Khotetsu @ Khotetsu @lib.lgbt

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2 yr. ago

As I always say, we fought a war over this. The whole world was involved.

And the irony is that people switched to cable for the exact same reason. They got tired of the nonsense that broadcast TV pulled with subscriptions for different channels and all the ads and everything, and went to cable because you paid one bill for every channel. Then, everyone moved to streaming because you had to buy 50 different cable packages for the one channel on each you actually cared about, and there were just too many ads to deal with, etc.

Something something, those who don't listen to history are doomed to lose profit margins or whatever.

Even if you buy a physical copy of Overwatch 1 in a store, when you pop it in your system, it'll install Overwatch 2 instead.

I've actually considered making other accounts to separate content out by blocking different communities on them, but I've never really felt the desire to filter out the memes enough to go through with it.

"How to tell an American from an Eurpoean: An American can tell a gunshot from a firework by sound alone."

As a pro-gun girl from liberal Massachusetts, I largely agree with you but have a few caveats:

These kinds of laws always bother me due to the nebulous nature of the definition of an "assault weapon" in this country. A quick search will tell you that there is no single definition for an assault weapon from a legal standpoint, but that it generally refers to "semi-automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns that are able to accept detachable magazines and possess one or more other features." This definition includes almost every pistol ever created, as the defining attributes of a pistol that differentiate it from a revolver are that they're semi-automatic and almost always use a detachable magazine, except for some early designs like the Luger which use an internal magazine. Notably, the Colt AR-15 (the one all over the news for mass shootings) is not an assault weapon, and neither are rifles like the FN FAL, which was the French army's rifle for awhile during the Cold War. I have also seen stuff like AK-47 variants that are legally considered pistols here in the US, and even pump-action AR-15s, which would be completely legal under these kinds of bans despite being able to fire rounds almost as quickly as a standard AR-15.

It's even legal to anonymously buy the majority of parts for a gun online here, except for the lower receiver, which is a part that has a unique serial code on it that must be registered. Which brings me to my main issue with these kinds of laws: they always feel like stopgap measures which don't do anything about the actual issues but allow politicians to pat themselves on the back and claim they've solved the problem forever.

It's completely possible to have a country where you can own guns without having the issues we do, but everybody is too wrapped up in this 2nd Amendment spat. Countries like Australia have shown that it's possible. Australia used to have a gun culture identical to the US until they had a school shooting in the 70s. At that point, everybody in the country agreed to never let something like that happen again, tightened their gun laws and had a mass turn in of guns, and they haven't had a school shooting since. There's even a country in northern Europe (I wanna say Sweden?) where everybody has to do like 3 years in the army, and they can keep their service rifle after that time, and yet, they have no issues with mass shootings like we do here.

The belief that everybody in this country has a right to own a gun, whether they can be trusted to be a responsible gun owner or not, is probably the biggest problem we have towards actually solving this issue, and no one state can do something about it. These kinds of bans are always fairly easy to circumvent just by going to the closest state with relaxed gun laws, and they punish responsible gun owners who are going to freak out for suddenly being criminals for owning something that they bought legally. So we end up with these bans that treat a symptom and not the root causes while also pushing gun owners to vote for politicians who want to get rid of any regulation at all on guns.

Yeah, there's been a number on both surgery and HRT, as well as plenty of studies on the effects of supporting trans people - especially trans kids.

I even remember a series of studies that found that HRT had a 90% success rate among patients. 90% of people in the study said that there had been either an improvement or at least no change in the quality of their life after they started compared to before, and of the 10% who didn't, many of them cited outside factors as being the cause of their issues. Stuff like unsupportive family and harassment/hate crimes were some of the most common factors, and post HRT regret being the least common factor. The majority of that 10% said they would be starting HRT again as soon as they were in a position where they safely could.

I'm somehow in a similar yet completely different boat from you. My feed under all is made up of like 5 communities - memes, lemmy memes, 196, linux memes, and programmer humor - with guest appearances by politics and technology. Regardless of what I set the filter on my feed to, I have yet to see a single piece of porn crop up; and I had to specifically find a search tool on my pc to find some communities to subscribe to like an r/foodporn equivalent just so I would at least have some stuff pop up on my phone with some more variety related to my interests.

This is probably all related to Lemmy being new and not knowing how to get the most out of the app I'm using (and that being new as well), but as of right now I'm largely using Lemmy the way I used to use Twitter X or something rather than how I used to use Reddit. As a time waster rather than a place where I got invested in the communities I interacted with.

Yeah, anytime you see somebody making the "think of the children!" argument, look at what the possible end goal could be with that removed. Protecting kids is a favorite smokescreen because kids can't speak up for themselves in these cases.

The worst part is that Boston is ranked like #3 for public transportation in the US (yes, even including the fires). The average commute time on a route is like 30 minutes faster than the national average for public transportation, and somewhere around 50% of Boston's workers use the T to commute every day.

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Why do you people keep talking about "the right to exist"? That's nonsensical. You either exist, or you don't. No one can take your existence away from you, it's not a right that can be granted by others.

Because that's exactly the kind of "anti-LGBT viewpoint" you're asking about. You don't have to go far to find people claiming that being Trans is just a fad, or a cult of pedophiles trying to groom your children, or just mentally ill men, or a nefarious group trying to destroy young girls' wombs through dangerous surgery. The list goes on and on, and that's just the recent anti-Trans crusade. These are the kinds of views that they want to bring to social media sites and claim their free speech is being censored when they're punished for it.

And these views are having real-life consequences. It's now considered a sex crime for a man to wear a dress in Florida. For several years, transgender people were more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than black or Jewish people in the US, and there's been an increase of hate crimes against both of those groups as well in the past decade. 8 out of 10 trans women in the US will be victims of sexual assault. LGBT people are one of the most likely groups to be refused medical care, often under the excuse that "it goes against my beliefs." Some of these groups have even outright said that their goal is to "eliminate transgender people from public life, and eventually, existing entirely." Some have straight up called for a trans genocide.

These same kinds of arguments have been trotted out for gay and black men - "they're a bunch of pedophiles coming for your kids!" Or for lesbians - "they're just damaged women." Or my favorite, said by a 20-something year old coworker to a 16 year old lesbian coworker, "you're not a lesbian, you just haven't had a dick in you yet."

To the neutral observer, it's quite clear that certain online communities cough are echo chambers that refuse to engage in honest discussion regarding LGBTQ topics and vigorously attempt to expel and shame those who do not adhere to the party line.

I could not have said it better myself. Time and time again, science has shown that not only do LGBT people exist, but also how damaging the anti-LGBT rhetoric is. And yet, the "anti-LGBT" jam their fingers in their ears and scream about "woke indoctrination" before returning to their echo chambers. And eventually, that's what these kinds of "free speech" platforms become. Echo chambers for hatred, as these people harass and drive off anybody with opposing views. As a wise bartender once said after kicking out a skinhead just for being a skinhead, "You allow one Nazi, and you no longer have a bar. You have a Nazi bar. Because if you allow one, then they'll bring their friends, and eventually, they'll force everyone else out."

Also, you seem to have fallen for the "both sides" rhetoric they use to make themselves look innocuous while villifying their opponents. Stuff like the people encouraging those who who called in bomb threats to Target and threatened their employees for daring to have a line of Pride themed merchandise by saying it was protesting - that it was the same thing as people marching with signs against police brutality. You talk about the in-group and out-group bias of LGBT people while conveniently ignoring the exact same thing from the other side. Ignoring that these "anti-LGBT" people think they're being unfairly persecuted and anyone who disagrees with them is a "woke" communist or whatever.

And yet "anti-LGBT" was the term used by the comment above to describe the kinds of viewpoints that they're questioning why they aren't allowed. It's also the label used proudly by some of these groups themselves. Like the term TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) which was coined by the group itself, but was later claimed to be a slur by that very same group when they realized how the majority of people viewed them negatively because of it.

Ask the groups of conservatives arguing that trans people are either just a trend, a cult of pedophiles trying to groom your kids, a cult trying to destroy young girls wombs or perform life changing surgery on children, or any of a number of other accusations that say that trans people don't exist, including the two they mentioned. These are the kinds of "anti-LGBT arguments" that they claim are being censored.

There's a screenshot elsewhere in the comments of him saying he was specifically removing transphobia and homophobia as punishable offenses from the rules because those rules "were being used to silence conservative voices." That's a pretty clear stance to me.

Because these 2 things are not the same, and by conflating them as such, you pretty clearly show what side of the fence you fall on. Debating on whether or not minorities deserve the right to exist is not the same thing as arguing about which brand of magic sky-daddy you subscribe to.

"Anti-LGBT viewpoints" fall along a pretty clear line. The same one that "anti-Jewish" and "anti-Black" views fall on. That these minorities don't deserve the same rights granted to white people, or even that they shouldn't be allowed to exist period. There has never been any other view presented by "anti-LGBT" people. They seek to exclude minorities from everyday life and eventually kill them off entirely. The arguments they use today against trans people are the same they used against gay people, which are just rehashed arguments they used to oppose equal rights for black people. There's no politeness to be found there. Might as well say that we should hear the Nazis out on this "final solution to the Jewish question," so long as they're polite in their arguing their case.

As a wise bartender once said, "If you allow one Nazi, you no longer have a bar. You have a Nazi bar."

CoL may be higher, but wages are usually higher as well. That was a big thing at the height of everybody working remotely. People were working for companies in high CoL areas but moving to cheaper places for the pay raise it provided.

And it's not just the tourism industry that's suffering, but construction and anything that requires freight shipping as well are already feeling the effects. There's been videos for the past several months of completely empty job sites with half finished houses and condos because DeSantis has made it a crime to drive undocumented workers, who make up almost the entirety of the construction workforce. A vast number of freight truck drivers also said that they won't deliver to Florida for similar reasons, though I don't remember exactly what law caused them to refuse to go into the state.

This is the big one to me. It's much more difficult to search for specific content if it's isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.

If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.

There's a flaw in your logic around people's preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn't be expected to give up what they want from a service. They'll just go somewhere else if they aren't getting the services they want.

It's like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody's going to put up with that. They'll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn't make that a good service model.

Now, I'm not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they're looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy's communities to specific servers going down.