When the CEO of the company that didn't turn away Nazi business says "this isn't going to work" you know it's bad.
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@claimingkeladry
When the CEO of the company that didn't turn away Nazi business says "this isn't going to work" you know it's bad.
Brian McFadden: Is Google Cooked? (via Daily Kos)
Study with Sandro Botticelli and "What's it like working at Lush"
Anna de Rijk for Vogue Netherlands, November 2012.
More photos from the Vogue Netherlands November issue. Look at that giant necklace. Somewhere, a designer for Alchemy Gothic is wailing and gnashing their teeth.
If youre a closeted person somewhere out there thinking "I want to transition but it would be less progressive/unique/countercultural for me to be that gender instead of this one" please know that you are a real person not a character in a narrative and cant live your life based on what is good media representation. You are real you can only be yourself and theres no moral weight to any identity over another
Liberal transphobes enjoy positioning trans identities as regressive compared to cis queerness or like non-transitioning transness or anything else they can leverage to make transphobia look progressive and I think its easy to absorb that message subconciously. But in real life we just are what we are and no ranking of validity can change the fact that you have an identity that is NOT chosen and is just your unchangeable truth. Not only should you not have to live a life dictated by what is most countercultural to identify as or whatever but also: being trans is extremely countercultural and feminist and leftist to begin with and theyre only trying to convince you otherwise bc theyre bigots
"Why cant you be a feminine man society hates feminine men đ„ș" and "all the butch lesbians are becoming men we need u đ„ș" = stay in the closet for the noble purpose of being an abstract representation point in my new york times opinion column. You wont actually be a gnc cis person youll be a closeted trans person who uses the wrong words but I need you to do that because i hate you
The guardian trying to find whoâs responsible for increased transphobia in this country
every day it just concerns me how little compassion people have. no compassion for those living in the global south. no compassion for immigrants. no compassion for disabled ppl. no compassion for addicts. no compassion for prisoners. no compassion for children. like holy shit ...
i made a separate post about this but actually there are plenty of people cough white people who care about animals more than they ever do human people . not what i'm talking about make your own post
Flexible feather armor
đȘœ Miscreations_us on IG
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.
I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.
I love that most of your advice about existing in the world is some version of "other people are actually cool and not your enemy and also they are also people and life is more fun when you open yourself to that" because yeah..
Yeah LOL I feel like I get a lot of messages and read a lot of posts that seem to imply the contrary and it always bums me the hell out!! I do think being open to others has transformed my life in meaningful ways so I like to share that. When I can.
40 days. One email. Your name on the right side of history.
Good letter template for contacting your MPs re the new code of practice. We have a month. Make the biggest stink you can. As stated at the link, this template is useful as it contains specific Procedural questions, which are harder for unsympathetic MPs to shoot down than exclusively Ideological ones (though there's space for that in the template too!). It took me less than ten minutes and I wrote like two paragraphs.
If you're in the UK, this is one of the easiest ways to do Anything about this bullshit. If not, you very well might have friends or followers who are, so send this their way. Regardless of where you are, please do all you can to support the trans people here.
It isn't a solution but its a fuckin sight better than not trying.
medical abuse opinions you can have are "that doesn't happen" "that doesn't happen" "that happens sometimes but definitely only to people who deserve it and they're not real people anyway so it's ok" "that doesn't happen" "that maybe happened in the past but its funny" "that happened in the past but it was empowering somehow" "that doesn't happen"
the thing is that if you look directly AT various forms of medical abuse it becomes so fucking instantly clear that the forms happening today (forced antipsychotic medication, involuntary institutionalization, involuntary sedation, electroshock, etc etc) all have the same goal that things like lobotomy did: to make someone more convenient to their caretakers. like. that and making money for drug corporations. i was put on multiple medications it was absolutely not appropriate to put a child on when I was institutionalized as a child. there's procedures and meds that they know parents/guardians and insurance companies won't refuse to pay for if their kid or family or whatever is institutionalized and the doctors get kickbacks from the corps to mass prescribe these to institutionalized people bc we're basically like farm animals to them. a captive population to experiment on and charge us money for the pleasure of doing so. this isn't a conspiracy theory, there have been infinite class action lawsuits about these cases. which drug corps work into their budgeting by setting aside Settlement Money bc they know that's cheaper than not illegally giving doctors kickbacks to overprescibe their drugs to vulnerable people. this is public information. it is happening now and it has happened to many, MANY people who are alive today and a lot of them are your own age and you probably interact with them in your daily life without knowing it.
"the kind of person who would be lobotomized" still exists and is still inconvenient to patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. they're still abusing us. stop ignoring us. STOP IGNORING US
Plastic Chair in Wood by Maarten Baas (2008)
I'm obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that's been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.
Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it's inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.
If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don't know about you, but I'll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.
@puppygirllaika
I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!
The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a "Monobloc", literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.
Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40's and 50's, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don't actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can't even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.
Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940's. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.
This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner's design:
The elements of D.C.Simpson's Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.
Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).
Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:
Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50's, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it's also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.
Enter: the Fauteuil 300
This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it's imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.
What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980's due to the sheer demand for them. They weren't cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That's not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.
With the price of plastics declining after the 70's, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80's and 90's, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.
And here is where we reach this piece, "Plastic chair in wood", by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I've left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas' chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.
That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it's not all there is to know. In fact, it's kind of just the start. I've linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it's far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it's place is in our world today. The impact it's made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It's fascinating, and well worth your time.
sources below.
"Stained glass" faille jacket by Freda Blackwood, 1970's or early 80's, via Kerry Taylor Auctions.
There's more of them!!
Edit: And here's a 5 minute video from the same exhibition.
its so funny watching people veer so far to the left that they start reinventing things like race science, segregation, purity politics, censorship, misogyny, bioessentialism, anti-theism, nationalism, lynch mobs, capital punishment and group punishment, etc.
and by funny I mean fucking terrifying but I have to laugh otherwise I'll spiral.
To anyone worried this might be them:
(I'm holding your hand while i say this)
You might be right.
You might have opinions that you feel have veered off into unacceptable territory. You might have come to feminism with a "fuck all men, we should start treating them like shit, see how they like it" mentality. You might have come to anti-christian nationalism with a "christianity is so patriarchal and imperialistic, anyone who practices it hates me and i hate them" mentality. You might have come to environmentalism with a "there are too many people on this planet, we need a new plague" mentality.
You might have noticed your opinions slipping further and further into radicalization but you might also feel like you started on that path from a genuinely good place and you've had only the best of intentions.
But (and this is the part you need to internalize), it is not too late to course correct.
Whenever I worry that my desire to make a better world has led me to accept opinions, beliefs, rhetoric etc. that I don't actually agree with, I take a step back and ask myself three questions:
First, am I assuming that other people are not people in the exact same way that I'm a person?
The root of all evil is the incredibly tempting tendency to treat other people like they're not exactly as much of a person as you are. So take a beat and ask yourself if you're treating them like they are.
(This can go in both directions by the way! Treating someone like they're less than a person is obviously harmful and dehumanizing but treating them like they're more than a person can lead to objectification, tokenization, and more. Not good stuff.)
Second, am I thinking from a place of love or hate?
The saying "you have to love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor" will untangle you from so many impossible ethical dilemmas, I promise you.
And third, am I putting my anger somewhere useful?
This is actually a two part question because the first step is asking yourself, "Am I directing my anger towards the person or institution I am actually mad at?" If the answer is no, then you are effectively yelling at a Walmart employee about how evil the Walmart corporation is and expecting them to be able to do something about that.
Then you move onto the actual question, "Am I putting my anger somewhere useful?" If the extent of your civic engagement is getting into fights on social media, I can assure you the answer is no.
So for example...
Let's say you are a girl in your early-mid 20s. You learned about feminism from your friends and maybe a teacher or professor or two and you've accepted the fact that patriarchy is real and harmful to women but you find yourself repeatedly thinking "Ugh, I wish all men could just fuck off and die. I should be able to treat them exactly as terribly as women have been treated since the beginning of time."
This is an understandable thought. I see how you got there. Misogyny is incredibly exhausting to deal with, many men have done exactly zero work to become less misogynistic, and living your life with the crushing weight of "a significant portion of the world's population do not think of me as a full and autonomous person" is very very difficult.
So what do we do about it? What is our response.
Here is where we pause and ask the questions.
First, am I assuming that other people are not people in the exact same way that I am a person?
Am I treating "men" like a monolith in the same way that misogynists treat "women" like a monolith? Yes? Okay then what's the reality? (Hint: it is always more complex than you first think).
For me, the reality is that "men" includes my best friend from college who loves me and the world so much he's spent 12 years learning about feminism and gender theory just so he could be a better person, a better friend. It includes Brennan Lee Mulligan (and Lou Wilson and Zac Oyama and more) who prove to me that it is possible to be a public figure without promoting toxic masculinity. It includes my favorite professor who still checks in on me and my career, even years after I stopped being his student. It includes trans men I want to celebrate and love, both for their trans-ness and their maleness. It includes so many men whom I love and who love me. Which brings us to....
Second, am I thinking from a place of love or hate?
When I have the knee-jerk thought "I wish all men would just fuck off and die" what am I actually saying? I'm saying I wish the world were safer and kinder and better for women. I'm saying I want women to live the lives they want to live, regardless of whatever a hateful man might think about it. I'm saying I want a higher quality of life for women.
And so....
Third, am I putting my anger somewhere useful?
Do I actually think all men should die? Do I think men should be violently eradicated from the planet?
No, that's ridiculous and not useful at all and certainly not coming from a place of love.
So instead I'll ask myself "How can I make my anger work for me?"
Well, what do women need to have a higher quality of life? They need to be paid a fair wage, they need access to high-quality health care, they need subsidized childcare and birth control and abortions and education. So those are the things I will fight for. Those are the things I will talk about.
Boom, I have turned hatred for misogyny into love for women, love for the world. And I have given myself useful and productive motivation to make the world a better place. Dope. We're doing great.
How do you do so much with three children? I have one (admittedly very, very young) child and I feel like I'm caring for him actively at all times and scrambling to do anything else. What is your secret??
There are a few!
Some are my deepest secrets, so please be kind, okay?