the earth is HEALING

all color categories are made up

and the only ones whose corresponding wavelength ranges are directly detected by our eyes are ~red, ~green, and ~blue

take it from someone who this year failed a color vision test so spectacularly that the doctor asked him ‘so do you just see in black and white?’: let people like things

even fake as fuck shades of color that we KNOW THEY’RE JUST MAKING UP to mess with us

wait what

The reason it doesn’t seem like I was arguing against your comment is that indeed, I wasn’t trying to refute your comment. Reconsider your defensiveness. And bear in mind that not all critiques aim to establish a kind of propositional negation of what they address.

Cures for otherwise blinding conditions do exist (e.g., cataract removal, some gene therapies for retinal diseases) and they’re good. I have a condition that will eventually render me blind and I would seek to be cured if a cure existed for it.

But pursuing/promoting cures for disabilities, including blindness, is not without problems. See, in the US for example, the politics of the National Federation of the Blind vs. the Foundation for Fighting Blindness. Cures also raise class issues and threaten to further marginalize people who won’t or can’t be cured, for whatever reason. In particular, imagining a world in which ‘everyone’ is cured is dangerous and even inherently harmful ideology.

Also, while I have some reservations about the rhetoric and what I think it likely really means, there are blind people out there who will tell you they don’t want to be cured because it’s part of who they are and they’re getting along just fine. Such people do exist. A similar sentiment exists for some within the deaf community as well.

Gene therapies for other genetic conditions often do, but then those aren’t neurodevelopmental.

I’m kinda fascinated by the question of how something like this would affect me. Like the way a psychedelic experience can teach us lessons we still retain (and want to hold onto), like the way formative experiences leave deep traces in us even when when we grow and change, what features of autism would always ‘stay with me’ on some level? If things changed perceptually for me, what old habits of mind would I retain? What would I miss most? What would I not miss?

In a lot of ways I think temporary windows into different neurotypes would be much more interesting than purported ‘cures’. People don’t usually want to undo their own personalities, including mental dimensions like neurotypes. But who wouldn’t want to play with that a bit, if they knew it were safe?

This kind of thing is really interesting for what it might teach us about autism and the human brain more generally, but when it comes to the practical applications I just don’t see a future where it doesn’t present a ton of problems. Even when you make it ‘voluntary’, eugenics is dangerous and closely allied with exterminationist sentiment, thinking, and practice.

And it seriously risks, at a minimum, deeply undermining struggles to accommodate rather than erase disabilities. Admittedly this is a step beyond the technical capability, but if a society develops an expectation that some major human variation (be that autism, deafness, blindness, or whatever) be cured rather than accommodated wherever it is a ‘problem’, where does that leave people (or parents) who refuse the cure for themselves (or for their children)? I can easily imagine arguments like ‘if you don’t want problems, just administer the cure! you’re being selfish’, ‘this creates an unnecessary burden’, etc.

Also, to be clear, there’s no accepted notion of ‘autism for mice’ (or any other non-human animal), even if describing animals as autistic can sometimes be arguably useful. So ‘works in mice’ is a phrase that does a lot of work here.

It might do something in humans, but the idea that autism is reducible to genes— and a single gene, at that— strikes me as laughable on its face.

This is similar to Marx’s critique of freedom under liberalism as merely ‘formal’. The problem is the gap between that can exist between a nominal right and practical exercise of that right.

This kind of problem is common with rights-based approaches to justice and can be witnessed with human rights broadly. Its identification isn’t unique to Marxism, either; liberals sometimes get at it with the phrase ‘equality of opportunity’, for example. To say that opportunities can be unequal (and that this is a problem) is to admit that justice requires the guarantee of more than just formal rights. I’d say this a problem that has shaped liberal ‘privilege’ discourse as well: privilege is just such a kind of gap that allows (or constitutes?) the persistence of injustice in the face of nominal/formal/legal equality.

Like in other cases, I’d say that the four fundamental software freedoms get at something genuinely important, and that it’s better to have them, even just formally, than not. But like with other freedoms and rights, it’s easy to conceive of them too ‘thinly’. They need to be fleshed out with a more general awareness of power relations and of the practicality of their own exercise.

To some extent, that awareness of software freedom as situated within power relations is actually already present in free software discourses, which talk often of things like subordination, domination, subjugation, etc., from the start. Unsurprisingly, that dimension is largely absent from the ‘open-source’ perspective.

arm the moderate gays

My father was recently diagnosed with a form of cancer that will probably kill him. For the past few weeks, pretty much the only things I’ve thought about have been my father’s looming death, my virtual estrangement from him, the genocidal siege of Gaza, and the past hundred years or so of the history of Palestine. Needless to say, I couldn’t keep that up. I had to make room for some lightness in my life and in my mind.

The past few days have been a relief.

I’ve reconciled with my father somewhat. He’s still often stressful to be around, especially in his own house, but I feel better equipped to handle and pass over tense moments with him than I’ve ever been in the past. It’s been good visiting him and my mom. I’m only now starting to look forward to going home.

I’m reading fiction again for the first time in a long time. I’d forgotten how easy it is compared to history or political theory; how effortless reading can be when you’re not trying to take notes, when you’re not stopping after nearly every sentence to make sure that you’re paying attention and understand well. What I’ve been ‘reading’ is actually an audiobook. My mom and I have been cozying ourselves up next to a shared Bluetooth speaker, sometimes with a bowl of popcorn or candy like we would for a movie. It’s been a delight! The novel itself has already been thrilling and intriguing for both of us, and we must only be like a third of the way through. (This October, my mom expressed interest in educating herself about what led up to current events, and so she agreed to read three books on the history of Palestine with me. We’re still committed to that, but good God is this novel so much easier!)

I’ve been playing a relaxing, delightful, and sometimes very difficult videogame for at least a couple hours each day. A lot of my attention has gone to music, to the cool weather (which I love), and to the young puppy who moved in here recently (although my own dog, who is visiting along with me, kinda hates him).

It’s good to have a break from all my ruminations, from current events, and from my job. I wish I could have another week off somehow, but this’ll do.

I wonder what CPUSA’s policies and statements/principles were back then, and whether they then held to the ‘internal colony’ line. I don’t know the history well enough to place that, but maybe another comrade browsing does.

What year is that image from?

It’s an annual harvest festival based on irregular, religious harvest festivals practiced often by the first English settlers of the United States.

Its commemoration, annualization, and celebration as a particular national holiday has played an important role in (and in maintaining) USian mythistory, mainly in falsely presenting early US settlers as peaceful, native-friendly religious refugees with no colonial aims or genocidal intent.

Leftists and indigenous Americans are critical not just of the ideological role of that national holiday as such, but are also attuned to how disgusting, callous, and hypocritical is the thought of celebrating one’s ‘good fortune’ to ‘find themselves’ settling such a catastrophically, genocidally depopulated environment. The latter criticism arguably applies to all ‘days of thanksgiving’ celebrated in this tradition in what would become the United States and Canada, and not just the big national holiday.

In the contemporary context, Thanksgiving is one of a few national holidays for which most USians customarily get (or try their damnedest to take) a day off. (At my employer, it’s the most ‘generous’ holiday aside from Christmas— we actually get not one but two days off. I think this reflects its cultural as status as a highly important holiday, to some extent.)

In the US, Thanksgiving is also the day on which, despite increasing familial atomization (a phenomenon that affects white families especially acutely), families are most likely to meet and feast together so that extended relatives actually see each other in person. This is where you get the talk of ‘when you see your family at the Thanksgiving table this year’, and so on.

Let him know that you think those anti-communist materials are wrong or misleading. Offer to explore some of these topics in depth with him in some format(s) that’s agreeable to both of you (video, books, podcasts, whatever). Let him pick some sources, and you pick some sources, and then you both discuss them together.

Most people who are anti-communist are reflexively so, and have simply never heard a lot of key history. Just studying/exploring/discussing communism and its history can undo a lot of that.

As tempting as it might be, you don’t have to go through everything in the propaganda they’ve sent you sentence by sentence and then debunk it. Just have a conversation with them about it and take a look at the real stuff together.

It’s especially weird that they did so rather vaguely. It’s not like they were like ‘fascist figure X was right about historical fact Y in context Z, and here’s why I think that matters’. They just favorably compare fascist ‘geopolitical analysis’ to your blog post, in general. That does seem like more or less just praising fascists to me.

Made curious by some of the other comments here connecting that Redditor’s abusive language and refusal to really say anything of substance beyond ‘I don’t like this’ and Maoism, I just spent kind of a long time looking back through that person’s comments trying to figure out what about their thinking is particularly Maoist, especially in the context of that series of insults they wrote on your post, which don’t, to me, reveal any particular way of thinking so much as a temperament.

I did eventually find some Maoist language across their comments. They probably do self-identify as a Maoist or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, though I didn’t see a comment to that effect.

But what I noticed more was that pretty much their only mode of discussion was verbal combat, and maybe in some cases declarations on certain questions or definitions of terms. There wasn’t a lot I could recognize as instruction, exploration, or listening, although I imagine they’d consider some of their declarations educational.

I’m tired. I can’t think. I don’t have a thesis here. But OP, I’m sorry that someone took it upon themselves to shit on your work instead of offering you feedback or simply saying nothing.

Reaction videos are the lowest form of content imo. Far lazier and far less interesting than speedrunning, coding streams, reading/discussion streams, etc. (Not that I find Twitch streams generally compelling, either.)

And payments to streamers aren’t donations in the sense of charity and don’t claim to be. They’re tips paid to entertainers, like money tossed into the hat of a street musician. It’s a different model than wage work but it’s not like a scam or a trick or something.

Using those tips to employ the wage labor of others (e.g., video editors) is exploitation, though.

The upvote/downvote numbers on platforms like this can be a powerful temptation to vanity, and addictive.

You have the right idea. Go spend time with people who love you.

Last week someone here called me a ‘fucking worm’ (repeatedly) and a ‘little baby’, and told me I should be ‘erased from existence’, along with a pile of other insults. (Someone else reported and the mods banned them, in addition to deleting the worst of their comments. Thank you.) That outburst was in response to me trying to voice what is, imo, another aspect of this same exact problem. That experience naturally got me thinking even more about this pattern, and my own relationship to it.

I’ve been cruel and domineering online before, especially in my late teens and early twenties. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out how to be critical and steadfast in my criticism without ever being vicious.

Finding one’s way to communism means, among other things, becoming more intimately aware of horrible, painful facts about imperialism past and present. There’s also a real sense of alienation that comes with rejecting the dominant ideologies in one’s own culture and society. I think that unfortunately often, among young men especially, ‘conversion’ to socialism does less to challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to violence and domination than to direct those attitudes to new targets.

It’s perhaps an especially difficult thing when learning the real history of socialist revolutions involves coming to understand that revolutionary violence can be truly necessary, that ‘terrorism’ is a label that has been weaponized against righteous and successful liberation struggles, that failure to suppress counterrevolution has historically meant defeat at the hands of brutal, brutal, reaction, and so on.

Emphasis on the material as a historical force, as something which generates ideology as a kind of rationalization, can also be misused to downplay or turn away from the role of the subjective. If one is already so inclined, it is easy to dismiss any call to introspection as idealism— especially when one sees radlibs make such calls in bad faith and treat them as the limit of politics.

The road to socialist understanding for men and boys raised under patriarchy is riddled with pitfalls. The distance and abstractness of online interaction don’t help here, either.