I Think What Probably Gets Me Deeply Into My Feelings About This “JKR Should Have Just Made Her Students

Skinsuit mindset, or how Buddhism gets pwned too

1. Identify a respected institution. 2. kill it. 3. gut it. 4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

-@iowahawkblog

(The full tweet in question adds #lefties, but I’ve increasingly come to feel that the left wasn’t the monster itself, just the most prominent suit worn by the Skinsuit Monster at the time.)

Today’s case of skinsuiting comes to us courtesy of the MIT Technology Review, which posted this dumb tweet:

Originally I was just going to share it with my friends on ephemeral media and have a small chuckle about how this was omnicide-bait and MIT Technology Review really should have thought out their phrasing better. No man, no problem, as Rybakov put it. (often attributed to Stalin)

Then I read the full article, “What Buddhism can do for AI ethics”, and had a feeling of [screaming internally] before falling into cynicism. It’s not just the twit who tweeted omnicide-bait. The full article repeatedly tees up the case for omnicide and hardly seems to notice.

Buddhism proposes a way of thinking about ethics based on the assumption that all sentient beings want to avoid pain. Thus, the Buddha teaches that an action is good if it leads to freedom from suffering.

The Buddha also taught a way of thinking about how best for everyone to die and stay dead (not reincarnate), because all life on Earth would inevitably involve suffering. A substantial chunk of Buddhist meditation is oriented to becoming a zombie of sorts: walking dead, not feeling suffering because you’re not feeling life. If you gave an archetypal Buddhist a lasting killswitch for Earth, he’d press it. I contend this would be an important subject to cover in an article on AI ethics – if you gave a fuck about Buddhist teachings rather than being a monster wearing Buddhism as a skinsuit, doubly so when you’re halfway to making the case for the killswitch yourself.

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Heard some important information on Twitter today, and thought I’d post it here for anyone who may not have heard it. This is actually a thing, devised by a human rights organisation called Karma Nirvana.

Reblog to save a life?

anyone who says “the bible is clear” about an issue, is 100% of the time wrong. the bible wasnt clear once. the bible couldnt be clear about how to make a table if it came in an ikea box

Could i offer you a samurai in this trying time?

Dorm room bingo

some of you are like “if a homemade cloth mask isn’t 100% EFFECTIVE AT PREVENTING DISEASE it’s worth LESS THAN NOTHING and you might as well go around licking doorknobs and DIE than cover your face AT ALL for ANY REASON”

look okay coughing or sneezing into your elbow isn’t 100% effective at stopping fluid particles from being dispersed into the air or on surfaces but even a measley 5-10% reduction in spewed particles is better than 0%

this is important. And if you can sew, even badly, you can do surprising amounts of alteration yourself

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

So in russian, nouns are either animate or inanimate gramatically, depending on whether they move.

Well, the russian word for corpse, мертвец, is animate, which raises quite a few terrifying questions about russia’s past

A bunch of my friends all moved into a big group house called Valinor. I’m not capable of living together with that many other people, but they were kind enough to let me have a small semidetached unit on the same property, which clearly has to be called Tol Eressea.

Even though I got the name kind of by coincidence, I’m happy with it. The theme of the Silmarillion is the conflict between serviam and non serviam. The Vanyar say serviam, and win eons of unbroken bliss by the sides of the gods - plus never appearing in the books again. The Noldor say non serviam, and get the short end of every stick in every wood on Middle-Earth - but are also objectively awesome and everyone’s favorite characters.

The Teleri of Tol Eressea don’t do either. They agree to follow the divine plan, then get distracted by various interesting rocks and pretty trees along the way and show up late for the boat to Paradise. When the gods schedule an extra boat trip just for them, they end up permanently settling on the boat, anchored just off the coast of Paradise - so they can say they technically accepted the offer to redeem them and take them to Heaven, but don’t actually have to live there. They support the divine plan, but they’re just really really not joiners. This is a perverse sort of religion and also one that I 100% identify with.

Tol Eressea is called the Lonely Isle, but I suspect it is “lonely” only in the way Andrew Marvell described Adam before the creation of Eve:

Such was that happy Garden state When Man there walked without a mate After a place so pure and sweet What other help could yet be meet? But ‘twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there. Two Paradises 'twere in one To be in Paradise alone.

Not all of the Teleri go to Tol Eressea. Elwe stays in Middle-Earth out of love. Cirdan stays out of duty. Others stay to pursue random distractions or their own weird #aesthetic. This is not a people given to spectacular sins of pride the way the Feanorians are. This is a people who accept Law, who love Order, who are willing to contribute and sacrifice as much to its upkeep as anyone else, to defend their comrades and their principles even to the death - but whose concept of Law and Order is basically the gods as a night-watchman state who let them do their own thing. And the gods accept. I know there are some earthly religions who would say this is not an available option - but in Arda, at least, the gods are pretty chill.

The Teleri end up being liminal - less the Sea-Elves than the Shore-Elves or Strand-Elves (see also: “Grey-Elves”). The West represents Paradise and Oblivion, the East represents the sublunary world in all its suffering - so the Teleri live on the eastern fringe of the West, the western fringe of the East, and most of all on the island in the middle.

They are also called the Falmari, or “Singers”. Poe wrote in “Israfel” that the angels sing more sweetly than mortals because their lives in Pardise are so much better than ours down below. Modern sympathies would side with the tortured artist, reverse Poe’s prediction and say that mortals would sing more sweetly - or at least more interestingly - because of the twists and turns of life. Tolkien puts his Falmari somewhere in between. He gives them the master Palantir - allowing them to see everything that goes on in the world of Men - but also gives them Calacirya, the gap in the mountains that allows glimpses of the very center of Paradise. The Singers live in full view both of the glories of Israfel and the horrors of Poe, and they don’t turn away from either. Their music is an attempt at a synthesis - just like the Music of the Ainur before them.

Because of their liminal status, the Teleri end up as conduits. They’re the ones who bring warnings from Valinor to the Numenoreans. They’re the ones who ferry returning exiles back across the Sea. And most important, when the world needed to send a message to the Valar, it was through the work of the Teleri Cirdan (who if you read closely is basically the most competent and impressive figure in the entire history of Middle-Earth), that Earendil was able to invoke the Valar, and the power of Melkor was broken forever.

(thus it is written: “a Teller is someone who calls down celestial energies”. Also, “a Singer is someone who tries to be good”.)

There’s something in all of this that resonates with me. I don’t believe in God, but I like Him. If He exists, I want to be on His side. And I’m surrounded by amazing people, with pseudo-divine plans of their own, and I want to be on their sides too. But I also know I’m not a joiner. I’m not a Vala, involved in the creation of the new world; nor a Vanya, wise and noble enough to utterly subordinate his will to the cause. But I would like to think I can at least be a Teleri - vaguely on the side of Good, working to defend it; not necessarily great at doing it strategically, but pursuing ends closely-enough allied to it that sometimes I’m in the right place at the right time to accomplish something that matters. And even though I am definitely the sort of person to get distracted by an interesting rock when I am supposed to be seeking the Utmost West - to think that overall by a special grace maybe this will serve some purpose for the gods and they will accept the bargain. I’d like to think that I’m in the right sort of liminal position to communicate what needs to be communicated, to those who know less than me - and occasionally to my betters - and that this can have some useful role before the end. So I will accept the name of Tol Eressea and I will build the Lonely Isle.

…except everyone else is already calling my semi-detached unit “the Scottage”, and I have to admit that’s also pretty clever.