Then five minutes later, someone figures out how to make a 3d printable gun that bypasses the gun detector on the 3d printer. It’s not like you’re printing a whole gun; you’re printing parts, most of which look nothing like a gun. How hard would it be to design an algorithm that takes a gun part cad file and then adds a bunch of extraneous pieces to it that can be easily removed? Just keep adding extra crap until the system no longer detects it as a gun part.
But there is no way to justify that importance and not see that it is no where near as important to them as actual gender affirming care is to a trans person.
Sorry. I cannot parse this sentence, it’s a triple negative and I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. My apologies.
To minimize or reject the later while choosing to seek the former is outrageous.
Performative outrage perhaps. But anyone outraged at this shows they really haven’t put in the time to understand or respect trans issues. This is the difference between real allyship and just putting pronouns in your bio. The difference between simply tolerance and actual respect and understanding. If you can’t understand the difference between a trans person getting gender-affirming care and a random cis person just getting a nose job they want, well I have to say, you really don’t understand trans people at all. Being trans is not just a quirky body mod people do for fun. This stuff kills people. This is life-saving medical care. I would be dead without the healthcare I received as part of my transition. I would literally be in the ground right now. To compare that healthcare to a random 18 year old who would just prefer her boobs be a little bigger is insulting.
I know it’s tempting to ignore all nuance and just say, “everyone should get what they want. Love and rainbows. Looking at hard reality and real world limits are too difficult. I love everyone and just want everyone to be happy! #uwu” That’s lazy liberal hugboxxing. Here in the real world, the hard truth is that insurance will never be able to pay for absolutely every cosmetic treatment people want. The difference is that trans healthcare has decades of research behind it showing that it greatly reduces suicide rates and directly saves lives. When a similar body of evidence exists to support cisgender access to an otherwise cosmetic treatment, I will consider them equivalent. Until then, you’re directly hurting trans people by comparing the two.
Again, if you can show a treatment is similarly effective at preventing suicide in cis people as GAC is for trans people, I will consider them comparable. But if that isn’t the case, it’s trivializing and demeaning the life-saving care that many trans people rely on to literally keep living. It’s the difference between someone taking ozempic because they’re morbidly obese and will die if they don’t take it, and someone taking it because they would like to lose ten pounds to fit in their summer swimsuit. Would it help both people to feel better about themselves? Sure. The already skinny person will have their well-being increase slightly. But to say the two situations are remotely comparable is insulting and outrageous. Same medicine. One is life-saving medical care, while the other is cosmetic. Nuance matters and we shouldn’t take the lazy hug box approach and just say, “well I guess all the people who want this must be in the same boat!”
As a trans person, I still get really uneasy when I hear people comparing cis cosmetic treatment to gender-affirming care for trans folks. It always seems trivializing to the struggles trans people face and the deep need trans people often have for these treatments.
The problem with equating cis cosmetic treatments to trans gender-affirming care is that you’re then implicitly arguing that trans treatments are cosmetic. Yet trans rights activists have had to fight for decades to stop insurance companies from considering trans care as “cosmetic” and to recognize it for the life-saving reconstructive treatments that they are. Comparing GAC to cis cosmetic treatments directly hurts trans people’s ability to access medicine.
Comparing SRS to a cis gal getting breast augmentation is implicitly playing into the hands of bigots that have always labeled trans care as cosmetic.
Trans rights advocates have had to argue for decades that trans medical care isn’t like a cis person getting a boob or nose job. They’ve had to argue that trans care is more like the kind of serious reconstructive medicine you get after a severe car crash. If trans care is no different from a cis person getting a nose job, then there’s no reason for trans care to be covered by insurance.
Unless the cisgender “gender affirming care” you’re citing is commonly paid for by insurance, you are directly harming trans interests whenever you make this kind of comparison.
That’s humanity. Reaching towards the stars while buried to their waist in the mud.
I would fuck myself, but honestly, I just can’t handle a partner with that many mental health issues. I’m sorry. I wish I were a better person. But I can only handle so much. I’m only human! I can’t have a partner like that. I have enough of my own issues to deal with! 😂
But I wanted more cosmic horror!
In my vision she’s leading an LGB-drop-the-T pride parade as the parade’s Grand Marshall. At some pivotal moment she gives a grand speech, ending with phrase, “and thank you to the LGB community!” Immediately after, a deafening sound of thunder echoes across the square, and all is obscured by a blinding flash of light. As the crowd’s eyes adjust, they see a sight before them. JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter and arch-demon to the trans community worldwide, is dead on her feet, struck down by lightning as if by the wrath of an angry God.
Sometimes you just have to go with the classics. And nothing quite says “wrath of God” like a literal lightning strike.
If you’re talking about a true offworld backup to our species, that is a very very long ways away. Even if we were to really take that effort seriously, it would take us millennia before we truly established and independent presence in space.
The key is that it’s not possible to have a non-industrial civilization on a place like Mars. Our cultural model for such things is always the Age of Sale and similar exploratory waves by European imperialists. But this cultural analog is flawed. People could sail from England to the Americas and live off the land once they got there. They could build houses, find food and water, and really form a farmstead with the tools and knowledge they already possessed. They could even cut down local trees and repair the ships they used to get there.
But Mars? There’s nothing there. You want water? You need to build a water purification plant. You want air? You’ll need a huge air cleaning and reclamation system. And all of this will require massive amounts of power. And all of this infrastructure requires vast supply chains to keep, both to build the things and to build the things that build the things.
What this ultimately comes down to is that until you have hundreds of millions of people living on Mars, you can forget any idea of them truly being able to survive without Earth. You could have a million people on Mars. But if Earth collapses, unless Mars is already self-sufficient at that time, the Martians are on borrowed time. Sure, once you start a colony, there will be strong incentives to make Mars as self-sufficient as possible. The transport costs alone will ensure that. But it will be a very, very long time before Mars is self-sufficient in something like, computer chips for example. Every colony would be built from the start with its own water and air systems, but inevitably most of the components for that equipment would be shipped in from Earth. It will be a very long time before such a colony is capable of producing all the tools and equipment it needs to keep operating. And remember, on Mars, going organic farm and returning to the land is never an option. It’s full industrial civilization or death. The planet is not capable of sustain life (or at least life like ours) without extensive technological supplementation.
Or alternatively, have your friends worry about you. Say you unavailable as you were drunk/high/intoxicated out of your mind. As times goes on, cite inebriation by ever-more exotic and illegal substances.
Earth, 2150:
As the last embers of organized human civilization crumbled in the hothouse Earth catastrophe, a handful of astronomers remain in cloistered study, pouring over the data from the last of the great space telescopes, built at the height of 22nd century science. What have they learned? We are not the outlier. In the light of other Suns we find them. Dead world after dead world. Once bastions of life reduced to wastelands of ruin by technological civilization. The majority of Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars are tombs, rendered unto sterile husks by the actions of their own offspring.
To firmly tease such a conclusion out of such ephemeral evidence as a stellar spectrum was truly a feat of the astronomical art. It required techniques undreamt of and inconceivable by 21st century scholars. But, the last of this civilization’s great astronomer’s found a way. And the conclusion was damning.
Intelligent tool-using life is a terminal disease for life on a world. Once a biosphere has dreamed up a species like ours, that world’s days are numbered. There are many forms that extinction can take, some more exotic than others. But most are through mundane causes like self-induced ecological collapse. For every one case of a civilization destroying itself in a science experiment gone wrong, there are a thousand cases of simple ecological catastrophe.
We are dying. We are alone. We are surrounded by the dead.
Ok! :D :D
I’m sure with all the latent mental illness he’ll be great in bed!
Well that’s literally what these laws are requiring. You can speculate on future laws, but you can imagine innumerable horrible futures. It’s important to stay grounded and not get lost in the dooming. And I see nothing wrong with an optional feature that lets you set an age on a child’s account. As long as it’s something I control, then that’s actually giving me more control over my hardware, not less.
Yes, there will be people pushing for more invasive methods. But those are the laws you should oppose. Not these. People tend to think in binaries. And they tend to lump everything called “digital id” into one bucket devoid of nuance or discernment.
If anything, lumping all digital id into one bucket without any nuance only helps the opponents of privacy. Simply giving the parents the option to enter an age is a perfectly reasonable policy. If you oppose that because you cannot recognize nuance and consider all id laws equivalent, then you’re hurting your side. People see you appealing to privacy when opposing something that reasonable people will not see as a violation of privacy. Again, we’re taking OS-level controls that actually give you more control over the machine.
You risk a “boy who cried wolf” scenario. You turn everyone against you fighting something that really isn’t an invasion of privacy. Then when someone does actually try to pass a law mandating facial recognition be built into apps, people will ignore you as they already consider you an irrational radical.
But that’s literally what these systems are. There is more than one form of age verification. The type we’re discussing here literally is just “enter your name in a box.” It’s important not to muddy the waters. If you don’t know what you’re opposing and choosing your battles carefully, you can’t effectively fight infringement on privacy. And I really don’t see anything wrong with a law that just says, “every OS needs to have a feature that lets parents self-report age on a child’s account.”
Yes, there are other forms of digital id laws. But we’re talking specifically about OS-level ones. This literally just be a more effective parental control, giving people more control over their own PCs, not less.
Again, try to focus on what specifically we are talking about, not similar-sounding but unrelated technologies.
I don’t really get this. Why is it such a big deal if your OS has setting where you enter your age, and the OS then sends that to websites? Face scanning or demanding uploads of photo IDs is an immense privacy violation. But simply having your OS have a setting you can use where you provide a number, a number that you’re completely free to alter or report whatever value you want? I really don’t see the issue with this.
This seems like a pretty easy way to give parents some control over their kid’s online activities while also not infringing on privacy. The parents can set up the OS and give an account to their kids that lists their ages as under 18. If they want their kids to access the web without restrictions, they simply don’t have to create an under 18 account on the computer. And even if your OS has to report an age to access a website, if it’s all based on self-reporting, you can just self-report a false age.
We tend to think in binaries, as this is convenient. We tend to view all digital age verification as horrible and equally horrible. But this? Just giving parents a way to give their kids a minors-only account, and have websites respect that OS-level flag? This is nothing like bills that require uploading face scans or photo IDs.
Sure you can speculate a slippery slope. But that is a fallacy for a reason. It tends to wash out all nuance and make you conclude everything is absolute evil forever.
There’s a reason we abandoned monarchy. Zuck is effectively the king of meta. Literally. The founding corporate structure is designed so he literally can never be fired. And if you give anyone absolute unaccountable power, it’s only a matter of time until they drive things right off a cliff.
Seeing someone as sexy? No. Seeing someone as a sex object, yes.
“Seeing someone as an object doesn’t dehumanize them!”
Really?
I would also be curious to know.
Sure. Some people do that. But this is an artist who creates their own work. You shouldn’t just start throwing around those kind of allegations unless you can back them up. And no, guilt by association doesn’t count.
Looking great girl!