Zelvyth @zelvyth - Tumblr Blog

the thing many people here do not understand about men is that sometimes when a man does lots of gay things in public it is actually evidence that he is fully heterosexual

guiltfactory

in a group of men jokingly kissing each other, the gayest one is the guy who refuses to participate

wutheringheightsfilm

every day it just concerns me how little compassion people have. no compassion for those living in the global south. no compassion for immigrants. no compassion for disabled ppl. no compassion for addicts. no compassion for prisoners. no compassion for children. like holy shit ...

wutheringheightsfilm

i made a separate post about this but actually there are plenty of people cough white people who care about animals more than they ever do human people . not what i'm talking about make your own post

nourishedbytime

yourfriendlyneighborhoodsloth

littledivathatyouown

chatterwell

motziedapul

Would you believe this wisdom came from Facebook? Anyway send this to anyone using conservative rhetoric in leftist spaces.

feminist-space

baddywronglegs

The people who insist AI is smarter than a human are doing their fucking damnedest to manifest that

geocaprican

muntzerism-diggerism

luulapants

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

naamahdarling

Finally, a good fucking take.

notlikingbestgirl

Out of Touch

is-it-out-of-touch-thursday

Yes

beardedmrbean

ignorethisatyourperil

a reminder that ursula le guin’s writing schedule was the best writing schedule.

myfootyrthroat

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

myfootyrthroat

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

official-torfmoor

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

myfootyrthroat

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

myfootyrthroat

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

bees-and-mice-and-frogs-and

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

myfootyrthroat

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

leebrontide

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

toreblogallthethings

Peer reviewing the tags: #these attitudes are also why ppl are weird about sex work#and weirdly enough visibly disabled people working - like esp thinking of like#places that employ ppl w LDs as workers and volunteers#what they FEEL is 'these people make me uncomfortable'#and they say 'they shouldn't have to do that'#so the solution is. no visibly disabled people getting to work#the fact that. they want to work. and want jobs#is irrelevant#too many people base their politics off their like. gut feelings of discomfort and unease#which are completely disconnected from both practicality and actual morality

clonerightsagenda

I think this is just a trend everywhere but I've been very frustrated this week by how much admin work is being outsourced to me as the patient/customer.

My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.

The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.

I feel like at a certain point these constant fetch quests become unreasonable?? Is it too much to expect these groups to communicate with each other instead of making me run back and forth between them???

clonerightsagenda

Made this post and then the new property manager (who started on Monday and only finally emailed us today because I sent a vaguely professionally hostile email to her boss because I hadn't heard anything and was not convinced she existed) asked for a list of open action items which her predecessor should have had but apparently wasn't keeping track of, which I learned when I met her boss and provided her with the list of open action items, which I guess tragically died in a fire in the last 2 weeks since she was sitting at my kitchen table, being menaced by the skull. How many people's jobs am I doing now