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I mostly love my job but there is That One Engineering Team that takes this approach to communicating new features or major changes to tech pubs and I confess I am getting a wee bit weary of it.
"Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words "acceptance" and "integration." There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.
Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.
You don't be afraid. I said it was intended that you should perish, in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man's definition, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word "integration" means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.
It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, "The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off."
You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.
Your uncle,
James"
- James Baldwin, A Letter to my Nephew, Dec. 1, 1962
Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shivering and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.
You don't be afraid. I said it was intended that you should perish, in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go beyond and behind the white man's definition, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word "integration" means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what America must become.
It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, "The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off."
You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.
Your uncle,
James"
- James Baldwin, A Letter to my Nephew, Dec. 1, 1962
I'd yell about people who think 'being anonymous' is the causative factor for online misbehavior, but Mike Masnick had done a good job, and why gild that lily?
Strongly recommended reading.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210131/01114246154/no-getting-rid-anonymity-will-not-fix-social-media-it-will-cause-more-problems.shtml
Strongly recommended reading.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210131/01114246154/no-getting-rid-anonymity-will-not-fix-social-media-it-will-cause-more-problems.shtml
[disclaimer: these paragraphs are coming from a ground-level normie understanding and I have not read up on things to a level that a properly educated libertarian or anarchist would not find risible. My understanding is one achieved by an interested amateur whose primary dialectic skill is sounding a lot more versed and confident in a given topic than is actually the case.]
A pal elsewhere asked for clarification on the difference between libertarianism and anarchism, specifically vis-a-vis taxation and force, and my answer ran a little long.
( tldr: a distinction without much of a difference, but with caveats )
A pal elsewhere asked for clarification on the difference between libertarianism and anarchism, specifically vis-a-vis taxation and force, and my answer ran a little long.
( tldr: a distinction without much of a difference, but with caveats )
lolsobs all round
26 January 2021 08:41
"Multi Ethnic Working Class" talk when they couldn't even find 3 white dudes with different last names, the audacity
(no subject)
21 January 2021 18:35[bookface xpost]
A general zeroth-pass heuristic for outrage, for me, is that I tend to reserve it for things that (1) happened and (2) matter.
There is _no shortage_ of material that passes this filter. Y'all don't need to be reaching for extra servings of rageohol when it's already an open-bar situation.
Anger, when it motivates us to correct an injustice, is a gift and a goad. When we're seeking out anger-fuel in might haves and could haves, just for that fleeting high of being in a fury, then the action isn't outwards -- towards the world, to correct what we're angry about -- but inwards. I can't think of it as healthy.
Seriously, there is no shortage of shit to be mad about. We ain't got to go looking for extra servings.
A general zeroth-pass heuristic for outrage, for me, is that I tend to reserve it for things that (1) happened and (2) matter.
There is _no shortage_ of material that passes this filter. Y'all don't need to be reaching for extra servings of rageohol when it's already an open-bar situation.
Anger, when it motivates us to correct an injustice, is a gift and a goad. When we're seeking out anger-fuel in might haves and could haves, just for that fleeting high of being in a fury, then the action isn't outwards -- towards the world, to correct what we're angry about -- but inwards. I can't think of it as healthy.
Seriously, there is no shortage of shit to be mad about. We ain't got to go looking for extra servings.
Monday night into Tuesday and Tuesday night into Wednesday were both miserable affairs where I was, at best, 50% asleep at any given moment, and always the wrong 50%. Not like my usual insomnia where allergies lock up my nose and I want to sleep but can't breathe right. Different, and not an improvement. Real brainfog zombie times, despite the usual surefire application of melatonin. Last night the sleep debt finally, blessedly, came due and it is so very welcome to feel like an awake functional human being. Look at me, executing on my desire to post here more!
Well I was gonna try to establish a habit of dailypoasting so you can see how well that's gone.
Been keeping up a decent streak on Duolingo Japanese, which is helping internalize the various glyphs if nothing else; I don't expect to come out of DL with anything like fluency, but I'm hoping to establish a decent enough baseline to autodidact in that direction. No shortage of material to practice with, both audio and written.
Allergies were miserable last night and I'm a little foggy. I'll see about being a little less zombish tomorrow.
Been keeping up a decent streak on Duolingo Japanese, which is helping internalize the various glyphs if nothing else; I don't expect to come out of DL with anything like fluency, but I'm hoping to establish a decent enough baseline to autodidact in that direction. No shortage of material to practice with, both audio and written.
Allergies were miserable last night and I'm a little foggy. I'll see about being a little less zombish tomorrow.
