Day: July 9, 2017

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (via prawnofsatan)
Source: prawnofsatan

girlwithbird:

canisbeta:

girlwithbird:

canisbeta:

babiest borb

where did you find this baber???? if u need any advice on taking care of le bebe let us at birblr know!!!

I volunteer at a wildlife rehabilitation center! This lil baby gnatcatcher is one of our patients and will be released when they are able to feed themself, as currently they need to be hand fed every 15 minutes due to being So Smol

because our center accepts non-native species, we do not get government funding and run entirely on donations. you can support this borb and other animals by donating here.

OMg amazing.  You are Guardian of the Smol Bebe.

deathlygristly:

quill-of-thoth:

aiden17:

ozymandias271:

maddeningscientist:

“Why box yourself in with labels instead of just being you?” is an idea i see a lot and it’s very distressing to me and I’m not quite sure why.

“why are you interested in having words to understand and talk about your experiences”

“Why be able to identify others like you when you can feel different and alone?”

“Your labels make me uncomfortable because they impede my ability to blindly ignore any need for representation or accomodations you may have, and challenge my assumption that MY state of being is the only ‘natural’ one.”

What bothers me about it is the power that the anti-label people give to words. It’s like they think of words that are just a collection of letters that we use to signify a group of traits as these really powerful talismans. 

And then when you observe their behavior and how they talk about these words, you realize that to them, yes, these words are powerful talismans, and when you say something that to you is just a collection of letters and sounds that you use to simplify communication about a group of traits, what they hear is…well, I guess it depends on the person and their individual history with that label. But they’re putting a lot more weight on that collection of letters than you are, and they’re investing it with a lot of cultural symbolism and social meaning and media portrayals that they’ve seen and stereotypes that they know but that you’re not aware of, and then they’re unable to separate you as an individual from all the images they have connected to that collection of letters.

I guess, for an example….

Like when I hear that someone has a learning disorder, I’m like “Oh, okay, so you have some traits that fit into this pattern that we’ve noticed and named, and you need some accommodations, and we can try out some ways to help you that have worked well for other people who have shown this pattern of traits.”

It would appear that when the people who give labels a lot of power hear that someone has a learning disorder, they think something like “This person is fundamentally flawed in some manner and they will never succeed at anything that my culture sees as having value, and everyone else will hate them and judge them. Also I can only think of this person now as being this word that is commonly used to describe a pattern of traits that they fit into. I can no longer see them as an individual. I can only see all the images and prejudices I have about this word. The dissonance between my previous view of this person and the view of them that I now have because of this word makes me really uncomfortable, and for some reason instead of changing how I think of the word I will just demand that the person remove the word, so I can go back to thinking of them the way that I did before the word”

And then too there’s people who have more experience with the type of people who imbue words with great power than I do, and so I think their fear of labels may come from that. Like even though they know words are just words, they also know that other people will completely change how they see you and treat you based on certain words, and they don’t want that to happen to other people. Like people who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and who’ve been treated horribly by professionals because when those professionals hear the word “borderline”, they can no longer see the individual in front of them and they can only see all the prejudices and stereotypes that they’ve collected around the word “borderline”, and that leads to dehumanization and maltreatment.

I don’t know. I think there’s a very basic difference in how people who see labels as a collection of words that are useful for communication about certain patterns and how people who see labels as these big huge scary things think about language and how they use language to construct their idea of reality.

Like I know that for me, language is a tool to describe reality. It’s a fluid that can be easily shaped and changed and adapted as needed to fit with the underlying reality, but it’s taken as given that it is never the reality itself. People who give labels immense power seem to see language as a solid, as a permanent structure that defines reality, rather than as an attempt to describe it.

I guess in the end it goes back to all those developmental theories I’ve studied. I should google around and see if I can find a developmental theory that applies to use of language. Because I think that it’s possible that the people who see words as great permanent immovable reality defining things are at conventional/concrete levels of development, and people who see language as more of a fluid imprecise and ever changing attempt to describe reality are at post conventional/abstract levels of development.

I am not really comfortable talking in terms of development, especially given some of the ways similar rhetoric continues to get used. (Even though I know you’re not going in the same directions with it, at all. Not suggesting you were.)

But, those are some very different perspectives, and that’s an excellent description of the “don’t define yourself by X!” way of thinking which has always amazed me. When what they really seem to be saying is “Once I am reminded of certain labels, I cannot think about anything else or see the person they’re attached to as a Real Person”. And that’s somehow the labeled person’s problem.

A lot of that does seem to rely on a very narrow acceptable range of what qualifies as Real People who deserve respect. Propped up by a whole slew of widgets. AFAICT, the weird reification stuff mostly comes straight out of real complicated human beings bashing up against that.

It strikes me as kind of like the people who insist that the world must be literally 6000 years old, or everything else they want to believe about how things work falls totally apart. Only it’s their own sense of worth that’s at stake. If the boxes they’ve been busily shoving the rest of the world into–safely away from themselves–may not be exactly what/how they’ve assumed? It calls a big chunk of their worldview into question. Including a lot of what’s been making them feel superior as Real People.

Even trying to emulate that enough to wrap words around it makes my head hurt. But, that’s the best approximation I can come up with right now.

If anything, that also seems to be a very culturally driven thing. Not just the exact specifications of those boxes, but how important maintaining certain divisions (with whole categories of Unpeople) even becomes to maintaining the status quo. Much less which widgets commonly get used for that, to the point of being hard to recognize as such for the ones relying on them.

Which helps make a lot of things more frustrating, but I have just about run out of steam for now. There were several other points I wanted to at least try and talk around, but maybe later.

I know I may not be doing so well at trying to wrap words around something when phrases like “barbican of widgets” start popping out 🙄

Not even trying to sound pretentious. Though I suspect some of the attempts at words come out sounding more bizarre than anything else, as poor a job as they end up doing at trying to convey anything close to my actual thought processes.

akanamay:

withasmoothroundstone:

moteinthedark:

Controversial opinion:

Geekiness is neither feminine nor masculine. It’s neotenous, or genderless. There’s a cluster of people who read more as “little kid” or “robot” or “serious, sexless nun/monk/scientist” than as “man” or “woman”.

There is a cluster around science/tech, introversion, neoteny, a particular kind of gender weirdness, and some flavors of autism. The geek stereotype is based on a real kind of person. I am that kind of person.

I actually like being that kind of person. Sometimes it means I Fail at Girl, but mostly it feels natural and good.

I get the sense that society has gotten way more interested in gender, and assigning genders to everything, and arguing about gender. And that’s good on net, because it results in more freedom for LGBT people. But also…the pinks are pinker and the blues are bluer, y’know? Marketing has gotten more gendered, and that includes the marketing of “content.” Everything you read is either marked blue or pink. It wasn’t, in the 90’s. Tech is marked “blue” now , and it didn’t use to be.

Feminism is very pink these days. 70s feminism had women who looked and talked more like me. Judy Chicago was dinky and Jewy and nerdy and slightly butch. She would have been easier for me to make friends with than most of the feminists I read on Tumblr.

I see people who are my kind of people, who are in the cluster, and they primarily talk about it as a “trans” thing or a “disabled” thing. What I see is a type that includes some trans and disabled people and some who are neither, but all of whom have some of this weirdness regarding gender and thinking style (and interpret it/react to it differently.) There’s a “geek phenotype”, so to speak.

Contemporary culture doesn’t really allow you to talk about that. “Geek” is defined to include everyone who likes Marvel movies. When you try to talk about the specific thing that is Our Kind Of People, you get accused of being insular. Or people say “oh you mean autistic” and it turns out that there’s overlap but there are lots of autistics who definitely aren’t “geek phenotype”. If you claim “there are more men than women who are phenotypically geeky”, you start being suspected of sexism. So you can’t really talk about this cluster that everyone knows is more-or-less real.

I mean, there’s a “nerd accent.” We’ve all heard it.

What *is* it that prevents us from identifying as a group?

I am… not that type but have known tons of people who are and at times hovered near social circles with a lot of such people in them and emulated elements of it.  I don’t know how much of the above observations I believe or don’t believe – by which I mean I literally have no opinion because there’s a lot I don’t know.  But I think I know what general type of person is being described.

Something that is not directly related (or may be, but not sure), but for some reason I kept thinking while reading this:

I have long observed that there is one set of traits that is read in two supposedly opposing way depending on context.  In some contexts it’s read as like the super-genius uber-geek.  In other contexts it’s read as retarded.  (I’m using that word, no matter how offensive it is, because I don’t mean intellectual disability, I mean an idea in people’s heads that correlates with the idea of ‘retarded’ most people have.  An idea closely related but not identical with intellectual disability. Just as ‘genius’ is an idea in people’s heads related to the idea of high IQ but isn’t identical to it at all.  If I meant high IQ and low IQ I would’ve just said those things.)  

The common denominator is autism.  These are traits of voice, appearance, habit, and mannerisms that are absolutely identical to each other and it is only context clues that make people sometimes read them as one thing and sometimes as another.  

Like I was trying to describe möbius mouth (one of the earliest ways to screen for autism in infants, and something that usually persists for life, and part of the stereotype-that-goes-both-ways) to an MIT professor, and she couldn’t see it as an unusual expression because it’s so damn common at MIT.

And that thing is related to the geek phenotype thing.  As in, the geek phenotype thing is like… one of several things that can happen in a lot of autistic people and some other neurodivergent people, that causes a couple different stereotypes in people’s heads to form, and which one they see depends entirely on context.  There are other things besides the geek phenotype that can be read in a similar polarizing way.  I’ve been able to notice this contrast because I have been seen as gifted and put into gifted programs, and I’ve been seen as developmentally disabled and put into DD programs, and I’ve watched the way utterly identical behavior is treated as opposites within these two contexts. 

Explaining to an MIT professor why I was terrified to lie down on the floor… she acted like my ideas came from outer space.  I’d seen people get the crap beat out of them and tied to tables for lying on the floor not bothering anyone at all.  Apparently lying on the floor is socially acceptable at MIT.  I felt so horribly out of place there – like I was an infiltrator who would be revealed to be not as smart or useful or interesting as they thought I was.  The last time I was on a university campus, several people with a lot of authority told me I didn’t belong on a university campus at all.  And then the professor took me to a neighborhood of a type I have been thrown out of for walking alone.  I couldn’t explain any of this to anyone and still can’t entirely.  It has to do with experiences that have shaped me on levels I can’t describe without any conscious awareness until events like this brought them up.  Emphasized the most emphatically because the day before MIT I was at an amazing DD self-advocacy conference where I felt a sense of belonging and rightness i’d never felt anywhere, and the contrast kept piercing my heart into pieces.  I kept trying to get them to be as interested in the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities as they were in the experiences of autistic people, but it wasn’t happening, they kept asking why, I couldn’t explain, but I felt that out of loyalty to the people who have made a place for me in their lives in a way others haven’t, I needed to say “You’re overlooking people with valuable perspectives.”

And I know that’s way off on a tangent from the OP.  But somehow this ‘geek phenotype’ thing reminded me of one of many different ‘phenotypes’ that are read in supposedly-opposite ways (’genius’ and ‘retarded’ are ideas most people refuse to combine) based on identical behavior in shifting contexts.  Which led me to my own experiences being read both ways, and once read one way people refuse to read you the opposite way, most of the time.  I find both ways dehumanizing and inaccurate.

If there’s a ‘geek phenotype’, there are… other things, too. Whatever I am, overlaps heavily with some autistic people but not others, like the geek thing, and also overlaps with a lot of nonautistic but usually neurodivergent people, including often people with certain kinds of epilepsy, certain kinds of intellectual disabilities, and certain things that don’t have official classifications as of the moment.  I can’t really describe it I just know it when I see it.  And for whatever reason we seem to inspire very polarized ideas in other people, and we also seem to be unable to fit into any of the common categories people create, not just a little unable to fit but a lot.  Like functioning labels apply to nobody, really, but for us we completely break the concept to pieces in a very visible and unavoidable manner, and that invites hostility and suspicion from people invested in the categories existing.  Some people try to shove us into one or another but when we don’t fit we get blamed.  And sometimes we try to shove ourselves into one or the other but it never works no matter how hard we try, and the not-working is unavoidable it’s not something we can avoid confronting for long at all.  (Like, some people it takes work to say why they don’t fit, we just flagrantly don’t fit in ways that become obvious quickly if not instantly.)

Anyway, I hope the OP doesn’t mind a zillion tangents like this, these things are just where my mind went.

regarding the weirdness of gender and thinking style as a coherent phenotype…. consider consuming THIS blog post

withasmoothroundstone:

moteinthedark:

Controversial opinion:

Geekiness is neither feminine nor masculine. It’s neotenous, or genderless. There’s a cluster of people who read more as “little kid” or “robot” or “serious, sexless nun/monk/scientist” than as “man” or “woman”.

There is a cluster around science/tech, introversion, neoteny, a particular kind of gender weirdness, and some flavors of autism. The geek stereotype is based on a real kind of person. I am that kind of person.

I actually like being that kind of person. Sometimes it means I Fail at Girl, but mostly it feels natural and good.

I get the sense that society has gotten way more interested in gender, and assigning genders to everything, and arguing about gender. And that’s good on net, because it results in more freedom for LGBT people. But also…the pinks are pinker and the blues are bluer, y’know? Marketing has gotten more gendered, and that includes the marketing of “content.” Everything you read is either marked blue or pink. It wasn’t, in the 90’s. Tech is marked “blue” now , and it didn’t use to be.

Feminism is very pink these days. 70s feminism had women who looked and talked more like me. Judy Chicago was dinky and Jewy and nerdy and slightly butch. She would have been easier for me to make friends with than most of the feminists I read on Tumblr.

I see people who are my kind of people, who are in the cluster, and they primarily talk about it as a “trans” thing or a “disabled” thing. What I see is a type that includes some trans and disabled people and some who are neither, but all of whom have some of this weirdness regarding gender and thinking style (and interpret it/react to it differently.) There’s a “geek phenotype”, so to speak.

Contemporary culture doesn’t really allow you to talk about that. “Geek” is defined to include everyone who likes Marvel movies. When you try to talk about the specific thing that is Our Kind Of People, you get accused of being insular. Or people say “oh you mean autistic” and it turns out that there’s overlap but there are lots of autistics who definitely aren’t “geek phenotype”. If you claim “there are more men than women who are phenotypically geeky”, you start being suspected of sexism. So you can’t really talk about this cluster that everyone knows is more-or-less real.

I mean, there’s a “nerd accent.” We’ve all heard it.

What *is* it that prevents us from identifying as a group?

I am… not that type but have known tons of people who are and at times hovered near social circles with a lot of such people in them and emulated elements of it.  I don’t know how much of the above observations I believe or don’t believe – by which I mean I literally have no opinion because there’s a lot I don’t know.  But I think I know what general type of person is being described.

Something that is not directly related (or may be, but not sure), but for some reason I kept thinking while reading this:

I have long observed that there is one set of traits that is read in two supposedly opposing way depending on context.  In some contexts it’s read as like the super-genius uber-geek.  In other contexts it’s read as retarded.  (I’m using that word, no matter how offensive it is, because I don’t mean intellectual disability, I mean an idea in people’s heads that correlates with the idea of ‘retarded’ most people have.  An idea closely related but not identical with intellectual disability. Just as ‘genius’ is an idea in people’s heads related to the idea of high IQ but isn’t identical to it at all.  If I meant high IQ and low IQ I would’ve just said those things.)  

The common denominator is autism.  These are traits of voice, appearance, habit, and mannerisms that are absolutely identical to each other and it is only context clues that make people sometimes read them as one thing and sometimes as another.  

Like I was trying to describe möbius mouth (one of the earliest ways to screen for autism in infants, and something that usually persists for life, and part of the stereotype-that-goes-both-ways) to an MIT professor, and she couldn’t see it as an unusual expression because it’s so damn common at MIT.

And that thing is related to the geek phenotype thing.  As in, the geek phenotype thing is like… one of several things that can happen in a lot of autistic people and some other neurodivergent people, that causes a couple different stereotypes in people’s heads to form, and which one they see depends entirely on context.  There are other things besides the geek phenotype that can be read in a similar polarizing way.  I’ve been able to notice this contrast because I have been seen as gifted and put into gifted programs, and I’ve been seen as developmentally disabled and put into DD programs, and I’ve watched the way utterly identical behavior is treated as opposites within these two contexts. 

Explaining to an MIT professor why I was terrified to lie down on the floor… she acted like my ideas came from outer space.  I’d seen people get the crap beat out of them and tied to tables for lying on the floor not bothering anyone at all.  Apparently lying on the floor is socially acceptable at MIT.  I felt so horribly out of place there – like I was an infiltrator who would be revealed to be not as smart or useful or interesting as they thought I was.  The last time I was on a university campus, several people with a lot of authority told me I didn’t belong on a university campus at all.  And then the professor took me to a neighborhood of a type I have been thrown out of for walking alone.  I couldn’t explain any of this to anyone and still can’t entirely.  It has to do with experiences that have shaped me on levels I can’t describe without any conscious awareness until events like this brought them up.  Emphasized the most emphatically because the day before MIT I was at an amazing DD self-advocacy conference where I felt a sense of belonging and rightness i’d never felt anywhere, and the contrast kept piercing my heart into pieces.  I kept trying to get them to be as interested in the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities as they were in the experiences of autistic people, but it wasn’t happening, they kept asking why, I couldn’t explain, but I felt that out of loyalty to the people who have made a place for me in their lives in a way others haven’t, I needed to say “You’re overlooking people with valuable perspectives.”

And I know that’s way off on a tangent from the OP.  But somehow this ‘geek phenotype’ thing reminded me of one of many different ‘phenotypes’ that are read in supposedly-opposite ways (’genius’ and ‘retarded’ are ideas most people refuse to combine) based on identical behavior in shifting contexts.  Which led me to my own experiences being read both ways, and once read one way people refuse to read you the opposite way, most of the time.  I find both ways dehumanizing and inaccurate.

If there’s a ‘geek phenotype’, there are… other things, too. Whatever I am, overlaps heavily with some autistic people but not others, like the geek thing, and also overlaps with a lot of nonautistic but usually neurodivergent people, including often people with certain kinds of epilepsy, certain kinds of intellectual disabilities, and certain things that don’t have official classifications as of the moment.  I can’t really describe it I just know it when I see it.  And for whatever reason we seem to inspire very polarized ideas in other people, and we also seem to be unable to fit into any of the common categories people create, not just a little unable to fit but a lot.  Like functioning labels apply to nobody, really, but for us we completely break the concept to pieces in a very visible and unavoidable manner, and that invites hostility and suspicion from people invested in the categories existing.  Some people try to shove us into one or another but when we don’t fit we get blamed.  And sometimes we try to shove ourselves into one or the other but it never works no matter how hard we try, and the not-working is unavoidable it’s not something we can avoid confronting for long at all.  (Like, some people it takes work to say why they don’t fit, we just flagrantly don’t fit in ways that become obvious quickly if not instantly.)

Anyway, I hope the OP doesn’t mind a zillion tangents like this, these things are just where my mind went.