FlyOnTheWall
6d ago
What exactly would be crazy according to you?
A "gender-expansive lesbian with he/him pronouns" is crazy to me. Also "it/its" pronouns (unless it is trans-species): in both cases because it doesn't map to a coherent desire (as far as I know)
FlyOnTheWall
6d ago
I would imagine the N95 mask requirement functioned as a hidden mandatory fee. What homeless person has that?
To quote the house rules on their website:
Wearing a well-fitted KN-95 respirator mask (or better) is required at all times. Contact the venue ahead of time to talk about an exception. Anyone who simply refuses without engaging in a good faith conversation to reach an accommodation will be asked to leave the space if necessary and provided with an opportunity to engage in an accountability process if deemed appropriate.
So perhaps they would provide a mask or provide an exception for someone too poor to afford a mask?
FlyOnTheWall
7d ago
I reach Noire, who identifies as a gender-expansive lesbian and uses he/him pronouns
No way this guy is serious.
Yeah I'd update my perception of leftists/progressives if this part is true (and the "guy" isn't trolling)
Most of this is not that crazy if you accept some basic tenets of progressivism (though sounds crazy to a non-believer - "the entire world is made out of these tiny things called atoms and there are bunch of different types like in this periodic table. No they are really small, you can't even see them with this light microscope. The atoms for table salt are the for a poisonous gas and an explosive metal but they bind strongly together so it's safe")
Nonetheless, some of it reads like a conservative parody of progressivism to the point I really do wonder... ("he/him gender-expansive lesbian")
[in response to making masks optional] “people like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” posted another.
“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists"
Last Ditch, which opened last year as a bar for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends,” is struggling.
One of the trio, Asa Rosario, a drag performer who uses it/its pronouns, envisioned a venue where it and its friends could perform.
No one would be turned away from the space for lack of funds. “Poor and unhoused people are welcome in the space.” The police were not.
“A lot of people are calling for an acknowledgment of harm and I’m hearing a WHITE therapist ... center[ing] the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff,” writes Noire, who is Black.
“There’s a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this [a community meeting], so for you as a white person that asks for me to stay for another meeting for free,” he says, is “incredibly disingenuous and racist. I’m not doing that.”
Matellian (who uses she/they pronouns) had been shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS,” he [Noire] writes
Noire, who identifies as a gender-expansive lesbian and uses he/him pronouns
I've never personally interacted with a space at this level of wokeness, but I have come across public spaces with this kind of vibe before: inclusive yet pleasant to be in (gender-expansive Black lesbians and neopronoun users vs. thuggish black/brown youths and homeless people)
How come these spaces don't just get overrun with undesirables who are too low-functioning to participate in a "community meeting"? To re-quote:
No one would be turned away from the space for lack of funds. “Poor and unhoused people are welcome in the space.” The police were not.
They are explicitly advertising this place as a shelter for homeless people (amongst other things), does word not get around and then the homeless people... go there for shelter?
Well that would require me to believe in satellites and photography
Yes it does, and that is reasonable. I guess you're gesturing towards the argument of "if we are willing to believe sources like photographs, then why not also believe the Bible/Church too?".
My acceptance of videos/photographs as evidence is something I'm willing to generally apply (even to stuff that I don't like) - but I don't think stuff being written down is similarly strong evidence (and I don't think you do either, since you probably don't believe in the Quran)
(aren't these devices stealing your soul anyway?)
No I don't believe in souls. And I'm pretty sure that even Christians, who believe in souls, don't think cameras steal them.
It could be AI-generated for all I know.
Good point, I think eventually photos/videos will become untrustworthy, maybe they are already untrustworthy. But I remember seeing photos of Antarctica years ago, before realistic AI image generation was a thing.
There is a significant portion of the educated Western population who claims that God sometimes gets confused and puts a soul in the wrong body. This is something they teach children in many parts of the West.
I assume you are referring to transgenderism? That's really not what most adherents believe (speaking as someone who was firmly pro-trans, and who is still broadly sympathetic to it) - given that most of us are atheists.
Some liberal detractors of transgenderism liken it to a religion by arguing a gender identity is functionally identical to a soul because lots of pro-trans people struggle to define what "womanhood" means explicitly.
But it can be done: a "trans woman" is a man who wishes to be a woman, and one's "gender identity" is just the gender/sex they wish they were (and then we redefine gender/man/woman/mother/father/etc to match gender identity instead of sex, and discourage mentions of sex) - no appeals to the metaphysical, just the phenomena of human beings having desires.
'Don't sacrifice children because an angel told you not to' is not that odd of a belief, by comparison, imo.
As I explained above, transgenderism boils down to the mundane claim that sometimes men want to be women, and vice-versa. I am almost certain that angels don't exist now, and never existed in the past - because I've never seen an angel, seen photographs of an angel, or heard any other convincing evidence they aren't made-up.
Don't sacrifice children ... But that's from growing up in a civilization that was deeply imbued with Christian values. Somebody who grew up in a Mayan city might be fine with Clancy-style late-term abortion.
Sounds like you're gesturing towards the fact that atheism has no objective morality, which is a good point that I think a lot of atheists don't address. Without a God, there is just people's subjective moral preferences - "sacrificing children" (i.e. killing them for no good reason) feels immoral to me, and to many others. But if someone felt otherwise, I can't actually prove they are wrong by pointing to a line in the Bible, and they wouldn't even be "wrong", they'd just have a different taste to me (and that would be horrifying to me)
And it might even be true that humans need a God to maintain a stable society long-term. But none of that has anything to do with whether God, angels, etc exist in the first place.
Clancy-style late-term abortion
Also, nice try, but I see what you did there: the pro-Clancy defence is that she was mentally unwell so it wasn't her fault. People who believe in abortion don't believe the fetus counts as human, so it's okay to kill it with full awareness of what you are doing.
FlyOnTheWall
18d ago
Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions
I have not absorbed normal formatting conventions, and I don't think anyone I know online/irl has either.
Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).
Again, I did not know this, and I'd be surprised if anyone I know irl/online knew that either. When I write text on a computer, sometimes I want to make a vertical space, and I just do the first thing that works to make that space (here, I do use paragraphs instead of line-breaks, but that's because paragraphs happened to be the first tool that worked)
Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.
I cannot remember a time where I was unsure about the number of people "they" referred to in a conversation. In pretty much every case the "they" is initially going to be introduced as something which is clearly singular but of unknown gender (friend, cousin, teacher, student, etc)
Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike
I'm saying it merits nothing, except maybe a piece of fun trivia about the difference between line breaks and paragraphs.
I have reached the limits of my patience.
If this is really the reaction you have to formatting/grammar quirks, then I guess you just have an extremely unusual set of sensibilities. So fair enough.
We all hold some beliefs we can't justify from the ground up. I've never seen Antarctica, I have to believe that it exists if anybody talks about it.
Me neither, but unlike for typical religious claims, we have:
- Satellite images (use Google Maps in globe + satellite mode and look at Antarctica)
- Various photos taken in Antarctica (e.g. of
polar bearsEdit: penguins - I actually checked this time) - Claiming that a specific part of the surface of the earth has land on it is less far-fetched than saying there is some kind of heaven/nirvana/elysium/etc transcending the physical world (living) humans can experience.
Example reasons to dislike a person
Religion and political views makes sense to me. I know a certain kind of libertarian/classical liberal type likes to pride themselves on it not mattering to them ("As long as they are respectful, I could be friends with a neo-Nazi and a woke progressive") - but it's harder to relate to someone when you have a different map of objective reality, and it's harder to feel comfortable around them when they hold moral intuitions you disagree with.
As for the other examples...
Uses "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender
Uses line breaks rather than paragraphs for no good reason, on a platform that differentiates between them (e. g., Markdown or raw HTML, not email or BBcode)
Places a hyphen between a number and its associated noun for no good reason (e. g., "after 10-years of imprisonment" rather than "after 10 years of imprisonment"; note that "a 10-year term of imprisonment" is fine)
Seriously?
Not saying your overall conclusion about friendship not being for you is wrong (from my own experiences, I weakly suspect long-term platonic friendship is a bad use of time, as a general human truth), but I don't think non-standard/non-canonical speech / writing (and similar trivialities) has anything to do with it.
I didn't clock the "mass disabling event" comment - that is an exaggeration (I doubt there are that many immunocompromised patrons, and even if there were, it is just one bar), but people sometimes exaggerate things when they are emotional.
But this policy is ableist - it is discrimination against immunocompromised people:
And you might point out, that obviously this is an absurdly high bar for accessibility compared to literally any other public space (not just normalising masks in 2026, but enforcing it), but this is a space that is specifically meant to be a refuge for the fringes of society. So it makes sense to hold it to a higher standard.
I think this kind of stuff is misguided from a tactical point of view, but I can understand the emotions and thought behind it (as opposed to actual crazy stuff like "gender expansive lesbian")
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