Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Prehistory of mankind is way too horrible to be remembered.
 But if we choose to ignore it, then we'll be doomed to repeat it."
  -- Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

[I wish my friends fasting tonight and tomorrow for Tish'a B'Av a safe observance especially if you're facing unusually hot weather where you are.]

"The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life." -- Frank Zappa (b. 1940-12-21, d. 1993-12-04), in 1987

"There are a lot of things I'd like people to understand about cats but one of the top things is that cats are really pretty good at communicating with us and the idea of cats being unknowable enigmas is entirely on the human end of it

[...]

"And again...in most of the other domestic animals that are able to communicate with us, we pre-selected for this ability. It was a top-down thing. We needed to be able to tell them to do stuff so they'd do it.

"We didn't need to tell cats to do anything. They already did stuff

[...]

"They're not....subtle. We only think they're subtle because, so often, we haven't made the effort to understand them. We only think they're subtle because they're not like dogs and dogs are the Default for us"

-- Elle M. (they/them) (ellle_em), 2021-07-04 [Note that these are from the start and middle of a long Twiter thread about feline development and socialization -- they didn't just drop a couple of statements obvious to a lot of people who live with cats and a surprise to people who bought the stereotypes. There more in the thread.]

From "I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world - and I hate it" by Britt H Young, Input magazine, 2021-03-04:

[...]

Prosthetic arm technology is still so limited that I become more disabled when I wear one. There are very few, special tasks I can do better with it (case in point: using a potato ricer). But mostly what it does is helps me mimic two-handed people. I realized that my excitement about my new hand was mostly about being able to be something other than disabled - a cyborg.

[...]

Angel says her multi-articulating, LED-lit, carbon fiber-coated hand is an extension of herself. She wears it outside of her house so that she knows she can do anything "the way" she wants to do it.

Often, that's the way that allows her to be left alone. "If I'm at a restaurant and want to cut a steak, and I go to do it with my little arm, everyone's gonna stare at me or offer to help," she tells Input. "But if I do it with my prosthesis, nobody. Says. Anything." Or, she adds, people will think it's cool. Angel loves her customized bionic hand and what it enables her to do socially, even if she is able to do most tasks without it.

[...]

No matter what, being cyborgs isn't saving us. The most disabling thing about missing my left arm is the way the world treats me, regardless of whether I put on a prosthesis for the day. "People have such rigid ideas about the human body," says Sara Hendren, Professor at Olin College of Engineering and author of What Can a Body Do? "People wouldn't make such a huge deal out of disability if they saw their own bodies as getting and receiving help when they need it."

In other words, none of us is utterly independent; we are constantly receiving help from other people or from some tool or piece of technology. If more people saw this clearly, then prosthetic limbs wouldn't be turned into "savior" devices by the media. My choice over whether to be a cyborg or not wouldn't be so high stakes.

[...]

[The author also points out class disparities in who gets prothetics (and who gets high-tech ones), groups of people who can benefit more (functionally) from fancy prosthetics, and that more people missing limbs or parts of limbs should get a chance to find out whether hi-tech prothetics make their lives easier or not.]

"When America commits genocide, it does so by making it look like the victim's personal, individual moral failing.

"If only he hadn't resisted. If only she had better job skills. If only he had a better job. If only he were able to pay rent. If only he were responsible."

-- Anosognosiogenesis (pookleblinky), 2020-07-15 (start of a short, seven tweet, thread worth reading all of)

"I'm honestly getting very concerned as to how bad the physical violence towards trans people has to get in order for society to start paying attention to the extreme radicalisation of shitloads of very dangerous people and even more seemingly otherwise normal people against us

[...]

"By the way we all know how bad it has to get. Like any other public safety issue, it takes the murder of a young, conventionally attractive person before the media will start to care. And then they'll just all pretend they had absolutely nothing to do with it"

-- Natalie Washington (Transsomething), 2021-07-07

"Here is a qhing about vocational 'callings' - many people think they are a kind of clarity or certainty. But often its just an swelling internal imperative to move toward ever intensifying uncertainty." -- Martha Crawford (shrinkthinks), 2021-07-07

"In an information economy, the most valuable company assets drive themselves home every night. If they are not treated well, they do not return the next morning." -- Peter Chang

[This might need to be rewritten for the telecommuting era.]>/p>

"Thinking of fan fiction as midrash is a useful alternative to Henry Jenkins's image of fan writers as textual poachers, an analogy he adopted from Michel de Certeau (Jenkins 1992, 24). Whereas Jenkins's analogy positions fans as serfs poaching game from the lord's estate in order to make meaning and to reclaim ownership of the storytelling that fans see as their birthright, the midrash analogy positions fans as respected interpreters, analagous both to the classical rabbis who for centuries interpreted scripture and to the modern midrashists who continue that work today." -- Rachel Barenblat (velveteenrabbi), "Fan fiction and midrash: Making meaning"

"The First Amendment expresses our Nation's fundamental commitment to religious liberty by means of two provisions -- one protecting the free exercise of religion, the other barring establishment of religion. They were written by the descendents of people who had come to this land precisely so that they could practice their religion freely. Together with the other First Amendment guarantees -- of free speech, a free press, and the rights to assemble and petition -- the Religion Clauses were designed to safeguard the freedom of conscience and belief that those immigrants had sought. They embody an idea that was once considered radical: Free people are entitled to free and diverse thoughts, which government ought neither to constrain nor to direct." -- Sandra Day O'Connor (b. 1930-03-26; US Supreme Court Justice 1981-09-25 to 2006-01-31), McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union, 2005-06-27

[Now if only we had fewer groups (all or nearly-all Christian ones AFAICT) who think the free exercise of their religion included denying other people theirs.]

[Responding to news about the lambda variant of the covid-19 virus...]

"This is a global pandemic, we live in a global pandemic

"By outbidding and buying up all the doses they could rich countries have ensured poor countries remain variant factories

"I don't need self-interest to motivate me to do what's right but in this case they line up

"We need to stop pretending that we don't all live together on one planet

"We can't address pandemics with nationalism anymore than we can climate catastrophe

"It is only by acting in community that we can move forward"

-- Quinn Hunt (HuntQuinn), 2021-07-06

"Most national literatures, ancient and modern, record a people's triumphs. Jewish literature records our failures, moral and spiritual. No people has been so laceratingly honest in charting its shortcomings. In Tanakh there is no one without sin.

"Believing as we do that even the greatest are merely human, we also know that even the merely human - us - can also be great. And greatness begins in the humility of recognising our failings and faults."

-- Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (rabbisacks), 2020-09-25 ( start of thread)

"I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." -- James A. Baldwin (b. 1924-08-02. d. 1987-12-01) [thanks to extraarcha for quoting this earlier]

"What we need to recognize is that the people who attacked our country, the people capitol, the people who attacked our way of life, and our way of governance, they belong to a faction. We can call it a Jim Crow faction, we can call it a Confederate faction -- it's a faction. And as James Madison defined it, a faction is a small group of people, a minority, that is intent -- who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest -- adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. This is what Madison was writing about in The Federalist Papers that he feared. And we have had this faction as a facet of our history from the founding of this country. This is a faction that, of course, refused to join the United States until they were assured that they could enslave other human beings. This was a faction that nullified laws that they rejected. This is the faction that more recently refused to grant that President Barack Obama was a United States citizen, American born. This is an ethos and an idea that has been part and parcel of this country since its founding. And at every turn we have not vanquished it; at every turn we have not identified it. And if we do not understand that today's Big Lie, the big lie that the will of the people should be vacated because of course we had the temerity to let Black and brown and young and new Americans vote, is simple the latest iteration of the overarching Big Lie -- the overarching big lie that we are in fact not created equal, the overarching big lie that there are certain people -- African Americans, indigenous people, newer immigrants -- who will never be, in some people's eyes, full and true citizens. And so I think it's incredibly important to position this 1/6/'21 investigation, this attack on or country, as a rooting-out of a supremely un-democratic, un-equal, unjust force that we need to get to the bottom of, and to understand that this faction, it's not a political party. It's taken up host in the GOP; it's a parasite on our nation, but it operates well beyond the GOP: it operates as a media syndicate [...], Fox News, Sinclair, Newsmax, OWN; it operates through talk radio, it operates through state legislatures, it operates through social media, it operates through paramilitaries like the Proud Boys. This is a faction that every single American of good conscience needs to care about, needs to get to the bottom of, and it is something that we simply cannot continue to live with as a nation if we are going to be united and make real the promise of liberty and justice for all. And so, once we recognize that the faction is ... well, it's a parasite on our naion, and if you'll allow the mixed metaphor, it's either a boil that we will lance, or it's a cancer that will continue to spread." -- Anat Shekner-Osotio (anatosaurus) Pod Save America, 2021-07-01 (0:08:49 - 0:12:10)

[Wishing my countrymen a good Independence Day, and may we ever strive to make our nation better and closer to its ideals!]

"Tale as olde as tyme
 Song as olde as rhyme
 Wasting tyme onlyne"

  -- Chaucer Doth Tweet (LeVostreGC), 2021-06-18

"Did you know that cops receive 'controlled escalation' training? It's training on how much more force than the other party you can use without it being 'excessive'.

"Did you know that de-escalation training for cops is viewed as radically progressive?"

-- Jenniferplusplus (jennplusplus), 2020-05-31 [start of a ten-tweet thread of things it would be good to remwmber about police and policing]

"This year as you celebrate and gather with family and friends, it must also be a time to reflect that the nation of our shared pride is also one that was built on colonialism, genocide and the continued oppression of Indigenous peoples. As Métis, we embody the integration of European heritage and First Nations. We live with both histories." -- Audrey Poitras, president of the Métis Nation, quoted in "First Nations call for reflection on Canada Day" (Sydney Upright, CTV News, 2021-06-30)

"Do you believe that people really want to know the true history of this country?

"For a long time the average Canadian was satisfied to pretend to be asleep. And the one thing that we know is that you cannot wake anybody up who is pretending to be asleep. So in order to shake them up out of their pretense it took a 2x4... it breaks my heart that it had to be the graves of innocent children to finally penetrate the collective Canadian psyche to say 'this is wrong.'"

-- Duke Redbird, indigenous poet and artist, on Metro Morning with Ismaila Alfa, 2021-06-29

[Note that reckoning with genocide is not just a Candian problem. Similar techniques were used here in the US, including boarding schools. We're about to start our own search for mass graves of Native American children who were ripped away from their commmunities. We've kind of gotten used to hearing people open or close some events or broadcasts with an acknowledgemt of standing on "land that belonged to the _ people, but I don't think most of us (white people like me) are any good at thinking about what taking that land meant.]

"I find it odd when people tell me I'm brave... I'm just trying to be myself and I'm terrified every step of the way." -- Daniela A. Wolfe (Daniela_A_Wolfe), 2021-06-10

"The best response: 'Help make it a world where we don't have to be brave to exist.'" -- Penny Sterling (sterling_penny), 2021-06-11

"When I came out, everything was Gay and Lesbian.

"We all called ourselves Gay and Lesbian because that was what had been yelled at us as youths. The symbol was the pink triangle.

"The pink triangle was used by hate groups and oppressors to identify us. We took it back. We took gay back.

[...]

"We listened, we learned, we included more people more explicitly. The symbols were the pink triangle and the AIDS ribbon.

"Two badges of death. And you would take them from our cold, dead, hands, motherfucker. Right? Right.

"After I graduated, the rainbow flag became predominant. Made by AIDS activists, by the way. Still coming out of death.

[...]

"Some time after that, other acronyms and terms started being used. QUILTBAG, for instance. Ace/Aro, these are now in use. Lots of terms.

"But nearly all the things we call ourselves have been used as weapons against us.

"Nearly all the symbols we use for our resistance have origins in our deaths.

"Not just oppression.

"Death.

[...]

"Everybody who came out before you has taken the rocks and bottles and made them into shields and wind chimes."

-- Sigrid Ellis (sigridellis), 2017-03-15

[Two comments from me: (1) compare my entry from 2021-06-24 quoting what racheline_m wrote the day before, and (2) I would quietly suggest that "everybody who came out before you" is survivorship bias -- the ones who thrived took the rocks and bottles and made them into shields and wind chimes, but many succumbed to attacks born of hatred.]

"No, this wasn't a 1960s student riot. Out there were the streets. There were no nice dorms for sleeping. No school cafeteria for certain food. No affluent parents to send us checks. There was a ghetto riot on home turf. We already had our war wounds. So this was just another battle. Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That's all. The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here. Non-existence (or part existence) was coming into being, and being into becoming. Our Mother Stonewall was giving birth to a new era and we were the midwives." -- Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, "Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats", 1989