Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

“What if you stepped on dog poop out on the street, and you went home without realizing it? What if the American father and mother and eldest son and eldest daughter all stepped on poop and went home without realizing it?”

If what you’re trying to get at is that whereas it is very important to unlearn the lies and exaggerations one was told about a country, that people also need to avoid replacing these lies with an overly simplistic and uncritical understanding of that same country, and that the current social media landscape makes it very difficult for many people to have the necessary nuance to avoid this pitfall… Then I would agree with you, but I’d also tell you that mentioning the eugenicists’ favorite way of measuring “intelligence” is a very bad way of phrasing this idea, and that your standards of what counts as “circle-jerking” about a country are probably not nearly as inviting of nuance as you’d think.

We wouldn’t need a translation feature if cxiuj lernis Esperanton, just sayin’

(I mean, we would, but)

HELL yeah

Hasn’t China also sold drones to Indonesia for use in West Papua? I think that might’ve stopped, though, but I’m not sure.

I am waowin’

I am bakin’

I have lost it all

I remarked the previous time this Telegraph article came up that I don’t believe Professor Anna Smajdor (who is a philosopher and not a physician) was sincerely endorsing the idea of whole-body gestational donation (WBGD). The key line in the Telegraph article is this:

Prof Smajdor argues that there is no moral difference in such circumstances between organ donation and surrogacy.

This makes it seem to me like Smajdor is really just trying to comment on the ethics of organ donation by imagining something obviously horrifying that would follow from what she considers to be the same rationale. Indeed, Smajdor’s article as written (which you can download here — I will note that I have only read it in part) concludes with this passage:

What I put forward here can be viewed as a thought experiment on one hand. But if we regard WBGD as being clearly outrageous, this suggests we have some uncomfortable questions to answer about the future of cadaveric organ donation. On the other hand, if WBGD is viewed as a straightforward means of facilitating safer reproduction, and avoiding the moral problems of surrogacy, we should be ready to embrace it as a logical and beneficial extension of activities that we already treat as being morally unproblematic.

…So I dunno, it just bothers me that we’d be taking a headline in the fucking Telegraph at face value.