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Somebody posted this video on Tumblr a while back (their post was deleted since so I had to find the video with Google, the video should play if you click on the picture). I feel there's a parallel between this and the way my probable autism influences how I (a basically straight cis male who's never seen a common low support needs autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!") relate to a lot of LGBTIA/queer people (especially trans and otherwise gender-variant people).

Tagging some people I think might be interested in this; @fregolious, @who-canceled-roger-rabbit, @invertebrateinvert, @ezrasbedroom, @aurpiment, @loving-n0t-heyting, @fierceawakening, @earlgraytay.

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I really hope Tumblr doesn't actually shut down in the near future.

I know this is pathetic, but I feel like this site is my best chance to meet people who might become my friends and partners. Every other social environment I've been in has been one where either 1) it feels like there's a large personality/neurotype gap between me and most people around me (face-to-face social interactions are like this for me), or 2) the space is one by and for people who share interests with me so they are more "my people" but the local social norm is that people more-or-less only go there to talk about their interests and this discourages attempts to make more intimate connections (Spacebattles.com, Sufficient Velocity, etc. are like this, the Yahoo groups I used to post in were like this). It's through Tumblr that I've so far managed to meet 1) people who were willing to give me and my mom serious financial support and shelter when we were in a crisis, 2) a person who wants to have sex with me. If Tumblr shut down tomorrow I'd be most of the way back to the social prospects I had in 2016, and that's a bleak prospect to contemplate.

If you'd like to stay in touch with me if Tumblr goes down and don't have a means to do so already, please send me a means to contact you off this site (Discord, substack, email, whatever works for you).

Hot take: text-based social media is a revolutionary social assistive technology for autistic people (for the reason cited in that post, but also because it makes it much easier for us to find and make social environments where we aren't outnumbered like 30 to 1 by neurotypicals), and the fact that our civilization treats text-based social media as a disposable trivial luxury is a form of structural ableism.

Current events are just further confirming my feeling that I really wish somebody would make AO3 but for blogging. We should have an online public square that isn't at the mercy of the winds of the market and the whims of accountants. We should have a means of online communication controlled by the posters.

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This post (which I can't reblog, and which I'm pretty sure is about aromanticism, see their tags) is, like, I want to write some sort of response to it but I'm not even sure where to start.

Like, yes, it is true that at least in pretty big parts of the world it's normal and at this point pretty normative for men to have casual sex. And what I think that person is actually getting at is there are a lot of hostile sexist men who approach heterosexual courtship in an adversarial exploitative way, and if hostile sexist men of this type were actually trying to do entryism to the LGBT/queer community via defining their adversarial exploitative approach to heterosexual sex as "aromanticism" letting them do that would be a very "so open-minded you've let your brain fall out" move. I don't agree with their claim that "cishet man who is emotionally uninvested in his sexual partners" is "the majority guy ... this is the normal way for cishet men to be," but that's not a necessary claim for their argument.

But:

1) IME "emotionally uninvested in your sexual partners" is not actually what "aromanticism" means in the dialect of people who are actually likely to claim it as an identity or defend the idea that it's a valid LGBT/queer identity. IME they're much more likely to talk about having friends-with-benefits type relationships with friends than to talk about the sort of sexual behavior I'd expect from hostile sexist straight men who just want to "score" with people whose company they don't desire for its own sake. They might be uwuifying their own sexual behavior to present a more socially acceptable persona, but...

2) I think the kind of hostile sexist guy who takes an adversarial exploitative approach to courtship is pretty unlikely to unironically identify as aromantic. This is the point on which I'm honestly most tempted to reciprocate that person's "is this your first day on Earth?" attitude toward people who think like me. Seriously, imagine how a guy who fits the negative stereotypes of PUAs or frat bros would react if you suggested to him that his adversarial exploitative attitude toward the women he sexually desires makes him "aromantic" and therefore queer. I don't think men like that want into the LGBT/queer community, by-in-large! Quite the opposite! Men like that are more likely to associate with and value inclusion in social groups in which perceived proximity to queerness would decrease, not increase, their popularity and clout.

I think if a straight cis man self-identifies as queer on the basis of being aromantic, it's pretty likely the experience he's using that self-description to articulate is something pretty different from fitting the negative stereotypes of how frat bro types relate to women. A guy who fit the negative stereotypes of how frat bro types relate to women would probably hang out with others guys like himself, and self-identifying as queer would probably decrease, not increase, his popularity and clout with those guys. I don't think a lot of guys are going to claim to be aromantic as a cynical dating/sexual strategy either; maybe some guy somewhere might self-describe as aromantic as part of a cynical strategy get into the pants of some Smith College types, but I think the kind of guy who might do that is actually not that common and the kind of guy who might do that would be more likely to adopt a persona tailored to appeal to more socially conventional women.

Like, I'm not going to say "hostile sexist man claims the adversarial exploitative way he relates to women he wants to have sex with is aromanticism" is something that never happens, the world is vast and various, but I don't think it happens on any significant scale, I don't think it's a threat we should be strategizing around on a scale above, like, small-scale friend groups who find themselves directly dealing with such a guy.

I went back and forth on whether I should tag that person in this or not (they seem a combination of logical and maybe unfamiliar with how ace/aro people self-describe that makes me think I might actually be able to change their mind about this to some extent, I would like to!), in the end I decided them making the post unrebloggable was a pretty clear implicit statement that they preferred not to have more engagement on it and it's probably better to not bring this to their attention.

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If you're in the US military or National Guard, and are given an illegal or unconstitutional order, the GI Rights hotline (1-877-447-4487) is there to help give you the support you need to do the right thing by refusing it. It would be good to think about this now before it becomes a live issue for you and it would be smart of you to memorize that number.

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Speaking as a writer, "I miss a logistical detail, a lot of my readers interpret the resulting unintended implication as implicit characterization that sets up a characterization of my protagonist that's radically different from the one I intended" type possibilities are scarier to me than "I miss a logistical detail, a lot of readers chuckle at my obvious error" type possibilities.

Re: that post which claims that Watsonian explanations are inherently more charitable to the work than Doylist explanations…

Sometimes the Doylist explanation is “author missed a logistical detail” and the Watsonian explanation is “the supposed hero gives no fucks about loss of life if they aren’t watching”. I don’t feel like the second one is more charitable to the work!

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i am once again reminded of how of all privileges on this site tumblr seems to never want to discuss the anglophone privilege, the privilege of being a native english speaker

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Huh, that's kind of the opposite of the implication I took from your opening post.

"i wonder if there's really poisonous manosphere Discourse about Asari. what we observe definitely seems to suggest that they date human woman a lot more often than human men."

The implication I took from this statement is maybe the Systems Alliance has a large political affiliation gender gap in the direction of men being more likely to be right-wing so men might be more likely to refuse to consider Asari as potential partners. The "poisonous manosphere Discourse about Asari" I was imagining was something like "The Asari insidiously weaken our race by seducing humans away from reproducing with their own kind, [whole lot of stuff portraying Asari as insidious temptresses in a way that channels ancient misogynistic cultural anxieties and prejudices about sexy promiscuous women who might seduce you to take advantage of you and harm you], you must resist their temptations and marry a woman of your own kind so you can produce human children with her." Though I don't think that by itself would be likely to make Asari partner with human women "a lot more often," a political affiliation gender gap big enough to outweigh the fact that most human women are primarily androphilic and most human men are primarily gynephilic doesn't feel likely (and of course it'd be very easy to have an equivalent of this script for right-wing women, if anything the version for women would be a more natural fit with right-wing sexual and "racial purity" anxieties). Maybe you could throw in lesbian/bi/queer women being a lot more likely to partner with Asari than straight men are cause LGBT/queer people tend to be pretty left-wing for the same reasons as in our world so they're much less likely to be space racists, but IDK I haven't played the games but internet osmosis gives me the impression that being a major factor shaping the demography of Asari-partnered humans would imply a much more culturally right-wing Systems Alliance than the one the games imply.

I think a species with the extremely weird reproductive process of the Asari realistically would probably have a pretty alien "sexuality" (if you want to call it that), likely one that's a lot less visual than ours since the primary compatibility factor seems to be the intelligence/mental complexity of the potential "mate" instead of genetic relatedness. Do their offspring even inherit any physical traits of the "father"? If not I think it's pretty plausible that Asari really would be basically sapiosexual/attracted to minds and more-or-less indifferent to the shape of their potential partner's body. It occurs to me that if that's the case I could see seriously physically disabled and disfigured people and old people being a hugely disproportionate share of Asari-partnered humans (since sapiosexual Asari might make great partners for such people), and if we're going to talk about rancid manosphere discourse, I'm now imagining some right-wing infighting between those "the Asari are insidiously corrupting our precious bodily fluids" people and "few millimeters of bone" blackpilled incel types who've gotten Asaripilled (sapiosexual Asari might actually be great partners for awkward spectrum-y straight guys whose big problems with dating include being pimply and greasy and poorly groomed and not all that handsome to begin with, I mean Asari might not like your typical incel's personality but then their attractiveness standards would probably be pretty different from ours when it comes to mental attraction too so maybe it'd work out a surprising amount of time).

The idea that Asari don't reproduce with their own species strikes me as pretty silly, it sounds impractical and raises the questions of how they reproduced before they invented interstellar travel and met sapient aliens and how they evolved in the first place. Then again, IIRC they more-or-less don't die unless killed by accident, violence, or infectious disease, they probably don't need to produce many children to replace losses to that or even have population growth, so I guess it might work. Still leaves the questions of how they reproduced before they invented interstellar travel and how they evolved in the first place. I think, yeah, best rationalization is probably that EY is like their equivalent of Huntington's disease, the default incidence of it in their population is low but non-trivial, and they just got less tolerant of the risk of producing offspring with it when they met sapient aliens and got better options.

There's just this kinda mad unspoken Thing with humans and gender in Mass Effect, it's nuts

the most parsimonious watsonian explanation is that gender role shit has progressed somewhat but not very much; women can serve equally in the military but there's very clearly still a lot of cultural baggage, and with any other species, there would be exposition about that, but they can't do that because it's not so much a conscious writing decision as it is just writers' contemporary assumptions showing (and because e.g. anywhere from 0 to 2 of the first human SPECTREs might be women) they can't really do that

anyway i wonder if there's really poisonous manosphere Discourse about Asari. what we observe definitely seems to suggest that they date human woman a lot more often than human men.

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If I had a girlfriend and she told me she thinks if I'd be "the bottom" in a sexual relationship with a male friend, that might make me uncomfortable, because it might make me suspect she's got that ancient Greco-Roman world kind of tradbrain, has noticed that I'm not very conventionally masculine, assumes that means I'd enjoy being a bottomsub for more conventionally masculine men, and thinks my friend would obviously take the domtop role in any hypothetical sexual relationship between me and him because she thinks he's more of a real man than me. I would not be thrilled about finding out I'm dating somebody who's got at least low-key paleoconservative assumptions about gender and sexuality (though depending on the details it might not be a dealbreaker for me).

I don't believe in the domtop/bottomsub binary but I know lots of other people believe in it and if somebody tells me "I think if you were in a sexual relationship with this other man you two would be having the kind of sex in which one person is consistently 'the top' and the other person is consistently 'the bottom' and you'd be the bottom" that's going to inform my guesses about what they mean by that.

PRO TIP FOR WOMEN IN STRAIGHT RELATIONSHIPS: tell your boyfriend you think that if he and his male best friend were a couple, he would be the bottom. If he reacts negatively this means he thinks being penetrated is degrading. Then you know to dump him. This is a WIN. DO IT NOW!

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"unless animals just fundamentally dont matter. that is the only exit, you have to admit that, yeah, at the end of the day, you DONT actually care about animal suffering, otherwise your moral intuitions would just not allow you to do it. and if your moral intuitions allow you to then you have to admit you dont actually care."

"the problem is not so much that they are being inconsistent but that they are being dishonest, they want the prestige of caring about animals when their actions reveal that they dont actually care about animals"

"is not about consistency, is about revealed preferences"

I think this is an all or nothing error. The other resolution of the apparent inconsistency is that these people do care about nonhuman animals, but they care substantially less about nonhuman animals than they care about humans. There are many possible degrees of being upset by something between "isn't actually upset at all, merely pretending to be for clout" and "is willing to accept a substantially lower standard of living for the rest of their life to do something about it and/or express their disapproval of it while knowing that this sacrifice will at best make the state of the world literally <.000001% less bad by their standards."

I'm a "I'm not a morally motivated vegetarian but I kinda believe in their beliefs" person and "I'm some amount of upset by the fact that factory farming of livestock animals is happening but substantially less upset about it than I'd be if it was happening to humans" sounds about right as a diagnosis of my psychology. I can't prove that I'm not lying about the contents of my own mind for clout, but I'll point out that "I basically agree with morally motivated vegetarianism in theory but I'm simply not altruistic enough to stop eating meat about it" seems like a position that's really not optimized for making myself popular; being too selfish to live up to one's own moral ideals is a stigmatized trait, and in most of human society expressing a belief that a vegetarian human is (all else being equal) morally superior to an omnivorous human in an important way is more likely to decrease your popularity than increase it and I don't think Tumblr is really an exception. If I was the kind of person who'd systematically lie about my own motivations for clout, I'd probably either become one of those people who dunks on vegans in a "meat-eating and hunting are culturally important to many indigenous peoples, I think it's very white to..." kind of way instead of a "for every animal you don't eat I'll eat two!" kind of way or simply pretend to be a morally motivated vegetarian (I could easily get away with the latter here!); those would probably be more effective clout-farming strategies than my actual behavior.

I think people who care about nonhuman animals to some extent but less than they care about humans are a lot more common than people who systematically lie about whether they care about nonhuman animals.

the thing that i just cannot agree with when it comes to people that oppose factory farming and slaughterhouses and thinks eating animals is wrong is when they go all, well im just one individual, if i were to stop eating meat my self nothing much would change, what we need is systemic change.

but the problem here is that the evil is not just on the system, IT IS ON THE INDIVIDUAL AS WELL.

imagine instead of cows it was black people. goberments are ok with corraling black people, putting them on factories, torture them, mutilate them, kill them in gas chambers and then sell their meat.

there would be no "larger system" or "voicott effectiveness" to think of here. if you as an individual went to a market and bought that meat and ate it, the very act of doing that, as an individual, would be considered abominable, regardless of wether it contributes to the system or wether it makes a difference or not.

the argument of "individual responsaility is irrelevant when considering its effect on larger systems" would not fly, to eat that meat would be axiomatically evil, as evil as it would be to rape or kill someone, would it not?

unless animals just fundamentally dont matter. that is the only exit, you have to admit that, yeah, at the end of the day, you DONT actually care about animal suffering, otherwise your moral intuitions would just not allow you to do it. and if your moral intuitions allow you to then you have to admit you dont actually care.

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I might be wrong about this, I'm not any kind of expert on historical indigenous American tobacco consumption practices, but... It's true that tobacco was first used as a drug by non-capitalist societies, but I have the impression that their relationship to it was pretty different from the one our society has and non-capitalist indigenous American tobacco consumption patterns were probably healthier than middle twentieth century USA and European tobacco consumption patterns (less frequent and more ritualized tobacco smoking vs. normalized heavy daily tobacco smoking). The most harmful aspects of the tobacco industry/modern smoking culture seem pretty entwined with capitalism both as a matter of how they work now and as a matter of how they came to be, even though the relationship isn't as simple as the statements in the screenshot in the OP may be interpreted as implying (I'm guessing there was a lot of smoking following approximately the same patterns as nineteenth to twenty-first century Western smoking culture going on in communist countries east of the Iron Curtain).

do you think capitalism predates tobacco cultivation and use. say sike right now

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I came across a xiaohongshu post that showed pictures of an abandoned traditional village in a mountainous region of China with very little surrounding greenery that had the captions: “so sad how traditional villages like these are empty and abandoned”

But the top comment was: “I am so happy for the villagers who finally made it out of the mountains and into new homes in prosperous cities. It often takes multiple generations of hard work to get the entire family out. Every family in this village achieved this. What you are looking at is the evidence of their success!”

And the second highest liked comment was: “You can tell this area has poor agricultural resources. The ancestors of the villagers were likely forced to settle here because more powerful villages have occupied the attractive fertile lands. Who knows how long they had been trapped here? I’m glad they finally made it out!”

Another comment with high likes: “My grandparents’ village was like this. Poor air quality from burning coal in poorly ventilated buildings. Bitterly cold in the winter. Dry and hot in the summer. Short growing seasons. And there was always a shortage of water. My parents got factory jobs in the city and after working and saving for years, they finally got all of us out.”

And it occurred to me how when we romanticize old fashioned villages and mourn the loss of the type of community they provided, we sometimes downplay and overlook the extraordinary liberation and agency that industrialization brought and brings to people who in previous generations had no option but to remain where they were born for most of their lives.

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I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

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i think we should be talking about the semi-recent advancements in cystic fibrosis treatment like all the time every day. there hasn’t been a drug like this since AZT medications for HIV infection it is truly fucking miraculous and very important

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"but if youre unwilling to produce enough housing that it can be allocated widely, i dont think it's really any worse to allocate it essentially by lottery"

I think "capitalism + it's illegal to build apartment buildings on most urban and suburban land + rent control" is a lot less bad than "capitalism + it's illegal to build apartment buildings on most urban and suburban land + no rent control" in some pretty important ways. In that context rent control prevents landlords and land/housing speculators from parasitically capturing even more of society's wealth, makes housing insecurity more predictable, and offsets the tendency of capitalism to give the rich access to the most and best goods and services across the board and the poor access to the least and worst goods and services across the board (that tendency of capitalism is bad because it makes self-reinforcing success cycles and self-reinforcing failure cycles much more likely which increases inequality which enables abuse and decreases social solidarity and consistently getting the least and worst goods and services is more likely to seriously harm a person than getting hit-and-miss but overall mediocre goods and services). Zoning restrictions that hugely restrict the supply of housing and no rent control seems like it'd clearly be the worst of both worlds; it'd be the government protecting landlords from competition while giving them maximum license to use the resulting leverage to parasitically extract vast amounts of wealth from the rest of society in a way that disproportionately harms the lower classes.

economy-knower-types love to shit on rent controls, and it's true that in a world where it was legal to build housing rent controls would be bad, because it would decrease economic pressure to build more housing when supply was low. but it's illegal to build housing, so the argument against rent controls is...rich people deserve to have more of a scarce good than poor people? landlords should cpature MORE of the economy? like. its not like rent controls are JUST, theyre not allocating housing in a "fair" way, but if youre unwilling to produce enough housing that it can be allocated widely, i dont think it's really any worse to allocate it essentially by lottery