Nachimir

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Posts posted by Nachimir

  2. Posted

    The Sarkeesian effect guys are breaking up. It seems the one handling the money tried to fire the other, and it shockingly didn't go very well.

     

    TLDW: Jordan Owen is cutting ties with Davis Aurini, and it's illuminating all sorts of shit about their working relationship and budgeting.

    Aurini blackmailing Owen now over the SALARIES they've been taking. It's almost as if their use of their budget was really unprofessional!

    Seems the makers of THE SARKEESIAN EFFECT didn't sign contracts with each other over the *thousands of dollars a month* they were receiving.

     

    https://twitter.com/mistertodd/status/572723003861045248
    https://twitter.com/mistertodd/status/572725585656459264
    https://twitter.com/mistertodd/status/572726145411514369
    https://twitter.com/mistertodd/status/572726922163044353

  3. Posted

    I once made the mistake of registering for tax self assessment after doing a guest lecture at a university (The university lost my paperwork multiple times and never paid me). It was only after three years of filling in returns with zeroes that HMRC wrote to say they weren't going to send any more. A few months later, I got a final demand in the post for £0.00p

  4. Posted

    Glad it wasn't your place.

    I stopped an electrical fire from starting this afternoon after smelling burnt plastic. So the house I live in didn't burn down, which is cool.

  6. Posted

    Fair enough - the cancer/chemo tweet I've seen really rubs me the wrong way though. :wacko:

    I can totally see that, it made me wince. I think one of the interesting things about bots is they'll make a hundred dross or nonsense tweets, then accidentally come up with something really funny.

  9. Posted

    I'm surprised no one thought of this Markov chain earlier (but then again I didn't either):

     

    DrilBiscuit

     

    "When you see games media sites celebrating the censorship of a video game and im here at the library trying to photocopy a fruit roll up"

    "These SJW journalists are part of an elite culture and they won't let me fuck the flag, buddy"

  10. Posted

    Sorry to hear all that S.A.M.

     

    I hope some of your parents projects pay off soon and relive the burden on you. Being more privileged than others doesn't mean our lives can't be hard, it just means they're not AS hard.

  12. Posted

    and 20% keep pushing and demand to know what kind of genitals my partner has.

     

    Ugh, sorry to hear that. I remember being a bit like that and cringe at my past self. Likewise the way some cis/het people edge toward asking bi people indirect questions that amount to "So when you're in a relationship with a woman, do you pine for cock?". I think it's most often non-hostile curiosity, compounded by the effort of thinking beyond cisnormative and gender binary stuff, but still gross.

     

    Using the pronoun that somebody asks you to use is not a lot of work. It's making a slightly different sound with your mouth, drawing a different symbol with a pen or typing a different key on the keyboard. I can think of few things that are less work. Breathing, maybe.

     

    As Tegan pointed out, it doesn't really have any more cognitive load than remembering and using someone's name.

  13. Posted

    Does anyone know if there's good writings about how and why people are hostile to their categorisation of the world being challenged? It seems like that's part of transphobia, people don't want to accept that there is more to gender than a binary system. Not always that it's just hard to grasp, it seems like an affront to some. I'm curious if there's been a good exploration of that.

     

    I've not read anything on this, but I did lose a friend over it last year. It started with talk of sports and the Olympic committee demanding that people have surgery or not compete, then went into gender differences not meaning gender is binary. When I mentioned the variety of chromosonal conditions that lead to gender complications or abnormalities he looked really troubled by the idea and went quiet. He really wanted to cling to binary gender, but couldn't argue for it, and ended our friendship within a few months.

     

    I don't think needing the gender binary is a condition these people have, but it's embedded so deeply in so many people's identities that it'll take a lot of education, time and people's stories to shift this.

     

    I only use home-grown free-range organic words, not any of these crazy newfangled words cooked up in a lab.

     

    <3

  14. Posted

    I too am cis, but have felt in the past like a barely balancing tower of meat and neuroses. I don't know what dysphoria is like, but I guess I have more experience than most of how mismatched yet persistent bits of self can be. That's bad enough when it's chunks of personality, I can't know but imagine it's much worse when a contradiction like that's reflected all the way from pervasive societal gender roles right down to your genetic makeup.

     

    I've wondered the same things as Merus, but knowing the complex preceding biological conditions, knowing plenty of trans people through work, and having at least one friend who's transitioning, it seems far more important to support them and offer an open ear.

  15. Posted

    I just mean, the thing that causes their identified gender to be one thing and their originally-assigned gender as another was that the assignation was based on physical characteristics.

     

    It can be a lot more complex than that, because sometimes physical characteristics are ambiguous at birth. It might already have been posted here, but this is a great article on gender complexity that goes through some of the different ways that can manifest:

    http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

     

    So, kind of what you said above, but sometimes it's complete guesswork, or bad parenting, or a mistake, etc.

  16. Posted

    144,000 is a number in the book of Revelation, which as you probably know is thought to be written by apostle John, probably while tripping balls. For the JWs, they interpret it that 144,000 of them will be the chosen few who go to heaven and form a government for the Earth with Jesus as its monarch. They believe the rest will either live through some kind of armageddon in which all the unbelievers are killed or, if they die before it, will later be resurrected to a paradise on Earth.

     

    (They also have a history of fucking up by proclaiming or heavily implying when armageddon will come. My favourite two instances of this are 1: some of the very early ones filing out onto a bridge in 1878 wearing white robes and expecting a rapture. 2: Lots of JWs getting loans and credit cards in the run up to 1975, fully expecting the world to end and to never ever have to pay anything for those sports cars, etc.)

     

    They tend not to talk about the armageddon thing on the doorstep anymore, and I think have shied away from their old iconography of that and paradise, but here's a good example of the former, and of the latter. They've apparently stopped using so much imagery like that, but it relied very heavily on verdant images in which people pick fruit, build barns, pet formerly predatory animals, and inexplicably wear their national dress.

  17. Posted

    From what I understand the fear of "worldly things" runs rampant amongst evangelicals as well. I forget whether there was important context missing from the line they're drawing from or whether it's one of those things that people should just be ignoring, like how there's two origin stories in the Bible that are mutually incompatible.

     

    It's incredibly convenient for keeping people in line, though, being able to say that anything that makes you uncomfortable or question the faith should be shunned.

     

    I think with the more unhinged belief systems, that layer of isolating fear is the main thing that stops them from crumbling away or becoming more tolerant and secular.

     

    Oh please Nachamir, release everything you have said with JW replaced with SWJ. I want to see what happens.

     

    Hah, GG would probably go nuts over there only being 144,000 of them or something :)(There are about 8 million of them… if you don't get the 144,000 reference, it's complicated and dull)

  18. Posted

    I think most of them are good people most of the time, but they exist in a bad organisation with rules that sometimes make them do crappy things and think they're doing good or pleasing their god. Also, that "worldly" thing is strong subtext for all of their interactions with non-believers. It was surprising when I left to find basically the same cross section of humanity outside.

  20. Posted

    The JWs are different to most because their processes are designed to exclude any flexibility in thinking or tolerance for other religions and ideas. They're a high control group.

     

    Related to that, did a fair number of other people born into it also leave (or try to) as you did? One of the members speaking to me said they'd grown up in a JW family but wasn't aware of anyone being badly affected by the effects of shunning policies as described. I got the impression they had to do a little mental loop-de-loop at that point, but I could have misread things.

     

    (some edits)

     

    They're on the other end of the shunning, so don't have to deal with or even see the effects. I never quite got the full experience of shunning people, because the first person I knew to leave was my own brother, living in the same house. Their advice under those circumstances is "minimise contact", but of course I got to see the effects firsthand. They refer to non-JWs as "worldly people" and like to reinforce a stereotype that worldly people are materialistic sinful liars who'll mislead you for their own advantage. Not all JWs believe that wholesale, but the process of kicking someone out then shunning them pushes them over that mental boundary into "worldly" for the more ideologically conformist JWs. Ergo, "that person has forsaken Jehovah, so I don't have to feel guilty about shunning them. They're probably full of dangerous ideas and lies". The less conformist will exchange pleasantries, but that's it.

     

    Leaving the JWs is hitting the eject button on an entire culture, and if you've been following its rules well, you won't have any friends outside of it. That's one of the things that makes leaving so terrifying and difficult. On top of that, you've been living under the idea of a vengeful, judgemental god presiding over an environment of rules that are impossible for most humans to live up to. Low self esteem and gossip tend to be endemic in JW congregations as a result (or at least, they were for the entire time I was involved), so when you've not long been out, are feeling vulnerable and isolated, and bump into some JWs in public, who avoid you but point and mutter things to each other, it doesn't have the best effects on your wellbeing.

     

    Teenage years are usually the point people leave, due to discovering sex, drugs, booze and lots of other forbidden stuff. I wouldn't say it's exactly a mass exodus, because the conditioning is strong, but it's a steady rumble and at times would get more insistent in certain communities and areas. Most other teenagers I knew at least used to poke the boundaries and keep secrets. I only ever saw one shotgun wedding as a result of that.

     

    (edit edit: Search this page for "Worldly people" (with quotes) to see some of their typical representations and opinions of non-JWs. I generally don't like ex-JW sites because they often have axes to grind, ranging from the very specific but mundane to really weird conspiracy theories. However, the quotes in that section are representative and not cherry picking. Judging by the more recent ones, nothing has changed since the 90's in respect of this: It's not a pendulum that swings, they aren't quotes from the JW leaders going through more conservative phases. Those are their consistent, cultivated opinions on non-believers and have been for many decades. I'll stop making this post longer now!)

  21. Posted

    TotalBiscuit has done this enough times I feel like I don't need to click on links or engage with his arguments in any way. Internally I regard him as a generic problem, rather than just the latest thing he's said being separate problems.

     

    Well-building in Africa... Fuck me, now that's a cause with absolutely nothing wrong with it.

     

    Thanks for the interesting read. I know someone who works for an NGO dedicated to clean water in developing countries, and she once told me the most effective thing they can spend money on is strengthening local government and human rights, before even thinking about putting infrastructure in.

  24. Posted

    It took me so long to work up the nerve to reply to people on Twitter. Even with people who followed me, I would generally wait for them to say something first before engaging. There was this intense feeling of not wanting to encroach on anyone's time, not wanting to bother them, even though they voluntarily deciding to allow my own tweets into their feed.

     

    (I typed a first reply to this then deleted it. I should do that more on Twitter, too).

     

    I think it's largely about the social context a person has to exist in. As someone with a lot of privilege, a stream of @'s from different people to me tends to be implicitly flattering in the way any sort of non-negative attention is. Because of my privilege, assholes rarely direct their guff at me, and non-engagement generally makes them go away. Consequently I've always felt less reluctant than you did to @ people. I bet lots of privileged guys assume twitter is like that for everyone.

     

    I've often been reluctant to @ people with a lot of followers or who've been harassed (unless it was just a message of support or encouragement, and even that makes me afraid I'll be unintentionally patronising), but until I read that link it never twigged that, over time if not immediately, being @ed basically sucks for all women and minorities.

     

    Edit: Long before GG, I saw @rare_basement tweeting that she wished she could only see @s from people she followed and not randos. It'd be a good feature, and I'm surprised it hasn't made it into any clients.