adderaline

India was Britain’s favourite colony and it’s clear. All of North and South America was colonised and it’s clear, as are Australia and new Zealand. Not to mention all the countries that colonised them.

when did these countries become “clear”? do you know? it wasn’t a billion years ago, lemme tell you that, and it isn’t all sunshine and roses in the modern day. as it happens, there are quite a few queer people from all the places you’ve mentioned who would probably disagree with this perspective, myself included. queer rights and queer liberation is an ongoing process in all the places you’ve mentioned. we’ve not reached some post-homophobic utopia by any means.

If you think that ex colonies aren’t capable of changing, then you are a racist, plain and simple.

right. so you don’t want people to think about the ways that colonialism impacts the cultures of the colonized people (that’s racist, apparently), and just straight up deny the fact that a great deal of these laws are, as written, directly sourced from British colonial law codes, to support your particular interpretation of Islamic depravity. many of the states on the list are majority christian, especially the ones in Africa, but its whatever. don’t let nuance get in the way of your Islamophobia.

Religion is the problem and it always has been. Some religions are worse than others. The abrahamic religions are particularly bad. Of those islam is by far the most draconian. Seriously pull up the map.

yeah, right, a single image of a map “proves” your extremely common right wing opinion beyond refutation. and the whole “religion is the problem” bullshit. as if the ills of the human condition can be reduced to a single solitary source. i get it, you like Sam Harris (or maybe Richard Dawkins, considering your spelling). you’re an Atheist. but the world is more complicated than that, and injecting your own biases about people that aren’t like you does nothing for nobody. religion didn’t happen in a vacuum. it’s not some outside force that warps us into a state of conflict and subjugation. religion is just culture, power, and hegemony. it was made by humanity’s stupid monkey brains, and is shaped around the biases inherent to our cognition. we’d find a way to hate each other without it.

the world won’t automatically be better by its absence, and rhetoric pushing Islam as somehow quantitatively worse than others is just fuckin’ bigotry. that’s why people give you shit about this. you aren’t some free thinker by thinking Muslims are icky, you’re just reproducing dominant cultural narratives about the backwardness of people you don’t know, narratives built by Christian nations to justify conflict and conquest, just as modern Muslim nations have identified themselves in contrast to secularized formerly Christian nations.

in short, learn more about the world, and stop relying on the baked in biases we all inherit from our culture to decide which quarter of the world population has the bad evil religion. its not a good look.

British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago

lol. lmao, even. British homophobia has not ended. Britain is a modern hotbed for anti-queer bullshit. the consequences and effects of British colonial rule have not magically been wiped clean. we aren’t “blaming dead people”, we’re talking about the impact that colonial and imperial oppression had on the cultures of oppressed peoples. the structure and politics of the British Empire are inextricably linked to the world we live in today, and attributing modern queerphobia to the oppressive and cruel politics of the one of the largest imperial powers the world has ever seen, who directly imposed anti-queer laws onto the people they oppressed, is not about “fixing” things. its about recognizing how the past has shaped our present.

its funny, i think, how willing Islamophobes are to bring up the present anti-queer stances of religious nation-states as reflecting upon the religion of Islam itself, with all its 2 billion adherents spread over every continent and nation in the world, while failing to recognize the role of the Christian church in both the historical and modern anti-queerness of the British empire and the modern european state. somehow, you see clearly the monstrous power of religious authority in one hand, and dismiss it in the other. you propose anti-queerness as an essential quality of Islam, and seperate it from the essential qualities of european nation-states.

somehow, Muslim homophobia is special in its qualities, rather than a modern trait that arose in the same period of the 19th century under which the Christian hegemony was exported throughout the world by the British empire and its contemporaries. somehow, it is always the case that the religion that is foreign to you is the true danger, what should be the focus of our attention.

it is important to “oppose” whatever’s present now. but Islamophobes diagnosis for whats “present now” so often fails to acknowledge the immense influence and power that european religious institutions have had and continue to have over the anti-queer policy of their former colonial projects (like Uganda, for example), and their prescription for what “opposition” looks like happens to look a lot like religious and racial discrimination. funny how that works. singling out Islam as the true danger to queer people does nothing to help queer people. in fact, the mechanism by which Islamophobes identify a whole fourth of the world’s population as uniquely dangerous, violent, and backwards is exactly the same mechanism by which queer people are identified as perverse, deviant, and predatory. prejudice.

the acronym LGBTQ+ arose out of solidarity. people with different experiences, extremely different in some cases, coming together because they recognized that their struggle was alike. that they were together subjected to the violence of prejudice and discrimination, and that they were stronger together than alone. that is what needs opposing in the modern day. the violence of states. the violence of hegemony, dictating to us what we ought to be and what we cannot be, wherever it is found. not a diverse religious tradition that contains the same number of queer people as any other population of humans.

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.

same. audio accounts for so much of the friction i’ve experienced on linux its crazy. it works fine for general computing (after tons of troubleshooting), but it kind of convinced me that i’d probably need to dual boot if i wanted to try music production. i’d love to be proven wrong about that.

link! i didn’t know Internet Archive had a merch store.

whoops! i was pretty high when i wrote that. guess i just felt like sharing.

not to dig this hole any deeper, but the defining characteristics of a chicken aren’t like, easily identifiable. we can build a hypothetical in which two proto-chickens are genetically capable of producing offspring that is “chicken”, but that’s kinda rube-goldbergesque, there must have been some extremely specific series of genetic coincidences required to produce something chicken enough to be a “chicken” in that scenario. genetics, and evolution more generally, tends to be more complex. the specific genetic markers that distinguish chicken from non-chicken, if we say they exist, are probably not in and of themselves what makes a chicken, because single gene changes don’t usually make creatures incapable of interbreeding with their parents’ species, and that’s a defining feature of the taxonomic category “chicken” belongs in.

like, if we grant that the chicken came from a proto-chicken egg, because the chicken has a special chicken gene, its really really likely that the next generation of “chickens” came from our progenitor chicken mating with a proto-chicken. taxonomically, that means that proto-chickens are chickens, because species is commonly defined by the ability to produce fertile offspring (eggs). so for every step in the process towards chicken-ness, we can’t really say that the egg came first in a taxonomical sense, because the first member of the species of “chicken” (as defined by whatever genetic marker we claim indicates chicken-ness) was almost certainly able to reproduce with things that didn’t have that genetic marker!

maybe there’s some other sense in which the chicken and the egg can be discretely separated, but if we are talking about species, taxonomically, anything that can lay eggs to make fertile chickens must be a chicken by definition, barring some really weird edge cases that probably didn’t happen.

fun fact: plants can do the weird edge case, and do it quite often. plants can duplicate their chromosomes without catastrophic consequences, unlike animals, and they can reproduce without sex with another individual, so a plant can produce offspring that aren’t fertile with their parent species, and can reproduce independently (called polyploidy). so a seed can come before the grass (as with some kinds of wheat, and many other plants). this can also happen in reverse, where a polyploidal offspring can start reproducing with a species it couldn’t before!

corporate governance structures are anti-democratic by nature. framing corporate capture of innovation, economic opportunity, scientific research, and our most critical services as a positive thing is grotesque. nobody should own lifesaving research. nobody should own our houses, our hospitals, our livelihoods and our parks, corporations shouldn’t be able to decide what causes are worthy, what challenges can be addressed. we should. the people who do the work, who make the products, who do the labor that serves others, not unaccountable boards of ultra-wealthy assholes who think they get to make our decisions for us, and are using that power to actively kill the fucking planet.

if you wanna lick the boot, have fun with that corpo.

“idealism” is a funny way of saying “opposition to war”. you are making excuses for a country raining death on a civilian population. you are drawing a line in the sand, saying that we cannot have a better world than this, and actively defending an organization that is killing children. war is the problem i want to solve, and your “solution” doesn’t solve that problem.

the world is not “wretched”, it does not “work” in some predefined way you expect it to. you have just decided not to advocate for a worthy cause, because it falls outside the bounds of what you have arbitrarily decided it is possible for the world to be, even as larger and larger groups of people fight to obtain that which you call a “fantasy”. there is no use in accepting the world as it is, in presuming that things cannot change for the better. we can’t know if its impossible without trying, again and again, as many times as it takes. progress was never made by accepting the status quo. it was never made by limiting the scope of our ambition.

stop speaking as though deflecting blame from the IDF, deflecting responsibility onto a terrorist organization, and making excuses for why a famine should continue are the “realistic” outer bounds of what we can do. the world you say you want doesn’t come about by aligning yourself with forces that are currently driving war, injustice, and suffering in Gaza. it doesn’t come about by abdicating the IDF of the responsibility of the war crimes you admit its soldiers are committing. you are seeing the alternative, you are seeing a principled opposition to war unfolding around you, and deciding that it is unobtainable, deciding that it foolish, and aligning yourself with the war-makers.

I will not do the same. I recognize the history of anti-war movements, the ways in which they have failed to achieve their goals. I do not have delusions that war is easy to kill. I just don’t have the arrogance to assume I know what the outcome will be. Even if we fail to create a world without suffering, at least I can know that we tried. Free Palestine.

you’re constantly trying to frame opposition to Israel as a failure to understand. i’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. we understand the conflict. we understand the players. we understand that Hamas is a far-right organization, and would do harm if they were to come to greater power. we just don’t think that justifies the kinds of violence being leveled at the Palestinian people. i’m not pro-Palestine because i don’t understand the stakes, because i’m blindly following the underdog. i’m doing it because i object to the death of innocent people, because i oppose war, apartheid, displacement, and destruction in all its forms.

again, deflecting blame. it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter what “every single nation on Earth” would have done (although I think there’s plenty of examples of other nations not doing the kinds of things Israel is doing in response to a terror attack), its doesn’t even really matter whether we call it a war or a genocide, we can see it, and it is wrong. killing tens of thousands of children is wrong, inducing starvation and famine is wrong, destroying hospitals is wrong. if this is war, than i want to kill war, if this is what nations do, then there should be no nations.

i’ve heard this talking point from other Zionists and Israel-apologists. that this is just what war is like, that casualties are inevitable, that against an enemy like this that Israel’s actions are necessary. fuck that noise. if this is what war is like, it is our obligation to seek peace at every opportunity. if killing doctors and journalists, families and childrens, if that is justified in your worldview, then that worldview is not worthy of respect, not worthy of consideration. whatever you call what Israel is doing, however you rationalize it to yourself, these things are useless platitudes. it does not matter who threw the first stone. it does not matter that Hamas has done terrible things to Israeli civilians, any logic, any excuse that leads us to accept mass starvation as an acceptable practice is not worth following. i want to live in a world where no children die of hunger, where people can live and die in peace, and the state of Israel has positioned itself against those goals, is pursuing an agenda that has and will kill innocent people.

if you can recognize that this is what war is like, can recognize the harm being done to the Palestinian people, you are morally obligated to oppose it, if only out of self interest. i don’t want to die of starvation. i don’t want my friends and family to be bombed, driven from their homes, killed in the streets. jailed and tortured. and if i want that, i cannot stand by as it happens to others, cannot accept the platitude of necessity. because if it necessary here, it can be necessary elsewhere. if we can justify war, we cannot expect to find peace.

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”?

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.

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.

so, the only way to address the problem of sexual violence in hospitals is just to divide the population in two? this is just like the bathroom bullshit. if you’re assuming that trans women are rapists, you are a transphobe. if you’re assuming that sex-segregated wards are a useful deterrent to rape, you’re an idiot. the thing stopping people from hurting patients in the hospital is the hospital. the staff, the doors, the nurses, the help buttons beside each bed, the check-ins by doctors and nurses.

so should we segregate our hospitals too? i’m sure you could find some examples of interracial violence if you cared to look. maybe the poor people should get their own ward, we all know the poors are more likely to be criminals! the argument you’re using right now is one that has been used against minority groups since antiquity. all people are capable of violence. that you focus only on the violence of a single case, and use that to justify discrimination? that is not “common sense”. it is prejudice.

its not nonsense, its a well documented part of trans discrimination. trans people are commonly treated as if they are cis, and many doctors just don’t have the kind of awareness of HRT’s effects that you seem to think is commonplace. like, more than half of trans people have experienced medical discrimination. trans people are routinely confronted with medical professionals that refuse to acknowledge their medical histories. trans people have quantifiably worse physical health outcomes even when they do get care. i have not met a single trans person who hasn’t experienced at least some kind of barrier to care. doctors refusing to perform mammograms, doctors who haven’t even heard of HRT, doctors turning trans people away at emergency rooms. there is tons of data out there about this problem that you’re refusing to believe even exists.

language changes. we don’t speak like people did last century. gay used to mean happy. we can make english “nonsensical”. we have, and we are, and we will. and you can’t fucking stop it any more than you can stop kids from making slang. as much as you hate it, you know how the singular they works, and have no reason to be a little bitch about it. its in the dictionary. suck it up and stop whining.

i have a general distaste for the mind/computer analogy. no, tweets aren’t like malware, because language isn’t like code. our brains were not shaped by the same forces that computers are, they aren’t directly comparable structures that we can transpose risks onto. computer scientists don’t have special insight into how human societies work because they understand linear algebra and network theory, in the same way that psychologists and neurologists don’t have special insight into machine learning because they know how the various regions of the human brain interact to form a coherent individual mind, or the neural circuits that go into sensory processing.

i personally think that trying to solve social problems with technological solutions is folly. computers, their systems, the decisions they make, are not by nature less vulnerable to bias than we are. in fact, the kind of math that governs automated curation algorithms happens to be pretty good at reproducing and amplifying existing social biases. relying on automated systems to do the work of curation for us isn’t some kind of solution to the problems that exist on twitter and elsewhere, it is explicitly part of the problem.

twitter isn’t giving you “direct, untrusted” information. its giving you information served by a curation algorithm designed to maximize whatever it is twitter’s programmers have built, and those programmers might not even be accurately identifying what it is that they’re maximizing for. assuming that we can make a “firewall” that maximizes for neutrality or objectivity is, to my mind, no less problematic than the systems that already exist, because it makes the same assumption: that we can build computational systems that reliably and robustly curate human social networks in ways that are provably beneficial, “neutral”, or unbiased. that just isn’t a power that computers have, nor is it something we should want as beings with agency and autonomy. people should have control over how their social networks function, and that control does not come from outsourcing social decisions to black-boxed machine learning algorithms controlled by corporate interests.

no, it wasn’t “more data”, it was just data. blood letting and mercury are pre-scientific treatments that were in use during the 1600s. puberty blockers were developed with a modern understanding of hormones, and extensively tested before they saw use in a clinical setting. you might as well have brought up magic as a legitimate medical practice that we eventually proved wrong. like, no duh, but it also has basically no bearing on the safety of a chemically synthesized hormone inhibitor invented in the 20th century.