Are you trying to imply that the US doesn’t already do this? They’ve overthrown democratically elected governments all over the latin americas (and other places, like hawaii) and imposed more fascist ones for access to their raw materials. Sure it’s not exactly using loans to do that, but the real end-game is fascism anyways once markets are fully saturated and there are no more ways to generate capital.

Op, do you just hate fun? most of these are pretty cute or funny and just because they’re not the most efficient design doesn’t mean they’re not allowed to exist?

Gonna have to disagree here. The social aspect of it all is just as important of the medical aspect. While there are trans issues that are mostly medical in nature, there are equally trans issues that are more social in nature.

I’m not sure what contexts you’ve seen truscum being used in, but from what I know it’s a term used for people who insist on a medical diagnosis in order to be trans. The problem with this, imo, is twofold. There’s a long history of medical gatekeeping that enforced cisheteronormativity in order to get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, leaving out all other forms of self-identity (among a whole host of philosophical issues). And the second is just the lack of understanding and research of the broader medical community. Treatment guidelines are all over the place, often misguided, and usually inadequate to achieve the goals of the patient.

Truscum rhetoric often reinforces cisheteronormativity which is mostly antithetical to what being trans is about in the first place. That’s not to say that the trans community doesn’t struggle with medical diagnoses or that that’s not important, but to use a diagnosis as the benchmark of what being trans is, is usually needlessly exclusionary.

Nowhere was I trying to say that Britain didn’t mistreat its colonies. Not sure where that came from.

I mean they’re right that the US was founded by a bunch of religious extremists and rich fuckers who didn’t want to pay taxes. For which we do in fact see the ramifications still to this day.

But to draw the conclusion that somehow it’s a good thing and we need more of it in public life is pretty twisted.

Hbomberguy makes long videos yes, but he doesn’t make six hours long videos. He still makes his points concise and presents them in interesting and entertaining ways. Only in his last video does he cross the threshold into 3 hours long videos, and in that one he even says, in the video, that there was an entire section that he wrote and edited and then cut out because it muddied the point of his video.

Maybe it’s a question of where to draw the line, but I think hbomberguy is very much not the norm for long-form content creators. And I do not appreciate having long videos for the sake of having a video be long.

Maybe it’s because I’m risk averse or maybe I’m just not as well read on it, but I do personally think it’s generally riskier than other transition surgeries.

For vaginoplasty, even if the job is botched, you’ll still be able to walk normally. FFS, you’ll still be able to talk and eat and smell normally. Breast augmentation, you can still lift your arms normally. Plus since these three are the “main” options available, there’s more people doing it and more people experienced in handling the complications.

For vocal surgery, if the job is botched, you can permanently damage your voice and not be able to shout. And even then it still takes a degree of voice training to get a good result (althought it does lower the bar). The relative rarity of the procedure also does not inspire me to take that kind of risk.

I’m open to being convinced that it’s not as risky as I think it is, but I do think that it’s a pretty risky option. Especially when you compare it to voice training on its own, which is way harder to fuck up. And voice training will get most people across the line.

This study seems to me to be a retreading of old ground by cis people. Like I can appreciate getting more data that yes, trans people aren’t freaks, but the study just seems like a massive “duh”.

Why did they think hrt changed vocal chords in trans women in the first place? It’s pretty well known that hrt cannot take away the things that first puberty already changed. I also don’t like how the article presents voice feminization surgery as if it’s a common and normal choice for most trans women. Even beyond the implication that trans people need surgery to be successful in their transition, voice feminization surgery is extremely risky and is only ever recommended in extreme cases. If they couldn’t even do that amount of research, it doesn’t make me feel confident that the study is all that worthwhile to think about.

Secondly, why only focus on trans women? It’d be more interesting if they included trans men in the picture since on their side of the fence, hrt actually does affect their voice. It would be interesting if the study compared their trans participants with cis benchmarks at all, actually. Maybe the study itself does that where the article does not, but for reason #1 I don’t feel like it’s worth my time to check.

Lastly, the actual results of the study are pretty “duh”. Just by the physics of how the human voice works, it’s pretty easy to see that yes, having a breathier and higher pitched voice will lead to having thinner vocal folds. Because having thinner vocal folds is what causes those effects on the voice in the first place. The study mixes up the cause and effect here, so it isn’t exactly groundbreaking research. What would’ve been more appropriate to examine is the vocal chords at rest compared to either cis benchmarks or the speaking voice average. Since the conventional wisdom is that voice training can’t really change your voice at rest, that would be more interesting to look at.

Overally I appreciate having more data about trans people, but didn’t find the study or article to be particularly knowledgeable about trans people in the first place.

I think the original commenter’s point is that calling grown women “girls” is a commonly used tactic to infantilize women and make the situation seem not as serious as it’s supposed to be.

Take for example the headline that we’re talking about here: “girl” vs “woman” is the difference in thinking that this is some 16 year old who made dumb decisions and someone who probably understands the consequences of what they’re doing and takes proper precautions to prevent it.

This is not to say that I personally believe that one abortion is more justified than the other (because I don’t), but just want to point out the semantic difference here.

So basically, James Somerton stole literally all of his content from other queer creators while positioning himself as the de-facto queer creator to support. And by “all his content”, it really means all his content. Every. Single. Thought. Was plagiarized from someone else’s writing. And the extremely few that didn’t revealed that James Somerton is a crazy misogynist Nazi-loving lesbophobic transphobe.

Basically, he’s a massive piece of shit who’s comically evil to a mind-numbing degree.

Have you tried reader mode? In both firefox and chrome (i think, I haven’t checked other browsers) there’s a button usually in the address bar that you can click and it’ll format the article into a readable page instead of a bunch of ad-riddled garbage. It works pretty well generally.

Am i mistaken in believing that cloud computing naturally lends itself to only having a couple of big players in the space? The whole point of the technology is to have someone else do the hosting for you, and the people doing the hosting win out by economies of scale.

This would be a different conversation if they found evidence in the software that it was throttling smaller competitors, but without any more information this seems like a lot of nothing?

I mean that’s fair enough but this article is specifically talking about how conservatives specifically use these tricks in this specific scenario. Which the author implies can be generalized to how these tricks are used in in other areas of discourse.

But let’s not mince words here. The entire conservative platform is built on ignorance and misinformation. Sure, misinformation can happen in other places too but the techniques the author analyzes here are part of the standard conservative playbook.

Okay that makes more sense. I do think that “online dating is awful” is a very different statement from “well it used to be good but now it sucks” and the two phrases come with very different qualifications and conclusions.

The former phrase is a pretty blanket judgement on this aspect of society in relation to the whole. But the latter statement has more to do with the enshittification of the internet and the capitalist systems woven inbetween. The latter statement is a historical comparison while the former is a value judgment of society.

As for your opinion itself, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. The nature of the internet has paradoxically connected more people than ever before while simultaneously isolating us more than ever before. I personally don’t think that online dating really differs from that mold. I think that this is one small part of a larger problem where capitalism has commodified almost every aspect of humanity, which is accelerated by the internet.

That’s not what the original comment said if you read it at all. The commenter was making the point that okcupid was pretty good before it was enshittified. There was no direct judgement about whether the world is better with or without OLD. And the subtextual judgment seems to be positive or at least neutral, so I’m not sure what you actually have a problem with.

Not sure if OP actually read the article but the title of it is clickbait. The author of the article is not trying to actually say that the single problem of society is single-parent families or anything like that. The article mostly goes into how conservatives will present some pretty banal data but then sneak in some normative assumptions of how things should work to make a conservative conclusion. This author is illustrating this point by specifically using a book about the data of single parent homes that makes the conclusion that we need more two parent households.

Imo was a pretty good read and probably one I’d show to someone who’s a moderate or a fence sitter, but it was nothing new to me. The author pretty cleanly lays out several of the tricks conservatives like to use to make it seem like their batshit crazy and bigoted ideas aren’t actually batshit crazy and bigoted.

I mean let’s be real here. Did anyone expect the NYPD (or any PD, for that matter) to actually put all their offenses on display? The NYPD in particular is among the worst of all the PDs in the country.

I found this mostly to be a satiric nothingburger that doesn’t make any meaningful observations at all.

Based on the title I expected it to go a little bit deeper into how “AI” technology will destroy society if it doesn’t get regulated, but instead it was just a couple of short quips about how some of the big tech companies nowadays have changed what life looks like nowadays.

I felt like I was reading a boomer say “get off my lawn! Kids these days…” without any additional nuance or context.

Are there any benefits to doing this over having a dedicated server with a vpn you can connect to for outside the network?

Because otherwise this seems like unnecessary performance overhead on a device which I’d like to squeeze as much performance out of in order to play games…

Well excuse me for trying to write an entertaining explanation while the earth is burning down from unchecked capitalist greed.

I guess people just aren’t allowed to have fun anymore :/

Here’s your award for being a boring and unhelpful person 🥇