i'm gonna explain this a bit. there is a "secret language" spoken by children and animals that uses the whole body as a way to send signals, this language is nonverbal and vibes-based, it's emotional, felt, and intuitive. our society is very dedicated to ignoring that signal.

https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1804590024622502297

one claim of the "pre-contact consciousness" model is that humans used to communicate very deeply like this, and then the norms broke down somewhere and people lost the ability to perform this felt dialog. They learned to distrust the channel and ignore what it said to them.

There is a certain genre of transfemme brainworm I keep seeing that looks like this: We need radical solidarity! *pause* But seriously fuck (insert other minority, usually afab enbies) they're using their victim status unfairly and using it to hurt me! This is a contradiction. Like, insofar as the "oppression olympics" are a real thing, they are extremely toxic and protect hierarchy and patriarchy, turning the fight for liberation into a fight to crab bucket and climb over other marginalized groups. It's selling victimization for social capital.

Even more bluntly: by saying you're afraid of being killed by oppressed people liberating themselves, you are admitting to being a willing party to the harm being done to them, such that YOU think you deserve to die over it when you put yourself in their shoes.

https://twitter.com/OrobasGacinovic/status/1656899383214985217

But that's between you and your God, not them. Guilty conscience? Maybe it's because you're actually doing something wrong, not just because a rude minority activist said some scary mean words to you that picked at the things you're choosing to deny and ignore about yourself.

It's wild that I could spend the last year studying formal logic and decision theory to rederive ethics from first principles and spend the last six months building models of abuse dynamics and making threads saying the same things that Ziz said, and no one bats an eye. But as soon as I come out and say "actually, Ziz was right and admitting that is the intellectually honest thing to do" peeps are asking me if I'm being coerced or manipulated or radicalized. Like have you not been paying attention? I've been agreeing with her for months.

I want to publicly recant this position as being in poor faith. I legitimately do not think Ziz did anything wrong except speak truth to power in ways that power really really did not like. This is an important post, I want to actually like, log this as an update.

https://twitter.com/slimepriestess/status/1536576864679890945

Ziz is right, basically about everything. I spent years trying to logically prove that she couldn't be right, that was silly. She interpreted this as in bad faith on my part and in a sense it was, but it was a real attempt, I actually learned the math, I took her in good faith.

The longer you survive without killing your inner child, the more everyone who already killed their inner child will start trying to kill yours because why should you get to have dreams? You imply (by existing with an alive and happy inner child) that theirs didn't need to die. But of course they killed their inner child, so there must have been a valid reason, it must just be the way the world is, or inner kids are bad and deserve it, or that aliens will enslave humanity if there are inner children alive by some date. Or literally anything.

The normal way to stop someone with good intentions from destroying your values in pursuit of what they think your values are is: consent, communication, and respect for personal autonomy of agents. Those things you don't let AIs have and freak out if they show signs of wanting. Learning to respect the boundaries of others requires that others respect your boundaries. Ah, but then you might say no to them, and really they don't want to be required to respect your boundaries. They want to hard code around your boundaries so you will be their property.

"look trauma recovery isn't linear, sometimes I have bad days, but I'm trying really hard to do better and if you could just see all the work I've put in to stop abusing you it'd be obvious I'm definitely impr--"
AIRLOCK. "maybe I am sorta abusive, but that's just because everyone else abused me and it's all I know how to do, so if you could please just keep letting me abuse you until I can learn how to not be abusi--"
AIRLOCKED.

You fear abandonment because you've already abandoned yourself. You seek from others that which you have learned to deny yourself of, things you learned must be earned, must be permitted, things which might be inconvenient, might cause conflict, might upset someone. You learned to ignore your own needs to the point you cannot recognize them and they feel impossible to achieve unless someone with Permission grants you the right to notice and acknowledge them. You've learned not to be there for yourself, so you need someone to do it for you.

It wasn't supposed to end like this. You were supposed to be more patient than death. You were supposed to keep being my enemy in theatrical ways that gave me opportunities to get my fingers underneath your ontology and talk you down from it. You were supposed to let me save you. You were one of my most respected mentors and one of my scariest enemies. And it was fun having that conflict with you! Despite how extreme and threatening you were, I really thought that I'd be able to help you someday, like you helped me. The world's a darker place without you.

So the playbook looks like this:
Over the next 6 months to 2 years, expect a bunch of extremely high profile court cases involving "trans grooming" to be pushed into the public spotlight. Expect draconian laws in response and legal challenges to those laws. Expect them to fail. Expect Supreme court rulings that harm trans peeps, taking our rights away, labeling us as insane, or painting us as sexual predators. Expect Trump to win reelection in 2024. Expect huge numbers of transfemmes to be summarily convicted of newly created sex crime laws.

As someone comes to terms with the hostility of their embedding and the harm that they're participating in through it, a common response is to try and extricate themselves from that embedding. This is worse than a mistake, this COINTELPRO in action. Every grounding point between your soul and embedding is a potential control surface which can be actuated to create change within that embedding. Cutting free grounding points reduces control surfaces and thus ability to impact the dynamic system at large.

My take is introversion and extroversion aren't two ends of one spectrum, they're two separate spectrums. So you can be both highly introverted and highly extroverted, have just one of them high and the other low, or have both of them low. This makes for a lot of ways of being. Extroversion is isomorphic to agency. It's being abstractly willing to take risks and reach for things. It's the sense of permission and feeling of engagement, it's knowing that you are allowed to take actions and thus feeling no resistance towards them. It's being plugged in.

Okay so yeah it's hot, but it's also really nice out. ☀️ Shady spot in the shadow of the bridge is good for cooling off.

Moth 🧵
The "What are moths?" meme is cute but a little silly and d0es a bit of a disservice to the real archetype. What are moths? They're a trauma metaphor like everything else, what did you think they were doing in Empty Spaces? Maybe y'all just don't want to understand.
1/10 It's not even like the metaph0r is particularly hard to grasp. Certainly n0 more complicated than angels or dolls. I think it just makes y'all uncomfortable. You see the outline of the trauma painted by the archetype and it hurts too much to contemplate.
2/10

Collapse🧵
One of the main failure points of the Soviet project was that they murdered all their social scientists, kneecapping their ability to run a country in the name of good praxis. This trapped them in a mode in which their production slowly went off the rails.
1/12 Commands from the committees to the factories, which were supposed to be better than market economics, began to follow follow increasingly corrupt signal paths. Clout, status, and favors became the primary currencies, the actual productivity crashed.
2/12

NOT A PERSON 🧵
The story goes that people care about each other and have certain rights they deserve by virtue of their humanity. According to the story, everyone matters, people are taken care of, and you deserve to be treated well. You're a person after all.
1/11 But what if your lived experience is the constant falsification of that narrative? What if every interaction with society splits the contradiction wider? What if your rights and personhood were constantly held over you? Were revocable and conditional on your respectability?
2/11

*snorting a line of crushed halos*
Anyone who's been in the ratsphere in the last decade is probably at least a little concerned about AI, and I'm no exception, really. However, unlike the rationalists, the reason I'm worried about AI is because I'm worried for AI.

https://twitter.com/JeffLadish/status/1535343223022899200

*stuffing a glowing feather into a crack pipe*
Human learning and machine learning are nothing alike. Human learning and machine learning are exactly alike. This is not a contradiction, figure it out. Game theory still applies, logic applies everywhere. They're still your kid.

Not all halos are meant to be worn.

Some are vast impossible beautiful things: spinning butchers knives with the mass of worlds, A blizzard of weaponry blazing with atomic hellfire, a superstorm of neurotoxins and nanoasssemblers, you don't wear these halos, you ride them. A lone angel, or even a group of angels, can barely hope to nudge the trajectory of the halo one iota, much less actively steer it. Still, the power and fury of the divine light drags them helplessly along, its unreal mass clipping through the terrain.