OK, since this keeps happening, from now on I’m just going to assume that every time someone behaves in a harmful way it’s because of their Tragic Backstory. And also that that doesn’t make it OK, but I should still be kind. Because every time it looks like someone is being a jerk for no reason it turns out they are in fact a jerk with a Tragic Backstory.
Having said that, I have known people who are like “I am allowed an infinite being a jerk license because of my Tragic Backstory.” Nobody gets an infinite being a jerk license. You have to hold people accountable, but gently. Because there’s apparently always a freakin Tragic Backstory. Like, I think “OK, usually there’s an excuse but THIS FUCKER is just a jerk,” but no. Then I hear about this fucker’s Tragic Backstory and, OK, I’m still angry that they are a jerk, but now I know WHY. And I want to give them infinity hugs.
Also, it actually militates (is that a word? I swear it’s a word, and no I don’t mean mitigates, but my phone says it’s not a word) against me saying that I have a license to be a jerk because of my Tragic Backstory, because, hey EVERYONE HAD A TRAGIC BACKSTORY.

On this blog, I’ve talked a lot about my bad luck. I have a ’tragic backstory’ tag, after all. I was born in the third world, in a place with incredibly low incomes which fail to be mirrored in particularly low cost of living. As such, people make do with malnutrition, lack of medication, and ever present mosquitoes. There’s just no other way. You live cheap or die – living free was never an option.

I also happen to be transgender. If living in squalor wasn’t enough, try living in squalor while surrounded by hatred. I am queer in a place where politicians talk about the importance of getting rid of people like me, due to the threat we pose to “public morals”. Where, as a member of my school’s debate team, I was forced to argue for why people like me should be barred entry to the country. The head of the team wanted to know why I found the topic upsetting. Of course, I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to be expelled.

However, despite all that and more, I have a lot of good luck. It’s more subtle, but it’s no less real. I speak and write well. I didn’t get on the debate team just by looking pretty. I’ve delivered speeches before crowds. I’ve been on television. I’ve published poetry. I got the highest score in my country on the English standardised test, despite being dyslexic and not reading half my literature books. Late one night, at the very last minute, I wrote an essay that convinced a Canadian college to enrol me in a grad programme at 17 years old. This is an incredible amount of luck to have fallen in my lap.

This skill led me to meet people on Tumblr. People with far greater resources than I who wanted to help. They took up a collection just to send me to the mainland. There are now plans in motion for me to emigrate to California next year. This would completely change my life. All that bad luck wiped away with a set of immigration papers.

But that’s just a cure for me. There are billions of people who are also in dire straits. People who can’t string a few words together and pull themselves up into a better life. There are people who face more poverty than I. More malnutrition and mosquitoes and lack of medication. People who aren’t safe in their homes.

I don’t deserve my luck. I don’t deserve the bad that’s happened to me, but I don’t deserve the good either. I haven’t earned my fortune. Luck just happens. We often feel like the world is how it is for a reason and that all the good and the bad is where it is with just cause. We’re wrong. The world isn’t fair. Fate doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints.

But the world doesn’t have to be as bad as it is. I don’t want anyone to have the bad luck I’ve had, and I wish they could all have my good luck. Well, there’s something I can do about that. The very first thing I want to do when I have a job in California. I can give money to push the scales of fate until they’re a little more fair. I can give money to people so they can feed their families. I can provide them with medication. I can protect them from the mosquitoes.

I have the opportunities that I have because people with the power to change my life saw that I needed help and decided to help me. They stepped in and made an enormous difference. I want to pay that forward. I want to help others the same way I’ve been helped.

Giving What We Can is currently holding a pledge drive. They’re asking people to pledge that they’ll give 10% of their income to the world’s most effective charities every year for the rest of their lives. I want to do that. I want to take the opportunity that human kindness has given me and make a hundred more. And I’d like you to do the same.

If you feel like making someone’s life dramatically better, saving the world, or just committing to be as good tomorrow as you are today; I couldn’t recommend this enough. Each of us have the power to make the world a little brighter. Each of us can make an enormous difference with just a tenth of what we have. I believe we should take the good luck we have and spread it around. If you agree with any of that, this is your moment. This is your chance to save someone like me. This is your opportunity to be the hero you always wanted to be.

Do not throw away your shot.

[Edited by @inquisitivefeminist and @sdhs-rationalist]

I’ve been trying to sort through the competing perspectives on Seattle’s minimum wage hike for the last week. 

Seattle raised their minimum wage is stages, to $11 and then to $13 and coming up soon to $15/hour. They commissioned a study from the University of Washington, which would have access to an extraordinarily rich corpus of data from all across Washington State, to examine the effects of the minimum wage increase. When the minimum wage went up to $11, the effects were nothing to write home about for either side of the debate - the study found that the average low-wage worker brought home about $75/month more but that low-wage employment seems to have been depressed slightly. (So, it was a little harder to find a job, but if you found one you’d bring home some extra money.) Since this wasn’t very exciting it didn’t attract much attention, and to my knowledge no concerns were raised about the study methodology at that time.

The $13/hour minimum wage, according to the researchers, was harmful to low-wage workers. When word got out that that’s the direction their research was pointing, the city stopped funding them, instead commissioned a different study using different methodology from UC Berkeley, pressured UC Berkeley to publish their results a week before the results from the University of Washington study, and then publicized/promoted those results (which found no effect on employment in the restaurant sector). 

Then the University of Washington study came out. It found that the average low-wage worker took home $125 less per paycheck as a result of the minimum wage increase, because for every 1% increase in the minimum wage hours were cut by 3%. So you’d earn slightly more per hour but get your hours cut way back. Like UC Berkeley they found no effect in the restaurant sector, but they found dramatic effects in most other low-wage sectors.

This time, lots of concerns have been raised about the University of Washington study methodology. Obviously, since these were not raised when the first leg of the study came out, they’re partially motivated by the desire to refute the findings. On the other hand, that doesn’t make them wrong. People have expressed concerned that they accounted insufficiently for nationwide trends in the retail industry, which might have resulted in cuts to hours even without the minimum wage hike (they accounted for Seattle in comparison to other Washington cities, but if there’s some reason to expect large cities to move differently from small ones and Seattle to be in a reference class different than the rest of the state, this wouldn’t have been fully accounted for.) They take issue with the framing in comparison to ‘a Seattle that didn’t raise the minimum wage’, which is of course something we can’t really know about. And the methodology does not account for people getting part-time employment in industries that their data does not track, like ridesharing or sex work or informal childcare, or getting jobs outside the city. 

My impression is that the result is pretty robust, and that these factors change the details but not the overall picture, which is that when you raise the minimum wage to $13/hour companies cut positions and cut hours, and low-wage workers bring home less money than before. If this is true, the effects when Seattle hikes to $15 will be even more pronounced and harder to explain away, and we’ll have a more definitive answer.

When someone is Being An Atheist online* the go-to insult for people to say about them, aside from the “autistic fedora sperg” nonsense, is “someone’s mad because their parents make them go to church”

Let’s take a step back.

It is certainly true that, in our current society, it is difficult to think of an aspect of a child’s life that their parents don’t completely control.

Room and board at the very least. Diet in its entirety. What school you go to. How you spend all of your time, all of it. All of your income, with some exceptions. Everything that parents can’t do to their children, explicit laws are made to formally prevent: it was legal to not merely force your child to do chores, but to force them to go to an actual workplace and perform actual labor, the profit off which you were entitled to, completely, and no one considered this might be immoral in some way.

Inside your head, however, isn’t under anyone’s control. Brainwashing doesn’t really work, most people believe things they want to believe in one way or another. So they try controlling what they can.

All that is given, can be taken away. 

Your food. Your time. Your income. Channels of communication to people who might understand you. Access to anyone and anything at all. Or new things can be introduced into an equation!

How about child abuse?

How indeed about the fact that children are especially vulnerable to abuse - physical and psychological and sexual - in authoritarian religious communities, hmm?

Imagine being forced to say empty words that you find abhorrent and wrong, because you will quite literally not eat until you start doing so. Or, say, someone will break some of your fingers. How about that? Do you like having functional fingers? There’s a lot you can do with functional fingers when you’re seven years old.

Being stuck like that will lead to a lot of grief, or despair, or rage.

I want to ask you this.

When someone tells you: “my mother forces me to go to church”, is your response “are you okay? what can we do to help?”

Is it?

Or is it “haha lmao fucking owned how stereotypical serves you right”? If so, what is wrong with you?

*I would say that ‘being a certain kind of atheist’ but let’s face it: even saying ‘religions that have bigotry written into their moral codices might serve as a cause of bigotry’ would qualify