Notices by Mads "Magna Cinaeda" Viande (byttyrs@radical.town)

fuck taxation. seize their whole property

'psudo <command>' accepts a password (but any text will do) and produces realistic output as if the command was executed successfully, without executing the command

me when a 'grammarian' complains about singular they: and yet thou usest singular ye? mayhaps thou shouldst get a real job

What happens when a person of color talking about racism says, "Don't tell me to CW this," and a white person does, in fact, tell them to CW it? Well, there's the obvious: A white person is disrespecting a person of color's boundaries in order to talk down to them.

But let's go subtler. What's happening in the mind of the white person who feels themself to be well-intentioned?

A collision of community norms. Many — not all!— people of color online feel that there is a tradeoff to be made between the urgency of a message and its potential triggers. When they and other people operating under those conventions interact, passing along information they may find upsetting because they judge it urgent, the system works as intended.

When someone whose etiquette system is CW-if-in-doubt sees this, it looks different. Perhaps like a violation! There's a clash of norms between different informal communities of use. For a really basic analogy, this is like seeing a photograph of a British car,

a. Individual people of color, gay people, trans people, disabled people may request something more stringent in CWs! People are different. Sometimes our needs collide, and you have to make judgment calls (maybe, for example "I need an alt for this!") This is a normal aspect of human society, and there are no simple solutions.

b. If another mad/disabled person tells me that I need to CW something related to ableism, that's one conversation. If a cishet tells me to CW something related to homophobia, that's another conversation. Either way I might decide to do it, or I might say "Please mute me;" but it's different! Don't speak for people who are already present in the conversation.

c. Sometimes people have a different opinion from you and it's not because they're misinformed. This is ugly and glaring in conversations where white people try to tell people of color about racism CWs: why do you assume they just don't know what CWs are for? They can know, & disagree about a specific case

They just run out of spoons. Either you open all of them without reading, and you're playing roulette with your triggers again, or you scroll past without reading, and communication stops.
b. Over-detailed CWs can be worse than the content itself. if you try to tag EVERYTHING, reading CWs becomes trigger roulette.
3. An immense, labyrinthine system of etiquette that you can only learn through being scolded is an accessibility barrier. Anybody who struggles to pick up on norms gets pushed out or leaves of their own accord.

So what is to be done? CW things people you interact with agree are universally upsetting. And respect the wishes of those who may be harmed by content. Which means,

3. You have to listen to people of color when they tell you "zero-tolerance racism CW" is an aggression. Their oppression? Their rules.

I routinely talk abt homophobia, transphobia, anti-madness, etc. w/oCWing it unless it's particularly harrowing. For some reason (I'm white), no-one bothers me abt it.

here's the thing about telling people to CW things:
1. CWs literally, logically cannot be a one-size-fits-all, universal norm. Humans are not limited to needing warnings for "predictable" subjects, or any small/reasonable set of things, at all. any aspect of a traumatic memory can become retraumatizing; my go-to example is someone who pointed out they're triggered by schoolbuses. should everyone, everywhere CW photos of schoolbuses? I don't think so! it's impractical, and how are the vast majority of people supposed to figure out that's a thing?

But if someone in your circles asks you to CW schoolbuses, you can certainly CW schoolbuses. CW conventions CAN be effective when tailored for the needs of a specific community, but this means CW conventions Need to be different between different groups. why?

2. Attempts to be exhaustive about CWs aren't just logically doomed to fail, they're inaccessible.
a. If the rate of CWs is too high, people's ability to make decisions gets overloaded.

still, what we're looking at there is: "selfishness" is a product of conditions. selfishness is built into whiteness, itself built into empire, itself built into capitalism. these things cannot be disentangled, but they are holistically *unnatural.*

there is a history of *specific* events and human actions that led to these conditions existing, and these conditions have only been in place for (depending on how you count and how fine-grained you are about "these conditions"), like, half a millenium, out of the forty-plus millenia that anatomically-modern humans have walked the earth.

"selfishness" does not rise organically out of "human nature"; it arises out of systems we made, and which we can unmake.

I'm skeptical that "human nature" exists as such, but if it does and we could theoretically discover its properties, we would still have huge methodological problems untangling "human nature" from external conditions.

but selfish, brutal, grasping competition for short-term gain with no regard to common good or the long-term future? that's literally a direct product of capitalism. zero-sum profit-hoarding from underpaying exploited workers is the fundamental M.O. of the bourgeois/capitalist/owning class.

the people whose wealth goes into printing educational materials have a vested interest in making their class-specific motives and behaviors disappear into the generality of "human nature." that's what 'false class consciousness' IS: the working class, duped into accepting the sins and values of their oppressors.

the bourgeois push the narrative that "no-one will work for free" (food, housing, leisure, infrastucture by and for workers/dependents = "for free") because they won't lift a fucking finger for anything that won't make them a profit. fuck that. selfishness isn't "human nature," it's a bourgeois class value