discourse cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

7d4b3858d6b0e9bb96a7cfa6aaa5c174407916cc

nuclearspaceheater:

kaduva:

jupiter2:

This chart shows the best and worst face masks

Source

to clarify about masks with vents:

they are not intended to prevent spread of pathogens. they exist solely to protect the wearer. they are intended for e.g. building sites or industrial settings where there may be dust & particles etc. in the air – i.e. they do a great job at filtering what comes in through the mask (hence the high stats), but they have a handy vent that opens when you breathe out. there is absolutely no filtering on the air coming out through that vent (because in the setting they’re designed for, there’s no need for it). do not wear these masks, they are almost useless in terms of preventing the spread of the virus.

Protecting yourself is still protecting others because you cannot spread it if you don’t catch it. Pathogens that can only reproduce in living humans are a rare area of life where the interests of the individual and the interests of the collective are in near perfect alignment. Obviously, if everyone inhaled only highly filtered air, the virus would have a hard time regardless of what happens to the exhalation.

Even putting that aside, there’s nothing wrong with protecting yourself.

All that aside, masks by definition (per OSHA) do not provide an air-tight seal around the face. Get an elastomeric respirator and some P100 filters instead. They’re available again for the general public and have been for a while now.

@ people who think that valved PPE shouldn’t be worn at all no matter how good its anti-ingress protection is:

As the saying goes [link], have you tried sitting down and thinking about the problem for five minutes?

b420f9a3d6388a41d3cf8c60e9376386a21a13e1

[Apparently Tumblr, in its hellsiteishness, does not allow descriptive alt text on images. For anyone unable to see it: that is a picture of a valved P100 respirator whose valve has been taped over with cloth.]

Tags:

#covid19 #reply via reblog #illness tw #discourse cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

systlin:

c-is-for-circinate:

A particular distinction I often wish got made in discussions of privilege (and those who have it, and those who don’t) is the difference between privileges which, in a fair and just world, everybody ought to have, vs the privileges that nobody ought to have.

Many things in the world qualify as privilege.  Being able to marry the person you love is a privilege.  Feeling safe in your own neighborhood is a privilege.  Having the space and security to put down a task, a fight, a social justice issue, and walk away for a while and rest, is a privilege.

And also: being able to hurt somebody else and get away with it is a privilege.  Knowing that others are likely to take your side in an argument, whether you’re actually right or not, is a privilege.  The ability to horde or destroy common resources like water and rainforests is a privilege.

Exercising an everybody-ought-to privilege isn’t wrong.  Using it in such a way that it interferes with another person or people having access to everybody-ought-to privileges is.

Having access to nobody-ought-to privilege is a flaw of the system, not the individual who has access to those privileges.  Using a nobody-ought-to privilege is a fault of the person.

Refusing to use your everybody-ought-to privileges “until everybody has them”, or demonizing their existence, so rarely helps anybody.  Straight people refusing to get married didn’t contribute too terribly much to gay marriage; you don’t make somebody else’s neighborhood safer by deliberately making your own more dangerous.  Insisting on never putting down or walking away from a social justice fight because other people can’t isn’t a recipe for progress, it’s a recipe for burnout.

There’s a difference between helping yourself and hurting other people.  We should talk more about finding ways to do one and not the other.

This is an excellent point.

Tags:

#yes this #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #discourse cw?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

rustingbridges replied:

regional municipality sounds sort of like unincorporated areas of counties, maybe? I don’t know the procedures for your area but official stats of 1/550 probably implies pretty high actual rates… shit sucks

I agree mask wearing probably has better uptake in NY than anywhere comparable in the US since we’ve had such a large volume of cases it’s got to be enough to convince almost anyone it’s serious

Tags:

#(update: I saw an article in the local paper recently complaining) #(that tests in our area are getting rationed even harder than in the rest of the province) #conversational aglets #replies #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #(oh also some good news: coworker-who-made-fun-of-me seems to be expressing interest in getting a cloth mask like mine) #(if I see her wearing one on multiple occasions I’ll remove the clip from my dirt file: sometimes people improve)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

tototavros:

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

 

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

 

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

 

tototavros:

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

 

rustingbridges:

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

 

brin-bellway:

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

 

rustingbridges:

I mean I call them male / female in the professional context, because those are the typical terms and I’m absolutely not tromping all the back to whatever closet the bits came out of because somebody failed to understand my nonstandard terminology.

and for all its crudeness, I’ve never dealt with anyone who misunderstood the analogy!

(see also)

Tags:

#conversational aglets #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw? #nsfw text

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

Tags:

#I’ve been thinking about this so much that it’s hard to keep track of #which of these things I’ve said publicly and which I’ve said privately and which I haven’t said at all #I hope I’ve included the correct amount of context‚ let me know if I haven’t #replies #rustingbridges #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #rants

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

Tags:

#I used to enjoy my work! #it wasn’t a Career (and I didn’t intend for it to be) #but it was easy and it helped people #now it’s dangerous and composed entirely of assholes #(it’s still rare for people to be rude to me in the *ordinary* sense) #(but under the circumstances just showing up is an asshole move) #reply via reblog #home of the brave #politics cw #discourse cw? #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

tototavros:

being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”

 

rendakuenthusiast:

I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.

 

alexanderrm:

In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.

 

tototavros:

That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack

 

rustingbridges:

I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post

Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.

(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)

Tags:

#nsfw text #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #reply via reblog #gender #discourse cw?

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

garmbreak1:

Indestructible is my least favourite keyword in MTG

 

shieldfoss:

“cannot be countered” might not have a keyword but it, is bad

 

brazenautomaton:

cry more blue mage

what is the slur for blue mages, imagine I said that

 

samueldays:

Fortunately for blue mages, everything can be countered. ;-)

Just cast Time Stop. It’s like Wrath of God for spells, nearly reading ‘Destroy all spells on the stack. Even the uncounterable ones.’ Speaking of WoG, I agree with Indestructible being a terrible keyword, the worse for becoming so normal it began to replace regeneration and circumnerf WoG.

 

rustingbridges:

indestructible was fine as a block keyword that only came on overpriced creatures, at a time when properly priced creatures were more expensive.

idk what it’s like these days

Tags:

#Magic the Gathering #discourse cw? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”what is the slur for blue mages‚ imagine I said that”) #((note: I don’t actually speak Magic the Gathering))

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

c11beb73eb8e6370460cb30ed0b31c96e43c7481

jadagul:

collapsedsquid:

Stockpiling intensifies

In fairness, the problem in Katrina wasn’t the storm surge overtopping the levees. Everyone knew to be terrified of that (at least those of us living in New Orleans). And the hurricane passed, and the city hadn’t flooded, and we all exhaled.

And then the levee collapsed.

I keep hearing rumbles about the threat of solar EMPs and how “we should prepare”, but what am I, Jane Q. Citizen, actually supposed to *do* about it? Or is this purely a “talk to your politicians and try to convince *them* to do something about it, because they’re the only ones who can” thing?

(Argumate seems to think this is funny, but I *do* in fact own a Wikipedia dump and I highly recommend it [link]. Not sure it would survive an EMP, though.)

Tags:

#apocalypse cw #covid19 #reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #discourse cw? #illness mention

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

transgirlkyloren:

I think if you’re writing porn online in this day and age and you have any sort of audience, even if you say “18+ only”, some teenagers are going to read it

(as well as some older people who for whatever reason don’t have much sexual and romantic experience)

and so part of Doing Porn Ethically is trying to make your porn something that you’d be okay with a very inexperienced person reading and drawing conclusions about sex from. and so some of that is trying to be realistic about the emotions involved with sex, about safer sex practices, about sexual ethics, and about the mechanics of sex and then when for whatever reason you don’t want to be realistic signposting ACTUALLY USING CONDOMS IS A VERY GOOD IDEA AND YOU SHOULD NOT RAPE OR ABUSE PEOPLE AND ALSO COME IS GENERALLY PRODUCED IN MUCH SMALLER QUANTITIES THAN THIS STORY CLAIMS

 

brin-bellway:

(I have a nagging feeling that I’ve misunderstood something here. I will tentatively post this anyway, but I might have gotten something wrong. (Although it’s also possible that the thing I’m wrong about is the sense that I’ve misunderstood something.))

—

Hmm. I’m so biased in favour of this that I can’t tell whether or not I actually agree with it on its own merits, rather than agreeing on the grounds of “I personally enjoy porn more when it’s about realistic ethical stuff, and I would like to encourage people to write their porn in a way I prefer”.

(Like…judging from context, this post was likely inspired by a post from yournaturalstate. I dislike yournaturalstate’s work primarily because it’s *unpleasant*, before even getting into any ethical considerations.)

—

I’m not sure whether this is a point in favour, or a point against, or a tangent, but it’s something related:

Mind-control porn in particular has problems with people insisting on putting blanket Do Not Try This At Home warnings on *everything*. Even things that are actually perfectly ethical and realistic. Even things that are thinly fictionalised scene logs of sex the author actually had (as an enthusiastically consenting bottom).

Written on the entrance to the largest and most well-known mind-control erotica repository are the words:

“The situations described here are at best impossible or at worst highly immoral in real life. Anyone wishing to try this stuff for real should seek psychological help and/or get a life.” (emphasis original)

(This warning is *not true*. Not in all cases.)

So personally, when I think of porn messing up impressionable teenagers, I think of teenagers being told they have to choose between being ethical (or safe) and satisfying their most deeply held desires. This dilemma is terrible enough when it *actually exists*; we *should not tell people it exists where it does not*, should not inflict that on more people than absolutely necessary.

(I say this as a former impressionable teenager falsely told her sexuality could not be safely fulfilled.)

…now that I’ve written that out, I guess this section is a point in-favour-but-with-reservations, pointing out a possible failure mode of a generally good idea. (And a failure mode the original context in question is particularly prone to, at that.)

(Well, okay, yournaturalstate specifically is not prone to it *enough*. But still, I’ve learned the hard way how easy it is to swing too far the other way.)

 

transgirlkyloren:

I think that noting which things are actually perfectly ethical and realistic is, in fact, part of having your porn be good sex ed. Misinforming people is bad sex ed. 

 

brin-bellway:

An excellent point. I agree.

Tags:

#relevant to the latest discourse #nsfw text #sexuality and lack thereof #discourse cw?