Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”
really i think the most insidious part of white supremacy is the way it will convince white people everything is actually About Them. being called out isn’t about you. poc expressing frustration at your behaviour isn’t about you. it’s about how you are affecting others. step one is literally just de-centre yourself from the conversation. anyone who’s not white has already had to learn this lesson the hard way and it gets tiring waiting for the rest of you to catch up
So much of cis and trans radfeminist discourse is like throwing a grenade into every room you think has a man in it, then when 99% of the people killed by the grenade are women you go “well, you shouldn’t have been in the room where a man might have been” and somehow it’s feminist praxis
Penis makes you evil? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. People who fuck with a strap get hit. Being a top gets you hit. Got penis envy? Must be evil. Can accuse you of penis envy? Evil.
Testosterone makes you evil? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. Intersex people get hit. Masc women get hit. Women of color get hit. Anyone you can force a masculine label on or deny of a feminine label gets hit.
Male privilege is a moral failing you both somehow choose but also cannot opt out of rather than a set of conditional circumstances society imposes on you that may temporarily benefit you? Trans women get hit. Trans men get hit. Anyone you can accuse of being too close to maleness gets hit.
Masculinity makes you evil? Trans men get hit. Trans women who are masc get hit. Trans women who you can accuse of being masc get hit. Masc women get hit. Anyone you can accuse of being masc get hit (woc, intersex people, ethnic minorities with features assumed ‘masculine’, anyone who rejects aspects of femininity or doesn’t perform femininity in a way you think they ‘should’)
Proximity to men makes you evil? Anyone who dates men is hit. Anyone who likes men is hit. Anyone who is friends with men gets hit. Ultimately people assaulted by men suddenly “had it coming” because they dared stand next to a man, and you call yourself a feminist spouting the biggest rape apologist catchphrase???
You wanna “kill all men” for what theyve done to you, but you’re not doing anything to hurt OR change cis men or society but you are wracking up a body count of women just as hurt as you.
“Feminist” when you’ve pushed more women towards suicide than an incel has? Gimme a break.
“Misandrist” you wouldn’t dare say that shit to a cis man, but you sure have a lot of gas in the tank for the woman standing near him or the trans man who *just* started using he/him after 20+ years of the type of misogyny you are going to gleefully throw back in his face
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
My job is to be the Anti-Gen-AI person at a college (and teach the field of Artificial Intelligence). When people ask my why i dont trust Gen AI i just send them this paper.
Managers hum and haw, but everyone gets real quiet when i ask if they read the paper and still want to push Gen AI.
anyway remember when the US government commissioned a study on dangers of pornography and when the commission returned with a report saying it doesn’t pose a danger and recommending removing restrictions the US government denounced its own study
[Image IDs: Wikipedia text reading: The Commission's report, called Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and published in 1970, recommended sex education, funding of research into the effects of pornography and restriction of children's access to pornography, and recommended against any restrictions for adults. On balance the report found that obscenity and pornography were not important social problems, that there was no evidence that exposure to such material was harmful to individuals, and that current legal and policy initiatives were more likely to create problems than solve them.
The report was widely criticized and rejected by Congress. The Senate rejected the Commission's findings and recommendations by a 60-5 vote, with 34 abstentions. The Senate rejected the following findings and recommendations in particular.
That there was "no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults."
That "a majority of American adults believe that adults should be allowed to read or see any sexual materials they wish."
That "there is no reason to suppose that elimination of governmental prohibitions upon the sexual materials which may be made available to adults would adversely affect the availability to the public of other books, magazines, or films."
That there was no "evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials adversely affects character or moral attitudes regarding sex and sexual conduct."
That "Federal, State, and Local legislation prohibiting the sale, exhibition, or distribution of sexual materials to consenting adults should be repealed."
President Nixon, who had succeeded Johnson in 1969, also emphatically rejected the report. /End IDs]
Like genuinely it is unquantifiably fucked up insane horror how many times the U.S. government has deliberately created fascist dictatorships and enabled genocides and funded terrorism all over the world in order to just weaken other nations or force them to depend on our own military for help, and how this isn’t a conspiracy theory but openly available public information, but neither right wing nor left wing journalism breathes a word about it and there’s no ongoing outrage or backlash against it from within this country nor is it discussed in most public education settings. It only ever gets addressed at all by independent authors, comedians, cartoonists and bloggers. It gets passed around in clickbait articles as Fucked Up History Trivia though it still continues even now and the aftermath of even the earliest cases is still killing and oppressing people. There are entire generations of multiple countries growing up in poverty and misery because of Henry Kissinger alone.
even if bioessentialism was real and all trans women had some inherent advantage over cis women in sports you could not pay me to give a fuck because sports are made up. they are games people play for fun. even though we as a society invented careers around sport it is still boiled down to the fun made up game where you kick a ball. or dribble a ball. or swim in a pool. or show people how fast you can run. it’s for leisure. fun. not serious. who gives a fuck. fun. #mygame⚽️🏀🏈⚾️
oh my god people yes i know calvinism is a type of christianity the joke is that it doesn't take skill to hit a baby who's predestined to get hit come on
médaille d'or olympique en frappage de bébés avec une batte
œstrogenèse-évangélique
déduction de points. ce dernier bébé était un calviniste
œstrogenèse-évangélique
oh mon dieu les gens oui je sais le calvinisme est un type de chrétienté la blague c'est que ça ne demande pas de talent de frapper un bébé qui est prédestiné à être frappé allez
The reason why so many of y'all's feminism sucks is because you still believe deep down in your hearts that there are only two kinds of people in the world: precious, ethereal, fragile dollthings called "women", and violent, lustful, rage-fueled apes called "men". Until you throw that idea away, 3rd-grade-tier "girls rule boys drool, girls are princesses and boys are stinky :(" is as feminist as we'll ever get-- and I hope it's obvious that that's lightyears away from the bare minimum of where we need to be.
I don't know how I'm supposed to explain to ostensibly trans-friendly feminists that "women are beautiful soft things made of glass, men are obsessed with violence and sex" is exactly what the patriarchy wants you to believe. Patriarchy wants you to believe that being a woman and/or having a vagina (patriarchy generally believes those two things are synonymous) makes one shatter on impact with reality. It makes you easier to control if you are scared shitless of the other half of the population, and it makes you more compliant with your lot in life if you believe it is in the nature of the other half of the population to rape and kill rather than realise those were choices those individual rapists and murderers made. There is no way to make gender essentialism progressive and feminist, because it is one of patriarchy's tools of subjugation. Stop trying to make it progressive.
And I can scream all of that from the rooftops over and over again, and what I hear in reply is "Trans men really are men because no woman would ever decide to become an inherently evil repugnant rapist ape", and "You're so right. Trans women are women because they too are pretty delicate little objects I can fuck", and "You're non-binary? So are you fucktoy non-binary or sexpest non-binary?", and my patience runs ever thinner.
Okay let me be less glib here. It's blinkered and ahistorical to say this. Radical feminism, at its anglophone roots, was formed largely in a hostile reaction to trans women's presence in feminist and lesbian organizing. A lot of people cite mitchfest, but Prof. Susan Stryker's Transgender History makes it clear that Beth Elliott's attempted expulsion and self-exile from West Coast Lesbian Conference was the moment of inception for TERFism in the anglophone feminist organizing, and those that stood against Elliott and their allies are some of the most foundational radical feminists that embraced TERFism with open arms at the moment of its evolution from radical feminism. The entire ideology is, from its origin, against the existence of trans women in public spaces, especially in places where trans women could assert themselves epistemologically.
I have noticed that when she talked about sex and sexuality (the most notable in her article on polycules), Knight leaned into uncritically citing TERFs. I keep seeing the defense that she's doing a lot for transfeminism or whatever, but this half-baked attempt at rehabbing radical feminism is neither new nor necessary. We can and should have left this behind, and anyone that uncritically cites TERFs are no ideological allies of mine, no matter how much credulous wierdos that's not done their readings like to say otherwise.
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