sapient [they/them] @ sapient_cogbag @infosec.pub

Autistic queer trans²humanist and anarchist. Big fan of dense cities, code,

---

Read more

Posts

6

Comments

201

Joined

2 yr. ago

"Yale Police Benevolent Association" is such a dystopian name. Real "Ministry of Truth" vibes :/

The absolute contempt for human life and dignity in this comment :/

Exactly. Poland itself is pretty damn far-right, and while they might be helping Ukraine and Ukrainians, this doesn't mean their government is not borderline fascist. Someone else below (@TimeNaan@lemmy.world) provided this link documenting some severe human rights abuses against lots of migrants (some of these are also from the Belarus side too, it's not just Poland).

Any situation in which a state denies access to people watching for such abuses - like this - is one that sends immediate and severe warning signs to me. Combined with the other stuff going on around LGBT+ free zones, well, it's worrying imo >.<

Some of this stuff is even worse than what I've heard of the US/Mexico border, though it's all pretty horrific.

Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it's own sources as well and provides a decent summary.

Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

Yeah because you're from hexbear and I don't trust you to engage in good faith or not immediately jump to the worst possible interpretation of something I said or missed (like you have done with the trans clinic thing), or do the whole thing where you assume only you are right and people can't reasonably disagree on something, or always pivot to "but the us/uk did..." and act as if the inevitable and only correct conclusion to any debate or discussion is that the US and "West" (which is itself a messy concept) is worse in every aspect of every single thing than anywhere else in every possible action. And I, you know, can read the information and compare it with the uk/us pretty quickly, without listing every single tiny factor that went into my consideration.

Frankly, the behaviour of hexbear users has made me always check the accounts of people with square-brackets pronouns before engaging unless I'm in a community on an instance that has defederated. I should not feel this way when pronoun tags are a trans supportive thing and would usually make me feel more comfortable when talking with people. But blegh.

I will probably block after this because all engaging with 95% of hexbear users does is cause me irrational amounts of stress every fucking time because of the constant goddamn micro-nitpick and aggression on every fucking thing, constant assumptions of superiority and assuming they are always completely correct in ever single debate or discussion, it's like they can't even conceive of being wrong on something. Honestly this is just a vent at this point lol, not even something you specifically have done since you're nowhere near the worst I've come across from hexbear.

Engaging just makes me feel the need to analyse every single thing I say to see if it will set the hexbear folks off on a tangent or completely dismiss you and do the weird misdirection and whataboutism and such. It makes me afraid to ever engage with hexbears in any manner, or overanalyse every tiny thing I say in case they use it to deliberately evade my main point like I was forced to do when younger in very hostile situations as an autistic person to avoid unpredictably angry people, and just like then it brings very little practical success because all my effort is spent trying to find any tiny way what I said might be interpreted in the worst possible way and there's always some excuse anyway.

China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

True. This doesn't change the other stuff I mentioned, and the UK also claims to be "improving" clinics for trans teens while doing the opposite, so forgive me for being a little skeptical of the persistency, especially since the hrt stuff is from 2022 and this is from 2021. It's also only in a couple provinces. However, if it pans out, which it seems to from what you see, it's a positive move, but again, it seems to be Shanxi and Beijing.

This was also explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia article and I did see it. But it was only a single province, compared to the entire government's more negative actions >.<

The point here is that it is demonstrably obvious to trans people living in the US and UK that China is better to us than the US and the UK, one of which is currently performing a genocide against us and the other of which is transphobic on a near daily basis and is expected by the community here to follow in the US' footsteps if it gets the chance.

China is pretty blegh actually.

They are actively making things worse w.r.t accessing HRT online, and require even more nonsense than the UK on changing legal ID, including shit like spousal approval, familial approval, and permission from various things like work, school, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_China

Access to hrt is also comparable to the uk by the looks of it. More importantly, the illegality of gay marriage combined with the massive approval process for id change means that trans people with different-gender partners can't marry legally, and trans people with similar-gender partners are probably? in an unfortunate position here, though the page doesn't include info on this >.<

The more sex-segregated components of various aspects of China also causes significant issues >.<

I'd say it's worse in terms of being able to socially and medically transition, but there's less overt hate. It's more death-by-bureacracy and a need for even more extensive social approval to transition (I'm almost impressed that they managed a worse system than in the UK). The greater hold the Chinese Government has over their internet means accessing DIY HRT is likely much harder :/

People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong, they both have different issues. The UK in particular, most of the transphobia I experience is from institutions and media rather than "on the ground" (though this def. happens too), and the way the government is going with using us as a scapegoat is very concerning. But the - for now - lower amount of control over communications means I got started on DIY HRT pretty simply and pushed my way through the "official" system.

On a side note, stuff like this is one of the reasons opposing authoritarianism especially w.r.t communication is important, it makes it easier to do things the government has not approved of because the infrastructure is not in place to control communication and coordination as effectively.

The US is as always a clusterfuck because of it's more federated nature, some of their states are trying to do genocide while others are acting as refuges and have things like informed consent HRT access and active protection against the more hostile states ^. - but fuck me if the dems aren't spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.

Honestly most large states constantly try and censor the internet with stuff like this, though in the US/UK/Europe it has been a lot less successful at least. In this case it's a more brazen attack on queer people, but this sort of stuff seems to happen every couple years. It's very frustrating >.<

People definitely have some double standards though - maybe racism or the false idea that China is communist - but it doesn't mean the Chinese govt is good on things, in my observation, just that people underestimate the things European countries, the UK, and US states do.

They may be better or worse and just because people often have double standards doesn't make the Chinese government better (though it is often not worse in some respects, but the overall greater control of communication and computing infrastructure means it is harder to evade the subjugation or organise around it via tools like Tor, and the greater centralisation means that if the government decides to do something particularly awful it's both harder for public dissent to occur and harder for regions to undermine efforts like that or even actively counter them :/).

libreoffice is local, MS office is not doing local.

I mean the person in tye image has a fox news logo as well as an antifa logo. I'm mocking the absurdity of the concept of someone claiming to be antifascist while liking fox news xP

You might like something called Syncthing. It's a FOSS data replication thing that doesn't store stuff on other people's servers but if you have a computer or some other place you want to throw files, it can keep things synchronised with your phone, without any cloud storage crap ^.

This is what the right thinks a joke is, folks. Apparently this person is an antifascist and also thinks fox news is good or something?

The soviet union was authoritarian state capitalist (as opposed to market-capitalist). It just called itself communist, even though the Soviets (worker's councils) were suborned to the party very rapidly.

Multi-source electric grids with cross-continental HVDC go brrrr

Based :)

Being anti-conscription is not a tankie position - I certainly am not in favour of conscription, it's one of the more authoritarian things a country can do, even if they aren't as prone to invading other places a-la Vietnam as the US is, and I loathe tankies.

Generally speaking I'm of the opinion that if a war or fight is not something people would willingly join to take part in, it's going to be unjustified (this doesn't necessarily mean that something people join the military to take part in is justified, it often isn't, but if you have to force people, it's definitely going to be unjustified >.<).

I understand why in Finland it might be more popular cus of the behaviour of Russia in the past, but my opinion remains the same - offer the training as an option, and if people agree that the threat of Russia is large enough to prepare to fight, they can sign up (which I'd think lots would given the particular situation of Finland, and with this method, you avoid the coercion, resentment, and unwillingness that comes from conscription and from what I understand of modern militaries, those things make conscription more of a hindrance than a help anyhow)

I'll leave my issues with States, military structure, and the MIC for another time ;p

Marxism-Leninism as a term was actually created by Stalin as a sort of post-hoc justification thing. It was not made by Lenin, but Stalin. This is linguistic weirdness/controversy, in that the name can serve to hide it's origins from casual readers.

The other commenter has explained the more concrete thing with the fact that lots of them are tankies or proto-tankies .

I'm actually pretty pro-AI (and in particular, pro-FOSS AI), so I'm pretty unhappy about this myself ;p

If nothing else, this kind of shit will mean that only the existing "Intellectual Property" holders will have access to using AI. It would entrench things even more >.<

In theory, existing forum software could implement activitypub and link with lemmy & kbin....

I hope to see fediverse SufficientVelocity and Spacebattles one day .

lol you really think I just parrot the US state department. Honestly this is another thing with tankies, they seem to be incapable of conceiving of geopolitics more complex than "arm of the USA" or "not arm of the USA".

The idea of only partial-alignment even among nominal allies, and complex conflicting geopolitical interests, and the idea of spectrums and complexity beyond "US=bad" "not US=good" is foreign to them, or even criticizing actions of organizations rather than just deciding XYZ organization is evil or good and retroactively justifying or opposing every action they take (let alone consider that an action could have mixed consequences or ethics, both positive or negative ;p).

For example, I am still capable of criticising Ukraine's actions (for example like using cluster bombs, even if last I saw Russia used them first I still am not in favour of them) and the propaganda they produce, or worrying about the effects of the significant debt on Ukrainians and their public services in the form of disaster capitalism, or also generally expressing my issue with States as a whole while still opposing brazen imperialism by Russia ., or criticising the dehumanisation of Russian people in some of the conversations I've seen (especially the people who left Russia, when those are the people least likely to support the Russian Government's actions and are often fleeing persecution themselves e.g. queer Russians).

I just don't usually specifically say these things because in practise the conversations in which it comes up are already horrifically derailed by apologia for Russia's actions and enlightened-centrism, so expressing the nuance is completely useless because the people I'm responding to just hate anything they associate with "the West" (which itself is not necessarily a fully coherent concept) and usually massively whitewash the shit going on in Russia, both about Ukraine and also other things <.<

"Gender updates" is the best term i've heard for transitioning in a while. I'm stealing it now, the bigots can't have it. 󰱫

(also note for anyone reading: the term "tankie" refers to people who embrace authoritarianism and usually specific self-declared "socialist" states repressing civilians, often modern day states that don't even pretend to be socialist like Russia, or the CCP, or North Korea/DPRK, or even just any nation considered "anti-West" regardless of their behaviour or internal political structure x.x

It started when parts of the Communist Party of Great Britain split off from the main party because the main party supported the USSR crushing (with tanks) Hungarian socialists trying to break off from the USSR, for a number of reasons - others were involved too, but the worker councils themselves were major parts of the uprising - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 - there were attempts at worker council parlimentary democracy and such, as well as attempts for direct-democracy .

The most recent Tankie Thing is supporting Russia for invading Ukraine, or doing weird enlightened-centrism on it because the USA gives support to Ukraine. More broadly, tankies generally seem to act as if any act by another country is always less bad than the USA, and that only the USA can be imperialist, or various variations on this concept >.<.

It should be noted that the right wing have started to some degree calling all leftists tankies and IMO anyone should reject this attempted co-option of the word because it allows people to falsely conflate leftism with tankie ideologies, even though they are often a small minority in IRL leftist activism, with more common groups being anarchists, democratic socialists, some Marxists (even some Marxist-Leninists, which itself is a controversial term tbh), various libertarian socialisms and communisms, and the odd further-left social democrat .)

Can't say you're wrong tbh :p

Luckily, it is possible to shield the power supply from a carrington event at least, and we do have satellites keeping watch. The main issue is making sure all the power infrastructure is actually shielded, which costs money >.<