millie
Americans largely haven’t had much of a choice. In states where the laws are decent and political corruption isn’t heavily entrenched, things are alright and the system isn’t totally broken. But in places where it has? There’s less and less ability to vote in more reasonable laws.
The problems are systemic. The same states have shitty education systems, mass voter disenfranchisement of prisoners and anyone else they can justify taking the vote from, extensive gerrymandering, and every other form of corruption and political inefficiency. The major population centers take a very different approach, but they have to compete with these backward and broken states through an electoral system that skews the results in their favor.
Trying to take direct action outside of the official political framework is also problematic. In Europe you’ve got the benefit of an extremely high population density and a relatively small area regardless of which country you’re in. In the US everything is extremely spread out. The result is that protest is often not terribly effective. You might be able to shut down a couple of streets, but there’s no way you’re disturbing commerce for more than a single metropolitan area (of which there are many) at a time. It’s the same reason mass public transit runs into issues: we’re way too spread out for strategies that require high and comparatively uniform population density.
That doesn’t mean there’s no answer, but it does mean we’re going to have to get a little more creative.
Lemmy needs proper moderation tools. Currently if someone posts an image you have to take like a dozen steps in a command line to delete it, and it doesn’t delete from federated instances when removed by moderators.
So let’s say you access lemmy.world through lemmy.film. Anything federated to lemmy.film through lemmy.world that’s deleted due to content moderation will still appear on lemmy.film until it’s deleted manually.
Couple this with an influx of malicious users and you’ve got a nasty situation on your hands that isn’t sustainable for instance hosts while putting them at significant legal risk.
On the user experience end of things, people seem determined to flood the all feed with bot spam and it seems as though the more hostile tide of reddit users and plants sponsored by bad actors have showed up to play.
Lemmy’s devs need to give some indication that they can even be bothered to glance in the direction of producing more robust moderation and federation tools if it’s going to keep its momentum. User-level instance blocking would help a lot too.
You should be able to show… a little bit of porn during impeachment hearings. 🥚
My memory really only seems to function properly for keeping track of large sets of complicated variables, like writing lore or designing a rule set or coding. Ask it to remember something simple and it’ll completely throw it out the window. Which, okay, it’s a pain in the ass, but I can really do that first bit in a way that I watch other people struggle with.
I may operate like a confused blob spreading in all directions, but every little piece of that work is a chunk of a bigger picture that I can see clearly. I may be flitting from task to task within that work and advancing ideas as my brain spontaneously shifts focus, but when they’re all tied to the same end result they all advance the work in an organic and automatic way.
When I let myself work that way, that’s when I really feel what Bukowski meant by “Don’t try”.
Yes, it takes me literally forever to leave the house in the morning. Sure, numbers without a specific meaning and immediate use swim around in my head like alphabet soup. Okay, I literally can barely tell the difference between one hour and six hours if I’m not using some sort of event to track the time.
But my awareness in the moment is pretty on point. I’ll catch things other people won’t. I’m great at spotting the silhouettes of animals out in the dark and I notice erratic drivers from a mile away. The same things about my memory that make me terrible at getting my day going or that make it hard for me to keep up to date with people or deal with paperwork also make me way more observant than I would be otherwise. They’re also the reason I can track these massive piles of inter-related data and not feel overwhelmed. My memory works differently, but it’s pretty useful for what I need it for.
We’re different, and sometimes it sucks. But a big part of the reason it sucks is because society isn’t built for our particular variety of human. That doesn’t mean we’re not beneficial to ourselves or our species, and it doesn’t mean we’re broken. It means we work differently and we have different capabilities.
For some people it may make sense to medicate to make it easier to keep track of things, and some people may not have or may not have found applications for the way their memory works differently; we all have to find what works for us.
But I also think that we don’t necessarily have to frame our experience of our own brains around apologizing for not being what society expects or overly pathologizing our own variation from the perceived norm.
Fuck that work ethic bullshit. Let’s live like cats.
I mean, yeah. Have you been on reddit since the API stuff? It’s absolutely flooded with bots trying to make up the difference. Which is like, reddit playbook 2009. The broken links are pretty prolific too at this point.
It’s not going to like, close its doors, but it certainly isn’t in the position it was just a few months ago.
If you’re 5 years old and entering puberty, you’re literally already going to be prescribed the same medication, because it was designed for precocious puberty. If you’re a little older and you’re taking them because you want to transition later in life, you’re literally only delaying puberty.
Nobody is giving testosterone or estrogen to little kids, let alone surgery. They’re just putting off the changes hormones would be making otherwise, because they can’t be undone.
If it’s the permanence of the decision you’re worried about, don’t be, because there isn’t any.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a significant impact on transphobia on the internet purely via debate and text. I do think it’s very possible to have a substantial impact in real life just be being a visible trans person out in public life interacting with people.
A lot of people have never once in their life had a conversation with a trans person. It’s a lot harder to weaponize someone’s existence when they become a fixture in your life. It also gives you an opportunity to occasionally share some of your struggle with people and educate them in a more direct way, but I think the former is often more valuable.
I’m both curious and personally invested on what their outlook on refugees would look like. I’ve definitely considered the possibility of having to flee to Canada as a trans woman, but I guess the question is how legitimately I’d be able to enter the country and whether I’d have to go into hiding once I get there.
