What's the most polarizing thing you've ever done or said?

CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 61 points –
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I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don't like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.

I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I'm waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn't happen, I guess I'm not really welcome in that group anymore and I'm ok with that.

There are no trans people in this group. I'm not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It's stupid. It's tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren't asshats about it.

Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.

Hell yeah. Concern silos divide the people.

Trans rights are human rights

Women's rights are human rights

Workers rights are human rights.

While I do agree that unity is the way to go in the fight for rights, I can understand why one would want to separate the T from the LGB. It's an issue of consistency - L, G, and B all describe sexuality, while T describes gender. The two are related, but ultimately separate concepts - one does not inform the other, and grouping them can hypothetically lead ignorant people to think that they are directly related, which could hypothetically lead to non-straight cisfolk experiencing more oppression than they would have otherwise experienced due to the perceived association with transfolk, as non-conforming sexuality is more generally accepted today than non-conforming gender.

That being said, it's all hypothetical, and what matters is the reality that people from all spectra of nonconformity are regularly oppressed, and in many places, the oppressors treat anyone LGBT+ with the same disdain. So grouping them is vital for the sake of the most oppressed.

I mean, you could similarly reason that bisexuals aren't welcome (both gays and lesbians are solely attracted to the same sex, after all), or that asexuals aren't welcome (you can be asexual and heteroromantic, after all), and so on. I think, ultimately, that unity between us is important, and allowing the umbrella to protect all members of gender, romantic, and sexual minorities strengthens the overall cause rather than weakening it.

If it were supposed to be pronounced "jif" it would have been spelled that way.

The creator of the format is documented as having confirmed the pronunciation is "jif", but I don't care. Once he created it and put it into the world, he relinquished his control.

I honestly believe he was just trolling when he said that and he probably giggles to himself everytime someone says (shudder) 'jif'. It's a hard G from graphics so I don't know how else is could be reasonably pronounced.

This is a jem of a response, but by jeneralizing pronunciations of acronyms only by the way they are spelt, you are opening a jigantic can of worms on etymology and linguistics.

The jist of it is that English is a weird language, jenerally descriptive, and there can be many correct answers to the same pronunciation problem.

As for me? I'm a choosy developer, and I choose jif.

jigantic

I read that as Jig-antic. I would have to turn it into jygantik for it to sound the same.

Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and yet we all pronounce it “lay-Zer” not “lay-Ser”

The A in amplification and E in emission are pronounced differently too, so the "correct" pronunciation would be "lah-seer".

So how do you pronounce giraffe?

It's a gift, not a jift.

Yeah and it's giraffe, not jiraffe. See how that gets us nowhere?

Jood gob indeed (just kidding, no malice intended)

GIF is an acronym. Giraffe is not. The Giraffe response has been debunked for decades.

Graphical is a hard G.

Debunked? Its a counterpoint to the fact that it's pronounced that way because it's spelled with a g. If that poor argument wasn't used, the giraffe one wouldn't have to come up. It's not evidence of anything other than that letters can be pronounced in more than one way.

For the graphical thing, imagine pronouncing NASA wrong because of the way aeronautical is pronounce. Or underwater in scuba. World in WHO? The I in AIDS isn't pronounced anything like immunodeficiency.

Your argument doesn't work either.

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How do you pronounce github? GIMP? GNU? GPU? Javascript?

Oh Geremy, it's time to jo to the jocery store! We need some jrape gelly.

Geoff is a gentle German giant with ginger hair. He's also a germaphobe, though generally he's still a genuine gentleman. You get the gist.

Wait they're supposed to be pronounced with J? Except JS obviously I pronounced them all with G

If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.

In the meantime, there is a Joint Photographics Experts Group. I love me some deep fried jfegs!

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And clearly based on the intense response you win the controversial statement award

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In a discussion about whether liking trans women is gay or not I said that they are all missing the point. Even if it was the gayest thing on earth, being gay should never be this big of a deal. And it just shows how hard it is for some to overcome the stigma of being gay, even if they are super tolerant in general.

That started a group discussion with a lot of different opinions on that matter.

Spaces

Tabs!

Insisting that all tabs should be the same length as eight spaces.

Open up notepad, and compare. Eight spaces = 1 tab.

8 space tabs is incredibly stupid

And yet, that is its default definition regardless of operating system.

That’s also why almost every IDE out there has tabs auto-set to 4 spaces, and/or gives the user to change it away from 8 spaces.

And yet, that is its default definition regardless of operating system.

Defined by what? When does the os, rather than a program, determine how many spaces a tab is?

Its funny that the argument against tabs is purely because someone once opened a file in a shitty editor.

I am not arguing against tabs. I actually find them a lot cleaner than spaces. But the default definition of a tab has it being eight spaces long, regardless of operating system.

It’s just that “tab = 4 spaces” is either the default in a number of IDEs, and in those which it isn’t, almost everyone changes it to that anyhow.

I didn't think that you were. I was criticising Notepad as a really shitty "editor".

I personally set tabs to 2 spaces, but then thats the beauty of tabs over spaces. You can have two or four, or even eight if you hate yourself without impacting anyone else.

People who demand spaces are Republicans, they want to force their 2/4/8 space rule on you even if it is inconsequential.

Marxism is correct and more relevant than ever.

I’m curious what makes you say that. What evidence is there to support Marxism? Isn’t Marxism just communism? Just genuinely curious. I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history. Not trying to say I think Capitalism is perfect. I definitely agree that Capitalism that is unrestrained and companies that are allowed to reign free is bad for the common people.

I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.

The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn't just implode of their own accord. Now, it's fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren't able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that's a very different assertion from "communism doesn't work".

communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War

You are aware of the many attempts in different countries to leave the USSR, right?

All of them were violently shut down, that's why the system was able to keep going, but without violence against their own population the USSR would've collapsed much earlier.

I'm unimpressed. The US has crushed rebellions from its inception, famously including the civil war but also many other attempts, and I would say that the patterns of what some call the New Afrikan nation within the US to revolt, going solidly up to the 1980s or further depending on your interpretation, are perhaps the most important.

As some guy said, "Revolution is not a dinner party" and establishing and maintaining a revolutionary state requires its own violence. No Marxist says otherwise, as it is the famous quote of Engels: "The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist."

Marxism is Communism, yes. Communism has been proven to work multiple times, and does to this day.

I suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds if that goes against what you believe to be true, though if you have specific questions I can do my best to answer.

Serious question, are there any true communist/Marxist nations today that would be examples of your statement?

Sorry about terribad formatting, old phone is old

Historically there have been more, such as the USSR, but currently the DPRK, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos are explicitly Marxist. There's a lot of misinformation surrounding them, but they retain Marxism.

Is it your stance that every nominally Marxist country is actually Marxist? That there are no revisionist countries even though, for example, the USSR spent most of its existence being revisionist?

I wouldn't say there are any "orthodox" Marxist countries, most have taken some fair bit of revisionism, but are still Socialist and practice Marxism.

Fair enough, I mostly agree. I can imagine that China, Vietnam, and Laos are on the list because of, uh, capitalist roading, and the DPRK is nationalist to a reactionary degree and kind of culty, but what criticism would you apply to Cuba? Do they do capitalist roading too? I don't hear much about them in that regard.

If we are strictly speaking ideological purity, the DPRK's Marxism-Leninism with Juche influences is probably the least revisionist overall. China is the most "relevant," of course, plus SWCC is legitimately a return to Marxism as compared to Maoism.

Cuba has some Capitalist roading, yes, it heavily depends on the tourist industry and said industry is decently privitized.

Ultimately though, a strong understanding of Dialectics and the Base and Superstructure is necessary when judging the impact of "Capitalist Roading."

I guess in real life that's polarising...

On here it's just preaching to the choir, thus the upvotes.

School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born

In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students' passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one's passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.

Yep. Sadly, I'm not sure there's another way for most people. On Lemmy we're mostly nerds, but would most people have learned even basic math if they didn't have to?

In some ways, the most motivated or talented students are just as ill-fitted to the production line system of education as the disabled ones.

The American public school system as it currently exists is largely a joke.

Always has been we just seeing for what it is after generations of failure

People considered woke often only focus on institutional racism and make every other form of racism seem unimportant, including those targeting so called "whites" / Europeans. (And I'm not trying to victimize perpetrators here, I'm aware of the current and historical situation in Western countries.)

I see that institutional racism is a huge problem, especially in the West, but that doesn't make any other form less important or significant.

For comparison: just because in sub-saharan Africa people starve on a daily basis due to extreme poverty caused by Imperialism doesn't mean that poverty inside industrial nations with less harsh effects is less of a problem, especially to the individual.

For Lemmy specifically, I don't think police need to be abolished.

are you saying you don't want to defund the police as a public service and have some sort of for-profit peace keeper mafia instead? what type of anarchism is this

People should be free to vote for those who best represent them, secure in the knowledge their vote will still be counted against those they don't want in office.

That only works with non-first past the post voting systems.

Telling 8th grade content teachers that they must modify their assignments to accommodate migrant students and English learners, and that just directly translating those documents forever wasn't going to cut it. Gosh there was a lot of grumbling in the room.

I get it, we're short staffed and overwhelmed, but it doesn't make it go away.

Complaining about politics in !memes

Using a word incorrectly 1,000,001 times shouldn't change the actual dictionary definition of the word.

But if everyone is using it to mean something new then we need to record that.

But that is literally why we have many of the definitions accepted as standard today.

Lear Welsh or French. They're both Prescriptive languages where that is (officially) true. English, however, is a descriptive language which means the dictionary is there to record how language is used not to define how it should be used

I think that's polarising because using a weird incorrectly does not change its meaning; it's far more subtle than that

Must be embarrassing to not understand that living languages evolve.

Probably "we should eliminate cars as personal transportation"

trains are great but motorbikes work really well too. living in a society dominated by two wheeled vehicles, every traffic jam you see is caused by some third dingus in a car

No they don't, motorcycles encourage the same city design (my fundamental problem with cars) and are even louder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdDYVjDwgwA

they make far better use of existing car infrastructure

You're thinking of a bus.

they work too, yea. personally i get bus sick. it's light rail or two wheels for me

Don't forget about ebikes being an option. They aren't too fast or loud (legal ones anyways, just because you can buy it doesn't make it street legal). They still help close the time gap between cars and bikes in cities. I love my ebike and its cheaper to own and operate than any motor vehicle.

Markdown is trash. It almost always comes in a fork that is naturally incompatible with other forks & never has the features you need for blogging or technical writing (leading to abuse of the limited features, unsemantic markup output, and/or embedding HTML which is both ugly & also ruining portability to non-HTML targets). This leaves you locked into some specific tool’s forked implementation & never looks good in other contexts. Markdown was also never the only or best option for lightweight markup at any time.

Downvotes here showing it’s controversial, but I am willing to bet these folk have never given AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, & LaTeX a spin in comparison (for ‘real world’ documentation, etc. with multiple output targets) to actually know what they are talking about 😅

You can embed LaTeX math formulas in Markdown with $x = y$ on many clients.

Let me try: $f(x) = \frac{1}{x}$.

Doesn't seem to work on Lemmy. Maybe a bug/missing feature?

It’s always a series of extensions nonstandardized but said to all be under the same umbrella. It would be better if these things called a spade a spade & say Markdown-like or Markdown-inspired instead of giving a false sense of compatibility.

Nothing beats org mode syntax for markup. You don't have to use emacs, but syntactically, org is so much more convenient, consistent and easy.

https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/

Org mode is fine, better than Markdown, but still wouldn’t be my first choice for technical writing. I will still respect you for using it tho. 😄

Told my friend that she was being a terf when she started saying terf shit.

I eat the tails of shrimp

I eat the heads and eyes of fish

Classic .ml degeneracy

/s

Take heart, Comrade! For even in death, every scrap of your body shall live on in the flesh of all living tovarischista fighting the good fight against the imperialist swine who waste their uneaten fish heads!

Ever?

The SNES is better than the Genesis.

Screw you, Douglas, I was right!

Being born to narcissistic parents was extremely controversial in my childhood home. I was the selfish little ingrate in the house who kept asking for things even though they already provided a house and food most of the time, and that was very polarizing for my parents.

Apparently arguing in favour of AI art is pretty controversial, but then the anti-AI luddites are about as intractable as trump cultists, and their arguments about as valid, so fuck 'em!

the luddites were happy to use the new tech, but not for less pay and worse working conditions, so they trashed the machines - and history has sadly looked down on them ever since.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/

They are mostly known for having smashed machines and been terrified of technology. That's where the parallel here lies, and what the term has come to mean. Whether they had good reasons back then is irrelevant, the anti-ai bunch don't have now.

I drew out the luddite parallel deliberately: artists likely do not mind AI tools if they are credited and compensated for their work, but they receive no residuals nor credit whenever their work is used so using the tools amount to their theft.

No it doesn't. It's not theft by any reasonable definition of the word. No images are stored, no artwork is used directly to create other artwork. It';s just not, that's not how latent diffusion works. That's one of most commonly repeated pieces of bullshit which has been refuted so often you would have thought it'd have got through a few of your thick skulls by now.

(thanks for the insult, stay classy) so the network training stage was pulled out of thin air then? Huh, I didn't know these models could self-bootstrap themselves out of nothing.
I guess inverting models to do a tracing attack is impossible. Huh.

The insult is justified because you are spouting bollocks. Again. You CANNOT pull any of the training images out of a latent diffusion model, it is simply impossible because they are NOT THERE and if someone says they did they are either lying or spent a fuck of a lot of time and energy on making it look like they did. Either way they are trying to con you. Also the training thing - it's no different to art inspiring human artists except the neural network in the computer is a lot simpler. It's a new medium being used by humans, by artists, to create art. That's all it is.

I don't have the time or energy to explain any more of this to you. Again. Learn how something works before you comment again. Or just shut the fuck up for good. That works too.

(nice ad hominem) Christ. When you reduce a high dimensional object into an embedded space, yes you keep only the first N features, but those N features are the most variable, and the loadings they contain can be used to map back to (a very good) approximation of the source images. It's akin to reverse engineering a very lossy compression to something that (very strongly) resembles the source image (otherwise feature extraction wouldn't be useful), and it's entirely doable.

So you can't pull an image out as it went in? Because it's not stored there? Yeah that's what I FUCKING SAID! Stop spreading bullshit. Just stop it.

(Ah, the joyful tantrum). Educate yourself on how a simple JPEG works and exactly how little features are needed to produce an image that is almost indistinguishable from the source.

Unschooling.

Elaborate on this a bit. What are the benefits in your opinion?

First I want to make clear that it is not an option for everybody and I understand what a huge privilege it is to be able to do this in our terms. For some families/ kids, school is/ can be beneficial.

I worked in schools for many years as did my SO, we did our best and had rewards and dissapointments alike and when we decided to start a family we knew we wanted different for our children.

It was a very unpopular opinion to not send our offspring to regular school, both our families were strongly against it and that filled us with doubt at first since we had never heard of anyone doing it. But we kept strong knowing the things we didn't want and understand that people can be afraid of new things.

It was also hard to find a community that had what we wanted: Non religious, science based, Non violent parenting. We found out the hard way that some families use unschool/homeschool as an excuse to abuse their children in horrific ways.

Socializing was another concern at first, but we sorted out easily IMO with play groups and whatever classes they needed/wanted. Our rule was to choose one class for fun and one for a must so there has been a high rotation over the years: Swimming, gymnastics, theatre, painting,scuba diving, sculpting, horse backriding, yoga, ballet, judo,violin,karate,piano,etc. Last year kid started attending Scouts meetings and is loving it so far.

For academic learning we let kid choose whatever they feel like learning and tailor lessons around the whole thing: One time for biology, for example, when insects were the interest, we went ahead and volunteered at the local botanical garden and got one on one time wih an enthomologist who taught us many interesting things. Me and my SO both have Phd degrees in our areas and that has helped too in a way.

This way of learning has worked beautifully! Kid is eager to learn different kinds of stuff and has passed the obligatory governement evaluations with flying colors, not that we care about grades, but for some people those are super important.

As far as making them do this, we don't. School is always on the table if they feel inclined to go at any time but so far, we have been school free for years.

The only downside I can see so far is that a lot of content in media is designed/catered to te school experience because that is what most people's experience growing up looks like so sometimes, especially when they were little, we had to explain what a hallway pass was, for example. This has gotten easier with time and since kid has friends who attend regular school it is not so foreign anymore.

ETA that this choice has not been a walk in the Park at all! Doing it entails much more work than we thought at first and it can be frustrating at times (mostlystuff regarding bureaucracy) , but the benefits surpass the downsides by far. Economically speaking it is also a challenge, some people have the idea that unschooling is cheaper than sending kids off to school. It is not. Emotionally speaking, it can also be a challenge for sure since, as a parent, you have to be always "on". That is why we have "me" days around here so nobody loses their minds.

"I'm a centrist."

wot? how do u liv wiv urself

skins a grape before eating it

drives with the seatbelt alarm going off every the minutes

I'm just a monster and monsters don't care.

It makes no sense to pronounce "jpeg" as "jay-peg" because the 'P' in Joint Photographic Experts Group clearly makes a sound like the 'F' does in 'fell'. Saying it like "j-feg" is more correct.

It's just flatout wrong to say it makes no sense because an acronym is pronounced as a word, not an abbreviation of its words. AIDS isn't pronounced "awh-ids", NASA isn't pronounced "N-eh-sa".

op's just trying to make that happen so they can justify the "graphics not jraphics" excuse

OP is probably saying "suck my fenitals" right now. Or "pheephee" I dunno

Motorcycles should not be street legal. If I can get a ticket for not wearing my seatbelt, why do motorcycles get a pass?

Because they're 2 different types of vehicle

You're inside the moving vehicle and should you not be attached to it you'll bounce around the inside or go flying out the window in a crash

A motorcyclist is not contained, and thus it's dumb to attach them to the dangerous and heavy metal should a crash occur. We instead require protective gear (unless you live in a shitty state) so you get less injured if you go flying

Because (in NL) you're supposed to wear a full protective suit with padding and a helmet, or get a significantly worse ticket and potential loss of head/limb.

You shouldn't get a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt.

I used to think that too until a friend pointed out to me that I might bog down the healthcare system with injuries that could have been easily avoided if I had.

On the one hand, it's a victimless crime, at least roughly. On the other, people have been shown incapable of making the obvious correct decision on their own.

I have a few. I'm not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don't refrain from putting them out there.

A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:

  • knowing things doesn't change things
  • work should be abolished
  • atheism and rationalism are a scourge on the ability of the Left to reach people
  • hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Some others:

  • suicidal and self-harming people should be listened to by understanding and validating the motivations behind their desire to hurt or kill themselves, even entertaining with them their own plans. Anything else would likely put a wedge between the two of you that will prevent from addressing the causes and ultimately do what's good for them.
  • mathematics is just narrative with rules/arbitrary opinions with rules
  • nurses, doctors, teachers and other professions of care attract the worst psychopaths because they are put in charge of vulnerable people. On top of that they are by default perceived as caregivers, so it's harder for them to raise suspicion of doing fucked up stuff.

Edit: people down voting in a thread about controversial opinions must be very very intelligent

You probably want to replace "atheism" with "antitheism" in that context. I would disagree either way, but I think you'd have a point with antitheism.

hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Do you nind elaborating a bit?

It would be quite a long argument, but I suggest TechGnosis by Erik Davis and this article: https://www.are.na/block/24206425

tl;dr: hacker culture is grounded in gnostic, individualistic californian hippie culture, and shares root with what is now the dominant, reactionary ideology of big tech moguls, ketamine cryptocolonialists, business white supremacists. One key tenet of hacker culture is the power of the individual super-human brain power to reshape entire societies through the production of disruptive technology. Mr. Robot tv series is one such example of said mindset. It preaches the superiority of the world of minds and the virtual over the material. The material is subject to the virtual and the virtual is where the real stuff is happening, where there's a real confrontation of power (the hacker vs the system, disruptors vs established businesses, out-of-the-box thinkers vs corporate drones). This mimics gnostic beliefs very closely. It is reactionary because it is individualistic, because it erases material conditions and collective action, but it also just operates from such a simplified worldview that it is impossible to adhere to if you have a very basic understanding of disciplines like sociology, history or politics. It's just not how the world works.

Interesting, thank you for the reply. I am not a hacker nor a gnostic but I have a slight fascination with the latter. But on hacking: while there's merit to your position that hacker culture is reactionary I have to ask what do you think of hacker collectives like the one that leaked Project 2025 or other noble computer nerd activities? It seems to me like a hacker is exercizing another avenue of power over her world like jumping or singing. Thinking the online world is seperate and intangible from our non-online experience seems to be making the mistake of dualism in upholding one sphere of reality over the other/s.

Gnosticism is by definition the epitome of duality. That said, conflict with a reactionary entity doesn't imply you're not reactionary. Russia and Ukraine are at war with each other and they are both very reactionary, becoming even worse due to the needs produced by such conflict.

Also, hackers tend to hold libertarian (in the European sense) values and that's how they pick their targets for direct action. When I say they are reactionary, they are reactionary in effect, not in intent. That makes them even more problematic, because it's not immediately obvious what's the problem.