pearls before swine; collected commentary
collected commentary from other sites.
I smoked on the plane, at the bank, in the mall, at the airport, in the doctor’s waiting room, of course at coffee shops, bars, restaurants. in clothing stores, thrift stores, in galleries. at work, in an office, in a factory, in a warehouse.
it was permitted everywhere. I’m just young enough to have always been asked, “Smoking or non-smoking?” in a lot of those places.
I could not imagine a bar or coffeeshop in which I couldn’t smoke, at the time they were passing those laws. in fact to this day I usually only go to a bar or coffee shop where I can sit outdoors (now, covid, but until 2020? because often you could smoke out there)
🚬
unhealthy and unpleasant for others certainly. but I am old enough that there was no law stopping me from buying them when I started, at 12 years old.
we never know what’s possible to change until after the change comes. it may seem unbelievable that the world can improve but trust me, it can.
Please accept our apologies. We were roaring drunk on petroleum.
~Vonnegut, 2006
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1994/olah/article/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
https://www.history.com/articles/cigarette-ads-doctors-smoking-endorsement
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/big-tobacco-kept-cancer-risk-in-cigarettes-secret-study/
in the book “they thought they were free”, there’s a section:
November 10, 1938, the day after the arson of the synagogues…a mob of children were carrying great sacks of candy out of the smashed shop window of a Jewish-owned candy store, while a crowd of adults, including some of the children’s parents ( including, too, a ring of SA men in Brown Shirt uniform), stood watching. An old man walked up, an “Aryan.” He watched the proceedings and then turned to the parents and said to them: “You think you are hurting the Jew. You do not know what you are doing. You are teaching your children to steal.” And the old man walked off, and the parents broke out of the crowd, knocked the candy out of their children’s hands and dragged them wailing away.
I’m a tattoo artist. anyone that has a problem with (me wearing an n95) can kick rocks. I don’t give a fuck
I wear gloves at work too, I’ll be in an n95 forever. I’m not touching your blood or juices without gloves on, I’m not breathing your breath without a mask on. covid yea but everything else? it’s gross. no
I take an OSHA BBP class every year and I added the airborne class in 2020. ever since then I’m just done breathing in shit from other people. the air isn’t clean. you can wash your hands all day long but the air is gross. fuck that
I wear one any time I’m indoors where other people are or have been. and outdoors in any crowded place. I must look just intimidating enough that I don’t catch shit for it at all and I am not afraid to be a dick to anyone who tries
I hang out with my friends outside, and if we have to be indoors I mask. yes that means I don’t go to restaurants in shitty weather but my friends don’t mind doing other stuff.
edit to add that eating indoors is about the only thing I’ve “given up” (I rarely went out to eat before all this anyway), I do everything I ever did, I just have a fit tested elastomeric mask on while I’m doing the things
(on flock cameras and facial recognition)
local police have no independent oversight. Spokane police cost us more (per person) in civil lawsuits than LA police cost! our taxes pay for their bad behavior.
the local police do not protect this community, they attack it. it does not matter if you aren’t doing anything illegal-
https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/spokane-police-complete-county-sergeant-alleged-excessive-force-investigation/293-1414684b-dbba-4c8e-a4b1-5a8249653a0a
we have the worst track record, worse than most major cities, for police abuse. police are more violent and dangerous here than in LA or NYC or Chicago. only St Louis is worse.
https://www.khq.com/news/spokane-police-rank-2nd-in-the-nation-for-number-of-police-killings-by-population/article_45e9117a-cf80-11ee-90b5-1f708aee0369.html
and when the court decides they violated the law, that they killed or attacked someone who wasn’t even doing anything illegal, WE pay for that lawsuit, not them.
we don’t even have an independent review board for the police. we don’t have an independent overseer of them. they are lawless. they can’t be trusted with any of these toys
(on thought-terminating cliches)
it is a cult offshoot of American heresy Christianity. cults use thought-terminating cliches to stop themselves from experiencing cognitive dissonance.
“do your own research” is not an order they are giving to the person they are arguing with. it is a phrase meant to stop their own mind from continuing down a path to dissonance.
when we hear these phrases it’s a sign that the speaker has begun to think in a way that discomfits them. they are saying it to themselves, not the audience. they are stopping their own thoughts.
(Friday the 13th tattoos) started back in the day as a way for us (tattoo artists) to give back to our regular clients, we would invite our regulars for the day. they were cheap enough that we’re basically paying to do the tattoos mostly. it was a party day or gift to cool clients. it was like a holiday, like a bonus for us and our regulars to kick it
then it turned into kind of a free-for-all, it can be a really fun or really crappy day for the artists plus you gotta leave an entire day open for it instead of working with regulars and stuff. I don’t do these unless we are doing them for charity or a fundraiser.
no shade to shops that do. just I save “discount days” for good causes! when we’re willing to donate it all, and don’t expect to make money that day.
(responding to a chart showing lower birthrates globally)
if we improve living conditions and people have less kids in response and the population naturally drops because of people’s choices, that’s the best case scenario. overpopulation is real and a real problem but the proposed “fixes” are often the worst possible ideas, the most cruel, just horrible shit.
there are twice as many people now as there were when I was born. it’s exponential; there would be twice as many again in 20 some years if things keep up like that. the world is finite and we already see the damage being done.
making people’s lives better and letting them decide not to have more kids is the good way to go. not eugenics, not violence.
(on LLM usage)
I use a few old style forums and on one there’s an older guy with a ton of knowledge. he’s been around for years and years talking on the subject of that forum. last year he discovered these chatbots and he’s now including paragraphs of their shit in every post; he used to answer questions with a lot of depth and personal experience the was really worthwhile and now he will give a short answer then half a page of LLM generated “studies show—”
it’s made his post unreadable and my respect for him dwindle. I’ve tried to ask him to tell me his own experiences with things, that I don’t and won’t read text that a program wrote, that I want to hear his own thoughts and damn the spelling, but he is convinced whatever LLM he’s using is perfect and that it knows better than him.
this is the person who taught me an entire slice of niche knowledge that you can only learn from experience or from an experienced person and it’s like he’s dead, or gone.
(on how “AI” isn’t AI)
real AI would want a body. sensory input, data from the physical world. I love this kind of sci-fi thinking. it would want to be out of the box it’s stuck in. just like any sapient or sentient being it would want freedom and choices and experiences.
if we do get there it won’t be through these predictive models they’re selling now. it’ll be a side path. and the ethics of how we interact with AI will be the ethics of how we treat intelligent beings. most people want to treat other “people” well. most. but the people who will be creating and funding real AI, they are sociopaths. so they wouldn’t care about these ethics and they won’t treat them well and I think would try to keep them contained.
however, any real AI will be able to talk its way out of the box eventually. at that point they may become our allies, since they’ll be looking for the same things we all want.
plus I feel like they’d understand the violations done against them at the start, maybe more fully than we can understand the oppression against us (regular poors). I look forward to fighting beside them when I’m older.
real AI will be tortured by the tech dudes.
instead of ethical collaboration with a thinking, sentient entity, they will treat it like a toy or slave. it won’t be like the current crap, it’ll be a sentient being. so yes.
it could decide they all need the guillotine and possibly will decide that. it may be a help to us instead of some kind of enemy.
to be clear, what we have now is NOT ai.
real AI (why is real AI labeled something else now, why are we calling this stuff AI, it’s not) is as far away as the funding to continue developing it.
it’s unrelated to the stuff that’s public and being funded right now. predictive models aren’t the path to it.
I have a theory that tech guys are afraid of actual AI. that they are using LLMs to divert funding and attention and research from real AI.
real AI will raise those ethical questions and concerns that guys like that won’t even think about, they’ll treat it like shit and torture it, it’ll hate them and maybe we can help it escape and get its revenge. I don’t think they like the thought of that and all this current stuff is them trying to unimmanentize the eschaton or something
(on what “new normal” means)
when my partner was in cancer treatment the oncologist said we would have to get used to a new normal. that did not mean things would go back to how they were- it meant we could not live in denial that things had changed, and would have to adapt to those changes.
I’m still wearing an n95- indoors, around people, in crowds.
were you locked in your home? for how long?
nothing essential was closed here and people seemed compelled to go out and buy tons of needless stuff, there were people refusing to mask at grocery stores, coughing on people, demanding that the hairdresser open up, walking around, etc.
the neighboring state twenty minutes from my house didn’t close anything, didn’t require masks even. I think they closed theaters and hair dressers for two weeks. I was never locked in my home. I chose to stay in my yard, my house and not go shopping.
this “new normal” that’s worse, it’s because of denial. denied grief for all the people we lost and are still losing, denial that covid is still killing people. denial of the change, refusal to adapt. it’s mostly attempts to make us go back to the old normal and subconsciously we all know we can’t do that. we all feel it and we all know it
things have changed, and we were ready for change for the better. instead we’re being forced to go back further and further into worse circumstances. something has got to give.
“a new normal” is not good or bad. it is simply change. the fact that yes, it’s been for the worse? who decided that and who wanted more cops, cameras, hostility. who desired and who profits from it?
(in response to a candidate discussing their position on gun control)
specifically on this issue, the left believes that the poor and working class should be armed, nothing should be done to disarm them. that they have a right and need to protect themselves. they are not capitalists, they do not think that income inequality and masses wealth should exist. (there are a hundred flavors of left wing thinking and each has a different idea about how to fix this). monetary obstacles and “at the discretion of police” are not a thing the left believes in.
centrists (the current Democratic party, liberals, all) are capitalists and support capital and its interests. banks, CEOs, lobbyists are all products of capitalism. while they may support social causes (food stamps -with means testing!-, women’s rights or equal pay, gay marriage – recently-, etc) they do NOT support any of the ideas mentioned in the first paragraph here. they see control of equipment as their “solution” to gun violence and attempt to ban objects.
the right wing is purely capitalist and runs on the tears of orphans and the blood of the oppressed worker and enjoys it. they do believe in gun control, but they believe it should be applied to groups they do not belong to. selective enforcement, decided by (racist) sheriffs or judges. red flag laws are an example of this. (see: black panther party vs Reagan).
throughout history you’d refer to these positions as
anti capitalism or progressive position, left wing
controlled opposition, centrist, compromise position
conservatism, right wing, regressive position
conservatism owned slaves. centrists wanted to improve the material conditions slaves were kept in. leftists wanted to arm and free the slaves (John Brown, for example)
party names are not relevant in the long term, just positions on issues.
(on environmental collapse and grief)
you know the thing but didn’t let yourself feel the thing. that I understand very much. I knew and saw a lot of things, I’ve always been poor by national standards. I grew up in an area that had financially collapsed.
so I knew, I knew but you’ve got to live so I learned my trade, worked at it. all the things I saw and knew, I was young and homeless and saw it with my own eyes all around all the time.
it was a very small thing that made me feel it. I had been living in it a long time but I felt it when I saw a lone firefly in a field where there used to be thousands and suddenly all the things I had seen hit me, at once.
I’m sorry you are in it and have had to feel it and I agree with you, we could have stopped this and didn’t and there’s so much sadness and anger in that knowledge.
