I think the word "transmedicalism" needs to be reserved for ideas that support giving authority over trans identity to medical institutions, actually.
The political project of trans self-determination can't be transmedicalist, no matter how much someone says "we need to prioritize access to medical transition," because increasing access in pretty much every real-world context is the same thing as attacking the authority of institutional gatekeepers.
Like when you're calling DIY advocates "transmeds" you have Lost The Fucking Plot. You have decided that "transmed" means "trans person whose vibes I don't like." Words actually need to mean things to be useful.
THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."
Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:
The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.
Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.
I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:
This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"
Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:
But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:
"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.
That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."
If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:
Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:
Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:
As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live").
Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.
In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:
"Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work):
Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807
Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem:
Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.
If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:
If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.
"Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy.
Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
There are people who have kinks involving glasses and there are people who have kinks involving compression stockings, so by the Rule of Three there must be someone out there who gets hard for RSI wrist braces to complete the "aroused by assistive devices popularly associated with nerds" trifecta.
Person whose biggest fantasy is getting a handjob from someone who has a special wrist brace specifically for jerking cock because you need a different kind of support to wank someone off than you do for data entry.
There should be the opposite of harassment campaigns where people go "this person seems kind of sad, we should send them a bunch of nice messages and money and fun pictures of animals anonymously until they feel better"
I've seen a lot of terrible analysis of this photo.
People are either shoving it through an AI detector, asking Grok, or they are peeping pixels with expertise they don't have.
Like, you can't go drawing straight lines on something with a highly skewed perspective that also has a distorted shape.
Let's ask Mecha-Hitler!
Or upload it to a sketchy AI detection website!
They often have the accuracy of a coin flip. Even lab-grade tools are only 70 to 80% accurate in controlled conditions. And yet people are trusting a free website with an ad for boner pills in the corner to tell them if something is authentic.
I have been doing high level photo manipulation for two decades. I'm as close to an expert as you will get on Tumblr dot com.
So let's properly peep at the pixels and do actual forensic analysis.
First, I think this is mostly a real photo. Probably taken at some other point in time.
And I don't think this is fully AI generated. I actually think it is a traditional composite. I think the hand and newspaper are separate assets that were blended. It's possible the hand was AI-generated and then composited. And I think they may have taken a real photo of someone holding a newspaper and replaced the hand.
The first oddity is the fingers.
Typically when you touch an object it creates a contact shadow. One finger has a contact shadow and the other does not.
It should probably look more like this.
The next sign of a composite is the edge of the finger.
There is a sign of a feathered edge.
This is a lazy compositing technique to help edges blend without making a super precise selection. If you look at all of the other edges in the photo, this is the only one that has a feathered edge. You can see how clean all the other edges are by the top arrow and how fuzzy the finger edge is by the bottom arrow.
If I were cutting out his other hand and taking the time to do it properly, I would clean up the edge to make sure it was consistent with everything else in the photo.
If I were in a hurry, I would just feather the edge and hope no one actually zooms in.
And then there is the edge of the newspaper.
This is called a matte line. The newspaper was most likely against a dark background when they cut it out, and they did not clean up the edge.
Again, it's lazy. Because Photoshop has a tool dedicated to fixing this exact issue.
In my expert opinion, I think they generated an AI hand, took a photo of someone holding a newspaper in similar lighting, and then manually blended them into an existing photo.
But I don't think this was 100% AI-generated. You typically don't see compositing errors in generated images. They probably couldn't get the AI to generate the newspaper without garbled text.
What's curious is that the pixel resolution is just barely bad enough that you cannot tell if the text is authentic. But it's not blurred or distorted. It is just low enough in resolution to give a sense of text without being legible. And I think that made people suspicious due to AI's reputation when text is involved.
But from what I can tell, the print size and letter spacing does seem to match.
So I don't think that is the clue people are making it out to be.
Last thing, image analysis like this is not 100% conclusive. I'm pretty sure there are shenanigans, but anyone who tells you with absolute confidence that an image is fake... is probably bullshitting or ignorant.
The missing contact shadow could be explained by the angle of the light filling it in.
The feathered edge could be motion blur.
The edge of the newspaper could be a sharpening artifact.
But the fact that the hand and the newspaper were vital aspects of the photo for proof of life, those three variables make this really damned suspicious.
I read so many fantasy novels with diverse magic systems where A Character happens to be a brujo or does Santeria or hoodoo or another closed practice.
I've never read a book where A Character happens to be Jewish and can do practical Kabbalah. Where's the teenager barely past their bnei mitzvah fighting off vampires who somehow knows one of the names of G-d and absolutely should not be that powerful.
Like. There are demons here. You're telling me that someone using Catholic folk magic and saints is fighting off Asmodeus and some Gandalf looking Rabbi doesn't appear at the same time looking for Ashmedai because he's literally been in Jewish myth longer than a Christianity??
While it’s realistic fiction and not fantasy so it’s not implied that they are actually doing magic, the characters in HaSodot (The Secrets) do practical Kabbalah!
Also, in the Golem and the Jinni, someone uses practical Kabbalah and it does work in a magical sense.
"Whether someone understands it or not, these are the consequences of the political views they're espousing" is a pretty important analysis tool for online movements because quite honestly, over half of everyone engaging in politics online have no foundations for the stuff they're saying and are just saying whatever makes them feel like a member of an in-group.
If your in-group is "the left" you're very much not immune to this. In fact, trying to do left-wing politics without even trying to build a foundational political understanding is a great way to end up as a neo-nazi with a tumblr accent rather than an effective left-wing advocate.
if i was in an alien movie i'd be luring the xenomorph into a hot wok and adding chili, garlic, ginger, shaoxin wine, scallions, white pepper and sesame oil
My psych professor mentioned swaddling in lecture so I emailed him a picture of me being swaddled in my dorm room and asked if I could get extra credit because it was really hot in there and I got really sweaty and he was like “fabulous, sure”
