Notices by Tattie (tattie@eldritch.cafe)

@eruonna you got it! You found the third mistake. 😊
@bazkie @cwebber

Dear cis guy on the bus who told me "we all love you" and "we're all here for you" after I was subjected to transmisogynist verbal abuse from a drunk guy: the sentiment is appreciated, I guess...

but...

like...

You coulda "been there for me" while the abuse was happening rather than sitting there studiously avoiding eye contact with anyone.

Just a thought.

I am not One of the Good Trans. I have always said this.

What I mean is: I reject the framing that picks and chooses "acceptable" #trans people, and rejects and invalidates others.
1/

@therivercrow co-signed. The party by now has proven itself irredeemable by refusing to get rid of Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, and refusing to counter the transphobic decision by the Supreme Court.
A vote for Labour is a vote for my rights to be taken away, a vote to create a hostile enough atmosphere in this country that I end up dead. You cannot vote for them now and expect to remain my friend.
The only truly moral vote in England right now is the Green Party. (Or perhaps a smattering of independents/"Your Party" candidates, but they're not a significant force). I grudgingly accept a Lib Dem tactical vote, but not Labour. Not to "keep Reform out", not because you think "Greens can't win". Do not.
(SNP and PC may be valid votes in other countries, yes. Still no Labour.)

It's interesting that mainstream culture seems to be pulling towards "biological" to describe cis women. Like, I certainly have feelings about it, but my rational mind is fascinated.

It's interesting that I'm described as part of the "blue hair and pronouns" crowd. Such a "non-biological" colour! Even if you're cis, you get to reject your biological womanhood with a tub of Manic Panic.

It's interesting that so much of the same crowd seems to be neurodivergent. A lot of us are on medications, rejecting the "natural order" of our brains. Tut tut, say the biological women, and the men who love them.

And then those same women start going thru The Change, and they have to choose between the biologically ordained havoc of their bodies, or hormonal assistance, just like us non-biological transes. What will their doctors advise? What do they want?

The appeal to nature is strong in this country.

[Alan] Freeman blamed the tendency of judges to focus on the perspective of the perpetrator of racial discrimination—what did he intend, what did he do—rather than on the perspective of the victim—in what ways do legal arrangements impede his freedom. For Freeman, the result was to normalize the “conditions” of racial inequality and reinforce the notion that most Americans were innocent of participating in racial injustice—the problem lay with a small group of prejudiced individuals acting with discriminatory intent.
-- Crenshaw et al, 1995

Oh, we think it's not racism if it's not done "with intent"? And so we concern ourselves almost entirely with examining the character of the person perpetrating the racism, rather than centering the people who were harmed by it and asking ourselves what reparation they are due?

Now what recent event does that bring to mind? 🤔

Fedi is fucking rotten for this. We're full of people with passionate anti-racist intent, who have never deconstructed this perpetrator-centred view of racism.

So yeah, let's talk about that incident, and our response to it. A white person with Tourette's says the N-word to two black people, in the presence of many more. A black person here on Fedi highlights the damage that does.

Immediately, what happens? We're focused on whether the perpetrator "could help it" or not, or whether they're "secretly a racist". It all becomes about him, his motivation, his moral purity. Loads of really fucking ableist shit is said, there's pushback, and suddenly we're trundling towards a broken narrative of "black people versus disabled people", harming both groups, and the intersection in particular.

Meanwhile black voices are not being listened to. The conversation that we should be having, centering what it is like as a black person to have the N-word shouted at you, the harm it does, how we can repair that damage and prevent a reoccurrence... none of that is being talked about.

And people are not taking the hint that they, too, could cause racist harm. They know they don't have racist intent, and they proudly affirm their commitment to the anti-racist cause as they, uh, go after a person with Tourette's?

Ugh.

Kinda galling talking to my brother and realising he's already written his own son off due to his gender.

"Yeah, he's just destructive, he can't help it. That's just how boys are. You know, because of the testosterone."

"He's four years old. His body hasn't started producing testosterone yet."

"No, I'm pretty sure boys always have testosterone, throughout childhood. You can see it in the way they act."

As far as I can tell, this absolute lie was popularised by a popular book called "raising boys", which claims that boys have a "testosterone spike" when they're four years old.

The paragraph in question says "one scientist has claimed that", followed by admitting that this is "controversial" (that is to say, unsupported by any evidence whatsoever).

But it's really convenient to the argument made by the book, of implicit behavioural differences of girls and boys, and so the author lets the conjecture stand with a wink and a shrug.

People seem to really want to believe this right now, and in a large part I think this is part of a pushback on trans rights. People are clinging to biological essentialism because the presence of people blithely switching from one sex to another Makes Them Uncomfy. They want to keep their boys and girls in very definite boxes, so said kids don't get ideas.

The other part is of course the antifeminism sweeping society. Presented with the evidence of all the shit that men are responsible for, we seem to have just given up on the entire gender. "Boys will be boys"— testosterone fates half the world to just Being Bad People so we just have to accept that.

Of course, these are not independent factors. They're very much linked.

And fuck the demonisation of a sex hormone anyway!

I've said it before: testosterone might make you hairy, horny, hungry, and hot, but it does not make you violent. It does not make you destructive. It does not make you anti-empathetic. Those are choices; gender behavioural norms that boys and then men are encouraged by social pressure to conform to, and may reject if they have the strength and the support to do so.

The fact that "testosterone made him do it" is being projected onto a four year old boy is proof of how ridiculous the demonisation of a simple sex hormone has become. The lie is taking on a life of its own, free from any sort of scientific rationality.

Biological essentialism of gender is a complete load of balls, if you'll excuse me for that. 😅

First Christmas decoration up, and I feel a heaviness. I feel grief.

Celebrations are never the same after profound loss. There's a wistfulness to them, a strange mix of loneliness and presence. She is here, always, and she is gone, forever.

She'd be putting up decorations, she'd be writing cards. She'd have her presents all bought, and the turkey ordered. Such busyness, such worldliness, offsetting my more spiritual, romantic nature.

Even before widowhood Christmas was more complicated for me, more about human persistence, and quiet gratefulness. A light in the darkness of winter, a feast to keep the spirits up. Joy did not come easy.

And yet grief is a strange sort of joy. What was, once, is, always.

She'd be dragging me away from my reflections, telling me to come help her with something. She was always one more for distractions than contemplation.

Christmas has begun. I hope it brings comfort to all those who celebrate it.

@hellomiakoda mind you, we are community animals, and we shouldn't all have to have all the skills for survival.

Befriend a geek today.

I grew up an intelligent yet persecuted outsider. I already am very susceptible to believing I'm unique, special, a class apart from other human beings. That's the "cope" that gets you thru that sort of childhood.

The more I believe I have some special level of perceptiveness that would make me immune to LLM persuasion, the more likely such persuasion is to work on me.

So no. Absolutely not. Zero LLM usage for me. It's just not psychically safe.

What changed my mind? Broader study? The humility that comes with age and life experience?

Maybe it's that I know I've fallen for stupid counterfactual ideas in the past. For example, for years I convinced myself that I was unloved and unwanted. That was a lie.

And for decades I convinced myself I was a man. And that l, too, was a huge fucking lie.

I can be so fucking stupid, it turns out.

Human beings generally are just really fucking stupid.

It's the way our brains work, and it's charming in a way. We see faces in leaves, we fall for stage magic and optical illusions, we implicitly believe the Monte Carlo fallacy, we get hypnotised, we feel sorry for a Roomba that gets stuck in a corner.

We're gullible and knowing that we are doesn't make us less so. I can know that the coke can in the optical illusion isn't really red, but I still see it as red.

I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.

It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.

It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.

Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?

I think about that a lot.

LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.

When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.

@astronomerritt forgive me