I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.
I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.
There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.
Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.
While I do agree that unity is the way to go in the fight for rights, I can understand why one would want to separate the T from the LGB. It’s an issue of consistency - L, G, and B all describe sexuality, while T describes gender. The two are related, but ultimately separate concepts - one does not inform the other, and grouping them can hypothetically lead ignorant people to think that they are directly related, which could hypothetically lead to non-straight cisfolk experiencing more oppression than they would have otherwise experienced due to the perceived association with transfolk, as non-conforming sexuality is more generally accepted today than non-conforming gender.
That being said, it’s all hypothetical, and what matters is the reality that people from all spectra of nonconformity are regularly oppressed, and in many places, the oppressors treat anyone LGBT+ with the same disdain. So grouping them is vital for the sake of the most oppressed.
I mean, you could similarly reason that bisexuals aren’t welcome (both gays and lesbians are solely attracted to the same sex, after all), or that asexuals aren’t welcome (you can be asexual and heteroromantic, after all), and so on. I think, ultimately, that unity between us is important, and allowing the umbrella to protect all members of gender, romantic, and sexual minorities strengthens the overall cause rather than weakening it.
Hell yeah. Concern silos divide the people.
Trans rights are human rights
Women’s rights are human rights
Workers rights are human rights.
If it were supposed to be pronounced “jif” it would have been spelled that way.
The creator of the format is documented as having confirmed the pronunciation is “jif”, but I don’t care. Once he created it and put it into the world, he relinquished his control.
This is why literary analysis created death of the author.
So how do you pronounce giraffe?
GIF is an acronym. Giraffe is not. The Giraffe response has been debunked for decades.
Graphical is a hard G.
Debunked? Its a counterpoint to the fact that it’s pronounced that way because it’s spelled with a g. If that poor argument wasn’t used, the giraffe one wouldn’t have to come up. It’s not evidence of anything other than that letters can be pronounced in more than one way.
For the graphical thing, imagine pronouncing NASA wrong because of the way aeronautical is pronounce. Or underwater in scuba. World in WHO? The I in AIDS isn’t pronounced anything like immunodeficiency.
Your argument doesn’t work either.
Thank you for providing me all new ways to pronounce things in horribly cursed ways, magic internet man.
The argument holds up.
It’s a gift, not a jift.
Yeah and it’s giraffe, not jiraffe. See how that gets us nowhere?
How do you pronounce gift?
Yes, but “GIF” is not etymologcally Germanic. 😉
How do you pronounce ghoti?
With the other pronunciation. Some letters have more than one. Your statement is nonsense lol
If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe.
How do you pronounce github? GIMP? GNU? GPU? Javascript?
Oh Geremy, it’s time to jo to the jocery store! We need some jrape gelly.
Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and yet we all pronounce it “lay-Zer” not “lay-Ser”
And clearly based on the intense response you win the controversial statement award
Saying that my favorite cli editor is
nanoThe only CLI editors I’ve used are VI and Nano. So my favourite CLI editor is Nano too.
Spaces
Tabs!
White colored words that insult the reader.
Insisting that all tabs should be the same length as eight spaces.
Open up notepad, and compare. Eight spaces = 1 tab.
Marxism is correct and more relevant than ever.
Stuck a wire in a power outlet.
Telling 8th grade content teachers that they must modify their assignments to accommodate migrant students and English learners, and that just directly translating those documents forever wasn’t going to cut it. Gosh there was a lot of grumbling in the room.
I get it, we’re short staffed and overwhelmed, but it doesn’t make it go away.
You can imagine ;)
Seriously, though, I said (irl) the home affordability crisis can’t be truly solved in any way that simultaneously still allows people to invest in homes (rent them out, sell them at higher prices, do business with tourism, etc) to any meaningful degree. Everyone around had very strong, diverse opinions on that.
seems uncontroversial to me
Objectively, yes. But it was polarizing at the time because some of the people present were investing heavily in real estate.
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People should be free to vote for those who best represent them, secure in the knowledge their vote will still be counted against those they don’t want in office.
I have a few. I’m not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don’t refrain from putting them out there.
A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:
- knowing things doesn’t change things
- work should be abolished
- atheism and rationalism are a scourge on the ability of the Left to reach people
- hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary
Some others:
- suicidal and self-harming people should be listened to by understanding and validating the motivations behind their desire to hurt or kill themselves, even entertaining with them their own plans. Anything else would likely put a wedge between the two of you that will prevent from addressing the causes and ultimately do what’s good for them.
- mathematics is just narrative with rules/arbitrary opinions with rules
- nurses, doctors, teachers and other professions of care attract the worst psychopaths because they are put in charge of vulnerable people. On top of that they are by default perceived as caregivers, so it’s harder for them to raise suspicion of doing fucked up stuff.
Edit: people down voting in a thread about controversial opinions must be very very intelligent
hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary
Do you nind elaborating a bit?
It would be quite a long argument, but I suggest TechGnosis by Erik Davis and this article: https://www.are.na/block/24206425
tl;dr: hacker culture is grounded in gnostic, individualistic californian hippie culture, and shares root with what is now the dominant, reactionary ideology of big tech moguls, ketamine cryptocolonialists, business white supremacists. One key tenet of hacker culture is the power of the individual super-human brain power to reshape entire societies through the production of disruptive technology. Mr. Robot tv series is one such example of said mindset. It preaches the superiority of the world of minds and the virtual over the material. The material is subject to the virtual and the virtual is where the real stuff is happening, where there’s a real confrontation of power (the hacker vs the system, disruptors vs established businesses, out-of-the-box thinkers vs corporate drones). This mimics gnostic beliefs very closely. It is reactionary because it is individualistic, because it erases material conditions and collective action, but it also just operates from such a simplified worldview that it is impossible to adhere to if you have a very basic understanding of disciplines like sociology, history or politics. It’s just not how the world works.
Interesting, thank you for the reply. I am not a hacker nor a gnostic but I have a slight fascination with the latter. But on hacking: while there’s merit to your position that hacker culture is reactionary I have to ask what do you think of hacker collectives like the one that leaked Project 2025 or other noble computer nerd activities? It seems to me like a hacker is exercizing another avenue of power over her world like jumping or singing. Thinking the online world is seperate and intangible from our non-online experience seems to be making the mistake of dualism in upholding one sphere of reality over the other/s.
Gnosticism is by definition the epitome of duality. That said, conflict with a reactionary entity doesn’t imply you’re not reactionary. Russia and Ukraine are at war with each other and they are both very reactionary, becoming even worse due to the needs produced by such conflict.
Also, hackers tend to hold libertarian (in the European sense) values and that’s how they pick their targets for direct action. When I say they are reactionary, they are reactionary in effect, not in intent. That makes them even more problematic, because it’s not immediately obvious what’s the problem.
Told my friend that she was being a terf when she started saying terf shit.
Using a word incorrectly 1,000,001 times shouldn’t change the actual dictionary definition of the word.
“Literally” officially meaning “figuratively” radicalized me.
Must be embarrassing to not understand that living languages evolve.
The American public school system as it currently exists is largely a joke.
