Notices by Xauri'EL Zwaan (xauriel@mastodon.nz)

People who wear glasses are disabled, BTW. We need disability aids to function as an active part of society. If you wear glasses, you are disabled; your disability is just one that happens to be highly (if not totally) accommodated. It is generally considered reasonable to insist that you need your glasses and cannot cope well without them, and glasses are readily available and prescriptions for them not heavily gated. Touching or taking them without your permission is considered rude and cruel.

There's a reason people poison the well about fact checking, and it's not because they're concerned that they are being unfairly targeted. The liar doesn't have to get you to believe their lies; all they need is to get you to give up on being able to know what's a lie and what isn't

I'm still enough of an unreconstructed Enlightenment rationalist that I respect the idea of free speech and believe that even people I strongly disagree with should get the chance to make their case in the public square. But it's not censorship to point out that the corporatized media system saturates the public consciousness with self-serving propaganda which serves the aims of fascism, a process that has only accelerated with the algorithmic reinforcement of social media and content platforms

It's actually kind of fucked that the concept of self-care is now being sold to us as "you deserve the right to spend money on consumable luxuries like bath bombs" rather than "capitalism is destroying us mind, body, and spirit and will always ravenously devour all time and space we have marked out for the maintenance of our own health and sanity"

The fundamental message of the phrase "Blue Lives Matter" is that police need to be allowed to extrajudicially execute marginalized people because they'we so scawed

One of the greatest disappointments of my life was realizing that there is a non-negligable fraction of the population who, if some douchenozzle on youtube told them that woke liberals want them to stay out of active volcanoes, would immediately go jump into one face first while screaming "THE LEFT CAN'T MEEEEME"

One thing I was never adequately prepared for about late-stage capitalism is how fucking ridiculous it is, and how hard it tries to normalize that ridiculousness. Like not long ago a toy-manufacturing megacorporation sent menacing thugs to a guy's house for too enthusiastically giving their products free advertising, and we made a big serious thing out of it as if it wouldn't have shamed the most vicious poison-pen satirist to have written it. Absolute clownshoes ideology

Techbro: Behold my brilliant new invention, the Child-Mangling Machine!

Us: This is worse than useless, it is actively dangerous

Thought Leaders & the Media: The Child-Mangling Machine will revolutionize every aspect of how we live our lives!

Us: Nobody wants this, please stop

Corporations: We're rolling out plans to put a Child-Mangling Machine in every supermarket

World: It's impossible for a country to be too authoritarian and too libertarian at the same time

USA: Hold my beer

The more I think about it, the more deeply immoral I feel like celebrity culture is. It's gross to want to know such personal and private information about someone you have no intimate relationship with. Parasociality is just fundamentally creepy, like a kind of stalking. It's a form of mass voyeurism that I can't imagine it's pleasant to be subjected to

Men: I don't understand why repeatedly subjecting women to my vivid fantasies about them being eaten alive by bears is not making them feel safer around me

"You're just antisemitic and support Hamas!" I can't imagine how horrible it must be right now to be a Jew who doesn't support the actions of the current government of the state of Israel, and not only having to deal with people assuming you do and mistreating you for it, but also having to deal with assholes like this purporting to speak for you

@SwiftOnSecurity ah, so letting phone companies bully and manipulate us into making phone numbers sometimes the *only* available form of 2FA may have backfired? Astounding

Hot take: if your students are "cheating", it means they do not see the value of the process of doing the exercise and see value only in the grade they obtain thereby. And if that is the case, at least part of the problem is that you as the teacher (and probably to a larger extent the education system as a whole) have failed to adequately communicate why the exercise is valuable over and above the grade (and more than likely failed to adequately establish that value in the first place)

Most high school students want good grades because they want to be done with compulsory schooling because they dislike having to do it, and most university undergrads want good grades to get a credential they can leverage for better job prospects. They behave like this not because they are lazy or mercenary, but because this is how the value of education has been sold to them. They don't want to participate fully in the exercises because actually learning things is beside the point

Anyone who scolds us for celebrating that Kissinger died gets stomped down hard. Genocidaires don't get soft-focus funeral portraits. Some people would be like "Hitler may have made a lot of bad choices but it's just bad taste to cheapen his memory like that, think about how his family feels"

Gee, they're really putting anyone who won't fall in line behind the narrative down hard this time aren't they

@AnthonyJK it could be argued that Robert Nozick or Friedrich Hayek have a point, but what is commonly called "libertarianism" is basically just an appendage of fascism at this point. It has been absorbed into the hodge-podge of ideologies conservatism has grafted onto itself over the years in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, much like mainline Christianity and classical liberalism. I sincerely doubt 1 in 100 self-professed "libertarians" have any principles left whatsoever.

The problem with being a visionary market-disrupting tech entrepreneur is that eventually you run out of other people's money

The problem with overleveraging your bank in the expectation that if you fail you'll just get bailed out to stop the economy from imploding is that eventually you run out of other people's money