adderaline

listen. even if we disregard the fact that lots of legal experts, including the peers of the people who put this ruling in place, believe this is an existential threat to democracy, in practice, the ruling puts the authority for determining what is an official act into the hands of the judiciary. the supreme court is the ultimate authority in making these determinations. its a power grab, plain and simple, which grants the president immunity for "official acts", and places the authority to determine what is and isn't an "official act" in the hands of the same people who granted him that immunity.

the fact that Roberts is making vague gestures towards some kind of accountability means less than nothing. considering how Trump is behaving, what he and his crowd seem to believe about the breadth of this decision, we should not assume that a room full of people Trump put into power have any interest in ensuring Trump doesn't "get away with everything", and we shouldn't assume that these people are even nominally interested in telling the truth about their intentions, considering just how much of their personal comfort is guaranteed by the institutions that Trump represents, and how resistant they are to accountability for their extremely well documented lies.

your personal confidence in Trump's eventual, eternally forthcoming guilt relies on the trustworthiness of liars and the moral fiber of bigots. good luck with that.

this shit gets me angry. both parties suck, biden sucks, yeah yeah yeah. he isn't in support of actively ripping rights away from millions of people, and he isn't on board with genociding trans people. i swear, you have either be super out of touch with the people actively under threat by republicans or putting your principles over the lives of actual people to even begin equating the two parties. work on utopian political projects every other day of the year, build movements to affect broader social change, but i swear if you end up not voting blue during one of the most precarious moments of this shithole's democracy what comes next is worse for all of us.

and to be clear, biden sucks and i hate him. but genuinely i don't want to get genocided, and the blue guy is a lot less likely to try that shit on me or the people i love.

i wish i didn't have to see dudes who wanna legislate me out of existence in prominent government positions. it fucking bums me out.

so if hamas is exploiting civilians for their own protection, they should kill their victims too? cool dude. you're totally not justifying killing civilians! it's not technically a war crime, so its fine! fuck. off.

people should not starve. we have the resources to ensure nobody starves. it isn't a naive statement, its a moral imperative.

I'm just waiting until these models get completely unraveled by training on output. The more people use generative AI to make stuff online, the more useless the internet is as a data source.

that frankly isn't the situation that we're dealing with. the idea that israel either has to let Hamas operate unchallenged or kill civilians is a vast oversimplification of how conflict works, and giving the IDF blanket permission to kill civilians if it also hurts Hamas is fucking monstrous. you suck.

this is just not a well founded assumption. humanitarian aid was going into Gaza, and was being distributed to the people there before Israel cut off the supply. you're trying to engineer a false dichotomy, where the only solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused in part by the denial of necessary resources is more denial of necessary resources. like, just think for like a moment. Hamas has a surplus of resources to supply their own forces. they aren't reliant on humanitarian aid. not allowing food and other resources to get into Gaza only negatively affects the civilian population, and does very little to harm the supposed actual target of this indiscriminate violence. like, even if nearly all of it was just taken by Hamas, the quantity that remained would almost certainly still help innocent people survive this conflict, and that's a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

but whatever, i bet you'll just move the goalpost again. we cannot act based on what Hamas "should" be doing if they were acting responsibly. Hamas isn't taking responsibility for the death and destruction being waged against the Palestinian people, they aren't providing the resources they have, they aren't distributing them to those who need them. and seeing that situation, we should act to prevent the suffering of these people who are not being served by the government that is supposed to represent them, instead of actively preventing aid from reaching into the region.

stop with the prophecy, and stop with the doomer shit. sure, lets say voting biden is "voting for team color". tell me, would the other team be better? fuck no, we'd be getting even more fucked than we already are. there would be a federal abortion ban. the federal government would be pursuing an actively genocidal agenda towards queer people across the country. millions of real human lives would be negatively affected. there would be less than no action on climate change, instead of the "meager" biggest investment in renewables in US history.

it just makes me so mad. if the red team wins, MORE PEOPLE WILL DIE. is that not meaningful? it is to me. it should be to you. vote blue. it isn't enough, but not everybody has the privilege of ideological purity. we have to survive in order to thrive.

IBEW statement. this is one of the unions involved, and their official statement on the matter. pretty positive.

we can whine about how we didn't do the right thing before now all we want, but we live in the world of today, and the solution, or at least part of it, must be to keep the actual fascists from doing actual fascism. we have to do more, electoral politics isn't gonna save us, but genuinely it makes me really mad when people get all doomer about this shit. most people used to be serfs. a hundred years ago children were working in coal mines. progress can be made. progress against capitalists can be made. and if voting didn't matter businesses wouldn't be pouring money into politics, republicans wouldn't be trying their best to stop people from turning up.

fuck man. you gotta be in a pretty good spot not being able to tell the difference. there are people who live and die on the outcomes of these politics. if you really think it isn't enough, get involved in a political project, join a mutual aid program, whatever you think is important, but genuinely even if it barely matters at all (and to be clear, it actually does matter a whole fucking lot, or republicans wouldn't be pouring billions of oil dollars into mobilizing their base) its literally just a single day at most of effort. if you can't do that, you genuinely don't have any right to complain about conservative outcomes.

i mean, no, that's ahistorical. historically, the reason they are "split" is because men didn't let women do sports for a really long time, and when women began pushing for their own sports, men didn't want them to be the same thing. it wasn't some dispassionate analysis of sexual dimorphism, it was rooted in the culture of misogyny of the time, and backed by deeply held pseudo-scientific beliefs about the fragility of women. they thought that sport, like higher education, literally caused infertility, and used that as a justification to restrict women from those pursuits.

The US women’s soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly.

oop! maybe look up the context for that one. in short, it was a scrimmage, and as part of a structured practice routine that the US national women's soccer team participates in as part of a youth soccer training program. not exactly representative of a competitive game, same for the women's hockey team.

that being said, its basically a non sequitur. i'm not denying that physical differences exist, they absolutely do, but the idea that these physical differences are the primary reason our sports are structured the way they are isn't historically accurate. there were potent social forces at work, including social forces which prevented women from participating in sports at all.

in any case, the fact that in some sports, some professional women athletes lost to some high school boy athletes in games that explicitly do not count for competition does not, to me, have some larger implications on the field of women's sports more generally. the unquestioning acceptance of reports on these practice games for fun with children as some kind of proof that female athletes just can't perform as well as men reveals, to me, a tendency towards confirmation bias. tell me, do you know if any prominent men's soccer teams have ever lost to children during a practice match? i certainly don't. exhibition matches aren't newsworthy events. the fact that these ones were has much more to do with validating the ancient belief that men are just better than it does with genuine interest in a demonstration of friendly sport for high school kids.

right, but how often does that actually work out in people's favor, and how often does that benefit corporate interests with massive influence? how many musicians don't have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry? how many artists working for large corporations are denied residuals because a condition of their work is that everything they produce is owned by their employer? writers? animators?

that's not even considering the ways in which corporations patent technologies that are the result of publicly funded research efforts. a great deal of pharmaceuticals would not be possible without massive public research grants, but the companies privatize the results of that research using the framework of intellectual property.

in theory, you're right, it does protect you against corporations using your shit without permission, but in practice it just stops you from using your shit without their permission. there are far better ways of ensuring corporations cannot exploit you than to make your creativity and invention a commodity to be bought and sold.

how are being a capitalist and despising the direct product of capitalism compatible lol?

i think that's a bit of an alarming stance, to be honest. authoritarians have a pretty long history of characterizing protest movements as looting and rioting, characterizing protestors as "outside agitators", and other nonsense as a way to justify violent oppression, and the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of participants it really isn't the case.

maybe there's some people who would say that (are these like twitter guys or something?), but in the vast majority of cases the actual objection to "antifa smashing up your city" was "no, actually, the amount of smashing being done is much less than what right-wing media sources are saying, "antifa" is often broadly applied to the protest movement in general, and police officers coming in with tear gas and rubber bullets often leads to escalating violence from protesters in response."

it was exactly like they were having an actual drag show. maybe not the modern cultural understanding of one, but they were dressing up as women to play feminine roles in the context of a performance, which fits under the definition of a drag show. it was a common practice in both the British and US militaries.

as far as i can tell, the claim that most female athletes are cisgender is mostly a refutation of the political motivation, that trans women are dominating women's sports, which is a common refrain in much of the legislation around this topic. the reality is that trans people aren't winning any prominent competitive sports, in part because they are such a small minority of athletes.

i would honestly doubt this is something we could get a very conclusive study out of, if only because there isn't a very huge sample size of competitive trans athletes that exist to be studied, and the ones that are there objectively haven't been winning very many awards. nor do i think this needs to be adjusted by population. competitive sports are not a random sample, they are the self selected group of the most physically fit people for a specific task. the fact that trans women aren't breaking records for competitive women sports, despite being in the self selected group of the women most fit for the task at hand, does say something on its own without the need for a more in depth statistical analysis.

There is no inconsistency in study results on the effects of testosterone levels

i mean, maybe read your sources a little more? two of them are about the effects of dosing testosterone in "normal male" subjects, which is not generalizable to women, or to endogenic testosterone, or to the effects of HRT for either transfeminine or transmasculine people, and the middle one is an overview of testosterone's role in exercise in both men and women which says this in the abstract:

Findings on the testosterone response in women are equivocal with both increases and no changes observed in response to a bout of heavy resistance exercise

which directly refutes your stated claim. equivocal is a synonym for ambiguous. the effects of testosterone on resistance exercise in women is explicitly recorded as inconsistent according to the article you're citing.

imma push back against that just a little bit. the shape of ui elements, what sort of interactions a platform allows a person to make, are kinda arbitrary, and putting deliberate thought into how they are laid out is important. in real life social interactions, there is functionally no analogue for a like or dislike button. there are fully cogent arguments for not including "the power of users to be negative" that don't rely on suppression of speech or whatever, because that power is kinda exclusive to online platforms to begin with, and can allow larger groups to suppress the visibility of people they don't like. "being negative" in a social context is a tricky idea to pin down, and there are a lot of real life social contexts where "being negative" would be seen as anti-social.

in any case, a downvote is sorta equivalent to shouting somebody down, or interrupting somebody who's talking. depending on how its implemented, it might actually be a pretty potent tool as suppressing discussion. in certain contexts it might be useful, but any utility it provides is necessarily less than articulating why you disagree with somebody with a comment.

oh for sure. i don't trust the dude, and his policy (like all capitalists) has tangible impacts on my quality of life. every moment we don't have universal health care, and specifically universal gender affirming healthcare for one of my specific minority corners, leads to the unnecessary deaths of innocent people. every moment we don't have housing justice, climate justice, and any number of other progressive policies leaves more people in horrific situations. i just don't think electoral politics provides a pathway for anything better at the moment, and if it goes to the red team things get much worse for everybody much quicker.

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

i'm sorry, but putting the blame for war crimes on individual soldiers is just deflecting from the institution that is arming and deploying those soldiers. you don't get to bomb hospitals, aid workers, mosques, and schools and then defer the blame from that kind of abhorrent destruction onto your soldiers. if they're using IDF guns, bombs, and uniforms to kill tens of thousands of people, displace so many from their homes, and prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering the region to the point that famine is spreading, then the IDF, and by extension the Israeli government, is responsible for those deaths. as for there being no evidence of a "master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it", if you're genuine in that belief, actually look at what the people who are accusing Israel of genocide are saying. there is credible evidence of both a genocide in practice and in intent. israeli and jewish scholars of genocide and the holocaust disagree with you. the UN disagrees with you. the ICC disagrees with you.

gender segregation in some sports is only an effort to filter out uninteresting matches

i'd be more willing to accept this rationale if the history of gender segregation in sports wasn't deeply rooted in misogyny. are you sure that isn't at least partly a post-hoc rationalization for a practice that has a lot of cultural inertia?

Maybe we should appreciate that some people not born with Usain Bolt’s long legs have value as well.

i'd recommend looking into the Paralympics if you want to see what sport, and even competition, without that kind of value judgement can look like.

Like JKR not being pro-trans is just her opinion. And as far as I know, she hasn’t gone on a crusade against anyone yet.

using a large public platform to disseminate the same kinds of anti-trans arguments currently being used by bigots to draft legislation putting trans people at risk is not just an opinion. like, it isn't a crusade, but when there is a crusade going on and you're saying the same thing the crusaders are saying, its not a good look.

if you can't conceive of the difference between a practice game and a game for competition, especially in the context of an explicitly educational goal, you can have fun with that. the idea that the segregation of sports is the only reason we have professional women athletes is a hilarious misunderstanding of why people like sports, and why women's sports have been growing in popularity for decades. the idea that single games in single sports indicate anything substantive about "women's sports" as a concept is silly.

you can live in your bubble of ignorance all you like, and insist that centuries old appeals to the superiority of the male body mean much at all to a modern context. the reality is, these stories about women losing matches? they aren't relevant. i could not give a single shit. ranking people on numbered lists is not the only appeal of sports for audiences or athletes. Serena Williams is still a popular and well liked athlete, and you didn't even give that dude's name, so whatever reputational damage seems to have both not affected her rise to prominence, and not boosted her opponents reputation, so like, who fucking cares?

why do you know so much about this? what relevance does being able to tell people all the times women lost matches in sporting events have to your daily life? to what end are you telling people these things? the reality is, you don't value women's sports, so you've scoured the internet for justifications for that belief. but people who do find value in these things don't look at things the same way. weird ass comparisons trying to judge the objective winner by category mean fuckall to me, i like watching cool people do cool shit with their cool bodies, and the fact that you can't conceive of people being interested in the physical skill of people that don't look like you is firmly a you problem.

he looks like a wax figure holy shit

this is such a weird thing to say. fascism is all about authoritarian shit, it is defined by ultranationalism, racism, bigotry, and centralized control, not by "virtue signaling", a phrase more common in right-wing spaces than anywhere else. we can quibble all we want about the left, but demonstrably, who is limiting the freedoms of minority groups, which states are attempting to disenfranchise voters, who has actual real ass nazi's hanging at their parties? it isn't the left, or whatever you think the left is.

like, don't get me wrong, there are very many ways a left wing government can demonstrably get authoritarian, but the term "fascism" is defined by being far-right on the political scale. i would just generally suggest reading some stuff about fascism, because you don't seem to be very well informed on what scholarship says about the ideology at large.

uh huh. because our current system has definitely demonstrated that shitty companies fail, right? i don't know how you can look at the landscape of modern corporations and come away with the thought that capitalism has in any way increased our freedom to choose, or that that really important part actually in practice weeds out shitty business practices in any way.

what companies do you like? are any of them the large multinational corporations swallowing up every speck of available market share and spiraling us towards climate apocalypse? if so, you're wrong.

whose rockets have been raining down on whose homes? the appeal of a potential future threat to Israeli lives outweighing the current, present threat towards magnitudes more Palestinian lives is played out. people here aren't ride or die for Hamas, they just acknowledge that leveling cities, hospitals, and schools, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and preventing them from getting food is both not likely to lead to less rockets on Israeli homes, and is in itself an act of genocide. when did appeals to not killing innocent Palestinians become support for Hamas to you? when did persistent, unending violence against the Palestinian people become "self-defence"?

i don't really know many on the left who would find the idea of a modern republican less frightening than center-right Democrats, and any awareness of what republican state legislators are currently doing in red states should disabuse people of that notion. whatever disappointments suffered under our current gov are not a match for what was happening under the other guy by any measure, and if you're queer it really should not even be a question as to who is more frightening.

the comment about getting bullied by the GOP and Fox doesn't really make sense to me either. Fox isn't doing great right now, state GOP is hemorrhaging money, and Trump's been indicted several times, with more coming down soon. i'm nowhere near happy with Biden, and would prefer somebody far more progressive, but your perspective just doesn't seem super well informed to me. i'm not sure where you're getting your info.

i'd also like to know what movements have been targeted/destroyed. the things i can think of are the railroad strike, which didn't turn out as bad as people think, and maybe what's going on with Stop Cop City? there are lots of state and city Democrats fucking with that shit, but its a pretty republican push overall, and i don't think the federal government is involved yet.

its from the DMX track "X gon' give it to ya". it came out in 2002.

i don't want to invalidate your experience, but harm reduction research suggests this is a flawed perspective. somebody should be getting drugs for people who need them. quitting some drugs is difficult, if you do it wrong you can die, and if people can get drugs without doing dangerous shit, they probably will. there are cogent arguments to suggest that giving people drugs when they ask for them, providing them with resources that make taking those drugs safer, and giving them a place to live might really make it easier for people to quit, because you are giving them stability they can't provide for themselves. certainly providing rehab resources freely is part of it, but if you remove the need to pay for drugs, alot of the incentive to do bad stuff to get drugs disappears.

thinking that farmers should do work with nothing in return as a method of ending food insecurity is ignorant to the work being done to address food insecurity. nobody is proposing farmers should work for free. food stamps, subsidized farming, community owned farmland, urban gardening, universal basic income, food banks, all of these things and more are how we eradicate starvation, and how many other developed nations have successfully reduced food insecurity.

systems which allow people to starve are indefensible in a world where we can make enough food for people, and we absolutely can do that.

But not having copyright law doesn’t fix that, it makes it worse. Without copyright law if you make music, a big label can grab your music and sell copies without paying you anything. Sure you can try to sell it yourself and try to educate customers that they should buy it from you. But the big label can easily out-advertise you and get into the top spots on streaming services, online and physical stores etc. and get 99% of the sales.

this is... really not a good example of copyright stopping this sort of stuff. seriously, look into streaming platforms, they are essentially pulling this exact stunt, down to the part about grabbing artists' music and not paying them anything, and its been extremely profitable for the record companies, who have been found to deliberately manipulate streaming numbers to ensure they get the top spots. most independent artists make very little off of streaming, but are compelled to participate because its captured so much of the market for music. i really can't exaggerate here, the situation you're describing as what would happen without copyright law is happening right now, and is being facilitated directly by copyright law as it currently exists.

The reality is that lots of people, or even most people, can't afford to move out of their home states. The idea that this kind of migration is significantly affecting voting patterns is not something i've seen validated in polls. Point me in the right direction if you've seen any data supporting that idea.

i've never seen someone steal food and i never will.

the scenario you're imagining doesn't exist. this isn't a rock paper scissors thing, where Israel either shoots through hostages to kill insurgents or dies themselves. if Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, they aren't attacking Israel, they're hiding. if they're attacking Israel, they aren't in a crowd of Palestinian civilians. the IDF does not need to have a shootout with civilians in the crossfire to protect its people. the IDF does not need to bomb civilian residences to wage war against an insurgency.

you are so willing to conflate the two, assume that Israel must kill or be killed themselves. that is a fucking falsehood. there is so fucking much a military force can do to defend against attack that doesn't involve shelling apartment buildings, shooting into crowds, and otherwise being monsters.

this is not "think of the children". its "tens of thousands of children have died, and will die, as a result of the actions of the Israeli government". we aren't appealing to the potential harm that might come to children, we are recognizing the current and ongoing slaughter of children and adults happening in Gaza.

i really don't like this attitude, and i see this it pop up around here fairly frequently. its kind of elitist? classist? i'll try to articulate myself here, though its not like... directly aimed at you, so try not to take it personally.

computer skills are just like being illiterate, but not in the way you're presenting. if somebody grows up to adulthood and they are illiterate, that isn't some sort of personal failing, its an indication that the people responsible for this person's care neglected their obligation to properly educate their child, or did not have the resources to provide such an education, because nearly everybody can become literate if somebody teaches them. the reality is that every single person on earth comes into this world without the ability to read, write, use computers, or do fucking anything at all, and its the responsibility of the people who do know these things to be open and kind and helpful so that they can learn. did you have the option to take computer skills classes in school? maybe? in a lot of places, no. did you come into technology effortlessly good at everything? probably not. lots of people aren't given the opportunity to hone these skills, or aren't given motivation to pursue them for themselves.

it's a problem in tech spaces. there is this subset of tech dudes who got in early and have made this weird, toxic culture of competition and exclusion that makes pursuing these skills actively difficult for newcomers. no. open source tech is for everybody. computer skills are for everybody. respond kindly and with understanding to those who do not already know these things, please. as much as it seems obvious or natural, it really really isn't. people need to be taught this stuff most of the time. i don't mean to be hostile, its just... the comparison to being illiterate is absurd to me, even if it was just a joke. when have you ever met a person who's illiterate who hasn't been systematically let down by their educators??? have you ever met somebody who's illiterate? they aren't that way because they're stupid, or don't want to learn, its usually something that happens to people who have been profoundly neglected by the systems supposed to protect them, who are poor, disabled, or otherwise marginalized. the stigmatization of illiteracy is cruel to people who have already been deeply wronged, denied full access to language and our vast inheritance of knowledge by systems and people which find it inconvenient to teach them.

i sorta agree with you, it's a bummer that people don't have these skills, that so many don't have a strong grasp of how the machines that are so important to their lives even work. but that isn't their fault, it isn't their responsibility, and our response should be kind and accommodating. it should be a call to improve public education and provide resources to expand access to this knowledge, to build open source and demystify what has been mystified. that's part of why there are so many free educational resources for coding online. because this is a field of study that is not being taught to students by default, as it rightly should be.

i don't mean to go off on you specifically. lots of people don't think very deeply about this, you haven't committed a social justice crime or anything. but this is not a "people are dumb" problem. its an injustice. its a failure that we should do everything in our power to correct.

food insecurity is a huge problem in many places today, including in some of the wealthiest countries on the world. there aren't too many communist regimes around to blame for it anymore.