[–] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 child)

(from our thread in Actual Discussion) It exists as you see it in this weird middle state now because gender used to be completely synonymous with sex (and for most people, it still is).

I first became familiar with the idea of gender in High School in the 90's. Unlike most, I have forestry credits as I was in boarding school and had some very odd classes. We ran an apiary and made our own honey, kept and raced sled dogs, worked a restaurant we ran, ran a library, etc.

We were also tasked with taking care of a square kilometre of forest up in Northern Canada and, as such, had to learn about plant species native to the region. Doing that, we learned about plant gender.

Plants have a gender because they lack a biological sex; it is a different classification system. In regards to humans, however, dictionaries (and people using the term) at the time used it interchangeably with the term sex. The only differentiation that I ever saw between the two was in dealing with plants or heavily academic papers dealing with some very specific things.

Intersex humans were, at least taxonomically, an aberration and not a classification. Early on they presented and operated as whatever their dominant sexual traits would indicate and frequently did not deviate and there was little issue with this.

But even without "gender," and even in the early 80's when I was born, there was a wide berth in what it could mean to be a man or woman. When people were talking about stereotypes, they seemed to be speaking about things that I'd seen in old TV shows from the 50's and 60's, not things I was familiar with in real life. That "housewife and single breadwinner husband" home shit was long past and seemed antiquated even then. It wasn't BAD to be stereotypical or not, mind you, but other than a few farming households I knew, I never saw the "stay-at-home-Mom" dynamic. Every family had a different dynamic and people fit where they built themselves space to do so. I knew very few "stereotypical male" Dads or "stereotypical female" Moms other than on TV, and we all knew damn well that TV wasn't true to life.

When I witnessed third-wave feminist messaging start to get big in the 2010s speaking about this stuff like it was common, expected, and had to be destroyed, it was odd to me. It was like they were fighting with ghosts from days long past.

I recognize that my personal experiences don't match everyone, but I lived in Cincinnati, Edmonton, Calgary, Saudi Arabia, Kingston, Amsterdam, Thailand, Kentucky, and many more. The only place I witnessed what could be described as "traditional roles" was in Saudi, and even then it was only defined by a few laws, not the way people actually acted. I knew many friends that had their father completely cowed by their mother even in that insane theocracy.

All that to say that gender in humans... doesn't seem to have a purpose to me. Since gender can be fluid in humans, it is not at all worth categorizing in humans. It means, effectively, nothing. It's like trying to categorize hair colour down to the hex code; it accomplishes nothing whatsoever.

Sex is a medically distinguishing characteristic and is easily definable. It adds clarity. I get why it needs to exist. It has value.

Gender? I don't understand why it came to be used for anything as it hasn't done anything other than stir basic culture war garbage.

  • source
  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I completed it last week. I would agree, although I'd say it's the best Quake campaign ever produced, not just recently... And I've played a lot of Quake / mods.

  • source
  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    But they don't correct them often, especially if it's a longer post that has some nuance to it. People here don't like nuance. I'm not sure people anywhere do anymore. That would involve reading and understanding others that you actively disagree with.

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  • [–] 19 points 2 months ago

    I think they're wrong.

    But also, you can do it at a not AAA level and it would be just fine. Most games shouldn't be AAA. The industry would be a lot more sustainable if they weren't.

  • source
  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Yes, motor vehicle testing requirements should be a lot stricter as well.

    And public transit should be better.

    But neither of those observations has anything at all to do with the massively increased injuries and zero liabilities from kids on these things.

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    You mean kids that don't and can't understand how to drive a motor vehicle shouldn't be driving motor vehicles? Weird.

    And there's no safety equipment required?

    There's been a bunch of property damage around here by kids just crashing into things. I have witnessed kids firsthand ignoring their surroundings and having conversations and just smashing to parked cars. These things need some kind of legislation passed on them ASAP.

  • source
  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Thought I was pretty clear by stating it in nearly every post. I'm not talking about babies other than to say they shouldn't have it done unless they have a very specific medical condition.

    And yeah, I'm totally pro-education.

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Absolutely. There are some truly weird attitudes that are deeply unscientific about this stuff. Even my wife didn't understand it when we first discussed it. We don't have any sons, but even if we did I wouldn't have had them circumcised unless they had a medical issue that required it. And yes that is true even though I am circumcised. No, I don't care about making any dicks look like mine. That's fucking weird.

    It is completely unnecessary because I live in a place with readily available contraception, low rates of STIs, and other factors.

    Am I mad that I was circumcised? No. Am I proud? No. It just is. I don't understand attitudes about it. Everything is a small trade-off in life. I appreciate the plusses that I gained from it, and don't really know or care about the minuses because they were never a part of my life.

    I have had compliments on it explicitly because I was circumcised and women expressed relief about it. I've also been told it looks nicer just hanging there. One lady I used to date would complain about her ex incessantly because he wasn't exactly the cleanest dude, and when combined with his lack of circumcision, he was kind of gross and you can use your imagination as to what that entailed.

    On the other side, my best friend in high school had his circumcision fucked up and every time he got an erection, it hurt because it was done incorrectly and caused one side to "pull" wrong.

    I've also had a septoplasty later in life so I could breathe better. This argument that you see above would be like going online and telling people that there is a medical use for it, but they come back and start screaming at you in freaked out panicked tones and assume you're meaning it's for everyone. It isn't, but to deny that there is a medical use is actively wrong and harmful.

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    Well it doesn't need to be removed for most people obviously, but to say it never needs to be removed for anyone is patently false. Same thing with other body parts like adenoids, wisdom teeth, and the gallbladder. It's not like they have no purpose, but taking them out can fix or avoid medical issues. Reading the medical papers, it seems it is removed because it is the first thing to rip during sexual intercourse, and as we all know from grade school, exchanging blood is one of the fastest way to get STIs or other diseases.

    Obviously it is also the best way to cure phimosis which is something my uncle had repaired this way when he was 20 something.

    And again, this is probably extremely unnecessary in most areas of the world.

    I have never defended, nor said a single positive thing about clitoral removal. Don't mix up circumcision with it please. They are not the same. I have yet to see a justification for removing anyone's clitoris that isn't some crazy religious bullshit that has no basis in scientific fact at all.

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  •  

    Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

    I've seen the phrase "leftist infighting" mentioned here and there around Lemmy, but prior to joining it wasn't something I'd ever seen brought up. After it was mentioned, however, I saw it absolutely everywhere leftists are.

    The belief system of the infighters seems to be the same even if the details aren't: "There can be no leftist victory without (veganism / giving perceived oppressed group rights that others don't have / complete overhaul and policing of language / rewriting power dynamics to match the stack I have in my head / complete governmental overthrow / anarchy)."

    It's one of the reasons my activity on Lemmy has dipped severely. The platform is rife with well-meaning, but overly-aggressive people who are more interested in their particular sliver of political ideology instead of coming together to solve issues. They can't explain why they're right, but they'll sure be angry if challenged even slightly and yell at you before blocking you, sometimes reporting you, maybe PMing you vitriol, and definitely using the word "nazi" in there somewhere (because there's nothing a politically-motivated person likes better than exaggerating and using the worst word they can think of to describe someone they don't like).

    Recently (since I'm in Canada), I watched the NDP Convention and it was... well, you can watch for yourself. To call it "inept" would be polite. I can't blame you if you don't want to watch. It's long, it's pretty boring, and everyone has their own pet issues that they feel are more important than running things correctly. There's little to no structure, and everyone is tripping over themselves to not step on toes (even saying that would be a verbal slight against people without legs and now you have people booing you, you ablest jerk) in invented and arbitrary power dynamics.

    I described it as "watching a philosophy teacher attempt to teach calculus to cats." Nobody knows how to run it, it wouldn't work if you tried, and the cats all fucking hate each other because they're different cats.

    In response to this criticism, you often get people who tell you that people can focus on more than thing at once, which is objectively true... as individuals. But as a group, you wind up with a hot mess and run a show where you prove you can't govern a single room of diverse people and views, let alone a whole country full of them. Even members of just that room can't cohesively come together, how are they going to convince normal voters?

    Am I overreacting? Am I overlooking something? Should we be rejecting solutions that do 90% of the population some good and can actually be implemented over letting 1% of leftists angrily dictate a different issue be addressed first? Are you also leftist and angry and now want to block me because I'm not your brand of leftist?

    I vote for this group. I want them to win. So how can a leftist group solve this and actually come into power without infighting when we can't even work together between servers on Lemmy?

     

    I'm requesting assistance to draft an email to our city council here in small-city-near-a-big-city Canada to help them decide to not allow an AI datacenter to be built. They said they won't read a big long letter with citations and everything which is sort of unfortunate, because it's what I had prepared, but I feel I've got to write something.

    Is there a list of punchy and true reasons why a small community would absolutely not want one of these things up in Canada here in a short form? My habit of over-writing things will only hurt, so it needs to make sense to people only barely tech-literate. This is why I need help.

    Background: I run a medium-sized IT firm and am very familiar with how they operate and what they entail. In fact, my company was selected to help implement the center until we saw the plans and the future scale (more than 10x) with the lack of care they envisioned and chose to back out completely.

     

    Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

    I've had some discussions in real life about what the best options would be for replacing the Canadian "First Past The Post" (and also the more-broken American system of course) system of voting and there are a ton of ideas.

    Shout out to !fairvote@lemmy.world for inspiring this post.

    Some examples are:

    STAR

    Single Transferable Vote

    I also have come to find that different systems work better for different sizes of vote. For example, local elections vs. federal elections.

    Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

    • What systems do you feel would work better for local, provincial, and federal elections?
    • Do you even think about how it could be made better?
    • Could you be convinced to vote for a single-issue party that would implement better systems and then abscond? This has been a serious topic of discussion within my local group of mayoral and city council members. Since it would benefit those on all sides, do you think people could be convinced?
    • Is there a perfect system, or is every system you've seen lacking in some way?
     

    Not sure if this is the right place for it, but would anyone be interested in assisting an MSP in helping refine our Linux Stack?

    Our goal is to take companies that are currently using a Windows stack and move them over without too much retraining on the user's part.

    Our current stack is Linux Mint, LibreOffice, a custom RMM agent, and a few bits and bobs that differ per client, but that's all malleable. We have a stack, I'm just interested in anything that may make it better. Of note, we donate to FOSS monthly for roughly the licensing fees of the non-FOSS alternative that the clients would be using.

    EDIT: Further info for some incredibly hostile replies who are seeking to purposely get offended...

    As an MSP, the monthly client fee remains the same regardless of if the clients are on Linux, MacOS, or Windows. I assure you, we're not winning new converts with Linux and hoping to capture some untapped market. This isn't a money-maker. We are avoiding e-waste and upcycling machines for free on our own dime. If the client doesn't want to convert, we donate the systems when they are discarded to one of the nonprofits we support for free. Again, switching clients to Linux wouldn't make us any money as we don't bill for project fees. If anything it would make us less money because we're not trying to sell new objects to the client and are signing ourselves up to train and deploy to them. There's no sneaky evil hidden agenda here.

    I was never looking for someone to design the entire implementation, just one or two comments saying something to the tune of "X distro / software is easier for newbies, take a look!" or something.

     

    Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

    We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I'm placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.

    This week, I'd like to discuss something that I've not seen discussed much elsewhere.

    Many on Lemmy are the type to want to see their government go through a revolution of some kind and think that slow change is impossible, but what happens after? Say you get a group and topple the oligarchy or shitty government in power, what then?

    Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

    • How do you defend what you're building from those who have more resources than you?
    • What does the government look like?
    • Would you keep anything from the old systems?
    • What kind of leaders would you need?
    • How do you stop it from turning into the NEXT horrible thing?
     

    Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

    We’re back! Instead of putting a neutral topic in the introduction, I'm placing a bit of opinion on an issue to see if it helps spur discussion. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you’d like to help out.

    This week, I'd like to discuss something that's been a bit of an issue for me personally.

    Lemmy (and Reddit before it) appears to have a problem with overly-aggressive bannings for perceived slights. In the topic linked above there were people permanently banning users from multiple communities (any they moderate - dozens in some cases) for single downvotes, 4 downvotes across a ten-month period, and bannings because a moderator thought they maybe sorta kinda read that a user may have had a negative thought about their pet issue.

    I've personally been banned from Communities (and been sent some pretty vile PMs) for posting in our weekly threads here playing devil's advocate where I state hard questions that I do not necessarily feel are correct. They think they've discovered some secret agenda by finding posts I've made here and use them as "receipts" in order to dismiss anything they think they're reading that may be contrary to their opinion. Any context provided for the post falls on deaf ears.

    I'm someone who operates on the idea of "If you can not defend an opinion from scrutiny, you should probably not hold that opinion."

    To quote myself:

    It’s pretty tragic that people can't handle opposing opinions. I think the activist nature of Lemmy is kind of a self-destructive spiral and people need to learn how to live with each other again. But I guess that’s the issue with modern social media as a whole… Nobody has any idea how to convince anyone else, only to yell at them louder.

    Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

    • Are niche Communities correct for banning anyone who downvotes?
    • Do downvotes represent a "disagree" button for you (this Community notwithstanding)?
    • Most importantly, what would it take to change this?
    • Does it help build the Community? What about the platform as a whole?
    • Is there a way to build a "safe space" without building an echo chamber online? Is that even a valuable thing to build?
     

    Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).

    Important notes:

    1. I don't use scripts.
    2. I don't mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don't like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
    3. Some of the communities I was banned from don't have any posts in them so I wouldn't have been able to downvote anything.
    4. Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It's quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
    5. One of my bans reads "Appeal Granted, not a brigading member" but I'm still banned.
    6. I don't troll.

    WTF is going on here?

    EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two "ban waves."

    The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477

    I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.

    The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.

    I have also stated in this thread that I don't have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.

    EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as "3 months ago" in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being "self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader" which are two things I didn't claim to be. God dammit Lemmy...

    Banning Spree? (lemmy.ca)
     

    I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.

    Odd, considering I hadn't posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that "Mod" had banned a bunch of people citing "Rule 5."

    Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).

    I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?

    And my apologies if this isn't the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.

    view more: next ›