My Hot Poasts

she/her, late 20s, finnish ☭

[itswaow]

Calling people "anti-intellectual" is a convenient way of shutting up justified anger (that often materializes as half-baked and, indeed, reactionary popular rhetoric). It's a veiled way of conveying: "You cannot comprehend the world. If you understood what *intellectuals* are actually saying, you'd know how stupid and wrong you are." Which intellectuals and what kinds of ideas are being upheld as the antidote to this supposed stupidity? It's school, academia, bourgeois thinkers and authors. All very unsurprising and seemingly inoffensive and uncontroversial, all upholding hegemonic ideas.

Of course, the people invoking the specter of anti-intellectualism usually see themselves as progressive -- though most of them are liberals at best. Charges of anti-intellectualism are a form of othering of people who are discontent ("they're stupid, don't worry about their objections") by marking them as uneducated and hysterical. Notice, too, how similar charges are perpetually leveled against the imperial periphery, how often you've heard about a “backward culture.” And see how often this anti-intellectual wave is presented as a global issue as well, as if the whole world had all of a sudden become unreasonable.

The observation that there is such a thing as a wave of anti-intellectualism does have a kernel of truth to it, but the very discourse of anti-intellectualism ends up veiling that truth: The imperial core is experiencing a particularly reactionary time as the end of neoliberalism draws near. As conditions worsen -- given that no alternative is present -- more people will end up holding regressive views. This reaction, ultimately caused by economic realities, is dressed as “anti-intellectualism,” construed as a sort of moral failing and a sign of societal decay. It ends up obstructing class consciousness, mystifying reality and advocating for a return to a past where people listened to “reason.”

As such, the framework of anti-intellectualism is itself a form of reaction, and in a way -- quite ironically -- the well-meaning anti-anti-intellectual ends up being part of the very reaction they're chastising.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so much of the "research" on "phones bad" is just statisticians congratulating themselves in a circle

[dragon-in-a-fez]

example: I am right now reading an article on "phubbing", which is apparently the term for ignoring people you're with in order to pay attention to your phone. we'll slide right past the claim that this is a normal word people use.

the authors have developed a "phubbing scale" and demonstrated that it has strong correlation with the existing "maladaptive technology use" scale. from this, they conclude the "phubbing scale" is a valid and useful metric.

the "maladaptive technology use" scale, if you go and read that paper, has shown strong correlation with the "problematic smartphone application use" construct.

have you caught the problem yet? nowhere has it been proven that scoring high on any of this is actually bad for you.

imagine someone told you "if the ground is wet it probably rained recently". then you talked to someone about rain and they said "if it rained recently there were probably clouds". yeah okay sounds reasonable. then all three of these people told you their research proves clouds, rain, and wet ground are all signs of demonic possession in giraffes. you'd be like hold up, I think you lost me somewhere

[ollievion]

I don’t need a study to know using my phone makes me feel like shit

[dragon-in-a-fez]

do different things on your phone then. I'm guessing you haven't written off paper as a technology just because tax forms make you want to cry

[weeknightbrutal-deactivated2026]

It's fair to be skeptical of research into problematic mobile phone usage on the basis that while some studies have shown it to be correlated with anxiety, insomnia, and depression, correlation is not causation and it is difficult to establish a causal relationship when studying this kind of problem. It's also fair to be skeptical of psych research in general due to the problems that are pervasive in the field.

But being not just skeptical but confident that you've debunked all the extant research on the basis that...the dumb statisticians never even bothered to check if this was actually bad for you LMFAO IDIOTS is just plain anti-intellectual though.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

> spend 5 years getting a PhD in youth and digital media

> express annoyance with a common failing of academic writing in your field

> get called anti-intellectual

[dragon-in-a-fez]

now reading a paper where the researcher:

asked students to volunteer to take a "screen-free challenge" where they didn't use electronic devices in class for a semester

recorded students' views on the challenge at the end of the course, and found that most of the students who participated had positive views while most of the students who didn't participate had negative views

completely ignored that this might just mean "people who thought something was a bad idea didn't do it", and instead concluded "the screen-free challenge leads to more positive views on the learning experience"

I'm getting whiplash from all the looking into the camera I am doing here

[allore]

Just to clarify, they only recorded the students’ views at the end of the study?? They didn’t ask the students what they expected at the beginning or ask why they participated??

That seems like such a basic step to mitigate your #3!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the thing you have to understand is that "screens bad" research gets published so easily you can basically make every research mistake ever invented and be fine

[innerchildabortionclinic]

also I don't think parents "these days" are uniquely terrible, I just think neglect is showing up in new ways as technology progresses. today's ipad kid would've been wandering around in a ditch alone all day and night before. parents not wanting to have to deal with children is not a new phenomenon.

[markovchaingang]

AI is bad because it's killing the environment

*actually looks at the environmental impact and discovers it's a drop in the bucket*

except it's not actually about that, it's bad because it's not real art

*realises my definition of art is so reactionary it excludes duchamp, pollock, and about half of the stuff since the 1800s*

except it's not actually about that it's about how it's STEALING our intellectual property

*realises my understanding of what is and isn't copyright infringement is somehow even more litigious than the actual law, and that adobe is trying to exploit the pro-copyright elements of anti-AI rhetoric to make artstyles copyrightable*

except it's not actually about that it's because it's destroying your brain

*actually reads the study i keep using as proof and realises that not only is it not a very good paper, the authors have explicitly disagreed with the conclusion i keep saying it proves*

except it's not actually about that it's about how it's replacing workers

*remembers that's been happening for the entirety of history and trying to destroy the thing automating your job out of viability has literally never worked*

except it's not actually about that it's about the innate human sovl

*realises my hitler particles are off the charts*

except it's not actually about that it's uhhh... because it's killing the environment

[markovchaingang]

because this blew up, here's a few clarifications:

AI companies are not your friend. their valuation is ludicrously inflated right now and sam altman is scamming investors out of their money (which admittedly is pretty sexy of him). anyone who's trying to convince you you need to "uplift your productivity with AI" is either an idiot or a snake oil salesman

i am not going to force you to like AI. i personally don't use AI because i've rarely ever had a need to. i think it's perfectly fine for you to not like AI art and want some sort of filter to exclude AI stuff from search results or whatever. it wouldn't catch everything, but it'd still remove the bottom 90%, which is where the real problem lies

any belief that boils down to "the masses are all tasteless rubes who don't know what's good for them and need to be controlled (by me and my group) in order to culturally uplift them" is both incredibly pretentious and rather dangerous

i understand that there are two different things people mean when they talk about "human soul" and i think they're both shit. either:

A: you genuinely believe in the existence of an intangible human soul and are telling other people what they should and should not be allowed to do based off of your religious beliefs, in which case i think you should examine what meaningfully separates you from people who want to ban homosexuality because of the bible

or

B: you're using it as a shorthand for "art that i personally like" and declaring that art outside of that category is without merit and should not be allowed to exist, in which case i think you should look at the wikipedia page on degenerate art

[closet-keys]

I have said before that I don't agree with the reactionary tendency to blame "social media" for broader issues, especially at this current moment where (particularly in north america and europe) we're being propagandized constantly to allow increasing censorship and surveillance via "common sense" rhetoric about how evil social media is.

with that said, I think it is necessary to understand policing of online public space as a dimension of the policing of public space more broadly. there is no ''just go outside'' solution to these issues, because ''outside'' is policed as well.

for example, the way that sex workers have been ruthlessly and structurally targeted for social death online is completely in line with how they are treated offline as well. these things work in conjunction. if you make sure someone cannot find and vet clients online, they must do so offline. if you make sure they cannot meet clients indoors, they have to meet them on the street. if they have to meet them on the street, police have more access to these workers (to harass, assault, sexually violate, abduct, and kill them). the whole system works together. every prediction I heard from sex workers in 2016 is the reality today.

so when transfeminized people are talking about being relentlessly harassed off of every social media platform, that is not just an "online" issue. it is happening alongside their being driven out of all public space, online or offline (e.g. with bathroom policing, denial from employment, housing, and shelters, etc.)

when people from the global south are being labeled as "scammers" or "foreign bots" and getting their accounts banned repeatedly, it is part of the exact same ideological justification for border policing, detention, and deportations--it is the constant reinforcement of the idea that these people are "criminal" and here to "take what's yours" and "might appear to be someone struggling but they're not really human."

when images of people with racialized features, fat bodies, facial and skin differences, visible disabilities, intersex and transsexual sexed traits, etc., are repeatedly hidden by algorithms, marked "mature," and censored, this indicates a resurgence of "ugly laws" as part of the broader ascendant eugenics movement. this cannot be divorced from the stigmatization, defunding, dismantling, and criminalization of healthcare for "undesirable" populations.

social media is part of public space. if someone wants to prevent a population from accessing it or being seen within it, this needs to be understood as a call to keep that population out of public space more broadly. if someone who does not own private property (most people) cannot be in public, they must be either trapped within a setting where autonomy is severely limited and communication is surveilled (prisons, detention centers, psych wards, etc) or dead.

[super-ultra-mega-deluxe]

a lot of folks on the anti-communist left fall into a sort of nihilistic despair at the state of things because they are unwilling to see the incredible advances in actual socialist projects as real, leaving an increasingly derelict capitalist structure as the only thing that exists in their perspective. which, in fairness, would also make me rather depressed! getting over the hurdle of accepting that socialism exists in real life does just totally ameliorate that, however.

[flesh-is-the-fever]

I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

[cross-entropy-commandant]

"I don't mean to be offensive, but would you call the way you dress 'punk?'" - @jingerpi

[itswaow]

[uhnonymoos]

i grew up around muslims, i am also trans and leftist.

people in every queer and trans community i go to set an expectation: i should ofrever abandon my muslim past, i should explicitly stop associating yourself with it whatsoever, you either get to be queer or you either get to be raised-muslim.

in reality, there's no such expectation for christianity, and none of them are ready to dismantle their "inner christian" in their heads as much as they expect be to dismantle my "inner muslim"

none fo them get to admit how most first world countries are culturally christian, because christianity is "default" to them, as well as first world, as well as white.

me having a complicated relationship with islam doesn't mean i absolutely despise every piece of it. it means i distanced myself from ummah, but won't hear islamic criticism from non ex muslims at all, because you expect us to dismantle "our inner muslims" in ways you aren't ready to dismantle imperialism and racism in you.

your expectation is us "acting white", you don't want us unless we're that, which means you don't want us at all.

a lot of people claiming to want to uplift brown queer voices and such don't procced to do anything meaningful for them, or for brown people at all. it's just virtue signaling, homonationalism. you'd only care of brown people being queer, and you want the "brown" part of it gone as much as possible.

a lot of people say they want the leftist agenda to stop being us centric and imperialist, but then it's just pretending to care about it. you already made is so little and unhearable you'd have to get out of your way to seek for us speaking. then you'd not seek or if you find us, you will just pass by. hoping someone else would amplify the voice you took from us? and that someone else would hope for that too, so what?

you want us only when we agree with everything usa says about us, you want us until our lives don't put you into too much discomfort. when they put you into too much discomfort, you don't ask why, you'll restore the comfort by banishing us again. your tolerability of us is so intricately conditional, to meet those a third worlder has to build themselves into a first worlder mindset. this is your (inter)nationalism hey.

anyway, islamophobia hurt me more than islam did. now what

[strawhatsufi]

i'm glad everyone's finally decided to have always been against leaving disabled trans women to die. hey, can people do me a big favour? related?

this website has left my disabled trans sister to die a few times now. she used to be a regular heavy user of it before it repeatedly did to her what it does to trans women.

aside from me she has essentially zero social contact with the outside world so and the two of us are trying to build a decent nest egg so that over the course of the rest of this year or so i (and I have a lot going on in my own right!) can start moving towards vocational training to take care of us instead of ebegging on here

our social support system is each other and then tumblr, which i hope we can all understand is a dangerous situation for especially her to be in. she has been repeatedly homeless for her whole life and her pinned post is a medical fundraiser she gave up on.

please throw as much money at her as possible

[mileva-morgan]

On the puppygirl question, apparently.

Karl Marx was disabled, and relied on Engels for rent.

[jingerpi]

I think this is the best essay on the topic yet, the theory section actually engages seriously with marx

[jingerpi]

early reviews are in

[stillnaomi]

it doesn't matter whether a writer uses an LLM or any other assistive technology. in the end, they're the ones who choose whether to a publish the final piece. as such, they're responsible for its contents. if the quotes end being fake, the arguments bad or bigoted, or the data hasn't been fact checked etc, that's on the author. how it was written doesn't matter when judging the author on the final product that they chose to put out

people can lie, misremember or find fake quotes, be bigoted, and be sloppy with data when writing without assistive technology. using speculation about the involvement of AI in the writing process to cast someone as morally bad isn't conducive to any constructive discussion of the words they chose to publish, it only serves as a way to get people to shun them as a Bad Person for reasons irrelevant what they actually chose to publish

[jingerpi]

good news everyone, I've talked it over with myself and decided that disability is capitalism. thanks for listening!

[itswaow]

[stillnaomi]

everything is cuter when a communist does it

[egregore-engine]

there literally isn't a way you can detect "AI generated text" from regular text. it's just text. I could pretend to write like chatGPT and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference because like. there isn't one. it's not Ontologically Marked With AI Soullessness. Trying to ferret out who is "using AI to write stuff" regardless of what kind of stuff it is, is a losing battle, and one in which people will resort to the academic equivalent of hitting the computer with a blunt instrument to fix it.

[apothneiskoimi2]

Ultimately I don’t disagree but there are patterns you can keep an eye out for, such as:

- strange use of idioms or expressions (e.g. “your question has a large blast radius”)

- overly verbose, lots of filler words and too many transitional, connective-type phrases

- overly-acquiescent, just begging to be useful to a degree that’s pathetic and terrified of coming across as rude even when it’s necessary

- circumlocution, too many abstract concepts or talking “around” something instead of addressing the topic directly

- em-dashes, unfortunately

- no stream-of-conscious or true passion. The “rant of love,” the messy run-on flow of praise that you’ll see here on tumblr, is reduced to a grammatically-correct essay

[egregore-engine]

but those aren't reliable and have massive false-positives that will inevitably discriminate against ESL speakers, autistic writers, etc etc, which was the point of the post. and which is a problem you are contributing to.

[itswaow]

[jingerpi]

Allyship 101!

Hi, I've seen a lot of questions recently wondering how to be a good ally, and I've been pondering the details and nuances at play in this conversation. many voices and years of research went in to this so I would really appreciate any support! please like share and comment anything I missed <3

Without further ado I would like to present my

Comprehensive guide to being a good Ally

1. don't support the US military

[strike-another-match]

china: i want to be everybody's friend and prosper together 👍

usa: A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT NEVER TO BE BROUGHT BACK AGAIN

the most open minded westerner: these two are the same