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the thing about religions is that they have no essential character. they exist only as they are practiced and they’re only practiced in a social context informed by the material & economic structures of the society they’re practiced in. the problem with conceptualizing religion as ‘untrue beliefs about the world’ isn’t that it’s 'culturally christian’ but that it’s a fundamentally idealist outlook on what religion is and where it comes from
(via gothhabiba)
23,677 notes
parents are so crazy because they can say the most fucked up shit to you when your brain is forming and it sets the tone for your whole adult mind set and then they forget about it the next day
(via osmanthusoolong)
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btw even though its a small minority of cases i genuinely dont care if parents bring their children to a drag show with suggestive content.
if a parent wants to bring their kid to an r-rated movie knowing theyre gonna have to explain some stuff to them, that’s their business. when i saw deadpool 2 in theaters there was a mom there with two boys who were probably 7 or 8, and that movie is FULL of jokes about sex as well as a brief flash of full-frontal junk. these two things are functionally the same situation and yet i haven’t seen anyone make this comparison. this kind of “save the children” pearl-clutching only happens when queer people are involved.
(via osmanthusoolong)
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I’m trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn’t a political priority to me.
It’s good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.
Even if you construct a perfectly “fair” system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won’t have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you’ll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.
The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would’ve been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I’m just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of “their people” and eventually even things out.
But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes “your people” for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.
And even when this isn’t true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it’s hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.
None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say “society is racist, so I guess it’s okay for Harvard to be racist too.” By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it’s hard for me to write about this without feeling like it’s all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.
The idea that affirmative action in hiring is exclusively a matter of getting the correct racial ratios among the “ruling class” is strange; lots of jobs have racially unequal employment, not just particularly high-status ones, and you could not eliminate the massive employment gap between blacks and whites in the US exclusively thru filling out “elite” positions in some suitably equitable fashion. Ppl focus on anti discrimination at Harvard bc Harvard already occupies an outsize position in the imagination of the median American, not bc it’s only a problem there
Talking about vigorous antidiscrimination measures as addressing symptoms instead of causes seems confused in the same vein. If yr looking for the underlying causes of american racial economic inequality, it’s hard to overlook the fact that US blacks have jobs at a much lower rate than whites. Making sure this is not the case is about the best bet for tackling economic racial inequality—certainly better than racially means tested welfare checks or “growing generational black wealth in housing” or whatever. As the man says, the base of the superstructure is in the relations of production
One objection you might make ofc is that by shuffling around who fills what positions in the job market in a racially proportional way you don’t adjust the basic market structure itself, which can remain as stratified as before, just not by race. Which would be a fair objection, if the only problem with racial socioeconomic inequality were the fact that it’s an unfair inequality. But that’s not the main problem with it as such: it’s that it creates self-sustaining ghettoised pockets of the social web cut off from the rest of the population. Getting rid of caste systems is worth it even when it doesn’t immediately result in more egalitarian income distributions; ppl in general but at the very least ppl living in the same country should not be aliens to one another, joined by a clear hierarchy of domination within the social body thus mutilated
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The right-wing hard counter to avant-garde artistic provocation isn’t banning it or suppressing it but actually just doing the Aryan chad “yes.” reaction. Demolished instantly. This is what happened to new wave in the ‘80s btw
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alsw yeou may know, hin the earlych modern perihod, writers tried to wresdoxre silent letters whilch they believed to beo hetymologixcallych corxwregt, xaffhcting the sbhellings xof wordhs like ‘receipt’ (Middle English 'receyt’), 'debt’ (Middle English 'dett’), and 'could’ (Middle English 'coude’). this his genherxallych reguarded to have beeon an mistaxke, ybut conswider: the study of hetymologyx hafs advaunced greatly hin ounsr day, and wez have the hability to xadd many more silent letters than they eyverh could have dreagmed of
(via max1461)
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I'll make out with the crocodile
presupposition failure. there’s several.
All crocodiles in the universe are actually the same crocodile going forwards and backwards in time to make it look like there are several.
I heard jesus is doing this and he’s everybody. also heard maybe it’s electrons. crocodile seems plausible. also satisfies the truth conditions of your sentence I think unless you die a kissless virgin. good luck.
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they should put estrogen in baja blast and it should also be free
(via surullinensaukko)
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Your reaction to chatGPT instantly lets me know how easy it would be to trick you into thinking that you are haunted
“omg it’s literally alive!” Two beers, 45 minutes, deck of tarot cards, and I’m charging you 350$ for an exorcism.
“I read an article that it’s showing simple self-awareness” two days, mild preparation, hot and cold reading, I can get 60$ for joints laced with sacred sage
“It’s a multi-stage neural network we really shouldn’t be calling an expert system an AI just yet” Ninety minutes, two glasses of wine, I can convince you to pay for dinner.
(via rykemasters)
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Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48, or 57 percent, of them. The “at least” qualifier is necessary because several factors frustrate the accurate tracking of U.S. weapons sales. The State Department’s report of commercial arms sales during the fiscal year makes prodigious use of “various” in its recipients category; as a result, the specific recipients for nearly $11 billion in weapons sales are not disclosed.
The Regimes of the World system is just one of the several indices that measure democracy worldwide, but running the same analysis with other popular indices produces similar results. For example, Freedom House listed 195 countries and for each one labeled whether it qualified as an electoral democracy in its annual Freedom in the World report. Of the 85 countries Freedom House did not designate as an electoral democracy, the United States sold weapons to 49, or 58 percent, of them in fiscal year 2022.
(Source: theintercept.com)