Don't ask
Erika2rsis @ Erika2rsis @lemmy.blahaj.zone Posts 7Comments 188Joined 2 yr. ago
Erika2rsis @ Erika2rsis @lemmy.blahaj.zone
Posts
7
Comments
188
Joined
2 yr. ago
"Was there a massacre in Tiananmen Square?"
—"No."
"Were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?"
—"...Ermh..."
"Ahem. I am asking you if people were killed in the area immediately surrounding Tiananmen Square, even if nobody was killed in the square itself."
—"The protesters in Tiananmen Square left after negotiations with the PLA. There was no bloodshed in Tiananmen Square."
"I understand that, but were people killed elsewhere in Beijing?"
—"Nowhere in Beijing were student protestors specifically targeted."
"Well, were non-students targeted, and were any students injured or killed without being targeted?"
—"Hey did you know that the Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest—"
"Gongchandang, my friend, I am begging you."
—"...Force may have been used when provoked by attacks."
"May force have also been used unprovoked? Could it have been that the protesters felt like they were provoked first, because you were sending tanks past the barricades that they'd put up?"
—"I mean... you know... uhh..."
"Gongchandang. Were you scared that the occupation of Beijing and the potential of a workers' revolt would threaten the survival of socialism in China, by presenting a still-socialist alternative to your rule, because societal division particularly among the less politically literate could be (and was) exploited by outside forces?"
—"OUR YOUTH ARE VULNERABLE TO IMPERIALIST PROPAGANDA, OK‽ ALSO, TANK MAN DIDN'T GET RUN OVER. SEE. HE WAS PULLED AWAY BY A PASSERBY. NOT RUN OVER."
Thank you for your contributions.
That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it's silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app -- no need to know why it works, just that it does.
People find love through dating apps
That is part of the business model, actually: if these apps absolutely never work, then there will be no word of mouth, no success stories to use in promotional material, and users would pretty quickly figure out that it isn't entirely their own fault that they haven't made the progress that they're expecting.
Also, like, language learning apps suffer from the same problem as dating apps: if these apps could actually teach you a language, you'd eventually get proficient enough at the language to no longer need the app — and if you no longer need the app, then it can't harvest your data or subscription money anymore, and line goes down. So the app always needs to give you the impression that you're making progress, while actually sabotaging your learning at every step.
This isn't to say that these apps don't have a place in the language learning process, but rather I'm saying that you need to be incredibly wary not just of the privacy issues, but of how to actually use these apps effectively. If you're aware of their tricks, then they become less effective.
Honestly with a million dollars you could just become a cis-passing trans girl and still have at least $800,000 left to spend, if not >$950,000. Or in other words, the button gives you a 1% chance of only you becoming a girl, versus a 99% chance of you and at least four others becoming girls, assuming that you spend the remainder of your wealth on funding other girls' transitions. Though you could just as well spend that money on funding trans advocacy and medical research or other sorts of long-term investment.
From that perspective, the 1% chance seems like a loss. What does "become a girl" even mean? Are you transported into the timeline where you were AFAB? Are you transported into the timeline where you had a botched circumcision and your parents decided to raise you as a girl despite being told not to? Is your body just magically poofed into a cisfeminine phenotype? Is this the timeline where you transitioned MTF but did so before puberty? Is this just the same as transitioning MTF but now the folks who won the million dollars are sponsoring your transition? Is this the same as transitioning MTF but all of society has with a snap of the fingers unlearned all transphobia, getting rid of the social and material barriers to transitioning?
There are so many questions one can ask about this premise, like, "What would it mean for me to have been AFAB? Same zygote but with a random AR mutation? Do I keep my old memories from when I was a boy?", or, "If I was circumcised, and have my genitals magically transformed, have my new genitals undergone type 1a FGM? What happens to my secondary sex characteristics?", or, "If I'm magically transformed, is my ID also magically changed? Does God drop down some boxes of tampons and new clothes from the heavens above?".
I would ask the maker of the button to write some very clear terms of service, because this seems like it could be a real monkey's paw...
got sold to Microsoft while Newell still lives.
Surely you mean while he's "Still Alive", right?
Jan Misali's 2022 Toki Pona language cover of the Symphogear "Beef Stroganoff" song is nearing its 40,000th view on YouTube. Whether this entertaining deconstruction of a beef Stroganoff recipe will reach this milestone of popularity this year or next remains to be seen. "Moku Sutolokanopu" is the most popular song about beef Stroganoff of the 2020s thus far, and the most popular song about beef Stroganoff in the Toki Pona language of all time.
That concludes this year's big Stroganews. Thank you for your attention.
- United Kingdom (or Liechtenstein, whose anthem uses the same melody)
- United States of America
- Dunno
- People's Republic of China
- Canada
- Dunno
Hopefully number 3 and 6 will come to me later!
STOP POSTING ABOUT POLITICS. I'M TIRED OF SEEING IT. MY FRIENDS ON LEMMY SEND ME MEMES. ON KBIN IT'S FUCKIN' MEMES. I WAS ON AN INSTANCE, RIGHT, AND AAAAAAALLLL OF THE COMMUNITIES ARE JUST POLITICS STUFF. I- I SHOWED MY CHAMPION UNDERWEAR TO MY GIRLFRIEND, AND THE LOGO, I LOOKED AT IT, AND I SAID, "HEY BABE, WHEN THE COMMODITY IS FETISHIZED" [ding-ding-dings to the tune of The Internationale] I FUCKIN' LOOKED AT A TRASH CAN, I SAID, "UNDER CAPITALISM, WASTE PLAYS A VITAL ROLE IN THE ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY THAT UNDERPINS THE ENTIRE SOCIO-ECONOMIC SYSTEM". I LOOK AT MY PENIS, I THINK OF THE OMNIPRESENT PHALLOCENTRISM IN OUR PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, AND I GO, "POLITICS? MORE LIKE POLY-DICKS!"
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Deleted
The Lemmy experience
Jump
"You know, that 1% of annoying radical leftists will drive away the rest of Lemmy's user base."
"YES, IT'S BRILLIANT, KATHLEEN, AND FAIR PLAY TO THEM! GREAT LADS!"
Columbo addressing his ancestor, lol
I've thought about this exact "solution" too, and even tried using it in writing sometimes (not for real people, though). Ultimately, although capitalized singular "They" does its job, and means that one needs to think marginally less about phrasing... It still just feels kind of weird, because of how capitalized pronouns in English are almost always honorific, and are associated particularly with the Abrahamic God. This includes capitalized "You", for the record. So at the very least, capitalized singular "They" comes across as a bit overly formal; at the very most, it comes across as literally deifying non-binary people.
Rephrasing or clarifying really does solve most of the issues with unclear reference. People who complain about singular "they" being confusing are basically just using the pronoun as a proxy for not wanting to hear about non-binary people. What I think is that the more people use singular "they", the more people will learn to use the pronoun in a clearer manner, and the more people will find disambiguating shorthands. The reason there's no standardized way to distinguish singular and plural "you" outside the reflexive, after all, is because the ambiguity of "you" is not enough of a problem to warrant a single standardized solution. I think singular vs plural "they" is going to be the same way, although I'm not confident in this.
Some people probably will use capitalization as a shorthand for number, like you and I thought of independently. More people will use phrases like "they themself" to specify the singular, or "they all" or "some of them" or "both of them" to specify the plural, much like they already do with "you". At the most extreme I could even imagine "theirsel(f/ves)" being used in place of the nominative or non-reflexive oblique, or people saying "theyse" à la "youse".
If I may propose something else, though —
Reflexive possessives were once part of Old English and are still used in a lot of Indo-European languages to this day. Taking the Old English words and applying the sound and grammar changes that English went through gives us "sy" and "sine". So, "She played with sy hair" (i.e. the hair belongs to the person playing with it) versus "She played with her hair" (i.e. the hair belongs to another person).
I think that this could disambiguate a lot of ambiguous pronoun usage in general, not just with singular vs plural they. I also like the sound of using "X sy/sine/s'n Y" as an alternative way of marking possession, in cases where -'s or -s' is ambiguous or just doesn't look or sound right. I don't use "sy" or "sine" for real people, but I've taken to using it for fictional or generic people.
Come to think of it, it could've also been that that community maybe actually did show up in the sh.itjust.works search results when you searched for just "piracy", but that the community was lower down on the page and sort of blended in with the other results, so you didn't notice it.
You can try searching just "piracy", and then choosing "communities" from the drop-down menu just to the left of the "subscribed" button. That should make the search results show only communities, so that it's harder for communities to get buried by or hidden among irrelevant results.
Try searching for !piracy@lemmy.ml on sh.itjust.works while logged in.
Meanwhile, deaf-blind people:
"What is or isn't politics is itself a political question" mfers when my politic is that nothing is political, there is only what the Irish call craic
Thoughts on George Habash? —He was a good doctor innit
Thoughts on the GERD? —It's a marvel of engineering innit
Thoughts on indigenous language education? —I like flicking through the Dakota dictionary sometimes. I don't understand any of it but yeah
Thoughts on the South China Sea? —yummy fishies there innit
Thoughts on trans people using public restrooms? —I'll answer your question with another question: why's it called a "public" restroom when you aren't shitting out in the open?
Thoughts on the world's interlocking systems of marginalization, exploitation, and oppression, including the core contradiction between the working and owning class, causing the slow demise of the planet under a world order which can only justify itself through unsustainable constant growth? —Them systems can't be reformed innit (※this opinion is apolitical because I have declared it to be common sense.)
For me, when a picture doesn't load on my Lemmy app (Liftoff), if I go back to the post about an hour or so later, it loads just fine. And as said, clicking on "view post in browser", then the picture will load just fine there, too. So it's a really weird problem that in my impression is specific to Lemmy apps.
Honestly, I read the above article a few months ago, and I think it is a genuinely good article that I would recommend others read. It was written nine years after Tiananmen by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, who was in Beijing during the protests; and the Columbia Journalism Review is a respected publication written by and for professional journalists. So the article is basically just trying to disspell the dumbing down and memeifying and misremembering and making-into-propaganda that happened with Tiananmen, and which honestly tends to happen with any major loss of life. No conspiracy theories, no denialism or claiming that "they had it coming", just dispelling misconceptions. It's good stuff.
I can't speak for Davel's other comment citing Prolewiki, though — I'm pretty skeptical to any website that tries to be Wikipedia but for X ideology.
In any case, this "butthurt report" feels pretty unfair, although I honestly did kinda roll my eyes at how Davel's comment said "6 out of 7 ain't bad", that was kinda cringe... But basically, what I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't fault someone for commenting under a "9/11 NEVER FORGET" post about the extent to which mismanagement and confusion contributed to the death toll of that, and likewise I wouldn't fault someone for commenting under a Tiananmen Square post with more nuance about that event.