipino-Americans today.

NURSE UNSEEN explores why so many Filipino nurses left the Philippines to work in the U.S. healthcare system and why they have been so disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, NURSE UNSEEN unearths the colonial ties between the Philippines and the U.S. that have led to the Philippines becoming the leading exporter of professional nurses to the U.S. Through our film, we hope to explore, contextualize, and humanize this staggering statistic of Filipino nurses who have lost their lives on the front lines of this pandemic.

OUR MISSION

On film, no one has yet told the deeper and complicated history of Filipino nursing and U.S. colonialism and its direct ties to what we are experiencing now in the age of the pandemic and the frightening resurgence of anti-Asian hatred and violence.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nurseunseen/nurse-unseen

[lesbianshepard]

stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life

[pastel-selkie]

Reblog if you would burn down the statue of liberty to save a life

[randomslasher]

Here’s the thing, though. If you asked a conservative “Would you let the statue of liberty burn to save one life?” they’d probably scoff and say no, it’s a national landmark, a treasure, a piece of too much historical importance to let it be destroyed for the sake of one measly life. 

But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”  

The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical. 

But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?

People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you. 

P.S. I would let the statue of liberty burn to save a pigeon. 

[boyist]

[robotmango]

also, there is an extreme difference between what things or principles *i* personally am willing to die for, and what i would hazard others to die for. and this is a distinction i don’t think the conservative hard-right likes to face.

an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.

they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.

the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.

if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.

and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.

but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.

would i be willing to risk death, trying to save the statue of liberty? probably, yes. but there is no culture without people, and therefore i also believe there are no cultural treasures worth more than other people’s lives. and as far as i’m concerned the same goes for laws, or markets, or borders.

[aquatixwitch]

Well said!

[lauraantoniou]

This is an excellent ethical discussion.

[oganizediguana]

The first time I came across this post, randomslasher’s addition was life changing for me. I suddenly understood where the right was coming from, and I had never been angrier.

[hazeldomain]

This is also why so many people on the right fail to see the hypocrisy of trying to make abortion illegal when they themselves have had abortions. They can tally up their own life circumstances and conclude that it would be difficult or impossible to continue a pregnancy, but they’re completely mystified by the idea that women they don’t know are also human beings with complicated lives and limited spoon allocation.

This is also why they think “get a job” is useful advice. In their heads they honestly do not understand why the NPCs who make up the majority of the human race can’t just flip a switch from “no job” to “job.” When they say “get a job” they’re filing a glitch report with God and they honestly think that’s all it takes.

This is also why they tend to view demographics as individuals. They think that every single Muslim is just a different avatar for the same bit of programming.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

Borrowed observation from @innuendostudios​ here, but: there’s also a fundamental difference in how progressives view social problems versus how conservatives view them. That is, progressives view them as problems to be solved, whereas conservatives do not believe you can solve anything.

Conservatives view social issues as universal constants that fundamentally are unable to be changed, like the weather. You can try to alter your own behavior to protect yourself (you can carry an umbrella), and you can commiserate about how bad the weather is, but you can’t stop it from raining. This is why conservatives blame victims of rape for dressing immodestly or for drinking or for going out at night: to them, those things are like going out without an umbrella when you know it’s going to rain. 

“But then why do conservatives try to stop things they dislike by making them illegal, like drug use or immigration or abortion?” And the answer is: they’re not. They know perfectly well that those things will continue. No amount of studies showing that their methods are ineffective will matter to them because effectiveness is not the point. The point is to punish people for doing bad things, because punishing people is how you show your disapproval of their actions; if you don’t punish them, then you’re condoning their behavior. 

This is why they will never support rehabilitative prisons, even though they reduce crime. This is why they will never support free birth control for everyone, even though that would reduce abortions. This is why they will never support just giving homeless people houses, even though it’s proven to be cheaper and more effective at stopping homelessness than halfway houses and shelters. It’s not about stopping evil, because you can’t; it’s about saying definitively what is Bad and what is Good, and we as a society do that by punishing the people we’ve decided are bad. 

This is why the conservative response to “holy fuck, they’re putting children in cages!” is typically something along the lines of “it’s their parents’ fault for trying to come here illegally; if they didn’t want to have their kids taken away, they shouldn’t have committed a crime.” It doesn’t matter that entering the US unlawfully is a misdemeanor and child kidnapping isn’t typically a criminal sentence. It does not matter that this has absolutely zero effect on people unlawfully entering the US. The point is that conservatives have decided that entering unlawfully is Bad, anything that is not punishing undocumented immigrants – due process of asylum and removal defense claims, for example – is supporting Badness, and kidnapping children is an appropriate punishment for being Bad.