an attempt at tidying up my browser via the medium of closing tabs

[kaberett]

Spirited Away: an alternative to the standard reading.

On (respect for) children as autonomous human beings.

Plants can hear??? White-gaze-y article, but the scientist profiled -- Leigh Joseph -- is working in and with her home community.

Decentring love, written by a friend; I have my reflexive kneejerk "THAT'S NOT WHY THE CAMPAIGN FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY EXISTS" reaction to a throwaway line in it, which Kat of course perfectly well knows (and also, in context, it kind of is) but I'm throwing it up here anyway in case it's of inerest, which I suspect it might be.

Righteous Callings: Being Good, Leftist Orthodoxy, and the Social Justice Crisis of Faith. I remain unsure what I think of this one.

Here are all London's abandoned tube stations.

8th Fire (TV series): "8TH FIRE is a provocative, high-energy journey through Aboriginal country showing you why we need to fix Canada's 500 year-old relationship with Indigenous peoples; a relationship mired in colonialism, conflict and denial."

(Completely unrelated other than being a TV series I have open in tabs: The Middleman.)

A colony of bats has moved into a triceratops.

Comments

[recessional]

Various responses since OBVIOUSLY THAT IS WHAT IS HERE FOR >.>:

- "Plants can hear??": Yeah a brief writeup for Quirks and Quarks is always going to feel a little trivializing/externalizing/"hello let us look at The Other"; it's the nature of the beast. Which is not so much an excusing as "this is something that is Going To Happen in this context until certain currents of change happen."

- "Decentering love": . . . I mean they're not wrong but also like . . . missing? a lot of points? and also doing that really strange thing that people keep doing about this issue where for some reason the idea of broadening our concepts of what kind of love and sex (and love without sex and so on) is okay is SEPARATE from forcing open and kicking hard at society's legal protections, that these aren't intimately related. Also that the writer leapt to assuming the "love" referred to in the slogan meant sexual-romantic love, which . . . doesn't even really track with general Pride concepts, in my experience. So I'm left with this sense of "okay nothing you've said is wrong, but. . . ?"

- "Righteous Callings" - what is it you're unsure about?

I mean I have a my couple of long-term quibbles (oh my god can we get rid of this knee-jerk acceptance of the idea that the structures of the oligarchical mercantilist society we live in are actually inherently "capitalist"? Can we actually TALK about this for a while so we can deconstruct this blind acceptance of outdated orthodoxy? PLEASE?), but in the main I can't find anything in that article I actually disagree with, and I hardcore agree with the end and, well -

She also very accurately hones in on something that has SERIOUSLY BOTHERED ME about reactions to, say, RH? which is the unwillingness to acknowledge that a lot of us are in the communities we're in because we have nowhere else to go. That okay, maybe the white disabled queer sf author has more privilege in some contexts than her PoC counterpart but it's not like she can fucking go back to mainstream society so actually if you let someone run around being abusive IN-COMMUNITY and using the dynamics of the community to abuse, well, THAT'S A PROBLEM?

(TBH I think there's also a lot of discussion to be had about people like Laci Green who have ALWAYS given me, let's be blunt, the same kind of vibes certain right-wingers and people like That Director Everyone's Mad At Right Now do which is that they're here for the adulation, the sense of power, the sense of Righteousness, etc - and when they stop getting that from one source their ideals will change so that they can get it from another. It was never about the actual desire to improve the world, for them, deep down: it was about their social place and status within a community.)

And also bless her (the article writer) for actually noting that hey, there are times when a white working class guy may in fact be struggling against greater odds than an affluent Asian person (and vice versa) and that THIS MAKES SHIT COMPLICATED.

- "A colony of bats": oh my god best headline.

[rydra_wong]

Great sentences of our time:

https://twitter.com/atlasobscura/status/897520072582889476

"Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home"

I've found myself reciting this in my head and I have to say it's quite soothing.

[kaberett]

- Decentring love: so super quickly, HAHAHAHAHA wow holy shit the Pride campaign in question was incredibly assimilationist this year. Like, I think it straight-up had more quotations by/from cishet "allies" than it did LGBT+ people. It was Pretty Grim. The advisory board issued a pretty damning report. It's a reaction to a very specific local thing that doesn't necessarily generalise.

- Righteous Callings -- tl;dr I have a wounded kneejerk "but that's not what I mean when I use the word 'liberal'" response, which isn't actually helpful 'coz I don't get to define all the terms of the discourse, but means that I find it ~emotionally difficult~ to sit with shit that (mis)characterises "my" position as:

As for Liberalism, that good old ethic of “whatever you do is fine by me as long as it doesn’t hurt others” — well, Liberalism is in its practical form is mostly just an appeal to maintain the status quo (since “hurting others” gets defined as doing anything that upsets the privileged class).

Which isn't actually a helpful thing for me to do! For a very great many reasons! But apparently I have an autism in this area. And then on top of that I have an instinctive baring-teeth-and-snarling at The Class Struggle Is The One True Struggle, which is not what is being said here but... I spent an unfortunately large amount of time around True Believers in the SWP, okay, and the kind of Labour-agitating dude who will actually yell at you about how no form of Labour, no not even New Labour, has ever done anything at all appalling or discriminatory toward disabled or LGBT+ folk. In front of an audience. If you can't, in that very instant, cite not only broad themes but also specific fucking Hansard references, more-or-less.

All of which leads to me feeling as though I am automatically alienated from anything that gets described as "The Community" or "The Movement" because I'm not "dedicated" or "radical" or what-the-fuck-ever "enough", which is in massive tension with my absolute unwillingness to go along with Yet More (white, cis, straight, able) people who are willing to tell me that we can worry about disability and queerness later.

[recessional]

- Ahaha yes okay that makes sense.


- Ah oh no that makes perfect sense, and I actually TOTALLY GET IT. I've just moved on from trying to engage with that one AT ALL and do an automatic translation. Which is not saying you should be able to but rather that it's only not catching me because I've managed to preempt the autism in that particular case, so that this is "blah blah jargon blah" where instead what's catching me is everything ELSE she was saying which is dead spot on.

And yeah see I come from the other direction, where NOBODY WILL TALK ABOUT CLASS QUA CLASS EVER. You will ONLY ever hear about class IN INTERSECTION with race and if you DARE bring up class WITHOUT doing so or imply ever that there might POSSIBLY BE a massive problem here and despite all the fairy-stories that might actually be part of why assholes keep getting elected you are clearly That Guy Married To That One SF Writer Who Googles His Name and are evil and destroying the movement.

Which is proooobably a NorAm/UK division thing.

But I also end up associating "the Movement" etc (and also being "radical enough") with, well. The tumblr antis. And that shit. Rather than raving Marxists (or whatever), so the result is that like the idea that there is A Movement/A Community (beyond the very small c-community of "we're all the people mainstream society fucks over and we have nowhere else to go" kind of community) is one of my SIGH-quibbles along with the "oh my god can we stop with the uncritical Blame Capitalism. I'M NOT EVEN ACTUALLY A FAN OF IT IT'S JUST YOU'RE WRONG AND SIMPLISTIC AND WE LIVE IN A MERCANTILIST OLIGARCHY THAT PRETENDS IT LIKES FREE TRADE BUT DOESN'T."

Which are such large-scale vast background issues that you know they're half the time not even worth MENTIONING, but hey I am really dead pleased to see someone With All The Cred (ugh) pointing out the other shit because the other shit is POISON.

[me_and]

Middle Link that doesn't include other stuff that just happens to include the words "the middleman" somewhere in their metadata.

[kaberett]

thk u