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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)EL
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2 yr. ago

  • Ada is the admin of blahaj, not a part of the mod team for 196. She has final say on anything that is on the instance but isn't directly involved in 196.

    The reason for the move hasn't really been clear. The mods were vague when they announced the move, effective immediately, and the most common theory I saw was about a certain person who uses neopronouns and an event where Ada stepped in to use her power as admin to overrule the mods of 196. The mods of 196 have since clarified with a vague statement about how they don't like how Ada handles moderation across the instance (banning trolls more on a "vibe check" than hard rules or something? I don't really know) and praise for .world's instance level rules regarding things like trolls and harassment.

    The community was blindsided by this, as 196 was locked and moved within hours of the announcement; and they largely voiced disagreement with the decision it seems. In response, I believe some member of the community created onehundredninetysix to keep the community on blahaj, and Ada herself is currently the only mod of the community, though she's looking for people to take it over.

  • The mods of 196 announced that they've spent months planning to move 196 to .world, effective immediately, citing differences in opinion over how moderation is handled on blahaj as an instance.

    You can't migrate communities from one instance to another, so they created a 196 on .world (and I think locked this one at some point? I'm unclear on that), and the community is split over the action and somebody has created a new 196 here on blahaj called onehundredninetysix. You'll probably find that your feed is filled with posts from there, as it's very active right now.

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  • I said in another comment about what I learned from following a Chinese lesbian on Twitter is that with China it's like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" - you can say and do things that you could or should get in trouble for, but as long as you do it the right way, it'll be overlooked.

    There's gay bars and a big lesbian scene in China, but there's a common practice there, that used to happen in Europe and the US as well before the culture shifted, where lesbians get married to men - either gay guys or just a guy they have an arrangement with - to fulfill the cultural obligation expected of them to get married, and then they basically live their own separate lives.

    So most likely what's happening is people who don't know the cultural do's and don't's are getting censored for stepping over the line.

    But LGBTQ stuff is censored all the time on other social media anyway, whenever they think they can get away with it, so it's not like it's all that surprising - especially when you add in China's official stance on LGBTQ people.

    These feel like they're freaking out about something that everybody already knew was gonna happen, and omitting the fact that it happens elsewhere as well to make it seem like a big deal.

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  • My question is how much of these articles are manufactured outrage. Like, I can't imagine anybody expected anything different - especially since some of this stuff is censored already on American social media (especially LGBT related stuff), and the media has spent 50 years telling Americans how much censorship there is in China and the Great Firewall.

  • Your analogy is actually very apt because at the height of their power, the Nazi party made up a whopping 15% of the German population, IIRC.

    It doesn't take a lot of crazies to end with a death count for a minority group so high that they only passed their pre-WW2 population levels about 15 years ago. It merely takes the indifference or implicit support of the majority. So many Americans are either one issue voters or indifferent because their rights aren't up for debate every 4 years that the political compass has swung so extreme that in the first 6 months of (I think) 2022, there were more anti-trans bills proposed than there were days in the year at that point. I did the math, and it came out to roughly 1.2 anti-trans bills per day. The Nazis didn't start with the gas chambers. They started with prisons and internment camps for political prisoners, LGBT people, immigrants, and anyone else they deemed "undesirable," inspired by America's treatment of the indigenous peoples.

    If we're willing to call the people of Germany in WW2 Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, then we can call the "I'm a Republican, I vote for the nominee" crowd that I've known my entire life and the indifferent silent majority Nazi sympathizers as well, and the MAGA crowd that call for banning trans people from public spaces and to deport immigrants Nazis. They hold the same values about fascism and white supremacy, and many even wear the same outfits and fly the same flags as Nazi Germany. They've been marching in the streets since Trump's first campaign. And we haven't even talked about the white supremacist terrorist groups and militias. The FBI spends more than 50% of their time putting down white supremacist groups.

    We have been marching down the exact same path as 1910s Germany for years, and we need to call it out. Even Hitler referred to the US as the sisterland across the ocean who shared his values in Mein Kampf. In any other country, the KKK would be considered a terrorist group. Here, they're a political activist group who almost got one of their leaders elected to a fairly major government position.

    The Democrats have spent 50 years "reaching across the aisle." How'd that go for them in this past election? The country seems to have slipped ever further towards a Fourth Reich to me. When Republicans came out in support of Harris in swing states, she lost a large percentage of independent voters in those states - like 5% of the total voters in each state. There's no understanding to be had with white supremacists and fascists. All they want is for people like me to die.

  • And yet you fail to see the parallels between Trump's rhetoric (one of Hitler's first campaign promises was to build a wall around Germany to keep the job stealing immigrants out), his and his party's stated goals, even his failed coup attempt (the Beer Hall Putsch sound familiar?), and the rise of Hitler's Nazi party. Even the phrase "Make America Great Again" was used by a pro-Nazi American political group during the onset of WW2, who only disbanded after Pearl Harbor because it united the aggression of all sides of the political spectrum in the US.

    Your argument basically boils down to "They're not oligarchs unless they come from the oligarchy region of Russia. Otherwise, they're "sparkling billionaires.""

    You majored in this in college, while I've learned much of the finer details of the Nazi party because of Republican policies in the past decade. If it steps like a goose, Sig Heils like a goose, and quacks about the purity of Aryan blood, I'm sure as hell not calling it a duck because it's an American goose and not a German one of 1910s breeding stock.

    And even in that metaphor, you could argue a direct lineage between the MAGA party and the Nazi party because the incoming president is the son of a real estate tycoon who was a German immigrant whose previous business was refining jet fuel for the Third Reich's Me-262 Schwalbes produced by Messerschmitt.

  • To quote the incoming administration, "We need a genocide of trans people."

    The LGBT community was one of the first groups in the camps. Alongside the immigrants and socialists. You know the famous picture of the Nazis burning books? Those books were records from the German Center for Sexual Wellness, a repository of knowledge about sex and sexuality, and the first known medical facility to treat transgender people using hormone therapy in the 1910s.

    Maybe you should learn history before saying something like a know-nothing ignoramus and discrediting whatever you have to say. But go off about "progressive biases." To also quote a Republican complaint, "Reality has a left-leaning bias." Is that what you think, too?

  • US media loves to go on about the horrible working conditions in China, claiming 11-hour days and all kinds of other sweatshop working conditions because nothing sells like a good tragedy, but nobody talks about the working conditions at home and talking amongst ourselves is often made difficult, either by cultural or business practices. It's illegal to punish employees for talking about how much they make with each other, but that doesn't stop businesses from doing it anyway, because people here simply don't know their rights as a worker and companies love to take advantage of it. So we think we have a clear grasp of how the Chinese live while still believing that people here work 40-hour weeks and somewhere in the cultural zeitgeist is still the belief that people can afford a house with a white picket fence, a dog/cat, and 2.5 kids on one person's salary.

  • Andrew Wimmer was handcuffed and taken to jail on January 22, 2003 because he refused to protest in a ""designated protest zone"" that was out of sight of the President as well as local and national TV news cameras.

    A woman, armed with a ""We Love You Bush"" sign showed up at the same corner shortly after Wimmer's arrest. Wimmer asked the police if they were going to arrest her if she didn't move and they said, ""no."" The police also allegedly blocked the national press camera crews and an AP reporter from approaching the protest zone to do reporting.

    https://www.aclu.org/documents/dissent-forced-be-out-sight-and-out-mind

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  • Thanks, it was actually largely inspired by the vibe of Tumblr and people like Strange Æons when I made the account.

    I live by the saying "become unmarketable" nowadays, and it seemed fitting to that vibe.

  • Yeah, it's really the fact that I am even saying that I might have a system with an AMD CPU and an Intel GPU running Linux that throws me for a loop. I'm pretty sure I can learn to handle any of that, but that is certainly not a sentence I would've expected myself to say 10 years ago.

  • The Dems have been "reaching across the aisle" since before I was born. How's that working out? 20 years ago, racism was couched under the guise of "it's just a joke." 10 years ago, the racists and transphobes were screaming about how they were getting canceled for their views on their TV specials. Today, members of the incoming administration have openly called for the genocide of trans people (their words, not mine).

    America has always been deeply bigoted. It's just out in the open now. And with my life on the line, the only thing I'm reaching across the aisle with is a loaded gun. The time for reconciliation is past. It's time to make Nazis afraid again.

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  • Tumblr is one of the gayest places on the internet. You should go for it. The etiquette is arcane and there is no algorithm to guide you, but so long as your shoelaces were stolen from the President and you enjoy getting important news via Supernatural memes, the community will embrace you with open arms.

    Search some hastags that you like, follow some people that post stuff you like, and before long, seeing a 15 year old post cross your dashboard will be like seeing an old friend again.