If my brother were still there, I’d say, “yes, please”.

Whales

Capitalist class when they’re ending the world: “All right, you’ve got this!”

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).

There’s not one. Sexting is very broad, it does not have to be pictures or direct references to boning. Any sexually-oriented text communication can be considered sexting.

China is not Socialist, it’s State Capitalist.

Firing older employees in order to pay less to newer employees to pad the bottom line is Capitalism 101, unless someone thinks all the big US companies (Microsoft, Cisco, Meta, Tesla, etc) that have been doing this same thing this past year are all Socialist.

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.

Yeah, this isn’t going to get any easier. Right now KSA is mostly blaming “unauthorized” pilgrims, saying that they did not have any air conditioned hotel rooms to escape the heat in, but I think given the very wide range of reported countries affected, they are just minimizing anger.

The Middle East is going to get more and more dangerously hot, and I’m worried this is going to start being more normal during Hajj.

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.

Mostly a really good article. Even when it’s very obvious that all groups of people will have (edit:) members who compete for acceptance by white supremacy hierarchy, it’s still sad to see it (and is another reminder why I abandoned the bird site).

Random peeve of mine, but I immensely dislike the emergence of “petty bourgeois” instead of “petit” or “petite”. There is a lot of meaning behind them being the “little” bourgeois, versus being “petty”, which carries a connotation of being insignificant or unimportant, when in fact they are an incredibly important component of class struggle. It feels like dismissing millionaires (and other petit bourgeois) as “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”, sort of belying the very dangerous function they fulfill in countering proletariat power.

They’re not “ineffective wannabe bourgeois”, they are mini-bourgeois; aligned in interest with their bigger bourgeois counterparts, but far greater in number, and far less easy to identify.

Yep, people sadly are bad at extrapolating how restrictions on something they dislike can be cross-applied to limit things they don’t dislike, by others.

Grim Dawn is my favorite ARPG since Nox.

I’ve played Last Epoch, PoE, D1/2/3, and a LOT of others, and Grim Dawn just knocks it out of the part for me. I really want more from Crate, once Farthest Frontier is wrapped up.

Businesses are not moral entities, and the sooner people stop expecting them to be, the sooner people can start pushing for regulations that control and limit them, instead of trying to “work with” them.

People often decry accelerationism, but the reality is that the slow-boiled frog is the one that sits and dies. Chipping away at freedoms, consumer protections, product benefits, etc is all less likely to spark backlash than when they drop sharply in a short time.

That doesn’t mean you should help to make things worse, but it does mean that you may want to reconsider constantly mitigating every bad thing that others are doing, rather than letting them shoot themselves in the foot. When people are being hurt, help them. When people are being inconvenienced, let them get angry.

The EFF’s response is right on the money, as usual:

Communications platforms are not comparable to unsafe food, unsafe cars, or cigarettes, all of which are physical products—rather than communications platforms—that can cause physical injury. Government warnings on speech implicate our fundamental rights to speak, to receive information, and to think.

There is no scientific consensus that social media is harmful to children’s mental health. Social science shows that social media can help children overcome feelings of isolation and anxiety. This is particularly true for LBGTQ+ teens.

We agree that social media is not perfect, and can have negative impacts on some users, regardless of age. But if Congress is serious about protecting children online, it should enact policies that promote choice in the marketplace and digital literacy. Most importantly, we need comprehensive privacy laws that protect all internet users from predatory data gathering and sales that target us for advertising and abuse.

This warning label announcement just feeds into the right-wing “tech platforms bad, full of librul thought, must protect the kids by surveilling everyone and blocking the harmful (minority-focused) content” agenda.

Keep in mind that this is not happening in a vacuum; many states have already put in place age-verification for sites they deem ‘harmful’ (and California is considering one as well, so it’s not just braindead red states getting in on the surveillance action), and this directly makes the argument that social media spaces (and the speech on them) are harmful, and should be subject to government approval.

“Israel uses the rescue of four of its civilians as cover to kill hundreds of non-Israeli civilians” more accurately conveys the intent here.

I’m confused. Are Feiglin, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich not Israeli?

Him quoting Hitler isn’t even the main issue in this case (to me), it’s really what he’s using the quote to justify, which is the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine/ Gaza, which is, as the article demonstrates, a much more broadly-held viewpoint among Israelis, including ones who unarguably do have a lot of political power.

Lastly, if there are not a lot of public quotes condemning this coming out of Israel, for them to quote, isn’t that itself kind of a problem?

implicitly blaming Biden for everything that’s happened throughout generations of neoliberal betrayal of the American dream

No dude, I have literally blamed Biden for nothing. He has no blame, but also no credit, because he doesn’t control the economy.

Just because something is built out of love does not make it safe, and attestation is about safety. You wouldn’t trust an un-attested surgical device, just because there’s a really positive community around its design.

Signal is a life-or-death app for some people.