PostmodernPythia

The left doesn’t have the money to prop up a decent counterpropaganda apparatus.

Yes, but none of that applies to a South African born in South Africa to South African parents.

As someone who has extensive personal experience with severe mental illness, I appreciate very much your desire to defend us (your instinct would usually be right), but psychopathy is a weird one. If the previous commenter had said “mental illness” instead of psychopathy specifically, I’d be pissed. But there is evidence that psychopaths advance in business management. I realize it’s not exactly JAMA, but here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniesarkis/2019/10/27/senior-executives-are-more-likely-to-be-psychopaths/?sh=24aa505d47c4

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Modern US conservative policy isn’t a complex question. The answer is always money or sadism.

I don’t want to do-over the Civil War.

Except how often do you hear about radical feminists who aren’t TERFs anywhere in mainstream discourse? For much of the population, TERFs are the only “radical feminists” they hear about. (I reject the idea that a belief that biology is destiny as compatible with feminism in any case.). It’s not so much people in this community I worry about getting the wrong idea, it’s everywhere else.

As a trans-inclusive radical feminist sick of radical feminism being tainted by their bullshit, I strongly disagree. Let them pick a new name showing how far they’ve strayed from the feminist ideal that biology shouldn’t determine destiny.

In the US, non-authoritarian leftists use it pretty often to mock the weird obsession of our right wing with the specter of communism. Most of the country thinks there’s no such thing as non-authoritarian leftism, so frankly, outside Eastern European neighborhoods, it makes no difference at all.

So we should be able to force Muslim and Jewish inmates to eat pork in prison simply because that was the cheapest thing the state could foist on them that week?

Quakers and Mennonites should be forced to sign up for the draft?

I don’t think as much actual policy is based on rationality, science, and evidence as you think it is. Even the non-religious exemption stuff.

Gender identity isn’t something you stop respecting because of a bad take, no matter how bad. She should go to a women’s prison for a long time. But, unless there are people willing to defend a refusal to accept someone’s gender and rape as a de facto punishment for a crime, this is indefensible. It’s extra (and barbaric) punishment because she’s trans. That’s wrong. Period.

If we have another pandemic, at least now we know the level of disaster to expect, yeah? Since people think masking is political virtue-signalling now. (I’m beginning to wonder if people call decency virtue signaling just because they don’t know what virtue looks like, based on how the term’s usually used.)

Rotating leadership in a military-ish context in deep space sounds like the material conditions for the creation of factions and potential mutiny. If getting rid of every hierarchy, even ones you freely volunteer for, is the only way a future counts as positive, there’s no point in writing sci fi. Ordinary citizens in the Federation aren’t in a military hierarchy, and it’s post-scarcity, so people aren’t facing economic coercion to join Starfleet. Not conforming perfectly to your personal idea of utopia isn’t a blind spot, though Trek has many of those, as well.

Some search engines and social media platforms make at least half-assed efforts to prevent or add warnings to this stuff, because anorexia in particular has a very high mortality rate, and age of onset tends to be young. The people advocating AI models be altered to prevent this say the same about other tech. It’s not techphobia to want to try to reduce the chances of teenagers developing what is often a terminal illness, and AI programmers have the same responsibility on that as everyone else,

Kind of pathetic that it’s the first big one, given our economic structure and the fact that we’re nearly a quarter into the century.

They’re rich, but it also makes them stand out, gets them extra headlines.

What are they afraid of? Country matters? Nothing?

Yeah. Not being legally required to abandon principles in favor of short-term profits for shareholders is tight.

People hate exercise, too. Not doing it will shorten their lives, but they hate it.

Transness, like fatness and pregnancy, is a body-difference-based status that’s socially vulnerable enough to need protections, but the easiest legal basis for protection is on the same path as pathologization. Not arguing with you, more musing under what circumstances it is worth it to accept the pathologization-for-protection deal.