raw nerves

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

blackblocberniebros:

No joke, companies working on facial recognition software should be destroyed. There’s literally no possible ethical use of that kind of technology.

 

argumate:

I disagree, but would say that it’s complicated.

 

blackblocberniebros:

I mean i could foresee some silly app-based games coming out of it but like I’d gladly deprive the world of those games if it means preventing the ever strengthening of the surveillance state.

Fire to their offices, smash their computers.

 

argumate:

Can’t put the genie back into the bottle; need to plan for a world where everyone’s activities are tracked basically all of the time, or could be.

 

blackblocberniebros:

Alright then I’m a primitivist now

 

argumate:

Luckily in small primitive communities you’re not continually watched and judged every waking moment wait what the heck am I saying

 

blackblocberniebros:

I mean you can be alone all the time as a hunter-gatherer.

But I was being facetious anyway

 

misanthropymademe:

The problem with facial recognition software is that it will finally settle the question if there truly is a difference between one’s face and ass. 

 

ilzolende:

As an autistic, it would be nice to augment with software to get up to baseline, as people have taken advantage of my impairment before and it sucked a lot.

Agreed (with ilzolende, not with OP).

It’s perfectly technologically feasible to give me assistive tech for my disability. We have wearable HUDs. We have software that can beat me in facial-recognition tests. The reason I don’t have assistive tech right now is because of neurotypicals whining that it would be an “invasion of privacy” to let me do to them in software what they’ve been doing to me in wetware for their entire fucking lives.

—

…okay, I see I do still have that berserk button, it’s just that nobody’s pushed it in a while. I guess that’s useful to know.

(Well, I suppose I would still have it, since it’s a subcategory of the always-terrible “person [sacrifices/attempts to sacrifice/advocates sacrificing] my well-being for the Greater Good, not because they’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided the greater good was worth the harm it would cause me, but because it literally never occurred to them to factor it into the decision”.)

Look, I don’t know whether facial-recognition tech is worth it overall. I’m willing to believe that it isn’t. But we-as-a-society can’t have that discussion properly until the pro-privacy folks recognise that seeing-eye computers for prosopagnosics would, all else equal, be a good thing, and that “if we do X, such computers will exist” deserves to be added in as one of the factors when deciding whether to do X.

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #raw nerves #discourse cw #disappointed permanent resident of The Future

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Hypnokink Education Alert

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

ellaenchanting:

@hypnokinkwithmrdream is posting their old hypnokink class notes under the Fetlife Hypnapocalypse tag. It’s a fascinating read- like having a mini-EEHU in my living room. Since there are a lot of older notes, it’s also an interesting peek into how and when hypnokink culture evolved into what it is now. 

Thanks for posting these @hypnokinkwithmrdream!

Personally, I find these posts chilling.

Being so much about the power of suggestion, hypnosis is, to a fair extent, what people believe it to be. What hypnosis is changes over time, as society’s view of it changes.

I happened to be born into a part of space-time where the view of hypnosis meshed with what I was naturally inclined to find hot. It hasn’t always been this way, and, I expect, it won’t always be this way.

Someday, you’re going to leave me behind. You’ll move on to new pastures, where I will not want to follow. When I read things like this (or this, or that vanilla article you linked a while back on waking suggestions that I can’t find), I fear that it is already happening.

I’ve read over two pages of the /chrono version of the tag you linked, and he hasn’t said a single thing that makes me think “yeah, that sounds appealing”. It’s all a mix of things that don’t sound like fun at all and things that sound like they maybe could be fun but in a purely platonic way.

His kink is okay, but it is not my kink. If I’d been raised in a culture where this was the consensus view of hypnosis, I don’t think I would be a hypno-fetishist.

Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner, the future of hypnosis will be defined by people who say things like:

“Honestly I think the ‘relax/sleep/deep’ is counterproductive to what I want. People treat it as an idiomatic crutch but the reality is that I don’t really want any part of the person to sleep. I want them to be so focused that they can barely integrate the experience they are having with anything before, after, or around them.”

I look at that, and all I can think is, “I hope I find my real people before these people realise I’m not theirs.”

(And if I don’t find them in time, at least I’ll have had something resembling a community, and which will have taught me some useful techniques that I’ll likely be able to preserve privately even after they fall out of fashion. The next generation of people like me may be completely alone.)

Tags:

#I spent yesterday afternoon dealing with communities that insisted on claiming me as a member against my will #and yesterday night dealing with communities that #I’m at least 60% convinced are getting ready (however slowly) to kick me out and leave me stateless in that regard #yesterday was a bad day for group affiliations I guess #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #adventures in ‘close but not quite’ #raw nerves #negativity #nsfw? #in which Brin is predictable #(maybe not quite *as* predictable as the other post I’ve used that tag on) #(but this involves a couple of recurring and related themes of my blog)

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Anonymous asked: What do you think of Christians adopting Jewish practices like Passover and Hanuka because they are seen as less pagan? Does this appropriation bother you?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slatestarscratchpad:

Asking a non-religious Reconstructionist Jew about appropriating Hanukkah is kind of like asking Elizabeth Warren whether it’s okay to wear an Indian headdress.

There’s probably an official halakhic opinion about this, but if celebrating Hanukkah is appropriating Judaism, then having scrupulosity attacks about whether your celebration is wrong and searching for an official halakhic opinion about it is definitely appropriating Judaism, so maybe you shouldn’t check.

My own feeling is that if there’s ever some resurgence of anti-Semitism, I would rather Christians think of Jews as the friendly people with the beautiful rituals who drew them into their circle and invited them to share in their celebrations, than as the scary people who screamed “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION! ONLY WE ARE ALLOWED TO DO THAT!” every time they tried to light a candle.

Also, there are a bunch of prophets who say things like “There shall come a day when all the nations of the world shall bend the knee together in glorious worship of the God of Israel”, and I imagine that upon the fulfillment of the prophecy, one of the Jews turns to all the nations of the world and gives them a lecture about cultural appropriation, and then God facepalms.

Tags:

#pretty much #@Jews glorifying bloodlines and martyrdom: you’re not just endangering yourselves #you’re endangering *me* #fuck off and stop trying to drag me down with you #(the defanged version of Hanukkah is all well and good) #(I approve of candles and singing and gifts and I do these things myself) #(I do *not* celebrate a man who murdered someone for doing exactly what I would have done in their place) #(I will worship Zeus if I deem it necessary and you have no fucking right to stop me) #rants #tangents? #Judaism #antisemitism #raw nerves

Deeper For Me: I’m Changing My Major to Kink

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: http://deeperforme.blogspot.it/2016/03/im-changing-my-major-to-kink.html }}

ellaenchanting:

hypno-sandwich:

deeperforme:

     Oh my god last night. Oh my god, ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod last night…

I’ve lost my virginity three times: Once when a woman touched me, with intent, for the first time (my first intercourse, only a week or two later, is almost an afterthought in my memory); once when I pinned a submissive girlfriend to the carpet and first saw that look in her eyes; and once when I hypnotized someone for the first time. After each one, the world changed.

…

Read on for my pre-NEEHU opus, about fighting programming that says it’s wrong to spend all this time, money and energy pursuing kinky sex. I put in video clips and quotes!

If we’re friends…
If you follow me…
If you read one thing about kink…
If you care about joy and love and living free from fear….
Read this.

On embracing something joyous. :)

“Opening yourself up to desire and passion takes courage. Makes you silly and vulnerable, like Alison in her underpants. My friend has a line about how much safer it is just to fantasize alone in the dark – besides the obvious risks of going out and doing things, you also risk having your cherished masturbation fantasies touched by disappointment, embarassment, sadness, all the complications that come with doing things with real people, in the real world.

The upside? Having my wildest dreams come true.”

…I honestly can’t tell if there’s something wrong with this post, or if it just caught me at a really bad time.

When I talk about losing my taste for mind-control-as-such and focusing more on the sedation aspect, I describe it as uncovering something buried under desperation and ignorance of other options. I still think that’s true, but today (just today, literally a few hours ago) it occurred to me there might be something else to it as well.

It’s also more convenient. When all I had were tales of mind control and people telling me it couldn’t be done, I was most attracted to the most common type of porn. Now that I know a great deal of it can be done, I’m most attracted to the safest acts.

Perhaps that’s not entirely a coincidence. Perhaps my reaction to learning my wildest dreams could come true was to stop having wildest dreams. My dreams are tamer, these days. Oh, the thought of partnered sex still scares me, but it’s nothing compared to the terror I’d feel at wanting to enact that.

I don’t like this theory. I don’t like the way it carries the implication that the way I am now is wrong. I’m happier now than I was, more hopeful now than I was, and it feels more right and true. I neither want nor want-to-want to play in the deep end of the proverbial pool: I like sticking to the shallows. Is that wrong? If my not wanting-to-want it is at all a factor, even partially and subconsciously, in my not wanting it, does that change the answer?

(I keep thinking of those people who say you haven’t lived until you’ve done psychedelics (and risked coming back wrong), that the simplistic highs of sedatives are not and should not be enough. I wish I were confident enough to tell that idea to fuck off. I wish I were not so worried that telling the idea to fuck off would be the wrong move.)

Tags:

#sorry Divney #pretty sure this isn’t a response you were looking for #sexuality and lack thereof #I have tried to polish this thought process from its original form into #something comprehensible to people who aren’t me #don’t know to what extent I succeeded #TMI

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

aheartmadeofglitter:

I hear people say “oh my god I hate people” all the time without backlash. everyone knows they don’t hate every single individual in humanity. they have friends and family they love and hang out with. they simply hate the greedy, corrupted, oppressive nature of some human beings.
but the minute we say something about white people or men, no one seems to understand that it’s the same concept.

How does that saying go? “The line between good and evil runs through every human heart”? Everyone is worthy of love, and everyone is worthy of hatred. No exceptions.

When I say I hate everyone (which, admittedly, I generally don’t do out loud, as it’s rather rude), I mean literally everyone. I mean my psychological barriers preventing me from contemplating why I ought to hate everyone have failed.

Said barriers are currently only in the alpha stage of development, and fail frequently: about 2 – 5 times a month, for about half an hour at a time. I’m working on it, though. I hope that one day, I’ll be able to repress my misanthropy as thoroughly as I do my mortality.

(I note that the anti-mortality barriers were a huge project, taking something like 2 – 3 years to develop to a point strong enough that I could talk about it without really thinking about it. I was around age 7 when I started it, so it was a big chunk of my total lifespan at that point. I don’t expect the anti-misanthropy barriers will be any easier, both in terms of how long it takes and in terms of the amount of pain suffered in the process.)

Tags:

#Misanthropes Anonymous #’everyone knows’ my foot