Apple Cider

I should really stop using "I don't get why" as a rhetorical device because most people think I'm serious. I know why people find value in him because people find value in other over-inflated assholes all the time, but I just don't get why they would, but that's more of a question for the ages, really.

#noisegate

I use Audacity, I would presume it has a noise gate feature?

Okay I know this has been my unofficial audio quality feedback thread but does anyone know how to cut back on audio bleed? Now that I'm doing separate track mixing, what I'm running into is having to cut three tracks worth of bleed (where someone's mic picks up the audio in their headphones) and having to silence all of that manually. I have no idea how to either cut it out entirely (whether it is fixing the gain or buying sound sealed headphones) or how to automate cutting it out. It's tripling my production time and I am a woman with limited free time and now I am doing this with two podcasts.

It's because we've attempted to formalize culture or views when we're talking the whole of human history across thousands of years and it's really hard! But yeah, a lot of it has to do with the fact that people still don't acknowledge that most of what we think of as "culture" was developed maybe a 100 years ago, if not maybe a couple hundred more. Colonialism did a lot to basically wipe out a lot of global diversity. Think of things like pink - pink was not considered a feminine color until the turn of last century. Diamond rings for marriage? That was an advertising campaign from...the 40s I believe. Slavery was literally three generations ago. This is what happens when we accept that things are the way they are and don't interrogate that things are pushed into being "tradition" by people for very specific reasons and not to be questioned. I would even say that feminism as we call it today was probably codified with suffrage movement (which was incredibly racist, btw) but women have been radically dealing with societal oppression for a very long time, etc.

It is really hard to nail down because the entire planet isn't a monoculture and historical feminism could nail down a couple of points - the rise of imperialism/colonialism in the Global West cemented very binary gender identities and roles and spread this to many "eventually civilized" cultures that they effectively wiped out, especially when missionaries went to spread Christianity. Colonialism also established "races" as well - there was no way to be able to enslave people or steal resources if you didn't class them out of being human. Many cultures that weren't Eurocentric had shared responsibilities, more than two genders, etc. But there's also anthropology data that states that some cultures did believe in masculine aggression and such, but given that much anthro studies are still through the lens of Western culture, it's not entirely accurate. You could also argue that the rise of Christianity annihilated many matriarchal spiritualities (I believe there was research done that states that pre-Abrahamic religion was largely goddess-focused, but I could be wrong) and cultural beliefs. But the biggest destruction and devaluing of women's labor HAS to be the Industrial Revolution if I had to put a finger on just the aspect of Labor as we know it today. Granted, women were part of the workforce, but it was often menial, backbreaking labor, especially if you were the underclass. If anything, classism had a lot to do with putting the lower classes and non-white groups of women in drudgery that was underpaying and dangerous (same with children) and upper class white women were to be cosseted and kept to grow up, do education until they were old enough to marry and then bear children. Again, I am not a historian, anthro student or anything, so take ALL of this with a grain of salt. It's literally me collecting bits and pieces of reading I've done. The thing is that history has always been written by the players in power and there's always this perception that progressivism is only a very recent thing as we've moved "Away" from worse times, despite that all over history, women have worked, bucked "trends" and also existed in cultures that were very different than Global Western ideas of culture and our own contemporary notions of how things are/were. Take things like ancient Roman society vs. Greek society (many parts of Greek society, you know, where democratic thought came from, was also incredibly misogynistic in a way that has carried into some conceptions of gender now, even) or Hun society (women were allowed positions of power, to get divorced), plus things like polygyny, tribal family raising, etc.

If it was merely a matter of "oh women are dropping out of the workforce" then why aren't we dispensing governmental salaries for women who take care of the home? Why isn't taking care of your home and kids considered work? Why do we penalize women who have gaps in their resumes because they were a homemaker? It's because women's labor is inherently devalued and expected to be XYZ and be done with little fuss and for almost no money. Also reminder that the wage gap cuts incredibly hard across racial lines and many people make way less money than white men, including black men. I think the lowest earners are Latin women.

I think it should just be feasible to have kids AND a career and not have it be a big thing, or that maybe a father wants to be stay at home, etc. The whole idea of pushing for parental leave and good amounts of pre-natal and after-birth care allows couples to make the kinds of decisions that are best for both of them, whether both parents go back to work or one stays home or whatever. But unfortunately there's huge amounts of financial and societal pressures that push women into being full-time mothers regardless.

My previous address is in NYC, so that wouldn't work, ha! But my paranoia is also informed by the fact that I have a restraining order against someone so I feel justified in being a bit reticent.

The moment we can significantly untether our bodies from the physical labor of procreation and child feeding will be an interesting day.

If there happens to be any other area Thumbs, we should all go to the 42 Lounge and get some beers.

I didn't put in my zip code because that's a little too close to my home for my enjoyment, but I am the only Milwaukee Thumb so far, as it usually is. Also I was sad I couldn't drop the pin on my favorite place - Discount Liquors.

Yeah, sorry, I am just not sure what value people get out of him at this point, it cannot be worth the inflamed butthole garbage he spews the rest of the time.

I don't get why anyone follows or talks to TB at this point, at all.

Yes, you can pump and store a ton of milk and honestly a lot of parents DO because otherwise you get really sore boobs apparently, between feedings. You produce a ton more milk sometimes than the baby needs every day.* *= anecdotal, I am not a mother, I gleaned this from the skadillion people I know that had kids recently.

I'm sure it's super well and good to want women (or rather, people with breasts, not all people with breasts are women) to breastfeed their kids to the detriment of their career, but you're neglecting that a lot of things need to be changed before this can really be effective. Like you said, fair pay needs to happen. The US is also woefully behind in implementing sensible parental leave for both parents as well as adequate pre-natal care, especially to low income parents. We also need to societally grasp that breastfeeding is a natural thing and not flip the fuck out about it every time it happens in public, nor force parents to take their kids unsafe or unclean places in order to make this happen. So while your suggestion is good, I guess (though I am not sure it's really your place to suggest it?) it relies heavily on a shift in our economy, our current job market as well as mores surrounding the auto-sexualization of breasts and the demonizing of exposing one's chest in order to feed a kid. There's also just the fact that many parents do not necessarily have the resources (see: time) to breastfeed, hence why they turn to formula, this happens a lot in low income areas. Same goes for companies trying to force formula on low-income families as well. Basically, your suggestion is great but it relies on a lot of other factors. Plus, as far as I know, child rearing should really be between BOTH parents (if it isn't a single parent household) - allowing equal parental leave helps parents make decisions that are best for their families. I don't think breastfeeding is the biggest factor when it comes to retention and pay gaps between men and women though? Women get paid less because their work has been historically devalued due to sexism, seriously. Retention rates are affected by things like if your company even OFFERS maternity leave, which many don't. A lot of companies will straight up fire you if they find out you are pregnant. It isn't really a case of a parent-to-be just up and leaving a job vs. having to because they won't get support from their company.

From what I understand, a lot of departments like to spend their budgets on things like tanks and not, like, you know, actual cybercrime departments.

I can absolutely vouch for the court/police stuff she talks about, it's literally the same rigamarole I went through a couple years ago. Law enforcement in most places has literally no idea how cyberharassment/stalking works or why it's so damaging.

This is a really great way to illustrate to people what privilege is or does.

I think the jokey corruptions of it are fun, but I bristle when anyone refers to me as an SJW, since it's passed into the parlance even from other social justice allies, because it's short. And no, I'm not an SJW. I am a feminist. It's a term I chose, it's not derisive, it's not pegging me as some horrifically angry woman all the time.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of you folks know some jerky people. >_> On the other hand, I think there's definitely some issues with how concentrated communication has to be, how many tonal and contextual indicators get stripped away. It's a shift in communication and we have to adapt to it. A lot of people's personal flaws that we tend to overlook in the every day are magnified online, particularly if people "gain a following" and so on. I see this a lot with Facebook too, which feels to me like basically a "have awful fights with your relatives" machine, especially if you're interested in social justice. I also think the ability to become a personality with less friends and more an audience is super-easy and it's often very isolating, just from my personal end of it. I like having friends, I hate having people who treat me like an opinion dispensing machine. It's hard because I do agree with a lot of what you guys find as negatives, but a lot of those negatives get foisted back onto me as a reason why I shouldn't be on social media versus it being a problem (see: being a feminist, etc.) Tumblr culture is a whole other kettle of fish than just Twitter Culture. ETA: Also thank you folks for saying such nice things, hah!

I could counter that message boards breed the same sort of social conformity by consensus as twitter does at the personal level, it's just that you have to get a larger group of people to agree on what's acceptable and it makes the margins way wider. Being new here, I've already run into a couple of times where people are not used to how I talk about things (which was strengthened by Twitter, actually!) in a pretty aggressive manner. It's been interesting to be on Twitter because it has kinda forced me to strip a lot of the hugely feminized cruft from how I talk (I'm sorry, but/I think/I feel like/you know what I mean) to just get straight to what I think. For the record, this is the first message board I've been on in a couple of years because I do not like message boards anymore and it's been an alright (sometimes frustrating) experience that I'm coming to enjoy more lately. "Outrage" is a word I have really grown to hate lately, along with "rationality" "emotional" and "objective". I'm also okay with blocking people who don't agree on the basic premise that I'm a human. I know that I get a lot of flack for unfollowing or blocking people on social media and I definitely try not to do it over things as disagreements but I'm okay with blocking people who can't meet my basic requirements for respect and empathy. It is my twitter feed and my timeline and I do like that I can enforce boundaries as I see fit. As someone who's struggled with a lot of abuse over my life, it's a really interesting thing. I know that comes off a lot (and it can even be the case with some people) as "forcing an echo chamber" but I see it as "requiring people to come to the table to not dehumanize others."

It's an interesting question, but it depends on how you do it. Nuance is a thing! If you pick on them for their lack of education, income, that's just being a dickbag (even if they ARE Nazis.) Making fun of their beliefs is fine because it is a pretty common moral ground to stand on to make jokes. Making fun of their beliefs is not their intrinsic values as humans, which is often what that "punching down" refers to. But (and there's always a but), this doesn't necessarily work if you're attacking people who are not parallel to you in some ways. There's also the fact that if you're attacking Nazis and other white power groups but not looking hard at white supremacy as it benefits you as a white guy, you're just taking an easy, popular tack and not doing the work in yourself. Which wraps back around to why anti-racist jokes fall flat if you're a white guy. Which is why satire is hard to do if you're part of the group that passively benefits! I feel like these comedy arguments come up all the time because people really, really want some hard boundaries so they can say "Well, I didn't step over THIS line" instead of looking how interconnected and nuanced it all is and are trying to abstract it from larger contexts. In short, do whatever comedy you want but absolutely be prepared to take the criticism for it if you don't want to do due diligence as to why it's shitty. Who is "beneath" is often based on a lot more complicated social structures and dynamics that still puts some people very much on top and not questioning why that is is where you get a lot of offensive humor.

'Anticipate the consensus' is a really amazing phrase, if you think about it.

I am probably going to post a lot in this thread, just a heads up. I have a lot of fragmented thoughts on this, especially as someone who's been heavily involved in social media (and I am assuming a lot of the point of reference here is Twitter) for a long time. I started out in places like IRC chats and message boards, livejournal where most of the interactions were still in the form of comment strings but I think Livejournal was the place that really gave you a place to both express yourself personally and invite comment on it. Communities were similar to message boards but personal journal posts were the closest thing you had as an abstraction of self. It was really unreal as someone who grew up in the very early ages of personal Internet use. It isn't surprising to me that Livejournal split into two camps - people who went to tumblr for fandom and people who went to Twitter for personal discussion. I was personally more of a Twitter person. As someone who was part of a message board community for a good deal of my 20s, Twitter was a radically different place. People came to talk to ME, and I navigated it as a persona, versus a message board where you develop an identity but it's still part of everyone jumping in to talk to eachother. But Twitter had some benefits that really hadn't been on a thing on message boards: freedom. Message boards were and still are ruled by general consensus on mores. You can experience pushback if you buck this in any way, any codified idea of what is acceptable behavior. Obviously this is for good reasons if you're a troublemaker but as someone who started developing radical politics from Twitter onwards, I started seeing the cracks in the system. If mods or other members start seeing you as a problem, it can be very hard to say what you're really feeling. A lot of nerdy messageboards were run and mostly populated by men - do you know how hard it is to talk about burgeoning feminist beliefs with a bunch of nerd men? So I left countless message boards because I felt like I couldn't say how I felt about things. This is why Twitter was really formative in my development of radical, leftist feminism ideas. Suddenly social media allowed literally anyone marginalized by media and internet spaces to have a voice. It was a place where you could to talk to a lot of people very much like you when before it felt like the internet was largely white and male, etc. However, this does have consequences and I think social media definitely developed the kind of fractured identity politics you see now. But I digress. I think I'll tackle problems in a later post. It is just incredibly freeing to have a place where you can express your feelings, bounce them off other people and you can't really be silenced (in some ways, yes, harassment does exist, etc) except in some very extreme cases. It's really amazing to feel like people enjoy you and your work. However, I've dealt with what people derisively call "call-out culture"/toxic feminism which is often a cudgel to stamp down intra-community issues from the outside. I do think there's problems though. I had to move away from the idea that people can enforce my Twitter content or who I talk to by mere shifting political boundaries. But again, this isn't really understood by people who aren't in that sort of thing. It's gotten stressful sometimes, because I think a lot of people take it to the extreme and get into trashfire fights on Twitter because they come to it with their personal grievances and don't adhere to the kinds of social decorum that you expect out of people when conversing with them offline. In that way, online is a liminal space of the real persona and the unreal rules of interaction. To answer your question, Zeus, no, I don't think it's eroding our humanity. If anything, it has given us greater access to many more types of humanity. In the same way that taking Instagram pics of ourselves isn't destroying our ideas of humility (which was ridiculous anyways), social media has destroyed a lot of antiquated ideas on what comprises humanity by letting us see so many types of people at once. We just need to negotiate the negatives as they come because it's all brand new. The idea of glorification of ego (as elmuerte said) is why people also scoff at selfies, despite the fact that the people building their egos are frequently the people that were told they shouldn't take pride in themselves at any point. I love having people tell me I'm awesome. Don't you? The idea that pride is a sin (to some degree) seems to come from people who absolutely will throw a tantrum if you don't believe they are awesome and so forth. But this belief that thinking you are neat and drawing attention to yourself is something I find a lot in misogynistic tracts because marginalized people taking value in themselves when the world tells them they are shit is radical, to me.