elfpie

I believe the problem is never showing evidence, but that the evidence is overwhelming. I could explain the general idea and, maybe, one or two specifics. People that use the XX/XY binary argument wouldn’t be able to explain either, but it’s usually only used because it conforms to a bias. And we are only talking about humans here. Language would implode if we tried to maintain convenient binaries and still back it up with science.

I've never been on twitter, but I'm not that surprised so many of us here were driving engagement.

I really tried to ignore it and let it go as just another passing trend. It’s not my language, not my culture and not my battleground, but it’s hard. It hurt me seeing it slowly spreading and getting bigger. What made me decide to vent was reading someone talk about their struggles and seeing a familiar sentence that might be familiar to all: “I was a weird child”.

Being weird is not usually a problem, the issue usually is people being incapable to accept what they consider weird. Different is not wrong, queer is not wrong, expressing yourself and living the only way you know when it’s not hurting anyone around you is definitely not wrong, even if it doesn’t conform with society.

All these horrible people hate being called weird because it’s what they having been calling us the whole time, but in more specific ways. I feel using it as a slur now just reinforces the negative connotations and validate their view.

Update: semantic satiation to the rescue. Weird became a meme and a trend everyone wanted to take part and use regardless of it making sense.

My friend wants to punch their aggressor, so they tell me. They think about running into him on the street and punching him on the face. Between the two of us, I’m definitely the pacifist and I would always want a world without violent solutions, but, in this case, I wholeheartedly support their desire to simply punch him in the face.

You see, they ended up hurting themselves days after their incident, weeks later they got the courage to finally look for legal counsel, then their family withdrew support for the supposed well-being of not my friend. To make matters worse, the same night the little bit of power my friend could’ve had was denied, they had an encounter with their aggressor. They didn’t punch his face, they left for home shaking.

Should I tell my friend to not think about punching their aggressor’s face? Should I deny them their small coping mechanism? I’m the pacifist, but my fantasies would not be of simply punching him in the face. I would go low, very low, lower than him, in creative and cruel ways that make me actually sick by just considering them in passage, but that wouldn’t be more terrible than the actual reality so many people have to endure because of people like him.

Stop judging the words of those suffering under the boot when that’s the only power they really have, their only solace. We are mostly not David, we are Don Quixote.

Once again I go back to the Exiled Lands (Savage Wilds this time, actually), and once again I can't help editing ".../Conan Exiles/ConanSandbox/Config/DefaultGame.ini" to strip away the opening credits that I can't really skip otherwise or automatically. Not everyone is bothered by it and the wait time is the same, but I'm happier this way.

Do you have some quirk like that in your gaming life? Something that takes at least a bit of effort or research to make your setup just nice? Give me all your most silly and trivial examples. All praise mods that automate doors.

"Plan to follow, look to overtake". That's quite a simple rule that should be taught to everyone. It's a nice instructional video they won't put drivers in the defensive.

As far back as 2010, in a piece titled “Little Brother is Watching,” author Walter Kirn wrote for the New York Times: “As the internet proves every day, it isn’t some stern and monolithic Big Brother that we have to reckon with as we go about our daily lives, it’s a vast cohort of prankish Little Brothers equipped with devices that Orwell, writing 60 years ago, never dreamed of and who are loyal to no organized authority. The invasion of privacy — of others’ privacy but also our own, as we turn our lenses on ourselves in the quest for attention by any means — has been democratized.”

The article is paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-WWLN-t.html

Another one from 2004: https://www.wired.com/2004/07/little-brother-is-watching/

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I had never heard the concept before, but it certainly serves to stop me from considering the state we are now as non horrifying. Bookmarked the podcast for later, but I’m sharing it right now anyway.

Something to keep in mind and that you realize after a while is that the history you know without much research or certainty is most likely the history of the ruling class, told to make they look as great as they believe to be.

I have just read Three by Kieron Gillen, the intentional Spiritual Antithesis to 300 by Frank Miller. I knew 300 is propaganda that only values the importance of a small portion of the people who fought. Spartans were the real soldiers, the superior people, the only that mattered. Then you have a class of people whose job is to do whatever they don't deem dignified, and fight their battles as well if needed. A class they rightfully feared for outnumbering their oppressors and revolting whenever the opportunity arose. A class they openly mistreated.

It's been two decades since I left school, but I'm pretty sure there was no mention of them in my history lessons. I recall the wars, but omitting the detail that most of the soldiers (in the practical sense) were not who you'd assume to be is huge.

The rest of the article (not translated) is an interview with Cathcart.

I guess the hopes of a mass migration to another app are not good. On the other side, Brazil's policies will have a great influence in the future development of whatsapp.

In the discussion I read elsewhere, people wondered if the way funds are granted would change and advocated for it. I don't think a system that can say they profit greatly from the status quo will ever care. I also remember how public funding were denied to researchers and then cut without all of it being used.