ritavonbees
(an ex-soviet socialist republican)
mags // 34 // существо среднего рода // 404 preferred pronouns not found (current frontrunner: *throws up hands in frustration and mumbles vaguely about how singular they will do I guess*) // "better than a lot of people (and some cats) (at being a cat)" - @someofthemusic //
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Last Seen Blogs
asklegion
Building Consensus
heyemersinn
heyemersin.com
hopeful-hugz
Under the Same Moon
pamithatheyn
borne on guilty wings
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the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck
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government wants trans people to detransition so here’s them chasing me to hot glue my bazoinkers back on
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This little asshole keeps getting into a bird feeder, so we need to test how small is *too* small
3 inch opening: no problem
2.75 inch opening: Easy
2.5 inch opening: doing fine
2.25 inch opening: Bit of a struggle, but as Mr Meeseeks says: CAAAN DOO!
2 inch opening: Alright, lets try chewing the opening a bit, As long as we get the nuts into the mouth (huhuhu) we good I guess…
Uh-oh… Steve is getting greedy
:insert grunts of effort here:
Taking a break…
The guy who made the original video decided after a long struggle to help Steve out.
A New Challenger approaches!
1.75 inchs: Quote Mr Meseeks: “OOOHHH HE’S TRYING”
GIMME GIMME GIMME
He ends up giving up.
Source: Chris Notap - Squirrel ● literally ● bites off more than he can chew ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS4ach0CwN4
via imgur
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really interesting episode, plus congratulations to skinks for joining the ibis in the cane toad cuisine trade
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psst... people in age of sail fandoms may be tickled to learn that "fathom" was once a synonym for "embrace", apparently by way of roughly measuring a fathom by holding your arms out to the sides. hat tip Merriam Webster's word of the day :3
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this is beautiful creatures which delight us
learned a fantastic new prayer at the Tzedek Collective anti-Zionist seder. fuck yeah, beautiful creatures and trees which delight us!
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learned a fantastic new prayer at the Tzedek Collective anti-Zionist seder. fuck yeah, beautiful creatures and trees which delight us!
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i was so baffled i did not request to see it, I'm afraid. just picture me spluttering "that fucking clown??" in broken Russian and them going "what? What's wrong with him?" because they literally have zero context for this because, again, we live in AUSTRALIA, and then me being immediately climbed on by small children who do not give a fuck
Y'all. elderly American Zionists are mailing my Russophone Australian grandparents favourable material about Boris Johnson. in the post.
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Y'all. elderly American Zionists are mailing my Russophone Australian grandparents favourable material about Boris Johnson. in the post.
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Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.
Periodic Table Regions [Explained]
Transcript
[A periodic table with regions labeled.]
[Hydrogen:] Slightly fancy protons
[Lithium and Beryllium:] Weird dirt
[Group 1 & 2 metals, Periods 3-4:] Regular dirt
[Group 1 & 2 metals, Periods 5-7:] Ends in a number, let it slumber ends in a letter, not much better
[Left side of the transition metals group:] Boring alloy metals Probably critical to the spark plug industry or something (but one of them is radioactive so stay on your toes)
[Most of the top row of the transition metals + aluminum:] Regular metals
[Below the rightmost "regular metals" - the "ordinary metals" and some transition metals:] Weird metals
[The platinum group:] $$$$
[Boron:] Boron (fool's carbon)
[Carbon, Nitrogen, and Phosphorus:] You are here
[The Halogens:] Safety goggles required
[Noble Gases:] Lawful neutral
[Iodine and Radon:] Very specific health problems
[Ordinary metals and metalloids - Arsenic, Antimony, Tellurium, Thallium, Lead, Bismuth, Polonium] Murder weapons
[Astatine and Period 7 from Rutherfordium onwards:] Don't bother learning their names - they're not staying long
[Lanthanides and Actinides:] Whoever figures out a better way to fit these up there gets the next Nobel Prize
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Anyone wanna read a 500 year old Welsh poem about Pussy?
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[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.
There’s a boy in you about three
years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.
The child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”
You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want
To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.
/end id]
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A lot of people seem to implicitly believe (or desperately want to believe) something to the effect of "the facts of the world make my value system convenient."
For example, anarchists tend to have a value system which says that hierarchies and systems of domination are inherently unethical. This is something I agree with very strongly, and is why I often describe myself as an anarchist. A common question then posed to anarchists is how, without hierarchy, bureaucracy, or other such systems of social control/management, it would be possible to achieve the large-scale coordination needed to accomplish certain tasks that are considered necessary for human flourishing: industrial-scale production of antibiotics and vaccines, management of carbon emissions, maintenance of a power grid, and basically anything else that requires a sustained, large-scale and legible set of social processes. Rather than addressing these (in my view) very valid concerns, most anarchists respond by dismissing the question. They claim, for example, that without capitalism we would have no need to manage carbon emissions, because the market incentives to emit would be gone. Or that industrial production of medical supplies isn't really necessary, because sufficient quantities could easily be made by small-scale local producers, etc.
And I'm always tempted to say "wow, how incredibly convenient". We don't even have enough understanding of human psychology to successfully model human behavior in our own society, and yet you're absolutely sure that in your hypothetical future society, humanity would just... no longer have any desire to engage in high-emission activities? You're absolutely sure that the physics and biology and chemistry and engineering involved in medical production all just happen to work out to make small-scale manufacture consistently doable? You're absolutely sure that all these problems people are posing just happen to be non-problems?
You may be right, certainly. It would be lovely if these things all worked out to be non-problems. But that's not something that can be determined through political theory. It's something that can only be determined through rigorous empirical study and technical work, and the conclusions that work comes to might just not turn out to be very convenient ones. This is why I sometimes don't call myself an anarchist.
But either way, my values stay unchanged. No matter what the answers to these technical questions are, I remain absolutely steadfast in my belief that systems of hierarchy and control are deeply unjust things. Either way, I will continue (as much as I can) to work towards a society in which these things can be done away with to the greatest degree possible, and their deleterious effects can be mitigated wherever they remain. And I think that I'm far more able to actually do that for being honest with myself about what the challenges of this project really are.
I want to be clear, this is not just a tendency I find with anarchists. I've encountered people of basically every political ideology engaging in this sort of dismissive optimism, insisting that the questions raised by their value system in fact demand no answers. But ultimately, it's not intellectually honest to insist that the universe has conspired to make your value system an easy one to hold. And that kind of intellectual dishonesty actually gets in the way of successfully working towards realization of the values you have.
Which is why, in my view, the most effective way to approach your social values is not as positions to be defended but as goals to be achieved. Inconvenient facts are not points against you, they are obstacles in your way. Perhaps they're insurmountable obstacles (that really would be, I think, a point against you), but perhaps they're not. The only way to find out is to acknowledge them as genuine obstacles and to try to find solutions. The inability to acknowledge the challenges in front of oneself has been the downfall of many, many movements, and the solution is as simple as having a little intellectual humility. And personally, I'd rather not let my ego get in the way of building a better world.
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