The crux of the anti trans movement is a war on bodily autonomy. They don't want you to have any agency over what you look like, how you dress, who you date, whether to have kids, etc.
They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.
Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone's self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.
Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Our rights are your rights. Our destruction is your destruction.
I love when household beasts are like whoa. You were gonna piss all on your own? No backup or companionship or anything? Babe. I got you. I'm right here. You don't have to be alone during this difficult time (pissing), and you won't be. Ever. This is not a discussion.
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.
It’s a shame that the internet’s takeaway from the Epstein thing is “Pizzagate was right and we should all start thinking like qanoners” instead of “The MeToo movement was right and should have involved more guillotines.”
the way ozempic has finally made the fact that eating healthy and exercising doesn't necessarily make you thin well known and society's reaction to this is not "oh i guess being thin or fat doesn't actually show if you're healthy" but "oh i guess everyone should be on this drug"
Hey Bri I hope you don't mind me sharing this on your post but in case anyone reading this is in Kansas or knows trans people in Kansas, Colorado is nearby and considered one of the safest states for trans & queer people. I know relocating is logistically expensive and challenging for many reasons, especially for people in a vulnerable situation, but if it is an option anyone is considering, there is a nonprofit here that may be able to help.
Steps These steps are intended to be a linear process to get you out of there and resettled here. But we get it, you’re a big kid and can do
TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)
In 1997 Amelia’s daughter, Mary Moran, and other members of the Moran family were invited to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where they were welcomed in Freetown by Sierra Leone’s President and then flown by helicopter to the country’s interior. There, in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Mary and Bendu Jabati met and sang this song together for the first time. Years earlier, Bendu’s grandmother had told her that this song, which had been passed down in her village from mother to daughter for centuries, would one day reunite her to long-lost relatives.
In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song: a processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.
(The OP's link leads to a site with a recording of the song sung by both Mary Moran and her mother, Amelia)
For anyone looking: original link is broken, but fortunately the site is still up just migrated here. Also shared on the site are this clip of a news report regarding the story of Amelia and her descendants and a video of Mary and Wilson Moran's own reflections on their family history.
The full story of search connecting Amelia's Song to the Mende is told in the documentary The Language You Cry In. The distributor's site is here if a public library near you doesn't have it available already.
The story of Harris Neck, GA and the seizure of land by the U.S. War Department removing 75 African American families from their homes is also part of the Moran family's story and part of the ongoing injustice faced by Black communities in the U.S. South. You can find out more about the fight to reclaim Harris Neck in the short documentary film Descended: The Fight for Harris Neck, which is currently fully available on YouTube.
The Harris Neck Land Trust has more information on all of the above on their website, where they can also be contacted, and accept donations to help support them in their legal battle to reclaim the land for the families it was stolen from.
both countries withdrew to avoid an "international incident" ie israel would have attacked them and they would be forced to actually materially do something instead of making statements
I actually do feel like the "unemployed friend on a Tuesday" meme actually helps de-stigmatize unemployment because it frequently affirms that when you don't have a job you're more likely to be getting up to some weird shit rather than just lazing around. But I also feel like the unemployed friend is frequently up to some random shit because there's a whole pile of miscellaneous life tasks that full-time employment keeps people from. The unemployed friend is helping their cousin move, or babysitting, or checking in with a neighbor with mobility issues. The unemployed friend is a walking thesis on the inflexibility of our current labor landscape and just how much work exists outside of work.
A woman went viral for being turned down for a next interview for a role, she asks the recruiter what she did wrong, the recruiter tells her they were “concerned about her lack of effort in her appearance.”
She explains she wore a freshly ironed blazer with a collared top. Her nails were painted a professional beige. She got a blowout for her hair, so a professional style. She had on subdued gold earrings.
The only thing she wasn’t wearing was makeup; she states she really doesn’t wear makeup, and only had chapstick on, as her skin is sensitive. Her lawyer mother has already explained she has no legal case against the company for any type of gender-based discrimination.
Just in case anyone wants to ask why feminists still refer to the “pink tax” or rail against more and more elaborate makeup trends being pushed on girls and women.
Women being punished socially for not wearing makeup is still a feminist issue.
Little girls being taught by TikTok at 10 and 12 that they have to have a “beat face” or a “snatched body” to be adequately feminine will go on to become recruiters and HR employees and managers in a decade.
We already know that women who don’t wear makeup are discriminated against in interviews. The next generation of interviewers were raised by Sephora and Ulta; it’s going to get worse, not better, unless there’s a concentrated campaign on breaking the connection between makeup+professionalism.
I fucking hate that the general response to RFK Jr's eugenist take on autistic people is "autistic people do pay taxes, autistic people do work, autistic people do date!"
Some autistic people don't and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life. Some autistic people do need constant help and support and that shouldn't make them less worthy of life.
Once again we're falling in the right wing trap of :
They make a hateful, fascist statement
Instead of focusing on the fact that it is hateful and fascist we try to show them that they are factually wrong
We throw our own allies and the most vulnerable of us under the bus in the process
We legitimise an only slightly less hateful, fascist view as we go
They have completed their goal of making us accept the still hateful, fascist second version, hurrah. What a victory.
Right now what we're getting to with that is that autistic people who can work and pay taxes are okay, and the others aren't. Fuck this shit.
Same thing happens with the people who are being deported ("they have a visa!", "they didn't even have a criminal record!" -> even if they didn't have a visa, even if they did have a criminal record, deporting them and detaining them in what's essentially a concentration camp wouldn't be okay, you absolute tools of fascism.)
What RFK is saying: "Autistic people can't work, so it's our duty as a society to erase autism" -> This is eugenics
Harmful response: "Many autistic people do work!" -> Validates the belief that that someone being unable to work is shameful and makes them a lesser person, and implies that autistic people should not need support
Correct response: "Yes, many autistic people can't work, so it's our duty as a society to make sure they are supported, you fascist asshole" -> Accepts the realities of disability and values the lives of disabled people, and names the actual problem here
This is funny, of course, but its worth noting that this is a repeating problem in these kinds of regimes.
Nazi incompetence also ate itself alive.
Under the many, many reasons that facism always fails, there's one very crucial one: when the most important qualification is blind loyalty, other standards like competence and cooperation are neglected. There's the weirdo sentiment of Facism being this like.... efficient but unethical machine, when really, its not just horrific but stupid to the core.
It always crumbles, it always eats itself alive, but with massive destruction along the way that must be mitigated and pushed back against. I'm not telling you not to fight it, I'm telling you that the fighting will work.
#and this isn't an ad hominem 'fascists are stupid' thing
#a distrust of expertise and an unwillingness to be told no is central to most forms of totalitarianism
#accurate risk assessment is almost impossible in an authoritarian context
#because it requires that people honestly tell the big guy that he can't do something
You might be OK with leaving this in the tags, but I'm not.
A Romantic at Best @chivalrystaysalive - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
