Zinnia

@Zinnia

General Roberto Vannacci #homophobia #racist #conspiracy

Cynthia #crackpot #fundie #conspiracy

I find it remarkable that there exist people who demand that you consider God to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, yet also demand that you accept a version of reality which does not require such a God, one which is limited and petty will do… and is in fact a more reasonable explanation of such a reality. It says more about them than anything else.

crodish #transphobia

Interesting that they differentiated between sex and gender here, and in the right way too.

Interesting that you appear to believe that international standards for medicine, medical science, and biology *don’t* make a clear distinction between sex and gender. Or that trans people themselves don’t.

it's Russia coming up with what should honestly be the world standard for dealing with transgenderism.

Also interesting that because sex ≠ gender, you automatically jump to the conclusion that only sex matters. Or alternately, even if gender matters to the individual, then society has an overriding interest in enforcing “only sex matters” above individual needs, interests, and/or concerns. And that either way, international organizations and/or communities have an overriding interest in forcing most/all societies into accepting such standards.

I will also point out that in the case of Russia specifically, Putin doesn’t believe that Gay/Lesbian/Bi people are real, there are only straights who engage in deviant behavior, but that Trans people are real but too dysfunctional to be proper Russian citizens. The laws of Russia reflect his personal beliefs (previously, trans people couldn’t legally have driver’s licenses, because they were “clearly” too dysfunctional to be able to drive), and the personal beliefs and/or whims of a single dictatorial leader are not an actual justification for anything.

There's no way to change a person's sex

That depends on exactly on how you’re defining “sex”. There some few reasonably objective ways, but each of them fails to 100% sort people into a strict binary, there are always people who don’t quite fit. The possible exception is strict genotyping, but most people don’t actually know their genotype and this has always been completely irrelevant from a social/legal perspective. And by some definitions, it is possible to at least change someone into a form of intersex which externally resembles that of the opposite sex, which is a genuine change.

Also unspoken, but often implied, is the assumption that either this will never be possible in a way that they would acknowledge that their sex was genuinely changed, or else once it becomes possible society will have an overriding interest in banning that as well.

people with DSDs being the exception.

Even if we were take everything else as valid, and that there’s also a similar overriding interest in forcing intersex people to conform to a sex binary, it’s of further note that in the vast majority of cases, they don’t bother to genotype children or confirm their internal anatomy and instead make a “best guess” based purely on external anatomy. In other words, they’re not using any reasonably objective concept of sex when determining which binary sex the child should conform to.

Congressman Paul Gosar & various commenters #wingnut

Note that “J6 Protestor” as used here is a bit of a equivocation, whether intentional or not.

As I’ve said before, a few thousand were there to protest and nothing more. Those people did not commit any crime, even if some people found their message odious. AFAIK none of those people have been investigated by the FBI.

A few hundred were there to storm the capitol. Some of them vandalized the place, a few attacked the police, a few stole important documents and Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, and at least a few (and probably many) were there to kidnap and/or execute Mike Pence and any Democrats which they got their hands on. This goes well beyond any reasonable concept of “protest”, and given the general motivation of this group in particular, would be better described as “insurrection”. As insurrection is a federal crime, of course the FBI went after as many as they could track down.

Now as quite a lot of these people were “respectable” middle-class members and had never been arrested or experienced jail, and some of them were still better-treated than a “common criminal”, and also these are largely the same sort people who think that criminals aren’t treated brutally enough, any complaints from them about being treated poorly is just petulant whining. And if they really think “Muslim prisoners in Gitmo are better treated” then they have a *really* distorted view of things.

Seek^ #fundie

@JM1234 #174022

Technically it’s two lines, neither of which is from Revelations, despite the fact that the rapture supposedly takes place during Revelations. Some of them combine it with a third line from Revelations itself, which is a vague line which suggests that younger children will be spared the suffering of the tribulations - it’s not clear if it’s because they die first, or because God gives them magical sanctuary, or doses them with bliss drugs, or what.

Regardless, there’s nothing in the bible called “the rapture”, and if you take the 2-3 lines in question out of context, assume without any good reason that they’re all talking about the same thing, apply an extremely questionable interpretation which virtually no historian or bible scholar would support, then sure, you’ve got something resembling the rapture.

(I will also point out that the concept of the rapture is almost entirely an American thing, and even then, limited almost entirely to Evangelical Protestants and Southern Baptists, and even then, still a minority view.)

Abdul Hakim Sharaee #fundie

Political parties are theoretically a bad idea, but in practice it’s not clear how that would work with modern democracies, since banning them would just lead to informal alliances which are parties for all practical purposes (though independents and minor parties would have something closer to a fair shot). Also the existing parties would just vote against the ban.

Of course, the real reason is because the Taliban demands a monopoly on approving candidates, because they’re unpopular. Most of the clanholds would prefer purely local control, and if they had to be ruled by someone the Taliban isn’t necessarily any better than the usual politicos; most of the city-dwellers would prefer not to be ruled by extremists, particularly those for whom economy and infrastructure are minor concerns at best.

Enlightened Turtle Kev #crackpot #dunning-kruger

Sigh. You read the Historia Brittonum or a later work based on it, right? It’s an early example of historical fiction, or should I say, historical fraud. Among other things, Londinium (now London) was founded by the Romans, not the Trojans. The Trojans didn’t even exist anymore at that point.

cbeach #wingnut

@TheKingOfRhye #173653

The “Fediverse” is a loose collection of strongly left-leaning alternatives to mainstream social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter (the best known which is Mastodon). Most also share a lot of the same underlying software. Strongly right-leaning counterparts like Gab, Parler, and Truth Social exist (though Parler is currently “on hiatus”).

The difference here is that conservatives, wherever they show up, are far more likely to harass liberals into leaving than the reverse, so they basically use “free speech¹” as the primary (but not sole) method of exclusion in order to create safe spaces² for themselves. Liberals have to get more organized and methodological in order to create safe spaces for themselves, which includes things like banning, gatekeeping, and blacklisting.

¹ Harassment is only “free speech” when it’s not happening to them.
² “It’s not a safe space! It’s [one of the common definitions of ‘safe space’]!”

Charlie Kirk #wingnut

jail for 500 years for having documents and opinions.

Absolutely! I mean like how Hannibal Lector went to prison for engaging in his cooking hobby. What is the world coming to, there’s nothing illegal about cooking!

(I’m aware that’s a fictional character, but used him because he’s probably better-known example than most real cannibals.)

Gary D. Barnett #wingnut #racist #transphobia #homophobia #conspiracy

Recently I’ve been re-reading early (pre-classical) history and it’s been noted how most cultures went from “this is the way things have always been” to a very different “this is the way things have always been” in only a century, plus or minus a few decades, with the more successful ones doing this more than once. This was nearly always spurred by local climate changes or certain population thresholds being reached. This did not come without a lot of conflict between those who insisted on keeping the old ways, and those who understood that “change or die” was upon them, with various people who trying to take advantage of the situation in hopes that the changes would result in them coming out on top (with the justification that their influence was good for everyone, of course). Failure to adapt meant collapse, stagnation, and eventual conquest by someone stronger.

Really, if there’s anything special about the changes in the past century or so, it’s that things have been in a state of constant flux, driven by the more rapid pace of technology and interconnectivity than population or climate (but those matter as well, and climate is likely to become a major driver again), where the new normal in one area doesn’t even finish developing before the new normals in other areas start developing. Another change is there have always been riots, but today protests are usually peaceful, with riots being the uncommon news-grabbing exceptions (and nearly always started by the police).

a grotesque environment of absolute ignorance by the bulk of society

No, that’s just the better-informed people ignoring you.

Edward Hendrie #crackpot #conspiracy

The “directed energy weapons” which they’re referring to were known as ADS (Active Denial System), of which prototypes were first shown off in 2001. Their main purpose was “crowd control” and were considered a potential replacement for tear gas. There were a bunch of conspiracy theories about it by people who apparently had no clue what this could or couldn’t do, including blaming it on the 9/11 attack latter that year.

But it saw very limited real-world use (mainly by the US during the Gulf War) and by 2012 ADS was abandoned as a failed idea. It simply had too narrow of a range of usefulness and nothing could fix that. At short range it was severe torture and caused deep burns and occasionally death, which is absolutely not what you want from a “non-lethal¹” weapon; at medium range it was at most mildly annoying, with only a narrow band in between where it worked like it was supposed to. Also it only hit people on the edge of a crowd, as the bodies of those in front blocked the beam for those behind them.

¹There’s no such thing as a non-lethal weapon, at most something can be minimally lethal, as people die from things that realistically shouldn’t kill anyone all the time. Most so-called “non-lethal” weapons aren’t even quite minimally lethal.

Masers (microwave lasers) have existed for far longer (since 1953), but they’re not used for destructive military purposes any more than regular lasers are - too high of an energy cost for too little effect.

Donald Trump #conspiracy #crackpot

In current TrumpSpeak, “racist” means “non-white person who opposes me”.

Lauren Boebert #conspiracy #wingnut

“Dark Brandon” is an indirect backfire; it started as two separate edgy pro-Trump memes, “Dark MAGA” and “Let’s go, Brandon”. Then somebody on 4Chan combined the two and the result caught on better than either of its parent components. Biden embraced it because it overshadowed “sleepy Joe” and “inappropriate Joe” and also made him look badass to younger liberals. Of course they’re trying to turn it back around with “absolutely not funny” and “see, he admits his evil” as if they wouldn’t embrace this sort of thing if it worked to make Trump look badass. Anyone else remember “I am the Storm”?

PETA #psycho #sexist

Are they assuming that women who aren’t vegans only that way in order to impress/please men? Or that women mostly have sex because men coerce them into it, so keeping women from having sex would be an ineffective form of coercion/punishment because that’s what they want anyway? How does this work with lesbians, or do they assume the vast majority of lesbians are vegans already?

Medeea Greere #wingnut #racist #fundie #conspiracy

@TheKingOfRhye #172792

I found the list, in multiple Tik Toks of all places. They are: the Arch of Baal* (Syria), Augusta Castle (Germany), Biltmore Hotel (Florida), Buckingham Palace (England), Bohemian Grove (California), the Capitol (DC), CERN (Switzerland), Comet Ping-Pong Pizza (Listed as California, but apparently exists only in DC), Denver International Airport (Colorado), Epstein Island* (Bahamas), Georgia Guidestones* (Georgia), Hoover Dam (Nevada), Bank of London (England), Bank of London (New York), J. Paul Getty Museum (California), La Louvre (France), London Bridge (England), London Bridge (Arizona), Northern Castle (??? not described, several places with this name), Notre Dame (France), the Pentagon (Virginia), Playboy Mansion* (California), the Queen’s Hunting Lodge (England), Statue of Liberty (New York), Stonehenge (England), Sydney Opera House (Australia), Tesla Building (Texas), Three Gorges Dam (China), the Vatican (Vatican City), Victoria’s Secret Headquarters (Ohio), Washington Monument (DC), the White House (DC), White House (??? not described, several other places with this name), Windsor Tower (Spain).

*Currently destroyed or defunct, this list has apparently been around for awhile.

It took a while to type all that because I couldn’t find a written list to copy.

[Edit to add: Apparently the “Arch of Baal” is properly named “Arch of Palmyra” and there are at least two reconstructions of it in London and New York City respectively, so it’s probably not referring to the destroyed original in Syria.]

Matt Walsh #wingnut

If the Founding Fathers were somehow transported to the present day, they’d be surprised that some of the kludges which they hoped future generations would fix are have been enshrined as time-honored essentials by some and are largely untouchable regardless. They’d also probably find the idea of black men having rights hardly surprising (if disappointing to at least a few of them) and women having equal rights bizarre, though I suspect Benjamin Franklin would be cool with it.

Regardless, long-dead people having a perpetual say isn’t really in the spirit which the Constitution was written.

Persimmon64 #transphobia

Can’t speak to other countries, but in the US, it’s technically true that there’s legally no such thing as “gender discrimination”. However, discriminating against people for their choice of gender presentation, and for their choice of sexual/romantic partner(s), still falls under “sex discrimination”. At least when Democrats are at least nominally in charge. Gets iffy sometimes when Republicans are.

The reasoning is that, if a man or someone who is presumed male is forbidden and/or punished for wearing a dress just for being seen as male, and a woman or someone who is presumed female isn’t, then it counts as being discriminatory against men. In a similar fashion, if a man can date a woman but a woman can’t, it’s discriminatory against women. This sidesteps the issue of gender in most cases. Of course some conservatives insist that it’s not discriminatory to require someone to wear sex-appropriate clothes or to only have opposite-sex partners because those standards apply equally to everyone, but the answer to that is that the majority of the public hasn’t been all that keen on enforcing what is effectively two different and unequal sets of standards for different people (even if not necessarily worded as such) for at least a few decades now.

Private groups can still discriminate against their prospective and actual members all they want, nobody’s forcing you to accept trans people into your TERF group. And I suspect some of you are pissy that increasing numbers of private women’s groups are anti-TERF, and you don’t like being made to feel unwelcome and/or excluded. But the main objection here is around sex-segregated spaces which serve the public. As a general rule, they’re required to go by gender marker on people’s government-issued ID. I know that it’s very, very important to you that people never be allowed to change their gender marker because your personal theory of gender has no place in it for trans and nonbinary people, but tough noogies.

[Minor edits for clarity]

TommyHunt #transphobia

“If a woman has more than six penises, while still being a woman, she might secretly be a cosmic horror.” – From a meme I saw somewhere.

Vic Biorseth #wingnut #fundie #homophobia #transphobia #conspiracy

<@KeithInc.> #172573

Serves me right for not checking the original (I wasn’t feeling like it, and considered it a low likelihood that there would be any sort of explanation). But wow, that’s new to me, and very dumb. He’s making the assumption that if evolution was real, Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam (who, incidentally, would have lived tens of thousands of years apart) existed in some proto-human species which was created by God, therefore the split which created Homo Sapiens would have resulted in humans being unable to breed with “Adam” and “Eve” if they were still alive, therefore evolution isn’t real.

Of course this is wrong on multiple levels. Evolution is neutral on whether the earliest life-forms were created or spontaneously generated (that’s abiogenesis, not evolution) so God’s existence or nonexistence aren’t part of the equation; nobody believes that a proto-human species popped into existence (whether spontaneously of via creationism), it only makes sense from the perspective of some version of YEC which both believes in evolution and Earth existing for a lot longer than the traditional 4004 BCE, which isn’t a thing as far as I’m aware; M-Eve and Y-Adam *were* members of Homo Sapiens anyway, rendering this moot; even if they had been a different species, this doesn’t change anything - they’re simply the last common (genetically) male and female ancestors of every human alive today, which doesn’t imply that they’re the *original* ancestors of all Humans. To put it in perspective, according to the bible, the last common ancestors of modern humans would be Noah and his wife, not Adam and Eve.

Also from the perspective of abiogenesis, the original ancestor of all humans was the original ancestor of all life, which would have been a protein strand that wasn’t even a cell as we usually think of it. And that wasn’t the last common ancestor of all life, which was a hypothetical single-celled organism known as LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor).

Marjorie Taylor Greene #wingnut

If he goes to prison for espionage and/or election interference, then he’s ineligible to be president. If he skates on those charges but somehow gets convicted of some of the less significant ones, then he’ll presumably just get a slap on the wrist - one of the perks of power and fame. Either way, there’s no realistic scenario where this is more than purely symbolic.

Vic Biorseth #wingnut #fundie #homophobia #transphobia #conspiracy

There is no "race" that did not descend from the same parents.

This one baffled me a bit. Assuming that this is a *very* badly-worded version of some usual nonsense, there are still multiple possibilities what they were trying to say here, some more likely than others:

1.) Mixed-race people aren’t a race
2.) Mixed-race people aren’t people
3.) “Trans-racial” isn’t real
4.) God created the races separately, so they should remain separate
5.) Furries aren’t a race
6.) Evolution can’t create new races (because evolution isn’t real)
7.) Adopting children of a different race is bad

Or it just might be something randomly weird where that specific phrasing mostly makes sense in context, who knows?

Nick Fuentes #crackpot #fundie #homophobia #magick #wingnut

Right wing protestors #conspiracy #wingnut

If you spend less time and money on daily travel, you’ll have more for personal/household maintenance, which means you won’t usually have to deal with such things on your days off, which means you’ll have more opportunities to travel to further-away places on your days off instead of doing those things. If that’s what you want to do.

Of course they’re really just being disingenuous; their real objections are conspiracy-theory stuff which they know most people won’t buy.

Jean Charles Moyen and Michael Salla #ufo #conspiracy

Even ignoring that we’re still at least a few years off from having our first real starship, I don’t think some of these people have any clue what kind of time scales it takes to get anywhere with current technology. It takes 6-7 months to get to Mars, and over a year to get to Jupiter. If “deep space” means something like “in interstellar space, outside the Solar System”, then the Deep Horizons probe took 9 years to get to Pluto, and that’s still only about 25% of the way to the heliopause, which is generally considered to be the boundary of the Solar System. Kids aren’t going to be kids anymore by the time the rescue happens, at the very least.

Florida State Board of Education #dunning-kruger #racist

They’ve been trying to portray antebellum chattel slavery as having been not significantly different from indentured servitude, with a heavy dose of “a silver lining justifies a dark cloud” mixed in, despite the two not being entirely compatible. The former is unhistorical; the latter is morally depraved.

Peachy Keenan #sexist #conspiracy

More people having fewer (or no) children isn’t primarily an effect of feminism, though it does have a minor overall effect in the cases where a husband decides he wants more kids than the wife does and the wife doesn’t really have a right to say no. It’s more of an effect of liberalism, which (among other things) focuses on improving the quality of life over the quantity of life.

GethN7 #transphobia #dunning-kruger

This argument mostly makes sense from the perspective that: 1.) Black people gained full social equality decades ago, perhaps not too long after the civil rights act of 1968, and racism is no longer a meaningful thing; 2.) Trans people only just popped into existence during the 2010s; and 3.) Trans people can totally be their AGAB without consequences, they just don’ wanna. That’s on top of the usual “sex = gender because I can’t imagine it being otherwise” and “it’s really important to me and a lot of others that no one should be allowed to cross/blur gender lines, so everyone is obliged to respect that”. Do I need to state just how wrong that all is?

Derek Gilbert #fundie #ufo #conspiracy

The problem with this “theory” is that Yaveh (YHWH) wasn’t the co-creator of existence associated with the sky. He was originally associated with Mars, at least according to the Yehudites (the forerunners of the Jews). He killed or banished his father El (associated with the Sky), claiming his powers and title, and forced his mother Asherah (varyingly associated with the Earth, Trees, and the Sea) to marry him. She then kind of disappeared after awhile, and the other Gods associated with planets/stars got associated with demons.

Geoffrey Grider #fundie #wingnut #conspiracy

They also generally think that the Chi Rho (☧) which is a symbolic abbreviation of “Christos” (Christ) is a demonic symbol, seemingly for no reason other than they’re not familiar with it. In reality it’s sometimes used as an anti-demon symbol.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene #wingnut #conspiracy

I can’t help but wonder if this counts as a variation of the Spiderman fallacy. Child trafficking is real, therefore conspiracy theories about child trafficking are also real.

Galactic Anthropology/Alex Collier #ufo #crackpot #quack

Molluscs have copper-based blood, which is actually more blue than it is green, yet molluscs in general are usually white or brown or some mix of the two. I’m not really sure what it would do to human coloration since blood does give a very slight pinkish-purple tone mixed in with the brown from melanin, maybe give a slight olive or grayish tint, the former of which some humans have already and no one calls that “green”.

Geoffrey Grider #fundie #wingnut #conspiracy

It’s the Mark of the Beast™ part MMMCLXXVII, isn’t it?

Look, this kind of tech potentially has serious privacy issues. I mean, you have to give Amazon (or whatever company) a lot of personally identifying information to confirm it’s really you, and then you have to trust that they will then delete everything but the bare minimum needed for the system to function, and that they will keep the data secure enough that there won’t be a breach and your bank account info won’t be stolen, and that your information won’t be sold to data brokers who might be able to use AI to determine your identity indirectly, etc. That’s a lot of trust.

But one issue you’re not going to have is one company gaining a global monopoly on payments and then forcing you to tattoo a barcode to your forehead. That’s just not a realistic thing to fear.

Henry Makow PhD #wingnut #racist #sexist #transphobia #quack #conspiracy

I feel like I’m missing something. Humanity becomes extinct, but the evil and presumably still human overlords and their human slaves are still alive and in evil overlord paradise?

Jennifer Bilek #transphobia

I’m reasonably certain that when people like this talk about “deconstructing gender” they don’t mean deconstruction in the sense of philosophical analysis, they mean it in the sense of gradual and careful demolishing. So when people talk about examining gender presentation, roles, stereotypes, etc. and the effect those have on society, they imagine those people are talking about something akin to gender abolition or postgenderism, just based on a misunderstanding of the term and not what anyone is actually saying.

Also I don’t get what some of these people think “sex-based rights” are. What exactly have women historically had that men didn’t, and how are they losing those “rights” now? I mean during some time periods upper-class women had a few specific privileges unavailable to anyone else, but those never applied to women as a whole.

ThyGeekdomCome #fundie #sexist

I am always weirded out by people who have a breeding fetish and either consider it to be a universal default, or think it should be one. Dude, just because you have a hard time getting off without imagining your sex act creating a baby doesn’t mean most people are like that.

various commenters #wingnut #racist

Before the federal income tax, the federal government funded itself with tariffs and excise taxes.

This was considered by some to be unfair, due to it affecting different industries to different degrees, and the costs were passed down unevenly to the consumer, with some sections of society hit more than others. Sure, you got to “keep all your wages”, but you might have to pay higher prices depending on where you lived and what you needed to spend those wages on. This rarely mattered for the rich, but screwed over a lot of the poor.

The income tax (and the payroll tax) may have some issues, but it’s more equitable and transparent than what existed before.

kodoku #crackpot

Steve Kirsch #conspiracy #dunning-kruger #wingnut

Also point out that there was a big spike in covid infections in some places during late 2021 - early 2022 due to holiday travel resuming.

David Lawn #wingnut #quack #conspiracy

If I had reason to believe that I was in a space which was being secretly monitored by actual humans - key word being “secretly” - and someone demanded that said monitors provided them answers, and someone actually did respond… I would suspect that it was 99.8% likely to be a troll, 0.1% likely to be a psyop, and 0.1% likely to be someone low-security and so bad at their job that we couldn’t fully trust what they said anyway. Spies don’t reveal themselves just because someone dared them to, that’s antithetical to their job.

Tatsuya Ishida #conspiracy #transphobia

Update for anyone who cares:

“Chestfeeding 4″ has the cis woman getting disgusted at the 911 operator for making it about gender identity. “How do you know they identify as a man? Did you ask for their pronouns?”

“Chestfeeding 5″ has a couple of rednecks commenting on how zombies are now forcing victims to feed on them. Also refers to the trans woman (?) as “him”.

@Yutolia #170601

- Tats seems to use the one-tooth thing as a symbolism of childishness or selfishness.

- I’m not sure if the “buying a baby” thing happened before (I seem to vaguely remember it did once under different circumstances, but might be wrong) but that’s totally what’s happening here, because in Sinfest world you can buy or steal whatever is needed for the ~~plot~~ latest screed.

- What’s even weirder is that babies are canonically brought by the stork, so either that’s a convincing fake baby, or Devil Corp can manufacture either baby-bots or real babies now, or Tats decided to have the stork go into retail for this strip because it’s ~~funny~~ stupid.

- I don’t think breastfeeding in public has been shown before, but if a ~~real~~ cis woman is doing it, then it’s currently acceptable in-world. At least until Devil Corp, The Church of Woke, Or Those Dang T-Slurs do something to shut it down on the grounds of it being offensive to someone or other, which probably won’t happen but you never know.

Some additional details / context

- The title of the strips (not shown here) are “Chestfeeding”, “Chestfeeding 2″, and “Chestfeeding 3″. This is a term commonly used by trans men and some nonbinary people, but not by trans women.

- The last frame of the second strip shows the trans woman (?) with an erection, not just a bulge. It’s not clear if he intended that she (?) has a nursing/lactation fetish and the arousal only just kicked in, or if she (?) has a humiliation fetish and got turned on by the verbal abuse.

- There was a recent strip where Clarence Thomas showed up on the holo-screens to stop the gender police from harassing Nana (who is still TERFy) only for Dark Brandon (Joe Biden, as seen in the last frame of the third strip) to also show up on the holo-screens and shut him (Thomas) down. Weirdly both seem to be able to force people to stand down just by speaking, as they’re not usually even present. But essentially, whether later shown in-comic or not, it’s the gender police who will likely show up, and they have Brandon’s backing, so…

Jennifer Bilek #transphobia #homophobia

@Sasha #170548

I have come to understand that while rights in general are not a limited resource, there are a couple which, in some respects, actually are. The more obvious one being social dominance hierarchies, which is a big thing in a lot of conservative circles. If you give people the right to opt out of them, then most other people will choose to do so, but it doesn’t work very well if people can just opt out. More so if the ones who opt in mostly don’t want to be on the bottom due to abusive behavior by everyone else. Even more so if you can’t tell at a glance who’s in and who’s out. And of course if it’s a religious or philosophical imperative that everyone must be part of it, then opting out can’t be allowed anyway. So the more rights someone has to not participate, the less ability others have to engage in it.

The other is more subtle and complex, and I’m not sure if there’s a good name for it, but it involves the “freedom” to choose between good and evil, according to narrow, black-and-white (and often religiously defined) concepts of good and evil. If you choose to do “evil” things because you believe doing them makes you a good person, or avoiding doing “good” things because you believe doing so would make you an evil person, then that “misinformation/deception” makes you “confused”, and thus not able to freely choose to be good or evil. It should be noted that doing things for reasons other than being good or evil don’t really compute to people deep in this mindset unless the action is fairly minor and has no particular value judgement. Anything which undermines this reduces people’s ability to enforce community and/or educational standards based on this mindset, while freeing other people to choose different standards. I would argue that a typical TERF’s insistence on enforcing gender and/or sex essentialism falls under this.

Those are both broad categories; bigotry seems to more of a common tool of enforcement than it is a “limited right” of its own. Without organization or popular support, most of the time bigotry is just being an asshole.

Sebastian Sicklinger #wingnut #conspiracy

I would be unsurprised if DeSantis ends up being the straw which broke the Republican party in it’s current form. I wouldn’t put high odds on it, far more likely he implodes and it ends up being someone/something else, but it wouldn’t be surprising.

Wonder who they’re going to focus on next once the usual scapegoats have kicked the bucket.

Anna Von Reitz #wingnut #crackpot #conspiracy

If I’m getting the timing right (and I may not be, as this was done with a very quick check) the 13th amendment was passed before any of the ex-Confederate states had anyone in congress, the 14th around the time when some of those states would have had members in congress but not others, and the 15th would likely have been missing Georgia at most. I would assume that the state governments would not have been able to vote on it either. [Edit: which even if true this matters little for the 14th and 15th, as Yutolia mentioned, there were enough votes by other states for them to pass anyway.] That doesn’t mean that they weren’t ratified, only that one could argue that they didn’t have the “full input and/or consent of the governed” at the time they were ratified - which isn’t much of an argument 155 years later. I’m also apparently not up to date on SovCit nonsense given that I can’t figure out how they would think a foreign government could have gotten them passed, or used them to run the country as a corporation, particularly since the 13th and 14th have been used to shackle corporate abuses.

The 16th feels like an odd inclusion here. While the 13th-15th were passed in the aftermath of the civil war and the issues they cover were interrelated, the 16th wasn’t passed until 1909 and is unrelated to the others - rather than citizen rights, it involves taxation. I can get why SovCits might hate it though.

Jennifer Bilek #transphobia #homophobia

Whenever there’s some minor advance in reproductive technology or genetic technology which has potential to contribute to reproductive technology, certain people get all panicky about the possibility of removing either men or women from the equation. What’s missing from their views is that this sort of thing is optional; unless we end up with some sort of dystopia where no one is allowed to breed and all children are artificially created or something similarly extreme, most people will continue to be straight and straight people can also take advantage of such technology if they wish to.

However, given that this is more transphobic than it is anti-tech, and doesn’t mention anything new tech-wise, I suspect the actual inspiration for this rant is the CDC’s recently released advice for trans women who wish to breastfeed.

Saint Germain via Jahn J. Kassl #magick #ufo #conspiracy

So basically midlife crises are invisible ~~pink unicorns~~ cosmic web implants reaching the end of their lifespans?

Pierre Lescaudron #crackpot #conspiracy

“Electric Universe” is the name of a hypothesis (not even theory) that gravity is just a form of electromagnetism, something which was considered highly implausible when it was proposed and has been thoroughly debunked. Its creator said that “Electric Universe can not be peer reviewed, because we have no peers” which is obviously a sign of good science. 🙄 Only a small number of pseudoscience cranks believe in it, and they tend to throw even more crankery into the mix.

Gazetteller #wingnut #conspiracy

It’s a thing which happens a lot these days: someone claims to have acquired “astounding proof” of something, refuses to show it for “their own safety” (as if nobody would shut them down, arrest them, or assassinate them to keep them from talking, so long as they don’t actually talk), continues to hype it up for months, embellishing it more and more, to the point where it goes far outside of reality assuming it wasn’t already. And when they are finally forced to put up or shut up? One of the following happens:

1.) They shut up, disappear for awhile, return and pretend nothing happened.
2.) They are forced to admit/reveal that they have nothing.
3.) Pages and pages of rambling nonsense which they wrote themselves.
4.) Public (not secret) documents which don’t say what they think.
5.) They fell for a very stupid scam.
6.) They actually have something they’re not supposed to, in which case the authorities notice and arrest them. Also, whatever they end up revealing is very weak evidence at best, and evidence against their claims at worst.

Unfortunately there do exist people where repeated claims of evidence is all the proof they need, and the eventual letdown is largely or entirely forgotten. So it remains in their subconscious as one of the “facts” which they know.

Anxieyote #psycho

I mean, those are valid ideas within the frameworks of those philosophies/ideologies, but they don’t actually define them. Most people who believe in one or more of those things still don’t promote suicide.

various commenters #transphobia

Wake up, wipe off the make up and take off your skirt, and "magically" you are once again back in the oppressor class...

This is particular line is essentially repackaged biphobia. Bi people can just marry someone of the opposite sex, what do they even need with Gay Rights? (Note for any younger readers: “LGBTQIA+ Rights” used to be referred to almost exclusively as “Gay Rights” by the general public.) Even if there was an element of truth to that, why should people who can more easily hide (at the cost of self-denial) have to? And why does that make them inherently not allies? And arguably trans people who have significant dysphoria have things worse than the bisexual comparison suggests.

What’s even stupider is that, after a certain point, “identifying into your oppressor class” is no longer remotely as quick and easy as “wiping off the makeup” - not for trans people who have mostly or entirely transitioned, and similarly, not for a bisexual person who is in a long-term same-sex relationship.