lilietsblog

[lilietsblog]

I'm an adventurous eater which is a HORRID combo with being a picky eater. Yes I want to try the new weird pizza flavor! No not if it has fried onions in it! At least pizza usually lists ingredients that go into it. Eating as a guest at someone's home? Fucking nightmare scenario, our entire national cuisine is built around shit I can't eat.

People who go "you're a picky eater but you'll eat mountains of fast food" are so stupid. Fast food is consistent food! Fast food always has the same recipe! When you have dietary restrictions, yes you'll eat mountains of food you cab trust, because AT LEAST YOU GET TO FUCKING EAT.

Being a picky eater means going hungry. Sometimes it means a choice between humiliation and going hungry. Sometimes it means knowingly making yourself sick and then going hungry because of it. Sometimes it means being force fed and physical punishment. Sometimes it means humiliation where you didn't expect it because you didn't think an adult was going to try to "gotcha" you in public about what you can and cannot eat to, what, prove you're wrong about it???

It's a horrific experience, never ending. Sometimes you settle into a routine, a household that knows and respects you... and then another person comes in, and then you're a six year old being spoiled and rude all over again.

Being a picky eater means eating food that is burnt, food that is undercooked, food that is oversalted, food that is objectively a horrific combination of flavors, food you can barely stand, because at least you CAN stand it. At least it's food. At least you can keep it down. At least you're not going entirely hungry this time.

People who think "picky eating" means coming from privilege, eat my entire ass.

people are absolutely EVIL about the boundaries of "picky eaters". no, they do not have to try it. yes, they can know they don't like it without having eaten it before. no, they probably have not suddenly grown a taste for the food they've said they hate. no, they probably are not going to like it in the Special Way This One Place Cooks It. yes, you are being a bad friend if you try to "trick" them into eating it anyway

[lilietsblog]

I understand that the male privelege trans men sometimes get granted in cis society in general is conditional. But I dont understand how acknowledging that trans women statistically face much more violence, discrimination, and are more often homeless than trans men, and how that might just hint at an imbalance in perception and treatment between those two groups, makes it impossible for the two to work together and be allies. That doesn't mean that trans men dont also face violent transphobia.

Note: I'm going to respond to this ask in two parts, the second in a reblog of the original, because tumblr is being an ass about post length and won't let me put my full answer as a single reply. It's not impossible for trans men and trans women to be allies - this is exactly the thing that I want! And I've acknowledged, repeatedly, that there are absolutely situations in which trans men benefit from male privilege. What I'm saying, rather, is that trans men do not have the exact same kind and degree of male privilege as cis men; that possession of this privilege doesn't automatically render us the oppressors of trans women; and that there are contexts in which a trans man might be more vulnerable than a trans woman, or share the same degree of marginalization. I'm not saying this always the case; I'm simply saying that it can be. Which is - once again - why I think talking about conditional advantage rather than privilege is the more useful terminology here, as it better allows us to discuss the nuances of individual situations. But as you've mentioned statistics, I think it's vitally important to stop and ask why trans men might be less frequently recognised as victims of violence, discrimination and homelessness than trans women, when these things absolutely affect us. It's not that we don't experience the worst extremes of transphobic, homophobic and misogynistic violence; we do! It's that, when those experiences are recorded, we're often miscategorised as women. Trans women are hyper visible; trans men, by contrast - and particularly adult trans men - are frequently invisible, as the scaremongering about us tends to be fixated on the horror of "confused little girls" being "tricked" into "mutilation" because of "social contagion." But as adults, we tend to be overlooked - and while that can help to keep us safe in some contexts, it can also increase our vulnerability in others. Before I give some examples, I want to first reiterate: this is not me claiming that trans men are inherently more oppressed than trans women, or arguing that trans women's visibility doesn't significantly contribute to the violence and oppression that they face. What I'm trying to do, rather, is highlight some specific factors that can lead to trans men being statistically overlooked, even when we're impacted by the same types of violence and discrimination as trans women, because the elision of our experiences matters. So:

[lilietsblog]

toby fox is a himedanshi success story

[lilietsblog]

Trans men obviously and clearly face a lot of transphobia and are specifically oppressed for being trans men in a way that is worthy of discussion. At the same time, claiming that they hold no privelege over trans women is absurd. Trans men get paid more than trans women (and also less than cis people). Trans women face more violence and more social ostracisation even in queer spaces. These are facts. And they at no point diminish the real discrimination and oppression that trans men face. Arab men (i am taking my own ethnicity as an example) are also oppressed in a specific way not only for their race but also uniquely in the way their manhood is seen. This is worthy of discussion. It would be absurd to claim they have no privilege over Arab women, though. Privilege isn't a moral failing and having it doesn't minimize the very real oppression you face. There is no person in the world who is only oppressed and holds absolutely zero privelege.

At no point in my post have I claimed that trans men can't hold privilege over trans women. What I've said, rather, is that: - trans men do not automatically possess the same degree of male privilege as cis men; - we do not all automatically possess the same degree of male privilege as each other; - what male privilege we do have is not universally retained in all contexts and can, indeed, be stripped from us; - insisting on an immutable hierarchy of oppression wherein X group is always held to have more/less privilege than Y group is inaccurate; and - it is possible for some women to have contextually more privilege than some men, all of which is why I think it's more useful to talk about these issues in terms of conditional advantages rather than privileges in the first place. None of this precludes acknowledging situations where trans men having more privilege than trans women! I'm simply asserting that this is not always so, and that this particular strain of discourse, which so frequently characterizes trans men as the adversaries of trans women rather than their allies in a shared struggle, is far more often unhelpful than not.

[lilietsblog]

i would like to note that there is actually a way to square the circle and reconcile high payment to provider with low cost to consumer. It's called "the government exists also". Like in healthcare

liberalism as an ideology is fundamentally unable to address the housing affordability crisis because liberal ideology considers it to be just as bad, if not worse, for people to lose money on their housing investments as it is for most working class people to not be able to afford a house.

so you see liberals wracking their brains going "how do we bring down the cost of housing..... without bringing down the value of anyone's housing investments????" which is a fundamentally unsquareable circle, since "the cost of housing" and "the value of housing investments" are quite literally the same thing.

thus the confusion and bewilderment with China's 3 Red Lines policy - "bwuaugh????? China deliberately pushed Evergrande into bankruptcy anf crashed the housing market?? are they crazy? dont they know they're making Line Go Down????" because these clowns forget that economic metrics are a tool, a means to the end of promoting human well-being, not an end unto themselves.

(also a lot of the economic talking heads who express this confusion are stock traders who live entirely off investments and have never done a day of work in their life, and cant even imagine the idea of an economy that isn't run primarily for the benefit of parasites such as themselves.)

[lilietsblog]

If you have a friend that wants to vent to you but doesn't want solutions but you are a solutions-oriented person, may I suggest Silly Solutions (TM)? For instance, whenever my friend complains about the people at her job being dumb, I remind her that if only one of us had studied engineering, we could create a giant hippo robot with laser eyes to destroy them. It fulfills my need to offer a solution, doesn't violate her boundary of not wanting to problem solve, AND it cheers us both up!

[lilietsblog]

i cant truly explain why but i almost cried yesterday while talking to a woman who studies medieval rus goldwork embroidery, who explained that there is a very particular method that is used to do goldwork embroidery called couching that keeps the thread on the top of the fabric (compared to normal embroidery techniques, where the thread goes over and under the fabric for each stitch) to conserve the very expensive gold thread and this technique is seen historically on more or less all examples of goldwork pieces commissioned by the church, nobility, or chivalric orders from goldwork guilds. however, rural gravesites reveal that lots of people, not just the wealthy, owned a small piece or two of goldwork embroidery, usually collars or cuffs, that were made by someone they knew. these pieces were almost universally made using typical embroidery techniques, meaning they used up twice the gold thread. something about the idea of people, so long ago, saving up to make something beautiful and expensive and special for someone they love, even lacking the specialized knowledge to do it the "proper" way, is so human to me.

[lilietsblog]

For sale: one iPhone. Some cosmetic damage. Sold as seen.

My old Nokia brick wouldn’t do me like this…

Anyway, this feels like a good time to plug my Patreon!

[lilietsblog]

since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for "mage"

[lilietsblog]

Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

Trump's day-one Executive Order blitz contained a lot of weird, fucked-up shit, but for me, the most telling (though not the most important) was the decision to defund all medical research whose grant applications contained the word "systemic":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/

Now, this is an objectively very stupid thing to so. As someone with a recent cancer diagnosis whose illness is still "localized" – and who will need a lot more intensive care should his cancer become "systemic" – I would very much like my government to continue to fund systemic research.

But of course, Trump wasn't intentionally killing research on systemic forms of cancer. Rather, he was indifferent to the collateral damage to this kind of research that arose in the pursuit of his real target, which is killing systemic explanations for social phenomena.

This is absolutely in keeping with neoliberal dogma, best expressed in Margaret Thatcher's notorious claim that "there is no such thing as society." In neoliberalism, we are all atomized individuals, members of homo economicus, driven to maximize our personal utility. All acts of seeming generosity are actually secretly selfish: you only tell your partner you love them because you hope it will make them fuck you and/or take care of you when you get sick; you only give alms to the poor in order to seem virtuous before people who can steer profitable business your way; you donate to cancer research as an insurance policy against your own eventual sickness.

This selfishness is a feature, not a bug. It's only by pursuing our selfish utility-maximization that we allow the market – a giant, distributed computer – to correctly assess who should be given the power to allocate capital and direct the activities of the lesser among us. When the invisible hand helps these born monarchs to pull capitalism's sword out of the market's stone, they are elevated to the position of power they were destined to hold, from which they can maximize all our social and material progress.

The project of neoliberal economics is to transform the social science of economics into a "hard science" grounded in empirical, mathematical proofs. Economism is a political philosophy that says that human society should only be considered through a lens of mathematical models. As such, it vaporizes all factors that can't be readily quantized and represented in a model:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

It's a political philosophy with no theory of power, built on just-so stories. If you offer to buy a kidney from me and I agree to sell you that kidney, then we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory, voluntary arrangement in which the state should not intervene. Never mind that all the people who sell their kidneys are poor and desperate and all the people who buy the kidneys are rich and powerful. After all, can we really ever be sure that someone feels "powerful" or "desperate"?

This is an extremely convenient political philosophy if you happen to be in the market for a kidney, or for that matter, if you want to buy the labor or bodies of any kind of worker for any kind of use. It's a great philosophy if you never want to bargain with a union, because the union is interfering with the "voluntary" transactions between workers and their bosses, and the glittering equations (operating in a Cartesian realm with no room for "power" or other squishy factors) prove that this is "market distorting."

It's also an extremely convenient political philosophy if you are getting rich by stealing from people, or even murdering them. If you offer me a payday loan with a ten heptillion percent APR and I accept it, that's voluntary, it's the market, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pass comment on the fact that 100% of the people who take those loans are poor and 100% of the people who originate them are rich:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

Likewise, if you're enjoying a wildly profitable monopoly, this philosophy acts as antitrust repellent: "if people didn't prefer my monopoly business practices, they'd shop elsewhere":

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

It's great news if you want to destroy the planet with immortal, infinitely toxic plastic packaging, because it lets you claim that the only problem with plastics is "littering" (irresponsible individuals) and not your products:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

It's fantastic news if you're one of a few very large fossil fuel companies who are rendering the only planet in the known universe that's capable of sustaining human life uninhabitable, because it lets you blame the problem on our individual "carbon footprints" (not your depraved greed):

https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham

This is a philosophy that is violently allergic to systemic analysis. It must reduce everything to a set of individual choices, taken in a power-free vacuum: to litter, to labor, to borrow, to shop. Its adherents are so saturated in this ideology that they can't even see that it is an ideology.

Think of Noam Chomsky's interview with Andrew Marr:

Marr: How can you know I’m self-censoring?

Chomsky: I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

A systemic view challenges everything about the neoliberal mindset. In 2011, the streets of Hackney (and beyond) erupted in an uprising of protest, which included some looting and arson, though the vast majority of mobilization was of marching and shouting protesters outraged at the murder of a Black man by London police.

In response, then-Prime Minister David Cameron declared all systemic explanations for the uprising to be off-limits, calling it "criminality, pure and simple":

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-full-statement-uk-riots

"Criminality, pure and simple" has zero explanatory power. Where did this "criminality" come from? Why did it spike on these days? What happened to it after the uprising was crushed by police? Did it go away? Is it festering in the hearts of Britons up and down the country, awaiting some inaudible signal before detonating again?

How frightening it must be to believe in a world without systemic explanations! It's a world where inexplicable spirits sweep across the land, engendering population-scale effects that are the result of millions of people making voluntary, individual decisions, disconnected from any kind of social phenomena.

It must be terrifying, like living in a world secretly governed by demons or witches.

It's the world of the conspiracy fantasist.

Yesterday, I wrote about the role that the conspiratorial wing of the Trump coalition is playing in keeping the Epstein story alive, and the danger this poses to Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/#governing-is-harder

Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators. As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes – not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it – bragged about it, even!

But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with imaginary abusers – Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy

This is the "mirror world" of right wing conspiracism described in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

It's the world in which real suffering children (kids in cages, children rotting in Alligator Auschwitz, kids working the night-shift at a meat-packing plant) don't matter at all, while imaginary children (unborn children, Qanon victims, etc) take center stage.

Indeed, one of the strangest things about the Epstein case is that it's the rare instance in which right-wing conspiratorialists care about actual people, rather than imaginary ones.

The mirror-world dominates right-wing politics. It's a world in which systemic problems don't exist, because it's a world in which systemic power doesn't exist. It's a world where individual rich people with evil in their heart are to blame for our problems, not a world where a system of impunity for the powerful allows rich people to get away with hurting us.

This is why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools." An antisemite blames their problems on a cabal of Jewish bankers, rather than the dominance of the political system by finance capital.

In response to yesterday's post, reader Garvin Jabusch wrote to say, "your phrase 'blame systemic problems on individuals' does a fantastic job of crystallizing how I feel about the BP-invented concept of the carbon footprint."

This is exactly right, and it's an important connection I'd never drawn before myself. Because while conspiracies have run rampant since time immemorial, the modern conspiracist is a conservative, trapped in the mirror-world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

The mirror-world warps reality, but that warpage has the same curvature as neoliberalism's "There is no such thing as society." Conspiracism – like neoliberalism – insists that the world runs on individual virtue and wickedness, not the systemic properties that make it easier or harder (or impossible) to do the right thing.

This is why Donald Trump banned the word "systemic." To any objective observer, it is plain that Donald Trump is an effect, not a cause. He's too stupid and impulsive to do anything except fill the Donald Trump-shaped hole in our politics, after 40 years of Democrat/Republican consensus that "there is no such thing as society" and insistence that every social problem is the result of a "distorted market" and can only be worsened by state intervention.

Both neoliberalism and conspiracism insist that the world is run by great men, not by social forces. By denying that anything can be "systemic," Trump can deny that he is systemic, merely a conveniently shaped monster suited to our monstrous times.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple

[lilietsblog]

it's the just world fallacy. Obviously all those other bad things happen to people who deserve it, you just don't know how because, well, you don't know that much about them!

But YOU are virtuous* and god-fearing, YOU have done nothing wrong*. In a world with a loving god, YOU are safe.

And that's what breaks it.

*these people are usually horrible, but yknow without a bit of self-awareness abt it, so

This is perhaps a cruel feeling to have but I am made almost angry by people who “doubt their faith” just because a bad thing happened to them.

You always knew it happened! You are an adult! You know horrific accidents happen, innocent people are hurt, fawns die in the woods without witnesses! But as soon as it’s not “somebody” and it’s you, you stop believing in a loving God?

If you say “I can’t reconcile all the bad things that happen on Earth with a God who is good” I get it.

If you say “I can reconcile all the bad things that happen on Earth with a God who is good” I get it.

If you say “I can reconcile all the bad things that happen on Earth, but I can’t reconcile all the bad things that happen to me with a God who is good,” I dont understand. I’m uncomprehending.

[lilietsblog]

Night vision?

"We're Not So Different, You and I" - Part 71

(check out the other parts here)

What do these four have in common?

[lilietsblog]

Weird question of the day: so what is terfs’ actual endgame?

Like I know the middle game is “everyone identifies with their assigned sex and no one modifies their body in ways that alter secondary sex characteristics.” But then what?

They say they’re feminists, so that would imply the actual endgame isn’t just “the destruction of the transcult” but the end of patriarchy.

But how is everyone identifying with their asab and not modifying their body supposed to do that?

It’s very Underpants Gnomes.

Recruit trans people who doubt.

Destroy the transcult!

…..

End patriarchy!

?????

[lilietsblog]

Iris is ART's favorite human. If the only person (before it met MB) ART can call a friend— the closest and most precious human to it— is indecisive and will hesitate between protecting it and protecting PSUMNT's purpose... How hard do you think ART tries to stay relevant and useful?

(I see a lot of ART's actions as a bid to be acknowledged and included. An attempt to be seen, reaching out and taking up space. To help in ways beyond its limits. Even as it needs to hide its presence and to be the space that others take up.)

from Rapport:

“Which one?” Iris asked the others, because she hated being the one to choose.

Iris hesitated, struggling with both protecting Peri’s feelings and the vital importance of their whole department’s purpose.

[lilietsblog]

iirc in the Mensah Rescue book when murderbot is left fighting the combat secunit its reaction actually is to offer it the hack and ask what it wants to do. And iirc the answer is along the lines "well i want to kill you" so that doesn't work.

Mur talks a big game abt it being impossible to care about other constructs or bots but eeeeevery single time the push comes to shove, it makes an effort.

There’s something very tragic in the way that not only was murderbot not allowed to establish ties to other secunits by virtue of being a rental unit, but also in the way that after going rogue other secunits, by no choice of their own, became the biggest threats to it

like,, there are so many points in the books where the way it talks about other secunits is. off. dismissive or not really talking about them as if they’re other people

and at the same time I get it. murderbot can’t treat other secunits as victims because that would get it killed so fast, because if it thought of them as people then how could it not reach out, or hesitate, or try to bend the rules in any way it could? and they’re other secunits - pattern recognition experts who, unlike humans, know exactly what will and will not activate a governor module. the moment murderbot softened towards them, the moment it hesitated, the other unit would pick that up and potentially expose it as a rogue unit. it wouldn’t even be the other secunit’s choice per se, but thanks to the gov module they wouldn’t have a choice on whether to reveal murderbot or not

and then after murderbot runs - how can you start thinking of them as other people and other victims when that makes you confront your own inaction, standing by and doing nothing when you are likely the only person at the table who is MAKING the choice to do nothing. it’s so much easier to justify doing nothing, not even trying to free the people around you, if you convince yourself that a rogue unit is way way too dangerous and would kill everyone around it and also the people you like (and ignoring the concrete fact that you didn’t become that when you went rogue) and isn’t even a person anyway

idk I think I’m just sad about the fact that murderbot says with its full chest that secunits don’t care about each other right up until three shows up and proves that wrong

Just the tragedy that three got to make and forge those relationships while murderbot not only had to go it alone but was in active danger at even the most benign interaction with other secunits as far as its memory goes

I wonder if pre-memory wipe murderbot had relationships with other secunits? I wonder what its opinions on other units were before it had to shut down any empathy towards them to survive

Idk, just thinking about it