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Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem] @ Erika3sis @hexbear.net
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1
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154
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I remarked the previous time this Telegraph article came up that I don't believe Professor Anna Smajdor (who is a philosopher and not a physician) was sincerely endorsing the idea of whole-body gestational donation (WBGD). The key line in the Telegraph article is this:

    Prof Smajdor argues that there is no moral difference in such circumstances between organ donation and surrogacy.

    This makes it seem to me like Smajdor is really just trying to comment on the ethics of organ donation by imagining something obviously horrifying that would follow from what she considers to be the same rationale. Indeed, Smajdor's article as written (which you can download here — I will note that I have only read it in part) concludes with this passage:

    What I put forward here can be viewed as a thought experiment on one hand. But if we regard WBGD as being clearly outrageous, this suggests we have some uncomfortable questions to answer about the future of cadaveric organ donation. On the other hand, if WBGD is viewed as a straightforward means of facilitating safer reproduction, and avoiding the moral problems of surrogacy, we should be ready to embrace it as a logical and beneficial extension of activities that we already treat as being morally unproblematic.

    ...So I dunno, it just bothers me that we'd be taking a headline in the fucking Telegraph at face value.

  • The article itself seems to be saying that this "defense boost" was something Denmark was already planning on doing, and Trump's remark really just coincidentally came just before they actually signed off on it. The Danish defense minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, called the timing an "irony of fate".

    The article describes the boost as encompassing the following:

    1. Two new inspection ships.
    2. Two new long-range drones.
    3. Two new dog sled teams.
    4. Increased staffing at Arctic Command.
    5. Upgrades to a civilian airport to be able to handle supersonic fighter jets.

    It's worth noting that the Arctic Command carries out a lot of tasks other than just defense per se, and as SoyViking pointed out, Danish military buildup in Greenland is largely due to anti-Russian paranoia rather than anything to do with Seppoland.

  • A "small invasion" of Mexico, Canada as the 51st state is a "great idea", controlling Greenland is an "absolute necessity", and he also wants the Panama Canal to return to US control to boot. Is our big wet boy trying to, like, speedrun expansionism?

  • I recently found a rap song in the endangered Tlingit language, I also recently had the opportunity to speak to a cousin in a language that stopped being passed down on that side of the family with our shared grandpa, and I also recently got to speak with an Ojibwe woman who is learning that language, about her experiences with it. An Ojibwe dub of Star Wars was recently released, as was the first ever feature film in Norwegian Sign Language. As someone who is interested in languages, their preservation and revitalization, I feel like experience and recent news gives me reason to be optimistic.

    Earlier today I learned that there is such a thing as pea milk, which means that there is another and more nutritious plant-based substitute for dairy milk which can be made entirely with local-grown ingredients in Norway. As someone who wants to both see food sovereignty and veganism in Norway, these sorts of advancements in food science leave me optimistic.

    When it comes to the topics mentioned in the OP, what keeps me optimistic is just remembering that the course of history is really just entropy, right? Suppression of activism, the erosion of people's rights, the rise of fascism and the epidemic of hate crime, these are all symptoms of a broader power structure trying to sustain itself by force. But that system just doesn't have infinite energy to sustain itself, it doesn't have infinite resources. We see evidence of this in the "little things" like my cousin learning a language that had been forced out of our family: the forces that had pushed the language out of the family could not keep it out indefinitely, because with the effort one family member would take to relearn it, the effort needed for others to do the same gets progressively smaller.

    Humans are known as persistence hunters: we certainly don't need to hunt for food anymore, but the same strategy is certainly useful for hunting down our own oppressors. Oppressors will grow exhausted of trying to fight their inevitable failure, and that's when they'll easily be slain as "paper tigers".

    The best thing to focus on in the present moment is simply what you can do. Because any new skill you master, any positive interaction you have, any good news you read, all of that will prove to you that challenges can be overcome, that you can make a difference and that there is still good in the world. It is the little challenges you overcome that make the big challenges easier to overcome in time.

  • Well, I want to say "vampire angel from space with a super cool robot gun arm" but the better answer is probably just, like, "immortal shapeshifter"

  • God, I remember when I was a little kid I once said something like, "When I grow up, I'm gonna be a boss, so that way I won't have to work for anybody" — and the grown-up with me said, "Well, you can't just become a boss. You need to work hard and get promotions and then you'll be a boss. So you'll still need to work a whole awful lot to reach that level. Do you think you have it in you?"

    ...I was very disappointed to learn that I couldn't escape working by just wishing really hard.

    With time I'd eventually come to learn that it was not only impossible to wish oneself out of working, but that the grown-up's line about "working really hard" was bogus, too.

  • Holy Hell, who could've possibly seen this coming!

  • It makes my blood boil. I can practically feel the drool of capitalist ghouls salivating at the thought of forcing a third world war — they can barely conceal their glee about their own profits and the preservation of their dictatorship through words about a "deteriorating security situation" even though they brought that "deterioration" upon themselves.

    And now, it seems, the capitalist ghouls will convince people that risks are more real than they are, by building bunkers, and mailing pamphlets, and putting aircraft carriers in our harbors, and tripling the number of American military bases in Norway, and doing military exercises in the middle of dense urban centers, et cetera et cetera et cetera. The people of Europe generally trust their governments still, so they would see all of these things happening around them and assume that it must be for "a good reason", right? Because it would be an awful lot of effort to just be "theater", right?

    Thus when the people are trusting of their own government, they are easily scared; and when the naïve are terrified, they're more willing to accept this sort of absolute nonsense, the idea of a "preemptive strike" in this case, which will surely trigger or bring us within inches of a third world war.

    "For the sake of security" — Give me a break!

  • redherald.org perhaps.

  • I've tried to look into what the Rome Statute says about non-cooperation, and historical cases of this happening, and it really would seem like the Statute's "mechanism" against non-cooperation is just a complete dead-end. So states "obligated" to respect arrest warrants can just ignore their obligations and nothing will happen to them whatsoever. Sasuga.

  • I favor gorilla tactics in conservation the same as I do in many other respects!

  • One of the PFLP's songs refers to America as the "Head of the Snake" specifically, which is coincidentally not actually dissimilar from Benjamin Franklin's own choice of political symbolism — except Franklin, radical that he was, chose to represent the Thirteen Colonies as a whole snake rather than just the head.

    In any case the PFLP didn't choose to hate the USA, in the same way Ned Kelly didn't choose to hate cops. Acting like the PFLP's hostility to the USA is completely irrational and literally just came out of nowhere helps nothing except Septics' cognitive dissonance about the nation's grotesque banditry abroad — it's just wilful ignorance, it's pure and simple "My Little Pony logic" to act as if the world's anti-Americans are just Evil Changelings who hate "a beautiful land abounding in the Magic of Friendship" for no reason other than that it is "a beautiful land abounding in the Magic of Friendship".

  • Never think that geocentrists were stupid. They were wrong, certainly, but they were not stupid: while it doesn't take much intellect to initially conclude that Earth is the center of the solar system, it does take a very great amount of intellect to rationalize away the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

    This is not a comment about people who voted or are planning on voting for Kamala Harris — this is an entirely unrelated observation about a completely different topic.

  • The Circassian genocide is the example that comes to my mind first. In my experience, most people, at least in Western countries, when they hear "Circassian", they will immediately think I'm actually talking about Cardassians, a race of fictional aliens from Star Trek (or they'll at least remark on how similar these words sound).

    I also think the Milan Congress is an event more people should know about. This was a congress on Deaf education in 1880 that declared a ban on sign languages in schools, causing trauma and poverty and general harm to Deaf people for nearly a century until around the time of Stokoe's research on ASL.

    Really, the amount of history that people should know is abundant, but a lot of it is also very clearly more important to know if you live in a certain area, right?

  • So you're certain that revolution is impossible, but you're also certain that if there is a "strong middle class" in the future, that you would actually be a part of it?

  • Well, it seemed like you were saying that if given a choice between more racism and more climate crisis, that you would choose more racism because of how "climate crisis is worse". Don't you think that's at all a weird or uncomfortable thing to say, given how there's a frightening number of people nowadays who genuinely are trying to present "more racism or more climate change" as an actual choice that people will have to make?

  • "I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at climate crisis!"

    "You can excuse racism?"

  • This is such a fucking scam, Jesus Christ. No wonder my immediate response to this news was "That was a lot sooner than I expected!" — no, it's still gonna be a long time yet before the Brits and Seps will actually concede their rule of Diego Garcia in any meaningful way. This agreement is as good as toilet paper.

    I wonder when Lalit is gonna make a statement about this agreement.

  • It isn't like American elections are in any way real or the government of the United States gives a fuck about the people who live there.

    Pfft! Obviously elections in the USA are legitimate. After all, every single US state and electoral district is situated entirely on land that the USA legally annexed, right?