Then I will run and run and run, until the dawn

Lace, 30s, she/her. Knitting patterns? Knitting patterns.

[buttons-beads-lace]

the day is fast approaching when I will have to explain particle-wave duality and Heisenberg uncertainty to a 13-year-old

[animate-mush]

You need to read Deep Down Things: the Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics by Bruce Schumm! It has the best demonstration of particle wave duality I have ever seen in my life! Also Bruce is the best physics professor I ever had and deserves all the love forever. (His book self bills as "the first comprehensive book on particle physics for a lay audience." And it's purple). But it's not like "here's a cute metaphor" it actually shows you how it works. I actually got it for a hot second.

The cute metaphor version is that "billiard balls" and "the movement of the ocean" are both inadequate metaphors for describing what light is. And the worst version of this is that "wave" and "particle" are mathematically equivalent notational variants of each other, and you use whichever one that makes the math easier. Which lets physicists pull bs like: "okay light can be modeled as waveforms or as particles called photons" okay good with you so far "so given that these are notational variants of each other, we can model sound waves as particles called phonons" *eye twitch* I Guess dot jpg "so for this problem we are going to model the ripples on the surface of a pond as particles called ripplons" *table flip* SCIENCE HAS GONE TOO FAR

The most intuitive understanding of Uncertainty is when Dave Dorfan, the head of our department, was walking by and grabbed one of the students and was like "Uncertainty is this. Imagine Troy [the student] is standing in an ice rink with the lights off and the only way to find out where he is is to throw rocks at him." (Troy: Hey!) The point being that to observe is to interact - not on a philosophical but on a physical level - and to interact is to effect. Every time a rock hits Troy it imparts a bit of energy to him and he moves a little bit on his frictionless surface, so the information you get about his location from this interaction is necessarily going to be slightly wrong. To measure something is to change it.

Mathematically of course it's just linear algebra. Can you teach your 13 year old linear algebra? p and x don't commute. That's it that's the whole Uncertainty Principle. The matrices don't commute. They have different eigenstates. To measure a value you have to be in an eigenstate for that value. You can't be in the eigenstate for position and momentum at the same time, so if you're measuring one you are not measuring the other. Because the matrices don't commute.

(We got to that point in out Quantum class and it was like Oh. Oh that's it isn't it. It was just that the whole time. Well okay then)

Anyway, good luck to you! These are some of my very favorite topics!

[buttons-beads-lace]

I entirely agree that talking about how it actually works is better than cute metaphors, and the way people sensationalize the ~power of observation~ is tiresome when it makes perfect sense as a practical problem.

Overall the approach I've been taking to talking about the history of chemistry is talking about things from the point of view of the scientists who discovered them- what did they already know (or think they knew), what unanswered questions were they trying to understand, what experiments did they do and what conclusions did they draw from the results? There's a bit less of that to talk about with the wave-equation model of the atom, but I talked to the 13-year-old about waves and diffraction and then we watched a video where you can see electrons make a diffraction pattern after going through a barrier.

One kind of nice part, though, is that the people who came up with these ideas re: particle-wave duality also thought they were pretty strange; it was just the only answer that fit the data. Why are the electrons limited to only traveling in certain specific "orbits" even though common sense says they could travel at any speed? I don't know, says Niels Bohr, but the data says that's what they do, so there must be some reason.

I sadly had to get rid of my college notebooks when I moved- I wish I still had them to refer back to, because once upon a time I did actually have to work with wave equations (the "particle in a box" one, that describes just one dimension, a particle moving back and forth along a line). But I told the 13-year-old that we could see what the equations look like, and then I would explain what they tell us, but we wouldn't get into how they actually work mathematically.

[stenchkow]

Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

[deepseametro]

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

[theothersarshi]

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

[repinipi]

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

[daylikescookies]

made a fat honse! pattern by makeshiftwings :D

coms open btw :3

[knocking-on-peoples-non-doors]

@elodieunderglass !

[elodieunderglass]

What a lovely shape!

[fravery]

Feeling inspired by the many shades of green in this stunning mosaic forest by artist Joanne Desheil.

[salmonella-warrior]

Joanne Daschel, Cathedral, 2020. stained glass and smalti. https://www.joannedaschel.com/post/into-the-woods

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I think people get mixed up a lot about what is fun and what is rewarding. These are two very different kinds of pleasure. You need to be able to tell them apart because if you don't have a balanced diet of both then it will fuck you up, and I mean that in a "known cause of persistent clinical depression" kind of way.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

When people say they enjoy things, they usually mean one of two things. The first is that these things are fun; that is, they satisfy immediate emotional needs or desires for pleasure. Candy Crush is fun, for people who are into that sort of thing; waterslides are fun, watching TV is fun. Fun, in the way I'm defining it for this post, is the party food of pleasure; immediately and usually temporarily satisfying, and after that, mostly satisfying only as a happy memory (although some of these activities, like watching a TV show, can generate further opportunities for pleasure down the line like daydreaming, discussion, and making fanart). Like party food, this kind of fun is a good thing to have, and someone who doesn't get enough of it is at high risk of stress-related health concerns. Also burnout. A lack of fun is a major contributor to burnout.

The second kind of pleasure that most people talk about is rewarding activity. The lack of rewarding activity in one's life is a major contributor to depression. It creates a sense of purposelessness and worthlessness and generates a low attention span, sapping the ability to feel long-term motivation or pleasure. People usually try to pick themselves up with the first kind of fun, which is a band-aid but not a very sticky one; the lack of rewarding activity grows and festers over time. Rewarding pleasure involves working on something long-term that feels worthwhile. There are usually also spots of fun (or you wouldn't have gotten into the activity enough for it to become rewarding), but there also tends to be long slogs that aren't that fun. Nevertheless, when people report on doing said activity, they will speak about it with great enjoyment and remember it being enjoyable and claim they like it. (I like being a writer. Writing can sometimes be boring as shit.) (Look into Csíkszentmihályi's work on experience sampling and flow states for more info on this, it is FASCINATING.)

In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal sums up what she thinks are the most important contributing factors to rewarding activity. These are not the only factors, but I agree that they're a good baseline of the critical ones. I'm going to paraphrase them using different language. The four big contributors are:

Satisfying work. This is the vaguest one because different people find different things satisfying. Basically, the task itself should feel productive, and you should not feel bad about doing it to the point where it causes you distress. Satisfying work involves clear goals with actionable steps and a clear product, preferably something that you can see, touch or use. A clean house, a new high score, a freshly built table, a happy child.

Mastery. Rewarding pleasure is often something that you can get better at. There are things to learn, practice, improve. Improving your ability to solve tricky code problems, getting better at painting landscapes, figuring out fun new strategies in Magic: The Gathering, being able to build computers better or faster or cheaper. Mastery does not require becoming the best at something (although some people enjoy that specifically also), merely seeing progress in yourself and being able to take pride int he fact that you are better than you were.

Social connection. Rewarding pleasure often involves social or community connection. A long-term social group that discusses fan theories of their favourite show. Your weekly tabletop rpg. Teaching a room full of kids who to make leather belts. Working at a small bookshop and making small talk with all the tourists. Some people find social activity to be fun in the 'immediate pleasure' kind of way, some don't, but it is a critical factor in mental health and in the long-term... rewardingness (?)... of a hobby. Animals can also partially fill this niche, but be warned, they are far, far less effective than people. Your cat might be able to stop you from committing suicide today. You cat alone will not make your life satisfying.

Contribution. Humans are community animals and have a need to be something larger than ourselves or, more specifically to be of service to something larger than ourselves. Looking after kids, cooking big meals for others, creating art or physical products for others. Teaching the next generation how to read. Serving your God. Saving a species of small fish from extinction. Volunteering at your local charity shop or soup kitchen. Being a member of a crowd to reach the Guinness World Record for "most people fit into a storage crate". Making useful tutorial videos, being an entertainer, joining your local queer support group or political organisation. Humans fucking love to be part of something bigger than their own brain and they fucking love to help people.

The world is full of rewarding activities, and not all of them rate high in all four categories. The woman working in the charity shop warehouse and chatting with her coworkers isn't necessarily all that interested in mastery of her job (although I've worked in these places and some people do take pride in learning to be as efficient as possible), the musical hermit training to become the best violinist in the world might not be all that interested in social connection or how the audience actually feels about him. You might have noticed that I've listed hobbies, jobs, and non-employed but important life work (volunteering and childrearing) as possible rewarding activities; you can find rewarding activities everywhere. (In fact the lack of rewarding pleasure in our work lives is a very serious problem that companies keep trying to condescendingly band-aid over. The late David Graeber had a lot to say about this and I highly recommend his work, particularly Bullshit Jobs, which is a book specifically discussing the lack of above points 1 and 4 (satisfying work and sense of contribution) in so many modern workplaces and its distressing psychological ramifications). Rewarding activities are not 'fun' all the time; in fact, Csíkszentmihályi's work found that many of them are quite unfun most of the time. They do, however, create long term pleasure, and are emotionally and psychologically critical.

One final point: research shows that computer stuff counts less. This isn't a 'hurr durr edison was a witch get off your damn computers and get a real job' point; plenty of people do most of their rewarding activity on computers, because the supply cost is so low (most of us already own some kind of computer) and it's so much easier to find an existing community. But it does, psychologically speaking, count less; your brain isn't very good at seeing computers stuff as as 'real', on a primitive sensory level, as things you can touch with your hands or people that are right in front of you. Your massive community of fellow fans on the internet are less effective at filling your social needs than the crochet club at your local library, even if you like the people on the internet much more. It doesn't have to be everything, but ideally you should have at least one physical meatspace social club and at least one physical meatspace hobby, craft, or volunteer job. (They can be the same thing. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen for both.) They don't have to be the most important thing -- I care way more about my writing (electronic) than my crochet (meatspace) and I do the writing a lot more -- but the meatspace thing should exist, if you can manage it.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#wow this did not go where i expected it to go#i thought this was going to be about like. when games make you feel like you've accomplished something so you keep playing#without realising you're not actually having any fun

You're talking about extrinsic vs intrinsic reward systems, which are a different but equally interesting thing! Games (and jobs and schools and other things) will sometimes try to instil motivation by over-relying on extrinsic reward mechanisms without bothering to make the activity itself fun, rewarding or meaningful. This does work in the short term but it does not help your mental health like properly rewarding activities do, and people who don't become "addicted" tend to bounce off them unless there's something else to hold onto them (such as a sunk cost, or a social circle of other gamers they really like, or a lack of alternate activities, or something).

[slightly-gay-pogohammer]

hey gang i got popsicles pick one as pass the box to someone else

mint

lemon

orange

strawberry

cola

pineapple

dark cherry

anise

Voting ended onJul 14

"i cant believe you dont have this or that flavor" listen they had these ones okay

[tchinoquenonai]

an idiosyncrasy of serbian as it is spoken in contemporary belgrade (or, at least, the register that may be tendentiously called “multicultural belgrade serbian”) is a “lazy” pronunciation of /e/ in stressed syllabes: i hear it as a near-open [æ], though i’ve also heard [ɛ̯ɐ], mainly in marked speech that also breaks stressed /o/ into [ɔ̯ɐ]. now. while ppl feigning autochtony to a city inhabited solely by expats since the 1450s may disagree, i personally support contemporary serbian’s endeavour to reinvent western romance

[ukfrislandembassy]

I see the Serbs (like always) are following the Russians in the march towards a vertical vowel system. Clearly it's due to Circassian contact.

/ˈfsʲa ɕəstˈlʲəvəjə sʲəˈmʲa pəˈxʷaʒə ˈdɾʷək nə dɾʷəˈga | ˈkaʒdəjə nʲəɕəstˈlʲəvəjə sʲəˈmʲa nʲəɕəstˈlʲəvə pəsfəjəˈmʷə/

[certified-linguistics-moment]

what's this vertical vowel system you mention :) ?

[ukfrislandembassy]

You mean you don't know?

Here's a relevant section from Colarusso's Kabardian grammar. There's a lot more vowels phonetically but that can pretty much always be derived

Systems with similar limited contrasts are also found among Ndu languages of New Guinea and Arandic languages of Australia; Foley's analysis of Yimas phonology in his grammar comes close to analysing it as a vertical system, while I get the impression that some parts of Chadic (e.g. Margi) also exhibit tendencies in this direction.

More thoughts on vertical vowel system typology will be provided upon prompting.

[certified-linguistics-moment]

oh so a vertical vowel system is one where all the phonemes have the same front-back dimension? is russian really tending towards a vertical vowel system?? is the circassian contact comment just a joke?

i'd be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on vertical vowel system typology :)

[ukfrislandembassy]

I'm very much joking with the Circassian contact comment, but the question of whether Russian is tending towards a vertical vowel system is an interesting one.

See, the most interesting part of the whole thing is not so much the question of precisely how many vowels a language has (a sizeable proportion of Arandic for instance seems to have and /i/ in addition to /a/ and schwa), but rather the relative proportions of central to front/back vowels and their diachronic derivation.

Because it's pretty clear how you get these systems historically; it's from POA contrasts that formerly occurred on vowels as e.g. [+front] or [+rounded] ending up being more associated with consonants as [+palatal] and/or [+labial] coarticulations respectively. Thus a contrast like *ki vs. *ku becomes something more like /kʲə/ vs. /kʷə/, with maybe some residual colouring of the vowels. The most telling detail would therefore be the same vowels after consonants that don't pick up these additional co-articulations showing a merger of these vowels.

Both Slavic and Goidelic (I have a colleague who reckons modern Irish has a basically vertical vowel system) show this kind of pattern, in that palatality quite readily transfers from vowels to consonants. Additionally, in Slavic you also get a fun corresponding fronting of back vowels after palatalised consonants, resulting even less functional load being held by the front vs. backness of the vowels. Russian specifically even has a recapitulation of this change in unstressed syllables with Proto-Slavic *o after palatal consonants going to /e/, pronounced [ʲɪ] and unstressed /ja/ also merges with it when not in word-final position, hence alternations like /ˈɕastʲə/ 'happiness' but /ɕɪsˈtlʲivɨj/ 'happy'.

Languages will of course vary as to which co-articulation they favour. As the above examples show Indo-European favours palatalisation, but elsewhere, e.g. in Arandic, labialisation might be the preferred co-articulation.

I would also classify some systems as 'partially vertical', in that some parts of their systems have shifted without completely levelling their front-back contrasts. For instance, both Enindhilyangkwa of Australia and some of the Coast Salish languages have 'square' /i e ə a/ with some phonetic /u/ from rounded consonants, which speaks to me of unpacking of labialisation onto adjacent consonants. Similarly, Ethiosemitic generally likes to unpack Proto-Semitic short vowels, resulting in fun palatal and labial suprasegmentals (see especially the southern languages like Chaha), but keep the long vowels in their full qualities, resulting in seven-vowel /i e ɨ ə a u o/ systems.

Do I think Russian will go all the way? No, I suspect in reality it'll end up somewhere in an awkward middle, as I can't see really how the /u/ gets lost like I joked here, not to mention that no Slavic language really ever manages to go whole hog on it despite many of the relevant changes being recurrent through the history of the family. But it's a fun typological thought experiment to ask if it might.

[scribefindegil]

I'm still thinking about the guy who saw me realize my wheelchair wouldn't fit in the elevator because he (also a wheelchair user) was already inside it and immediately quipped, "This elevator ain't accessible enough for the both of us."

[edderkopper]

Today I learned that cuttlefish experience REM sleep, and that it makes their skin flash random colors. This is the cutest thing ever.

[blackbearmagic]

The electric eel at my aquarium has a voltmeter attached to his tank, and whenever he pumps out a burst of electricity–either when he’s navigating his tank or getting fed–the meter lights up and makes noise. Sometimes, I’ll walk past him when he’s snuggled up and totally motionless on his log, and see the voltmeter going crazy.

I am left to assume that he is dreaming, and is sleep-zapping at the things in his dreams.

[arachnospooky]

I am absolutely delighted to learn that electric eels dream of kicking ass.

[targuzzler-deactivated20180224]

[annelidarchive]

house of leaves / goncharov esque project consisting of the paratext of a nonexistent text where the described-but-unseen source material is an 800 page rulebook for the worst tabletop game you've ever heard of and the paratext is a series of arguments and blog posts generated by insane forum users

[louisegluckpdf]

being turned on by proficiency makes going to concerts really embarrassing. yes you got up in front of me and sang a beautiful song for 2 hours and now i want you to hit. I’m no better than a songbird

[beaft]

the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.

[beaft]

actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.

[buttons-beads-lace]

the day is fast approaching when I will have to explain particle-wave duality and Heisenberg uncertainty to a 13-year-old

[darkladynyara]

Let America Be America Again

By Langston Hughes Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed! I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean— Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years. Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home— For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free." The free? Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay— Except the dream that's almost dead today. O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME— Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again. Sure, call me any ugly name you choose— The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America! O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be! Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again!

[sapphling]

and honestly it's just fucking insane that every time we try to talk about harm to children in particular we have to talk circles around the fact that these things are very, very overwhelmingly done by parents/family members/teachers/religious leaders/known and trusted adults in a position of power over a child, to the extent that many people's suggested solution to child abuse is "give the people most likely to abuse a child EVEN MORE strangling legal and material power over the kid"

[sapphling]

you're not supposed to actually address who is abusing children and what can be done to give those children recourse and the ability to leave abusive situations because nobody actually gives a shit about child abuse beyond the familial property rights violation it represents to them and the cudgel against minorities which it can be turned into

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

You see something broadly similar in nursing where you have to tip toe round the fact that nurses can directly and intentionally harm patients; one of the most common phrases you'll hear when trying to address an issue is something like "well no nurse is coming to work deliberately wanting to hurt their patients". I don't say this to derail from the issue of protecting children from their parents/guardians, i say it because i think it highlights the consistent problems that not offending the sensibilities of people in positions of power over vulnerable people is seen as more important then actually protecting those vulnerable people. "How dare you suggest I'm a bad parent, I'm not going to listen to anything you say because clearly you just hate me, and my feelings are clearly the real issue now" type mindset that means you end you talking circles around issues trying not offend anyone instead of directly addressing what is wrong

[kayloulee]

You may have heard of the Australian National Redress Scheme, which is set up to help people who have suffered institutional child abuse.

Recently there was an ABC News headline that the Scheme is meant to wind up in 2028 and it is nowhere near being able to finish answering all the current cases, never mind the complaints they'll receive between then and now: Redress scheme will not clear backlog before closure at current processing rate, ABC News, 2 July 2026.

A while back, I was involved in a particular national healthcare institution's response to the Scheme. We had to supply the Scheme with, amongst other things, every location the organisation had ever run or been involved with, the dates they had been involved, and if that location had ever treated minors, and if so under what circumstances.

Now, 'minors' refers to people under 18 years of age. From birth to 17 years and 364 days 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds old.

Some of these locations had had maternity or mother-baby services. And I had to explain very gently to the leadership that yes, minors includes maternity wards, and no, I don't think that anyone was abusing literal newborns or babies, but that wasn't the question.

The question was, do or did you serve people under the age of 18 years, including literal newborns. Not, 'do you think child abuse happened here'. I have no idea if it did or did not, and it wasn't relevant to our answer. Newborn babies are certainly minors, and therefore our answer was "yes, there were minors at this institution".

I didn't think it would be a good idea to say this, also, but YES there are people in this world who DO work in maternity wards and NICUs and paediatrics wards and so on, who DO abuse their minor patients. And those people could be or have been present in your organisation. And if you LIE to the REDRESS SCHEME about if you SERVED MINORS, and then it turns out that A BABY was ABUSED and you LIED ABOUT IT, you will richly deserve the criminal penalties that you and your organisation will suffer.

I thought I'd better get them to let me just put everything down accurately, rather than have a fight about if I actually think they did that - it doesn't matter if I do! I have no idea! But for god's sake don't LIE ABOUT IT.

[anarchopuppy]

we dont talk abt the way that constantly being distrusted and talked over as a disabled kid makes it impossible to understand ur own feelings as a disabled adult

i learned very quickly that if i said "im tired all the time and cant find the motivation to do schoolwork" theyd say "no ur just lazy, stop making excuses" and if i said "my ritalin makes me feel uncomfortable and itchy all day" theyd say "stop being difficult and just take the pills" and theyre the adults and im just a lying lazy kid so what they say goes

so since correctly identifying and expressing my feelings was punished i focused instead on making excuses that adults would accept. "i cant bear to spend another day doing busywork in that awful windowless building where all the students and faculty hate me" turned into "i just threw up". until i learned to skip the step where i ask myself why i feel so awful, bc that information sure isnt going to help me

eventually all i was left with was the internalized voice of my teachers and parents insisting that no matter how miserable and exhausted i am i just need to stop faking it and try harder. and its taking a long long time to unlearn that and figure out how im supposed to know how i feel

[greatmountainfloofsquatch]

As a disabled kid, I noticed and came to loathe the cultural belief that kids are "lazy" and "trying to get out of things" in general. Treating kids with suspicion and distrust only makes them less trustworthy.

[earhartsease]

if kids consistently don't have a lot of energy that's usually a clue that there's something wrong with their health, not their attitude

[jomiddlemarch]

Romancing the Vote

romancing the vote is a massive auction raising money for two organizations fighting to preserve the right for every person to have their vo

[buttons-beads-lace]

There are many amazing things on offer here and I want to tell you about one of them.

Samuel Alito is a whiny pissbaby

Auction item 'Samuel Alito is a whiny pissbaby' hosted online at 32auctions.

This is an hour long video conversation (possibly longer; there's more than an hour worth of shit-talking to be done, but Courtney will try and respect time limits) with Courtney Milan. There will first be a talk where Courtney will demonstrate with opinion, fact, and personal anecdote why Samuel Alito is a whiny pissbaby who violates ethical rules and purposefully twists history into a pretzel in order to reach his intended result, which is wide scale bigotry. This will be followed by a Q & A period. Items that will be discussed include: - Sam Alito's shallow and ugly misreadings of history -- with text and explanations - Originalism is a loser's philosophy and Sam Alito is the biggest loser in the originalism tank - This section includes a fun game: Alito Opinion, or quote from Dred Scott? - One of the most powerful men in the world is a gigantic whiny loser who can't be satisfied with his enormous amount of power - What Sandra Day O'Connor said about Samuel Alito Questions will be taken at the end. I am sick and tired of this whiny pissbaby taking our rights, and if you are, too, I hope that this session will be cathartic. Will be held sometime in mid-to-late July with a poll to find out when the best time is for people; recordings will be available for those unable to make the actual talk. Depending on number of takers, there may be more than one session. BIOGRAPHY Courtney Milan is one of the founders of Romancing the Vote. She writes romance, largely historical, about people who kick ass. She clerked for the Supreme Court, and had lunch with Sam Alito once. He spent the entire time complaining.