HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Can't believe I'm using "Game of Thrones" as an instance, but think of the Targaryens and Jaime "Kingslayer" Lannister. The Targaryens are the result of putting family over duty, of literal incest used to keep the bloodline pure, and the results of that are not good. Jaime is faced with a choice: do his duty as a member of the Kingsguard, obey the king, and be part of a massacre. Or break his oath, with a devotion to the higher good.
Now, Jaime's choice is not pure, because there's self-interest there, there's trying to save his father's life, and other things. But it's something like the choice Arjuna is facing: do what society says you should and must do, or do what is right by the higher truth?
"How can you fight and kill your family and mentors?" is a hard choice, but the results of “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” is that eventually it becomes corrupted into "our little cabal and what is best for us, and to hell with the country, the constitution, the law, and the lesser beings".
HereAndGone2
4d ago
Doctor Doom could be great but (1) you need to have a decent actor playing Reed Richards as the deuteragonist and (2) you need a really good writer not to make Doom stupid, Richards weak and stupid, and avoid temptations about ret-conning or making the villain too sympathetic and (3) yes, you do need Reed Richards, Victor has set up his entire notion of revenge against him even if stepping back and looking at it as an outsider that's dumb, Victor and (4) don't forget that he's ruler of Latveria and well-regarded by his people since he is actually a decent ruler, don't make him some kind of 'this is commentary on Trump authoritarian fascist dictator Amerikkka nazi bad guy'.
I don't trust any studio right now to pull that off.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Yeah, I think for something where the plot is only an excuse for the ACTION!!!, you can get away with it (though as we've seen, Marvel have managed to milk the cow dry, with people finally getting burned out on the plethora of movies being released). I might go see a fourth Iron Man movie. I'm unlikely to go see Ant-Man. When we get to "nobody knows or cares about this character, why are they getting a movie?", you stay home and see if there's anything on Netflix.
HereAndGone2
7d ago
If birth certificates are updated regularly to reflect changes in the life circumstances of a person
Yeah. We need to decide what birth certificates and similar documents are for; are they proof of identity based on physical fact (time, space, location, etc.) or are they simply vanity plates for your life (okay, I wanna change my name/where I was born is too hicksville/Mom and Dad are horrible meanies, I want to be Uncle Bert's kid instead!)
HereAndGone2
7d ago
Because the more sequels you add to any franchise, the more it gets diluted. You have your novel idea, that's the first movie. You have questions arising or undeveloped plot points from the first movie, that's your second. Maybe you can get a third out of it, but from that point on, you're just trapped in Flanderization (see all the slasher movie/horror movie franchises which run out of ideas until they're at the point of "for the fifteenth time, the dead serial killer is resurrected but this time in, uh, spins wheel of fortune space!")
HereAndGone2
10d ago
They were a full adult, very reserved, Christian and generally conservative, and they didn't tend to really reveal anything private about themselves. So it was quite a shock when they came out. They weren't out to score political points or be trendy or live out a fetish or whatever you might be thinking. They just wanted to live authentically, to heal whatever psychic suffering they struggled under.
Someone like that, yeah, I have sympathy. Maybe even let's permit them to put female on the driver's licence, though that's a big switch. They're not trying to score points, they want to live as normally as they can.
But the problem is that they are lumped in with, and used by, the types like Mr. Restaurant Misgendered who made a career out of looking to be offended in order to create those videos. Mr. Misgendered gets repudiated by the trans activism groups as a narcissistic grifter, then I have no problem with your acquaintance getting help and support because there's genuine need there. But Mr. Misgendered won't be, that's the trouble.
HereAndGone2
10d ago
Wasn't there something about the insistence on referring to Jill Biden as Dr. Biden? With one side claiming it was horrible disrespect to omit her title and the other claiming it was puncturing pretension?
HereAndGone2
10d ago
Article on the latest trans murder statistics, you will all be surprised to learn that making yourself a big, visible target and/or being poor or living in Third World countries, engaging in criminal activity and sex work is the most dangerous way to be:
New global data from TGEU’s Trans Murder Monitoring 2025 (TMM) reveals a dangerous shift: a growing number of murder victims are trans movement leaders and activists. Over the past year, trans activists accounted for 14% of reported murders and are the second most targeted group globally, following sex workers. The year-on-year rise in murders of trans activists shows this is an attempt to silence those fighting for trans rights worldwide.
Key findings
- 281 trans and gender diverse people were reported murdered between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.
- Since 2009, TGEU’s monitoring has now recorded 5322 murders worldwide.
- Sex workers (34%) remain the most targeted group of all known occupations.
- There is a notable rise in murders of activists and movement leaders, who are the second most targeted group by occupation this year, accounting for 14% of cases (up from 9% in 2024 and 6% in 2023).
- Echoing the pattern of previous years, 90% of reported murders were feminicides (victims were trans women or transfeminine people).
- 88% of victims were Black or Brown trans people, a 5% decrease from the all-time high last year (93%).
- Age distribution: 24% of murder victims were aged 19–25, 25% aged 26–30, 26% aged 31–40, and 5% under 18.
- 68% of murders occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean; Brazil leads the list for the 18th consecutive year with 30% of total cases.
- Five cases were reported in Europe, down from eight in 2024.
- 31 cases were reported in the United States, down from 41 in 2024.
- 44% of reported murders were shootings.
- 25% of murders occurred on the street, and 22% occurred in the victim’s own home.
As in previous years, Black and trans women of colour, and trans sex workers are over-represented among murder victims, with sex workers (34%) being the most targeted of all known occupations. This highlights how misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and whorephobia intersect in deadly ways.
“In the last two years, the murders of trans activists and movement leaders have doubled,” said Deekshitha Ganesan, Policy Manager at TGEU.
Disentangling "murdered solely and simply for being trans" from "murdered because women get murdered more than men by intimate partners/prostitution has always been risky" is tough. Also some of the data gathering is skimpy, to say the least; take this example of 2008 murder in Winnipeg, which is happily included in the "there have been 19 cases of trans people murdered in Canada over the years" statistics, even though it's purely notional:
https://transmurdermonitoring.tgeu.org/en/entity/8ig65tvrsdl
Gender identity or expression: trans / transgender
Sex Characteristics: Unknown
Sexual Orientation: Unknown
Occupation: unknown / not applicable
Migrant status: unknown / not applicable
Nationality: unknown
Race or ethnicity: unknown
Age range: unknown
Disability: unknown / not applicable
TDoR period (Oct-Sept): TDoR 2008
Calendar year: 2008
Date of the incident: Mar 25, 2008
Time of the incident: unknown
Type of homicide/murder: unknown / not applicable
Type of location of the murder: own residence
Number of perpetrators: unknown
Type of perpetrator(s): unknown
Basis for bias: unknown / not applicable
Bias indicators: unknown
Source of information about the murder: press
Reported by: Xtra!, 28.04.2008
Response from local authorities: unknown / not applicable
So somebody was allegedly murdered (though it could have been suicide or they fell down the stairs or something) on that date in that place, and all that is known is that they were transgender. No name, nothing else, just "transgender person murdered for being transgender in Canada, put it on the list".
Yeah, sure. There's a very subtle eliding going on with these cases; from "trans person murdered" to "this is because they were trans". Such as this case, which could be an ordinary street robbery gone wrong (again, data very skimpy). The victim was trans, but that's not the reason for the murder (unless we assume random person on street identified this as a trans woman and decided to do some trans murdering). However, in such lists released to the press and used as publicity, the implication is "all these people were murdered for being trans" not "trans people are murder victims for a lot of the same reasons cis people are murder victims".
That dishonesty is what dries up any sympathy I have for the activists and their causes and calls for "we just want to be treated with politeness".
HereAndGone2
10d ago
For the completely ignorant, such as myself, what is Block and why should I care? also, were they financially over-extended and this is just a way of reducing headcount and costs, but wrapping it up in "no no, we're not firing anyone because we can't afford to pay them, we're replacing them with our sexy new AI!"
HereAndGone2
10d ago
Round here we do have a cow college and our new(ish) university fought its way over decades to get that status from starting off as a vocational training, not a university, no degrees, practical trades third-level institution.
Cow colleges are nothing to be ashamed of!
HereAndGone2
10d ago
The thing is, claims about epidemics of anti-trans violence are used to back up "and this latest legislation/storm in a teacup is yet more encouragement to commit trans genocide!" and are unquestioningly repeated by the media.
Such lists, as I have exampled, get issued by the activists and are propaganda. Instead of fact-checking (and I only needed about twenty minutes with Google and the names, I didn't even use AI!) "is this really true?", the media is happy to parrot "56 murders of trans people according to this list from Reputable Organisation" when the truth is "56 unsubstantiated claims according to this propaganda from activists".
One example from a previous list was "Trans man murdered for being trans!" Turns out the person was an environmental activist who was shot inside a tent during a police raid on a camp. You can argue over "was this murder?" but it is undeniably a lie to say it was "trans man murdered for being trans".
So the next time you, or anyone, sees a news report about "X number of trans people murdered due to transphobic hate crimes", you should assume that this is probably a lie, at least about "murdered for being trans due to transphobia as instanced by state of Y legislation about not putting rapists with functioning male genitalia into women's prisons, which is dysphoria-inducing hate legislation against innocent trans people who just want to be treated civilly and which encourages crazed murderers to go out and murder trans people".
HereAndGone2
10d ago
Well, that's for you to decide. If I could remember any details, I might be saddened/gladdened should this be our last dance, but I have no long-term memory for such things, so let it be.
HereAndGone2
10d ago
Can't speak for the Millies, but I think for GenX the defining cultural touchstone is "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (and I hate that movie with a passion, I hate the lead character, I hate the assumptions underpinning it) and I think you're correct: you can goof off but still expect, since you are on the 'right' path, to have a comfortable life just like your parents ahead of you. You can rebel against the authority of The Man, but we all know that this is not genuine rebellion and you will follow the path of 'go to college, get the degree, get the job, get the life'. I think the position of Dean Rooney in the movie is intriguing; he has no real authority. Ferris can trick him and expect to get away with it, and nobody in similar positions of authority (the police) will back him up. Teachers have gone from being respected to being regarded as losers, in a sense; Ferris will move on in his life (probably into a cushy PMC job like his dad and his friends' dads) and be successful, while the teachers are stuck in (low-paid) repetitive jobs doing the same thing with the same age groups over and over again. Cameron's father can own a Ferrari, at the end of the movie Rooney has to hitch a ride on a school bus.
Authority can be mocked but the social bargain still applies, is what the movie ends up saying; you are owed the Good Life if you follow the Rules, even if you bend the rules about "respect authority" and "tell the truth" and "do the work". Being smart and knowing which rules are for chumps and how to game the system gets rewarded. If you want a day of self-indulgence, go for it. Truancy records? Missing school? Who cares? You don't need that, you just need to be charming and know how to socially engineer relationships.
Then the bottom all fell out of that, certainly in the economic slump, and so the Millennials onwards feel cheated. They were promised the Good Life! Why aren't they getting what was promised? Well, turns out if you keep mocking authority for being old-school fuddy-duddy about 'do the right thing and don't cheat and don't break the rules', eventually you end up with other forces in its place that operate on the same "keeping to the rules is only for suckers" level, and they won't stick to the bargain of "follow the path laid out for you, you get the Good Life, you can then indulge yourself as a self-actualised individual whose only responsibility is to yourself and what makes you happy and fulfilled".
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Wake me up when an outreach program for more female coal miners gets some serious attention from the mainstream media.
You mean about getting women back to the mines, after the 19th century campaigns to get them out of those?
In 1841, 2,350 women were employed in UK coal mines – in a variety of roles. Although women are often thought to have only worked at the surface of mines, women did in fact often hold roles that required them to work underground, before this became illegal in 1842. In 1842, the Coal Mines Act banned females of any age from working underground and required boys who worked underground, to be no younger than ten years old. This law was in response to an inquiry, which was ordered by Queen Victoria.
Queen Victoria ordered the inquiry after an accident at the Huskar Colliery in Barnsley, in 1838. After violent thunderstorms, a stream overflowed into the mines ventilation system and caused the death of 26 children – some as young as 8 years old.
...Women were not allowed to work underground in mines until the Employment Act of 1989 replaced sections of the Coals Mines Act 1842 and the Mines and the Quarries Act of 1954 (which also prohibited this type of work for women). 150 years after their ban, women were once again allowed to work underground.
The hope of labour reformers such as Robert Bald was that by freeing women and children from the pits, coal mining families would experience an improvement in living conditions. Having all the family members employed in the pit meant that there was no time for domestic work, which was a full time job in this period before labour saving devices. Bald hoped that women being at home would therefore improve the quality and cleanliness of home life.
Eventually in 1842 the Mines and Collieries Bill was passed by Parliament. This banned underground work for women and girls as well as boys under ten. However, many women still needed to earn a wage and consequently women took work on the pit surface instead. Nonetheless, the act benefitted children who were now able to go to school and stopped women from doing more physically dangerous work in the pits. However, the Act today is viewed with mixed opinion as there is also an argument that it may have resulted in forcing women into lower paid and less structured forms of employment.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Stuff like that is a rock and a hard place, though. If no mention was made, people would be complaining that the administration couldn't even celebrate Historic Victory For Our Sport.
We get it in Ireland, too. Agreed that a lot of politicians just like to jump on the bandwagon of a feel-good moment for publicity, but if this is the least thing they are wasting our money on, we should be glad. At least Patel seems to have a genuine interest in hockey, there have been some cringe moments where Minister Whosis who you can tell never kicked a ball in his life fakes being a massive fan of the team, Go Our Boys In Green! for the PR opportunity.
HereAndGone2
11d ago
Ok but how the heck you gonna dismiss violence against trans people as just a few small cases
Because it is, and it's not a genocide? I've mentioned this before, but I've gone through two of the lists from the Trans Day of Remembrance List of Murdered Genocided Trans People, and about three cases were "yep, this person was murdered solely for being trans".
When your supply of Trans Genocide is so skimpy you need to include "fatal hit-and-run traffic accident" as "Deliberately MURDERATED FOR BEING TRANS!", I think we can indeed safely say "violence as trans people is just a few small cases". In fact, the lists should be celebrated as being true achievement of the aims of being accepted as your preferred gender, given how many domestic violence and murders by ex-partners happened, just like cis women! Yay! You are being treated like a Real Woman!
(That last is not meant as anything more than black humour, just to make it clear).
(And I wish I was joking about the transphobic automobiles, but that was a seriously intended explanation for including such cases in the stats: systemic how's your father bingo card phobia and -isms mean that, uh, if a trans person is killed in a car accident then it's equivalent to being deliberately murdered for being trans, society to blame).
HereAndGone2
11d ago
From the other side, to take your example of "can you call yourself doctor?", the demand to change identity documents to reflect a fake status is as if someone who didn't go to university, didn't have a PhD, and was not otherwise qualified no matter if it's DEI or not, was sticking up "I am Doctor Smith, address me as such" on their doorbell and letters and the rest of it.
Whatever about driving licences, I do think that "I want to change my birth certificate so it says Mom and Dad had a baby girl on 17th September 1978 in Wenatchee Maternity Hospital at 3:45 a.m. and not a baby boy" is not permissible. A birth certificate is either a statement of fact or not. If we're going to make legal documents like marriage and turn it into "whatever you feel makes you happy, be that two guys can get married, six people are too a real marital unit, or boys will be girls and girls will be boys, sure thing and paperwork is just fiction depending on how you feel at any particular moment in time", then what is even the point of having registers?
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Used to be "finish your education at 15, that's plenty old enough" then "finish high school, don't drop out at 15", then "get some kind of post-school training or qualifications" then "get a Bachelor's Degree" and now "a basic BSc? not nearly good enough, even a Masters is no good, PhD or bust" or "okay, you did a basic BSc, now you need qualifications in this, that and the other".
And of course "you need to get into the right university, a mediocre degree from one of the top tiers will get you into more places than a great degree from some cow college".
God knows what "basic qualifications" will look like in the dawn of AI employment. Are we already beginning to see that?
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Hello, Butterfly! I kind of remember you for something, did we exchange views before?
HereAndGone2
12d ago
That would seem plausible if the guy wasn't already under criticism for having a suspicious number of "business trips" to cities that just so happen to be holding events he wants to attend.
Politician and junkets? I am shocked, shocked I tell you! Let me tell you about Irish politicians and Cheltenham. Half of them head over for the racing and sometimes you'd hope they'd stay gone.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
To be fair, he wouldn't be the first government official trying to piggy-back off a winning team's popularity.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
The joke about "if I don't invite them I'll be pilloried for being sexist" is probably correct that he would be pilloried for not inviting the women. I see that they too are gold medal winners, so fair enough, they too should be invited. Though now apparently they're not going to show up.
HereAndGone2
12d ago
I know nothing about software engineering, but your resumé reads like you're not long out of college and don't have a lot of work experience right now. So you're caught in the trap of "we want someone with five years experience in X", but if you can't get a job, how can you get that experience?
Job searching is always brutal, I think the notion of "just get a basic qualification and walk into a job" happens/happened at specific times (e.g. when there was full employment and employers were desperate for any warm body to fill the vacancy) or for specific niches (e.g. when software engineering took off and became a viable job and there were more vacancies than qualified people).
Good luck with the search, keep on ploughing through!
HereAndGone2
12d ago
Yeah, plucking eyebrows is something that needs to be done carefully if you're going to do it. Plucking too much will eventually cause the eyebrows to stop growing and then you have to pencil in fake brows and it looks terrible.
Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
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