[pussyhat]

[thatisababyitshuge]

“At a clinic in Anand in northern India, women give birth to Western children. White women’s eggs are inseminated with white men’s sperm, and the embryo is implanted in the wombs of Indian women. The children will show no traces of the women who bore them. They will neither bear her name nor get to know her. After giving birth to the children, the Indian women surrender them. They sign a contract and receive between 2,500 and 6,500 USD the moment they give up their responsibility for the child they just gave birth to. For the women, most of whom are poor and from nearby villages, the payment can be up to the equivalent of ten years’ salary. The buyers are typically American, European, Australian, Japanese, or wealthy Indians; they are childless heterosexual couples, homosexual men, and single men… With traditional surrogacy, the industry had been limited to the Western world. An Indian mother would have meant a child with Indian features. But suddenly, through the miracle of modern technology, it became possible for an Indian woman to give birth to a white child. Thus, Americans could pay two-thirds less than for surrogacy in the USA and still come home with their “own” child, even though it had spent nine months in an Indian woman’s body. Embryo transplantation also impacted on American courts’ judgments in the child custody cases. In one case from 1993, almost identical to “Baby M”—the mother had second thoughts after the birth and wanted to keep the child—the judgment was that she was not the child’s mother. She “was not exercising procreative choice, but was providing a service.” Because the egg wasn’t hers, the pregnancy wasn’t motherhood but a “service”; therefore, she had no rights to the child she gave birth to. This has now become standard practice in the USA, and even when the egg belongs to a third woman—a so-called egg donor—custody is granted to those who paid for the child.”

— Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self (via invertprivileges)

[orthoscheme]

supermarkets should have benches

[orthoscheme]

everywhere should have benches

[little-miss-rasputin-pageant]

in almost every other children's book where the main heroine is swept away to a land of whimsy she's shown having a lovely time; braving dangers occasionally, trying to find her way home, sure, but ultimately delighting in the magic around her. meanwhile alice spends her entire time in wonderland like

[roach-works]

look, here’s the thing: alice in wonderland’s enduring fucking charm is that it perfectly captures the vibe of being a very tired and annoyed child who is nonetheless required to play along with adult nonsense.

alice is dragged from place to place without warning, forced to play stupid games with no good prizes, grilled over her schooling and manners and recitation and dress, scolded, judged, insulted to her face, sent away, given gifts she didn’t ask for and doesn’t like, corrected incorrectly, been subject to shifting and arbitrary rules, and then when she gets snappish with all this bullshit everyone acts like a little girl’s temper is the end of the fucking world.

alice in wonderland isn’t a drug trip or a nightmare or a metaphor, that’s just what being ten years old is LIKE. that’s why kids love it so much. even if they can’t quite articulate how, they recognize themselves in it.

[trans-pickles]

I'm gonna go ahead and add - the reaction image is barely even a joke. This is the original illustration of her at the Mad Hatter's tea party.

look at how fucking angry she is

[maureen2musings]

Côte d’Albâtre, Étretat

mobywils

[smaragdine]

[thefiresontheheight]

A woman not shaving or wearing a dress or wearing makeup or wearing femme clothes or having styled or long hair or caring how she looks or using a masc name or whatever else is actually a neutral thing and not a sign of her being depressed or giving up or being sad or whatever

[thehairiestfeminist]

[stillwater67]

to the pacific

[thoodleoo]

one of the funniest sections of pliny the elder's natural histories to me is in book 30 when pliny excitedly says that moles are the animal that magicians love most and then goes on to explain that it's because moles are creatures becursed and despised by nature itself

[thoodleoo]

pliny the elder, seeing moles: truly there is no creature farther from god than this

[recolored-classics]

Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) by John William Waterhouse

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[optionalcausality]

My fear is the combo of "I am clicking on a button to tell me a made-up answer instead of spending any amount of time and effort to look this up" and "The output is Mostly Fine so let's just put what it says without making corrections/edits".

Because they do go together. Once someone has adopted the attitude of "it's Mostly Fine", especially if they're doing this for time-saving purposes, then they stop reading it to check if it actually matches the assignment.

I expect that in about fifty years, there's going to be a human-curated list of the publications from this time period that must be corroborated by a second source because the information therein was partly generated by the bullshit machine whose output cannot be trusted.

[sophsun1]

Arrested Development – 1.01: Pilot

[teaboot]

Why so many wolf attacks in fantasy. Where are the Boars. The immortal and humongous Boar

[crevicedwelling]

location: moss oasis, endless barren waste

known for: moisture, spores, mite farming

[bogleech]

They say there are other worlds out there beyond the stone sea, but I think that's stupid nonsense.

[apersnicketylemon]

I want to make something really clear that I think Anti-Choice people have failed to understand that Pro Choicers definitely saw coming.

An exception for Rape, Life of the Mother, and Incest mean nothing when you have to prove it in a court of law, or get a team of lawyers and judges to sign off on it which can take weeks or even months.

Weeks a person dying hasn't got. Women are now dying. Actually dying. Because hospitals legally could not save their lives until they could wake up a judge and get their lawyers, and another sides lawyers awake and up and figured out if it was actually necessary or not. All people with no understanding of medicine, and no attatchment to the person suffering who simply doesn't want to die.

There's a lot more I could cover, like the increase in illegal abortion, abortion tourism, the massive increase in infant abandonment... but I'm going to leave it here.

People are dying. People who should be alive. Who would be alive if abortion was legal and the hospital could have simply treated their patient without waiting for a dozen men with no medical experience in another building to decide if their patient actually needs treatment or not. And yes they do have to wait. Because if they don't they get charged with murder for trying to save a life.

Your policies are killing people. Not theoretical people. Not fetuses with no conscious thought or pain. Adults with lives. Teenagers with a whole life ahead of them. Mothers with children who need them. Real people with conscious thought, with fear, with pain. People who meet every definition of personhood.

[lizard-of-oz]

They know.

[alskjfweipjasdfk]

‘am i right ladies’ is the best way to end any text post am i right ladies