Hey! I appreciate you taking the time to write this. I have a lot a lot a lot A LOT of thoughts on Israel/Palestine as a Jewish person who studies the Middle East. Honestly, I too would prefer a religion-free resolution to the one/two state solution issue, but the identity of a Jewish state is central to Zionism, so I don't think that's a fight that anyone is going to win, especially while the ultra Orthodox have a chokehold on Parliament or while the rest of world Jewry is so invested in the "fate" of Israel so to speak.

Going through the unlearning process is really hard and takes a lot out of the people doing the unlearning. It was really easy to absorb all of the messages thrown at me growing up and when I lived in Israel for a short period of time. And then one day the radical notion that whoa Palestinians are people too and your elders don't always know what's best hit me, and I've been working through a decade and a half of shit to get to where I am now. That's something that has to happen on a large scale for us to get anywhere meaningful in this process, but because it's hard people don't want to. And that's a shitty excuse but you see it everywhere.

This is just me throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks so I hope it makes sense

I have some nice poetry news.

I've been nominated twice now for a 2015 Pushcart Prize, for 2 separate poems. A nomination is very nice - but not terribly impressive on resumes, as it's like saying, "Hey! Some person in a place of some power thought that I wrote a good poem once!" Two nominations was both surprising and double-nice.

Now the Pushcart committee or whatever will go through all tens of thousands of the nominations, read all the poems, and select probably a short list which will be published in Real Book Format and available at Real Book Stores, and Real People Who Want To Know Modern Lit will read it. It'd be amazing if I got on that list, but I'm not holding my breath. However, there's also probably going to be another list, Honorable Mentions or something, which may be about as long as the short list in and of itself. Maybe I'm delusional, but I like to think I might be able to get that.

The two poems are "A Great Grave," published by Starline (for those of you who bought a copy of The Taj Mahal,* there's a copy of that poem in the chap), and "My Loneliness Keeps Me Company." Unfortunately neither are on the web in print but I've posted them around on Hubski so if you're curious, I'll link ya or something. Alternatively, I've been recording my poems on Soundcloud, so you can listen to most of my published poems (not all yet, but working on it) here.

Also, I sent out some poems over the weekend, including a set of four witch poems that I just had a feeling a certain press (which I love) would really like. They got back to me within a day, they are taking all four, and they are paying me $15 for the privilege!! That is absolutely the most amount of money I've made off poetry in a sitting. It has helped re-inspire me a little bit. I wrote a lot of witch poems but I haven't worked on them much, I am going to start doing that and see if maybe there's a book here or something. For those curious, the press is FLAPPERHOUSE , and the print version will go live on Dec 22, so if you want, you could order a copy. (Or just donate a little money to them!) However, they usually put up poems from each issue gradually, so I am pretty sure I will also be able to put up a OC post in the next few weeks and share them with you.

So that's good news there. Maybe I just need to be having sex again in order to get back on writing poems.

As if you can understand the depths of my soul which resides forever in shadow.

I rescind the majority of my comments made on this post. The tone of the article pissed me off and clouded my judgement. The simple fact is it's the media's responsibility to protect the disenfranchised and shame the hateful and the fact that most of America is at sea regarding discussing transgender issues means the media needs to step UP, not step back.

I do think that the discussion needs more care than NYMag feels it deserves but the discussion does need to happen.

It's weird to me because you're saying "we" and "us" and "people" but you can't get specific to save your life. It's everybody's job, but to you it's also nobody's job.

Yeah, reddit also has a sub about pics of dead kids, beating women, and so on. They are universally shunned, and nowhere in the regular part of the nation are such ideals common. Nobody considers them as good.

Don't give me that shit, they all have large numbers of subscribers and it's the "front page of the internet." Please tell me who "nobody" is, again, because you're speaking in swaths. If they were universally shunned, they'd get shut down, and they wouldn't have subscribers to begin with. Can't have one when the other exists.

When I hear about someone gunned down on the street, I think of things like the steriotypes that drive people to actions, I think of the complex interactions between police and the people they are over. I think of how and why these things happen

THEY HAPPEN BECAUSE THEY THINK WE'RE LESS THEN HUMAN, HOLY SHIT. Do I really have to pull out the numerous, NUMEROUS texts and emails found amongst police that LITERALLY call Black people animals? The Telemundo guy that compared Michelle Obama to an ape from Planet of the Apes? That's not Reddit, Bio, you can't really cover that shit up!

"You aren't black, you don't know" is not a valid argument, and never will be.

BUT YOU DON'T FUCKING KNOW AND YOU NEVER WILL. It's easy to play the "reasonable man with facts and knowledge!", it happened on Hubski before and I fucking left for a while because of it. You will. literally. Never. Know. I understand this is upsetting: it's the same reason #blackgirlsrock got coopted with #whitegirlsrock, or why #blacklivesmatter got coopted with #alllivesmatter. It's like telling me all about riding a rollercoaster when you've never been on one in your life.

See: holocaust, slavery, and other situations. When people have all freedom taken from them and are treated as if nothing about them matters, as if every part of them is scum and nobody should give them any moral consideration. That is what an animal is. What a non-human is. Cases such as how race is in modern society are not cases of treating anyone like an animal.

Okay, so you are being purposefully facetious and pedantic. At least we got that out of the way.

People don't change without information, people don't change without someone pushing the right button that inspires it. People aren't going to change if you simply expect them to, or think they will out of human decency.

Every person that's stepped up to make change got shot, lol. I've done my part.

It's not up to society to change to their whims, it's up to them to show and prove their morality is the right one.

Oh my God. Acceptance is not "proving that my gayness is the right morality." It's "fucking accept my gayness and stop being a bigoted piece of shit." It''s not "I need to prove that you should treat me better as a Black person", it's "you better fucking treat me better as a Black person".

However, when you are taking time out of your day to correct someone, and scold them for something like considering a rapper flawed, do so in a constructive and progressive way, not in a demeaning and regressive one.

Ah, the Common perspective. The rapper, since I'm ABSOLUTELY SURE you've never heard of him. All "hug the white people so they feel better about themselves, that'll fix things." Maaaaybe in hell.

I would be willing to bet money that not a single person in furgeson considers black people as less than human.

You'd probably lose that bet.

REAAAALY think you would.

My point isn't that such things do not exist, but instead that ranting and raving about how society treats black people as inhuman and how wrong society is will fix nothing, accomplish nothing, and lead to a society that is stuck in a ditch while yelling at each other.

Alright, well you've bitched enough. What's your idea of fixing and accomplishing things, Bio? The riots aren't enough? The protests aren't enough? Asking to be treated like an equal, to not get stopped for walking, or eating, or breathing while Black, that's too much for you? It doesn't accomplish anything? Then what does? Because you need to stop putting the onus of discrimination on the people that have been systematically oppressed.

It's that stereotype, that "blackness" as the author calls it, that needs to go away. Not an impression that black people are less than human.

I...I don't understand how these are mutually exclusive.

Reddit has a literal "chimpire". But you're saying that:

No. We are not living in the sixties. Nobody, outside the small enclaves of KKK members who are shunned by society, considers black people as inhuman. Society does not treat black people as animals, as less than human, or any of such things.

I mean, holy shit, dood. How many times does a Black guy have to get gunned down by a cop on the street before we take a step back and think, "hmm, maybe the way we're treating these people is a little inhuman"?

Also:

No.

is super obnoxious. How the fuck would you know, man? You've been Black for a day, I take it? Where do you define being treated as human? Is your literal definition of the term purposefully facetious? Get followed around in every gas station you've ever been to, etc. etc. I've said it on Hubski a million times before, and then when you feel like a second class citizen, define to me again what being treated like a "human" is.

Exaggerating a point to the nth degree

No. < - And this is purposeful.

Fight that impression, and you will find that there is no progress to be made, because everyone already agrees with you.

No. Again. Let me take a page from the "SJW" handbook. "It's not my job to educate you." By "you," I mean it's not my job to be some Black Experience preacher that needs to explain to White people all the time why they shouldn't treat Black people the way they do. It's not my job to fight any sort of impression. It's not my job to explain why rap isn't the reason SAE talked about hanging niggers from trees, and it sure as shit is not my job to explain why I don't "talk black". It's their job to accept who the hell I am, and the Black experience as a whole - whether it's the Kendrick experience, or the Drake one, or the Kanye one.

I mean, you're right if you say that I do it all the time anyways, which I do, but it's from a place of futility and a slight retching sound that I make in the back of my throat whenever I get online.

Also, go to Ferguson, please tell me that the police officers there agree with me.

I would go on, but really you should just peruse right over here and spend some time seeing the shit that we put up with on the daily, bruh.

This is an article with its heart in the right place and some thought-provoking points, but it misses some big, important stuff. In my opinion, a better argument would have been titled "Why we should design things to be PERMANENT."

So check it:

I’m not suggesting that everything should be designed to be more difficult to use. Toilets have a perfectly good user interface, except in Japan (why do Japanese toilets have a remote control? Where else are you going to be when you flush them?

There's some irony here, particularly as Japan has been branded with one of my all-time favorite phrases: a "technological Galapagos." It's like this: The Japanese have a cultural affinity for extraordinarily complex gadgetry. The average Japanese consumer regards every gadget they own as something to master - a device whose purpose is to provide you endless hours of fun as you explore all of its options. If you can figure it out quickly, it's obviously a piece of shit. This is why Japanese remotes look like this:

And American remotes look like this:

Japanese toilets have remote controls because if all it does is flush it's obviously a proletariat chunk of shit.

Apple had a hell of a time selling iPhones in Japan. iPhones are sophisticated pieces of kit but most everything you need to do on an iPhone can be figured out without a manual. This is actually a design maxim of Ray Kurzweil: The more pages the manual has, the more you have failed at the design. I've always found that kind of ironic because my K2500XS came with three spiral-bound manuals of a combined 1100 pages but you know what? A K2500XS does a lot of things. A toilet it ain't.

Which brings us back to the beginning:

I love my camera. I love it even though I took terrible pictures with it for a month. I love it even though I have to adjust the aperture, worry about depth of field and annoy my family while I twiddle with its metal knobs. I love it because it makes me think: about light, colour, composition. I take fewer pictures with it than I take with my phone, but much better ones. And I’m not alone in my love for my camera. While sales of point and shoot technology continue to decline, the market for fiddly manual cameras is growing nicely.

A Leica is a professional tool. Snapchat is not. Full-manual Leicas were created for professionals and for dedicated amateurs who wanted better shots than they could get from a Brownie.

And that is where the discussion should go- complication for complication's sake is BS. But complication for function's sake is not.

Slick web design keeps us in a kind of unthinking trance, where we buy things on Amazon or post photos on Facebook without ever having to stop and consider what we’re doing. While this is great for retailers, it’s also good for fraudsters. Phishing scams rely on our trance-like state: please reset your password. Follow this link. Enter your password. Thank you. Click, click, click, oops.

Slick web design is intended to make everything easy. Thing is, there's advanced stuff that needs to be done in configuring your Facebook privacy, your eBay account, all sorts of stuff where there are big consequences from glossing over deceptively "simple" design.

Photoshop is a complex program. It takes a lot of mastery to figure it out. It's so unwieldy for photo editing that Adobe folded out all the "photo" stuff into Lightroom. Apple, for their part, decided they could do a better job with a simpler program - Aperture. But it was so simple people didn't use it. Same problem with Final Cut - FCP7 was a complex but feature-rich program. FCPX was "streamlined" to be easy - thereby eliminating lots of the features FCP's actual customers used every day. FCPX is much better for editing wedding videos - call it 'iMovie Pro' - and they sell plenty of licenses for that. But they lost the high end. Nobody professional uses Final Cut anymore.

It's okay to have a complex UI if complexity is warranted. Complexity is warranted if operation is sophisticated. The problem is, it takes time to learn a complex UI so the program needs to have some permanence. And nobody is building anything to exist longer than 18 months.

The command line prompts I used in AutoCAD 9 back in 1992 still work. So do the eleventy million menus and buttons and palettes added since. That's not complexity for complexity's sake, that's configurability by professionals who know what they're doing and are willing to invest the time.

But the market for that sort of program is drying up. People use Sketchup now at 1/5th the price, and its UI changes every generation.

Sketchup is great for fucking around with what your rec room should look like. It sucks ass for actually, you know, designing.

And that's why things should be designed to be permanent. Not because complex is better, but because complex is often necessary.

And the amazing thing is you think I'm not entitled to do exactly that.

Then something happens. You start noticing these peculiar little behaviors that are difficult for everyone else to see. These usually take the form of slight insults, intentional or not,

This is for you, too, longstocking, but I'm calling out nowaypablo because I want him to see it. Pabst, remember how I told you I called a guy a sexist pig at a 4th of July barbecue?

I was trying to leave the BBQ with my brother and a female friend. I had driven there, but then drunk quite a bit. I still had my keys in my possession, however as I possess a remote key I can have the keys in my possession and as long as I'm sitting in the car, anyone can drive. Additionally, these keys were not visible.

As we were leaving - I suppose I was leading my brother and friend through the house to leave - a tall guy stepped in front of me and told me I wasn't driving. I said "OK, I'm not driving," and kept walking. The guy continued to step in my way, refusing to let me leave. I didn't see what his issue was, as I had two people with me and I knew one of them was fine to drive. It was clearly visible that these two people were with me and were leaving with me. I actually don't even know why this guy assumed I was driving except that I was leading the way.

My friend and my brother both stepped up. My friend said "That's okay, she's not going to drive," and asked me to give her my keys. I did so. The guy continued to refuse to let me leave. My female friend said "Look, it's fine, there's two of us here, one of us is okay to drive, it's okay" to the guy. He kind of talked over her. But then my tall, good-looking brother spoke up. "That's fine," he said. "It'll be fine."

The guy looked at him and said "OK, you can drive." And that's when I said "Excuse me, you sexist pig, are you really saying he's fine to drive but she's not? You're a fucking asshole." Because you know what?

Less than an hour ago I'd done two back-to-back shots with my brother. He'd had at least three beers (as had I). While he was a male and had a higher tolerance, I knew my brother was on his way to drunk. I was already pissed off at this random dude because hell, I hadn't seen him around the party, there was no way he knew how much I had had to drink so who was he to tell me I couldn't drive? (Regardless of whether it was true.) But on top of this, now, he was standing there ignoring my female friend who had had 3 beers over the course of 3 hours and was good to drive, my female friend who was telling him everything was fine. He refused to listen to two women but as soon as a drunk man spoke up and appeared to "fix" the situation, this other male was willing to stand down.

I feel like that is a great example of the small sexism that most people don't notice. This guy didn't have context and knowledge that i did but he still felt comfortable telling me who could drive my car when I left to leave a party - sexist thing #1 - and then he chose the male over the female for no perceivable reason and, indeed, when the male was not legal to drive.

Guy was a fucking douche, man.

BAN EVERYBODY.

More people need to know that there is a worm that eats and shits out of the same hole.

The thing is, we don't know the difference between women and minorities who don't get involved in a certain field (using "field" loosely to include bitcoin) as opposed to those who have been discouraged from that field via societal pressures or even direct discrimination. It is mentioned elsewhere in this thread that it has been shown that job/class candidates with equal grades, degrees, and schools, but different genders, have different acceptance ratios. We are assuming that Bitcoin probably holds true to this standard as well. After all, there is no logical reason that women wouldn't be about as equally interested in Bitcoin. There is no such thing as a field that men are naturally drawn to vs. that women are naturally drawn to. I do not believe that women are naturally "nurterers" any more so than men, for instance; I do not believe that women are naturally drawn more to teaching or to teaching the youth, even though they tend to be overrepresented in lower education (but underrepresented in upper education, where, by the way, there is more associated prestige - hmmmmmm).

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that these women already exist in respect to Bitcoin, but for some reason or another have opted out of exploring their interest. So, whose responsibility is it to promose more even representation? Why, if it is society's fault, then it is society's responsiblity, which means in turn it is everyone's responsibility to promote more even representation. You do this by treating women and minorities as equals. Every day, every time you interact with them. You do this by respecting individuals of the LGBT spectrum; instead of asking men about their wife when you see a wedding band, ask about their "spouse." (That's just a very small example; it doesn't apply directly but I wanted to point out, it's not just women. It's not just the visible minorities. It's the LGBT crew too, and I mean every letter of that spectrum.) You do this by monitoring your thoughts as well as your actions and you do this realizing that you are not perfect and probably don't realize ways in which you may be discriminating (which the privilege article should help any reader realize) and looking for those and trying to stop those.

You do it by speaking up when you hear other people discriminating in the workplace. Or when you see it.

There are 2 women on my company's senior leadership panel or whatever they call themselves, and 6 men. All are white. I got an opportunity to talk one-on-one with one of the women and I told her I wanted to see more women. I told her I knew that this was as much a product of availability as anything else but I told her that as a woman, it would be more comforting to me to see a more equal distribution. And she told me she also wanted to see more diversity; more color, more LGBT people. I realize that in order for someone to get to senior leadership, they need to climb up the lower rungs first - I'm willing to do that. I know that it's nothing against the 6 men who got to those positions, that they may not be racist in any way at all, and she assured me that they were actually quite accepting of minorities and so on. I don't have a problem with all those old white men. I have a problem with the fact that the given standard for senior leadership is "old white man." I want to change that. I'm willing to do it myself.

Blind interviews if you have to, if we're talking about jobs. Blind and non-vocal. Of course, that's not really possible.

It should be a sad fact that it was no small comfort to me that when I got my first job, all my interviews were conducted over the phone, and not face-to-face. I repeatedly turned to this fact as reassurance that I had indeed earned my position, inasmuch as I could. I'm not a Person of Color (PoC) but I do know we judge people based on their appearance, especially women. I was glad to know it wasn't a factor with me.