41288461922 - Tumblr blog

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Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing

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I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

Alison 

Coursera

FutureLearn

open2study

Khan Academy

edX

P2P U

Academic Earth

iversity

Stanford Online

MIT Open Courseware

Open Yale Courses

BBC Learning

OpenLearn

Carnegie Mellon University OLI

University of Reddit

Saylor

IDEAS, INSPIRATION & NEWS (websites which deliver educational content meant to entertain you and stimulate your brain)

TED

FORA

Big Think 

99u

BBC Future

Seriously Amazing

How Stuff Works

Discovery News

National Geographic

Science News

Popular Science

IFLScience

YouTube Edu

DIY & HOW-TO’S (Don’t know how to do that? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Here are some great websites.)

wikiHow

Wonder How To

instructables

eHow

Howcast

MAKE

Do it yourself

FREE TEXTBOOKS & E-BOOKS

OpenStax CNX

Open Textbooks

Bookboon

Textbook Revolution

E-books Directory

FullBooks

Books Should Be Free

Classic Reader

Read Print

Project Gutenberg

AudioBooks For Free

LibriVox

Poem Hunter

Bartleby

MIT Classics

Many Books

Open Textbooks BCcampus

Open Textbook Library

WikiBooks

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES & JOURNALS

Directory of Open Access Journals

Scitable

PLOS

Wiley Open Access

Springer Open

Oxford Open

Elsevier Open Access

ArXiv

Open Access Library

LEARN:

1. LANGUAGES

Duolingo

BBC Languages

Learn A Language

101languages

Memrise

Livemocha

Foreign Services Institute

My Languages

Surface Languages

Lingualia

OmniGlot

OpenCulture’s Language links

2. COMPUTER SCIENCE & PROGRAMMING

Codecademy

Programmr

GA Dash

CodeHS

w3schools

Code Avengers

Codelearn

The Code Player

Code School

Code.org

Programming Motherf*?$%#

Bento

Bucky’s room

WiBit

Learn Code the Hard Way

Mozilla Developer Network

Microsoft Virtual Academy

3. YOGA & MEDITATION

Learning Yoga

Learn Meditation

Yome

Free Meditation

Online Meditation

Do Yoga With Me

Yoga Learning Center

4. PHOTOGRAPHY & FILMMAKING

Exposure Guide

The Bastards Book of Photography

Cambridge in Color

Best Photo Lessons

Photography Course

Production Now

nyvs

Learn About Film

Film School Online

5. DRAWING & PAINTING

Enliighten

Ctrl+Paint

ArtGraphica

Google Cultural Institute

Drawspace

DragoArt

WetCanvas

6. INSTRUMENTS & MUSIC THEORY

Music Theory

Teoria

Music Theory Videos

Furmanczyk Academy of Music

Dave Conservatoire

Petrucci Music Library

Justin Guitar

Guitar Lessons

Piano Lessons

Zebra Keys

Play Bass Now

7. OTHER UNCATEGORIZED SKILLS

Investopedia

The Chess Website

Chesscademy

Chess.com

Spreeder

ReadSpeeder

First Aid for Free

First Aid Web

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Please feel free to add more learning focused websites. 

*There are a lot more learning websites out there, but I picked the ones that are, as far as I��m aware, completely free and in my opinion the best/ more useful.

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the thing that a lot of western leftists seem to struggle to even consider is that there is a long long history of resistance and insurrection and social change that has nothing to do with the united states or europe or christianity, that you can’t cast an entire country as a purely good or bad actor without erasing the existence of dissidents within that country with their own values and beliefs that you don’t have the context to understand as an outsider. you can’t just invert everything in the dominant narrative that you’re familiar with (usa bad, enemies of usa good) because then you’re still operating under the assumption that everything is about you

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Do you actually understand what radfems believe? I don't think you do (and no, vague callout posts don't count)

*record scratch*

This is the point where you benevolently instruct me on what radical feminism “really” is, invoking a no-true-scotsman fallacy for the vast majority of radical feminists I have encountered, educating me into a benevolent version of radical feminism that is “just” about recognizing women as an oppressed class, “just” acknowledging biology, “just” about protecting the lesbians that are under imminent threat of being raped by men that use trans inclusive legislation to “access women’s spaces.”

At which point I am supposed to go, “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I guess the whole TERF thing is piggybacking on a long trend of people hating feminism for no reason!”

Unfortunately for you, you’re not the first person to try this, nor am I unfamiliar with the so called Radical Feminists, and I know that what probably appears and feels like innocent and important critical thought is the mouth of a deep pit with hateful bigotry, batshit assumptions, and oppressive, restrictive bio-essentialism at the bottom of it.

You possess only benevolent concern for trans men, until you start calling recipients of mastectomies and hysterectomies “ruined” and “mutilated.” You just want to stop abuse, until a woman is alleged to be an abuser, and this doesn’t seem possible to you. You just want to acknowledge the reality of biology, until a person born with two X chromosomes and a vagina and labia who also has facial hair and a deep voice wants to use the bathroom, and it feels to you like she shouldn’t.

The radfem understanding of “biology” and its importance is wrong. There is no need to “affirm” or “deny” biology. It just is. No matter what your opinion on the nature of intersex conditions, a strict biological sex binary in human bodies objectively does not exist. We are talking about science. There is no “should.”

To consider the conditions necessary for reproduction, or anything that is evolutionarily advantageous, as a moral imperative is bonkers. It is not “better” to conform more to a sex binary. God is not watching. My uterus does not “make” me a woman because it’s not “for” anything. I potentially CAN become pregnant but biology does not “want” me to, evolution has not made me “for” being a woman, evolution does not think or want or intend ANYTHING. Categorizing people based on which size gametes they could produce under ideal circumstances is 100% a choice.

To judge human reproductive biology as a moral ideal is survivorship bias; yes, we “have to” have “biological sexes” (which really doesnt mean anything outside of having differentiated gametes) to cOnTiNuE aS a SpEcIeS. No, this does not mean that everyone does fall into one of two categories, or that everyone should, or that we should care about the consequences if we don’t. “Humans have two sexes except for disorders” is not the objective statement you think it is. On a cosmological scale, life itself is an anomalous disruption of equilibrium. We are disorder.

Y'all are like 4% away from being far-right evangelicals in MANY of your ideas. When you assert that trans men only “identify” as men because they’re unhappy and you’re only benevolently concerned about them, you’re repeating something that homophobic fundamentalists very much do say about lesbians (and the most threatening thing about lesbians to these fundamentalists is their gender non-conformity!) The same group of people cites human reproductive biology as evidence that no one is “really” gay.

And of course, if you take producing eggs as both the fundamental defining quality of a woman and as more sacred or defining than anything else, and you feel entitled to the bodies of trans men to the extent that you think you have any say at all in what medical procedures they do or don’t have, you fundamentally don’t support reproductive rights. You don’t support the rights of women to their own bodies, you don’t support the rights of men to their own bodies, and there are indeed many self-identifying “pro-life radfems,” who have taken this idea to its logical conclusion.

Do not do this. Stop. Your ideas about trans people are repugnant, don’t get me wrong, but fundamentally this stuff hurts everyone. I would not be a “radfem” even if it wasn’t for the bigotry toward trans people. The whole ideology is ass backwards. And it is stuffed to the brim with people who are willing to hurt anyone, even those they are supposedly defending, in order to hurt the people they hate.

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Seriously though like, I missed the boat on this whole radical honesty thing. I guess everyone wants to be true to themselves now? That’s…great…but like you’re really only ever going to meet a select few people you can be totally honest with about everything. Lie to strangers! Lie to authorities! Like damn didn’t you have parents that told you never to tell people on the phone that you were home alone? When the interviewer asks if you ever experimented with drugs, you say no! This is not a therapy session! He’s got no business asking you that anyway! Lots and lots of people are not entitled to your vulnerability. Damn.

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modern ‘big budget’ films are shot so heavily underexposed and dark because they use so much cgi and stupid gimmick techniques and unnecessary equipment that it’s basically impossible to get a correct shot in “normal” lighting like that’s it and it’s stupid but that’s it. and that’s why the next person who writes more than two lines about this bullshit having to do with like the cynicism of modern cinema or directors being ableist or is actually going to get gangstalked for the next 6 years.

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in all seriousness now would be a very good time for people to learn about the history of us backed coups and intervention in latin america. the resurgence of left wing parties in many countries is going to be considered a threat to us hegemony and the us will intentionally destabilize countries and back fascist leaders to maintain control. its imperative that we know what these kind of regime change efforts have looked like historically so we can identify them in the here and now.

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I really fucking hate how people say the Soviets were the ones who defeated Nazi Germany single-handedly because every single time the first thing they mention are soviet casualties.

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what if... people took a 24 hour break from discussing identity and trying to find community in identity and labelling everything... and just used those 24 hours to focus on more direct action at the root of matters instead of talking in circles... what if people collectively remembered that labels are secondary to the innate and undeniable value of personal experience, and that labelling everything to quickly understand everything through simplification is a fool’s task... what i am saying is... imagine the work that could get accomplished once we stopped discoursing over who gets to be a worthy person. if your worldview and morals hinge on You and your need to feel in the right, all the time... instead of taking in things outside you for a change... consider that your behaviour is only adding to the noise

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A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life. Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

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People are like I’m fighting classism by sharing racist articles abt Azealia banks and thinly veil their white rage and wealth envy as class consciousness and then are like I’m so anti racist because I don’t “use aave” and reblog gofundmes made by scammers.

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On the topic of being obsessed with introspection and “self discovery”, i recently read something by Viktor Frankl which I feel fits the whole following of astrology/mbti/personal discovery etc very well. He said that, because life has become void of meaning for many, because there is an “existential vacuum”, we compensate by “psycho-analyzing” ourselves, sharing our psychological problems and insights with others, discussing them, etc (and he predicted this development in the 40s!). An existential vacuum leads to an obsession with the own psyche that can be the cause of neuroses and its pseudo-therapy. Self-reflection can in itself be the root of many problems. I had a talk with someone about how phases of self-reflection and lots of journaling are often the least mentally stable and happy ones. When we feel good, we do not feel the need to conduct some sort of self-therapy. Viktor Frankl also came up with the concept of using a paradoxical intention for healing neuroses. A patient with insomnia, for example, cannot sleep because they so rigidly and obsessively try to sleep, which hinders them from relaxing into an unconscious state. So a paradoxical intention would be “for a change, why don’t you try to not sleep tonight, and just relax and think about something nice?” - which then makes them fall asleep quickly. Maybe by setting the paradoxical intention “i will not try to figure myself out and heal myself” many of the problems which were simply rooted in obsessing over yourself will take care of themselves.

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1.When you re-frame things as a compulsion, then it becomes about directing  rather than developing its parts;  u can, metaphorically, concentrate on irrigation and the material is reliably self-generating, its possible for me, for example in drawing, to endlessly map crawling lines onto surfaces, emanating from or toward points or corners;; viewing as a compulsion may allow me to  re purpose mindfully ‘all these lines’ into something else, instead of fixating or getting lost in the lines themselves, I treat them like running water and concentrate on what container id like to fill.

 2.Thinking of contemporary art history as a kind of mental disco. Cindy Sherman dressed up as other people in her hometown of Buffalo without understanding why but was able to set it to abled practice. She got the camera involved. Art becomes her  beard, transable. Imagine chuck close read as outsider art. Somehow he transcends where he wouldn’t in another space. The work worked, so the person works. Artists, autists, Andy Warhol n’ Andy Kaufman. the old idea of impassioned madness seems to fit much less comfortably in the second half of the 20th century, in an intensified way this early 21st has  the autistic obsessive-compulsive finding definition; someone who continually needs to complete the picture of their being; the inadequacy of language and bodily expression, virtual reliance. Everything in scare quotes. Collectors ready to be collected. The ‘poor image’ in person.

3. Autism as construction for ‘thinking about other things’. Autism is a literal, sort of, thing..  the ’sort of’ opens it up to use as a cultural construction; ‘Sort of’ in that there’s something flimsy about a broad spectrum of ill-understood, incurable and particular cases . There seems to be a popular tidal movement developing autism as not local, not something you ‘have’, but as an alternative relation, a whole brain, and something to try to understand rather than cure. There are parallels in the development of gay culture and non-hetero sexuality’s history of classification as mental illness. This movement seems directly related to the voice autists have found online. If we’re trans, that is: if there’s a part of culture trying to change its face/gender to accommodate people who’s voice have been historically suppressed, (this tide comes with for one thing, a significant demographic shift in America; the dissolution of a primary racial majority; accompanied by the opposite of accomadation : tension violence murder, playing out on the political stage too –as well as in mobbish clickbait circulation online. Trump living click-bait.) then we find ourselves autistic, in the face of each others difference, needing to approach each other with that kind of care. In the process of a deconstruction of a central voidic normalcy (the goal?) Each body is political, particular and pre-normative. 

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The true extent of our elite institutional rot really becomes evident once you realize that we are now approaching a year since the pandemic started, and we have done zero institutional reforms, built zero new infrastructure, added zero new productive capacity. Nothing.

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It's so much easier for liberals to make minorities who don't support their agenda "Transracial" with pseudo-academic jargon than to grapple with the huge spike in minority support for Trump and the republicans. Their naked contempt is showing...

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald·Jan 18

Fascinating attempt to reconcile the fact that so many non-whites voted for Trump (more than 2016), and that some of the key participants in the Capitol riot and related groups are non-white: "Multiracial whiteness": they're white even when they're not.