DinosaurThussy

notably including a novel type of sleep deprivation

I’d like to know more about this

I know we insist that it was solely the John Brown posting that did us in, but supporting violence against cops probably did not help our case in terms of not getting banned

Nothing interesting happened with Tienanmen Square

If we are your proxy for this extreme and this was your takeaway from the readings and videos you’ve been linked, I don’t know what to tell you. The June 4th Incident was the culmination of weeks of protests and has lasting impacts to this day both domestically and internationally. Chinese students are taught as much in school.

Invoking Occam's Razor here is conflating neutrality with simplicity which is not always the case. Most political dichotomies of opinion are social constructions which themselves have bias. While there is a kernel of truth to “the truth lies somewhere in the middle” (you should try to get a complete picture before reaching a conclusion), applying it to already-biased dichotomies and then landing in the middle is going to result in you favoring the original bias present in the construction.

Would not recommend DuoLingo for Mandarin. I’ve been using HelloChinese and a couple weeks of it has me farther along than months of DuoLingo and few years ago

We need to start a master doc for these. This isn’t the first time this has happened

I didn’t even know states could sue other states like that

The reasons generally start out personal and become generalized as a political “position”, which really consumes your life after a while.

Rowling has said that she had a queer “phase” and that if she were going through that nowadays, she would likely have ended up considering herself trans (incorrectly, by her assertion). That reads to me as some internalized bigotry that she never worked through. Musk has a daughter who’s a trans woman and disowned him for being a piece of shit. He started posting about “pronouns” soon after. And Zuckerberg seems to have seen the way the winds are blowing with the current administration and jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon because he’s a lizard man with no soul (metaphorically, not in the David Icke antisemitic way). These are all guesses, but not based on nothing.

It ends up being socially unacceptable to say, “trans people remind me of my estranged daughter so I don’t like them,” and rightly so. So you have to retreat and bury the context, taking it up as a matter of principle. And your mind can backfill the justification over and over again, further cementing the ideas as people start to ask you to talk about trans people over and over again. After all, you’re a public figure who doesn’t like trans people. That’s a hot topic. People on Twitter want to talk about it. Reporters want to talk about it. So it snowballs from there. Transphobia can absolutely take over the life of a public figure.

Philosophy Tube has an excellent video on something called phantasms and how people get stuck in irrational worldviews. Would recommend.

Alright, poster, I’m revoking your right to lump yourself in with “normal” people as you clearly do not meet the requirements

Gun control for thee, not for me

Straight up Orwellian but about capitalism instead of communism

I read it as contemptuous. Whether you can mask that with humor is an individualized thing. I don’t blame you for being sad. It made me sad too.