@professoractuality - Tumblr Blog

[no beers in] do you think im ever going to belong somewhere

here's two articles about how JK Rowling just posted on X an upskirt photo of Freda Wallace, a transgender woman, after deadnaming her and misgendering her repeatedly online.

The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in

Rowling posted the picture taken from below because the trans woman, she said, was "refusing to debate me."

sailatina3

Thank you for posting without the fucking destiel meme

hirsuteandcute

I'm just going to say it - body hair (and beauty standards in general) is truly one of the final frontiers of women's issues in the West. Too many women just love their gilded cage too much. It shocks me how virulently women will defend it. I barely open my mouth and the "well I like how it feels. it just makes me feel cleaner. sensory issues. I do it for me. feminism is about choosing (to conform)." brigade come rushing in by the dozens.

Well I don't like how it feels. I don't feel cleaner without body hair. I don't prefer not having body hair. But who will advocate for women like me, but me? For women who do like hair removal, they are advocated for every time they step out of the house and see 99% of the female population also conforming to that standard, or when they watch a movie and see all the shaved actresses, or view an advertisment, or open a magazine, or watch a music video, or scroll through social media, or walk down the streets without receiving insults and glares for having a completely normal bodily feature.

You genuinely can't even point out that hairlessness is a man-made standard without women losing their shit and acting like they are totally immune to propaganda they've been exposed to from birth. I'm so tired.

communistkenobi

I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting

communistkenobi

People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results

dramatic-dolphin

and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.

hiveswap

^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.

The roommate who I'm distancing myself from is having guests over tonight for dinner so I'm. Hanging out elsewhere for a bit. Checking out one of my favorite parks/walking trails.

#yapping on camera

peregyr

chirp?

undying-princess

they're executing the count from sesame street for violating the masquerade

cosmonautroger

7pm

[ID: a little dog eating raspberries from a bush. /End ID.]

pikablob

@furashuban

dykecadence

every moment of every day i am thinking about this tiktok

purrfectly

Lumpfish come in a variety of shapes and colors.

[He scoops up the fish, it spits water and he turns it toward the camera]

This one is stumpy and green. Very beautiful, very powerful.

[He picks up another fish and turns it toward the camera]

This is what a normal lumpfish looks like. It is more elongated, but still a vibrant blue color. Very beautiful, very powerful.

[He picks up another fish and turns it toward the camera]

This is one of the stumpiest ones we have. Its hump is very high. It is very stumpy, but yet very beautiful, and very powerful.

[He pans over a lot of fish, all looking up at the camera]

My fish army is ever growing, and soon I will over throw the world. Very beautiful, very powerful.

saint-batrick

because of this tiktok, i frequently murmur "very beautiful, very powerful" at myself, and i cannot recommend it enough.

casualcarnage

mich-vanadis

In a world full of "Rocky hates Stratt" I am "Rocky thinks Stratt is brave for giving up the one person who understood her most"

trans-girl-nausicaa

The Clarifier would like to make just one more comment

phantazesthai

My Aumaua Envoy, Ulalume 🍄🪻 Dreamy Court Augur with a penchant for frost magic and axes 💕

noahsfault

One of the biggest tragedies of half the TADC fandom rejecting Jax's transness is they're not appreciating the fact that goose trojan horsed her transfem character in the shell of a tumblr sexyman and then made it canon in cinemas

You are robbing yourself of how funny that is and I'm sad for you