"Talmudic law [notes] that while many crimes can be repented for, no one can fully repent for cheating with measures as they can never account for the full impact of their actions. As soon as the crime is committed, it spreads like slander, eroding trust… 'The punishment for unjust measures is more severe than the punishment for immorality, for the latter is a sin against God only, the former against one's fellow man,' says the Mishneh Torah." - James Vincent, "Beyond Measure"
A war correspondent's open notebook, reporting live from Ukraine. Click to read The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of readers.
I follow / read you on Substack. I’m only on Mastodon and Spoutible so I’d comment or share here. And yes, for both, hashtags help (new search on Spoutible might help).
@xdydx I don’t ever get your credit card number. The payment processor takes the payment but doesn’t give me that data. The only thing I get is an email address.
I only work on and post on the Middle East - but I follow Ukraine. I understand the feeling that it’s an effort but do try to persist here. And I will sign up for your substack
I got the impression (but didn't confirm) from the way someone was taking a photo of it that perhaps they'd just got through the trap but damaged the car in the process.
I would like to reassure the Lib Dem Parliamentary Party that I do not in fact have access to any launch codes, so I cannot in fact nuke the lot of you from orbit.
Definition: Richard Foord MP (Lib Dem), who thinks there is intolerance on both sides of the issue of trans rights, and thinks that parents should know if kids change pronouns at school.
@antinomy Indeed. It'd be nice if kids felt they could tell their parents everything, but you can assume that kids have a better handle on their particular parents than the school does.
@pseudomonas I’m genuinely boggled that it isn’t obvious to these people that the safeguarding risk to a questioning child with possibly homophonic / transphobic parents or other family adults is not *at school*.
Wow thanks a lot, added the anti koch gif that you uploaded too, I remember enjoying greatly another gif of yours which I encountered on a post of John Baez on the LRL vector johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2… thank you very much for that one too!
You probably that planets go around the sun in elliptical orbits. But do you know why? In fact, they’re moving in circles in 4 dimensions. But when these circles are projected down to 3-dimen…
I was just reading up on various parasites (trying to figure out what's biting us) and came across this sentence about agromyzid midges: 'The midge adults would have caused the holes back when the leaves were still folded up inside the bud, resulting in a “snowflake” like pattern of holes once the leaves expanded'.
(Parasites on the midges are known to bite humans too.)
I haven't found any pictures that look like snowflakes, though you can clearly see the symmetry. bygl.osu.edu/node/1967
I find myself yearning for trn's thread navigation when reading fedi posts, Slack threads, Facebook threads, ... In fact, just about any online discussion. Even given the vagaries of Usenet threading, it Just Worked(tm).
Argh. The results for my OU module are out, but I can’t read them because the website isn’t coping with the load of all the other students trying to get their results 😢
I tried eating fruit but the onboarding was confusing. I have to choose from apple, banana, orange? How is a normal user supposed to navigate this complexity
I'm going to stick to that chopped fruit you get in the little plastic boxes marked "Fruit". Regular fruit needs to take some UX lessons from those guys
Getting some annoyed responses to this. Look it's up to you if you don't want to take UX seriously, but you can't expect fruit to reach a mainstream audience if you don't solve the onboarding issues
I witnessed another trans person's deed poll today. A bit more involved, necessitating a trip to the solicitor, because he's 14, but nevertheless it reminded me of the surreal socially distanced signing dance I did during lockdown for my deed poll with @Zoë O'Connell and @Sarah Brown
It didn't have to be me that signed -- it could have been anyone who knew him and his parents -- but I felt privileged to do it, passing on some part of the support other trans people gave me.
I think I’m ill suited to social media, because of my unwillingness to argue at length with things I think are probably not true but of which I don’t have encyclopaedic knowledge.
I replied to one of your toots earlier and deleted my reply for this reason. I realised I'd accidentally said "relativistic effects" (which affect *electrons* of big atoms) instead of "non-spherical effects" (which affect *nuclei* of big atoms) and suddenly realised someone who could plausibly make such a mistake clearly doesn't know what they're on about, and what was I playing at, there's probably an actual nuclear physicist on your TL. So I deleted it. So you're not alone in this! 😀
"The essay" is an educational tool, not an engaging presentation format. That "paragraph intake of breath" is so depressing. There's so much great material in these things, but I do wish people would study public *lectures*.
For millennia people have been perfecting it in all kinds of varieties to suit personalities, access, etc.
"Like a video message from someone being kept hostage by an evil history postdoc" is one of the *less* successful.
My mental health remains somewhat wobbly, as it has been for a month or two now. There have been two absolute low points, one "head buzzing so much with despair" and one of the form where the world is a treacle of minor chords and even being present feels like an effort that can't be guaranteed. In between it's been recovery and walking a sort of narrow path on the edge, as if solid rock can be felt to one side and an abyss to the other. A forgetfulness of joy, too, as if I have lost the object permanence of love.
I have CBT starting next month. I have an appointment with my GP potentially to adjust antidepressant doses. I've got the endocrinologist tomorrow. The things I can do apart from just hanging on, I am doing. (To be clear, I'm not a danger to myself or anyone else.)
Caster Semenya won her case in the ECHR yesterday. Only the legal summary is currently available in English: “Discrimination against professional athlete with differences of sex development who was required under non-State regulations to lower her natural testosterone level to compete in women’s category in international competitions: violation”.
Normal instruction leaflet. “DEAR MASTER, IT'S MY PLEASURE TO SERVE YOU! In order to serve you better, I wanna share you some secrets about myself and beg your pardon. I'm sorry when I become loud during high-pressure inflation 2 min after starting, as I'm pumping on full throttle!”
David Tennant, of Dr Who fame, apparently said some pro trans things and now the TERFs are going after him on Twitter. His response is that he isn't worried because, and I quote, "I'll be fine, Terfs can't climb stairs"
I want that on a T-shirt. No, I NEED that on a T-shirt!
ETA: Apparently it was a parody account that said the stairs line. I still want it on a T-shirt.
I think there's a danger of confusing different types of intelligence and awareness. Humans are quite clearly as a collective super-smart intellectually in terms of our ability to creatively outwit other species and manipulate our environment. We mostly don't seem to have the type of intelligence, at least in our current mode of operating, to regulate that impulse that prevents us from going way too far with our 'advantage' and destroying everything.
It's not totally unique to humans, there have been monkeys that have also been observed overfishing their environment, but it's rare. That's not including the cases where we've set other species up to cause harm by transplanting them somewhere else.
Tennant didn’t say the line, but he is pretty awesome on trans issues. The whole thing exploded because of a t-shirt he was wearing. In addition, he’s been wearing a nonbinary pride pin to all his public appearances for some time, apparently in support of one of his kids.
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The Grand Canal, Venice. A #slitscan from Casino di Venezia to Ponte delle Guglie, using a vaporetto (waterbus) as a slow, steady scanning support, using a suction-cup camera mount inside the window.
Oh, just in case you were wondering why you had an extra follow request from me. I decided to start using friendica more. A compact and bijou Mac Mini goatery appears to be more reliable than mastodon.online. I’m still in both places mind, hedging my bets.
OpenAI threatening to leave the EU if they pass legislation requiring them to list their data sources because: "In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources it leaves them open to legal challenges."
Like every other boom tech company, it's just doing labor crimes and theft and claiming you're actually too innovative to be regulated, God.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned that the company could pull its services from the EU if it finds upcoming regulations too onerous. The EU AI Act is currently being finalized by lawmakers and should become law next year.
Some trans women breastfeed and conservatives have a LOT of feelings about that, which they're determined to make all of our problem.
For Assigned today I wrote about the latest right-wing meltdown over trans people doing a thing, compared it to coverage of cis adoptive mothers using the same method for inducing lactation trans moms do, and dived into the science of lactation (which for me is always the most fun part). #trans #journalism #science
The Newman-Goldfarb Protocols are known to help people who didn’t give birth to breastfeed. The right can’t handle the fact that it works for trans moms too.
IIRC, Dr. Christine McGinn used this exact method to be able to breastfeed one of her children. I swear I remember reading an article or seeing an interview with her about it.
@turboquokka My reactions to this story (thanks! <adds Assigned to reading list>) were, in order:
- wow, they can DO that? - that's amazing - our bodies are amazing - now even more babies get breastfed (which is awesome btw) - and even more moms get to breastfeed (which is also awesome btw).
Only nutbars who are so inherently opposed to anyone but themselves experiencing anything that is awesome or wholesome could possibly oppose this. What sad lonely people.
i worked as a breastfeeding counselor for ten years. it doesn't happen all the time, but mothers who are transgender, sisters who have never been pregnant, & postmenopausal grannies can all nurse babies, if they want. people can bring a little milk in, & they usually use a thin tube supplementer, with donated or artificial babymilk, just like other adopting/fostering moms do. conveniently, of course, there once were professional "wet nurses" too. we need better vocabulary for this stuff.
@lisamelton they will continue to rage against anything trans people do, since they are upset with their very existence. Sadly no amount of evidence or logical argument will ever have an impact when arguing with fascists, which is just sad… but it would likely help if journalists were fawning over every word and stupid hateful crusade they decide to spew out and if they weren’t allowed on social media.
xanna
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