5434a
4mo ago
You don't have to read it. I often don't, beyond skimming through for posts that show more consideration than simple partisan reaction. If it feels like I've read enough and there's twice as much again left to go I collapse the thread.
Discussions here would be stale without two sides, which is what makes your own presence here worthwhile as someone who often brings a measure of balance to gendered topics, so I encourage you to consider staying on.
5434a
2d ago
I can't remember if it was Your Name or Weathering With You that I watched. I think it was Weathering. I downloaded both of them after reading yet another "recommend some anime for non-anime watchers" thread. Whichever one it was I switched it off unfinished, deleted the other one without watching it, and re-examined my credulity for internet anime recommendations.
One Punch Man on the other hand was thoroughly entertaining even as the joke began wearing thin, but that was recommended to me by a real person who isn't into anime.
5434a
2yr ago
it’s a complete fucking riddle to me if someone discloses that they “identify as a woman” or whatever.[...] what I’ve repeatedly experienced is a marked reluctance to offer up anything more than the vaguest of details.
As I said a few days ago, the transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be. Applying it to uses outside that scope throws up unanswered questions and contradictions because it wasn't made for more general uses and so it fails in other applications. It was constructed to serve their immediate ends and no more.
Looking at it like this brings the matter into focus. It's a medical condition only as long as it needs to be to access medical resources. In scenarios where access to medical resources isn't required, guess what? It's no longer a medical condition. When it suits to be a psychological condition, or a linguistic label, or a particular aesthetic, those are the things transgenderism will be - until it no longer suits. The details aren't vague so much as they're ephemeral. The consistent quality is the self-servingness and self-justification.
You're a defence lawyer, you must be familiar with this tactic. I assume the difference is that in the legal realm you don't tie yourself in knots puzzling how to make sense of these competing claims. "I was at home that night... What I mean is that I had at some point been home that night... I mean, I didn't say whose home I was at that night... What I mean is I was batting in a baseball game... ... So, uh, can I go home now?"
They're not the other sex. They want to be the other sex. The entirity of transgenderism is the struggle to resist the unfortunate and persistent reality that they cannot be the other sex. And if in a biopunk future they somehow could, they'd still have not-been and be relegated to arriviste status. In the absence of full transexualism the very best a transgender can achieve is to be transgender. This could have been tolerable, but the more rhetoric they deployed the more holes were revealed until there's more hole than there is doughnut. There are male men and female women, and there is masculinity and femininity. Outside of the truly rare edge case congenital medical conditions I don't see which complex meanings can't be rendered legible with these simple terms. The transgender philosophy and lexicon renders these meanings less legible, and I suspect it's by design to construct a means to an otherwise impossible end.
5434a
2mo ago
Little by little my Nook ST is beginning to wear out so I'm thinking about what I should look for when it's time to buy a new one. What are some of your must have features / biggest annoyances / missed opportunities in e-readers?
It's table stakes but I still love having an instant dictionary. Instant translation would be nice. Instant wikipedia would be good too. The more quick-look-up reference resources the better.
I like the idea of bookmarks and highlights/margin notes but I don't use them as they're not well implemented, for example when moving books between devices and different software. That raises the issue of software and hardware. Call me old school but I'm a firm believer in removable local storage as a means to preserve data should the device fail.
Not once have I wanted to install additional apps. I also don't particularly care about having a fancy OS/UI since I spend 99.999% of the time inside the book, not outside. I guess that audiobooks could be a relevant feature but I never listen to them and it's a slippery slope to podcasts, music, and just using a fully featured tablet. Ideally there would be a read-out-loud feature that used the ebook as the source rather than a separate audio file, and I imagine it's not far off if it hasn't been done already but again it feels like that would require a much more powerful device for only marginal benefit.
5434a
2mo ago
What is a pajeet? Urbandictionary has it variously as a slur which could refer to Canadian Sikhs, north Indians, Hindus, Indians in general, or any South Asian.
5434a
7mo ago
Is there anything else I can try or steps that I'm missing in remedying a chronically blocked nose?
I don't have a runny nose, a cough, any other sign of infection or the itchy red eyes and puffiness I'd associate with an allergy. I've tried waiting it out, I've tried nasal rinses and steam inhalation, I've tried aromatic decongestants like eucalyptus oil and eating onions and pickled chillies (more effective than I'd expect, and tasty too), and I've tried anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and paracetamol. So far the most effective remedies have been pickled chillies and paracetamol but it's not healthy to take paracetamol daily. If I stack them all together I can sometimes get it to ease off for a few weeks before it slowly creeps back to where it was.
I think my next move is to try antihistamines to rule out an allergy and then if that doesn't work book a doctor's appointment. I might ask a pharmacist but I'm not sure what over-the-counter remedies they can suggest that I haven't already thought of.
5434a
1yr ago
Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women.
Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.
Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.
[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]
5434a
1yr ago
there should be some kind of more literal rite of passage that, upon completion, triggers said emancipation
Any suggestions? One of the few things I can think of that satisfies being challenging, demonstrating (limited, for the naysayers) competence and is broadly recognised as (again for the naysayers, largely) legitimate is military or some comparable form of national service. But last time that idea was floated at the old place it was dismissed as being literal slavery (beside the objection that the army and every other profession doesn't want them). Which, hyperbole aside, is admittedly a problem: How can you place demands on a populace under threat of withholding rights and still call yourselves defenders of freedom? Whichever way you look at it it boils down to a state-to-citizen quid pro quo.
The trouble is for it to hold any significance it must impart a cost, and even if the benefits outweigh the costs people will still bristle at the need for any measure of sacrifice.
Pilgrimage? Mortification? Or something altogether more milquetoast like graduating high school, which many here are just as eager to condemn as little different from slavery and imprisonment. Or how about tying it to your first point and make it necessary to have raised a child who graduates high school? Three birds with one stone!
5434a
2yr ago
I've got a plan to dip my toe into salsa classes and other non-formal partner dances. What's holding me back is I'm making a concerted effort to clear out the backlog of loose ends accumulated from sub-diligent general living before I take up new projects and hobbies.
The primary reason I want to try partner dancing is that I've spent years going to clubs, parties, raves, festivals and other gigs and I'm fed up of the atomisation and informality. No matter the size of the crowd or the style of the music the audience were 99% locked in to focusing on the performer over the music or the other attendees, and any dancing that did happen was either self-conscious freestyling, lesser or greater degrees of going berserk, or thinly veiled dry humping.
Since you're here and it sounds like you've got some breadth of experience, how would you describe the differences in the type of people who are involved with the different styles? Any hobby drama or other funny/memorable stories?
5434a
7mo ago
I recently gathered up all the major 8bit and 16bit Zelda games to play through via emulator. I've tried playing the later games before but lacking the rose coloured glasses of childhood nostalgia meant I couldn't get into them and found them to suffer from the familiar issue with open world games of using a map that is too large for the amount of content. Combined with the Zelda games' approach of making everything a multistep puzzle resulted in time spent mostly travelling from one side of the map to the other searching high and low for whatever tiny clue I'd overlooked to unlock the next level.
5434a
2yr ago
Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?
5434a
1yr ago
I blinked and my comment got eaten. TLDW find a practical project that puts work in your hands, not your head.
5434a
8mo ago
Isn't donating blood supposed to be good for your health too? Within limits, obviously.
5434a
1yr ago
I've read most of the replies and I wonder if it doesn't boil down to unwillingness to entertain anything short of a perfect case. If a vegan can't provide a watertight case for how turning vegan will generate ideal outcomes on all aspects under consideration then their argument is irredeemably flawed, and if their argument is flawed it can be rejected wholesale and we can all carry on as we were. And of course The Motte is a filter for people who live to pick holes in arguments (cue "no we're not!").
What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat? Or does it have to be the once-and-for-all slam dunk that settles the matter for ever?
5434a
7mo ago
The 3D era games. To be honest I only played Ocarina of Time as it's rated so highly and since I didn't enjoy playing that one I don't see much point in trying any others. I'll admit that I use a walkthrough for handholding when I get really stuck, at this age I don't have the time or the patience, but I like to give the puzzles an honest try first. It's embarrassing to admit but for OoT I literally had to look up a walkthrough just to get out of the introduction and training area after scouring every inch of it, and it continued in the same vein until eventually the telecomms workmen repaired our broadband connection and I happily switched it off forever.
I think it might be because the 2D worlds are broken up into discrete screens and so you can mentally map the world to a series of separate tiles that you travel between, each one with at least some kind of distinct feature, while the 3D ones largely just roll on and on in every direction. That works well in an action game but in a puzzle game it ends up feeling like looking for a correct sequence of needles in a haystack.
5434a
10mo ago
This is a good thing. The emoji set is too bloated with these "but I have mid length hair, freckles, and stud earrings, not hoops!" inclusions. A simple 2+2 pictogram is perfectly sufficient. The point of the yellow happy face is that it's happy, not that it's a yellow face.
5434a
1yr ago
What's always confused me is where beauty becomes subjective. I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.
Where it gets confusing is wondering how many other people see the women I find attractive the same way I see Margot Robie. When I look at the row of canonical "10s" (sorry, "9.5s") linked at /r/truerateme I'd swap their placing with the 7s. For example Taylor Hill (whoever she is) could be an average checkout assistant. I say that because I used to work as a checkout assistant and had half a dozen colleagues who were more attractive and I still wouldn't have rated them as "1 in 50,000 ultra attractive top tier super models". Taylor Hill looks directly comparable to Summer Glau but with a slightly lower hairline, but Summer Glau is rated as 5.5 there!
I suppose no matter which way you cut it there will always be a degree of subjectivity that can't be captured in an objective description.
The best method I can think of to begin to start getting a handle on the matter would be to have people subjectively rank the set of faces in that chart and then figure out where the results overlap and where they split into groups who prefer different "types" that still share a lot of overlapping ratings within those types. Probably somewhere like that website (amihot.com? I can't remember) would also have a reasonable dataset. Until that question has more detail the "beauty is subjective" platitudes make an important, if overstated, point.
5434a
2yr ago
I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
5434a
2yr ago
Purely idle curiosity: Could someone following the Charles Atlas exercise program achieve Charles Atlas's physique?
5434a
2yr ago
It's not over until they take down the perspex wagie cages in the supermarket. Even banks and the other traditionally physically secured service counters are back to being wide open in the way they were already becoming pre-pandemic.
5434a
2yr ago
Miniscule level question of philosophical aesthetics: Is a television wall-mounting bracket more part of the wall, or part of the television?
I have a black TV set and a white wall, and I'm shopping for a bracket. The one I've chosen comes in black or white. In my mind the true-to-itself colour would be unpainted metal. I've flip-flopped a couple of times but I think I've made my choice. I'm interested to hear others' opinions and reasoning.
5434a
6mo ago
I thought it was just my PC being old but my recent experiences of YouTube making my PC sounds like it wants to take off combined with this comment suggesting that it's not just my PC has inspired me to move over to a desktop YouTube client. I've chosen FreeTube because it comes with ad block, SponsorBlock and ("most") age verified videos enabled. Seems alright so far.
A multi media push for Bluesky is happening today.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Bluesky&iar=news&ia=news
Currently listening to BBC radio news with guests talking about "is X over?" To their credit the host is offering some criticism of the move and the possible motives.
Is X over? Is this push organic, or coordinated? Are journalists helping contribute to a more positive platform, or are they running away to a hugbox in an effort to punish Elon Musk for supporting Donald Trump?
I don't have much to say but I thought this was worth a post given these platforms' centrality to the internet culture war and its synergies with journalism. For my part I've always thought Twitter was shit, is shit, and will remain shit, and the same goes for any copycats adopting the same format. I lament the drop off of RSS, which suffered from terrible branding/awareness. I didn't understand the value of RSS until it was already in decline, dismissing it as just more icon clutter below a standard format blogpost next to Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and send-to-email share links.
Twitter's rise began with journalists hailing it as the beginning of "citizen journalism", plateaued with it becoming a journalism circlejerk of mutual citationogenics they could profitably mine for clickbait from the comfort of their pillows with no need to undertake difficult tasks like research and real world reportage, and is now being abandoned as those same citizen journalists have increasingly turned against the professional journalist class who lauded them. Reap what you sow, Frankenstein's monster, the student has become the master, etc...
Is it a coincidence this is happening on a Friday night? Sunday night is the typical slot for setting a news agenda for the week, but something like Bluesky might be more suited to a weekend when people would be settling down to a relaxing night of shitposting.
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