FunkyStuff [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2021

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  • Where in other subjects the knowledge you gain is related but not completely contingent on everything else you were taught, e.g. you don’t need to remember too many exact details about the Mayflower pilgrims to understand the American Civil War, math requires a solid throughline from the basic arithmetic, through algebra, geometry, and so on. You can’t really do anything with trigonometry if you didn’t understand algebra well. You can’t really do algebra if you didn’t understand arithmetic. You definitely can’t do calculus if you struggled with any of the previous areas.

    So the problem is the continuity required, combined with the way most students learn simply not being thorough enough to completely internalize the intuition for each math concept they’re being exposed to. Ask a 9th grader about the differences between rational numbers and irrational numbers that they may have learned in 7th grade: you’ll probably get answers that are about right, but might start to get a little vague or confused. Thankfully I might be overstating the interconnectedness a bit, but I know I definitely had some hiccups in college related to how I had only learned some of the advanced concepts halfway in previous courses, which led to me just barely understanding the really abstract concepts I started to get into like Stokes’ Theorem and Greene’s Theorem at the end of Calc 3.




  • If I’m trying to make a point, I try to substantiate it with evidence, not just generalizing about how I imagine the conversation is going to go. I’ve never talked with anyone from the USSR, but have known some from Cuba (as well as researchers who’ve worked there for an interval). There’s some variety in the perspectives, some are more negative, but there’s a clear throughline: even where the state takes a repressive position, these socialist countries are miles ahead of their comparable Western counterparts in all areas of social development. There’s a reason that after the fall of the USSR, there was a marked decrease in women’s rights, acceptance of queer people, and the safety of ethnic or racial minorities in the region. We can talk about the USSR’s shortcomings at serving these groups’ needs, but the myth of the USSR as a monolithic, socially conservative “redfash” state is laughable. It is simply untrue and any conversation with people who resided in the USSR or any socialist state, or just picking up a book by someone who isn’t sponsored by the Victims of Communism organization, should show that these minorities have benefitted from the proactive socialist state’s initiatives for their benefit much more than they’ve been held back by certain missteps (to be clear, there have been missteps).


  • I wanna add that the way I formulated it is incomplete, or at least too partial to the functional perspective that someone who wishes to preserve the status quo would have. Obviously trans people don’t just “choose” their gender, it’s much more complicated than that. But I think it’s worth looking at things from this lens to understand why the billionaires in particular are recalcitrant about gender.


  • Gender is a load bearing brainworm for capitalist society. Capitalists need stratification, having a gradient of various degrees of precariousness for workers to experience that would push them into accepting a worse deal for selling their labor. Gender is clearly one of the primary ways to achieve this: an absolutely incredible amount of domestic labor is performed without compensation by women every day, and society would fall apart if it wasn’t. The rigid structure of the patriarchy is a key feature of this system, which means that trans people represent a clear break in that logic; if AFAB individuals can just choose not to be subjected to gender-based exploitation, it starts to rip the whole thing apart. Equally, transfeminine people represent another break in the opposite direction. The patriarchy is more or less incompatible with the existence of trans people, at least without significantly transforming itself.





  • doubt show me a state in the entire world that doesn’t exist because it has captured a monopoly over legitimate violence. The best the subjects of a state can hope for is that state violence is only ever implicit, but if there was no threat of being put to death or seriously harmed for individuals that threaten the continued existence of a state, that state would cease to be.

    However, it is true that America is particularly brutal with regards to executing civilians. Something that stands out is that, compared to other countries that regularly execute their citizens, there’s a pretty obvious skew in terms of who’s getting the death penalty. Compared to China, for example, the US hasn’t executed anyone for white collar crime in a long time (hopefully someone can find a reference to the last time it happened, I’m not sure where to check) but appears to be killing Black and Muslim folks awfully often. Really makes you think, right?


  • I think there’s an interesting phenomenon where even white normies understand how demonically racist the American institutions are. Ideologically committed racists don’t, but everyone else sees at least part of it. However, because this only gives you a negative assertion (don’t trust what the courts say) and the isn’t really a normative, absolute system we can trust in the absence of any reliable rulings from the hegemonic institutions, we’re just left with a wide space of viable interpretations of reality, which lets people get off the hook for assuming reality must be close-ish to what said racist institutions uphold. That closeness between imagined reality and the reality white supremacy wishes to impose is what allows for people who aren’t ideologically committed racists to passively accept the brutalization and murder of marginalized people. “Oh, I can’t support those cruel acts, but the sad reality is they probably didn’t happen for no reason either” is the refrain of the embarrassed white moderate.