Last year I wrote a grab-bag post titled, Don’t Forget To Brush Your Fur, because I’m terrible at SEO or making content easily discoverable.

In the same vein as that previous example, this is going to be in the style of Lightning Round talks at technology conferences.

Why are we doing this again?

I maintain a running list of things to write about, and cross ideas off whenever I cover a topic.

After a few months of doing this, I realize most of what remains is kinda interesting but not quite interesting enough to warrant a dedicated entry.

It always needs more isogenies.
(Art by Lynx vs Jackalope)

Contents

• Asymmetric Key Wear-Out
  
  • ECDSA Key Wear-Out
  • RSA Key Wear-Out

  
  

• HMAC Wear-Out?
• Asymmetric Commitments
• Against “Fluffies”
  
  • Divide and Conquer
  • Pre-Existing Terminology

  
  

• A Meditation on Furries and Cringe
• Furries and Blue State Privilege

Asymmetric Key Wear-Out

Last year, I wrote about cryptographic wear-out for symmetric encryption. That post has attracted quite a bit of feedback from folks requesting comparisons against other block cipher modes, etc. One topic that I didn’t see requested much, but is equally interesting, is how this reasoning can be applied to asymmetric cryptography (if at all).

Let’s get one thing clear: Cryptography keys don’t “wear out” in the same sense as a physical key might. What we’re talking about is an ever-increasing risk of a collision occurring in random nonces.

ECDSA Key Wear-Out

ECDSA signatures involve a one-time secret, k. The scalar multiplication of k and the base point for the curve is encoded as half of the signature (r), while its modular inverse is multiplied by the sum of the truncated message hash and the product of r and the secret key to produce the other half of the signature (s).

If your selection of k is biased, or k is ever reused for two different messages, you can leak the secret key.

Strictly speaking, for any given ECDSA curve, there is only one k value that corresponds to a given r for all users (n.b it’s not distinct per keypair).

This means that all users of e.g. ECDSA over NIST P-256 have to worry about a shared cryptographic wear-out: After 2^112 signatures, there is a 2^-32 chance of a single collision occurring.

Fortunately, the search space of possible k-values is enormous, and this will not impose a real-world operational risk in the near future. If you’re worried about multi-user attacks, P-384 gives you a wear-out threshold of 2^176 messages, which we’re probably never going to achieve.

RSA Key Wear-Out

In order to calculate the wear-out for an RSA message, you first have to begin with an attack model. Previously, we were looking at algorithms that would become brittle if a nonce was reused.

RSA doesn’t have nonces. You can’t attack RSA this way.

But let’s assume that such an attack did exist. What might the safety limit look like? There are two remaining possible considerations for RSA’s security against cryptographic wear-out: Key size and padding mode.

RSA private keys are two prime numbers (p, q). RSA public keys are the product of the two primes (n) and a public exponent (e) that must be coprime to (p-1)(q-1). (In practice, e is usually set to 3, 65537, or some other small prime.)

The security of RSA is subexponential to key size, based on the difficulty of integer factoring attacks and the requirement for p and q to be prime numbers.

This primeness restriction doesn’t apply to your message. The padding mode dictates your upper limit on message size; e.g., PKCS#1 v1.5 padding will take up at least 3 bytes:

• For encryption, x = 0x00 || 0x02 || r || 0x00 || m, where r is random padding bytes (minimum 8 bytes).
• For signatures, x = 0x00 || 0x01 || 0xFF..FF || 0x00 || m.
• In either case, the padding is always at least 11 bytes long.

So if you have 2048-bit RSA keys, you can encrypt or sign up to 245 bytes (1960 bits) with PKCS#1 v1.5 padding. This corresponds to a safety limit of 2^974 messages.

(Art by Lynx vs Jackalope)

HMAC Wear-Out?

To keep things simple, the security of HMAC can be reduced to the collision risk of the underlying hash function.

If you’re trying to estimate when to rotate symmetric keys used for HMAC, take the birthday bound of the underlying hash function as your starting point.

• For SHA-256, you have a 50% chance of a collision after 2^128 messages. For a 2^-32 chance, you can get 2^112 messages out of a single key.
• For SHA-384, this is 2^176 messages.
• For SHA-512, this is 2^240 messages.

In either case, however, these numbers might as well be infinity.

With apologies to Filippo Valsorda.

Asymmetric Commitments

Did you know that fast MACs such as GHASH and Poly1305 aren’t random-key robust? This property can matter in surprising ways.

Did you know that ECDSA and RSA don’t qualify for this property either? This is related to the topics of malleability and exclusive ownership. You can learn more about this in the CryptoGotchas page.

Essentially, if a signature scheme is malleable or fails to provide exclusive ownership, it’s possible to construct two arbitrary (m, pk) pairs that produce the same signature.

Any nonmalleable signature scheme with exclusive ownership (i.e. Ed25519 with low-order point rejection and canonical signature checks, as provided by the latest version of libsodium) provides sufficient commitment–mostly due to how it uses a collision-resistant cryptographic hash function. (It’s also worth noting: HashEdDSA doesn’t. Isn’t cryptography fun?)

Generally, if you need random-key robustness, you want to explicitly make it part of your design.

Against “Fluffies”

In my blog post about the neverending wheel of Furry Twitter discourse, I mentioned the controversy around SFW spaces for underage furries.

Everything I said in that post is still accurate (go read it if you haven’t), but I want to emphasize something that maybe some people overlooked.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1426638694786682884

Underage furries calling themselves “fluffies” is a bad idea, for two reasons.

Divide and Conquer

The first reason is tactical, and not specific to what they’re calling themselves: If you label yourselves separately from the larger furry community, you make it much easier to be targeted–especially by propaganda. There’s a severely disturbed alt-right fringe to the furry fandom (dubbed alt-furry, the Furry Raiders, and so many other names) that would love nothing more than to sink their claws into younger furs.

It’ll start innocently enough (“Yay, you have your own space!”), but it will quickly accelerate (“Congrats on kicking those degenerates to the curb!”) to horrible places (“All LGBTQIA+ people are degenerates”), gliding on the wings of edgy humor.

This descent into madness is also known as the PewDiePipeline and all parents of furries should be made aware of it, lest it happen to their child:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmRYRRDbuw

It bears emphasizing: This existence of a PewDiePipeline within the “fluffy” space is not predicated on the intentions of the proponents. They can have all the best intentions in the world and it will still happen to their microcosm.

https://twitter.com/ARCADEGUTS/status/1425687280983937027

Preventing this from happening will require an almost inhuman degree of vigilance and dedication to correcting discourse from going sour. None of us are omniscient, so I wouldn’t take that bet.

Pre-Existing Terminology

The second reason the “fluffies” label is a bad idea is more specific to the word “fluffies” in particular: It already refers to a very disturbing meme on 4chan from not-very-many years ago: Fluffy Abuse Threads.

I’m intentionally not including any videos or images of this topic. There just aren’t enough content warnings for how gross this content is.

By calling yourselves “fluffies”, the most deranged 4chan-dwellers and/or Kiwi Farms lurkers on the Internet will begin associate you with the “fluffy abuse” memes, and may even act accordingly. In their twisted minds, they may even rationalize their conduct as if somehow you’re consenting to the abuse, by virtue of what you call yourselves.

Look, I get it: When you’re young, the over-sexualization of the media can be very uncomfortable, and it’s natural to want to avoid it. Additionally, it’s only human to want your own special club with a special name to hang out with your exclusive (n.b. same-age) community.

But please think carefully about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and which adults you decide to trust.

Also: maybe talk to older queers and/or furries about the history of the Furry Fandom, Pride, and kink before you make dangerous moves that make you more vulnerable to the worst humanity has to offer? Even if you don’t agree with us, we don’t want to see you get hurt.

There definitely is room in the furry fandom for people who are not comfortable with sexual content, or simply don’t want to be inundated with it all the damn time. It doesn’t need to be an exclusive thing or concept; instead, it should be normalized.

Ultimately, there’s probably a lot of work to be done to ensure kids and families have a safe and enjoyable furry con experience during daylight hours without repressing the queer and sexual identities of consenting adults at night. The best way to get from here to there is to talk, not to isolate.

Otherwise, we’ll keep seeing occurrences like this:

https://twitter.com/PrincelyKaden/status/1426192114694692866

The onus here is going to be largely on furry convention staff and chatroom moderators to actually listen to people reporting abusive behavior. They haven’t always been good about that, and it’s time for change.

https://twitter.com/MegaplexCon/status/1425966589241970693

A Meditation on Furries and Cringe

Every once in a while, I get a comment or email like this one:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1360835077899436033

The biggest magnet for poorly-reasoned hate comments is, surprisingly, my tear-down of the “sigma male” meme.

You’d think the exposure of TheDonald’s non-CloudFlare IP address would draw more ire than having correct opinions on masculinity, but here we are.

Art by Sophie

Let’s talk about masculinity for a moment, guys.

There is nothing manlier than being your authentic self. Even if that means liking some “girly” things. Even if that means being soft and vulnerable at times. Even if that means actually conforming to some stereotypes perpetuated by toxic masculinity when it coincides with your likes and interests. You do you.

But this isn’t just true of the male gender. Authenticity is the epitome of humanity. There’s nothing that stops women and enbies from being ruthlessly themselves.

You can’t be authentic when you’re participating in Cringe Culture, which blindly tears large swaths of people down to stoke the feelings of superiority in the people who evade its blast.

People are weird. I’m weird. I don’t expect everyone to like me, nor do I want them to. (Parasocial relationships suck!)

It’s okay to be a little obsessed about something other people look down on just because you happen to like it. Just make sure you’re not eschewing your adult responsibilities. (We all have bills to pay and promises to keep to the people that matter to us.)

If people don’t like you because you suddenly revealed your fondness for classic video games, rock-tumbling, or linear algebra? Fuck ’em. May the bridges you burn light the way to people who will appreciate you for who you truly are.

I’ve been told my blog is “weapons grade cringe” before, because I dared talk about encryption while having what, to most adults, comes across as little more than a cartoon brand or company mascot.

(Art by Lynx vs Jackalope)

Furries and Blue State Privilege

I sympathize with most queer people and/or furries for not wanting to subject themselves to the bigotry that runs rampant in Red States, but the ones who are jerks to other members of their community for living in those states, I can do without.

https://twitter.com/SarahcatFursuit/status/1413566747148435456

Being an asshole to someone because they live in, or are moving to, a state whose politics you dislike is equal parts stupid, selfish, and self-defeating:

• It’s stupid because there’s no reason for expressing prejudice or painting with broad brushes. For example: “Florida Furs are bad people” is an attack on the author of this blog.
• It’s selfish because not everyone who wants to leave these states has the resources or opportunity to do so, so all you’re doing is shining a spotlight on your own privilege. Way to show your entire ass to the community.
• It’s self-defeating because of the way the U.S. political system is architected:
  If you wished for a genie to move every LGBTQIA+ person to the west coast of the United States, within a few years you’d essentially reduce support for LGBTQIA+ rights to approximately 6 out of 100 votes in the US Senate and 68 out of 435 in the House of Representatives.

  When you factor in who owns the land in the big tech cities (San Francisco, Seattle, etc.) and how much political and economic power they wield, it becomes very clear that your shaming of others for not boarding the bandwagon serves the interests of the worst of humanity: Landlords and venture capitalists.

  Not a good move for people who claim to be progressive, and want to achieve progressive political outcomes nationwide.

The fact that some states have horrendous laws on the books, even worse bastards enforcing these laws, and somehow even more terrible politicians gatekeeping any meaningful progress from changing the system isn’t ever going to be improved from the outside.

I say all this, and I acknowledge Florida does suck in a lot of obvious ways: Our governor (Ron DeSantis) has a disposition that would actually be improved if he wore clown make-up to press appearances. We also have far too many furries that are anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, or both.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1300911840000708608

But when furries go out of their way to shame someone, simply for living here? You’re not helping. Seriously stop and think about your priorities.

And maybe–just maybe–be surgically precise when you decide insults are warranted.

Now that I’ve flushed the blog post topic buffer, I’m fresh out of ideas. Let me know some topics that interest you in my Telegram group so I don’t get bored and eventually write Buzzfeed-quality crap like this:

In hindsight, ideas like this are 90% of the reason Cringe Culture refuses to die.

https://soatok.blog/2021/08/16/lightning-round/

#asymmetricCryptography #ECDSA #Florida #furries #FurryFandom #HMAC #Politics #RSA #Society #wearOut

Dhole Moments

2020-07-07 14:05:09

There are a lot of random topics I’ve wanted to write about since I started Dhole Moments, and for one reason or another, haven’t actually written about. I know from past experience with other projects that if you don’t occasionally do some housekeeping, your backlog eventually collapses under its own gravity and you can never escape from it.

So, to prevent that, I’d like to periodically take some time to clean up some of those loose ends that collect over time.

Random-Access AEAD

AEAD stands for Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data. Typically, AEAD constructions involve a stream cipher (which may also be a block cipher in counter mode) and a message authentication code (which may also be an almost-universal hash function).

AEAD modes are designed for one-shot APIs: Encrypt (then authenticate) all at once; (verify then) decrypt all at once. AES-GCM, ChaPoly, etc.

AEADs are less great at providing random access to the underlying plaintext. For example: If you’re encrypting a 240 GB file with AES-GCM, but you only need a 512 KB chunk at some arbitrary point in the file, you’re forced to choose between either:

1. Authenticating the rest of the AES-GCM ciphertext, then decrypting only the relevant chunk. (Performance sucks.)
2. Sacrificing integrity and decrypting the desired chunk with AES-CTR.

Being forced to choose between speed and security will almost certainly result in a loss of security. The incentives of software developers (especially with fly-by-night startup engineers) all-but-guarantee this outcome.

Consequently, there have been several implementations of streaming-friendly AEAD. The most famous of which is Phil Rogaway’s STREAM construction.

Source: Rogaway’s paper

The downside to STREAM is that it requires an additional T bytes (e.g. 16 for an 128-bit authentication tag) for each chunk of the plaintext.

A similar solution, as implemented in the AWS Encryption SDK, is to carefully separate plaintexts into equal-sized frames and have special rules governing IV/nonce selection. This lets you facilitate random access while still making the security of the whole system easy to reason about.

Can we do better than STREAM and message framing?

The most straightforward idea is to use a Merkle tree on the ciphertext with a stream cipher for extracting a distinct key for each leaf node. This can be applied to existing AEAD ciphertexts, out of band, to create a sort of deep authentication tag that can be used to authenticate any random subset of the message (provided you have the correct nonce/key).

However, I haven’t found the time to develop this idea into something that can be toyed with by myself and other researchers.

More Introductory Articles

Let’s face it:

Art by Riley

I’ve previously suggested an alternative strategy for programmers to learn cryptography. I’d like to do more posts covering introductory material for the topics I’m familiar with, so anyone who wants to actually employ my proposed strategy can carry themselves across the finish line.

Dissecting Dog-Whistles

Random fact: My fursona is a dhole–also known as a whistling dog.

Soatok is a dhole, not a fox. Art by Khia.

Coincidentally, I’m deeply fascinated by language, and planned to start a series analyzing dog-whistle language (especially the kind commonly used against queer subcultures).

However, the very nature of dog-whistle language provides a veneer of plausible deniability for the whistler’s intent, which makes it very difficult to address them in a meaningful way that doesn’t undermine your own credibility.

So, for the time being, this is on the back-burner.

Reader Questions

I’ve received quite a few questions via email and social media since I started this blog in April. The most obvious thing to do with these questions would be to periodically collate a bunch of them into a Questions and Answer style post.

However! I have an open source projected called FAQ Off that is way more efficient at the Q&A format than a long-form blog post. If you’d like to see it in action, start here.

Art by Kyume

General Punditry

I make a lot of dumb jokes, typically involving puns and other wordplay. Most of these live in private Telegram conversations with other furries, but a few have leaked out onto Twitter over the years.

Is automated vulnerability scanning a nessusity?

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) November 23, 2017

Nurse: "I suspect this patient attempted to shove a foreign object into their urethra for pleasure"

Doctor: "I believe your theory is sound"

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) June 25, 2018

A lot of them involve queer lingo.

People say it's lonely at the top.

No wonder there's so many bottoms in this fandom 😛

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) December 30, 2019

BitTorrent users are thirsty bottoms. Always complaining about wanting more seed.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) August 4, 2019

My RAID controller has big disk synergy

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) August 1, 2018

Some of them involve furry in-jokes.

Q) Why are foxes so prevalent in the furry fandom?

A) We're a sub-culture not a dom-culture.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) May 24, 2018

Intrusion detection systems are old hat. What we need is a protrusion detection system.

Introducing OwO

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) February 1, 2018

Some are just silly.

Using mined bitcoins to buy a pumpkin spice latte makes you an ASIC bitch, right?

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) February 6, 2018

So in gay male furry culture if you give into a booty call from your ex-boyfriend… does that mean you were craving the XD?

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) August 25, 2018

If SQL is pronounced "sequel" then PHP must be pronounced "fap".

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) July 23, 2019

What do you call a submissive dragon with a mathematics background who's already lubed up for you?

A sliding scale.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) December 26, 2018

Did you hear about the clairvoyant babyfur that broke RSA?

Turns out, all you needed was a padding oracle.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) October 1, 2017

I should look for my next partner in a nuclear chemistry lab.

I hear they're good at dating.

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) December 8, 2016

In my humble opinion, there haven’t been nearly enough puns on this blog (unless the embedded tweets above count).

Normally, this is where I’d proclaim, “I shall rectify this mistake” and proceed to make an ass out of myself, but I don’t like forced and obvious puns.

A lot of furries get this wrong: “Pawesome” is not clever, unless you’re talking to someone with a marsupial fursona. Then maybe.

The best puns come in two forms: They’re either so clever that you never saw it coming, or they’re just clever enough that the punchline lands at the same time you realized a bad pun was even possible.

Only Soatok brand puns are 100% whole groan

— Mastodon: soatok@furry.engineer, Cohost: soatok (@SoatokDhole) January 26, 2018

Miscellaneous / Meta

The past few blog posts touched a little on political subjects (especially How and Why America Was Hit So Hard By COVID-19, but this short-term trend actually started with my Pride Month post).

At some point in the future, I may write a post dedicated to politics, but for the time being, it’s not really a subject I care enough about in and of itself to emphasize all the time.

Let me be clear: Being gay in America is inherently political. Developing technology is inherently political (although you don’t always realize it). Being a gay technologist, saying something politically significant is an inevitability.

But I’m not interested in the traditional roles and narratives that infect politics and political discourse. Labels are stupid and I’m not interested in being a Useful Idiot for anyone’s propaganda.

---

The most difficult thing about writing blog posts for me is coming up with a meaningful title. I’ve lost many hours due to the writer’s block that ensues.

The second most difficult thing for me is writing closing statements that aren’t totally redundant.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/l44OV2jlN7A?start=665&feature=oembed
George Carlin – “Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies” – Skip to 11:05 if WordPress breaks something
Some bloggers like to sign off like they’re writing an email. “Happy hacking!” and whatnot. To me, this feels forced and inauthentic, like a bad pun.

So instead, here’s a totally sick piece of art I got from @MrJimmyDaFloof.
Furry artists are, like the rest of the fandom, amazing.
https://soatok.blog/2020/07/07/dont-forget-to-brush-your-fur/

You’ve probably heard the rumors by now. It’s cropped up in Michigan, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and even Australia.

The rumor is: Parents around the country are expressing “concerns” over schools allegedly permitting students that identify as cats use litter boxes in public schools.

You can hear this idea being parroted by Nebraska State Senator Bruce Bostelman, without an ounce of irony or self-awareness:

https://twitter.com/jonnykip21/status/1508485363177861124

Of course, it doesn’t matter how often or how thoroughly these allegations are debunked (and, make no mistake, they are debunked), that doesn’t stop people from spreading this false and damnable rumor on Facebook Groups like “Protect Nebraska Children”.

As a member of the furry community who also strongly opposes misinformation on the Internet, I feel it’s necessary and appropriate for me to expose the dark truths about this litter box story once and for all.

Who and What Are Furries?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPSQVRJuDTs

Furries are members of the Furry Fandom, an art-centric participatory online community (with real-world conventions and events) consisting of people who enjoy anthropomorphic characters.

Characters like this!
(Art: LvJ)

For one reason or another, furries are also a predominantly LGBTQIA+ community. If you took a large random sample of people, you’d expect at least 90% to be heterosexual and cisgender. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. But if you took a random sample of furries, that figure is now only 20%.

For this reason, furry hate was often used as a dog-whistle for homophobia in forums where overt homophobia was not permitted.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

If you’d like to learn more about the furry fandom, I highly recommend the appropriately named 2020 documentary The Fandom by Ash Coyote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY

Are Furries in K-12 Public Schools?

Overwhelmingly, no. The average age of the furry fandom varies from survey to survey, but 26 years old seems like a good estimate for the median age for survey participants (as of 2020).

Source: FurScience, 2020 survey results

Interestingly, the median age of furries was only 20 in the year 2011, which suggests that the furry fandom is consistently getting older.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t any furries under the age of 18. We just don’t have any data on them today.

Second, due to ethical restrictions, the IARP is unable to study minors (as parental consent would be required, something we cannot reasonably expect to obtain if a person has not “come out” to their family as a furry).

Furscience

This is the only scientific data we have, and it’s not perfect, but you can actually extrapolate a reasonable heuristic for the magnitude of underage furs based on the change in adult median age over time.

Since the adults of the furry fandom are consistently getting older (median 20 in 2011, median 26 in 2020, which is a 6 year increase over 9 years), the proportion of people under 18 was likely at most 33% of the total furry population in a given year during this interval.

This upper limit assumes most underage furries continue to be furries in adulthood, a negligible mortality rate, and people are discovering the fandom younger than 18.

If a lot of furries discover the fandom after they turn 18, then 33% is probably unreasonably high.

If this proportion still holds true, then the median age for furries is still squarely in the realm of young adulthood, not childhood.

Do Furries Identify as Animals?

No, furries do not identify as animals in the way that these very dumb rumors would imply.

People that identify as a non-human animal are called therians (or more broadly, otherkin). Most furries are not therians, but some are.

Do Furries That Identify as Cats Use Litter Boxes?

No, this is a damned lie with no basis in reality. Even Snopes debunked it.

If you’re interested in the origins of this dumb rumor, Dogpatch Press has a deep dive into the history of it going all the way back to the 1990’s.

The Dark Truth About These Rumors

If it’s not true, why are Facebook Groups and GOP politicians spreading lies about furries and public school students all of the sudden?

Unfortunately, the answer is transphobia.

https://twitter.com/KandissTaylor/status/1506603753008472064

There is an emerging generational culture war about transgender people.

To many older Americans, the idea that a person could be anything other than male or female seems absurd, and the notion that anyone could change their gender is uncomfortable (but science is consistently on trans people’s sides here).

Most younger people don’t carry the same prejudices as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

This litter box rumor is both a dog whistle for generalized queerphobia (as the majority of furry hate always has been) and a weak satire of non-binary gender identities. “If they can decide they’re neither male or female, what’s stopping them from identifying as a cat?” is the premise of this bigoted reasoning.

Before gay marriage was legal in America, there were a lot of online arguments put forth by evangelical Christians and Republicans that, “If you make gay marriage legal, soon you’ll have people wanting to marry their pets and we’ll have to legalize bestiality.”

Which, yes, is a very dumb slippery slope fallacy, but the current furry panic certainly echoes their same delusional beliefs about alternative lifestyles.

In short, the entire premise of the “furry litter-box in public schools” rumor is to bully nonbinary and/or transgender students through a dog-whistle, so they can evade being cancelled for overt bigotry.

These people are showing their whole ass when they spread these lies.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1506931766837321731

Also, it’s interesting that the people spreading these lies are Republicans, who claim to want to “protect children”, but are also in favor of child marriage.

What Can We Do About These Lies?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify anyone in your life who believes these rumors (especially if they’re sharing lies from Facebook Groups that peddle misinformation), and then link them to this blog post.

I don’t expect it to persuade everyone, but it can save you the effort of having to argue further with them. Just copy+paste the URL and move on with your day, knowing you did your part to tell them, “You’re wrong, shut the fuck up.”

Where Did This Hoax Originate?

Allegedly, this entire hoax about “furries being permitted to use litter boxes in public schools” was started as a prank by a user named Tracing Woodgrains, a contributor to the anti-trans podcast Blocked and Reported, hosted by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog (alternative mirror).

(Art: LvJ)

So—what does it take to persuade Libs of TikTok to tilt at windmills, to spread a moral panic over a falsehood? How can hoaxers break past her fact-checking, with nary a red flag to be seen?

A nonexistent man passed on a false tip on the basis of paper-thin evidence, then squirmed away at any attempts to nail down the concrete before finishing things off with a broken link to a Facebook group that did not exist.

— How I Convinced Libs of TikTok to Publish a False Story

So there you have it. This entire thing is not only unbelievable, but fabricated for the sake of trolls’ amusement.

https://soatok.blog/2022/04/06/the-dark-truth-about-the-furry-protocol/

#demographics #falsehoods #furries #furry #FurryFandom #lies #litterBoxRumor #misinformation #Politics #rumors #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-04-24 02:43:25

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

It all started with an article in the Mississippi Free Press by Nick Judin.

Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, with library officials stating that he has demanded that the system initiate a purge of LGBTQ+ books before his office releases the money.

Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding

The mayor goes on to tell the reporter, in response to being asked if he even has the legal authority to withhold the money from the library system, “I don’t know that I do or do not. But right now we’re holding the money.”

The executive director of the Madison County Library System made it clear that withholding these funds (roughly 5% of their annual budget) would negatively impact the library, the services they provide their community, and whether or not their staff members would lose their jobs.

In short, Mayor Gene McGee was illegally withholding funds that had already been approved from the budget, and thereby holding library employees’ livelihoods hostage, unless they complied with his demands to purge the public library of “homosexual materials” that were incompatible with his private religious beliefs.

The director then explained to the mayor that the library system, as a public entity, was not a religious institution. “I explained that we are a public library and we serve the entire community. I told him our collection reflects the diversity of our community,” Johnson said.

Apparently, the mayor was unmoved. “He told me that the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above,” she finished.

Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding

Art: LvJ

Enter, the Furry Fandom

I was first made aware of this news story because of its inclusion in a viral Twitter thread about Maus being banned in Tennessee.

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1486470195036270600

Everything in that Twitter thread is terrible. Banning books about the Holocaust is suspiciously aligned with the Holocaust denial playbook used by neo-Nazis and the alt-right. (It’s almost like alt-right recruitment tactics are effectively neutered by prior education, and they feel threatened by the public being informed.)

But the addendum to the thread about the Ridgeland mayor stood out to me as an egregious violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The blatant homophobia couched in terms of religious faith only made it more personally vexing, but my eye was more drawn to the amount of money being withheld from the library.

$110,000? Sure, that’s not nothing to sneeze at, but the furry fandom has raised more in a weekend before. If we put our minds to it, surely we could match the deficit for this library and effectively tell Mayor Gene McGee to fuck off with his outdated prejudiced worldview.

So, with that in mind, I looked at the library’s website for a means to donate. I ended up on this page, which included a form to print out and mail in with a check. This was a bit of a nonstarter because, like most young tech workers, I don’t actually own a checkbook. So I decided to contact the library asking for an electronic means to contribute.

I’d like to donate money (i.e. as part of the Friends of the Ridgeland Library program), but I don’t have a checkbook. Is there any way to donate electronically?

Their response (available with full headers, for establishing authenticity):

Thank you so much for reaching out. We are overwhelmed by the public support.

Funding donations for the Ridgeland Public Library may be made payable to Friends of the Ridgeland Public Library with “Ridgeland Funding” on the memo line. Send to Friends of the Ridgeland Public Library / 397 Highway 51 / Ridgeland, MS 39157. Funds may be donated online at https://www.fundlibraries.org/ridgelandbookbanning or via Paypal to paypal@mcls.ms Please indicate the gift is for “Ridgeland Funding”.

Thank you for your interest in our story and for standing with us against censorship. Your support is appreciated beyond measure.

Tonja Johnson, Executive Director, Madison County Library System

Overwhelmed? You haven’t seen nothing yet.

Art: LvJ

Equipped with an electronic means to contribute to funding the Ridgeland Library to offset the amount of money Mayor McGee was illegally withholding, I turned to a bastion of Chaotic Good energy: Furry Twitter.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486708632041443330

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486708634688106496

The non-profit collecting the funds (Friends of the Ridgeland Library) had set an initial fund-raising goal at $2,500. I decided to start strong with a $500 donation, and shared a link to my tweet with a few friends with larger audiences than me.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486710991203098632

I’m not very good at social media marketing, so I have a modest Twitter following. However, some of my friends are somewhat influential in the furry fandom, and gladly shared it with their friends and followers.

Within an hour of my tweet, the fundraiser already looked like this:

However, things were quickly about to accelerate beyond even my expectations.

The Fundraiser Reaches Escape Velocity on Day One

After less that one day from my inaugural tweet, the fundraiser had reached Over 9000 dollars.

Additionally, when I was looking through the backers’ comments, I noticed someone remarkably not a furry had already contributed.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1487000926237954048

Ray Mabus (Governor of Mississippi, 1988-1992) wasn’t the only Mississippi politician to notice the fundraising effort.

Over that weekend, infamous homophobic mayor Gene McGee also noticed us (remember him?), and decided to respond in the only manner appropriate for American politicians.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1487882614824488963

More Than a Furry or LGBTQ+ Issue

Although the fundraising effort was largely popularized by the furry community (which is significantly LGBTQ+), and although the stated motive for the Mayor’s actions were deeply prejudiced against LGBTQ+ people, it would be incorrect to say that the fundraiser was limited to being merely a furry issue, or even an LGBTQ+ issue.

What Mayor McGee aimed to accomplish was an attack on everyone.

An elected official trying to selectively ban queer materials from a public library solely because of his private religious beliefs is both abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press and an establishment of religion in one fell swoop. This is a double-whammy of a violation of the First Amendment.

A lot of furries donated, especially in the beginning. And a lot of LGBTQ+ folks donated, of course.

But so too did a lot of straight people. And so, too, did many self-identified conservative Americans.

Because regardless of demographic labels, or the party affiliation on your voter identification, a public official extorting a public library to purge books you dislike or else suffer the consequences of having approved funding illegally withheld is such deeply contemptible behavior that most of us can agree that it must not be tolerated.

It’s important to recognize that the reason this issue resonated with so many people outside of our communities is because it’s abundantly clear to everyone what Gene McGee is doing is wrong. Violating the First Amendment is among the most un-American things an elected official can do. Furries just got the ball rolling.

An International Perspective

Some of the people who donated to the Ridgeland Library fundraiser live abroad. It may be worth exploring the question, “If the core problem was that McGee’s attempt to ban queer literature is un-American, why would people outside America contribute too?”

The right to free speech isn’t a uniquely American ideal. Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

It turns out, freedom is a damn good idea, and good ideas are infectious.

The Fundraiser Get Noticed By the Media

Art: LvJ

Shortly after I noticed that Gene McGee had blocked me on Twitter, Dexter Thomas from VICE sent me a Twitter DM to set up an interview. We talked for over an hour about the mayor, the library, the furry fandom (and our past fundraising activities), and how this story had unfolded.

Quick aside:
There has been a tense relationship over the years between furries and the press. A lot of people in our community are hesitant to talk to journalists because of poor treatments in the early 2000’s that treated furries as scandalous (rather than a vibrant, participatory online community).

This hesitance was likely exacerbated by the “Furries and the Media” panels at Anthrocon by the Anthrocon chairman, which basically told everyone, “Don’t talk to the press” in response to this history of yellow journalism. It’s a sensible defensive move, given the atmosphere at the time.

That being said: I don’t follow orders from anyone.

VICE in particular has historically been respectful in their coverage of our community. (Every linked word goes to a different news story.)

VICE published Dexter’s story the following Wednesday: Furries Are Leading the War Against a Book-Banning Mississippi Mayor.

And then this happened:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1488938921425838082

Shortly after talking with Dexter Thomas from VICE, I was interviewed by Keisha Rowe of Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger, who wrote an article titled Furries raise money for libraries after mayor threatens to withhold funds due to LGBTQ+ books.

Keisha’s article subsequently earned a score of over 50,000 points on the r/nottheonion subreddit and made the front page of Reddit.

Some variation of this meme was independently invoked by dozens.

Somewhere along the way, the story of furries leading the charge to raise money for a library being extorted by the local mayor was covered by LGBTQ Nation, AV Club, Boing Boing, PinkNews, QNews, and The Saturday Paper (postscript). The latter two are Australian; this story had gone International.

Not included in the above list are the news outlets that decided not to mention furries in their coverage of the fundraiser: Mississippi’s WJTV, The Hill, Los Angeles Blade, etc.

Was the Campaign Successful?

Art: LvJ

Update (2022-02-12):

We successfully raised the $110,000 that Mayor Gene McGee was withholding from the Ridgeland Library with 3 days to spare. The final donation that put it over the goal was a doozy too:

Original text follows (struckthrough):

As I write this, the fundraiser is 92% funded, with over $100,000 raised from over 2,300 backers, and there are still 5 days left (out of the original 18 day runtime) to cover the rest.

Even if we don’t manage to raise the last several thousand dollars in time, we’ve already contributed enough to make a difference. This will ensure the Ridgeland Library in Madison County, Mississippi can offset the funding deficit caused by Mayor McGee.

At the very minimum, we’re certainly already far more successful than the libraries professed to hoping for when the fundraiser when live:

Update on Sunday 2/6 – We did not think it would be possible, but because of all the support coming in from folks around the country we are raising the goal to $110,000 for the library. It is so important that the library can fight this threat without worrying about operating funds. Thanks for making a difference.

Campaign Description

If you’d like to donate to the Friends of the Ridgeland Library to help them reach 100% of their goal in anticipation of February 14, the link to the fundraiser is:

https://www.fundlibraries.org/ridgelandbookbanning

Clarifications

A few misconceptions have cropped up throughout this fundraising campaign, so I wanted to take a moment to briefly address each of them.

What the Fundraiser Buys

The mayor of Ridgeland almost certainly does not have the authority to withhold money without approval from the board of aldermen. What he’s doing is extremely illegal, and everyone expects him to eventually have to surrender the money.

However, it may take some time for a decision to be reached.

What the fundraiser does is allow the library to keep operating, and providing vital services to the community, while the mayor’s extralegal behavior is being debated with the board of aldermen, or in the courts.

Until the appropriated funds are disbursed, without community support, the library would be forced to reduce their services and lay off staff. If this happened, everyone would lose.

Libraries are the backbones of communities: Beyond the obvious benefits they provide, libraries are one of the first stops many people make to escape poverty because they provide critical Internet access and job skills trainings for the people in the area they service.

Ergo, the long tail of consequences for McGee’s bigotry is difficult to estimate, but he’d almost certainly use DARVO tactics and blame any negative effects on the librarians for not complying with his unconstitutional demands.

If Mayor Gene McGee was planning on a war of attrition against the librarians of his city, up to his inevitable loss in court, donating to the fundraiser effectively denies him this tactic. It also saves a lot of innocent people from suffering, including (but not limited to) the library staff.

When the funds are disbursed, the extra infusion of cash from thousands of people will only allow the library to better serve the community. There’s no downside to supporting a public library.

Art: LvJ

On Game Theory and Interdimensional Chess

Several commentators on Reddit and Twitter have objected to this fundraising initiative because it might lead to perverse incentives wherein local politicians use outrage-fueled fundraising to justify slashing budgets, so they could spin it as a new cost-saving measure in line with conservative talking points.

I can understand why people think that (see: life insurance companies recommending people start GoFundMe campaigns when they need life-saving treatments), but it’s a relatively low risk. See above.

What would be a cause for concern is if McGee somehow loopholes his way into being permitted to egregiously violate the First Amendment. On this matter, should it go that far, we simply have to trust the competence and commitment of the courts to make the right call.

The Origins and Authenticity of the Fundraiser

Early on, some Twitter users raised concerns that the fundraiser was illegitimate, or a fraudulent cash grab. I anticipated this sort of reaction, which is why I published the full headers of the email I received from Tonja Johnson.

This is a computer forensic argument for authenticity. In order to falsify a DMARC header, I would need to have privileged access to their mail server (which would be a different, and possibly more severe, felony).

Beyond that, several journalists independently verified that the fundraiser was legitimate by contacting the Madison County Library System and inquiring about it. Mississippi Residents have a clear and simple way to verify this information without having to trust their mail servers: They can simply ask about the fundraiser in person.

The fundraiser itself was set up by EveryLibrary, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization registered in the State of Illinois. I had no hand in the fundraiser’s creation; nor did any other furry (to my knowledge).

Aftermath

Note: This section was added on 2022-03-28.

Earlier this month, the Madison County Journal published a braindead editorial in the opinion section, authored by “The Editorial Board” (which consists of only two people: James E. Prince III and Michael Simmons), which claims that Mayor Gene McGee wasn’t trying to push his personal religious beliefs onto the Madison County Library System through withholding funding to the Ridgeland Library.

I was perfectly content ignoring this opinion piece (bad takes are a dime a dozen in the Opinion section of any newspaper, after all) until they parroted the same idiotic narrative in their coverage of a new library contract being agreed upon at Ridgeland City Hall.

Art: LvJ

I could take the time to analyze their narrative in order to expose its lies and deceptions, but the fatal flaw in their Public Relations strategy is this:

If Mayor Gene McGee wasn’t guilty of the homophobic agenda he’s accused of, why did he decided to block me on Twitter after I started raising awareness of the library fundraiser?

After all, an Appeals Court previously ruled that it’s Unconstitutional for politicians to block critics on social media accounts used for official purposes. And since McGee’s campaign website links directly to his Twitter account in the footer, establishing that it’s used for official purposes isn’t exactly difficult.

Not only does the Madison County Journal‘s false narrative about Mayor Gene McGee fall apart in the face of this evidence, but it’s pretty clear that the Mayor violated my Constitutional rights as an American citizen.

Actions speak louder than words.

The only reason I haven’t pursued legal action against the Mayor is that doing so would effectively dox myself through the courts. McGee really isn’t worth sacrificing the pseudonymity I enjoy as a blogger or as a queer furry on the Internet.

The lies and omissions of tabloid publications notwithstanding, the plan to save the library was an overwhelming success.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1507351230603010048

In Closing

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone that donated to the fundraiser, shared links on social media, or covered this story. Without each and every one of you, we wouldn’t have come so far.

This will probably not be the last time a library needs financial help from the community (but hopefully the others won’t be under duress of a theocratic bully in the municipal government). If you’d like to go above and beyond the effort discussed here today, visit your local library and find out how you can help.

Disclaimer

Everything on this webpage is the sole opinion of the author, and should not be confused for statements of fact. It should also not be confused for a representative opinion of anyone else (employers, communities, demographic sectors of the human population, etc.) unless other parties externally concur with what is written here.

Header is a collage of art from @FlashWhite_, @MrJimmyDaFloof, and @JohisArt.

https://soatok.blog/2022/02/09/that-one-time-furries-saved-a-library/

#furry #FurryFandom #homophobia #LGBTQIA_ #Mississippi #Politics #publicLibraries #Ridgeland

Dhole Moments

2020-06-09 13:00:00

I rarely think about the labels that describe me.

That isn’t because of privilege (I spent many years painfully aware of them), but because my friends are incredibly supportive and we’ve been able to cultivate an environment where I’m not constantly reminded of why I don’t “belong”. (It took many grueling years to achieve that, and I’m still reminded of my weirdness if I leave home for any appreciable length of time. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a homebody.)

The majority of people don’t think about their labels either, but for privileged reasons, until a minority calls it to their attention. Then you get almost-comical indignant hot takes of the “don’t call me cis, that’s a slur!” variety.

At least, they would be comical if they weren’t so stupid and dangerous.

Identity

Identity is a funny thing. I actually find rather insulting the proposition that you can take the vast diversity of the lived experiences of billions of people and compress it into one bit of information.

“Are you a YES or a NO?” “Are you X or Y?” “Are you good or evil?”

Labels are a lossy compression algorithm. They’re meant to simplify and convey ideas so they’re more broadly accessible and easily understood. In practice, people are overly reliant on them, and they become a crutch.

Sure, you can think of me as an androsexual, demisexual, cisgender male with a dhole fursona, but do most of us even know what that means?

Most of us just simplify our identities to, “I’m gay”. Art by LindseyVi.

Pride

Pride is a protest against unjust systems. Pride started with a riot in response to police violence and discrimination. You probably didn’t learn about Pride in great detail in history class (if at all).

Pride parades in recent years have been co-opted by what some call “rainbow capitalism”.

I wish I knew the original source for this meme.

And this obviously feels really gross, but at the same time, it’s often somehow forgivable that companies use Pride Month (June) to show active support for their LGBTQIA+ employees. (If nothing else, it assures us that we won’t suddenly become unemployed if someone accuses us of falling in love with a person with the “wrong” phenotype, etc.)

There are currently a lot of hard conversations taking place about a different target of police violence and discrimination.

I hope that the protests happening today will result in the change our world needs, so that everyone can live equally without fear or shame for who they are.

This will almost certainly require dismantling racist systems and rebuilding them without the tainted legacy they originated from.

That being said, I’ve never really been fond of the emotion, pride. It feels inherently reckless to me. At the same time, I acknowledge it’s a great foil for the emotions that bigots want us to feel (fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, etc.). If that works for you, I’m happy. Keep on keeping on.

Rather than pride, I’ve always sought contentment and joy in my life.

Authenticity means a lot to me, and being fearlessly and shamelessly me is something I shouldn’t have to work for or feel proud about; nor should anyone else.

Contentment and joy… there used to be another word folks used to encapsulate that genre of emotion: Gay.

It always comes full-circle, doesn’t it?

A Dream To Seek

Art by Khia.

Society has numerous institutions and systems that are designed and implemented to ensure discrimination and injustice against people who are different than their architects.

As long as bigoted institutions and systems exist, society will always need movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter to resist atrocity and inspire loud authenticity, in equal measure.

So it might sound odd to say without the above context, but as a strong proponent of human rights and equality, I dream of the day when these movements no longer need to exist; for the day when their job is done and we have moved past the specter of hate that continues to haunt each generation that survives its direct violent influence. I say this knowing that this day will probably never come (at least in my lifetime).

Until bigotry is abolished, and bigotry’s apologists recognize that they’re little more than asymptomatic carriers of that vile psychic pathogen, I will continue to strive to enable everyone I can reach to enjoy the same peace that my friends and I have built at home.

No matter your sex. No matter your gender. No matter the gender(s) you’re attracted to (if any). No matter your race or ethnicity.

The labels people use to describe us shouldn’t condemn anyone to a life of misery and injustice.

The day we cultivate a society that is absent of, and resistant to, the kind of hate and discrimination we’ve seen for centuries will be a day worthy of pride.

And the only way to get there is to acknowledge a simple truth: Black Lives have to Matter in order for the superset (“All Lives”) to Matter.

What Do Your Labels Mean?

This will probably be my only Pride Month post on this blog, so I suppose it makes sense to explain them.

I’m a guy, who’s attracted to guys (thus, androsexual)… but I don’t exactly have a “type”. I have to genuinely like a person to find them attractive. That’s the demisexual part.

Most people understand being gay, conceptually. Asexuality might also click readily without a lot of exposition.

Being demi is weird: You spend a lot of time wondering if you’re asexual or not, until you actually develop feelings for someone else for the first time.

Cisgender just means “not transgender”; that is to say, I identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth.

If that’s helpful to know, cool. But you don’t have to think of me in those terms. I’m just Soatok.

https://soatok.blog/2020/06/09/pridemonth/

Last week, Floridians were startled by an emergency alert sent to all of our cell phones. Typically when this sort of alert happens, it’s an Amber Alert, which means a child was abducted. In Florida, we sometimes also receive Silver Alerts, which indicates that an Alzheimer’s or dementia patient has gone missing. (Florida has a lot of old and retired people.)

To my surprise, it was neither of those things. Instead, it was a Blue Alert–a type of alert I had never seen before. Apparently nobody else had seen it either, because a local news site published a story explaining what Blue Alerts even are for their confused readers.

What’s a Blue Alert?

A Blue Alert is an involuntary message, communicated over the emergency alert infrastructure, to perform the equivalent of a Twitter call-out thread on a suspected cop-killer or cop-abductor.

Blue Alerts are opt-out, not opt-in, and you cannot turn them off without also disabling other types of emergency alerts. Even on newer phones which offer greater granularity with the types of emergency alerts to receive, there is no specific flag to disable Blue Alerts and leave all the other types turned on.

Blue Alerts Are Security Theater

Blue Alerts do not provide any meaningful benefit towards public safety, and actually make us less safe.

If someone just killed a cop, do you really expect random untrained citizens to get involved? We already know how that worked out for the armed and trained professionals.

https://twitter.com/cel_decicco/status/1408127188671647748

If law enforcement wants an uncritical platform to broadcast their lies and omissions with no questions (or only softball questions that presuppose the frame that they’re telling the truth), they already have every major media outlet in their locale. They don’t need the Blue Alerts to get the word out, or to advertise a cash reward for information leading to an arrest. They already have channels for that.

Why are Blue Alerts a thing? The best reason I’ve been able to discern is: Because the surviving families of deceased law enforcement officers want to feel like their loss is taken seriously. The need to “do something”–even when that something is meaningless, or even harmful, but still looks like a solution–is the essence of Security Theater.

But Blue Alerts aren’t as harmless as a mere expression of sheer self-entitlement over the rest of us unimportant proles.

Blue Alerts actually serve to make our society less safe by increasing Alarm Fatigue, which negatively impacts public safety by making people less focused when an alert comes in.

Alternatively, some people will actively disable Blue Alerts to prevent alarm fatigue. But, as stated above, there’s no way to disable them in isolation without also disabling other emergency alerts, which puts them at risk of being uninformed of an actual severe or extreme emergency.

Making the public less safe goes against the very predicate for why police forces exist in most states.

Just say NO to Security Theater!
(Art by Khia.)

Blue Alerts Are Copaganda (in Practice)

This one needs a bit of explaining. I’m going to focus on Florida, because it’s familiar to me.

Blue Alerts were created in Florida in 2011 via an executive order by then-governor Rick Scott. According to Spectrum News 9, only three alerts have been issued since the system was created.

(Anecdote: I’ve had my own mobile phone since 2008 and never once received one until last week.)

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement identifies four criteria for a Blue Alert to be issued:

1. A law enforcement officer must have been: seriously injured; killed by a subject(s); or become missing while in the line of duty under circumstances causing concern for the law enforcement officer’s safety.
2. The investigating agency must determine that the offender(s) poses a serious risk to the public or to other law enforcement officers, and the alert may help avert further harm or assist in the apprehension of the suspect.
3. A detailed description of the offender’s vehicle or other means of escape (vehicle tag or partial tag) must be available for broadcast to the public.
4. The local law enforcement agency of jurisdiction must recommend issuing the Blue Alert.

That fourth requirement gives law enforcement a lot of discretion in deciding whether or not to issue a Blue Alert.

That power to arbitrarily decide whether or not to send one might explain why, despite having 2 cops killed in 2020 and 4 cops killed in 2018 due to shooting incidents (both in Florida alone, and I do not have access to data earlier than 2018), a Blue Alert wasn’t emitted for any of those incidents.

Gee, I wonder if something else could have happened last week to prompt law enforcement to exercise a rarely-used tool in their toolbelt?

What Happened Before June 2021’s Blue Alert

I’m not particularly clued into the specific events of the shooting that issued the Blue Alert, but there was a particularly embarrassing incident for law enforcement in Florida the day before that was starting to gain a lot of attention.

Florida Highway Patrol tased a teenage boy in his girlfriend’s yard. And it was starting to get national media coverage.

Content Warning: Do not watch this video if violence–especially police violence–might cause you severe discomfort or trigger an involuntary psychological response to past trauma:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4wSkqQlA9o

I do not have, nor will I claim to have, any specific evidence that proves that the cops used the shooting in Volusia County, Florida as an excuse to trigger the surprising Blue Alert to confuse and distract the populace.

However, all cops are bastards, so I certainly suspect them of doing such a thing to cover for their buddies.

And since their mere suspicion is generally sufficient justification for cops to violate the Fourth Amendment with wild abandon, it’s only fair that my suspicion be sufficient to launch an investigation into their motives.

Just kidding!

We know the system is stilted in cops’ favor, which is why there’s a Blue Alert when a cop gets killed, but not a Stasi Alert when cops decide to murder an American citizen.

(Art by Khia.)

In Conclusion

Blue Alerts are not actionable for their recipients, and make the public less safe. Additionally, they provide the police yet another propaganda tool that I suspect they already used once to distract the public from an embarrassing news story.

Here’s what needs to happen:

1. Mobile Operating System developers need to create a dedicated toggle to disable Blue Alerts without disabling other emergency alerts.
2. These toggles need to be easier to find and configure.

These aren’t political solutions, merely technological ones, but as a security engineer, that’s all I can offer.

https://soatok.blog/2021/07/02/blue-alerts-security-theater-and-copaganda/

#ACAB #BlueAlerts #Florida #police #policeState #Politics #publicSafety #SecurityTheater #Society #Technology

Dhole Moments

2021-07-02 06:32:20

Last week, Floridians were startled by an emergency alert sent to all of our cell phones. Typically when this sort of alert happens, it’s an Amber Alert, which means a child was abducted. In Florida, we sometimes also receive Silver Alerts, which indicates that an Alzheimer’s or dementia patient has gone missing. (Florida has a lot of old and retired people.)

To my surprise, it was neither of those things. Instead, it was a Blue Alert–a type of alert I had never seen before. Apparently nobody else had seen it either, because a local news site published a story explaining what Blue Alerts even are for their confused readers.

What’s a Blue Alert?

A Blue Alert is an involuntary message, communicated over the emergency alert infrastructure, to perform the equivalent of a Twitter call-out thread on a suspected cop-killer or cop-abductor.

Blue Alerts are opt-out, not opt-in, and you cannot turn them off without also disabling other types of emergency alerts. Even on newer phones which offer greater granularity with the types of emergency alerts to receive, there is no specific flag to disable Blue Alerts and leave all the other types turned on.

Blue Alerts Are Security Theater

Blue Alerts do not provide any meaningful benefit towards public safety, and actually make us less safe.

If someone just killed a cop, do you really expect random untrained citizens to get involved? We already know how that worked out for the armed and trained professionals.

https://twitter.com/cel_decicco/status/1408127188671647748

If law enforcement wants an uncritical platform to broadcast their lies and omissions with no questions (or only softball questions that presuppose the frame that they’re telling the truth), they already have every major media outlet in their locale. They don’t need the Blue Alerts to get the word out, or to advertise a cash reward for information leading to an arrest. They already have channels for that.

Why are Blue Alerts a thing? The best reason I’ve been able to discern is: Because the surviving families of deceased law enforcement officers want to feel like their loss is taken seriously. The need to “do something”–even when that something is meaningless, or even harmful, but still looks like a solution–is the essence of Security Theater.

But Blue Alerts aren’t as harmless as a mere expression of sheer self-entitlement over the rest of us unimportant proles.

Blue Alerts actually serve to make our society less safe by increasing Alarm Fatigue, which negatively impacts public safety by making people less focused when an alert comes in.

Alternatively, some people will actively disable Blue Alerts to prevent alarm fatigue. But, as stated above, there’s no way to disable them in isolation without also disabling other emergency alerts, which puts them at risk of being uninformed of an actual severe or extreme emergency.

Making the public less safe goes against the very predicate for why police forces exist in most states.

Just say NO to Security Theater!
(Art by Khia.)

Blue Alerts Are Copaganda (in Practice)

This one needs a bit of explaining. I’m going to focus on Florida, because it’s familiar to me.

Blue Alerts were created in Florida in 2011 via an executive order by then-governor Rick Scott. According to Spectrum News 9, only three alerts have been issued since the system was created.

(Anecdote: I’ve had my own mobile phone since 2008 and never once received one until last week.)

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement identifies four criteria for a Blue Alert to be issued:

1. A law enforcement officer must have been: seriously injured; killed by a subject(s); or become missing while in the line of duty under circumstances causing concern for the law enforcement officer’s safety.
2. The investigating agency must determine that the offender(s) poses a serious risk to the public or to other law enforcement officers, and the alert may help avert further harm or assist in the apprehension of the suspect.
3. A detailed description of the offender’s vehicle or other means of escape (vehicle tag or partial tag) must be available for broadcast to the public.
4. The local law enforcement agency of jurisdiction must recommend issuing the Blue Alert.

That fourth requirement gives law enforcement a lot of discretion in deciding whether or not to issue a Blue Alert.

That power to arbitrarily decide whether or not to send one might explain why, despite having 2 cops killed in 2020 and 4 cops killed in 2018 due to shooting incidents (both in Florida alone, and I do not have access to data earlier than 2018), a Blue Alert wasn’t emitted for any of those incidents.

Gee, I wonder if something else could have happened last week to prompt law enforcement to exercise a rarely-used tool in their toolbelt?

What Happened Before June 2021’s Blue Alert

I’m not particularly clued into the specific events of the shooting that issued the Blue Alert, but there was a particularly embarrassing incident for law enforcement in Florida the day before that was starting to gain a lot of attention.

Florida Highway Patrol tased a teenage boy in his girlfriend’s yard. And it was starting to get national media coverage.

Content Warning: Do not watch this video if violence–especially police violence–might cause you severe discomfort or trigger an involuntary psychological response to past trauma:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4wSkqQlA9o

I do not have, nor will I claim to have, any specific evidence that proves that the cops used the shooting in Volusia County, Florida as an excuse to trigger the surprising Blue Alert to confuse and distract the populace.

However, all cops are bastards, so I certainly suspect them of doing such a thing to cover for their buddies.

And since their mere suspicion is generally sufficient justification for cops to violate the Fourth Amendment with wild abandon, it’s only fair that my suspicion be sufficient to launch an investigation into their motives.

Just kidding!

We know the system is stilted in cops’ favor, which is why there’s a Blue Alert when a cop gets killed, but not a Stasi Alert when cops decide to murder an American citizen.

(Art by Khia.)

In Conclusion

Blue Alerts are not actionable for their recipients, and make the public less safe. Additionally, they provide the police yet another propaganda tool that I suspect they already used once to distract the public from an embarrassing news story.

Here’s what needs to happen:

1. Mobile Operating System developers need to create a dedicated toggle to disable Blue Alerts without disabling other emergency alerts.
2. These toggles need to be easier to find and configure.

These aren’t political solutions, merely technological ones, but as a security engineer, that’s all I can offer.

https://soatok.blog/2021/07/02/blue-alerts-security-theater-and-copaganda/

#ACAB #BlueAlerts #Florida #police #policeState #Politics #publicSafety #SecurityTheater #Society #Technology

Normally when you see an article that talks about cryptocurrency come across your timeline, you can safely sort it squarely into two camps: For and Against. If you’re like me, you might even make a game out of trying to classify it into one bucket or the other from the first paragraph–sort of like how people treat biological sex–and then reading to see if you were right or not. Most of the time, you don’t even have to read past the headline to know where the author stands.

Unfortunately, the topic of cryptocurrency is complicated in ways only nerds could envision. And I’m not even talking about the cryptography involved when I say that.

(Art by Khia.)

Cryptocurrency is one of those cans I keep kicking down the road, lest all of its worms escape. I’m neither an enthusiast who wants to pump dogecoin to the moon, nor a detractor who thinks that the idea of digital cash is inherently stupid.

https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1380576100888281094

The “crypto means cryptography” trope exists because, after Bitcoin’s first price hike, a shitload of speculative investors flooded cryptography forums and drowned out the usual participants’ discussions. I’ve previously said that some gatekeeping is necessary for the maintenance group identity, and that the excess of this minimum amount is what creates toxicity. Unfortunately, this trope has far exceeded the LD50 for healthy discourse.

Some of my friends make their living working on cryptocurrency projects–as researchers, mathematicians, programmers, security engineers, and so on. A lot of the interesting cryptography breakthroughs we’ll see in the next 10-15 years will be, at least in part, the result of cryptographers working in the cryptocurrency space. It’s difficult to talk about zero-knowledge proofs without acknowledging some of the kick-ass research the Electric Coin Company has done in order to launch their privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, and that’s only one example.

Here’s cryptographer Jean-Phillipe Aumasson, whose employer is launching a regulated cryptocurrency marketplace:

https://twitter.com/veorq/status/1384045994413678598

If you’re not familiar with JP’s work, he wrote several cryptography books (including Serious Cryptography), contributed to several hash functions (SipHash, BLAKE2, and BLAKE3), and initiated the Password Hashing Competition that resulted in Argon2.

However, there’s also a lot of bullshit in the cryptocurrency space.

• Years of securities fraud enabled by “Initial Coin Offerings” (ICOs) on the Ethereum blockchain. Most famously: Bitcoiin (yes, with two I’s) whose spokesman was bad movie star, Steven Seagal.
• The plague of hacked Twitter accounts pretending to be Elon Musk, perpetuating a “give me some $ and I’ll give you more back” scam that’s sadly effective.
• The whole cryptoart / NFT debacle.
• Litanies of startups trying to “use blockchain to solve X problem” without ever asking if the problem warrants a blockchain in the first place.
• Every microgram of drama related to John McAfee.

And those are just the items I can list off, off the top of my head. The awfulness surrounding cryptocurrency is like a fractal: The deeper you look at it, the more shit you see.

Cryptocurrency Subculture: A Tale of Too Shitty

The world’s most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin, was created in 2008 by an anonymous cryptographer who liked to be known as Satoshi Nakamoto and distributed on metzdowd.com, a mailing list created by a group of cryptoanarchists that called themselves “cypherpunks”.

At the risk of being overly reductive, cryptoanarchists are people who believe strongly in a right to privacy and therefore the right to use cryptography to protect communications from others–be it governments, corporations, or jealous ex-lovers. The cypherpunks were a group of cryptoanarchists that also wrote code. It’s a wordplay on “cyberpunk”.

It’s difficult to speculate about the intentions or politics of Satoshi Nakamoto, considering they said very little of substance about their private beliefs, and no longer answer emails from random strangers. However, given their presence on metzdowd, it’s reasonable to propose they were at least sympathetic to the cypherpunks’ cause.

Most outspoken cryptocurrency enthusiasts today are not like Satoshi Nakamoto. They don’t understand or frankly give a shit about complex, nuanced points about privacy and the government machinations underpinning public safety–let alone how that intersects with the racist history of the institutions charged with keeping the public safe. They’re largely anarcho-capitalists who want to make as much money as they can and, in turn, pay as little as possible in taxes.

How do you make money in cryptocurrency?
By obtaining some amount of a coin, then convincing other people to buy it to drive up the demand, and therefore the price, and then sell at a later date. Then you can sell your coins at a higher price than you paid (either directly, or through energy costs from “mining”) and pocket your profits.

Don’t let the name fool you: anarcho-capitalists (a.k.a. ancaps) aren’t anarchists (and furthermore, cryptocurrency-manic ancaps aren’t cryptoanarchists). Here’s a helpful video to disambiguate the terms involved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOTlxsn8tWc

If I said that large swaths of the cryptocurrency community was generally shitty, I would not be the first to make this observation. The earliest Bitcoin events were caricatures of the kind of toxic sexist excess that dominates chauvinistic power fantasies. (“When lambo?”)

It’s not just the bad politics or the stark contrast between cryptocurrency in practice and cryptocurrency as envisioned by the earliest architects on the metzdowd cryptography mailing list.

Last year I wrote about a dumb attack against the second hash function used by the cryptocurrency, IOTA. After I wrote this story, my Twitter mentions and DMs were flooded with astroturfing attempts by IOTA enthusiasts. Nearly a year later, most of those have been deleted–presumably because of an account suspension.

https://twitter.com/HapaRekk/status/1283485380004597760

Before IOTA, Monero enthusiasts used to engage in bad faith with anyone that dared criticize their favorite cryptocurrency project on Reddit or Hacker News.

To be clear: I don’t think that cryptocurrency projects or their developers are ever necessarily responsible for the behavior of their users. Sometimes you find toxic assholes like Sergey Ivancheglo (the IOTA developer that threatened security researchers) at the helm, and then immediately jettison it until they leave (to great fanfare of the non-toxic part of their community).

I don’t want to overstate my case here. A lot of blockchainiacs are just downright awful people. The absolute worst. But I’ve found over the years that, the less a person talks about cryptocurrency as a financial endeavor (e.g. speculative trading), the less likely they are to be shitty. It’s not a law of the universe, but it’s a useful measuring stick.

But with all that in mind, an obvious question emerges.

If there’s so much awful shit surrounding cryptocurrency, why would furries (a subculture that constantly receives endless helpings of flak from society at large) ever venture near cryptocurrency?

The Politics Inherent to Furry Identity

Art by Swizz.

A lot of Americans like to think of themselves as “Free Speech” proponents. Some of them get all sweaty over whether or not they should be allowed to broadcast, and profit from, bigoted or hateful content laden with slurs.

And yet, the most censored people in American society are, without a doubt, sex workers. And you rarely hear any so-called “Free Speech” proponents give an iota of shit about the plight of sex workers. They can’t even freely engage in commerce here.

Sex work is explicitly banned by most financial service providers, such as PayPal. It’s exceedingly difficult for sex workers to make ends meet without constantly having to worry about their accounts being frozen and funds inaccessible.

There are a lot of reasons why the plight of sex workers is so bad in America. At the top of the list is the intersection of conservative politics and evangelical Christianity, which overall condemns healthy and consensual expressions of human sexuality. (Ever noticed how the only people who think they have a “sex addiction” are religious or right-wing? Not a coincidence.)

Do you know who else is a target of evangelicals and conservatives?

Furries, as you might know, are widely considered an LGBTQIA+ subculture (although not all of us are LGBTQIA+; only about 80%). But we’re more than just an LGBTQIA+ subculture. We’re also a vibrant community filled with skilled artists. Some of this art is pornographic in nature. It turns out, when queer people aren’t forced into the closet, they tend to embrace shameless authenticity and celebrate their romantic and sexual attractions with pride.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/992819169593716737

A few years ago, the Death Eaters in Congress passed two bills (FOSTA and SESTA) that were advertised as an attempt to crack down on “sex trafficking”.

In practice, these laws killed Pounced.org–the only furry “dating” site at the time that wasn’t a sketchy cash grab (FurryMate, FurFling, etc.). Pounced.org died because the cost to avoid being criminally prosecuted under these laws was so exorbitant that they couldn’t sustain the website anymore, and it probably wasn’t the only small dating site to be killed by poor legislation. Only the big players could really have front-loaded these costs.

Which leads to the meat of this issue…

Why Furries Might Be Interested in Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency can be very attractive to members of the furry fandom because of the bullshit baked into the societies and cultures we exist in.

Cryptocurrency promises to be permissionless and decentralized; to bank the unbanked. If you make your living filling up someone else’s spank bank, the idea of creepy rich white men not being able to exercise targeted censorship against you or your family is, frankly, irresistible.

“Can’t use PayPal for your trade? Just setup a cryptocurrency wallet and give a different address to each of your clients, and instructions on how to access some vaguely reputable cryptocurrency exchange.”

Granted, most furries aren’t sex workers or porn artists, but some of our friends are, and we want to see them protected. But there’s another threat that cryptocurrency promises to alleviate: Chargeback fraud.

The prevalence of chargeback fraud is why I always tip artists. It helps to offset some of the harm caused by shitty behavior.
(Art by Khia)

This is the usual story (although exceptions do exist) I heard from my artist friends:

Someone under 18 decides they want to commission an artist they cannot personally afford, so they steal their parent’s credit card and use it to pay for a commission. Later–often after the work has been completed and delivered to the client–their parent notices the unauthorized charge on their credit card, and issues a chargeback.

Not only does this steal from the artist, but it incurs a $35 fee and increases the risk of their account being permanently suspended by their payment provider–thereby preventing them from accessing the funds paid to them by legitimate customers.

“Thanks for the free art! Now you’re at least $35 poorer and maybe lost your only lifeline out of perpetual poverty.”

— Assholes

And thus, the Siren Song repeats once again!

Cryptocurrency doesn’t prevent chargeback fraud, but it does shift the risk from independent artists that have no capital or political power and onto billion dollar financial institutions like Coinbase.

Once the cryptocurrency has been transferred from the Coinbase wallet to the furry artist, it cannot be unspent. Bad faith behavior might still happen, but the artist doesn’t risk their livelihood because of it.

And that’s why, when furry auction site The Dealer’s Den announced a plan to rebuild with “Blockchain Technology”, I didn’t even bat an eye. It seems like an obvious solution to a pervasive unsolved problem to me.

Sure, it’d be great if we could solve this problem with sensible civil policy. But when is that going to finally happen? After all, we’re talking about the same governments that bungled COVID-19 last year, and the AIDS crisis last century, and so on…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJtvKSUPICA

However, and this bears emphasizing, the CryptoArt / NFT trend is not a valid reason to get involved in cryptocurency! As I said on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370045499122843654

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370046285798064128

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370047071949033472

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370047509314297862

So, super long preamble aside, what I thought I’d do today is talk a bit about cryptocurrency and how to engage with the topic responsibly, especially if you’re trying to mitigate the damage of the systems we inherited.

Cryptocurrency For Furries

I’m going to be very light on technical jargon, in the interests of accessibility, but at the risk of being imprecise.

No two cryptocurrencies are created equal. If you’re hoping to use one to mitigate systemic harms to our community, I implore you to learn the technical details in depth.

Decentralized Consensus

Cryptocurrencies can be classified by something called their consensus mechanism, which is how they can maintain a consistent ledger without being centralized. It doesn’t really matter, for the purpose of this article, how any of them work. I’m happy to dive into that in a future blog post, should anyone want it.

What you need to know is that Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithms are designed to maximize energy waste across the entire cryptocurrency network. That’s how it maintains its security against different kinds of esoteric-sounding attacks.

When you “mine” a Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency, what you’re doing is solving a computationally hard puzzle (e.g. find a number that, when combined with the previous block’s hash and your address and hashed, produces a specific number of leading 0 bits determined by an algorithm to ensure this happens at a set average frequency of time), which results in the entire network agreeing that your address gets the “block reward” (a fixed amount of whatever currency) plus transaction fees.

Cryptocurrency discussions frequently invite conversations about the environmental impact of mining. Proof-of-Work is the cause for this excess energy use which certainly contributes to global climate change.

So, if you’re going to get involved with cryptocurrency without contributing to global climate disaster, you’re going to want to avoid Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. There are several other options to choose from.

Proof-of-Stake is popular among my cryptocurrency nerd friends, although it receives a fair bit of criticism from experts (especially the “nothing at stake” problem). Ask your cryptographer. It’s probably not me.

On-Chain Privacy

The vaunted “blockchain” is a public, transparent record of all transactions.

When you use a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, it’s sort of like tweeting your financial activities for the world to see.

“But nobody knows who owns this address,” Bitcoin maximalists might argue. To which I point out: Nobody is supposed to know your sockpuppet Twitter accounts either, but when you use them to harass someone right after they block your main account, we know it’s you.

The people whom this applies to know who they are, and should stop.
(Art by Khia)

Some cryptocurrencies, like Zcash, try to provide something like TLS for your transactions. When you use shielded Zcash addresses, the transaction amounts and recipients are encrypted, and this ciphertext is accompanied by a zero-knowledge proof to ensure the total amount in the shielded and unshielded pools remains consistent.

I highly implore you to choose a cryptocurrency that has on-chain privacy, especially if your target audience includes queer people and/or sex workers.

Mainstream Appeal

Finding a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency that doesn’t equate to Global Warming Bucks is a tall order, but if you want people to actually use a cryptocurrency, it needs to be accessible.

By accessible, I mean available on all the mainstream cryptocurrency exchange platforms (Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, etc.).

This might sound like pointless gatekeeping, but remember: They have the money and lawyers to negotiate with the economic powerhouses of the world, while sex workers and furry artists do not.

Cryptographic Security

Any regular reader of Dhole Moments probably saw this section coming a mile away, but an important consideration for a cryptocurrency to build upon is whether or not it’s actually secure.

This is where things get tricky. Weird or poor choices in cryptographic algorithm don’t seem to matter much.

Bitcoin uses ECDSA over Koblitz curves. IOTA shipped two broken hash functions, threatened researchers, and then tried to claim the first broken hash function was backdoored for “copy protection”. The CryptoNote currencies (n.b. Monero) tried to build on EdDSA but introduced a double spend attack.

I’m certainly not qualified to audit an entire cryptocurrency and say “yes/no” on its security. But any cryptocurrency you consider should at least pass a smoke test from your cryptographer.

Which Cryptocurrency Should I Choose?

If you’re looking for a cryptocurrency that’s secure, accessible, privacy-preserving, and doesn’t waste a fuck ton of energy all the time, the short answer is that there is none. You’re going to have to make a trade-off.

Shocking, I know.
(Art by Khia)

I’m sure there are cryptocurrency projects that use privacy-preserving technologies without a Proof-of-Work algorithm, and their design and implementation might even be secure! But, to date, I’m not aware of any such projects that also have mainstream accessibility on large exchange platforms.

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention price volatility in my list above. There’s two reasons for that:

1. I’m not a financial expert. For all I know, price volatility might be something you want out of your cryptocurrency, especially if you’re LARPing a day trader.
2. It’s hard enough to make this choice without adding more complications to the formula.

If Zcash ever adopted a consensus algorithm that wasn’t Proof-of-Work, it’d be a shoe-in for me to recommend. It checks all the other boxes neatly and is one of the most interesting cryptography projects on the Internet, after all.

In the meantime, maybe some other project will fill this niche and become widely accessible for everyone. There’s a lot of exciting and/or scary things happening with cryptocurrency research.

If you’re stuck with a hard decision, honestly, just do the best you can and be very transparent about the trade-offs you’re making and why you’re making them. Then ask a friend or expert to check your reasoning before you commit to it. “Do nothing” also needs to be publicly considered, no matter how absurd it might seem.

Disclaimers and Other Remarks

I do not work with cryptocurrency in my dayjob. I’d like to say that, consequently, I don’t have a conflict of interest, but all humans have subconscious biases, and a lot of my favorite people in cryptography do work in or with cryptocurrency. I want my friends to be able to continue to do awesome work without feeling ashamed.

https://twitter.com/cryptolexicon/status/1331712883403722752

Thus, I don’t care if you invest in Bitcoin or Dogecoin or whatever. Shoot for the moon while you awoo at the moon. Just be careful; for every winner, there’s at least one loser.

Fact: Dholes are also known as “Whistling Dogs”
(Art by Khia)

I’m a fan of transparency logs–which are often compared to blockchains, but without the currency aspect. If you’re not familiar, read up on Trillian and Chronicle. Notably, Trillian is the backbone of Certificate Transparency, which helps keep the CA infrastructure honest and consequently makes HTTPS safer for everyone.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/19/a-furrys-guide-to-cryptocurrency/

#Cryptocurrency #furries #furry #furryArtists #FurryFandom #Politics #Society

Dhole Moments

2021-04-02 11:30:22

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

I dislike politics in general.

That doesn’t mean I don’t write about it when it’s relevant, but I’m always less happy with any of my writing that touches on these subjects. I usually feel obligated to condemn these pieces to Draft status in perpetuity.

It’d be great if we lived in a world where I could opt out of political discourse entirely, but that only exists when you have the systemic advantage in our imperfect society. And since me being LGBTQIA+ is unavoidably political, and we’re a minority, opting out of politics means submitting to whatever dark fate toxic people decide I deserve.

A fate–by the by–which looks like this:

https://twitter.com/AnnaForFlorida/status/1313162239386488832

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1268683707638075392

And that’s just what they think they can get away with in the near future. That’s not to mention what the Trump administration has already done to hurt the LGBTQIA+ community.

Now, you’d think that the furry fandom–a community that is at least 80% LGBTQIA+— would be loudly and consistently opposed to bigotry in all forms.

(Drumroll, please?)

The creator of the Rexouium species in VRChat is strongly anti-gay, and in the species’ official Discord you can discuss lots of things, but not homosexuality (this isn’t about NSFW or not, that’s a separate rule).

I tried bringing this up privately, but most folks said “…so?”

— Silver Eagle (@SilverEagleDev) October 11, 2020

Archived here

Isn’t that just delightful? Oh, and don’t worry, the guy in question later changed the rule from “homosexual content” to “immoral sexual behavior”.

smh (Art by Khia.)

And then (if that weren’t vexing enough) some random furry decided–in response to Silver complaining about that dude’s conduct–to spite-buy a model from the homophobic bottom-feeder, thereby rewarding the dude because “cancel culture” or something.

Furries supporting anti-LGBTQIA+ bigotry out of spite is oddly reminiscent of bigots spite-supporting Chick-Fil-A despite its history of donations to anti-LGBTQ organizations.

As I’m writing this, we’re also a few weeks away from another election in the United States, and on day two of Senate hearings to nominate yet another conservative to the highest court in the land.

So, to my chagrin, let’s talk about politics–a necessary evil because there’s so much unnecessary evil when we don’t talk about it.

My Political Positions

Rather than leave divining my political values as an exercise to the reader, let’s just get some of this out of the way up front. If you don’t particularly care, feel free to skip to the next header.

I’m in favor of responsible gun ownership and the right to self-defense, science-directed education efforts, decriminalization and legalization (but regulation!) of most controlled substances, restorative justice for past criminal offenders, universal health care, reducing police funding to funnel it into social workers to care for our communities in ways that armed cops can never provide, legal and social recognition of polyamory as a valid relationship style, racial and gender equality, encryption and online privacy protections, and equal rights and necessary legal protections for LGBTQIA+ people.

I’ll cover what I’m opposed to later, but if you’re looking to pigeonhole me into some convenient label, the answer you’re looking for is whatever the sum of all that is.

I personally don’t care for labels. That isn’t to say I don’t take sides in a conflict, but that I don’t anchor my personal identity and sense of purpose in life to an ideological tribe. And most of the labels people use are a poor fit for my opinions at any given snapshot of my life.

Note: This summary is current for October 2020 and I’m at liberty to change my mind about this topic at my sole discretion and without explanation. If some jerk-off tries to refer back to this post years down the road, make sure you also point to this paragraph while calling them a dishonest dipshit.

In a Nutshell: Fuck Tradition!

I really don’t like tradition.

Tradition is often defined as, “a long-established custom or belief that has been passed on from one generation to another.”

But what tradition in practice really means is, “We’ve always done things this way, so why do things differently?”

Relying on tradition to solve life’s problems and codify one’s beliefs means abandoning the possibility of creative thought. It means relying on the default choice to make decisions, rather than trying to improve upon the world we inherited from past generations, and solve problems more effectively.

Why use AES when we already have a perfectly serviceable block cipher–DES–to build our software atop? Nevermind the tiny security margin! My parents used DES in their software and their parents used Vigenere ciphers. So you see, we’ve already compromised on a modern solution. Pushing for AES is just leftist extremism and postmodernism.

What appeals for tradition sound like to cryptography nerds.

The cult of tradition is also the cornerstone of fascism, and extolled by right-wing hate groups like the “Proud Boys“.

Love for tradition is what makes a lot of very religious people vulnerable to the Siren song of right-wing extremism (which includes, but is not limited to, fascism).

Tradition is toxic, and the only way we can make it non-toxic is to severely reduce the dose we all intake.

Let me be clear: It’s fine to have traditions. Humans are habitual creatures, and at their core, traditions are just habits and ideas you inherited.

A lot of your traditions are probably even fun and wholesome! And I applaud you for practicing them if it makes you happy.

The problem comes from people who rely on tradition to inform their political beliefs. They base their decisions on adhering to the mistakes of the past instead of learning from history.

“I’m not homophobic, I just believe in the traditional definition of marriage,” says the person whose knowledge of the history of marriage is extremely limited by a recency bias, right before they vote to deprive gay people of the same civil rights they enjoy.

If you’re relying on tradition because a newer, better idea hasn’t come along yet, that’s also fine. Provided, of course, you’re open to new ideas and actively exploring your curiosity.

Systems and Models

There are two incompatible mental models for how society should be organized: Flat and hierarchical.

A flat structure is typically more aligned with politically far-left ideals. Even if they’re not outright in favor of egalitarianism, they’d prefer equal opportunity and for justice to be blind to things like color and sex.

A hierarchical structure is typically more aligned with politically conservative ideals. “There’s always a bigger fish.”

This incompatibility in the core worldview of liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning people shines through in most of the points they argue about.

And if you pause for a moment and reflect on this, it’s abundantly clear why the left and the right never seem to agree on anything. To a liberal, social and economic inequality is a problem to be solved. To a conservative, this is the way things should be.

“CLOSED. WONTFIX. Works as intended.”

Here’s the rub: In any particular area, some of us will score higher on an arbitrary metric than others.

I might be better at writing robust and reliable PHP code than you, but you’re almost certainly far better than me at anything musical in nature. Odds are, neither of us can hold a candle to Michael Phelps in a swimming competition.

This isn’t a bug, this is a feature.

Diversity and specialization are one of humanity’s superpowers.

However, depending on how you’re collecting your data, this also naturally leads to the creation of hierarchies in our society. It doesn’t matter what you’re measuring, the hierarchical structure usually emerges. To wit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlRsmijwHMk

This phenomenon is a deception from bad data modelling and poor systemic thinking.

Ask yourself this: Does scoring higher on some arbitrary metric make you a superior person to anyone else?

When you look in a vacuum, hierarchies seem natural. When you look at the whole system with lots of independent measurements, we tend to average out to mediocrity.

And when you consider the reason that conservatives love hierarchies is that the measurements that the powerful have agreed are important are also the same ones that puts them and people like them on the top of the pyramid, it’s difficult to justify the hierarchical worldview.

If you ignore all other factors–ceteris paribus–and only look at this single variable, me and people that look and talk like me are superior to everyone else. There has to be an alpha, so it naturally falls upon us to lead society and benefit from our leadership.

The essence of hierarchical worldviews

The other reason conservatives love hierarchies is because they’re reinforced by tradition.

But just as driving a lifted pick-up truck won’t make your dick bigger, being wealthy and powerful doesn’t make you more enlightened or better at critical thinking.

Mass Manipulation

A lot of political disagreements result from propaganda, rather than the actual state of affairs.

For example, let’s look at the conflict about women’s right to abort a pregnancy. This is a contentious issue (and the primary motivation for the Republican Party’s court-stuffing initiatives), but here’s the truth of it:

Regardless of what you believe on this issue, we actually want the same thing. We want there to be no abortions. How we plan to achieve this outcome is what differs.

The conservatives believe in making abortions illegal (for reasons that vary from person to person and aren’t exclusively religious).

The liberals believe in preventing pregnancies from happening in the first place, but also keeping the procedures legal and readily available for medical emergencies that threaten the life of the mother.

Some people love to twist these positions around and give each camp cute names that serve their political purposes, but that’s the core position of each side.

Being pro-choice doesn’t mean you want there to be more abortions.

There are many pro-choice women that would personally never elect to have one unless their life was in immediate peril, and would find the experience psychologically traumatizing.

Abortions suck. Criminalizing them just makes them suck worse, and puts more women’s lives in danger.

If we could prevent unplanned pregnancies from happening in the first place–without attempting to suppress healthy human sexuality–we could get the number of abortions to near-zero. With better investment in the sciences and especially medical research, there may even be hope to one day reach the goal.

But if you pay attention to the discourse on this topic, this nuance is papered over. Conservatives call liberals godless baby-killers. Liberals call conservatives women-hating puritans.

Nobody wins.

There are, of course, some people whose involvement in the political discourse is to maximize cruelty. A good example of this is the Republicans who pass legislation forcing women to listen to their fetus’s heartbeat before aborting it. There’s no medical reason for such a requirement. It only exists to increase the psychological trauma the woman experiences; to punish them for being forced to choose. These ghouls aren’t what I’m talking about above. Fortunately, sociopaths are somewhat rare compared to the rest of the population.

Against Tired Narratives

Everyone is the protagonist in their own story. And while society’s problems are far more complicated than “good vs. evil”, you hear the same tired narratives echoing from all directions all the time.

Is an economic hierarchy nigh-inevitable under systems which have trade and commerce (as opposed to central planning)? As far as I know, yes! After all, there aren’t enough factors that lead to wealth to yield a flat structure.

Does that mean we shouldn’t strive to shrink the distance between the top of the hierarchy and the bottom? No, and fuck every tradition that insists otherwise.

Do not let other people’s narratives dictate what you think and feel. Especially mine!

The best cure for propaganda is also a remedy for tradition: Questioning things.

Ask yourself “Why?” until you get a satisfactory answer. Employ the Socratic method. If you like ancient beliefs so much, take a page from Lao Tzu.

Question your own beliefs before you question others’.

The people in power do not want a nation of critical thinkers that will question their bullshit.

Where Does All This Have Anything to Do With Furries?

The furry fandom–which you can think of as the largely queer sector of geek culture–has a problem with negative peace. I am not the first to make this observation.

Furries are, like most people, susceptible to the seduction of nostalgia.

Many of our friends yearn for the days before the fandom “became political” (whenever that was), before “cancel culture” took over.

Never mind the fact that everyone who has been cancelled was doing something heinous:

• “Kero the Wolf” and his crew sexually abused animals.
• BlondeFoxy of Don’t Hug Cacti engaged in many years of sexual abuse, including against animals.
• 2 Gryphon (an unfunny hack) was encouraging suicide, being antisemitic, and insisting that child molesters are a good thing.

People who decry cancel culture are advocating for negative peace.

Negative peace is toxic, because it reinforces the status quo (which was largely engineered by bigots that died a long time ago) and ignores the reality of the human experience.

One of the consequences of diversity is that social friction is inevitable. This almost always leads to some form of conflict. Conflict can be healthy.

Valuing your escapism over the safety and well-being of the rest of your community is the epitome of being self-centered. (Need I remind everyone that narcissism is a personality disorder?)

If you want things to “go back” to the days “before cancel culture”, the only way we’re going to get there is if you help us take out the trash today.

Stop living in the past.

We can achieve so much more if we focus on the present and strive towards a brighter future.

A Brighter Tomorrow

I’m not going to pretend that voting blue will solve all the world’s ills. Setting aside how fucked up the DNC is, a lot of democrats are too conservative to ever let real change happen. (They’re also allergic to strategy and fetishize “bipartisanship” when their opponents are only interested in domination and power at all costs.)

However, the other major political party in the United States is so much worse on all fronts that we’re pretty much forced to vote for harm reduction instead of supporting the leadership that we really want.

I don’t expect anyone to change how they vote because of the words I wrote here today, and that’s not my goal.

Real change often happens between elections. Gay marriage was the result of thousands of activists, not the generosity of our sitting President at the time.

Deplatform all of the bigots. Make them feel unwelcome in our spaces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTs_Q4hEqmA

Make them choose: You can either be a member of our community, or a hateful piece of shit, but not both.

Aside: Anyone who finds themselves dealing with right-wing, Trump-supporting bigots–whether or not they’re also furries–should check out this series on the alt-right playbook before engaging with them at all.

At the same time, keep the opportunity for restorative justice in mind: People who want to get away from hate need an exit strategy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM6HZqQKhok

If you’re racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, or otherwise prejudiced against people who aren’t hurting anyone, you don’t deserve the warmth and positivity of the furry fandom.

This means risking being accused of being part of “cancel culture”, but fuck it. I sleep better knowing my friends don’t secretly pray for me to stop being me, and who I am is a very gay furry.

What are your priorities?

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1319509598328524800

https://soatok.blog/2020/10/13/politics-in-my-fandom/

#Politics

Dhole Moments

2020-07-02 21:22:50

As America prepares for record-breaking infection statistics on a daily basis, many of us are looking at other countries safely reopening and wondering, “Why can’t we have nice things?”

What you see if you type “COVID-19 statistics” into a search engine. Data sourced from Wikipedia.

Of course, everyone has their favorite target to blame for this catastrophe. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats.

I’m not interested in blame. Regardless of who takes the blame in the end, the responsibility for fixing this problem is shared among everyone. Instead, I’m more interested in answering the “Why?” question.

Why Did Things Get This Bad?

Art by circuitslime.

There are a lot of popular theories–many of them politically useful–about why the COVID-19 crisis is particularly bad in the United States.

A Failure of Trump’s Leadership?

Let’s get this one out of the way:

Was the current hellscape we found ourselves in a direct consequence of Donald J Trump’s failure to ethically and responsibly use his power as President of the United States in the best interest of the people?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/svrxYLvJYto?feature=oembed
“It’ll miraculously go away in April!” – Morons
It’s certain that Trump has totally failed at leadership, but I don’t think that’s a satisfactory explanation for the current crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/s9vzT-0hchw?feature=oembed

That is not to say that Trump is without fault! Just that the problem is bigger than one idiot in a three piece suit.

Challenges Due to Scale?

A lot of the countries that performed better at responding to COVID-19 had smaller populations and occupied smaller land masses than the United States. Is that a reasonable explanation for why the USA suffers?

No, it isn’t.

Per-capita analyses and samples from other countries with similar populations and occupied surface area would be consistent with the USA if that was the reason. This problem is mostly uniquely American.

Are the Protesters at Fault?

COVID-19 has an incubation period of up to two weeks.

The first signs of an uptick in COVID-19 infections was visible early into the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which implicates an earlier cause. The most likely one was the Memorial Day weekend celebrations that took place before George Floyd’s murder sparked widespread outrage.

Indeed, a further analysis did not show an uptick of COVID-19 infections even 4 weeks into the nationwide protests (which is two incubation periods).

Instead, the sharp spike in COVID-19 infections–factoring in the incubation period–coincided with states reopening their bars and restaurants. (Especially Florida.)

Why Things Are So Bad Today

The problem that America faces is the same one we’ve been faced with for many decades: Rampant Anti-Intellectualism.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZnBL2dFgyI?feature=oembed

American anti-intellectualism is the juxtaposition of proud ignorance and conspiracy theories.

Let me ask all you female mask wearing ASSHOLES… are you ready to put a burka on next?

That mask is NOT about your safety…. it's about MIND CONTROL

The only reason I know masks are worthless is because Andrew Cuomo keeps telling EVERYONE to wear one

Stick it up your ass!

— 🇺🇸🍺TRUMP WON🍺🇺🇸 (@PISDI94_96) June 30, 2020

Tweet is also archived in case it gets deleted.
Anti-intellectualism takes many forms:

Every single time y'all tell me you're not ready to submit a talk on a subject you've been researching for months, I want you to think about "I don't actually ride in Ubers" internet-commentator guy. pic.twitter.com/aK2LAcFtzb

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) July 1, 2020

People are so willing to die on the hill of their ignorance that even literally dying doesn’t deter them from campaigning for self-destruction.

RIGHT NOW: Dozens are marching in Sanford chanting “My body. My choice.” They are protesting after a mask order went into place in Seminole County today. pic.twitter.com/kMT7EebDKN

— Stephanie Buffamonte (@StephBuffamonte) July 1, 2020

The reason that things are so bad in the United States of America boils down to the following:

1. Too many Americans are proud to be ignorant, and in many cases, argue in support of “my ignorance is just as good as your facts”.
2. Too many Americans are susceptible to bullshit conspiracy theories.
3. Too many Americans are so selfish and short-sighted that they’d rather go to bars and waste money they don’t have on alcohol and shallow conversation than save the lives of the people they profess to love and care about.
4. Conservative politics and media is a death cult that literally turned “wearing a mask to stop COVID-19” into a culture war issue.
5. The people I’ve described in points 1-4 vote in every election, to make sure someone representing their bullshit has a seat at the political table.

It’s far too tempting to scapegoat the sitting President–especially when they’re as terrible as Donald J Trump. But if you do that, you’re ignoring the reason that he’s in the oval office to begin with.

Willful Ignorance Kills

I’ve talked about this before, when I used to write on Medium:

1. https://medium.com/@soatok/american-ignorance-in-2020-c72c78d11dbb
2. https://medium.com/@soatok/dear-furries-bullshit-and-misinformation-will-hurt-you-4a6f531d62bd

The sole cause for the situation we’re in is the same anti-intellectualism that Isaac Asimov complained about back in 1980.

Even if you want to solely blame Donald Trump, about 40% of Americans currently approve of his presidency (archive).

How to Escape This Hellscape

Art by Swizz.

The only way to get out of the mess we’re in today is to stop tolerating ignorance and bullshit in your daily life. (Yes, this means you too, furry fandom! It’s not “all fun and games” anymore.)

That means, at a minimum:

• Not spreading the Myers-Brigg personality test bullshit
• Not giving the anti-LGBTQIA+ bigots at Chick-Fil-A any money
• Listening to experts (this means: SCIENTISTS, not talk show hosts or politicians)
• Being willing to admit “I don’t know” and then being curious enough to seek the truth
• Stop reading or financially supporting biased news media

Even if we manage to get out of the current COVID-19 hellscape without addressing these flaws, the next catastrophe will hit us just as hard.

Can People’s Minds Be Changed?

No. I don’t think most of the willfully ignorant assholes currently living in America that favor Trump’s presidency today are willing and capable of redemption.

There will be exceptions, and we should remain open to the possibility of some people coming around, but in general most of these jerks will dig their heels in when pressured.

Instead, we’re going to have to wait for them to die off naturally.

What we can do in the meantime is promote better education for the American kids.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ILQepXUhJ98?feature=oembed

A nation of enlightened free-thinkers fully capable of critical thought would be a good thing (even if Carlin thinks it will never happen). And we can get there, eventually.

All it takes is everyone deciding to be humble and actually verify what other people tell them (n.b. by referencing reputable sources).

It might not make a difference today, but in 10 or 20 years, a consistent effort to enable younger Americans to become smarter, wiser, and more empathetic than their parents and grandparents will change the political landscape of our country–and maybe even the world–for the better.

Art by Khia

Of course, the Powers That Be know that, which is why we see bullshit like this keep happening during a pandemic:

With a stroke of his veto pen, Gov. Ron DeSantis wiped out the entire $29.4 million budget for a suite of online education services that have become critical to students and faculty during the Covid-19 outbreak https://t.co/6PMop4SIPv

— POLITICO (@politico) June 30, 2020

Remember, DeSantis is the governor of the state whose COVID-19 infections-per-day graph looks like this:

You can see a clear data pattern with Florida's COVID-19 with a lull each Sunday. I've computed the baseline for this week (Sunday's numbers) and the last two weeks' increase relative to Sunday. We're easily on track to hit 10,000 new cases Friday-ish, maybe even higher. pic.twitter.com/8pnXF5uEwR

— 💙💛 "Dog Boy" Nex' 💙💛 (@NexJql) July 1, 2020

It won’t be easy. Bullshit is everywhere. But it’s doable.

---

Addendum: A Carnival of Stupid

In case you still had any doubt about the potent lethality of American anti-intellectualism, look no further than this story:

Florida teen dies after conspiracy theorist mom takes her to church ‘COVID party’ and tries to treat her with Trump-approved drug: report – https://t.co/Bw3SMVitxx

— Jeffrey Levin 🇺🇦 (@jilevin) July 6, 2020

We have to demand better of ourselves before we can demand better of others. But damn if the bar isn’t really, really low to begin with.

I believe someday we'll open up textbooks and find this screenshot under the definition of "cognitive dissonance". pic.twitter.com/n535Obq6SB

— 🦊 Ennex is trying this again! 🦊 (@EnnexTheFox) July 7, 2020

The White House Press Secretary on Trump's push to reopen schools: "The science should not stand in the way of this."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 16, 2020

https://soatok.blog/2020/07/02/how-and-why-america-was-hit-so-hard-by-covid-19/

#Politics

As American students are preparing to return to the classroom during a pandemic–in flagrant disregard of everything ranging from our scientific understanding to matters of good taste–we keep hearing from politicians how essential education is.

Of course, if they actually believed the words coming out of their mouth, you’d expect them to be a little more consistent with their treatment of teachers throughout their legislative voting records.

But while they’re pantomiming concern for our students’ education, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some lessons you won’t hear about in the classroom. And the reason you won’t hear any of these in the classroom is because of incentives. That’s our first lesson.

Incentives Override Character

Most of the time, people are driven by two things:

1. The structure of incentives in their environment
2. Satisfying their own ego

If you have a passing interest in philosophy or religion, you might be familiar with the “free will” debates: Do humans have free will? It wouldn’t really matter if they did; most people will make choices based on those two factors, rather than any deep or intrinsic quality to their character.

The reason why this matters is, a lot of the bullshit adults put kids through is intended to instill certain character attributes, like grit, determination, honesty, and integrity. But the simple fact is, most adults don’t possess these qualities themselves–they’ve just accumulated the delusion that they have them. (Ask your friends how many of their upstanding, law-abiding parents hit the bong on weekends in states where marijuana isn’t legal yet, and you’ll see what I mean.)

Instead of participating in publicly accepted hazing rituals also known as extra-curricular activities, students would be better off learning the two ways to escape from the psychological tarpit that leads to poor decisions and upholding the socioeconomic status quo as if it was something worth preserving.

How to Be Better

The first escape hatch is to overcome one’s ego. There are a lot of different schools of thought about how to do this, but the most obvious example is the practice of Buddhism. Ask a Buddhist for some insight in how to accomplish this, because I certainly don’t have the answers on this one.

The other way out is to choose different incentives. This is more honest and practical for most people than expecting them to become less self-centered. Instead of desiring the same things (wealth, prestige, power), focus first on the bottom two slices of the hierarchy of needs, and then once those are met, pin your self-actualization to something downright strange. I’ll give you an example.

Incentives: The Usual Suspects

Your average American is conditioned from a young age to graduate from high school and go to college so they can secure stable employment and start a family. Not all of them follow this track, but it’s a typical expectation that gets communicated throughout the public school system’s cultural indoctrination of our youth.

Along the way, a student’s incentive structure is “outperform their peers on standardized tests to get into more prestigious colleges” then “outperform their peers to graduate higher in your classes to get a stable, well-paying job” then “outperform their coworkers to ensure job security when the downsizing hammer comes down on your department”. Competition, competition, competition. Uninspiring.

Y’know what you don’t see a whole lot? Students who aim to graduate in the bottom 10% of their class because they’re spending their college years helping others succeed and forming lifelong friendships. It might sound ridiculous, but a lot of those can yield long-term business relationships that can be spun into a successful career as an independent consultant–thereby freeing you from the “rat race” that leads to so much depression, burn-out, and failed marriages because one or both partners is working so damn much.

Get creative with your incentives. You get to decide what motivates you (beyond a threshold of what’s determined through genetics and epigenetics, anyway). So why choose the same high-demand, low-supply incentives everyone else chooses? Where’s the fun in that?

I say it’s okay to be weird. And this isn’t my own incentives speaking. I gain nothing by strangers being less self-conscious and insecure about this, since I’m already surrounded by friends who are (in their own way) just as weird as I am.

And if you’re afraid of being ostracized and losing yourself in the process of embracing your weirdness, at least that will be instrumental in overcoming your own ego.

On Kindness and Weakness

Going back to my previous hypothetical example of a student aspiring to be in the bottom 10% of their graduating class (because they’re focused on helping their low-performing peers achieve higher than they otherwise would), anyone who attempts this in earnest will likely find themselves with both a greater understanding of the subject matter and greatly improved communication skills.

To another student with a purely competitive mindset aiming for the top 10% and a “perfect” 4.0 GPA, the behavior of our hypothetical nonconformist might seem like weakness. They might call them an underachiever (or some modern euphemism that may or may not also be a dog-whistle meme for something racist).

But is attaining greater mastery of your chosen field and better skills at explaining topics to non-experts really a form of weakness? This is yet another crack in the armor of the bullshit indoctrination that our society likes to subject us all to, but our education system should aspire to counteract every chance it gets.

Most people confuse kindness for weakness, and the worst of us choose to exploit weakness for their own selfish gain. However, this tendency is in itself exploitable: It makes assholes predictable to the point of being tiresome.

If you choose to be kind in the areas where you’re the strongest, this will do two things: First, it will completely fuck over the plots of the terrible. And second, it will make life a little more pleasant for the rest of us.

I call that a win-win.

If you take nothing else away from this blog, remember this: The purest expression of integrity, personal conviction, and resilience is through kindness, empathy, and compassion.

Anyone who doesn’t understand this is trying too hard to be macho, to deflect from their own deep-seated insecurities. It almost makes you wonder what their incentives are.

Ignorance and Stupidity

Ignorance gets a bad rap. It’s perfectly acceptable to not know something, even if it’s something everyone else knows. As long as you’re aware of your own ignorance and actively seeking the knowledge you lack, there’s nothing to be ashamed about.

On the other hand, willful ignorance–where you don’t know something, and don’t want to know it–is a form of stupidity. But being stupid isn’t the same thing as being ignorant.

Stupidity (for lack of a better term) doesn’t usually stem from a lack of knowledge. Consequently, you can’t inform someone into being less stupid. Careless? Sure. But stupid? Not a chance.

Stupidity–or at least the American brand of stupidity we’re all too familiar with especially from four years with Donald Trump as president–stems from believing in things that are untrue rather than not knowing.

Therefore, the correct word for people who support a Trump presidency in 2020 isn’t “ignorant”. Instead, these people fall into two camps that have distinct words to describe them: Bigoted and spiteful. (And if you don’t think that’s true, try sitting down to watch the news with one of them in a relaxed environment and watch how long it takes them to say something racist, homophobic, or otherwise hateful. You won’t need the patience of a saint to observe results, although it might help with escaping the encounter with your blood pressure at a healthy level.)

When discussing stupidity, it’s tempting for writers to point to obvious examples like anti-vaxxers or the Flat Earth Society and insist, “This is what stupidity looks like.” But this does a lot of harm. Focusing on extreme and obvious examples trains your mental heuristics to expect stupidity to be broadly or generally obvious. It isn’t. Stupidity is subtle, pernicious, and ubiquitous.

A specific example: Any gay person that supports the so-called “LGB Alliance” is stupid because they’re being manipulated into attacking transgender people by right-wing jerk-offs who want to create a wedge in the LGBT community in order to divide and conquer us and ultimately deprive us of our civil rights. It’s also stupid because it stems from beliefs that have been thoroughly debunked by science.

Stupidity ultimately comes from two main sources:

1. Authority figures and institutions
2. Our brains’ tendency to invent and believe stories

Sometimes, possibly as a result of trauma, our cognitive storytellers decide to distrust official sources even if they’re not associated with political power. This is why stupid people believe stupid conspiracy theories: Anyone who could disprove it is perceived to be part of the conspiracy.

Rather than fall for these trappings, a much more reasonable position is to default to a mild distrust and to judge sources of information on their own merits. Make them earn your trust.

But this requires effort, so nobody does this consistently. Still, you can get a lot of mileage out of limiting your media consumption to unbiased and pro-science publications.

Why These Lessons Matter

Anyone capable of reading and comprehending the lessons I’m sharing today will find themselves more capable of resisting the trappings of modern American society.

If enough of us do this, we can pull the rug out from under the feet of the wealthy business interests that continue to make the American education system terrible (through lobbying and/or monopolies on textbook publishing). Ideally, this would especially harm these companies’ soulless advertising and marketing efforts by rendering them less effective. Good riddance to bad garbage.

https://soatok.blog/2020/08/21/a-few-missing-lessons-from-american-education/

#America #AmericanEducation #education #ignorance #incentives #kindness #lessons #Politics #Society #stupidity #weakness

Dhole Moments

2020-07-02 21:22:50

As America prepares for record-breaking infection statistics on a daily basis, many of us are looking at other countries safely reopening and wondering, “Why can’t we have nice things?”

What you see if you type “COVID-19 statistics” into a search engine. Data sourced from Wikipedia.

Of course, everyone has their favorite target to blame for this catastrophe. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats.

I’m not interested in blame. Regardless of who takes the blame in the end, the responsibility for fixing this problem is shared among everyone. Instead, I’m more interested in answering the “Why?” question.

Why Did Things Get This Bad?

Art by circuitslime.

There are a lot of popular theories–many of them politically useful–about why the COVID-19 crisis is particularly bad in the United States.

A Failure of Trump’s Leadership?

Let’s get this one out of the way:

Was the current hellscape we found ourselves in a direct consequence of Donald J Trump’s failure to ethically and responsibly use his power as President of the United States in the best interest of the people?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/svrxYLvJYto?feature=oembed
“It’ll miraculously go away in April!” – Morons
It’s certain that Trump has totally failed at leadership, but I don’t think that’s a satisfactory explanation for the current crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/s9vzT-0hchw?feature=oembed

That is not to say that Trump is without fault! Just that the problem is bigger than one idiot in a three piece suit.

Challenges Due to Scale?

A lot of the countries that performed better at responding to COVID-19 had smaller populations and occupied smaller land masses than the United States. Is that a reasonable explanation for why the USA suffers?

No, it isn’t.

Per-capita analyses and samples from other countries with similar populations and occupied surface area would be consistent with the USA if that was the reason. This problem is mostly uniquely American.

Are the Protesters at Fault?

COVID-19 has an incubation period of up to two weeks.

The first signs of an uptick in COVID-19 infections was visible early into the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which implicates an earlier cause. The most likely one was the Memorial Day weekend celebrations that took place before George Floyd’s murder sparked widespread outrage.

Indeed, a further analysis did not show an uptick of COVID-19 infections even 4 weeks into the nationwide protests (which is two incubation periods).

Instead, the sharp spike in COVID-19 infections–factoring in the incubation period–coincided with states reopening their bars and restaurants. (Especially Florida.)

Why Things Are So Bad Today

The problem that America faces is the same one we’ve been faced with for many decades: Rampant Anti-Intellectualism.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZnBL2dFgyI?feature=oembed

American anti-intellectualism is the juxtaposition of proud ignorance and conspiracy theories.

Let me ask all you female mask wearing ASSHOLES… are you ready to put a burka on next?

That mask is NOT about your safety…. it's about MIND CONTROL

The only reason I know masks are worthless is because Andrew Cuomo keeps telling EVERYONE to wear one

Stick it up your ass!

— 🇺🇸🍺TRUMP WON🍺🇺🇸 (@PISDI94_96) June 30, 2020

Tweet is also archived in case it gets deleted.
Anti-intellectualism takes many forms:

Every single time y'all tell me you're not ready to submit a talk on a subject you've been researching for months, I want you to think about "I don't actually ride in Ubers" internet-commentator guy. pic.twitter.com/aK2LAcFtzb

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) July 1, 2020

People are so willing to die on the hill of their ignorance that even literally dying doesn’t deter them from campaigning for self-destruction.

RIGHT NOW: Dozens are marching in Sanford chanting “My body. My choice.” They are protesting after a mask order went into place in Seminole County today. pic.twitter.com/kMT7EebDKN

— Stephanie Buffamonte (@StephBuffamonte) July 1, 2020

The reason that things are so bad in the United States of America boils down to the following:

1. Too many Americans are proud to be ignorant, and in many cases, argue in support of “my ignorance is just as good as your facts”.
2. Too many Americans are susceptible to bullshit conspiracy theories.
3. Too many Americans are so selfish and short-sighted that they’d rather go to bars and waste money they don’t have on alcohol and shallow conversation than save the lives of the people they profess to love and care about.
4. Conservative politics and media is a death cult that literally turned “wearing a mask to stop COVID-19” into a culture war issue.
5. The people I’ve described in points 1-4 vote in every election, to make sure someone representing their bullshit has a seat at the political table.

It’s far too tempting to scapegoat the sitting President–especially when they’re as terrible as Donald J Trump. But if you do that, you’re ignoring the reason that he’s in the oval office to begin with.

Willful Ignorance Kills

I’ve talked about this before, when I used to write on Medium:

1. https://medium.com/@soatok/american-ignorance-in-2020-c72c78d11dbb
2. https://medium.com/@soatok/dear-furries-bullshit-and-misinformation-will-hurt-you-4a6f531d62bd

The sole cause for the situation we’re in is the same anti-intellectualism that Isaac Asimov complained about back in 1980.

Even if you want to solely blame Donald Trump, about 40% of Americans currently approve of his presidency (archive).

How to Escape This Hellscape

Art by Swizz.

The only way to get out of the mess we’re in today is to stop tolerating ignorance and bullshit in your daily life. (Yes, this means you too, furry fandom! It’s not “all fun and games” anymore.)

That means, at a minimum:

• Not spreading the Myers-Brigg personality test bullshit
• Not giving the anti-LGBTQIA+ bigots at Chick-Fil-A any money
• Listening to experts (this means: SCIENTISTS, not talk show hosts or politicians)
• Being willing to admit “I don’t know” and then being curious enough to seek the truth
• Stop reading or financially supporting biased news media

Even if we manage to get out of the current COVID-19 hellscape without addressing these flaws, the next catastrophe will hit us just as hard.

Can People’s Minds Be Changed?

No. I don’t think most of the willfully ignorant assholes currently living in America that favor Trump’s presidency today are willing and capable of redemption.

There will be exceptions, and we should remain open to the possibility of some people coming around, but in general most of these jerks will dig their heels in when pressured.

Instead, we’re going to have to wait for them to die off naturally.

What we can do in the meantime is promote better education for the American kids.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ILQepXUhJ98?feature=oembed

A nation of enlightened free-thinkers fully capable of critical thought would be a good thing (even if Carlin thinks it will never happen). And we can get there, eventually.

All it takes is everyone deciding to be humble and actually verify what other people tell them (n.b. by referencing reputable sources).

It might not make a difference today, but in 10 or 20 years, a consistent effort to enable younger Americans to become smarter, wiser, and more empathetic than their parents and grandparents will change the political landscape of our country–and maybe even the world–for the better.

Art by Khia

Of course, the Powers That Be know that, which is why we see bullshit like this keep happening during a pandemic:

With a stroke of his veto pen, Gov. Ron DeSantis wiped out the entire $29.4 million budget for a suite of online education services that have become critical to students and faculty during the Covid-19 outbreak https://t.co/6PMop4SIPv

— POLITICO (@politico) June 30, 2020

Remember, DeSantis is the governor of the state whose COVID-19 infections-per-day graph looks like this:

You can see a clear data pattern with Florida's COVID-19 with a lull each Sunday. I've computed the baseline for this week (Sunday's numbers) and the last two weeks' increase relative to Sunday. We're easily on track to hit 10,000 new cases Friday-ish, maybe even higher. pic.twitter.com/8pnXF5uEwR

— 💙💛 "Dog Boy" Nex' 💙💛 (@NexJql) July 1, 2020

It won’t be easy. Bullshit is everywhere. But it’s doable.

---

Addendum: A Carnival of Stupid

In case you still had any doubt about the potent lethality of American anti-intellectualism, look no further than this story:

Florida teen dies after conspiracy theorist mom takes her to church ‘COVID party’ and tries to treat her with Trump-approved drug: report – https://t.co/Bw3SMVitxx

— Jeffrey Levin 🇺🇦 (@jilevin) July 6, 2020

We have to demand better of ourselves before we can demand better of others. But damn if the bar isn’t really, really low to begin with.

I believe someday we'll open up textbooks and find this screenshot under the definition of "cognitive dissonance". pic.twitter.com/n535Obq6SB

— 🦊 Ennex is trying this again! 🦊 (@EnnexTheFox) July 7, 2020

The White House Press Secretary on Trump's push to reopen schools: "The science should not stand in the way of this."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 16, 2020

https://soatok.blog/2020/07/02/how-and-why-america-was-hit-so-hard-by-covid-19/

#Politics

We’ve more-or-less all been coping with the pandemic since early March.

During this time, I’ve seen a lot of people stressed and depressed to their breaking points, usually while also blaming themselves for not being able to bottle their feelings up and believing no one else is at their limit.

And that’s simply not true. Everyone is suffering, everyone is coping. Not just from the pandemic and the stress and isolation of avoiding the risk of infection, but from the other social ills of our world.

In a different vein, three different colleagues recently told me that I make blogging “look easy” because of the rate that I manage to output new blog posts here.

And if we take a step back and look at both situations, there’s a subtle theme here that I’d like to explore: The unseen.

Art by Khia.

Seeing Without Seeing

Everything you know about the world is an abstraction of the truth.

That isn’t some philosophical pontification, it’s a plain and simple fact. You don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s brain at any given moment (especially if they have no inner monologue at all).

Under better times and better conditions, I’d say that the surest and fastest path to being mental unwell (depressed, anxious, etc.) is comparing your behind-the-scenes footage to other peoples’ highlight reels.

Social media is nothing but highlight reels.

Hell, this very blog is a highlight reel of the ideas I managed to flesh out into a coherent structure.

Nobody would ever have known the stress, frustration, and nihilism that goes into trying to come up with a topic to write about if I didn’t just allude to it in this sentence. My writing process is too informal to articulate and very unhelpful to anyone who has to write words for a living: If I can’t think of what I want to say and why, I don’t write. It’s that simple. I can’t force it. I’ve tried. And sometimes I have very strong opinions about certain topics, or something really funny happened, or I observed something really noteworthy that should probably be captured and immortalized in prose… yet, I just can’t figure out how to put it into words, so it languishes forever.

And yet, so many people are so over-exposed to this polished and curated filter bubble, I fear they’ve lost sight of the human experience, and how badly we all struggle and fuck up all the time.

The isolation sure isn’t helping.

The Political Queer Experience

Being LGBTQIA+ in the United States of America is quite an experience, whew, let me tell ya.

https://twitter.com/DogpatchPress/status/978408138612158464

https://twitter.com/NazifurReceipts/status/1325207247157301249

Sometimes I have to ask myself: Does anyone really believe that the Trump administration or the GOP is actually pro-LGBT? Surely nobody could have missed the memo? To wit:

• GLAAD has outlined all the ways that Trump has harmed LGBT rights.
• The Human Rights Campaign has outlined Trump’s timeline of hate.
• The Republican Party platform for 2020 under Trump’s leadership (PDF) specifically called for a reversal of Obergefell v. Hodges (the case that allowed for gay marriage rights). See Page 9.

It’s even worse when you hear from alleged “Gays for Trump” or even “Furries for Trump”.

It’s bizarre; how can so many people support someone who wants to hurt them?

Enter Dean Browning

Dean Browning is a political candidate from Pennsylvania who lost the Republican primary in 2020. He also runs a PAC.

When he’s not siphoning money from the pockets of gullible American conservatives, Dean Browning likes to pretend to be a black gay guy named Dan Purdy on social media to try to deceive the public about the Republicans’ intentions for the LGBTQIA+ community.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1326270305933942784

His cover was blown when he forgot to switch to his alt account (which apparently is owned by his adopted son?) to attempt to astroturf a critic. He then tried to offer “context” into the tweet.

Neither the original fuck-up nor his nonpology went unnoticed:

https://twitter.com/NerdyBlkGyrl/status/1326285558570692608

https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1326270324783132673

Sometimes the unseen gets revealed to us through truly spectacular mistakes.

What more is there to say?

Furries Improve Everything

I know I just talked about politics and we’re all sick of it, but I want to briefly visit this topic one more time for the sake of setting the stage.

Remember this?

https://twitter.com/thatbilloakley/status/1325152158866567168

Never one to miss a beat, Coopertom (the cat fursuiter from the infamous cursed photo) decided to remake this hilarious performance art of a gaffe in VRChat.

https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560

This blew up. You’ve probably seen news coverage of this event. It made The Verge, it made BuzzFeed. Hell, it even made PC Gamer.

For many readers, this is the first time they read about the furry fandom in a positive light.

For the first many years of the furry fandom’s existence, our media strategy was nonexistent.

We kinda just winged it (with apologies to avian furries), and the end result was an episode of CSI about furries that was so inaccurate and bad in its portrayal of the furry fandom as sex-obsessed losers that if you type “that episode” into Google, it’s the first search result.

Unfortunately, this has stuck in the public imagination for many, many years since. Almost every interaction I’ve had online has been colored by a history of bad press that the many recent years of fair coverage hasn’t abated.

As a result, almost nobody outside of the furry fandom truly has the slightest clue about who we really are, or how incredible the community can be.

Even most furries don’t know this!

Let’s circle back to Coopertom. What many of the folks who saw the news coverage of his VRChat world didn’t see is that he later posted this…

https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325912477209649154

…followed a few hours later by this:

https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1326000299954343937

I don’t think even Coopertom anticipated how much love and kindness he would be met with by the community he’s been a part of for at least a decade. He surely wasn’t counting on it. You can hear that much in his voice.

Everyone who hates furries because an old CSI episode portrayed us in an unflattering light–or because of the actions of a scant few individuals that did terrible things and are consequently not welcome in our community–has chosen to blind themselves to what this fandom is really about, and they will forever be Plato’s cave-dwellers as a result.

The furry fandom has always been about humanity.

Whether to celebrate or to critique? That depends on the individual.

Anyone who tells you different is missing the point. (To be explicit: The point isn’t sex, although we aren’t exactly prudes.)

Can We Take the Blinders Off?

A few years ago there was a TED talk to commemorate 1000 TED Talks, in which the speaker recursively used Amazon Mechanical Turk to summarize each of the talks into six words each, and then to summarize the summaries, etc. until he landed on a mere six.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5pklFtGthY

In the same spirit, I’ve been thinking what the six words that describe the furry fandom would be. (Spoiler: See the title of this blog post.)

Whether you’ve been a furry since the days of SomethingAwful trolls or are just discovering your interest for anthropomorphic characters, you’re not alone.

No matter how depressed, frustrated, stressed, angry, despaired, hollow, hopeless, or scared you might feel about your life, it gets better.

This video was made before the pandemic, but it hits differently after:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waAVJtE23Wo

If I can be said to be coping well (and making blogging seem easy as a result), it’s simply because I’m privileged to have so many good friends to lift up my spirits. It’s not a reflection of me being somehow special, and it isn’t a poor reflection on you or anyone else if you aren’t.

But on the other paw, I utterly failed to gripe about a recent irksome instance of sensationalist cryptography reporting, as well as the recent anti-encryption legislation in the Five Eyes nations. So maybe I’m not doing as hot as some of you might think I am? Win some, lose some.

https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1326373134161862657

https://soatok.blog/2020/11/11/youre-not-alone-it-gets-better/

#coping #happiness #LGBTQIA_ #mentalHealth #pandemic #Politics #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-06-09 13:00:00

I rarely think about the labels that describe me.

That isn’t because of privilege (I spent many years painfully aware of them), but because my friends are incredibly supportive and we’ve been able to cultivate an environment where I’m not constantly reminded of why I don’t “belong”. (It took many grueling years to achieve that, and I’m still reminded of my weirdness if I leave home for any appreciable length of time. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a homebody.)

The majority of people don’t think about their labels either, but for privileged reasons, until a minority calls it to their attention. Then you get almost-comical indignant hot takes of the “don’t call me cis, that’s a slur!” variety.

At least, they would be comical if they weren’t so stupid and dangerous.

Identity

Identity is a funny thing. I actually find rather insulting the proposition that you can take the vast diversity of the lived experiences of billions of people and compress it into one bit of information.

“Are you a YES or a NO?” “Are you X or Y?” “Are you good or evil?”

Labels are a lossy compression algorithm. They’re meant to simplify and convey ideas so they’re more broadly accessible and easily understood. In practice, people are overly reliant on them, and they become a crutch.

Sure, you can think of me as an androsexual, demisexual, cisgender male with a dhole fursona, but do most of us even know what that means?

Most of us just simplify our identities to, “I’m gay”. Art by LindseyVi.

Pride

Pride is a protest against unjust systems. Pride started with a riot in response to police violence and discrimination. You probably didn’t learn about Pride in great detail in history class (if at all).

Pride parades in recent years have been co-opted by what some call “rainbow capitalism”.

I wish I knew the original source for this meme.

And this obviously feels really gross, but at the same time, it’s often somehow forgivable that companies use Pride Month (June) to show active support for their LGBTQIA+ employees. (If nothing else, it assures us that we won’t suddenly become unemployed if someone accuses us of falling in love with a person with the “wrong” phenotype, etc.)

There are currently a lot of hard conversations taking place about a different target of police violence and discrimination.

I hope that the protests happening today will result in the change our world needs, so that everyone can live equally without fear or shame for who they are.

This will almost certainly require dismantling racist systems and rebuilding them without the tainted legacy they originated from.

That being said, I’ve never really been fond of the emotion, pride. It feels inherently reckless to me. At the same time, I acknowledge it’s a great foil for the emotions that bigots want us to feel (fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, etc.). If that works for you, I’m happy. Keep on keeping on.

Rather than pride, I’ve always sought contentment and joy in my life.

Authenticity means a lot to me, and being fearlessly and shamelessly me is something I shouldn’t have to work for or feel proud about; nor should anyone else.

Contentment and joy… there used to be another word folks used to encapsulate that genre of emotion: Gay.

It always comes full-circle, doesn’t it?

A Dream To Seek

Art by Khia.

Society has numerous institutions and systems that are designed and implemented to ensure discrimination and injustice against people who are different than their architects.

As long as bigoted institutions and systems exist, society will always need movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter to resist atrocity and inspire loud authenticity, in equal measure.

So it might sound odd to say without the above context, but as a strong proponent of human rights and equality, I dream of the day when these movements no longer need to exist; for the day when their job is done and we have moved past the specter of hate that continues to haunt each generation that survives its direct violent influence. I say this knowing that this day will probably never come (at least in my lifetime).

Until bigotry is abolished, and bigotry’s apologists recognize that they’re little more than asymptomatic carriers of that vile psychic pathogen, I will continue to strive to enable everyone I can reach to enjoy the same peace that my friends and I have built at home.

No matter your sex. No matter your gender. No matter the gender(s) you’re attracted to (if any). No matter your race or ethnicity.

The labels people use to describe us shouldn’t condemn anyone to a life of misery and injustice.

The day we cultivate a society that is absent of, and resistant to, the kind of hate and discrimination we’ve seen for centuries will be a day worthy of pride.

And the only way to get there is to acknowledge a simple truth: Black Lives have to Matter in order for the superset (“All Lives”) to Matter.

What Do Your Labels Mean?

This will probably be my only Pride Month post on this blog, so I suppose it makes sense to explain them.

I’m a guy, who’s attracted to guys (thus, androsexual)… but I don’t exactly have a “type”. I have to genuinely like a person to find them attractive. That’s the demisexual part.

Most people understand being gay, conceptually. Asexuality might also click readily without a lot of exposition.

Being demi is weird: You spend a lot of time wondering if you’re asexual or not, until you actually develop feelings for someone else for the first time.

Cisgender just means “not transgender”; that is to say, I identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth.

If that’s helpful to know, cool. But you don’t have to think of me in those terms. I’m just Soatok.

https://soatok.blog/2020/06/09/pridemonth/

As America prepares for record-breaking infection statistics on a daily basis, many of us are looking at other countries safely reopening and wondering, “Why can’t we have nice things?”

What you see if you type “COVID-19 statistics” into a search engine. Data sourced from Wikipedia.

Of course, everyone has their favorite target to blame for this catastrophe. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats.

I’m not interested in blame. Regardless of who takes the blame in the end, the responsibility for fixing this problem is shared among everyone. Instead, I’m more interested in answering the “Why?” question.

Why Did Things Get This Bad?

Art by circuitslime.

There are a lot of popular theories–many of them politically useful–about why the COVID-19 crisis is particularly bad in the United States.

A Failure of Trump’s Leadership?

Let’s get this one out of the way:

Was the current hellscape we found ourselves in a direct consequence of Donald J Trump’s failure to ethically and responsibly use his power as President of the United States in the best interest of the people?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/svrxYLvJYto?feature=oembed
“It’ll miraculously go away in April!” – Morons
It’s certain that Trump has totally failed at leadership, but I don’t think that’s a satisfactory explanation for the current crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/s9vzT-0hchw?feature=oembed

That is not to say that Trump is without fault! Just that the problem is bigger than one idiot in a three piece suit.

Challenges Due to Scale?

A lot of the countries that performed better at responding to COVID-19 had smaller populations and occupied smaller land masses than the United States. Is that a reasonable explanation for why the USA suffers?

No, it isn’t.

Per-capita analyses and samples from other countries with similar populations and occupied surface area would be consistent with the USA if that was the reason. This problem is mostly uniquely American.

Are the Protesters at Fault?

COVID-19 has an incubation period of up to two weeks.

The first signs of an uptick in COVID-19 infections was visible early into the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which implicates an earlier cause. The most likely one was the Memorial Day weekend celebrations that took place before George Floyd’s murder sparked widespread outrage.

Indeed, a further analysis did not show an uptick of COVID-19 infections even 4 weeks into the nationwide protests (which is two incubation periods).

Instead, the sharp spike in COVID-19 infections–factoring in the incubation period–coincided with states reopening their bars and restaurants. (Especially Florida.)

Why Things Are So Bad Today

The problem that America faces is the same one we’ve been faced with for many decades: Rampant Anti-Intellectualism.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZnBL2dFgyI?feature=oembed

American anti-intellectualism is the juxtaposition of proud ignorance and conspiracy theories.

Let me ask all you female mask wearing ASSHOLES… are you ready to put a burka on next?

That mask is NOT about your safety…. it's about MIND CONTROL

The only reason I know masks are worthless is because Andrew Cuomo keeps telling EVERYONE to wear one

Stick it up your ass!

— 🇺🇸🍺TRUMP WON🍺🇺🇸 (@PISDI94_96) June 30, 2020

Tweet is also archived in case it gets deleted.
Anti-intellectualism takes many forms:

Every single time y'all tell me you're not ready to submit a talk on a subject you've been researching for months, I want you to think about "I don't actually ride in Ubers" internet-commentator guy. pic.twitter.com/aK2LAcFtzb

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) July 1, 2020

People are so willing to die on the hill of their ignorance that even literally dying doesn’t deter them from campaigning for self-destruction.

RIGHT NOW: Dozens are marching in Sanford chanting “My body. My choice.” They are protesting after a mask order went into place in Seminole County today. pic.twitter.com/kMT7EebDKN

— Stephanie Buffamonte (@StephBuffamonte) July 1, 2020

The reason that things are so bad in the United States of America boils down to the following:

1. Too many Americans are proud to be ignorant, and in many cases, argue in support of “my ignorance is just as good as your facts”.
2. Too many Americans are susceptible to bullshit conspiracy theories.
3. Too many Americans are so selfish and short-sighted that they’d rather go to bars and waste money they don’t have on alcohol and shallow conversation than save the lives of the people they profess to love and care about.
4. Conservative politics and media is a death cult that literally turned “wearing a mask to stop COVID-19” into a culture war issue.
5. The people I’ve described in points 1-4 vote in every election, to make sure someone representing their bullshit has a seat at the political table.

It’s far too tempting to scapegoat the sitting President–especially when they’re as terrible as Donald J Trump. But if you do that, you’re ignoring the reason that he’s in the oval office to begin with.

Willful Ignorance Kills

I’ve talked about this before, when I used to write on Medium:

1. https://medium.com/@soatok/american-ignorance-in-2020-c72c78d11dbb
2. https://medium.com/@soatok/dear-furries-bullshit-and-misinformation-will-hurt-you-4a6f531d62bd

The sole cause for the situation we’re in is the same anti-intellectualism that Isaac Asimov complained about back in 1980.

Even if you want to solely blame Donald Trump, about 40% of Americans currently approve of his presidency (archive).

How to Escape This Hellscape

Art by Swizz.

The only way to get out of the mess we’re in today is to stop tolerating ignorance and bullshit in your daily life. (Yes, this means you too, furry fandom! It’s not “all fun and games” anymore.)

That means, at a minimum:

• Not spreading the Myers-Brigg personality test bullshit
• Not giving the anti-LGBTQIA+ bigots at Chick-Fil-A any money
• Listening to experts (this means: SCIENTISTS, not talk show hosts or politicians)
• Being willing to admit “I don’t know” and then being curious enough to seek the truth
• Stop reading or financially supporting biased news media

Even if we manage to get out of the current COVID-19 hellscape without addressing these flaws, the next catastrophe will hit us just as hard.

Can People’s Minds Be Changed?

No. I don’t think most of the willfully ignorant assholes currently living in America that favor Trump’s presidency today are willing and capable of redemption.

There will be exceptions, and we should remain open to the possibility of some people coming around, but in general most of these jerks will dig their heels in when pressured.

Instead, we’re going to have to wait for them to die off naturally.

What we can do in the meantime is promote better education for the American kids.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ILQepXUhJ98?feature=oembed

A nation of enlightened free-thinkers fully capable of critical thought would be a good thing (even if Carlin thinks it will never happen). And we can get there, eventually.

All it takes is everyone deciding to be humble and actually verify what other people tell them (n.b. by referencing reputable sources).

It might not make a difference today, but in 10 or 20 years, a consistent effort to enable younger Americans to become smarter, wiser, and more empathetic than their parents and grandparents will change the political landscape of our country–and maybe even the world–for the better.

Art by Khia

Of course, the Powers That Be know that, which is why we see bullshit like this keep happening during a pandemic:

With a stroke of his veto pen, Gov. Ron DeSantis wiped out the entire $29.4 million budget for a suite of online education services that have become critical to students and faculty during the Covid-19 outbreak https://t.co/6PMop4SIPv

— POLITICO (@politico) June 30, 2020

Remember, DeSantis is the governor of the state whose COVID-19 infections-per-day graph looks like this:

You can see a clear data pattern with Florida's COVID-19 with a lull each Sunday. I've computed the baseline for this week (Sunday's numbers) and the last two weeks' increase relative to Sunday. We're easily on track to hit 10,000 new cases Friday-ish, maybe even higher. pic.twitter.com/8pnXF5uEwR

— 💙💛 "Dog Boy" Nex' 💙💛 (@NexJql) July 1, 2020

It won’t be easy. Bullshit is everywhere. But it’s doable.

Addendum: A Carnival of Stupid

In case you still had any doubt about the potent lethality of American anti-intellectualism, look no further than this story:

Florida teen dies after conspiracy theorist mom takes her to church ‘COVID party’ and tries to treat her with Trump-approved drug: report – https://t.co/Bw3SMVitxx

— Jeffrey Levin 🇺🇦 (@jilevin) July 6, 2020

We have to demand better of ourselves before we can demand better of others. But damn if the bar isn’t really, really low to begin with.

I believe someday we'll open up textbooks and find this screenshot under the definition of "cognitive dissonance". pic.twitter.com/n535Obq6SB

— 🦊 Ennex is trying this again! 🦊 (@EnnexTheFox) July 7, 2020

The White House Press Secretary on Trump's push to reopen schools: "The science should not stand in the way of this."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 16, 2020

https://soatok.blog/2020/07/02/how-and-why-america-was-hit-so-hard-by-covid-19/

#Politics

Dhole Moments

2020-07-02 21:22:50

As America prepares for record-breaking infection statistics on a daily basis, many of us are looking at other countries safely reopening and wondering, “Why can’t we have nice things?”

What you see if you type “COVID-19 statistics” into a search engine. Data sourced from Wikipedia.

Of course, everyone has their favorite target to blame for this catastrophe. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats.

I’m not interested in blame. Regardless of who takes the blame in the end, the responsibility for fixing this problem is shared among everyone. Instead, I’m more interested in answering the “Why?” question.

Why Did Things Get This Bad?

Art by circuitslime.

There are a lot of popular theories–many of them politically useful–about why the COVID-19 crisis is particularly bad in the United States.

A Failure of Trump’s Leadership?

Let’s get this one out of the way:

Was the current hellscape we found ourselves in a direct consequence of Donald J Trump’s failure to ethically and responsibly use his power as President of the United States in the best interest of the people?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/svrxYLvJYto?feature=oembed
“It’ll miraculously go away in April!” – Morons
It’s certain that Trump has totally failed at leadership, but I don’t think that’s a satisfactory explanation for the current crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/s9vzT-0hchw?feature=oembed

That is not to say that Trump is without fault! Just that the problem is bigger than one idiot in a three piece suit.

Challenges Due to Scale?

A lot of the countries that performed better at responding to COVID-19 had smaller populations and occupied smaller land masses than the United States. Is that a reasonable explanation for why the USA suffers?

No, it isn’t.

Per-capita analyses and samples from other countries with similar populations and occupied surface area would be consistent with the USA if that was the reason. This problem is mostly uniquely American.

Are the Protesters at Fault?

COVID-19 has an incubation period of up to two weeks.

The first signs of an uptick in COVID-19 infections was visible early into the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which implicates an earlier cause. The most likely one was the Memorial Day weekend celebrations that took place before George Floyd’s murder sparked widespread outrage.

Indeed, a further analysis did not show an uptick of COVID-19 infections even 4 weeks into the nationwide protests (which is two incubation periods).

Instead, the sharp spike in COVID-19 infections–factoring in the incubation period–coincided with states reopening their bars and restaurants. (Especially Florida.)

Why Things Are So Bad Today

The problem that America faces is the same one we’ve been faced with for many decades: Rampant Anti-Intellectualism.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bZnBL2dFgyI?feature=oembed

American anti-intellectualism is the juxtaposition of proud ignorance and conspiracy theories.

Let me ask all you female mask wearing ASSHOLES… are you ready to put a burka on next?

That mask is NOT about your safety…. it's about MIND CONTROL

The only reason I know masks are worthless is because Andrew Cuomo keeps telling EVERYONE to wear one

Stick it up your ass!

— 🇺🇸🍺TRUMP WON🍺🇺🇸 (@PISDI94_96) June 30, 2020

Tweet is also archived in case it gets deleted.
Anti-intellectualism takes many forms:

Every single time y'all tell me you're not ready to submit a talk on a subject you've been researching for months, I want you to think about "I don't actually ride in Ubers" internet-commentator guy. pic.twitter.com/aK2LAcFtzb

— Lesley Carhart (@hacks4pancakes) July 1, 2020

People are so willing to die on the hill of their ignorance that even literally dying doesn’t deter them from campaigning for self-destruction.

RIGHT NOW: Dozens are marching in Sanford chanting “My body. My choice.” They are protesting after a mask order went into place in Seminole County today. pic.twitter.com/kMT7EebDKN

— Stephanie Buffamonte (@StephBuffamonte) July 1, 2020

The reason that things are so bad in the United States of America boils down to the following:

1. Too many Americans are proud to be ignorant, and in many cases, argue in support of “my ignorance is just as good as your facts”.
2. Too many Americans are susceptible to bullshit conspiracy theories.
3. Too many Americans are so selfish and short-sighted that they’d rather go to bars and waste money they don’t have on alcohol and shallow conversation than save the lives of the people they profess to love and care about.
4. Conservative politics and media is a death cult that literally turned “wearing a mask to stop COVID-19” into a culture war issue.
5. The people I’ve described in points 1-4 vote in every election, to make sure someone representing their bullshit has a seat at the political table.

It’s far too tempting to scapegoat the sitting President–especially when they’re as terrible as Donald J Trump. But if you do that, you’re ignoring the reason that he’s in the oval office to begin with.

Willful Ignorance Kills

I’ve talked about this before, when I used to write on Medium:

1. https://medium.com/@soatok/american-ignorance-in-2020-c72c78d11dbb
2. https://medium.com/@soatok/dear-furries-bullshit-and-misinformation-will-hurt-you-4a6f531d62bd

The sole cause for the situation we’re in is the same anti-intellectualism that Isaac Asimov complained about back in 1980.

Even if you want to solely blame Donald Trump, about 40% of Americans currently approve of his presidency (archive).

How to Escape This Hellscape

Art by Swizz.

The only way to get out of the mess we’re in today is to stop tolerating ignorance and bullshit in your daily life. (Yes, this means you too, furry fandom! It’s not “all fun and games” anymore.)

That means, at a minimum:

• Not spreading the Myers-Brigg personality test bullshit
• Not giving the anti-LGBTQIA+ bigots at Chick-Fil-A any money
• Listening to experts (this means: SCIENTISTS, not talk show hosts or politicians)
• Being willing to admit “I don’t know” and then being curious enough to seek the truth
• Stop reading or financially supporting biased news media

Even if we manage to get out of the current COVID-19 hellscape without addressing these flaws, the next catastrophe will hit us just as hard.

Can People’s Minds Be Changed?

No. I don’t think most of the willfully ignorant assholes currently living in America that favor Trump’s presidency today are willing and capable of redemption.

There will be exceptions, and we should remain open to the possibility of some people coming around, but in general most of these jerks will dig their heels in when pressured.

Instead, we’re going to have to wait for them to die off naturally.

What we can do in the meantime is promote better education for the American kids.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ILQepXUhJ98?feature=oembed

A nation of enlightened free-thinkers fully capable of critical thought would be a good thing (even if Carlin thinks it will never happen). And we can get there, eventually.

All it takes is everyone deciding to be humble and actually verify what other people tell them (n.b. by referencing reputable sources).

It might not make a difference today, but in 10 or 20 years, a consistent effort to enable younger Americans to become smarter, wiser, and more empathetic than their parents and grandparents will change the political landscape of our country–and maybe even the world–for the better.

Art by Khia

Of course, the Powers That Be know that, which is why we see bullshit like this keep happening during a pandemic:

With a stroke of his veto pen, Gov. Ron DeSantis wiped out the entire $29.4 million budget for a suite of online education services that have become critical to students and faculty during the Covid-19 outbreak https://t.co/6PMop4SIPv

— POLITICO (@politico) June 30, 2020

Remember, DeSantis is the governor of the state whose COVID-19 infections-per-day graph looks like this:

You can see a clear data pattern with Florida's COVID-19 with a lull each Sunday. I've computed the baseline for this week (Sunday's numbers) and the last two weeks' increase relative to Sunday. We're easily on track to hit 10,000 new cases Friday-ish, maybe even higher. pic.twitter.com/8pnXF5uEwR

— 💙💛 "Dog Boy" Nex' 💙💛 (@NexJql) July 1, 2020

It won’t be easy. Bullshit is everywhere. But it’s doable.

---

Addendum: A Carnival of Stupid

In case you still had any doubt about the potent lethality of American anti-intellectualism, look no further than this story:

Florida teen dies after conspiracy theorist mom takes her to church ‘COVID party’ and tries to treat her with Trump-approved drug: report – https://t.co/Bw3SMVitxx

— Jeffrey Levin 🇺🇦 (@jilevin) July 6, 2020

We have to demand better of ourselves before we can demand better of others. But damn if the bar isn’t really, really low to begin with.

I believe someday we'll open up textbooks and find this screenshot under the definition of "cognitive dissonance". pic.twitter.com/n535Obq6SB

— 🦊 Ennex is trying this again! 🦊 (@EnnexTheFox) July 7, 2020

The White House Press Secretary on Trump's push to reopen schools: "The science should not stand in the way of this."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 16, 2020

https://soatok.blog/2020/07/02/how-and-why-america-was-hit-so-hard-by-covid-19/

#Politics

What happened to Greta Thunberg?
_________________________________

As Greta’s politics have grown and evolved, they reached a point where they now make billionaire media owners, milquetoast executives of major non-profits, and more than a few politicians a little uncomfortable. All she’s done is follow the science, but over time the science has led her to see that the climate crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are massive monetary incentives to destroy the planet in this capitalist system.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP made over $100 billion in profits in 2023 alone. In following the science, Greta had to start examining the capitalist system if she wanted to get down to the root of the climate crisis.

But Greta kept going. When she published The Climate Book in 2022, the then 19-year-old activist had some words for the entire system we live under today:

"We are never going back to normal again because ‘normal’ was already a crisis. What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the Global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.”

That was two years ago, and it’s no surprise she hasn’t been given the spotlight nearly as often since. In fact, in the wake of that book launch, she’s been the subject of countless hit pieces, and her Palestine solidarity activism has been denigrated as well.

Greta went from a cute kid saying that climate change is bad to a young adult rightly charging global systems with not only fueling the climate crisis but also being oppressive and grossly harmful to life in numerous other ways. And, perhaps most importantly, she sees these systems as interconnected and knows that radical change is necessary for the future of life on this planet.
_________________________________

FULL ESSAY -- https://www.jphilll.com/p/gretas-growth

#Politics #Economics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange