The Packbats' Weblog

Caveat: we are not pilots, we have never been pilots, we have other priorities. This whole thread was us being fans of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot".

I think if there's one thing to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it is that "am I the asshole?" is a much less useful question than "how did the totality of habits, tools, knowledge, communication, and so forth - because it's never just one thing - result in something unfortunate happening, and what can I learn from this to avoid such things happening in the future?"

I think if there's two things to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it's that if you've had less than 21 hours of sleep in the past 72 (numbers to be adjusted as necessary based on your own medical history, but that's the standard for pilots), you ought to bear in mind that you are at elevated risk of fatigue-driven mistakes.

Anyway, now we're going to fix the "it's totally normal to have two to-do list alerts all the time" problem. The dentist one we can do on Thursday, so we'll hide it until Thursday, and the cmus one we can do now.

*opens the man page*

(This explanation assumes you are confidently capable of long division. We can add an appendix about that if one is needed.)

If you want to divide one by three, you have a problem: either you can't because 1 < 3, or you can't because the long division never ends - you just keep getting more 3s. So, we make a convention: when we have a repeating part that never ends, we just indicate what repeats and let that stand for what we would get if we could write infinity decimal places. And the nice thing is that this works - you can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division the same way you did before, you just have to figure out what the result and its new recurring decimal will look like.

But a weird thing happens sometimes. If you multiply one-third by three, you get one. But if you multiply 0.333... by 3, all those threes become nines and you have 0.999.... So either our nice new strategy just broke ... or we have to declare that 0.999... equals 1. But in math, you can't just declare it, you have to show that it works to do it that way.

So, this is important. All of elementary school mathematics is riding on this. Can we prove 0.999... equals 1? We know it should - a third times three is one - but can we prove it?

Here's two arguments, and I think you can make both hold up in court.

(This began as this fedi thread.)

Bigotry is specifically the exercise of power within and by a system like kyriarchy to fuck over marginalized groups in favor of privileged groups. We're not professionals, but that's our best understanding of the definition.

That said, kyriarchy isn't self-consistent. Kyriarchy can contain hatred of men just fine - hating men is a lot less threatening to it than hating injustice, so threats to the system can be diverted to individuals within it...

...and especially diverted to marginalized individuals within it.

So, yeah, misandry is real. You can tell it's real because autistic people, black people, trans people, disabled people, PoC, children, migrants ... we all get attacked. People take a power structure, turn it into a description of a villain, and use it to attack the vulnerable. It's not hard - all it takes is attacking people you hate with things you're told are hateful traits, and never ever ever listening to them when they try to teach you to be better.

This is half a tangent, but we still like Jay Smooth's video "How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist" and its distinction between the "what they are" conversation and the "what they did" conversation. Pretty near every time we try to talk about something we have a problem with, we try to talk about actions we have a problem with - about what they did - and, when necessary, let people draw conclusions from what they did about what they might do next.

(By the way, Jay Smooth's followup TEDx talk, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race", is terrific. It's worth watching both.)

I'm gonna be honest with y'all as people who've been around on the Internet for a hot minute: we've seen some bullshit. But I'm also gonna be honest with you as a disabled genderqueer transfem Black plural system: "what they are" got fuck-all to do with whether you got bigotry in you. You got bigotry in you. You got that for free.

So when we're talking about misconduct, we leave "what they are" out of it. We even avoid "reply guy" and "mansplaining" and other suchlike phrases. Are they doing harm?

Are they doing harm?

Like, seriously, is anyone being hurt here? Is this just weird and uncomfortable and makes you feel bad? Because it's okay to feel bad, feeling bad isn't a sin.

And if people are getting hurt, what kind of hurt is it, where did it start, and why? If one person weren't fighting, what would the other person be doing? (That last question is inspired by "Lady Eboshi is Wrong" from Innuendo Studios.) (Lady Eboshi transcript.)

It doesn't matter which people in the conversation are being called what kinds of oppressor. Calling your critics your oppressors is the easiest damn thing. And the kyriarchy doesn't care why you attack its favorite targets. It just wants those targets taken down.