watermelon-aegis

[watermelon-aegis]

huge fan of the vibes in this octopath traveler marathon speedrun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IyyE2P9xnM

[watermelon-aegis]

ah. i have just figured out that blue prince is a pun on blueprints.

[watermelon-aegis]

Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell - Notes Part 2

book club by myself.

TW: alcoholism, sexual assault, rape, suicide, police brutality

the second half of this book is where i start to feel deeply interested, excited to learn, and thoroughly out of my depth. i think this book does a good job of introducing the subjects it talks about, but there's so much more i need to know before i can feel like i understand the subjects as a whole.

if you've stumbled upon this, this is not a good summary of the book, this is me noting down the parts i found interesting for my future self who will look back and say "so what did i think about that book again?". if the topics interest you, i recommend you read the book for a non-butchered explanation of things. i'm not a writer. i throw words at a wall and hope some of them stick.

also this book gets pretty dark, so. warning given.

---

the idea of matching: does someone's facial expression match what we expect (social norms) of the emotion they're expressing? we think the answer is yes. the answer is generally no. I'm pleased, as someone who has trouble reading facial expressions, to learn that "neurotypical" people suck at reading people when they don't "match"- when someone is guilty but confident, when someone is innocent but nervous.

I use social norms of emotional expression to indicate how I'm feeling. or read expressions as how someone wants to be taken. but they aren't a foolproof indicator of how someone's doing.

get rekt, neurotypicals.

---

chapter 8 is a doozy.

i am not equipped to talk about chapter 8 knowledgeably.

what i mean by this: this chapter is about sex, alcohol, and parties. i have never had sex. i don't drink alcohol. i don't go to parties. i don't partake in any of the culture that this chapter discusses. i wouldn't write too much commentary or information about this chapter because it references a life so far outside of mine.

unfortunately, it is, by far, the most interesting chapter of the book.

if you care, i recommend you just read it. i can't do it justice. this is just for me to remember.

this chapter talks about brock turner. it's important to understand that the fact that he committed a crime is true, that the book fully acknowledges this, and that we are not blaming the victim for what happened. it's important to understand that when we are talking about preventative measures, we are not insinuating that a victim's use or unuse of some measure was the reason the crime occurred.

i can lock my door, understand that it's good to lock my door, want to lock my door, while fully understanding that if someone breaks in and steals something, it's the burglar's responsibility for the crime, not mine. same deal.

that being said, let's look deeper. because brock turner isn't just a bad person, he's also a product of an environment that fosters destructive behavior. and we can just say that men are just terrible people who want to sexually assault women and leave it there, but i'm not satisfied with that. i want to inspect the environment and the beliefs that surround behavior like this. maybe it can be changed.

-

first. what constitutes consent? i'm of the opinion that someone needs to clearly say (if they're mute, some equivalent) heck yeah (i also don't swear), or it's a no. i'm also really dense. so, to me, it makes perfect sense that things need to be clear. i'm not in the casual sex scene. i don't know what things people constitute as consent there- what if they take off their own clothes? nod in agreement? is that consent? the book has a handy infographic (possibly out of date) where, across genders, it's around a 50% yes, 50% no, and a handful of depends or no opinion.

of course, it's basically sexual assault when one or both parties have not given clear agreement. but does x constitute clear agreement? if some say yes, some say no... without a clear societal agreement, this is an invitation to disaster. this, of course, is for the people who are afraid of committing sexual assault even with good intentions. that's your responsibility to unambiguously check for consent. (if you're worried that someone would falsely accuse you of sexual assault, that's just outside the scope of this book. truth-default says you trust the person who seems to be consenting, which isn't necessarily helpful.)

-

unfortunately, and fascinatingly, this chapter isn't mainly about sexual assault.

it's about alcohol.

once again, i don't drink. against my better judgement, intoxicated people can give consent to sexual activity, but i'm not here to question that. incapacitated people can't consent though.

the book doesn't have an issue with saying that turner acted completely out of line. where the book has issue with the popular belief is why brock would do such a thing. it's tempting to believe that alcohol is purely a disinhibitor, that deep in his bones, brock really wanted to commit atrocities against college women. alcohol would release his inhibitions and let him do such things.

alcohol, this book claims, is more of an agent of myopia. (this is a theory, and this is one of the shortcomings of the book- i want to know where this theory stands among social scientists today.)

part of this is understanding that "we do what we really want to do when drunk" is bs under any scrutiny, part of this is a philosophical understanding that our "inhibitions" are part of our personality- where we decide to have restraint in our lives is part of who we are, not a barrier to our "authentic" selves, part underestimating the effect a drunk person's immediate surroundings has on their understanding of the world and their actions.

(other cultural studies on alcohol to look at because they're interesting: the bolivian camba anthropological study by the heaths, and the mixe indians observed by ralph beals. in both studies, they find that drunk people in those are more principled and structured in their actions, possibly because of the environment they're in. perhaps the hypersexualized ambience of the american college party is magnified with alcohol, not just the drunk's inner desires.)

"drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. it crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences."

"when you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes."

"alcohol isn't an agent of revelation. it is an agent of transformation."

so how do we determine if consent was given in this scenario?

-

a final piece of this is the idea of being blackout drunk.

how can you tell if someone is blacked out? (this is a genuine question from me. i know there are cases of people being blacked out that seem, maybe drunk, but otherwise normal. they still function. they just don't remember.) what if you have sex with someone, then later learned that they weren't just drunk, they were blacked out?

you cannot consent when you are blackout drunk. you are responsible for your actions (as a perpetrator) when you are blackout drunk.

Emily Yoffe writes in Slate:

"Let's be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will attract the kinds of people who, shall we say, don't have your best interest at heart. That's not blaming the victim; that's trying to prevent more victims."

Gladwell rewrites this for men:

"But we are failing to let men know that when they render themselves myopic, they can do terrible things. Young men are getting a distorted message that drinking to excess is a harmless social exercise. The real message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you will commit a sexual crime. Acknowledging the role of alcohol is not excusing the behavior of perpetrators. It's trying to prevent more young men from becoming perpetrators."

(as a side note, it's generally biologically easier for women (sorry, i'm not sure about the genderfluid or trans folks) to get blacked out than men. so if you match drink for drink, the woman will get to blackout sooner.)

people don't think that alcohol restrictions would reduce sexual assault in college parties. they think self-defense would be better. (how are you going to effectively practice self-defense when you're drunk?)

"students think it's a really good idea if men respect women more. but the issue is not how men behave around women when they are sober. it is how they behave around women when they are drunk, and have been transformed by alcohol into a person who makes sense of the world around them very differently."

(i argue that there are cases of rape where the aggressor is sober. this chapter is not talking about that, as many encounters happen when drunk.)

-

the whole point of all this. alcohol is a thing to be consumed responsibly. responsibly means understanding what alcohol does, how it affects your functioning and decision making, and how it affects others around you.

maybe we, as a society, could be more transparent about these things.

otherwise, this will keep happening.

-----

torture (or enhanced negotiation) can affect the memory of those you're trying to extract information from.

"the "truth" [...] is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. we will never know the whole truth. we have to be satisfied with something short of that."

-----

gladwell argues that suicide is coupled with method. i.e. if a method is taken away, those who were going to commit suicide with that method will NOT then try to commit with another method. i agree with this, though i find his rationale lacking- his data seems to instead support that people committing is a fragile thing; if in the moment they get the guts to really do it, if it doesn't work out, or it's inaccessible (for any reason, including method not existing, or something else), it won't happen.

still. it is a shame that we believed people jumping off the golden gate bridge would just "find another way", and didn't put safety measures until years later. which worked.

that's something to share with the public- putting that barrier was worth it. even though everyone thought it wouldn't be.

-----

crime, gladwell argues, is highly coupled to location. the areas that are crime heavy are a few streets at most. across the intersection, basically no crime.

once again, i'm unqualified to speak on this. he gave data though.

but gladwell argues that this is important because it explains traffic stops (the bane of modern existence and a prime example of police overreach).

trying to curb rampant crime in the 1970's, a few experiments were done in kansas: more patrols had no effect. giving a gun hotline was well received but ineffectual at curbing crime. trying to see concealed weapons didn't work.

what worked were- the traffic stops. the police took advantage of bending the law to stop cars for little to no reason in a small, specified, high-crime area. aggressively searching these cars worked.

to recreate this success, places all around the world tried to mimic this. but they forgot the importance of crime being coupled to location.

"law enforcement didn't need to be bigger; it needed to be more focused."

but they made law enforcement bigger. not more focused. and so they fell back into the same failure of the first experiment: more patrols had no effect.

-

brian encinia, the police officer who fought sandra bland (who later committed suicide after being in jail for 3 days), was following orders. his training was to aggressively stop people in cars and try to search for illegal activities. (funnily enough, it does seem like he wasn't racially profiling people. other police officers do. he just gave everyone infractions, all the time.) but that's largely useless in the relatively crime-free area he was policing, and even as the original kansas experiements acknowledged, this sort of police overreach eroded public trust- the original only felt comfortable doing it in a high crime area where such strict policing was somewhat balanced by the amount of crime.

when they tried to expand this method, they didn't take into account that it would only benefit those small areas where crime occurred. police officers didn't notice that crime occurred in targeted locations.

(you might argue that police have no business being in those areas, either. that's somewhat outside of the scope of this book.)

because police training asks them to stop defaulting to truth (assuming that drivers aren't secretly criminals) at the cost of public trust. to ignore that crime is coupled to location (allowing widespread traffic stops in the first place). to assume that sandra bland was being transparently criminal (she was not, she was just angry at the police). because brian encinia, trained to be suspicious as he was, was scared that sandra would harm him- and because his training told him to assert authority in those situations.

this is a basis for a moderate acab viewpoint. brian encinia essentially caused a woman's death not because he was a corrupt cop in a good system, but because he did exactly what the cop system told him to do.

there are people who are cops who are good people (depending on your definition of good). they have good intentions. they do good things. but because of these fundamental misunderstandings of the human nature and maybe even malicious avoidance of improvement, these people are trained to commit atrocities.

(and perhaps you can get into the cycle of it attracting bad people. that is beyond the scope of this book, but just barely.)

-

Larry Sherman, who designed the kansas city gun experiment, had this in mind.

"you wouldn't tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they've got bad gallbladders. you need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. and stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. it can generate hostility to the police.", he says.

"we have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody's liberty. and so it's not just about putting the police in the hot spots. it's also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch- not an iota- more."

the north carolina state highway patrol went from 400k to 800k traffic stops a year in 7 years. with those extra 400k searches, they found 17 extra guns/drugs. "was it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 [innocent people] in order to find 17 bad apples?"

-

this book describes itself as a book about why the sandra bland event happened and what we need to know and what we can do to prevent it from happening again.

it's a book that asks us to look at startling quirks of human behavior that we should know but don't. it's a book that is frustrated at how police brutality was covered, because without a clear understanding of where policing as a structure fails (and simply blaming it on bad people), nothing will change except for hatred of the other group, which will grow.

this book was not about how to have a conversation as someone who's socially awkward.

i suppose that's alright.

[watermelon-aegis]

just a lil rant before bedtime because i saw someone calling women magical and mysterious for flipping pancakes with their fingies...

...i get it, it's magical when people do cool stuff, but it's not the kind of magic you only get whispers of, the kind that is unattainable to those who aren't innately blessed with it. it's everyday magic. it's the kind of thing you find everywhere- wonderful, but extremely commonplace, and something that you can tap into as well.

flipping a hot item on a pan isn't mysterious, it's experience with cooking exposing and working your fingers again and again until they become resistant to the pain, it's practiced skill figuring out or imitating someone on how to hold that food item so the heat exposure is lessened, it's not women only, and not all women can do this.

just like how if you don't do your laundry and cook and sort out the trash from the recycling because you "never learned how" or the person you live with is "so much better at it", that's not a compliment, that's weaponized incompetence. and not only does it hurt the people you rely on to be "superheroes" when you burden them with these tasks you insist only they can do, you diminish the work and time and energy they've put into learning and practicing and doing, because they probably didn't know how to do all that from the start, so they stepped up and put in the effort and failed and tried and improved and learned. which you conveniently look past when you say they were made for this, that they are just innately better at this, you insinuate that they didn't need to put in all that work, you don't recognize the sacrifice they made as valid.

certainly not everyone can do everything. we don't have the energy for that, nor the time, and some of us have some disability or another that prevent us from doing even basic things in a conventional way or at all. in this case, it's fine to rely on others, and even fine to talk about you wouldn't/couldn't- but you can do this without diminishing the other person's effort. in a similar vein, you can acknowledge that someone has done something historic or unique without- again- telling them it's innate instead something they reached out to do.

(as a pendantic person, i need to say that this post is about things people do, not things people are. like, this does not apply to telling people they're taller than you. that's generally innate. disregarding environmental factors that could stunt growt- look, you get what i mean. also, you can probably tell michael phelps that his fish body or whatever gives him an edge up.)

sometimes things aren't worth doing- i was, and am, thoroughly uninterested in becoming a black belt. it's entirely possible that my health issues would make it misery or even impossible if i did try. but see- it'd still be kind of disingenuous for me to tell someone that "oh, you're just so miraculously strong and talented, i could never, i don't have the je ne sais quoi that you have". that particular wording- the assumption that it's an unknown force that trained them up to where they are- would diminish my ability to grow and their pride in their achievements in one fell swoop.

you could just say that "you're so strong and talented! you worked really hard on this, congratulations."

(though i guess if you're trying to get an sigma male to fawn over you, you can go the swoony "oh, wow, i could never do what you do! ur just so handsome and powerful and i'm just meeeeeeeee" but like. is that really what you want to do?)

[watermelon-aegis]

[watermelon-aegis]

and now how do you expect me to get that geocache on the ISS

[watermelon-aegis]

15 years ago. 15 years ago.

[watermelon-aegis]

Shou Xin aka 手訫 aka Xin Shou (Chinese, based Henan, China) - A group of mischievous little line-drawn cats is pouncing your way!, Drawings: Pencil, Eraser, and small Knives for added texture

[watermelon-aegis]

i know i'm being greedy, but i yearn for a subscribe button. or an email list. or a pinglist. just something to let me know if cucumber quest updates. i guess i'm really just throwing this into the algorithm so that in case something does happen, maybe tumblr will pick up on it and send something my way.

i don't hold any expectation of it updating by a given time, or at all. i appreciate what's been put into it already. but in the case that an update happens, i just want to be gently poked, so i can enjoy the work in its entirety one (more) time.

unfortunately, after years and many todo list cleanings, i don't have the space anymore to check cq every few months, to get into gg's new works, or to sift through ggdg updates. so i guess i'll leave it up to fate now. it was wonderful <3

[watermelon-aegis]

Moushley. Safely returned.

[watermelon-aegis]

wikihow to raise a child

[watermelon-aegis]

take me out of my misery what IS this

[watermelon-aegis]

watching the metal gear solid 3 secret theater only having known the plot of mgs 1 and 2 is certainly.

it is certainly.

[watermelon-aegis]

just took a deep dive into the history of mgsv's nuclear disarmament, and, wow,

[watermelon-aegis]

weeee

[watermelon-aegis]

twitch dot tv is really special because i'll pop in and it'll say "oh, yeah. none of the streamers you're following are online, but here! here! let me show you specifically this stream. you should watch this stream. it's a guy sleeping"

[watermelon-aegis]

Look at the new Rowlet card that just dropped in TCG Pocket