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@kditmiaou
I’m sorry I support all jokes but cave johnson would not be supportive of trans women
Due to a recent accident in the labs, the boys downstairs have found a way to turn men into women. Amazing breakthrough, and we wish you all luck on your transition. And your job hunt. You’re all fired. Sorry boys, nothing against you. We just don’t need women around here trying to clean up the lab while the men are trying to do real work. Cave out.
Hello! Was wondering if you know of any good sources or general arguments to use when people claim things like the minsk agreement was never about russia helping the people of donbass and the lpr. I know largely this is unfortunately one of those conversations, where if people are already deciding to deny the actions of ukraine in the dpr and lpr it may be useless but I do think it'd be useful for me to know regardless in the event someone actually decides to listen
This might sound defeatist given that I spend a great deal of time trying to communicate things of that nature to fence-sitters, but if someone is so instinctively anti-Russia that they perceive even clear attempts at de-escalation which would've ensured the people of the DPR and LPR retained their sovereignty and democratic rights alongside a cessation of the violence as some inherently untrustworthy and duplicitous act, then they are frankly too far gone to reel back in.
Like the terms of the Minsk agreements are not a secret. You can argue about much regarding them, but not about the fact that they clearly prioritise the safety and sovereignty of donchane people. So my most honest answer is that there is probably literally nothing you can say that will move someone who is already familiar with Minsk yet nonetheless chooses to believe Russia had 0 intention of helping the Russian-speaking minority in the border regions and was actually the bad-faith actor in this equation. Ultimately someone like that is not animated by some great love or empathy for Ukraine, they’re animated by a deep-seated hatred and distrust of Russia, first and foremost. You cannot easily reason someone out of what is essentially racism, prejudice is not housed in the chamber of the mind governed by reason. You can sway them on many things. You can waver their support for the Maidanist Ukrainian regime. With enough evidence you might even get them to begrudgingly acknowledge that a genocide is taking place in Donbass(<- immensely difficult, but not impossible). But it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it would be to convince them that Russia is not forever and always acting in evil, subversive ways for evil, subversive self-serving ends. And if those are the terms of the discussion it will always be fruitless imo.
But if you wanna try nonetheless it’s good to keep in mind that what they're usually actually asking you to do is prove something that is ultimately impossible to prove: the purity of a state’s motivations. Like. Unless you can just... call Vladimir Putin up and have him personally relay to us his innermost thoughts at the time while twirling the phone cable and kicking his feeties, if we’re talking intentions we’re all just making inferences at the end of the day. The heart is the domain of Allah, not I, nor you. You cannot intuit intentions, and I don’t have vovochka’s number :(
What we can instead look at(and redirect them to) is what was materially taking place;
Millions of people in the Donbass region rejected the post-Maidan order and organised politically around demands for autonomy, federalisation, or outright independence from Kiev. And that opposition was not unfounded or unprovoked. For people in the east things like the massacre of activists in Odessa+the growing influence and acceptance of open fascists+the increasingly genocidal rhetoric toward Russian-speaking populations by those in power, to name a few, were taken as clear signs of what the new western-aligned political order had in store for them.
Like The DPR and LPR were not beamed down from the Kremlin one morning fully formed like Aphrodite from the sea foam. They emerged from a real political constituency with real grievances and fears and had real popular support. And the new Ukrainian government’s answer to that popular demand for sovereignty was military force; eight years of genocidal warfare, shelling, and displacement aimed at destroying a population that had made it very clear it no longer consented to being governed by the new regime.
So when people try to frame the conflict as though it began and escalated alone with Russian interference, they’re hoping u will just sidestep the accounts and fears and political aspirations of the millions of people who actually live in Donbass and whose, again, popular support made the republics even possible in the first place. That’s why the burden is always on proving Russia's ‘sincerity.’ Because if it was on explaining away the existence of a population that spent years resisting the post-Maidan Ukrainian state and were routinely violently denied their sovereignty, they would sound ghoulish. Because it is a ghoulish position to defend.
Like my support for the DPR and LPR, for the sovereignty of the people of Donbass, and for Russia’s role does not hinge on my believing that Russia is somehow the one state in the world that never acts according to its interests, because it isn’t and even if it was it would be impossible to prove. It hinges on the fact that there comes a point where u have to decide whether self-determination is a universal principle or one that only applies to populations whose humanity has been cosigned by the west+the fact Russia, regardless of intentions, was the only major state actor in this conflict materially supporting the people of Donbass while NATO states armed and politically backed the far-right regime massacring them.
As for Minsk, the terms of the agreements were literally structured around guarantees of Donbass’s autonomy, self-government, amnesty for resistance fighters, right to elections, constitutional reform, and a cessation of violence. Like I’d imagine it would be very difficult to argue that Donbass was an afterthought in an agreement whose central premise is very obvious upon reading was about resolving the status of Donbass😭
But for what it’s worth, I actually agree that Minsk was never intended to be implemented in good faith. Just not because of Russia. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande straight up admitted afterwards that the agreements largely served as a ploy to buy time for Ukraine to strengthen itself militarily.
truly like. to have a successful mutually beneficial interpersonal relationship with someone its very important that you believe that they are a full real entire person just like you are, really believe that. and then you have to successfully communicate that to the other person. and they have to believe the same thing, AND successfully communicate it to the other person. and then you have to decide how you want your relationship with each other to be and you have to agree on most things, or else it doesn't make sense. and you have to actually believe it and not just want to believe it in order to be able to believe you yourself are a good person. you have to actually believe it.
i think those are most of the. the ones you can't do without, if you want it to be relationally healing or whatever. people will be able to tell if you do not really think they are a person with interiority in the way they are. they will not like it.
most of us flatten others to some degree and we do this bc we need psychologically to be able to justify the fact that our brains only have so much social categorization capacity. if you're doing it to the people directly around you, they'll notice.
I didn't understand why people were reacting to me the way they were until I understood what my behavior had been saying to them! then it made perfect sense and I was like "oh shit that's not what I wanted to communicate to you at all, geez, I have to get better at understanding this language so I can make sure I'm showing the things I believe with my behavior in a way this person will understand and that will not instead harm them! i definitely do not want to be harming people but I was sort of unpersoning this person to justify how I was acting because I was making choices based on what I wanted and not what they wanted. if someone asked me straight up "do you want to have interpersonal relationships where you're always making choices based on what you need and discounting what the other person needs and wants?" i would say "no! i don't want to have those kind of relationships! i value not hurting people!" but in those individual instances I was ignoring behavioral communication that I was receiving to just go ahead with what I wanted.
i don't think it's evil to say things like "look buddy I don't care if you're having a bad day, I really did NOT like being spoken to that way" to dismiss someone's feelings. but if someone you claim to care about is behaving in a way that YOU CAN READ as hesitant or reluctant to bring up what you are doing and how it is hurting them, then you better respond to that by saying "hey if you don't want the same things that I want, that's okay. i just want to know the real answer so we can be on the same page. i really value you and it is important to me that you be able to trust me. i have not behaved in a way that has made you feel that I am trustworthy. i will behave differently in order to communicate that to you better"
like sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority" like for real for real. and boy howdy that can sure change your interactions if you can read it, right? like when a doctor has shown me that I can't trust them to believe I am a person who is accurately reporting what is going on with my health, that changes EVERYTHING about the interaction. And if someone i LIKE and who I VALUE tells me that they weren't considering me to be a real person, that's a whole different thing.
I'm not saying everyone is always telling you exactly how human they see you as at all times. but like. its there subconsciously! some people are fine with this and some people grapple with it. i grapple with it a lot. its really hard right? sometimes not seeing yourself as uniquely different is hard. sometimes you know that it is important that you see others that way all the time because it's what is true; we are all human beings. no one can value every single other human the same as themselves or the people they love because we would go insane I think. sometimes it's easy to slot someone you like a whole lot into that grouping a little bit, sometimes, because you want something. sometimes you want that person to play a role in your life that they are not prepared and don't want to play. if people feel like their needs don't matter to you as much as your own, they will not feel fully safe in the relationship, and they'll be right.
this can describe a lot of dynamics and obviously one end of the spectrum is abuse but stuff that isn't abuse can also involve an amount of doing this. its just that the amount and kind of harm it causes depends on the specific circumstances in each case.
this is my most truest hottest deepest cptsd hack. all trauma is relational. you have to regain your own personhood not by denying the personhood of others, but by believing in the personhood of the people around you. and then include yourself.
now maintain that.
that's my ego death recipe! enjoy
this bit
sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority"
is sooo difficult to confront when you are the one doing this because you've been conditioned to believe thats how everybody is interacting. like as a child I struggled to feel seen + understood as a real person by nearly everyone around me, and I think ultimately that led to a rejection of my own responsibility to see others as whole people in their own right. I started to assume that all my social interactions would involve my personhood being ignored and by assuming that I was implicitly refusing to see others as people themselves! So no wonder I was never overcoming the canyon between myself and others and felt incredibly alone.
Over-extrapolating a perceived pattern like that is very easy to do I think. I only interrupted that tendency in myself after fully leaving home and my social context (and growing up lol). And even then it wasn't like a switch flipped, it took practice and commitment to trying to see people as people, and the good luck to meet people who were also trying to connect on that level.
yes yes! I think most people who habitually do this have been taught that how you get your own needs met involves dehumanizing others/denying that they have needs that are as important as your own. I grew up being the only person who would consider my own needs so it made sense for me as a child in that situation to be able to disregard the humanity of the people controlling me to prioritize my own narrative. however! ☝️ ONCE YOU ARE ADULT interacting with PEERS this becomes unfair and harmful! you HAVE to stop treating the people you love like your abusive parents. has been my takeaway. sooooo many of us have noooo idea that is what we are doing when it is absolutely what we are doing. we ascribe people who we feel our selfhood threatened by for whatever reason as having some authority we are justified in resisting, even when that is absolutely not at all the case and we in fact simply don't know how to navigate stressful situations where that ISN'T the case.
this harmonizes very nicely with what I've been thinking of as the role of curiosity in relationships. as I see it, if I acknowledge someone else's personhood and interiority, that also carries a measure of curiosity - or at least a lack of certainty, because I can't assume they follow the patterns I've already seen.
curiosity is hard. it takes a lot of energy, and admitting I don't know is very vulnerable, and I think that effort is part of the reason why it's sometimes downright easier to flatten people. which relates, to me, to the role of fear in dehumanization, because when my trauma made it harder to be vulnerable because I was so guarded, I could not bear the idea of being wrong, especially about other people (not to mention that, to me, being wrong about someone felt dangerous).
I think the closest I've gotten to an internal solution with this is to remember that curiosity is tiring, but it's not all or nothing - I can be passively open to being wrong without actively looking for it, the way I do with my loved ones. but dear lord did it take me a long time to get there.
yeah!!! and I had to get over a bump when learning this where I realized I was getting better at reading people which sometimes meant I could conceptualize why they were acting a certain way than they could, because I was thinking about it and they weren't. and I had to figure out how to square that with the fact that every person is the only person with access to their own interiority. and even when I am Quite confident that the guy screaming at the cashier is doing so because he's insecure and embarrassed about making a mistake, that doesn't mean that I know better than him what his experience is feeling like to him in that moment. i can guess! and some situations I'm more likely to be right than others. but I'm still building a system to approximate being able to imagine what someone is experiencing and feeling based on behavioral clues and pattern recognition. that comes with a necessary caveat that my information can be (and in fact will always be to some degree, even if I'm correct) incomplete. and THAT necessitates me prioritizing continually gathering the information that will help me modify my models and equations which necessitates CURIOSITY yes yes I love curiosity thank you for bringing up curiosity :)
Wow! This sounds a lot like what Nonviolent Communication is trying to do. It never says it quite as clearly tho. It has scripts centered around explicitly stating that you're guessing the other person's emotions, but in the literature there's a sort of '????? ... Step 4, Profit!' where they don't really say why it's helpful. Not that the personhood thing is the only reason, but it's significant!
this has been my huuuge frustration with NVC as a framework! its prescriptive but it doesn't explain what things are most important to prioritize or why, which is often different depending on the specific situation. it doesn't give you the tools to make those determinations yourself, only the tools to Follow Directions. or at least the literature I have read about it does that.
and this is not the FAULT of the framing NVC uses, but not for nothing: I've had people weaponize the concept of NVC frameworks to justify why they don't have to listen to me when I am expressing that something they do has hurt me or someone else, because I "didn't say it right" by which they mean "in the way specified in the NVC guide"
i think sometimes people in the Process of Trying to Heal can latch onto anything prescriptive about interpersonal interaction to use as an excuse for not receiving feedback that they don't like. and I think it's an issue that NVC can be easily utilized this way
[nihilist columbo voice] just no more thing
social media is an experiment by the US government to make the population hate art by having operatives calling themselves artists be the most annoying people in recorded human history
Most important topic in conservation and no one's talking about it
Once I age progress I'm leaving this fucking house
Apparently someone got their car stuck on the light rail tracks at Mt. Baker. For those unfamiliar this is 35 feet up in the air
Fun fact! this is likely due to racism. Not the drivers, to be clear, but this is a not-entirely-unsurprising result of systemic racism in the greater Seattle area and the influence it has on infrastructure spending.
I'm a huge proponent of public transit, rail in specific, and I'm very glad that the greater Seattle area is finally starting to see some solid light rail infrastructure sprouting up in the form of the 1 and 2 lines, but that in no way stops me from critiquing the decisions made in planning and implementation.
Light Rail, in it's colloquial form here in the US, is basically always a compromise solution. It's cheaper than subways, can make good use of existing right-of-way around freeways, and can function as a kind of low-capacity commuter rail in the suburbs while behaving more like a tram or streetcar in downtown areas. It is crucially, however, not a streetcar, nor is it a commuter rail. Streetcars make frequent stops and are optimized for dense areas with lots of traffic. Commuter rails are larger and stop less frequently, optimized for bringing suburban residents into city centers. Commuter rail should, however, be independent of street traffic so it can travel at higher speeds. For this reason, most of the Link light rail system in seattle is actually not at-grade (street level), but on either elevated or sub-grade track. Downtown, the lightrail actually functions as a low-capacity low-frequency subway system in what used to be the bus tunnel (we don't have time, but yes it was stupid). Everywhere else, it's up on elevated tracks that largely follow the freeway system.
There are three stations, all immediately south of that Mount Baker elevated station, where the Link actually runs at-grade. These stations run through the historic low income immigrant neighborhoods of southeast seattle. Here, the trains are forced to stop at red lights, interact with crossing and left-turning traffic, and even cross through sidewalks and terrifyingly narrow pedestrian islands. They could have built elevated track here, as they did everywhere else, but they didn't. they didn't want to spend the money. I have personally watched light rail cars carrying hundreds of people have to wait two full minutes for cars turning left in front of them, delaying trains so like, 5 people could drive there. Once it reaches the end of this low income immigrant-dominant neighborhood, however, the Link returns to it's above-grade status, with Mount Baker being the first elevated stop. You want to know how this woman, who claims she was misdirected by her GPS, probably ended up here? I would bet anything she tried to make a turn at the intersection just before the stop and got confused. The intersection, for reference, looks like this:
I'm not saying it's an easy mistake to make, but given the number of people who drive through here every day, it's honestly not that surprising that someone, especially someone who is from out of town, or someone who is used to shared streetcar lanes, would eventually make this mistake. When you're dealing with a city of hundreds of thousands of people, it's only a matter of time before a mistake like this happens. but it is only possible for it to happen because of the decisions made in the planning process, and one of those decisions was effectively "we can save money if we make everything worse in that part of town where all the foreign poors live", and so they built the thing at-grade, instead of keeping it elevated like everywhere else.
and yes, those tracks are in the middle of a four lane road, and no, there is no way to get to any of the at-grade stations without crossing at least two lanes of traffic on a very busy avenue. and those tiny little pedestrian islands are not only terrifying to walk on, but a man in a wheelchair was clipped by a passing train car a while back because his chair didn't really fit through the tight turns well and one of his feet was sticking slightly out when the train passed by. This is not a problem at like, any other stops in the Link system. Just here. Just in this neighborhood. And it's a fucking disgrace.
Man, Xi Jinping knows more American culture and history than most Americans.
"christian characters in movies are poorly written because the writers are atheist" "atheist characters in movies are poorly written because the writers are christian" stop fighting. all human experience is poorly written in movies because the writers are californian
I don’t like when you guys say “atp” to mean “at that point” or whatever. It means adenosine triphosphate
The Summertime Is A Little Different From The Normaltime
Did You Know Clovers Theyre Doing This Kind Of Thing Nowadays