genderkoolaid:

psa for cis people: it’s not “women and people who menstruate,” it’s just people who menstruate. adding “women and” implies that

1. the only relevant women are (menstruating) cis women, so there’s no need to add any qualifiers (like “cis”)
2. womanhood is central to menstruation & menstruation is central to womanhood by unnecessarily bringing up gender right before using a gender neutral phrase

just say people who menstruate. women who menstruate are people. saying “women and people who menstruate” is a nonsense phrase that only serves to soothe the egos of cis women. they can cope with not having their ciswomanhood centered, I promise.

(via gayfeatherfiend)

netherworldpost:

invaderxan:

mikesmoustache:

biglawbear:

dispatchesfromtheclasswar:

Good for this person. This is exactly what you do. Screw the job.

I had a job that made me work an all nighter, 30 hours straight, over Thanksgiving. I resigned that Monday and it was one of the most satisfying decisions I’ve ever made.

Part 3:

Please pay attention to all the manipulation tactics this boss uses, because they’re pulling out every trick in the book.

• “I’m not your boss, I’m your friend”
• “Other people will be hurt by this and it’s your fault and I’m going to tell them all that”
• Mocking language
• Jobs are important too
• “Be a team player”
• “We’re your family too”
• Talking as if this is a thing you must do
• “We all make sacrifices”
• Undermining your authority
• “You caused all of this, really”
• Accusing you of being “unprofessional”
• “Look at the money you cost us”
• “Just laugh it off and come back to work”

This is like a 101 course in how employers use guilt trips to coerce you into putting up with their bullshit. This is precisely why you should never trust those employers who insist that they’re “like a family.” They are not. It’s just a ruse so that your boss can neg you into putting your job ahead of your actual life.

This came up after I just made a post about start-up life.

Fang has 50% equity in everything I’ve built up because she works her ass off.

If she walks? There is an immediate cash transfer of $X. No questions asked. She has full access to it herself. If she was in the mindset of “This cash xfer is my resignation letter,” it could be thus initiated with a few clicks without me.

If someone is so valuable that your entire company rests on their singular labor, they must be trusted and compensated.

Because if not, then you don’t have a company, you have a giant rock poised over your head. “I can’t do this without you” is a table to build a negotiation, not a battle cry.

(via iamnotanotter)

only-tiktoks:

(via iamnotanotter)

pupyjpeg:

pupyjpeg:

My absolute hottest take is that, from a culturally relative perspective, no food is bad. None of it. It’s an expression of culture, art, history, ecology, material conditions, subjective taste. It’s all inedible pap to somebody and the taste of childhood for someone else. Americans be eating cheesed burger. Pea wet is as good as gravy in Wigan. The French eat snails and the Inuit eat seal, the Germans eat sauerkraut and the Russians drink kvass, the Inca ate cavy and the Romans ate flamingo. People around the world have been eagerly awaiting their serving of simple bread or thin porridge or fermented milk product or pickled whatever-the-fuck since we learned to cook food over fire. We all love the slop we grew up eating. Food is a reflection of millennia of culture and loving human artistic expression. Attempting to extrapolate largely harmless online food banter into actual serious comparative rankings or half-baked critical analyses of cultures based on how much you subjectively don’t like what they eat is a miserable way to live. Live a little. Peace and love on the only planet with food.

This is a post of critical support for bland English cuisine and unhinged Brazilian pizzas and everything else I don’t understand. Turning food, something literally every person on earth enjoys, into a moral or cultural judgement is, well, if it’s not full-blown reactionary and parochial… then it’s at least kind of nasty, huh?

(via fatphobiabusters)

gabriellabowden:

it’s hard 2 be sad about ur body when you think of it as a landscape. you don’t criticise a mountain for being too big, or a valley for being too winding, and no one ever complains about the vastness of the sea. u are part of the earth and u are so beautiful friends.

(via cpt-bagel)

lessamao:

I have 4 pairs of earrings up for grabs in my shop! Ready to ship! Find them here

(via cpt-bagel)

antediluvian-microchip asked: Hey you said something that's making me think, you said you like empiricalism and kinda rationalism, I've never heard of empiricalism as a philosophy and I'm wondering what the difference is?

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel

This is beautiful, and your description of Empiricism is spot on. There is a boulder located outside of one of the main entrances to to the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. On that boulder is enscribed what is considered to be one of the most thorough understandings of the universe Humanity has ever discovered: The Standard Model. People walk by that boulder every day, look at it, and think to themselves “Today’s the day we finally prove it wrong.”

Nobody is against the Standard Model, but we know that somewhere, somehow, there’s a piece of it that could be improved. Newtonian Gravity is 99% accurate, but doesn’t account a few small situations such as the orbit of Mercury. So we replaced it with Einsteinian Gravity, which is 99.9% accurate, but doesn’t account for gravity at the atomic scale. Current theories might propose a new law that is 99.99% accurate but would still have something they missed.

And so on and so forth. It’s a beautiful way to approach problems, because it admits falliability, the possibility that you don’t know everything, and gives you a drive to constantly improve.

I love this so much.  We live in a weird, inexplicable world that’s never gonna play by the rules no matter what we do.

Just found another quote that said it better than I could:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

To GROSSLY oversimplify it: empiricism is all about how we can never know anything for sure, rationalism is all about how everything can be known if we just apply enough logic.  I’ve had a lot of training in empiricism and I really love empiricism, which tbh is part of the reason I kinda hate rationalism.

Empiricism is the belief system underpinning a lot of (especially Western) science, one that emphasizes trying everything to see what happens and paying close attention to one’s senses.  It’s the reason that science never proves anything, only gathers more and more evidence for and against various hypotheses.  If one can rule out enough potential explanations, one can eventually posit a theory, and let that theory stand as the dominant paradigm for now, while constantly seeking evidence that’ll falsify the theory.  For a lot of people, empiricism is frustratingly unsatisfying, because it prides itself on never having any simple or even certain answers.

Rationalism is NOT diametrically opposed to empiricism, but rather a close cousin.  It’s the belief system underpinning (mostly Western) philosophy, abstract mathematics, and old-school economics.  It seeks to guarantee the existence of mathematical proofs and other logical absolutes through creating abstract problems that have only one solution, and then demonstrating why they only have one solution using a clear-cut set of inflexible principles.  Rationalism has a clear set of certainties, and a clear set of rules for how to go about obtaining those certainties.

In practice, rationalism is often prescriptive where empiricism is descriptive.  Rationalism might propose an ideal set of grammatical rules and then explain the superiority of those rules; empiricism might describe the ways that everyday language deviates from grammatical language and then test a bunch of hypotheses about why those deviations occur.  But empiricism would no more exist without rationalism than science would exist without math.

[Image description: Detail from the Renaissance painting “School of Athens” which shows two men in Classical outfits, walking through an acropolis and talking to each other.  Plato, on the left, is pointing up at the sky; Aristotle, on the right, is gesturing toward the ground.]

Raphael’s depiction of Plato (one of the founders of rationalism) and Aristotle (one of the founders of empiricism) beautifully sums up the key differences.  Plato would inspire Descartes to say “I can know nothing for sure except that I am a being which can generate these thoughts (cogito ergo sum).”  Aristotle would inspire Karl Popper to say “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability.”  Plato spent his career staring at the heavens, contemplating the nature of love.  Aristotle spent his career crawling around in the dirt, swinging pendulums and dissecting birds.  Plato believed that there is an absolute truth to be found outside the cave, if we can just open our eyes.  Aristotle believed in pulling things apart to see how they work, not caring if our perceptions are just cave-shadows.  Again, I oversimplify, but that’s the gist.

I don’t dislike rationalism in theory.  Rationally, I know there’s nothing wrong with its framework.  Empirically, I see it get misused a lot, and empirically, I know that my discomfort with rationalism is valid even if it’s not logical.

To quote Hank Green: 

Hey, so, science communicators by and large prefer to not indulge in the “rationality vs emotion” dichotomy because we recognize that it’s just a manifestation of the kind of superiority complexes that have traditionally held science back.

But it does tend to do really well with…certain audiences, and also it feels good to be able to ~~know more~~ than normal people. I know that this, rather than actual curiosity, is what drives a lot of people to science content.

Indeed, it’s part of what drove me to science as a young man. But it turns out (get this!) that emotion and beliefs and values and stories are /also real./ And that’s something most science communicators are excited about and interested in and AWARE OF.

So when we see the rationalism worship and the inherent superiority that comes with it, most science communicator types quietly groan with collective embarrassment. I just want everyone to know that.

I would add that Green’s category of “science communicators” definitely includes scientists as well.  Rationalism as a philosophy is important and foundational and useful for things like abstract math.  Rationalism (as discussed in the podcast) also does a hilariously terrible job of modeling human decision-making.  Rationalism cannot describe dynamic systems of many semi-independent units (e.g. stock markets, storm fronts) AT ALL.

Rationalism, like empiricism, like holistic modeling, like religious faith, like every philosophy, sometimes gets used as a tool to crow the alleged superiority of one’s own worldview over that of other people.  Rationalism happens to be associated with the alleged superiority of the white-western-atheistic perspective popular on Reddit and Tumblr, which is a big part of the (irrational) reason I’m not a fan.  Because humans aren’t a rational species; we’re a rationalizing one (X).

If the theorists had spent less time with money and more time with politics and war, or even marriage, they might have come to different conclusions about human nature.  In politics and war, as in fraught human relationships, the choice faced by the decision-maker was often between two unpleasant options with unknowable odds.
A very different view… might have emerged if the outcomes of decisions in the private-personal, political, or strategic domains had been as easily measurable as monetary gains and losses.

That’s Kahneman & Tversky (1979), talking about the theoretical but nonexistent “rational man” used in research, until their own work showed that rationalism is useless for decision-making in war, and hypothesized that it’s useless for decision-making in relationships.

fozmeadows:

Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -

And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”

And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.

Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.

The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.

I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.

I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.

I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.

And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.    

Felice never played a trick on me again.

Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed. 

And I feel like this is information worth sharing.  

(via cpt-bagel)

lrgcarter:

blatantescapism:

asmuchasidliketo:

rarity-femme:

do NOT get into fibre arts!!!! you try one and then all of a sudden you have 10 hobbies and wanna try 10 more

yessss… yes

(via iknityounot)

unniebeans:

vampireautism:

vampireautism:

also before it starts to happen: if i see a single person calling july “gay wrath month” or saying “we deserve a second one” it is ON SIGHT. that is DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH. abled queers i will run you over with my wheelchair if you so much as reblog one of those comments.

hello! reblog this version instead!

Hello! Disabled person here. Did you know those of us declared legally disabled and collect SSI and benefits are barred from getting married? Yep! I’m also queer so this isn’t hate at all, it’s a call to action: if you love marriage equality, come help us fight for ours.

Marriage Equality – Center for Disability Rights

Marriage Equality – Center for Disability Rights

cdrnys.org

(via thehumantrampoline)