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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)EX
Posts
12
Comments
810
Joined
12 mo. ago

  • If bug bites are a normal part of mosquito life, why would a mosquito consider it to be ironic that they were bitten? They'd just think it's normal.

    Foxes like eating rabbits, but wolves like eating foxes. Do you think a fox who gets eaten by a wolf while snacking on a rabbit thinks "that's ironic"? Not unless a human who got eaten by a tiger while eating a hamburger thought it was ironic. No, to carnist humans, foxes, and mosquitoes, eating other animals is a fact of life, unremarkable. This comic relies on the premise that a mosquito would think of the human-mosquito relationship the same way a human would. But they wouldn't. A mosquito, even an intelligent talking mosquito, would not feel that much empathy for humans, just as most humans choose not to feel empathy for cows.

  • I have a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to politics that convinces people I'm some sort of troll when I say completely reasonable left wing political views. I guess other leftists feel the need to qualify and speak softly and really try hard to make themselves understood by the other side. I don't care about making my views palatable to reactionaries, and I guess for some reason that makes them unpalatable to other leftists as well. It's really fucking weird.

  • Whereas in a communist economy where people didn't have to struggle to survive, game developers could focus on improving their craft and telling whatever the funnest story they can think of is. We can already see this on a small scale with the difference between indie passion projects like Hades, and AAAA cash grabs like suicide squad. Imagine if everyone could afford to chase their passion instead of money.

  • If you like the tactics soulism adds to the leftist arsenal, you should read the soulist manifesto at http://soulism.net. There's only a few dozen of us, but after reading the manifesto, I saw some pretty huge failures in the mainstream leftist worldview. Most leftists want to win a material victory against Capital, but they categorically refuse to deconstruct the social reality created by Capital to control us. Socially, they're reactive. They take the way their opponent describes the world at face value and only disagree when the scientific method disagrees. But most of our reality is social, not scientific, and the scientific method doesn't help you with that. The mainstream right is much better at crafting realities - a process we soulists call magic - than the mainstream left is. Escaping the body prison doesn't really help if you can't even begin to challenge the mind prison.

  • I thought so. As a soulist, I'm interested in deconstructing and remixing social constructs into forms that benefit social justice. I noticed the hypocrisy of transphobes crying wolf about kids going through irreversible changes, and figured out it takes next to zero effort to use their own language. In appropriating the forms of our enemies' arguments, we reduce their disagreement with us down to its fundamental form - in this case, a religious belief in genetic destiny. That's the only thing setting their arguments of "for the children" apart from my arguments of "for the children". And this is a much harder thing for a bystander to accept unquestioningly than "for the children". I like showing bystanders what's really setting our enemies apart from us.

    Think of it like rhetorical kung fu. Using the opponent's force against them

  • Anarchism isn't no government, it's no state. The distinction between a government and a state varies between different definitions, but the most widely accepted distinguishing characteristic of a state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

    For example, a high school club might have a system of government, with a president, treasurer, and secretary. But the club president has no greater right to the use of violence than any other member.

    It may be hard to imagine a national government operating the same way, but I believe it is possible.

  • It'll start right back up again completely naturally as soon as you stop taking the pills. The pills are hormone blockers. The gonads still produce sex hormones, but the blockers react with the hormones and render them inert. The inert hormones are passed as urine like any other waste product in the blood. A few days after you stop taking the blockers, they'll run out and the sex hormones will start expressing themselves just like they would in someone who never took the blockers. Puberty will begin (or resume) just as nature planned.

    The only side effect is that you won't go through puberty. Unfortunately, this does mean you'll have a child's amount of bone density, which is not good for a lifetime. But there's absolutely 0 risk in delaying puberty until age 18. You'll just grow up slower, the same as any late bloomer.

    Hormone blockers are actually a component in an adult trans person's hormone replacement therapy. To take me as an example, I have a pair of testes which produce testosterone. So I take an antiandrogen; a testosterone blocker, to suppress the effects. And I take estrogen pills so that I have a female blood chemistry. When I started taking hormone pills, my body reacted just like any teenage girl's body. I got softer skin, mood swings, and better hair. I tell you what, having the emotions of a teenage girl as an adult is an absolute trip. I'm glad they've settled down since then. Some trans women I know even got period cramps, despite not having a uterus. I don't envy them.

    The body is genetically programmed to respond to sex hormones in a certain way. It doesn't matter what you were born as, everyone's organs, muscles, bones, and brain have a genetic programming that responds to estrogen one way, and testosterone another way. The potential is already inside every living human. That potential remains there for your entire life. Puberty blockers can't do anything to take it away.

    If I ever stopped taking my testosterone blocker, I'd start growing bigger muscles and hair in strange places. My body would resume functioning like a male body. One day I'll get my testes removed, and I'll never have to worry about that again. But that surgery is only available to adults, and it requires a psychiatric assessment. I've been openly trans for years and years and I'm still not allowed to do it yet. There's absolutely no risk of a child going through the procedure without the absolute greatest caution, and a very urgent, life-saving need. And even if a horrible one in a billion mistake was made, they could just give the kid hormone pills the same as I take in order to restore their original sexual chemistry.