soliflux

I don't want to define myself just yet

[taobanker @taobanker]

boomer origin stories are always like "Finally at 35 years old I decided to get serious with my life -- fortunately there was a national shortage of hedge fund analysts"

[Blue Bear @Bluebearmonkey]

50 years ago, China made a secret deal with the heavens where every national failure, every humiliation, every embarrassment, every loss… will be inflicted upon and the suffering born by China’s men’s football team.

Today, we salute your sacrifice. 🫡

[竱肇 @liuzhao_cn]

@moonmin_03 By the way, I'm still shocked that things like Chinese gacha games or Douyin trends would actually become a serious topic of discussion outside of China. Our generation was constantly fed the idea that anything Chinese could only ever be liked by Chinese people themselves.

[The Last Farm @TheLastFarm]

Romanticizing all the shittiest parts of NYC is loser behavior. The humans are what make the city cool & interesting, not the awful infrastructure or the smell of garbage or the ludicrous cost of living or any of the other failures people try to rationalize

[onionweigher 🧅⚖️ @onionweigher]

hmm
yeah

[ROYZ @royzkingin]

To achieve anything significantly big in life, you must be disgusted by mediocrity.

[soliflux @soligenous_]

@ninja_lt60 @edwardW2 wow so cool!

[Tinaᛏᛁᚾᚨ ከሰማየ ꀑꃈꃀꃅꃴ @ninja_lt60]

When I write notes on the first four major historical records of China in this format, they seem much simpler and easier to remember.

[Eivor @Eivor_Koy]

On X you can always see Chinese videos being called “Japanese” and things originated from China being labeled Japanese — sometimes even smeared as “China stole it,” like with Mocha (抹茶).

Here’s the actual story:

Mocha (powdered tea) originated in China during the Tang Dynasty (7th–10th centuries) and reached its peak in the Song Dynasty. Tea leaves were steamed, dried, and ground into fine powder, then whisked with hot water in an elegant “pointing tea” style popular among scholars.

Strong evidence comes from China’s Famen Temple (法门寺), a Buddhist temple over 1,700 years old with an underground palace containing undisturbed royal treasures. Among them is one of the earliest known royal tea sets, including a gilt silver tea caddy woven out of metallic yarn (Picture 1), a gilt silver tortoise-shaped tea box (Picture 2), a tea roller-grinder (Picture 3), and a silver stove. As part of the set, a “Tiao Da Zi” (调达子, Picture 4) mixing container was used — in ancient China, tea was prepared like a meal: ground into powder, mixed with spices into a paste, then whisked with hot water.

In the late 12th century, Japanese monk brought the technique and seeds from China. Japan refined it with shading methods and made it central to Zen Buddhism and the tea ceremony, turning it into a symbol of harmony and tranquility. While China later shifted to loose-leaf tea, Japan preserved the powdered form.

Today, Mocha is booming globally as a superfood. China has reclaimed its place as the world’s top producer, with Guizhou Province (especially Jiangkou near Fanjing Mountain) as a major hub — often called China’s “Mocha Capital.” Its misty high-altitude climate is perfect for quality tea, and modern factories have made it a big exporter.

In short: Born in China, popular in Japan, thriving again in China.

[//ɍØᵽɇx @null_ropex]

apophenia, the perception of meaningful patterns in unrelated data, is considered a symptom when it produces incorrect connections and genius when it produces correct ones, and the cognitive process running underneath both outcomes is identical, which means pattern recognition at high sensitivity is the same instrument that produced every scientific breakthrough and every conspiracy theory, and what separates them is not the cognitive style but the quality of the reality-testing protocol running alongside it

[icecreampizzer.art @ 🟦️🌫 @icecreampizzer]

"Art is not inherently political" the writers of the minions movie had to exile those little freaks for 200 years until the 60s because they realized too late that making them follow "the evilest people on earth" has very ugly implications, to the surprise of nobody else but them

[ลูกคนจีน @thaibornchinese]

ไหนๆแล้วเอาคลิปพัฒนาการดื่มชาของจีนมาให้ดูดีกว่า ในช่วงราชวงศ์ซ่งคนจีนฮิตบดชาและตีฟองมากๆค่ะที่ญป.เอาไปต่อยอดทำมัตฉะ แต่ๆๆๆการดื่มชายุคนั้นเน้นติดแกลมโชว์รวยมากกว่าเอารสนะคะ จนกระทั่ง…

ตอนต่อตั้งราชวงศ์หมิง ฮ่องเต้จูหยวนจางที่มีพื้นฐานเดิมมาจากชาวบ้านชาวนา บอกพอเถอะติดแกลม สั่วยกเลิกชาแกลมๆให้ขุนนางข้าราชมาพัฒนาทำชาใบอร่อยๆ กินง่ายๆ ชงน้ำดื่มพอ จนกลายเป็นรากฐานชาใบแบบปจบ.ค่ะ

[hanzala. @juliusssiezure]

Persepolis eurocentrism also reminds me of Fanon. Fanon was concerned with how colonized elites seek legitimacy through categories established by europe. desire isn't necessarily 'i want to become european' but 'I want europe to recognize me as civilized modern rational cultured'

[TheFilmist 💜 @HenryJBaugh]

My god, this article is saying EVERYTHING THAT I'VE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS. This is cathartic to read.

[Zito @_Zeets]

There’s an essay that talks about the trope of female characters—moms, wives, sisters, girlfriends, friends etc—having to die within this context. I’m going to try to find it but reading about it in this essay is also fascinating.

[St. Wilding Gyres @wilding_gyres]

He’s absolutely right, and all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from you liberals and Westoid Marxists proves his point: individual consumption is your highest value

[leftpain @left_plain]

there’s a billion “leftist” dissident Chinese twitter accounts who, every time there’s a new right wing coup/US military action, seem to end up cheerleading it. It feels incomprehensible until you understand it as a form of cathexis for a hypothetical Chinese state collapse.

[Rikali ✨🏳️‍⚧️ @Rikalii]

I may be in the minority, but I actually like this question. It is, ultimately, a very pro-trans question. At least, if you take it seriously and not just as a gotcha question.

If you ask "what is a woman" (or a man, but for simplicity's sake let's take that as assumed), you are essentially asking for a definition. For some criteria that can be applied to anyone, and that will faithfully tell you whether that person is, in fact, a woman.

That's fine. Nothing wrong with definitions. But let's be very clear what we're thus looking for a test that:

can distinguish women from non-women, and

successfully identifies all women. That is, it must be 100% accurate. It cannot leave any women out, and cannot accidentally identify any non-women as women. (i.e. no false positives and no false negatives.)

100% is a pretty stringent level of accuracy to reach, but it necessarily must be so: the question essentially asks "what are the defining qualities of women", in which case all women must share those qualities, whatever they might be, literally by definition. And conversely, no non-woman can also share all such qualities, or by definition, that person would also be a woman!

And anyway, whoever asked the "what is a woman" question can hardly cringe at requiring such a high standard, can they? One presumes they want a reliable answer to their question, right?

Moreover, as a less purely logical but definitely common-sense criteria, we should add one more thing to our test:

it should agree with "obvious" cases.

That is to say, if you can point to someone who everyone agrees is a woman (e.g. Gal Godot or somebody), then the test should also indicate that they're a woman. Likewise, the test should never identify as a woman someone everyone agrees is a man. Otherwise, you permit non-sensical tests which, for example, might be pointlessly restrictive or pointlessly broad, to the extent that they are useless for any actual purpose within society. There will always be edge cases of people where everyone doesn't all agree that that person is a woman, but that's exactly why we need this test, right? That's exactly why the question is being asked in the first place. We want a test that is definitely correct for the obvious cases, so we can have confidence that it's right for the edge cases too.

And again, whoever asked the question shouldn't object to that requirement either, because after all, they are asking the question in the context of a society, and one presumes they want to be able to apply the test in actual social settings.

Now that we know what properties such a test should have--gives a yes/no answer for everyone and is never wrong (which implicitly means it will agree with the obvious cases anyway)--we can start to ask what the test is looking for.

Here, we can work from the outside in, from the superficial to the internal, and see where we end up.

Perhaps the measure of a woman is in clothing, hairstyles, and makeup? The most obvious, most superficial measure of all. Except, no, that can't be right. Such a test would identify skillful drag queens as women, even though everyone (including the drag queens!) agrees that they are not women.

Fine, then. Get rid of the clothes and go one layer deeper. Maybe the measure of a woman is her boobs and vagina. Except, no, that can't be right either. What if you have a vagina but no boobs? Either because they're too small, or because of breast cancer, or because you're pre-pubescent? And boob-growth is a continuous process, so how do you draw the line between what is and isn't "enough boob" to qualify someone as a woman?

Well, if boobs are problematic, then what about reproductive capability? Except, again, what if you don't have that? There are plenty of people who society absolutely agrees are women even though they're infertile. Maybe they have really bad PCOS. Maybe they had a hystercetomy. Maybe their bodies never developed a uterus in the first place (this happens in something like 1 out of every 10000 female births).

Ok, forget reproduction. Maybe the measure of a woman is the absence of a penis! Ha! What about that? Sure. So long as you're willing to say that soldiers who got their dicks blown off when their Humvee drove over an IED are women, then I guess that works. Oh, you're not willing to say that? Yeah, neither am I. Also, that fails the "obvious cases" criteria.

Is it hormones? Does that determine womanhood? Well, no, because a) hormones change throughout life so there's no single determinative standard you could use for hormone levels, and b) again sometimes medical conditions mess with your hormones in ways that would make the test disagree with some obvious cases of women.

But the chromosomes! Show me those two X chromosomes! Well, hate to disappoint you, but there are a lot of genetic conditions that can yield people who are obvious cases of women yet don't have the typical two-X chromosome pattern. People who, if this was your test, you would absolutely for sure swear were completely obvious women, until you looked at their chromosomes. The most extreme example of this is CAIS, which yields an individual with XY chromosomes but with the most extreme feminization possible because their bodies simply do not respond at all to androgen hormones. Like, literally the most feminine people possible are CAIS XY individuals. And if that's not enough to get someone to shut up about chromosomes, then I don't know what.

Fine, so not chromosomes. Maybe the measure of womanhood is something less tangible. Maybe it's life experiences. After all, women are socialized different and have different experiences growing up. Women are subject to marginalizations that men aren't. Perhaps this is the test we need! (This is a frequent TERF argument, by the way.) Except it doesn't work, because socialization and marginalization are very different from one society to another. Which means that, like with the boobs, you can't have one standard that correctly identifies all women. This fails one of the basic requirements for our test. And, coarsely speaking, such a test would say that women in matriarchal societies, where women are the politically dominant gender, are not women. Or that the Queen of England is not a woman because she has too much status and power. C'mon.

So, jeez, what the hell is left? Everything we can possibly measure doesn't work because some people still manage to be obviously women while not fitting that measurement! And, yeah. That's the problem with human diversity, borne of our messy biology and equally messy nature as social animals. We are so diverse that any such measures will inevitably fail.

But there is one thing left. One thing that doesn't have this problem. That thing is a woman's inner gender identity. This one thing is different precisely because it is not subject to external measurement. It is only measurable subjectively. Internally, within the woman's own mind.

Which is exactly the conclusion we should come to. Because the measure of a woman--that is, whether you should label someone else as a woman--is not something you can measure. It is not something externally visible, not even if you amplify the power of your vision with microscopes and biochemical testing.

The measure of a woman is that her gender identity is female. And because gender identity is inherently subjective, because it is a phenomenon that emerges from the complex operation of our minds, because it is an essential aspect of our deepest selves, it can only be observed by our selves.

I, and I alone, am capable of observing what my gender identity truly is. You, and you alone, are capable of observing what your gender identity truly is. Neither of us has any authority whatsoever to declare what the other's gender identity is based on anything we can observe or even theoretically observe.

If you want to know if someone is a woman, the literal and logical best you can do is to ask her, and to believe her answer. Subjective determination must be the the measure of a woman, because all other tests fail. This is all that's left.

That is why "what is a woman", or "what is a man", are such a profoundly pro-trans questions. Because if you actually take those questions seriously, they force you down a line of reasoning which ends at respecting everyone's autonomy to determine and assert what their own identity is.

[soliflux @soligenous_]

@Rikalii Kudos to her, she went beast mode

[Wynn @slimygirlholes]

One of the most basic and primary Marxist texts talks about how the subjugation of women to men is a direct result of the class structure