2025-11-21 02:30:42
Final day of having the carpenter here. A lot of sawing. Built the dresser desk drawers, cut all the perspex into shape for the windowed doors that fit together now but still need gluing.
The dresser drawers are just about big enough to put the hairdryer in, so that's nice.
Still quite a bit for the other workers to do. Detailing for panels on the doors, gluing and hanging the window doors, handles and painting and touch ups. They reckon another 5 days work still, only two of which can be next week because I have stuff to do.
Must be weird being a builder and finishing your part of the job then never seeing it completed. He's done all this great work on it but will only see the completed work if he has to come back for something else. And he doesn't want to come back coz he's fed up of driving across London 😆
Very glad to finally see this issue being addressed in a major publication. The headline is a little confusing. It’s not about engineering, it’s about all disciplines.
Even as we have made gains getting women into post secondary now young men are not coming, aside from a few specific traditional areas. Especially in Arts and Humanities, there is a huge gap. I see it every day at my university.
We need to reverse this. We need men and women in every field and discipline. We need men and women learning critical thinking, learning history, learning biology, learning engineering, together, collaboratively, in ways that speak to all genders.
I blame a large part of the gap on a notion that is still perpetuated by both regular people and government, that “trades gets u a job” with implicit and explicit bias toward those trades being male dominated. The manosphere often degrades traditional “thinking” degrees as not masculine enough.. or have been “woke” and a threat to stereotypical male roles. Plus there remain biases against teaching and healthcare as “women’s” work in those influential spheres, and not helped by general society either.
TLDR: we just need to stop devaluing post-secondary every other moment of the day and make it free and easy for absolutely anyone to walk in and expand their minds!
#viu #university #postsecondary #canada #education #gendergap #men #manosphere
https://archive.ph/NhuKo
The fascist coalition was never going to hold. It couldn't. Fascists want everyone to be exactly the same. That's their whole thing. Leftists want diversity, so we can actually form coalitions. Fascists will always reach a point where they have to kill all the other fascists who aren't exactly like them.
Project 2025 betrayed this. It wasn't consistent. It was a jumble of different ideas that couldn't actually be implemented together. Someone gets left out. The Groypers haven't been getting what they want. Things have been moving too slowly for them. So now we get to see what happens. If they keep accelating, Trump could be forced to choose between cracking down on the far right (and destroying his coalition completely) or letting his people get killed. I hope that's a choice he has to make.
🍿
While Rome burns, go build things that help people and get other people involved in it. The way we win is by not getting involved in that mess, but rather just clearly demonstrating that we can make things better.
Picture the human body. Zoom in on a single cell. It lives for a while, then splits or dies, as part of a community of cells that make up a particular tissue. This community lives together for many many cell-lifetimes, each performing their own favorite function and reproducing as much as necessary to maintain their community, consuming the essential resources they need and contributing back what they can so that the whole body can live for decades. Each community of cells is interdependent on the whole body, but also stable and sustainable over long periods of time.
Now imagine a cancer cell. It has lost its ability to harmonize with the whole and prioritize balance, instead consuming and reproducing as quickly as it can. As neighboring tissues start to die from its excess, it metastasizes, always spreading to new territory to fuel its unbalanced appetite. The inevitable result is death of the whole body, although through birth, that body can create a new fresh branch of tissues that may continue their stable existence free of cancer. Alternatively, radiation or chemotherapy might be able to kill off the cancer, at great cost to the other tissues, but permitting long-term survival.
To the cancer cell, the idea of decades-long survival of a tissue community is unbelievable. When your natural state is unbounded consumption, growth, and competition, the idea of interdependent cooperation (with tissues all around the body you're not even touching, no less) seems impossible, and the idea that a tissue might survive in a stable form for decades is ludicrous.
"Perhaps if conditions were bleak enough to perfectly balance incessant unrestrained growth against the depredations of a hostile environment it might be possible? I guess the past must have been horribly brutal, so that despite each tissue trying to grow as much as possible they each barely survived? Yes, a stable and sustainable population is probably only possible under conditions of perfectly extreme hardship, and in our current era of unfettered growth, we should rejoice that we live in much easier times!"
You can probably already see where I'm going with this metaphor, but did you know that there are human communities, alive today, that have been living sustainably for *tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years*?
#anarchy #colonialism #civilization
P.S. if you're someone who likes to think about past populations and historical population growth, I cannot recommend the (short, free) game Opera Omnia by Stephen Lavelle enough: https://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/
What are you going to do when the regime falls? After calling all your friends, after the great memes, after the parties, what are you going to do to make sure it never happens again? What world should we create?
Taxing billionaires is great and all, but we could build systems where billionaires are impossible. Is hoarding wealth and using it to control people even something we should consider part of a functional and humane system? Any system where one group of people doesn't have rights means that anyone can be stripped of their rights, like has happened with all the US citizens who've been illegally detained and deported by ICE. Does the concept of "rights" that must be defended with violence, that can be stripped away by people who can exercise more violence, even make sense? Or should the bedrock of a functional system be the obligations that we have to each other and to society, that cannot be severed or taken from us, that tell us we *must* defend regardless of whether systemic oppression will impact us or not?
Americans have been so restricted by the limitations of the two party system, only able to choose between options acceptable to different sections of the capitalist class. Would we even be able to imagine what we could do if those restrictions went away?
The fall of the Berlin wall was a surprise. The fall of Assad was faster than anyone expected. One day the government of Nepal was an unrepentant oligarchy, the next it was on fire. Everything can change in an instant, faster than anyone expects. No one can predict revolutionary change. Will you be ready if the opportunity presents itself?
The US cannot be fixed. The economic system is a ponzi scheme that has been patched again and again, but has finally run out of options. Racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism are baked into the system at every level. Trump gutted the system of soft power that held the US economy together, now there is only a slow decline. Even after he's gone, the damage is done. Once we let go of how to fix something that cannot be fixed, we can start to imagine something that cannot be achieved within the current system.
This is a time of opportunity. Do not burrow so deep in terror that you miss your chance to dream.
#USPol
Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)
For those interested in learning more about the Galleanisti, it's worth digging in to understand the context, IMHO. Like I said, I think that insurrectionary anarchism is generally a pretty bad strategy. I have quite a few critiques, that I won't go into now. But I also think it's worth understanding that part of history and how it all came together.
https://attackthesystem.com/2021/06/05/and-they-called-them-galleanisti/
"Look again at this small world. This is home. The only home we’ve ever known.
Every person who has ever lived. Every story ever told. Every love, every war, every sacrifice – it has all happened here on this tiny, drifting world.
And yet, we act as if there is another waiting for us. We carve borders into the land and fight over them. We build towers of wealth while others are left to starve.
We poison the water we drink, scorch the air we breathe and tear apart the very foundation of life, driven by the hunger for more, by the illusion of control.
We hold power over each other but not over the forces that could erase us in an instant. A rock adrift in space could end it all. A wave of fire from deep within the earth could rewrite the world in a single eruption. A burst of radiation from a distant sun could silence everything we’ve built.
In the face of the universe we are fragile beyond measure. Mere passengers on a planet that owes us nothing. And yet, we fight, we kill, we burn our home as if it were replaceable.
We act as though our time here is infinite. Though history has shown us otherwise. But for now this is all we have. Out there among the countless stars, there may be other worlds. Planets where life has taken root. Where others look up and wonder if they too are alone. But they are distant beyond our reach, beyond our time.
For the foreseeable future there is no second earth, no distant rescue. This is where we stand. This is where we make our living. What happens here, what we choose to destroy, what we choose to protect will echo long after we’re gone.
Think again how small we are. how brief our time is, how easily we could vanish. A fraction of a second in the lifespan of the universe, a blink in the endless dark. And yet in this fleeting moment we are here.
We love, we create, we shape the world around us. What we do with our time matters. Because in the end everything we leave behind is what we chose to built and who we chose to be. But for now we stand together on a mote of dust."
#Trance
#Techno
#AmbientTechno
#EnlusionLabel