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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2023

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  • This is funny when you just look at your profile’s first page and see you’ve made comments like these:

    I hate this rhetoric. It implies that this a refular occurence. It is just a man hating comment. If this is happening to you frequently, maybe you are the problem. I am tired of being assumed an asshole just because I am a man. It is sexist. Plain and simple.

    So you deny “unproblematic” women regularly experiencing unsafe behavior from men who are entitled and you’re also denying people’s gender identity - otherwise, why would it be a waste of time for a woman’s fight for her right to access women’s spaces? So you’re hateful towards people you perceive to be “men” while complaining about “man haters” elsewhere. Logical inconsistencies in favor of hate is a hallmark sign of right wing extremist views.


  • With this context, it gets more interesting:

    On 6 December 2022, the Parliament of Indonesia passed the country’s new criminal code (NCC), outlawing sex and cohabitation outside of marriage. Under the new law, extramarital sex carries a jail sentence of one year, while cohabitation of unmarried couples carries a jail term of six months. In a statement given to Reuters, a spokesperson for the Indonesian justice ministry justified the law on the grounds that it aimed to “protect the institution of marriage and Indonesian values.”

    Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked – at least not in the short term. So now they can’t have sex and they’re not marrying either, worst of both worlds. Maybe they also wouldn’t have a prison overcrowding problem if they stopped jailing people for things like these.


  • This world’s pretty fucked up. I remember being disillusioned of socialism back in the day (still am) but shit like this makes me wish there was some magical better system than our shitty capitalism.

    I mean there is something better than “shitty capitalism”. You can call it what you want, market socialism, social democracy, cool capitalism, but look to Norway for a pretty good example of what we could have:

    2/3rd of Norway’s GDP is driven by the public sector, most of the hydropower is owned socially, trains are socially owned, 20% of housing is socially owned through housing coops, gigantic social wealth fund that could singlehandedly fund UBI from like half the returns it makes every year, they have almost 60% union density without a Ghent system like Sweden and Finland, very low income inequality, low on the hours worked per week by country list, high GDP per hour worked… I could go on.

    And there’s more cool stuff like that in other countries around Europe too, Vienna’s approach to social housing, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives, most of the electricity companies in Denmark being socially owned through cooperatives, 90% of Finland being a member in their grocery coops… like, there are so many examples of good things spread out everywhere - we just need the political will to do them more.



  • (the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right)

    In practice, does the US?

    Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions

    It seems to me there are a lot of exceptions to free speech in the land of free speech. I wouldn’t see any harm in adding hate speech to the list given how large it already is.

    e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.

    That seems more of a problem with flawed democracy or autocracies, than to do with free speech. Any awful thing could become law under a flawed democracy/autocracy. The UK has plenty of undemocratic elements and they’re abused to pass horrible laws right now, and we need to fix those elements - the laws are just the end result.




  • My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).



  • I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.

    I see people say what you’re saying (bus vs car road damage elasticity) in “fuck cars” communities, I don’t really see why you’ve decided to attack them collectively. But it’s a pop-community, they’re going to be wrong every now and then either way, please give them some slack. Their purpose is to make an average person aware of car dependency and that it’s generally a negative thing, so that actual urban planners with technical knowledge have an easier time arguing for and implementing realistic solutions, and they’ll take into account the variables you bring up. Think of “fuck cars” like a form of lobbying except it’s done by common people with good intentions - similar to how Japanese coops lobbied for better food safety standards decades ago - rather than wealthy corporations.



  • Reminder that US state agencies helped Bolsonaro

    In March 2020, the Intercept reported that Brazilian prosecutors had secretly collaborated with the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in a manner “that may have violated international legal treaties and Brazilian law”. The Brazilian Ministry of Justice had not been informed; making this collaboration illegal. They also found that money paid by Brazilian companies in the US were funnelled back into Brazil; chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol said he would use part of this sum to set up an “independent fund to fight corruption”. This attempt was then deemed unconstitutional by Brazil’s Supreme Court. It was reported that Mr. Dallagnol had called Lula da Silva’s arrest “a gift from the CIA”. Leslie Backschies, the head of the US FBI’s international corruption unit, alluded to this incident when discussing the sensitivity of anti-corruption investigations in a 2019 interview with AP news saying “We saw presidents toppled in Brazil”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash#Leaked_conversations



  • There hasn’t been any scientific consensus change on whether porn is actually harmful to view for underage viewers, much less how much harm at various ages (i.e. should we lower it from 18, or raise it). Meaning, anyone who outright claims it is, is likely falling for populist rhetoric feeding off our cultural aversion to nudity and sex, not scientific truth.

    It gets even worse when you consider how instrumental porn is to us queer folks who often learn more about their sexuality through the medium, esp. when you consider consumption rates of queer folks vs straight folks. Or when you consider the queer folks who use sex work to earn money because they’re treated worse in other jobs simply for being queer.

    Let this sink in for a second: it took us less than a decade of anti-porn laws being proposed to being implemented without scientific consensus (in the UK, Germany, the EU now, Canada is currently doing the same…). Meanwhile we dragged our feet for decades on climate change and still are. That alone should make this whole trend smell fishy, like it’s being done with ulterior motives.



  • What possible use is that?

    I’ve noticed “has this sub gotten more right wing recently?” posts reaching the top post of the day in the last 6 months or so. r/norge and r/unitedkingdom being examples. You can automate bots that change a subreddit’s consensus on certain topics by bot-spamming threads pertaining to those topics, especially in the first hour of a thread going up. I don’t know if that’s happening, or if it has more to do with the Reddit protest that saw mods abdicate their positions last June and new mods being responsible for the change… but it could also be a bit of both.