In all seriousness, we all appreciate your work. These are the growing pains that are to be expected, and your hard work and transparency (and writing it up at a level that even I can understand) is welcome.

Yeah, I agree with this suspiciously named man. Whether it happens sooner or later, Reddit’s death is on the horizon, as it will keep making the wrong choices and so steadily lose those communities and content that built it in the first place.

When another trustee asked Dungan if she personally objected to an illustration of cross-racial friendship, she demurred, simply declaring that she was just trying to avoid "situations like that." Situations like what, exactly? She didn't say. Dungan's behavior is a perfect illustration of the "anti-woke" tap dance. The person alleging nefarious wokeness never admits to their own bigotry, instead pretending that they're reacting to "woke" people who are "pushing" an agenda, in this case through innocuous poster art. Of course, the entire premise of the argument is rooted in bigotry, as this example shows. It presumes that the feelings of real or imagined bigots who might take umbrage at such an image are of paramount importance, and that everyone else's freedoms must be curtailed to appease them.

Fucking thank you, Amanda Marcotte. Nail on the head.

And thank you for using the word “innocuous” because my god it’s a picture of people holding hands in a school. It probably had something like “teamwork makes the dream work” on it because holy fuck these people probably boil their eyeballs in piss before they stick them in their sockets.

“We can always tell!”

They can’t, but that’s not a flaw: the stated aim is to terrify and harass trans people out of public venues, but the side effects, of policing ANY behavior or presentation that is outside of cultural norms - autistic people, short haired women, effeminate men - the point is to use cruelty to enforce homogeneity.

Watch people build a graveyard of dead 3rd party apps, which gets wiped every so often by admins.

Which then gets covered up by a vague drawing that oscillates between a middle finger and a pixelated penis.

So here’s what we do: we start a TikTok challenge. “Nickname November” or something like that, where you use a different name every day of the month for maximum confusion. Get a couple classes doing it, especially if there are any trans kids in the school, and you can see how far you can stress the system.

For the schools that require physical signatures, that’ll piss people off right quick. For the ones that just use an automated email and call it a day, toss in a twist: have each student loudly announce their new name at the start of every class, AA style. Heck, get the school announcer in on it. “Chess club on Wednesday has been cancelled, and Squidward Jones is now going by Jackie McJackson Johnstone.”

They want a ridiculous law to be followed? Okay, here you go.

“There are 150 ICBM missiles that are being controlled by that Air Force base and by these individuals.”

“I do not want someone who doesn’t know if they are a man or a woman with their hand on a missile button.”

His “argument” is that trans people are inherently unstable because they are trans (really, questioning, but that distinction doesn’t matter to him).

This is what queer people are dealing with: the constant pathologizing of our very existence to the point where we’re viewed as a threat. This is why I can never accept people who continue to vote for these dangerous assholes: they either benefit from or are indifferent to the suffering this rhetoric engenders. It’s not a difference in opinion and deserves no such protection.

Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.

For any lurker out there: a lot of it is just mental. It can be a hurdle to get over the first few times, but once you start posting and getting responses it feels more like a conversation than a feed, and you can get more out of it.

I lurked exclusively on Reddit because there were too many people to be able to talk to anyone (there’s a Yogiism for you). It’s all just a series of comments there.

So give it a chance, see if you like it some more. There are plenty of nice, knowledgeable and talkative people here to meet.

While TikTok has removed multiple videos depicting James narrating his abduction and death in Kirkby, England, many remain available to view on YouTube.

This is fucking ghoulish.

Does this constitute psychological torture? I’m serious. This is so much eviler than what Westboro does.

Christ. I already hate these people.

Here’s a condensed version:

“It’s not that mistakes were made, you just got angry. Spontaneously. Weird how that happened, when we love you just, like, so much.

Anyways, let’s move on. Fill out a form to become a member of an unpaid focus group.”

I’d imagine that there are a lot of users and communities on here that want law enforcement as far away from the Fediverse as possible…

America is harder to live in the poorer you are, and it’s on a steeper scale than in other industrialized nations because there are fewer and less robust social services, especially health and child care, and declines in union membership have paired with a rapid increase in wealth inequality that is forcing the shrinking middle class downward and stomping on the poor even harder.

You can live a comfortable life (for now…) if you are firmly middle class and up. Your higher salary than your counterparts in Europe is eaten away at by higher costs, and you deal with risks that they don’t in the form of transportation being car dominated (more accidents and less walking exercise) easy access to guns (the most dangerous being the one in your own home, to you) and less strict food safety laws. Compared to those in Eastern Europe, however, your likelihood of suffering from a foreign attack is drastically lower, not that it was ever very high to begin with.

One thing that Americans take pride in (and rightly, mind you) and full advantage of is our First Amendment right to not have our speech be curtailed, so a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns). So there’s a cultural element to it that may or may not exceed the truth.

Right? “May cause bisexual yearning” is supposed to be a warning?

The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.

“‘The Hangover Is Over; Smooth Sailing From Here!’ Declares Habitual Drinker, Popping Open Another Bottle In Celebration”.

Did Digg die in days?

”Rudy Giuliani had nothing to do with this,” said Robert Costello, Giuliani’s attorney. “You can’t attach Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell’s crackpot idea.”

“Just landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together!” an employee from the firm Sullivan Strickler, which was hired by Sidney Powell to examine voting systems in Coffee County, wrote in a group chat with other colleagues on January 1.

Former New York Mayor Giuliani was consistently referred to as “the Mayor,” in other texts sent by the same individual and others at the time.

“Most immediately, we were just granted access – by written invitation! – to Coffee County’s systems. Yay!” the text reads.

Props to the authors of the article, Zachary Cohen and Sara Murray, for the excellent comedic structuring.

Stephen Miller is what you get if you take Steve Bannon and change his blood from 80 proof to concentrated formaldehyde.

That if I reach out for help before things get bad, they don’t get as bad for as long, and that it makes people happy that I reached out.

I’m not a burden, I’m a person.

Since December 1982, the O-rings had been designated a “Criticality 1″ item by NASA, denoting a component without a backup, whose failure would result in the loss of the shuttle and its crew.

Richard Feynman[:] “… [the shuttle] flies [with O-ring erosion] and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. You got away with it, but it shouldn’t be done over and over again like that.”

Taken from an excellent writeup of the fatal 1986 Challenger flight.

Pretty much.

Oh, he’s being used by others in his party while his cognition declines? Guess what he was doing before that happened.

I can’t stop him if he plans to die standing up, but since he chose to stand directly on the face of America, he gets no tears from me as he goes.

The vast majority of the challenges handled in the March hearing that Ramsey attended had been submitted by Frazier, who had challenged about 1,000 people registered at nonresidential addresses, such as P.O. boxes or businesses[.] […] At the meeting, Frazier defended his challenges. “I’m free labor trying to help the system to make sure everyone can vote,” he said. “I’m not trying to suppress anyone. I just want clean voter rolls for a multitude of reasons[.”] […] When Frazier himself was challenged in 2022 for being registered to vote at a business address — he sells vegetables from his farm at his house — he decried it as a “frivolous retaliatory challenge” from someone he himself had challenged.

Emphasis mine.

They are always lying. They are always lying. It is always about winning, it is never about principle.

And even if what I do is relatively tame, I want others to be protected from the wolf at the door.

I know a lot of seamstresses, from quilters to knitters to stitchers.

Without fail, if they make their own clothes, they add pockets.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of clothes, must be in want of pockets.

Oh don’t worry, I’m not confused: I’m reveling.

I assume at least half of this needs to go down the throats of oil tycoons in order to have any real effect.

Exactly. Places/communities like Lemmy can and should serve different functions for different people - newsfeed, forum, meme collection/dumping ground - but the fine line between value and addiction gets obliterated by moneyed interests.

“To sign up, please complete this simple route problem: there are seven bridges in Königsberg…”

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

“The brutally honest care more about the brutality than the honesty.”

“Reasonable people can disagree reasonably.”

I can’t live up to those ideals but it would be cruel to myself and others to stop trying to.

Given that the AI we have is prone to making things up because it “fits” according to the models it trains on, how much faith would you have in a translation done by an AI on writings made by people who lived millennia before said language models were developed?

I can’t be the only one who can’t parse this sentence.

I’m sorry, can you rephrase this? I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.

I agree with the premise that defining one’s gender as “what the other gender doesn’t/can’t do” is limiting and will inevitably conflict as said other gender makes gains, but I disagree that this is an aspect of capitalism.

History is chock full of men bemoaning the current state of manhood and how modern (whatever age that is) man is actually modern woman, regardless of whether they barter, bow to a king, or buy stocks.

Ranked choice voting is like the little brother of March Madness brackets, and plenty of people take part in that every year.

This is entirely about wanting to force strategic voting so as to not lose power for the mainstream within their own party.

Well, there’s the obvious will, but since it doesn’t specify how you die: an advanced directive.

An advanced directive is a document wherein you, while living and conscious and with control of your mental faculties, detail end of life care in the event that you are not capable of providing informed consent. You can detail how much and what kind of resuscitative or palliative efforts are made, assign someone you trust to make medical decisions for you, and what to do with your body.

DNRs (do not resuscitate, meaning no CPR done on you if your heart stops) are parts of advance directives and if you are serious about one make sure it gets into your medical chart: EMS personnel MUST provide CPR if it isn’t official.

If your family/friends situation is poor, contentious, and/or you can’t trust them to make the right choices for you medically, this can save you a painful death. Unfortunately, a lot of end of life “care” is the family’s attempt at prolonging the heartbeat of a nearly dead person because they can’t accept loss.

If your situation is good, it can still be a huge load off people’s minds to know that there’s a plan being followed, and it can prevent any rifts from forming. Even though you won’t see it, it’s a kindness to your loved ones to give them some peace of mind during what is often a chaotic and confusing time.

Running for president as a 3rd party is like proposing marriage to random strangers instead of, y’know, dating people. We all know you’re doing it for attention because it’s not going to work.

Eh, I think it’s cute. Neither skeleton is gendered with bonetits or pink wraps or a tie and it doesn’t come off as hateful, it’s just observational humor about how different sleeping styles can cause friction.

You could show me a picture of him at anywhere from 90 to 105 percent size and I would not know if it was real or not.

Because they, like Trump, don’t use the meanings of words to communicate what they’re saying. They use the force behind the words, the feeling.

“Would be a real shame if this guy died” might be literally expressing concern, but all the underlings know what that means.

“You’re too honest” means “you’re TOO honest [for your own good]”.

The slowness is healthier, in a way. I’m reading a lot more articles than I did on Reddit, and I’m no longer a lurker.

With apps like Voyager and Memmy I’m cautiously optimistic, a few hiccups with instances going down notwithstanding.