So in case anyone wanted more evidence of how government suppression of free speech is spreading globally, in the UK on Thursday evening (March 27th), twenty police officers broke into Westminster Quaker Meeting House in London and arrested six members of the group Youth Demand who met to discuss concerns about the climate and Gaza. The charge was apparently conspiracy to commit a public nuisance - this raid is a direct result of law changes in 2022 and 2023 designed to dramatically restrict people's ability to plan and carry out protests. In addition to breaking into the Meeting House, there have apparently been twelve related house raids and three other arrests.

This is horrifying. It is happening under an allegedly left wing government (our current PM Starmer is Labour, but that name doesn't really mean anything under his government). There is no harm caused in meeting to discuss ways to challenge the government, except to the government itself. Yet apparently, a simple meeting is enough to justify police armed with tasers and more than a dozen raids.

We are allowed to believe that change is necessary. We are allowed to discuss ways to make change happen - and across history, the most significant social changes have only been made possible thanks to protest.

Screw Labour and the UK establishment.

I want to add some more context about why this is so terrifying. The last time a Quaker Meeting House was violated like this in the UK was in the 1600s, to disrupt people who were exercising their right to freedom of religion. The state of free speech in the UK is apparently in a worse position than it has been for centuries - and certainly within living memory.

Our Meeting Houses are places of worship. They are places of peace and contemplation and it is so utterly disrespectful to break down our doors to stop people talking to each other. And I only know about this because I'm a Quaker myself, and I think it should be spread across the UK so people know how the state is actively working ageist us.

Please share this if you can.

big stretch!~ ⚡️

ok gran pa lets get you to bed

As a reminder if you're wondering why Gundam has so many weird names for people and things, this is why.

Ganges River dolphin Platanista gangetica

Observed by roylesafaris, CC BY-NC

I answered yes before I looked at the year.

I played the 1993 SEGA Genesis game and wrote a walkthrough for it.

In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.

See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.

And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?

The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?

And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.

Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.

So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.

Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?

And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?

But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...

That's what a TERF is.

Now you know.

i feel like it bears clarifying it’s not that trans women were a convenient target, it’s from what you said before, that they believe biological sex is the number one reality underpinning everyone, and gender expression is fake, which immediately leads to the conclusion that transgender people are misogynistic for (supposedly) reinforcing the existence of gender, which is inherently oppressive to women. this then takes a variety of forms from there on, but i just think it’s important to stress that the transphobia and transmisogyny of terfs isn’t incidental, it’s intentional

Yeah, so I wrote this a few years back with the goal of trying to get folks to understand why radfem ideology isn't actually driven purely by transmisogyny, and in fact why it's very possible to have what's called a "trans-inclusive radical feminist" (TIRF) or radfems that focus on other targets altogether, like sex workers (SWERF), intersex and asexual people, transmasculine folks anywhere along the spectrum, and anyone who can be spun as "letting the side down" against the real enemy, which is men.

So if it sounds like I'm downplaying the centrality of transmisogyny to modern, post-intersectionality radical feminism in this post, it's very much because I am. I want to teach people what radical feminism looks like in terms of its ideological roots, not in terms of common targets, because radfem groups often switch their targets based on who can be attacked without incurring too much censure right off the bat. I want people to be able to recognize what has essentially become a fascist ideological understanding of gender before it targets a community that they personally recognize as an ally who needs defending. And that means divorcing your understanding of what a community is from its targets.

That being said, you are also right that transmisogyny has never been precisely accidental, and trans women have been a favorite target within feminist and queer feminist groups for going on fifty years now. They really love that whole secretly infiltrating narrative shit.

This is because as far as radical feminism is concerned, gender relations are an ongoing zero-sum, binaristic struggle between men and women in which one side must triumph, and that side better be women. People who complicate this narrative by embracing uncertainty about the dividing line between these two eternally struggling categories become targets because they question whether men and women are actually mutually exclusive and all encompassing categories, whether you can move from one category to another, whether conflicts have to be zero-sum, whether it's not all our responsibility to ally with and support men trying to build a better world for themselves along with women. That's why sex workers are such a common target: the Pornography Wars were driven by arguments about whether it was women's sexual interaction with men that was inherently degrading or whether the actual problem was the poor worker protections and pay scales within the porn industry.

I'm a butch ace woman, okay? Radfems spent at least a decade mobilizing hatred against my community as a radicalization pipeline for feminists, especially queer feminists, in this exact space on Tumblr. I have never been shy about defending trans women when I see them under fire, but I am also not shy about defending other targets, either. So I want (collective) you to be able to see what I'm talking about in terms of a shitty ideology that is tuned to capture people like us, and that means talking about how post-intersectionality radical feminism has a distinct shape of its own that isn't purely a function of transmisogyny.

You know, I want to reblog this today because one of my reading snippets has been making the rounds through radfem spaces, and I keep getting served the most atrociously bad takes. Here's the quote that kicked it off, from feminist historian of the family Stephanie Coontz in The Way We Never Were:

That's the sum total of the post I released: that quote, Coontz's name and the date her book was last revised (2016).

The thing I find really illustrative about those responses is the sheer level of defensiveness radfems levy at that quote.

CIRCLE TIME!!!!

I don't like the Goron Race <8')

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Sometimes you live through something awful.

But you do live through it.

remember a year ago, when I was so scared they wouldn’t get along?

I feel like the big push for AI is starting to flag. Even my relatively tech obsessed dad is kinda over it. What do you even use it for? Because you sure as hell dont want to use it for fact checking.

There's an advertisement featuring a woman surreptitiously asking her phone to provide her with discussion topics for her book club. And like... what. Is this the use case for commercial AI? This the best you could come up with? Lying to your friends about Moby Dick?

One of the big pushes tech companies are making for AI is entirely in the tool of convenience. Take Gemini for example, one of Google's really big pitches for it is in features like Help Me Read and Help Me Write, which are like the lowest tier use case for deep learning models but are also the two AI features that the average consumer will actually care about. Sure they advertise the GenAI stuff Gemini Advanced is able to do, but they've woken up to the idea that the average consumer does not care about GenAI and non-AI Bros fundamentally loathe GenAI.

Every company with a language model got sucked into the venture capital pitfall of AI and now have to market the one set of features the general person actually cares about.

I work in advertising and the culture shift surrounding AI even from January until now (end of March) has been drastic. At the beginning of the year, the company I work for was using AI to design most of their assets. Clients started coming back and requesting that we no longer use AI generated images or videos for copyright liability reasons. Basically, there's no way to tell whose art or photography was scalped to make an image, so as companies who are trying to make a profit using potentially stolen images, it puts them in a gray area, legally.

Also, companies do look at their comment sections. Anti-AI commenters on social media ("this is not a real image" "I don't trust companies who use AI" etc) are seen by higher ups of a company. Basically, keep bullying brands who use AI, it's working. Now my company uses almost no AI for deliverables, which is a huge win.

Aside from stolen images: AI-created images and text can't be copyrighted. Companies don't want their content to be unprotected, free for anyone to use.

AI can be a useful brainstorming tool. It writes great DRAFT boilerplate, which then needs human review. If you need a generic email that says "our festival is coming up in two months; here's why it's awesome and you should attend; sign up at [link]," it'll do that quickly, and then you can adjust any weird phrasing.

A good content writer might be able to compose the email just as quickly on their own - but your Events Coordinator And Budget Manager may not have those writing skills. Or they may be too busy today. However, they may have proofing/editing skills to fix the draft. The AI-bot has saved them 15-30 minutes of time, which can be anywhere from $20 to $100 saved for the company. (They could hand the "write draft" job off to someone else - but it's possible nobody else has time this morning.)

Repeat for

This is a notable help... but it's not "wow we can fire entire departments of admin assistants and replace our contracted blog writers with a bot" level of help. It's not "we don't need an IT team or database managers anymore."

AI images are getting more realistic. AI text is getting closer to sounding like it was written by a person.

Both are still prone to hallucinations. Neither is capable of following simple instructions that humans can do, like "a picture just like that one, but put green curtains on the window," or "list of our quarterly reports sorted by the signer's last names." (Especially if the reports are signed in four places by different people, because one is the main signatory and the rest are signing different sections.)

The AI pushers have been trying to claim that, in time, with more power, more energy, better code, they can fix these problems.

They can't. Humans understand data. AI just repeats patterns.

There's a lot of use for pattern repetition in both business and art.

That use is never going to remove the need for people who understand the actual content, and can edit it.

This is aside from issues of ethics, both where they got the content to train the LLMs and art-based AIs, and what they're trying to do to employees over it. This is aside from the issue of the environmental costs of AI.

Corporations don't have ethics and don't care about the environment. (People in corporations may. Corporations themselves, as entities, only care about profit. and usually that means short-term profit.)

The crucial message for them is: AI cannot do the things they want it to do. It never will.

It can assist. And for that to be a long-term part of business, we need to discuss the ethics of the training material and the environmental costs of the tech.

But regardless of those answers: AI will never remove the need for human review and intervention. Companies that shift to relying on it for more than rough-draft production are going to have a short period of increased profits as they fire their human staff... followed by a collapse when the AI fails at a crucial task, and nobody caught it: A fake report went live leaving them on the hook for fraud; a scandalous photo in a report cost them their best client; it bought non-refundable plane tickets for half the staff to attend a conference; it cancelled all company-issued credit cards over a single misuse-of-funds complaint. Or their top three coders quit because the AI accidentally scheduled a crucial meeting over their vacation time. And so on.

There are parts of the AI-into-business movement that are rough for writers and artists, and that sucks.

But hang in there. It cannot last, and the bubble is starting to burst. Because whatever value it does have - it can't do what they want.