Hey Sorry If I Was Offputting And Strange And Bizarre And Weird As Fuck Last Night I Was Just Being Myself

we should globally ban the introduction of more powerful computer hardware for 10-20 years, not as an AI safety thing (though we could frame it as that), but to force programmers to optimize their shit better

i have no patience for people talking about violent rhetoric on the left really because every day i read the news and every politician in this country and in most others is saying 'we gotta kill more people'. they use different words to say it. obviously you're not supposed to just say 'we gotta kill more people'. but there's all kinds of polite and okay ways to say it.

'we need to control our borders' is a phrase which here means 'we gotta kill more people, we gotta drown more refugees in boats, we gotta send more people back to warzones and governments that want them dead, we gotta make more camps and we gotta make the camps more fatal'.

'we need to be tougher on welfare fraud' is a phrase which here means 'we gotta kill more people, we gotta make disabled people do more song and dance routines to convince some indifferent bureaucrat that they deserve to eat and we gotta make sure that the bureaucrats say 'no', we gotta starve those kids more, we gotta make sure families and kids and old people are freezing in the winter'.

'we need to tackle violent crime' is a phrase which here means 'we gotta kill more people, specifically Black people, unless we said Terrorism instead of Crime, in which case it's specifically muslims, shoot them, imprison them, surveil them, disappear them, brutalize them, whatever.'

and of course none of this is Violent Speech. this is Sensible Political Discourse. these are Common-Sense Policy Goals. we gotta kill more people: that's an electable policy. you can always count on we gotta kill more people as a platform. we gotta kill more people is gonna sweep the nation baby. we gotta kill more people 2024 -- vote now on your phones. now slow down. hold your horses. did that guy just say we gotta kill more people? well that just wont do. thats why im running on a platform of we gotta kill more people for cheaper, to stop this wasteful madness. and the people just keep dying but seems like there's still some of them left so i guess we're just circling back around to our main thing which is: we gotta kill more people

via @swatercolor [insta]

Medium

Autistic “Memory-Foaming”

Why the difficulty (and sometimes inability) to self-advocate is so common to the autistic experience… and why it’s so insidious.

During a writing workshop I took this past year, I was reading a submission from someone in the group, and the following passage hit me like a brick: “I learned the things most people don’t have to know, too, how to shut down my brain and just perform the motions when needed. I made myself into the perfect parallel, not a mirror but foam. Folding in when he needed to push down, anticipating his next move, and absorbing it in kind. I became resigned to his every need, trying to never let him get ahead of my mental preparation.” — Lizzie McCord I unpacked this with my partner, and then with my therapist, and the concept of social memory-foaming formed. Here’s my attempt at a formal definition: Memory-foaming is the process of losing, giving up, or having trouble forming a sense of self-identity, self-advocacy and self-determination in social situations, and molding oneself to someone else or to a situation. It often involves excessively conceding, bending, conforming and acquiescing to someone, either actively or passively, either as a reaction to specific feedback, or in anticipation of a certain response. It often involves making yourself as small, as accommodating, and/or as agreeable as possible, to the point of self-neglect and self-alienation. Memory-foaming is different from people-pleasing in its process of self-unknowing, and in its process of identity-anchoring to someone or something else. It involves actually taking the shape of whatever or whoever you come into contact with, and being an adaptable, soft, malleable cast, often in order to fit in, gain acceptance or maintain connection. In relationships, memory-foaming is different from compromise, generosity, accommodation, and balanced self-sacrifice mainly because of its characteristic ignorance or un-awareness of self, and the resulting extreme deference to someone else by default.  It often involves the actual adoption and internalization of someone else’s perceptions and desires, and therefore often involves not knowing the difference between “mine” and “theirs.” As a result, just like real memory foam, it takes a long time afterwards to understand what was “me” and what was “them.” Sometimes, that understanding never comes.

Wow. This was a fantastic read. I think Lizzie McCord & Attlee Hall's "memory foaming" metaphor describes a psychological experience common to Autistics far better than "people pleasing", "codependency" or even "fawning" ever did.

at least some of these haven’t been posted here yet.

anyways (I say this as someone who is deeply critical of the united states government, military, unchecked capitalism, police, etc) I am SICK of people treating america as if it has no cultural value or positives so….. I love u 85 million acres (bigger than italy) of national parks. I love u harlem renaissance. I love u groundhogs day. I love u sweet tea and fried chicken and jambalaya. I love u apple cider donuts and maizes on crisp autumn days. I love u 95k miles of coastlines and new england fisherman and hand knitted sweaters. I love u halloween where millions of people dress up and give candy to strangers and carve jack o’lanterns. I love u small talk and small towns and potlucks and bringing over casseroles to your struggling neighbors. I love u cowboys and ranch hands and arizonian cactus. I love u appalachian trail and dirtbikes and divebars. I love u sparklers and fireflies. I love u mark twain and toni morrison and emily dickinson and henry david thoreau. I love u rock n roll i love u bluegrass and hippies i love u jimi hendrix and nirvana and CCR and janis joplin. I love u victorian houses and jonny appleseed and john henry and mothman and bigfoot. I love u foggy days in the pacific northwest and neon signs and roadside attractions. I love u baseball and 1950s diners and soft serve. I love u native american art and pop art and poptarts. I love u blue jeans and barbecues and jazz musicians 

Man accidentally reinvents Bionicle.

eugenics is a big scary word and yet people that would claim to be left-leaning can very easily be convinced to be pro-eugenics if you just never use the word. like oh you think "dumb people" shouldnt be allowed to reproduce? you think "dumb people" shouldnt be allowed to have children? its kinda scary

the problem i have with the whole "humans and nature as opposed and mutually exclusive forces" style of environmentalism is that it discourages people from a sustainable, mutualistic relationship with the ecosystems around them, because getting resources from an ecosystem is Bad. Therefore it requires you to think that parts of Earth that provide resources are not ecosystems.

this is where you get unbelievably stupid crap like the "half earth" project that proposes "protecting" half of Earth's land mass as nature preserves, never mind how we choose what half or what happens to the other half.

this type of environmentalism literally encourages people to think of their own presence as excluding or cancelling out "Nature."

And so people think of their lawns as Not Ecosystems, as Not Nature, so they cannot think "How do i live in right relationship with my ecosystem, as its caretaker?" This is death to ecological thinking.

The lawn was consciously created by intention and design, with heavy machinery that was manufactured, sold, and operated, it is not spontaneously created by fumes that the human body gives off.

You act upon the land, now time to learn what you are doing, and who you are doing it to.

i love graffiti. "comics and jazz are the only american art forms" you forgot graffiti. did you remember graffiti? That art form birthed in Philly and NYC in the early 70s by poor Black kids. that art form that spread all over the world and influenced so many. that's used without irony in commercials when they're trying to appeal to a "young urban" customer.

did you forget graffiti? that racism broken windows theory victim? that reach the establishment takes claiming that it's exclusively violent gang members throwing up those full-color pieces and wildstyle tags in the middle of the night outsmarting fifty security cameras because the billboard was ugly anyway. as if, even if it was, it wouldn't be impressive as all hell. risking brutality and fall damage so your art can occupy the space a gentrified condo named something like "Coluumna" took away from you. proving that despite only assholes affording to live here anymore there's still a soul beneath it. an animal with dripping stripes and teeth that go clack-clack tsssss