Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

“Dumbing down” has tended to only cause problems for me, since if I’m too laconic and straightforward about a point, people will let their own biases color how they interpret my words, and their interpretations tend not to be as charitable as I’d like. It really is best nine times out of ten to just say what you’re thinking in as few or as many words as comes naturally, with whichever words feel natural.

What I’d say is that there is no-one on Earth who believes that fat people were enslaved and brought across an ocean to break their backs on plantations, with the descendants of these slaves still haunted by poverty to this day. There do however exist people who think that fat people are discriminated against, and to this I would say that the kids in order to make fun of that fat person had to be taught that fatness is something to make fun of in the first place, and whoever taught this idea to them had to have a reason to do so, and when the same thing keeps happening again and again, there is probably some sort of systemic cause for it.

My point with this is that acknowledging that people experience discrimination or marginalization on the basis of a specific trait, is not the same as saying that this or that form of discrimination is “the same as” the most infamous form of systemic discrimination: every form of discrimination has a different history, different manifestations, different roles and different causes, and intersects with other forms of discrimination in novel ways.

I’ve never been fat myself, mind you, but my dad was, and after he died far too young when I was just a kid, my mom told me that he died as a result of medical discrimination against fat people. Not that I am a physician myself — and by all means we would both be biased to look for someone to blame — but I still today feel like he would’ve lived much longer if the world were just more accommodating for people of all shapes and sizes.

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”

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.