Jump to content

kj35

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    2,410

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    4

 Content Type 

Posts posted by kj35

    Moonfall

    in Recommended Reading, Viewing and Audio

    Posted · Edited by kj35

    On 3/31/2022 at 3:51 PM, Nairda2022 said:

    The director, Roland Emmerich, has an interesting wikipedia entry.

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Emmerich

     

    Interestingly, the credits to 10,000 BC includes a reference to Graham Hancock's 'Fingerprints of the Gods'.

     

    And anyone who has read "Who Built The Moon" will recognise the references to the moon being hollow mentioned by the character Dr Houseman.

     

     

    Interesting to read that Nairda when I was watching the film I immediately thought it had a lot of the day after tomorrow themes running through it, as it now seems it's the same director that would explain it! 

    Minor News items - Not worth a thread of their own

    in Today's News

    Posted

    16 hours ago, EnigmaticWorld said:

    Microplastics are found in live human LUNGS for the first time – proving we are breathing them in from the air
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10691181/Scientists-discover-microplastics-live-human-lungs-time.html

    This doesn't surprise me. In my former life my job entailed looking at a lot of products.  A main one flagged up was nano particles used as 'silver ' in things like deodorants. Only after these silver nanoparticles were in widespread product use was it ' discovered ' the nano particles crossed the blood brain barrier where previously it was thought they wouldn't.  By this point  silver nano technology was in such widespread use it was too late to do anything and a worldwide ' watch and see' approach was taken. Interestingly and this is MY THEORY only most of these silver nano particles were in men's deodorant.  And there seems to be a marked increase in male Parkinson's diagnosis.

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 2

    Food

    in General Chat

    Posted

    The traditional time to plant potatoes on UK allotments is good Friday. It was a rare day off work for the working class man and they spent the whole day spring planting. It's a moveable feast that links with the moon cycle. Ours go in next Friday.

    • Like 3

    Transgender Trend

    in Politics & Social Engineering

    Posted · Edited by kj35

    Decent articles I've previously read on drag being tantamount to woman face are disappearing off the internet. Posting this one here before this too goes. Whatever anyone thinks of feminism, the fact is women's voices are being silenced, what they are, their very essence is being reduced to ridicule.

     

    ARTICLES, COMMENTARY, FEMININITY, RACE

    APRIL 25, 2014

    Why has drag escaped critique from feminists and the LGBTQ community?

    by MEGHAN MURPHY

    Daytona Bitch in blackface

    I don’t intentionally go to many drag shows. Not as a political or even personal decision — in fact, it’s not really something I’ve thought about all that much. I suppose that form of entertainment simply has never interested me. That said, it’s been around for so many years that these performances are practically mainstream — many a documentary has been made about drag culture and drag queens and drag performances are often a part of gay/queer nights, fundraisers, and other events. It’s pretty impossible to have missed drag. But because it isn’t very much a part of my world, I think it’s escaped my radar in terms of a feminist analysis.

    The other night I was at a bar for a gay night and a portion of the evening featured drag queens. As I watched, I was struck by how accepted drag is by liberals and progressives — people who will, without a second thought, call out things like blackface and yellowface, which are understood by most (frustratingly there are some who continue to need education on why blackface isn’t funny or ok) to be racist.

    Why is drag any different? Really, I’m asking. It’s possible I’m missing something here…

    To me it seems equivalent to cultural appropriation or the way in which white people have mocked black people, Asian people, Indigenous people, and pretty much every other race/ethnicity that isn’t theirs, under the guise of “performance” or “satire.” Why is it cute or funny or entertaining for men to mock women via drag? Why is it not considered to be a form of cultural appropriation, but with regard to gender? Why have progressives and mainstream feminists avoided critique of these performances, in large part?

    I imagine that the defense of drag would include arguments that say this performance of femininity is so exaggerated that it doesn’t mock women so much as it mocks a cartoonish version of extreme femininity, but I’m unconvinced that turning women into extreme, cartoonish charicatures that are to be mocked is particularly progressive — rather, it feels regressive to me. There must be a reason women don’t do this to men — turning masculinity into entertainment or a joke, that is.

    Why is it funny for men to dress up as women and not for women to dress up as men? There’s something about this performance that says that femininity and, in turn, women, are a joke (just like white people dressing up as “Indians” for Halloween turn Indigenous peoples and cultures into a joke or simply a costume one can put on or take off at will). If only being a woman was simply a costume one could take off…

    Last year, a drag queen named Daytona Bitch was fired from a Toronto Pride event for a blackface performance in which, as Laura Kane reports, “she dressed up as Miss Cleo, a kitschy telephone psychic from the late ‘90s, complete with black face paint.”

    “After tweeting photos of the costume, she received several outraged responses on social media from members of the LGBTQ community.” And rightly so. But where is the LGBTQ community on drag? Why is it understood that the appropriation of a marginalized ethnicity, race or culture is facilitated by white privilege and that it’s offensive, but not that the same arguments could be applied to a group of men (who benefit from male privilege) who appropriate femininity as a form of entertainment?

    In a 2006 paper, entitled “Imitating Others As Control: Is Drag Sexist/Racist?” Kirsten Anderberg writes:

    “When men dress in drag and supposedly imitate women, it is most often very sexist in a remarkably similar way to the whites imitating racial minorities… All the things I have shunned as part of the ancient ‘cult of womanhood,’ all the superficial, commercialized, and fake aspects of ‘femininity’ that I have fought to be freed from, these men were embracing as their ‘womanhood!’ Tons of make up, huge dyed bouffant hair-dos, binding lingerie, heels, nylons, shaving…and these men in drag who were supposedly acting like women, also acted giddy, stupid, shallow…it is odd to me that this could be seen as anything but blatant sexism.”

    While there have been the odd critique here and there, I’ve seen little from mainstream feminism or from the LGTBQ community about the sexism of drag. In a post from back in 2011 called “Is drag sexist,” Kelly Kleiman asks: “Why do we despise performance in blackface and celebrate performance in drag? Is blackface considered an insult and drag a joke because of some inherent difference between them, or because African-Americans won’t tolerate ridicule while the women’s movement is still trying to prove we have a sense of humor?”

    And I can’t help but wonder the same thing. Feminists are routinely accused of being “no fun,” having no sense of humour, and generally hating everything. We try very hard, as women, to be “in on the joke.” We pretend to like porn, join in on rape chants, laugh at rape jokes, and self-objectify, claiming that we like and feel empowered by our own oppression — we’re owning it, and therefore it’s ok. Wishful postfeminism, I’d call it.

    Kleiman writes: “There was ridicule of African-Americans. ‘Look how silly they are! But look how they laugh, and doesn’t that prove they’re happy in the confinement in which we’ve placed them?’ Likewise, men who dress up as women and adopt stereotyped feminine behaviors are comical because of their stereotyped behavior, and the inference the audience is encouraged to draw is not that stereotypes are comical but that women are.”

    Beyond that, it feels as though drag queens are given free reign to insult women and adopt over-the-top sexist language (bitch, ho, etc.) and objectified depictions of women in ways that women don’t even get away with, within a feminist context.

    After watching a documentary about the famous drag queen, Divine, Julie Bindel wrote: “He played, according to his manager, female characters who were ‘trash’, ‘filth’ and ‘obscenity in bucket loads.’ But Divine was born into a conservative, middle-class family and played on nasty stereotypes of trailer trash women to get a laugh. In his films Divine called his female co-stars ‘sluts.'”

    So a privileged male is permitted to mock women and use sexist, derogatory language because, what? “Performance art?” “Humour?” Help me out here…

    To be clear, I don’t think that drag queens are all intentionally working to subordinate women (but who knows, I’ve never asked any), nor do I think your enjoyment of drag performances (if you do indeed enjoy them) make you a necessarily Bad and Wrong, misogynist person. But I do think that the unwillingness of the LGTBQ community and mainstream feminism to talk about drag as something that is no more acceptable than any other kind of cultural appropriation or than white people’s efforts to turn ethnicity and race into a stereotype and a joke, is significant.

    After Daytona Bitch was fired, Toronto Prides’ executive director Kevin Beaulieu said about the performance: “It doesn’t meet our mission or our mandate, which is to celebrate the full diversity of Toronto’s LGBTQ community.” The statement begs the question: where are women in that “celebration” of “diversity?” Do we matter at all? Or are we just a joke?

     

    • Thanks 1

    Shill, idiot, or genuine

    in General Chat

    Posted

    2 minutes ago, Morpheus said:

    We all make mistakes, the trick is learning from them and not making the same mistake again. Easy to do in this jungle of mis/disinformation. The war on information rages so make sure you traverse these waves with core values and you can't go wrong. Good to see you back by the way. 😎👍

    Thank you. May not be for long the way it's going. Couple of more things I've wanted to share for a long time and then after that we'll see.

    • Like 1

    A new tech thread

    in Technology, Transhumanism and AI

    Posted · Edited by kj35
    Added in link

    Petri dish grown mini brains used to power computers. Source JohnsHopkins

     

     https://caat.jhsph.edu/programs/oi/

     

     

    'Organoid Intelligence


    The human brain is unmatched by modern information technology: In 2013, the world’s fourth largest computer took 40 minutes to model one second of 1% of a human’s brain activity[1]. The storage capacity of a single human brain has been estimated at 2,500 TB[2]. To give some perspective on energy requirements, it would take 34 massive coal-powered plants generating 500 megawatts each to equal the power demands that US based data centers would require to hold this much data (Masanet et al., 2016). Brains, on the other hand, have been estimated to be about 100,000 times more energy-efficient than computers, and could meet the same data storage capacity with only 1600 kilowatts of energy, illustrating the immense implications of brain-directed computing for energy conservation.

    Besides massive increase in energy efficiency, it is becoming more and more clear that the human brain outperforms man-made computers on many levels such as decision taking on incomplete datasets. For this project, we are proposing to learn from and utilize the inherent computing capacity of human brain organoids; to harness the computing power from human brain organoids.

    The last six years have seen a revolution in brain cell culture moving away from traditional flat monolayer cultures to more organ-like three-dimensional (3D) organized cultures. In 2016, the PI’s group developed the first standardized and mass-produced brain organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells (Pamies et al., 2017). These brain organoids are spontaneously electrophysiologically active and were the first human brain model to show myelination of axons, which makes electrical conductivity about 100 times more efficient. Cell density is about 1,000fold higher than in 3D boosting synapse formation. Each of these brain organoids is made up of about 30-40 thousand cells and is thus roughly one three millionth the size of the human brain (theoretically equating to 800 MB of the brain’s memory storage). Our team is currently producing thousands of these per week in a small incubator and is fully prepared to scale this effort.

    To date, the term biological computing has been mainly used to describe the use of biochemical data storage systems (i.e. using DNA as a medium for digital information storage). Our vision, however, is to expand this definition to include brain-directed computing (Organoid Intelligence, O.I.); to scale the current brain-organoid model from ~30,000 neural cells to ~10 million (1 gram (g) of cultured biomatter), and use biofeedback to systematically train it with increasingly complex sensory inputs and output opportunities. In essence, we will move to O.I. by interfacing the brain organoid with computers, sensors and machine interfaces to facilitate supervised and unsupervised learning. Ultimately, this field of study could enable many complex functions of software-based artificial intelligence (A.I.) to be performed more efficiently, faster, and at a fraction of the energy costs.'

    • Like 1
    • Sad 1
×
×
  • Create New...