He / They

  • 19 Posts
  • 1.16K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • This is literally 2016 repeating itself.

    I really hate being right about the worst fucking stuff.

    Biden should never have been put up again, and his performance is gonna enthuse absolutely zero non-political-junkie normies to vote for him.

    With states being as voter-suppressed/gerrymandered (or however you prefer to describe the electoral college bullshit) as they are, Dems cannot afford to be slightly ahead. Hillary was slightly ahead. You have to be WAY ahead, and Biden’s not.





  • Locker room humor generally refers to talk between guys, which could have sexual undertones, but isn’t normally something I’d think of as “sexually-oriented”.

    And flirting can range all the way from smiling long at someone at a cafe or calling them ‘cutie’ in conversation, to me spanking my s.o. as they walk by in a sexy outfit and telling them they’re gonna get punished if they keep distracting me from work- so there’s a huge range in there, some of which I’d definitely consider sexting, if texted to someone.

    Frankly, I have zero sympathy for him, because it’s very easy not to interact over direct message with fans at all, much less underage ones.

    I’ve worked customer-interfacing jobs that required a high level of direct, personal relationship-building before (sometimes even *gasp* with people I found attractive!), and I never once felt compelled to take those communications into a private space, and there was never even a potential for those people to have been kids.

    You don’t “stumble into” private messages with a minor that “get out of hand”.




  • Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There’s a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes…

    But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.

    The author focuses on the danger of startups dying out and therefore bricking your devices, but another major problem with startups is that they are VC-backed, and those VC investors are expecting the exact same unsustainable growth that the incumbent “market leaders” are chasing in their enshittification journeys. When the startups don’t die, they will also ‘have’ to enshittify, to satisfy investors.

    It’s not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.

    Sadly, this is the impossible part. Policymakers (at least in the US) will never prioritize consumers over companies.

    Honestly, the best we can ever hope for is a law mandating that it’s no longer illegal to modify your tech if the company who operates it dies, or shuts down the backend server infra, but this will be opposed by basically every company out there (including if not especially video game companies, who won’t want to potentially have to allow people to develop and operate private servers for defunct MMOs).






  • First off, thank You for responding to my questions.

    From the exclusionary christian’s point of view, no matter the identity of the CPU in question, we are capitalising the pronouns of a mortal and therefore challenging Deus’ supremacy by dismantling its symbols. Good. We should do that. And we should also respect whatever the CPU identifies as.

    I have a few different converging thoughts, and I’ll try to lay them out separately to make sure my question’s premise is clear:

    • You acknowledge the power dynamic which people perceive around capitalization of pronouns
    • Pronoun capitalization is also used for royalty- not just divinity (e.g. ‘Her Majesty’), so this is not a power dynamic specific to religious people
    • You have used un-capitalized pronouns for other people, so at least perceptually, You’re not treating all people as being of this same ‘elevated’ position
    • Your neopronouns are not optional; You have insisted that people use them, which is not a universal standpoint on neopronouns; many neopronoun users are fine with people switching between their pronoun sets, or have a ‘fallback’/ auxiliary set
    • Words have meaning, and You cannot pretend or decide that other people have to not care about them. That would even be directly hypocritical to insisting others accept the pronouns of Your choice.
    • Just to reiterate one last time, there is unquestionably a power dynamic at play, because upending the exclusivity of that deference to figures of authority is one of Your stated reasons (or at least benefits) for using them:

    we are capitalising the pronouns of a mortal and therefore challenging Deus’ supremacy by dismantling its symbols. Good. We should do that.

    You are forcing them to extend You that same deference, or claiming that Status for Yourself, however You prefer to view it.

    But I am struggling to see how Your insistence on this particular set of pronouns does not engender a requirement of people to extend You deference You are (at least by default, demonstrably), not extending to them? (and I am not referring to the exclusionary Religious here, but fellow Beehaw users)

    There is a strong debate over using neopronouns like “master/masterself”, “daddy/daddyself”, etc (certainly without auxiliaries), that may create uncomfortable power dynamics for the persons needing to use them. I think this is striking some of us as similar to that, which is I think why You are seeing this much pushback.



  • Wrt technical question 2, I don’t personally believe this should run afoul of self promotion guidelines. This was not a monetized service, just this person’s personal thoughts.

    I think this method actually works really well for having more in-depth discussions, so you can have a lot of background information in a longer form piece that lets you keep the post itself about a tighter discussion, rather than being a text dump. It’s also more useful as a method to use for reference elsewhere.

    I’ve been considering doing this for some of my posts, I just don’t have a blog myself. :p


  • Are you seriously calling a populist uprising a “US backed coup”, implying the US had a hand in it, simply because the US ideologically supported their goals?

    NATO expansion is not a justification for invading another country, especially a non-NATO one. Ukraine has the right to self-determination and freedom to associate with whomever they want, and Russia doesn’t get to tell them who they can or can’t be friends with.

    I can only assume based on this that you philosophically support the Bay of Pigs operation, as the US saw Soviet expansion near them as a threat.

    Putin didnt make his move on Crimea because he was trying to defend Russia, he did it because he knew that his plans to reassimilate Ukraine were threatened by the new Ukranian government. And the 2022 expansion of the invasion just proves that.



  • Yes, obviously the US is a massive Imperialist power. I don’t want it to have those bases, or nuclear weapons, or even a military or government at all, but I sure as hell don’t want it to be replaced by an openly autocratic imperialist power that also has all those things anyways, which is what Russia is aspiring to be under Putin.

    But that is a completely orthogonal discussion as to whether Force is required to stop malicious actors from imposing their will on others through violent Force themselves. That is, as an anarchist, a basic requirement of human interaction; self defense and defense of others.

    What hypocrisy do you think is taking place here?


  • Likewise, a trans person you meet on the street isn’t benefiting from the might of the Roman church. So you’re not supporting hierarchy by using a trans person’s preferred pronouns. By affirming trans men, generally you are dismantling patriarchy, and by affirming trans capitalised pronoun users, generally you are dismantling monotheistic oppression.

    So, I want to start by pointing out that this article is directly making a link between capitalization of pronouns, and the specific practice of capitalization as a Christian show of religious reverence.

    Worse, if you refused to use a trans man’s preferred pronouns because of this, you’d be guilty of pretty blatant transphobia. I believe refusing to use capitalised pronouns for a trans person who requests them is exactly the same bigotry.

    Is the assertion here specifically that capitalization is tied to gender expression, or simply that it is another aspect of a personal identity that should be respected? Obviously neopronouns can be non gender-related, but the article isn’t really making clear if that is the case here or not. If anything, it is quite muddled on this point.

    By affirming trans men, generally you are dismantling patriarchy, and by affirming trans capitalised pronoun users, generally you are dismantling monotheistic oppression.

    Wooph… The first part of that is by no means a safe assumption. While I would certainly hope that trans men would not seek to enforce a male-dominant gender power dynamic, it is by no means beyond their ability to do so as an intrinsic matter. Now, whether they can benefit from that dynamic in a given time and place is a different discussion, but even in places that do not afford them the systemic backing of the patriarchal system, they can still support and reify it themselves. Any person who attempts to enforce a male-dominant systemic power dynamic can be supporting patriarchy.

    The end of that sentence seems to confirm that this is about a show of religious reverence? Or is the assertion that by capitalizing the pronouns of not-the-christian-diety one is inherently attacking Christianity?

    I think that if these are simply the neo pronouns that make someone comfortable, it is for the most part fine to request this, but the article is directly drawing the link between capitalized pronouns and religious reverence, and that is not something anyone can demand someone else extend, and not one that is inherently inappropriate not to.

    There are plenty of arguments over the limits of neopronoun usage within the neopronoun-using community, but generally neopronouns like “master”, that confer or denote a power dynamic, are considered inappropriate.

    This feels like this is skirting that line to me.

    There is something very uncomfortable to me about demanding the use of a deferential title, while also insisting that not to do so is a moral wrong, while also claiming not to support hierarchy of peoples… which the creation of distinct and deferential titles would seem to contradict.