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Cake day: November 8th, 2022

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  • I understand your issue. No, don’t hang yourself. You’d just get replaced immediately by another person ‘just following orders’.

    It’s true that we’re all virtually powerless in ‘the machine’, but as the analogy would put it, it is via all the ‘powerless cogs’ that the machine is able to crush and destroy at all. You shouldn’t kill yourself, but instead should malfunction so as to damage the machine’s ability to crush, or to change it’s function entirely.

    Education is one part, and the best education is realizing what you’ve been deprived by uncle Sam. You have no power because you’ve been deprived of what gives you power: privacy; community tied only to mutual uplifting instead of hobbies or less vital matters; a well paying job by which you could actually have meaningful effects on society around you; time unburdened by work or distraction, through which you can self-actualize and forge meaningful bonds; housing which you own, giving you security from undue raises in cost of living and protection from undue eviction.

    The second part is community forming, mutual aid, and counter-establishment activism. That and not excluding others based on race, gender identity, homeland, or cultural differences (that’s the rub for many). Essentially, rectifying your ancestors’ mistakes is the same as uplifting ones own situation outside of society’s predefined means, and uplifting everyone alongside you.





  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoVideos@lemmy.worldFirefly and the Lost Cause
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    12 days ago

    I agree that the Lost Cause myth is romantic, and I’d say that Whedon used it very effectively as a theme.

    I can’t really agree with Feral Historian’s take that this myth was ‘kinda true’ for the south as that seems to suggest that southern fighters are somewhat absolved of guilt. “They were just trying to preserve their way of life!” When that life revolved around assisting plantations in maintaining control over their slave populations, often by hunting down slaves, or acting as overseers of their work, rings hollow to me.

    It reads the same as anyone who’s kept their head down to get by in an unjust system. You are culpable. And then fighting to try and preserve that unjust system makes you even more culpable.



  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMake it about me
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    16 days ago

    We have groups like !mensliberation@lemmy.ca available for talking about men’s issues. The problem is that these groups often attract users who explicitly want to blame the issues faced by men, mostly or entirely on women. This derails the conversation similarly, and robs men of the autonomy to improve their situation, since if women are entirely to blame then there is little men can do to help themselves than pressure women to change (a bad solution). Plenty of users there try to shut that kind of toxicity down there, luckily. That does not stop that kind of interaction, though.

    Think about the similar history of the Incel movement being hijacked by misogynists.

    There are issues which both genders cause for each other, but there many more issues which every gender causes for themselves as well. It is best that we all own those issues we cause at the same time that we find solutions (for both internal and external issues) which don’t cause issues for others. Otherwise we’ll just continue in a war of the sexes.


  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMake it about me
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    16 days ago

    This is potentially gender construct and sexism getting directly in the way of advocacy against real issues. Women start a protest advocating against a very real issue they face, by women for women, and it is spun as a direct attack on men. Same thing happens for men’s advocacy.

    “…For the Master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support…” - Audre Large, in “Master’s Tools Will Never Take Down the Master’s House”

    I don’t think most would blame many women for the practices they do in public to stay safe, despite the behavior explicitly being sexist. This is because we understand that in absence of these kinds of behaviors, women do actually get prayed upon, most often by men. It’s the reality of a dangerous world. however, we get angry when the statements and phrases used to justify these behaviors are said aloud.

    What we fail to acknowledge is that that same kind of victimization is possible to a guy. Most guys would find the idea of deliberately using the bathroom at the same time as their friend as weird, possibly even girly. Machismo stereotypes and trying to conform to manliness actively makes men more vulnerable .

    We also downplay women being violent, yet again a gender stereotype which not only lets women get physical in public, but actually also makes women easier to dismiss when they’re angry and yelling. This not only lets women get away with toxic behavior, but robs them of being taken seriously at other times.

    These are both issues caused by gender, which is also actively defining how advocacy happens and creates an arbitrary divide.


  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMake it about me
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    16 days ago

    That is very true. Often, it is reactionaries coming in trying to deny the existence of those issues blocking progress, not advocates for either. There are many actively trying to stop the conversation, and those very same individuals actively pose as ‘advocates’ while spitting vitriol. “There’s nothing wrong with how you act, it’s all just those progressives faults! No, you don’t need any help, it’s all fake!” This is explicitly just to shut the conversation down and strengthen the divide between gender advocates.


  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMake it about me
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    16 days ago

    I understand the anger at the statements. They are visceral and immediately labelling. I’ve found that it is good to understand these taglines as simplified mantras, such as “don’t talk to the police”. It is meant as a heuristic for women’s safety, and so long as you understand that you yourself aren’t dangerous, the tagline does not apply to you. It also lets you know exactly where women are coming from: why they only use the restroom in groups, why they aren’t going to give you an outright answer most of the time, and why they will keep their distance until they know you.

    I’d argue that these behaviors should not be gender-coded and should be practiced by both men and women, and that vilification of violent outbursts , and similar sexist tropes, should also not only apply to men. It is explicitly sexism which puts this barrier up, where women being violent is downplayed, and men who use women’s playbooks are viewed as less masculine.

    These are issues of the same coin, which is a divide created by both genders applying different stereotypes to one another and then operating based on those stereotypes


  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltoComic Strips@lemmy.worldMake it about me
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    16 days ago

    I think it is most often when these conversations happen online that vocal reactionaries try to derail the conversation. More often than not, local and private dialogues I’ve been apart of and around tend to be more civil. In fact, both men and women seem to be on the same side when they voice their issues to each other face-to-face. I think cameras can also sour the situation, since it can put people on edge to be recorded.

    At the same time, while there is a massive amount of people who get behind feminist movements and those who back counter-feminist movements, there is very few of those same counter-feminists who seem to actually ever participate in man wellbeing support infrastructure, hence why that infrastructure does not materialize. It seems that a good portion of folks only seem to pipe up as a direct counter to women trying to advocate for themselves, and then are silent and frugal when men are trying to advocate for themselves non-adversarily. I’d argue there are many people who are trying to attack both as they try to uphold the status quo.

    We saw this reactionary behavior against feminist advocacy during Gamergate, as a great example - specifically when talking about the events related to Anita Sarkeesian’s ‘Tropes vs Women in Video games’. I went back and watched that series, and overall the points are fair criticisms of videogame writing (and honestly tropes in media in general). I don’t think that anything Anita pointed out was even that vilifying either. The overall response, however, was very toxic and dismissive, and was paired with a harassment campaign.

    We saw a similar backlash from a vocal minority for most subsequent feminist actions surrounding cases of sexual abuse such as “Me Too” being countered by protests such as the “HimToo” movement. There’s no reason both these conversations couldn’t happen but it always seems that they only ever show up at the same time, and try to steal each others thunder.

    We could also talk about the Depp v Heard court case, which had extreme levels of toxicity across the board, with large portions of folks on either side choosing to view one side as exclusively as a lying abuser and the other as completely exalted of any blame when what was being shown was an relationship full of mutual toxicity.





  • _NoName_@lemmy.mltomemes@lemmy.worldDeprecated
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    1 month ago

    For those wondering, the AI singularity is a concept in which an AI becomes intelligent enough to improve its own intelligence and does so. The idea is that it continually improves itself over and over until it reaches the highest level of intelligence possible.

    It is a potential Deus Ex Machina scenario - a God from a machine.

    Edit: to be clear, this is not a scientific idea, it’s not really proveable, falsifiable, or even testable in any straightforward fashion. It’s mostly a philosophical thought experiment. A hypothetical.