Temporarily Protected and other statuses

[asakiyume]

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't all have the same level of safety. A bacterium is a different level of threat depending on the strength of your immune system; oppressive politics always have a favored exempted few, etc.

And I had to laugh at our current age's fascination with quantification. On a scale of 1 to 10, sure.

My tutee has a green card. This makes her situation a lot safer than that of the dozen new employees I was in the company of the other day who were from Haiti. They all have a card showing temporary protected status. ... We know how secure that status is ... But for the time being at least, it makes them safer than people with no legal status at all.

I love what people do with the power of imagination: we create all sorts of things; we can create elaborate shared worlds called things like "the economy" or "nation-states." We joint-roleplay these so intensely that it becomes our reality. It's like a picture book I remember from childhood called Conrad's Castle, where a boy throws a stone up in the air and it sticks there, and then another and another, and soon he builds a whole castle up there. It all falls down when a hater says "Hey, you can't do that!" ... But then he says "I can too," and rebuilds it.

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

Comments

[sovay]

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

So mote it be.

(Precedingly, I hate one-to-ten scales.)

[asakiyume]

One-to-ten scales, I don't know where to start on them.

So often, as here, they offer unnecessary fake-precision, quantification where quantification just isn't needed. And I mean, what are we talking about, even? On a scale of one to ten, how sharp it your unicorn's horn? (And, LOL--I say this as someone who's had to edit a LOT of marketing papers), the scale doesn't even have anchors. What's one? What's ten? What does it meeeeaaaaan? Reminds me of the Kate Beaton cartoon about steampunk and throwing gears on things: (top one).

[sovay]

One-to-ten scales, I don't know where to start on them.

If forced to use them, I have found myself over the years sort of kludging together my own: like if I am supposed to be quantifying my pain levels, 10 becomes something like "exceeded normal top of the range where all I can do is lie there and breathe and try to endure it, severity and duration are making me wonder if I am actually in danger of permanent damage or my life," because standard metrics like "hurts too much to carry on a conversation" are not very relevant to my life.

On a scale of one to ten, how sharp it your unicorn's horn?

I like that line; you should use it for something.

Reminds me of the Kate Beaton cartoon about steampunk and throwing gears on things

Yes!

"I put a shitload of cogs and watches on my boot!"

(That cartoon is one of my favorites.)

[asakiyume]

Yeah, the levels of pain you have faced ought to make the 1–10 scale slink away with its tail between its legs...

[sovay]

Yeah, the levels of pain you have faced ought to make the 1–10 scale slink away with its tail between its legs...

And many people have worse! But a lot of people can have conversations through a ridiculous amount of pain! Maybe we should just use the Beaufort scale instead.

[wayfaringwordhack]

They asked Farmer Boy this at the ER and he just looked at me, totally at a loss of how they wanted him to quantify that. He said 8, and I know and the tech knew it wasn't The Hospital's Notion of 8, but for a little, suffering boy, it was an 8, by God!

[asakiyume]

How nuts is it to ask a boy in pain to quantify it on a 1–10 scale?? (On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say that's a 10, maximum nuts.)

[wayfaringwordhack]

And yet they thought their system was ingeniously helpful. *eyeroll*

[amaebi]

(Lower down) Bible fanfic!

[asakiyume]

I would love to see a medieval monk's Gospel of Mark fanfic! I wonder what it would involve (... how would it differ from fanfic for the other synoptic gospels ...)

[amaebi]

I've seen quite a lot of ancient NT fanfic, but it's more like expansions of Acts, or Jesus childhood marratives, or apocalypses.

[light_of_summer]

Good points, thanks.

I think the part about removing rocks fits well with something political that I read, yesterday. It's from back in April, but it's still very worth considering, in my opinion. It's on Facebook, but can be read without a Facebook account—just click the X to close the box for logging in or creating an account, and then click "See more" before the comments start, to see the full text.

Dr. Pru Lee says...

[asakiyume]

Thanks! Yeah, same idea.

[f0rrest]

Reality is consensus, almost. Metaphysically, I sometimes wonder if this extends beyond just societal constructs. We all know about the chair example. What is a chair, exactly? Ultimately, it's whatever we choose to define it as. It's useful to be able to direct someone to a chair, for sitting. There is some utility there, consensusly. It's also important to question consensus. What exactly is the utility of, say, a gender, or a religion, and so on. Do these things do more harm than good? Should they be challenged, dismantled, or rebuilt? What's really scary is that, nowadays, and perhaps it's been like this for hundreds of year by now, the media basically controls the consensus, thus they control reality, in a way. I don't know what the answer to this is exactly, but I will say that, personally, I don't believe any shit I hear on the news, regardless of political-leaning, at least not on the deep level of, "yeah that exactly happened just like they said it happened." I am an incredibly skeptical person, but this has its own risk, because occasionally, I've found, skepticism can blind you to some of the real bad shit going on.

[asakiyume]

Nodding my head vigorously. Yeah, I do think it's a consensus for all intents and purposes. For me this is why it's so mind expanding when you meet someone with a really different worldview--for-real for-real different, not just "hey, I have a different position on tariffs than you" or whatever. Because, what if we just said no? Just looked at things with whole other eyes.

We're pretty stuck right now because we can't say no to pretty much anything. Like if we want to eat, we can't say no to a work-for-pay economy (I mean there are things we can do around the edges, but they're still based on most people working for pay). I want to believe that even just seeing a different way is something, because it frees you to imagine other things, but imagination alone just isn't enough.

And I agree with you about not believing pretty much anything because yeah! I know the other guys lie, but when I investigate some righteous-indignation provoking headline from my side, it turns out it's not quite the way the headline describes and I get really frustrated. But I also agree that the skepticism can blind you to some of the truly bad shit so ... yeah.

[sartorias]

I love the image of the castle built from a stone in the airl.

[asakiyume]

It was a charming picture book! Not many words, lots of activity on the page. And it obviously stuck with me!

[mallorys_camera]

Temporary Protected Status for Haitians is in the process of being revoked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktfuo0VQUfQ

I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done. I wrote up a facetious account of my dinner a couple f nights ago with an immigration attorney, but part of my conversation with him was actually serious. He described the plight of several clients that he was certain ICE was gonna pounce upon in court while he was actually standing right there. So, I kinda think immigration attorneys are useless.

[asakiyume]

On every front in my life, rights for people who are important to me are being erased. Trans people, gay people, immigrants and refugees, academics, and that huge >50% of the population, women.

[minoanmiss]

This is so beautiful and wise and true and I have so much I want to say and no time in which to say it! *makes a note*

[asakiyume]

Thank you, my friend--you're very kind to say so. (And I totally understand the no-time. Thanks for stopping by!)

[amaebi]

Absolutely.

[asakiyume]

🙏🏻

[smokingboot]

Much wisdom here thank you. I love Conrad's Castle even though I knew nothing of it til you told me.
Mastodon, though, one to ten, how nuance free is our world? I laugh too.

[asakiyume]

Mastodon, though, one to ten, how nuance free is our world? 😂

--[Horatio Nelson voice] NUANCE?! I SEE NO NUANCE!