#caste discourse

[blackoutlandish]

That picture of that purple girl in the dress is offensive. idk how she gets off on wearing blue. Fucking rich business owners don't know their place.

In case my followers needed another illustration of why the caste system needs to be burned to the ground, here’s another exhibit for the collection.

[sparkler-trail]

I’m not claiming we’re oppressed, almost nobody thinks except for people in denial about whether they are successes or not and trying to blame the world for it, or I guess people who are really into caste-justice but think that you need to be Oppressed in order to participate, that but it would be nice if other castes would stay out of the things that jobs for failure greens

most castes have jobs that a person who isn’t great at being a member of their caste can still do and save up enough for a credit in a slow but reasonable amount of time

there are so many jobs purples can choose from, based on what they’re good at, if they have a skill there is some job that pays enough for a credit eventually that uses it. greys specifically push for jobs that are obviously actually part of other caste’s fields to go to the greys who can’t do grey things. yellows and oranges have less choices but not none, and blues all have the option of doing nothing blue but automatically making enough blue income that any actual job they do for fun is still less than the OOCI cap.

other castes on average are taken less seriously about most things (than nerd greens. I don’t think anyone takes art greens seriously about anything but art?) and that is bad.

(also I think colluding on credit auctions only works when you have a really small population with less direct zero-sum competition in all fields, otherwise there are too many people with too many factors to account for and to punish defectors? although it has been years since I saw my game theory nerd friend and they explained it to me.)

but there are so many failure greens and it would be nice if people could just. let us do our thing. we’re an unfortunate byproduct of gambling to get geniuses or even just actually good nerds and artists and people could stand to be less obnoxiously mean about it.

like, one of my housemates has set up a program that pops up a window with an estimate of how much we are likely to be delaying a baby every time we buy something over a certain threshold. the things we do are mostly not incredibly necessary for ~improving the planet~ or otherwise necessary in any way. if I did not exist, there are plenty of other people who could do any of the exact same things that I do, or they just wouldn’t get done or would be done by computers and nobody would miss the difference.

obviously people shouldn’t be trying to take over work that actually belongs to other castes, but some people are really desperate and want there to be less competition over whatever it is they do.

we are not necessary for anything except in the way that sawdust is necessary for carpentry. but we’re here anyway and like approximately every other person on the planet we want nice things and the government doesn’t demand that we just kill or sterilize ourselves because we’re part of the decision they make so could everyone please just stop.

[fill-the-unforgiving-minute]

I’m pretty sure this post is basically correct, but I can’t be entirely certain, because I didn’t make it all the way through the ALL CAPS and the “I’m three years old and know everything! Let me explain it to you like you’re 1!”

Learn to write in a coherent fashion, folks.

[strawberry-poison-frog]

as you're probably seeing from the discourse on your post, they don't really think of their thing with reds as a /caste/ thing. :(

Yeah, I can see.  It’s really something, isn’t it?  

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I don’t actually want them to understand what we went through.  

[to-find-the-sun-deactivated]

things I think about when I’m on the train: 

which castes of children do I think I could do right by (answer: complicated) 

would Makel Alasi get less shit if he wasn’t crosscaste or am I just mad that people criticize my fave (answer: involves a hypothetical and cannot be answered) 

is it ethical for me to have children and is it ever going to be (answer: no and hopefully)

setting aside spring babycrazy, do I actually rationally want to have children (answer: yes but not enough to have one) 

would I be happier if I wasn’t half-yellow (answer: I would be such a different person that the question has no meaning) 

would I be happier if I were a yellow (answer: god I have no idea) 

[notcasteinstone]

So I’m seeing a lot of Caste Discourse lately, and compared to what a lot of people are discussing this is kind of petty, but, like--

I’m the product of an intercaste marriage (my dad’s green, my mom’s grey) and on, like, a professional level it’s pretty much worked out fine for me--I’m artsier than average for a grey, sure, but I’m very happy sublimating that as a dancer. But I wish there wasn’t so much pressure to dye my hair??? I’ve got this gorgeous verdigris going on under the grey dye and I get hassled soooo much if I try to let it grow out.

[blackoutlandish]

We’d always suspected that when we finally made contact with aliens, there would be some cultural friction. That there would be things about each species that the other would find bizarre, or incomprehensible, or disturbing.

We still weren’t prepared.

The aliens were too tall and too narrow, visibly unstable, nearly falling as they walked. Their limbs must have been even narrower than the environment suits they wore to contain the toxic atmosphere of volatile gases they thrived in, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what they really looked like. One of my colleagues had seen pictures, and had gone quiet when I asked. I did not ask again.

Their castes were marked by features less obvious than ours, wispy tendrils partially concealed by their environment suits, which was why (we told ourselves afterward) it took us so long to notice. It started with an innocent question from one of our researchers, a xenobiologist working on classifying the intraspecies variations in their physiology.

One of the aliens had an aberration in its tendrils, near the base where they connected to its body. At first we thought the alien might have had some kind of disease, but when we (cautiously, politely) asked it, it seemed unconcerned. Apparently it used a sort of cosmetic alteration, which was beginning to fail and would have to be reapplied.

That was when the xenobiologist asked her fateful question. Why, she wanted to know, would the alien alter its caste markers in this way? Did it indicate a subspecialization of some kind?

No, apparently it was attempting to indicate a different caste than the one naturally indicated. Nor was this a simple case of deceptive mimicry; apparently its natural caste markings were mismatched to its actual caste, and it was applying a cosmetic correction to bring its appearance into line.

That was how we learned that Amentans allow their castes to interbreed.

[blackoutlandish]

Where I'm from doctors need to use a broad knowledge of their field and a strong grasp of statistics to diagnose diseases and select treatments. Those aren't orange skills, hon.

"only greens are capable of learning things or doing math, no one else has job skills of any kind”