ATTENTION ALL VIRGINIA RESIDENTS!!

Your governor is currently trying to pass updated student model policies that mean, basically:

All schools must require a written consent form from parents in order to use a different name/pronouns for their child, and students currently using different names and pronouns will be forcibly outed to their parents.

As you can imagine, this is a Living Hell for all trans students. HOWEVER: YOU CAN HELP THEM!

There is currently a 3 day comment period ending TOMORROW AT NOON. email [email protected] with comments AGAINST the policy!

They’re also meeting on december 19 at 10am (get there early- around 8:30 so you get a seat) in the Pocahontas Buidling Senate Room A (900 East Main Street, Richmond)

There are anti-trans organizations going to the committee meeting as well, show up if at all possible so you can, to show power in numbers.

YOU CAN HELP TO KEEP TRANSGENDER STUDENTS SAFE! PLEASE REBLOG AND SHARE THIS POST AS MUCH AS YOU CAN!

There are three main models of disability that are in common use. The moral model, the medical model, and the social model.

You may not have heard of the moral model before, but if you are disabled, you have felt the impact of it. The moral model is disability as a failure of character. It sources the problem of disability in the character of the disabled person. It's the people who insist that if you just tried harder, were better, had a better attitude, that you would no longer be disabled. It is a model that is used by ableists in order to conceptualize of disability as a failing of the individual. An extreme example of this mindset are the Christian Scientists, who believe that all illnesses and disabilities should be healed by the grace of their god and that if you are not healed, something is wrong with you. It is the the most cruel of the models, and the least successful at assisting disabled people.

The medical model is the model used by the medical establishment and by those who put their stock in medical authority. It sources the problem of disability in the body. It measures disability against a theoretical average person, and seeks to make disabled people match that average person more closely. This model works very well for disabled people with disabilities that can be measured, have a potential treatment plan, and want their disability gone. It does not work very well for people who do not match all three criteria. If they match the first and second but not the third, then strict adherents of the medical model often fall back on the moral model, stating that they are stupid, lazy, or selfish for not being interested in being cured. This also often happens if treatment fails to improve the condition of the disabled person.

The social model is a newer model, largely designed by disability activists and scholars and often defined in opposition to the medical model. It sources the problem of disability in the interaction between the disabled person and their physical and social environment. It argues that the solution of disability is to change the environment so that impairments are no longer an issue. This model works very well for disabled people who consider their disability not to be an issue when fully accommodated. It does not work well for people who consider their disability an inherent impairment and/or desire a cure. Strict adherents of the social model often fall back on the moral model when considering these people, stating that they are short-sighted or that they worship the medical model. These are the people who state things such as that depression would not exist in a world without capitalism.

When a disabled person fails to behave as expected by the model a person has of disability, the moral model is almost always the fallback position, because many people cannot conceive of why someone would disagree with them other than a lack of good character. This is a problem, because the moral model proposes no solution but to ignore or abuse the disabled person until they behave as expected.

Another notable interaction is that adherents of the medical model can often be persuaded to support the more traditional parts of the social model, such as providing large text resources to people with impaired vision, so long as there is empirical research backing it. However, they rarely support more radical arguments that challenge how we define disability and how society should be structured or restructured.

All three models have major failure points. The moral model fails every disabled person it is applied to. The medical and social models both fail different disabled people when adhered to strictly. The best approach at the moment seems to be hybridizing the social and medical models, so that they cover each other's weak points and fit the needs of the widest spectrum of disabled people. The main barrier to this is that they are often defined in opposition to each other.

My New Article at WIRED

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So, you may have heard about the whole zoom “AI” Terms of Service  clause public relations debacle, going on this past week, in which Zoom decided that it wasn’t going to let users opt out of them feeding our faces and conversations into their LLMs. In 10.1, Zoom defines “Customer Content” as whatever data users provide or generate (“Customer Input”) and whatever else Zoom generates from our uses of Zoom. Then 10.4 says what they’ll use “Customer Content” for, including “…machine learning, artificial intelligence.”

And then on cue they dropped an “oh god oh fuck oh shit we fucked up” blog where they pinky promised not to do the thing they left actually-legally-binding ToS language saying they could do.

Like, Section 10.4 of the ToS now contains the line “Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent,” but it again it still seems a) that the “customer” in question is the Enterprise not the User, and 2) that “consent” means “clicking yes and using Zoom.” So it’s Still Not Good.

Well anyway, I wrote about all of this for WIRED, including what zoom might need to do to gain back customer and user trust, and what other tech creators and corporations need to understand about where people are, right now.

And frankly the fact that I have a byline in WIRED is kind of blowing my mind, in and of itself, but anyway…

Also, today, Zoom backtracked Hard. And while i appreciate that, it really feels like decided to Zoom take their ball and go home rather than offer meaningful consent and user control options. That’s… not exactly better, and doesn’t tell me what if anything they’ve learned from the experience. If you want to see what I think they should’ve done, then, well… Check the article.

Until Next Time.

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Read the rest of My New Article at WIRED at A Future Worth Thinking About

I'M IN LOVE WITH YOUR ART, will you ever sell the last ones for the playlist in pdf or something like that? I'm from Brazil so is easy for me in those formats, and i would love to buy one. ❤💚❤💚

Thank youuu!! pdf? like I sell the fullsize image digitally & you'd print them off yourself? I hadn't thought abt that! I'd still need to redraw them at a larger size for print tho Here's the current sizing issue:

I genuinely wasn't expecting people to want merch lmaoo, I'm just drawing for my own sake (these were a fun lil side project) But esp since this is the third time someone's asked abt merch of these, I'm considering it! (gonna use these to fund my vitamin d tablet & multivitamin supply 😏) 🥲 i'm really glad my art is resonating w people so much ❤️

I know it's less of a "thing" these days but as w any of my art, u (and all my followers) have my permission to print out the tiny versions i've posted to tumblr [just for personal use, not for profit] & put them up on your wall or w/e. like those old-school anime collages.

If I do ever make a better print-size version, and u still want it, u can always buy it whenever that happens :)

Emily Krause at Private Policy, Fall 2022

without sounding like I'm bragging I've had people come up to me and tell me theyre jealous so many of my friends have confessed to me not knowing how world shattering it is for me because I either feel like 1) some unobservant jackass and continue with my very friendly behavior that's often mistaken as beinf flirty OR 2) I end up feeling used and pull away from said friends as a trauma response 👍

may i be extremely pedantic and annoying about the ai generated image policy

The Tory Migration Catastrophe

How Conservative Immigration Policy Will Destroy Its Thatcherite Model

Source: The Financial Times

By Honest John

LIKE A desperate gambler deciding to bet his shirt on one last turn of the roulette wheel, Rishi Sunak has staked his entire political reputation on the latest iteration of the Tories’ Rwanda bill. This is a piece of legislation which has been declared illegal by the British Supreme Court; which has so far cost the British taxpayer £240m with a further £50m due to be paid to Rwanda next year; which is considered as impractical as it is morally questionable and which has seen precisely zero asylum seekers so far sent to Rwanda to have their claims processed. This sad wheeze is going to be dragged before the House of Commons once more, while Sunak desperately claims black is white and that Rwanda can miraculously become a safe country for asylum seekers by the passing of a law in Westminster. The Prime Minister’s determination to turn Tuesday’s vote on the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill into effectively a vote of confidence in his leadership is simultaneously reckless and absurd. Sunak’s desperation to quieten the increasing insurrectionary noises from his party’s right wing in the wake of the dismissal of Suella Braverman, has led him to to invest all his hopes in a piece of legislation for which there is no evidence will succeed in deterring the “small boats” (its stated claim), which will place the U.K. once again in breach of international law and will succeed only in enriching the government of Rwanda, incredulously receiving millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money for its civic infrastructure, gifted by a country whose own infrastructure is falling apart. It is actually hard to find anyone outside the fevered confines of Sunak’s inner circle who supports the plan or thinks it will work. Apart perhaps from the government of Rwanda itself that is.

It is easy to laugh at the infantile antics of a government that, in any real sense, has ceased to function and to treat this latest act in the Tory psychodrama as the piece of absurdist political theatre it undoubtedly is, but the Rwanda bill is simply the congealing icing on the top of a poisonous cake that the Conservatives have been serving up for years, masquerading as migration “policy”. This is legislation that is as contradictory as it is cruel; as performative as it is populist. For the Conservatives, migration is their key emergency break glass area of public policy. When everything else that they and the succession of hopeless lightweights they have foisted on the country as Prime Ministers, has turned to dung at their touch, they still believe that the prejudice and hatred of “the British People” toward foreigners and immigrants has no bottom level: for Tories you simply cannot go too low on immigration. The Rwanda scheme - when it was first cooked up in the days of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel - had nothing in reality to do with deterring asylum seekers from trying to cross the Channel to Britain; it was all about trying to appeal to a mythical “Red Wall” voter for whom no amount of cruelty, illegality and contempt was too much when it came to migrants. As their polling figures slumped and by election and council election results confirmed their worst electoral fears, the Conservatives still believed that victimising the victims could yet turn it around for them - no matter the dark forces their racist and bile-filled rhetoric might unleash: if they could just once again gaslight the electorate into believing that all the catastrophes of the last fourteen years of Tory rule are, in fact, the fault of incoming foreigners, all may yet be well.

This dismal flirting with the fascist playbook may have resulted in the headline-catching idiocy of Sunak’s latest Rwanda wheeze, but beneath that blather James Cleverley has announced planned measures that are far more significant, far more damaging, and far more frightening than any amount of ludicrous assertions about the Rwanda scheme. Tired of being taunted by Labour and others about the huge rise in legal migration (its net increase topped 600,000 in 2022) despite all the Tory promises to bring the numbers down over the last fourteen years, the Conservatives’ response is to quite literally attack, and potentially destroy, its own Thatcherite economic model.

For over forty years, Tory politicians have extolled Britain’s “flexible” workforce; its deregulated system; its low wage/low unemployment economy and its marketised society. Indeed, for years we were told by politicians on the right and the left that in a globalised world, mobile and non-unionised workforces, cheap production costs, outsourced supply lines and minimal regulation was essential to the easy access, low price, and plentiful supply digital capitalism that has taken hold in Britain. Key to the success of this model has been migrant labour, first from the EU and now from a swathe of sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and South Asian countries whose residents have been offered visas to replace the low wage flexible European workers that post-Brexit Britain apparently no longer wants. The legal migrants that the Conservatives are now in such a lather about are an essential component of the Thatcherite economic model they have all been promoting to us for decades. If, as Cleverley maintains, the government wishes to reduce net migration figures by 300,000 in 2024, then that is 300,000 workers not available to drive lorries, deliver Amazon parcels, pick our crops, clean our offices, valet our cars, serve in our restaurants and, crucially staff our hospitals and care homes. By creating a shortage of deregulated low wage labour, the Tories will simultaneously damage large parts of the service economy and drive up wages, and with it inflation. In their desperate belief that hatred of foreigners will somehow save them from oblivion at the next General Election, the Conservatives are prepared to throw overboard an approach to employment and wages that has sustained them for nearly two generations and was one of the driving ideological impulses on the right that drove Brexit. The revolution has truly begun to eat itself.

Apart from the casual abandonment of what has been the essence of right-wing Toryism for years, Cleverley has also managed to introduce the class-based nastiness of the Sklled Worker minimum salary threshold of £38,700 pa that legal migrants and their dependents must meet. This is a measure that will drive families apart, possibly force British citizens, married to foreigners but earning below the threshold, to emigrate to be with their loved ones and cause untold damage to the university sector (one of the few growth areas of the British economy) and the NHS and care sector, already on its knees after years of austerity and disproportionately reliant on migrant labour. It is as if the Tories are not content with the calamities that austerity, Brexit and Trussonomics have already wrought on British society: with this latest episode of ill-thought through prejudicial nonsense, they seem to want to finish it off altogether. I have predicted for some time the implosion of modern Toryism - its Thatcherite ideology a busted flush and its Brexit nationalist makeover lacking in depth or practical solutions; but what I hadn’t bargained for was that the Tories would try to take the whole country down with them.

Never has a government looked more threadbare, pointless, desperate and unlovable. All they have left to offer is hatred, racism and self-defeating vindictiveness. If Sunak’s absurd posturing over his doomed Rwanda bill results in his resignation before Christmas and a January General Election, the “British People” that this band of charlatans and incompetents keep claiming to speak for, but who in reality they do not understand, will breathe a sigh of relief, because we the people will at last be given the opportunity to cast this catastrophic version of Toryism into an electoral oblivion it so richly deserves and from which it will, hopefully, never emerge.

Migration may yet be modern Conservatism’s epitaph.

10th December 2023

[wip] 🐇 day + i finally found a lineart brush i like to line with

i was picked to join the MUN and now i am fucked up with minimal research done as of writing this post 🥲

The job I just quit asked me to join their board of management. Why do people want me on their board of management so bad. One time an organisation rejected my job application in the same email as asking if i'd serve on their board. Pay me, motherfuckers.

Im rewatching Nimona with my mother and just. Can’t get over what a goddamned political (in a good way!) movie it is

The freshest thing about gaming are the colors. People think that you have to do the whole entire most to making gaming interesting. It’s stupid. It’s humiliating. It’s probably the worse idea that I have ever heard of when calling it the metaverse brilliantly describing gaming as something futuristic. It’s not. Gaming is fun. And this is what is about to happen…

The metaverse have been trying. I give them that. Exoskeletons, virtual reality helmets, even motion floor modules…but it’s humiliating. It’s clunky and probably the most expensive piece of play equipment someone could ever buy.

With addition, the gaming equipment we have is satisfactory. It’s the production of more life in gaming and structures the reality of gaming in a general way. We have a gaming mat and gloves. Simple, right? The mat contains nine buttons including up, down, left, right, diagonal upper left, diagonal upper right, diagonal lower left, diagonal lower right, and an empty button in the center. With gaming instead of “walking for real;” we would just step on one of the arrows and hold it. Jumping would result to the empty space as being fit will become its results by limited game play and augmented development.

The gloves we have are simply developed with ease and no clunkiness. The gloves are light and Bluetooth compatible of which games that use projectiles and punches could ovate a different play of gaming controls and even gaming reality. From practices and function, gaming is practical all together. The worlds and how we respond to them is trinity to our normality, imagination, and nirvana. We build with poise. We destitute in function. As the metaverse have made an attempt, our technology have really done it.

In conclusion, the games we have been producing are the results to joy and even education. Be on the lookout for more game development information on Light Shine Incorporated. We are really doing things that’s about the change the way we move in this economy. As a nuance to gaming, we have some more victory to claim.

Josie Dupont at Private Policy, Fall 2022

Got my Orc costume prosthetics and I love them :] :] :] still gotta trim out around the eyes and lips just a little bit to fit my face (I'm very happy when costume prosthetics leave a bit of extra around the edges so you can trim it to your face shape) but it fits surprisingly well besides those extra spaces! They even made it so that the tusks part runs from the mouth all the way to under the chin for better support and so you can blend your makeup out in a less noticable area :] haven't messed around with it too much yet but I'll probably post some pictures when I do get it shaped and prepped for use :]