I’m a socially awkward person, but because the world reads me as female, I’m allowed to be kind to strangers and friendly to children I don’t know. Which is good, because that’s my instinct.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have that instinct squashed/made suspect. https://t.co/c5WoGpQFof

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) April 28, 2021

I can tell you that it really sucks to be treated as always suspect.

And as an adult man, you get that a lot. Constantly. Do something nice for someone female? YOU MUST WANT TO FUCK HER.

Be friendly to any kid anywhere? YOU DIRTY PEDOPHILE!

Men often have to go out of their way to be unkind so as not to be perceived as creeps. I don’t think most women really realize this, so I am glad Laurie brought it up.

All this talk of “authentic self” and “authenticity” in general is such a sham. It’s just BS. It’s a neoliberal con job and when you’re out in the world doing things, it matters not a whit.

Esse quam videri: “to be, rather than to seem” is how I’d prefer to live my life.

I need to research this claim more, but interesting stuff.

The brain gets even wilder when we zoom in. Since electrochemical thresholds activate neurons, a single proton could, in principle, be the difference that causes a neuron to fire. If a proton spontaneously jumped out of its atomic bonds, in what physicists call “quantum tunneling,” this could cause a cascade of sudden neuron activity. So even at the tiniest measurable level, the neuron’s physical structure has a non-binary indeterminacy.

The problem is that proton tunneling is much rarer than electron tunneling since the proton is 2000 times heavier than the electron. But if it happens at all in the brain, this means that you have true non-deterministic thoughts sometimes, because proton tunneling is by definition non-deterministic.

Be the cosmic horror you want to see in the world.