Joshua Rothman considers lookism—discrimination against people who are unattractive—and whether we should see it like other forms of discrimination, such as racism.

As above, so below: If you’re afraid of who you are or of criticism, you can end up doing some really stupid stuff to try to prove you’re something you aren’t and don’t need to be. That’s especially true if you start being dishonest with yourself about who you are, and miss information that is really important to avoiding real regrets down the road. This is not easy for the kinds of people who get obsessed with politics to understand, because they are often neurotic control freaks, but people will actually respond more positively to you just being your sometimes off-putting self if you’re willing to work with them—and that’s easier to do when you’re not twisted in pretzels about gender discourse.

I really don’t get politics. For that matter, I’m starting to think no one in my party does.

In which I opine on the origins and nature of the growing gender polarisation and sketch a vision of a very grim future, one in which we’ll have to choose between The Longhouse and The Gooncave

via: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/female-neediness-is-real-but-its

This essay argues that feminism is impossible. After examining a recent #MeToo episode—a bad sexual encounter between actor Aziz Ansari and a woman named Grace—as a case study in feminist disappointment, the essay turns to several key seventies feminist texts to reconstruct their theories of bad sex. By taking bad sex as the model for women’s oppression, seventies feminists crafted a culturalist theory of patriarchy logically culminating in lesbian separatism. This theory, while containing the essence of all feminisms, proved unactionable: feminism could not outlaw women’s stubborn desires for men. Hence, by the eighties, some feminists had reframed bad sex as rape, calling upon the state to police sex in lieu of changing women’s minds.

Friggin’ awesome piece.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmutjUfrpQQ

Thiings is a curated online collection featuring a wide array of visual inspiration, design assets, and beautiful resources, including tools for creating aesthetic link-in-bio pages.

via: https://lobste.rs/s/rhxsow/monospace_web

Turing’s Strange Seas of Thought North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) Austin, Texas, June 23, 2012 Bruce Sterling Thanks for that introduction, Talking Alan Turing Bot. I’m glad to be here at the summer school to vent some personal issues about logic, language

For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we ac