You vote for the person, you should get the person.

that game is a steal at full price, let alone a discount.

Hm, it’s been a while since I’ve been active in this space, I’m quoting from memory. I’ll look up some stuff.

There are five grades of FGM; MGM is equivalent to hoodectomy, which is grade III.

The worst FGM is much, much worse that MGM, but the least-worst FGM is much less-worse than MGM.

Could this count as a hate crime?

Look, murder all the children you want, but don’t you ever claim we didn’t help you do it!

Fully automated luxury war slavery

What do you think an algorithm is?

He says, on social media

… how many of the people who didn’t survive a cardiac arrest had consumed an energy drink?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

How complex does a neural net have to be before you can call any of its outputs ‘pain’?

Start with a lightswitch with ‘pain’ written on a post-it note stuck to the on position, end with a toddler. Where’s the line?

With the best will in the world, I think you’re still conflating the symptom with the disease.

Gender-policing is abusive, and abused people often behave in problematic and indeed shitty ways. While of course there are no excuses for shitty behaviour, it’s also incredibly shit to turn around and frame that behaviour in terms of the criteria by which they were picked out for abuse in the first place.

For intance (to get into properly uncomfortable territory), it’s fair to say that systemic racism drives poverty and disadvantage, which in turn can drive all kinds of antisocial behaviour and societal problems. But imagine for one second some sociologist coming up with the concept of ‘toxic Africanity’ (or equivalent) to describe it. They would get fucking dragged, and rightly so.

It’s not about being ‘probably one of the good ones’. It’s about looking at a bunch horrible maladaptive coping strategies, and asking what the hell it is we’re expecting people to cope with, and why we put up with that.

You know, gender studies is arts-faculty - people who devote their careers to parsing the subtlest nuances from the gauziest wisps of meaning.

Yet when it comes to making up two-word catchphrases like [HORRIBLE] [DEMOGRAPHIC], it never even occurs to them that people might associate [demographic] with [horribleness] when they hear it.

I’m just a little bit cynical about this.

This post right here is exactly why ‘toxic masculinity’ is a fucking shit term that should never be used.

The intended meaning of the phrase was never ‘men, who are toxic’, or even ‘men who are toxic’, even though that’s the straight-line interpretation of it.

What it’s supposed to mean is ‘overexaggerated performative masculinity required by social norms, the imposition of which upon men is toxic’.

Given that that’s a fucking mouthful and the short form is horribly misleading, I always go with “gender policing” instead.

Stop telling people how to do their gender, and a vast number of social problems will evaporate. It also places the blame on the actual cause of the problem, and expands to cover mandatory-performative-femininity as well, which is also a shit thing to subject people to.

Israel: “lol oopsie woopsie, never mind”

mmm yes, slavery. Delightful.

How about a law stating that the terms of all contracts with corporations be listed in a public registry?

You want the state to enforce the terms of your agreement, you put that agreement out in the open. No secret laws, and no secret laws-by-proxy.

‘Racism’ is a good enough umbrella term for ‘being shitty to people because of some demographic category’. Whether the basis is ethnic, national, religious or anything else doesn’t seem like an important distinction. Nobody considers ‘race’ to be a useful term any more, after all.

That horse bolted decades ago; the term is lost.

Just call it racism and be done. We don’t need specific terms for different demographics.