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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2025

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  • These exaples are “not my world”, what does that even mean? You live on a different world? Examples have to be specifically from your zip code to be relevant discussion on a global web forum do they? Did you actually argue maybe all women are ok with being oppressed in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? Because many have famously vociferously opposed it, up to the point of being executed and being shot in the head. One of them works at the UN now, putting together work like whats in this very article. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24379018

    The Garrick Club has incredibly powerful members including kings and prime ministers and hundred of members of Parliament. If you cannot see how excluding women from such a club is an issue of patriarchy then you are really not trying very hard to understand anything here.

    And of course, everything is a strawman argument nowadays…

    A strawman argument is stating a false weaker argument (or premise) of your opponent, to then argue against more easily than their real argument.

    Your claim: there is no ‘formal’ system [of patriarchy]

    Me: here’s several examples of formal systems of patriarchy.

    You: I am being strawmanned!


  • Really, there is no formal system of patriarchy? No kings in your world?

    The Catholic church still to this day refuses to ordain any women into the priesthood: men only.

    Ask a girl in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if there’s any formal patriarchy when they try to go to school, or drive, or go outside without head to toe covering, or simply go outside unaccompanied by a man.

    In the west there are hundreds of industry bodies, clubs and business societies that wield enormous power and are exclusively men-only - or were men-only until the Civil Rights Act and were then taken to court to have their rules banning women overturned, or pressured for many decades to change their stance, such as the Garrick Club in the UK whom only finally opened their doors to female members last year.

    I’m a man but I’m starting to hate men too with these replies.


  • What conversation though? The guys that lap this up dont even have conversations with women and feminists to begin with, which is why they can be manipulated to accept such a slanted view of their arguments - they have no point of reference. Akin to how people with no Muslim friends or colleagues in their lives are more easily misled to believe fearmongering and misinformation spread about them. I think you touched on the real root of the problem: influencers and social media funneling people into echo chambers.

    I get that both sides sometimes talk past one another, but in my experience the young guys I talk to (via gaming mostly) have never spoken to a feminist or read a lick of literature and when bored online have just sought out a voice that tells them they are the good guy, or shits on a demographic that’s not them. Those voices usually start in the ‘feminist fails #38’ style YouTube videos (cut and edited to misrepresent of course)… then the Stephen Crowders… and the Andrew Tates. The pipeline to the manosphere / red pill scumbags, or worse incels or blackpill.

    These guys existing and their views increasing is not necessarily a symptom that feminists are messaging incorrectly or that academics need to use different words to explain systemic issues - IMO they’re just another wonderful side effect of the “eyeballs = money, damn the content” algorithm preferences on social media, coupled with a very accepting attitude towards mysogyny and redpill content in Facebook, YouTube and other major social media content curation teams. All you have to do is look at who they censure and ban and who they don’t (and who they unban), and who they promote. Go use a fresh install of one of these platforms on a new device to see what their algorithm promotes in the main feed to a fresh new user. The angry rich white guy influencers get peppered in amongst the Mr Beast and music videos from the first couple of pages, so it’s no wonder more guys are exposed to this bullshit.

    I tell the guys I’ve spoken with that those ‘entertainers’ are poison, chipping away at their empathy and compassion and pushing them to more isolation and fear - and that they need to be critical of what the influencers claim, and show curiosity for the community around them and engage with it rather than accept the simplistic charade. I’ve converted a few but its an uphill battle and that conversation takes months. The article points out that this is an issue that needs to be addressed - not that ‘boys need to be fixed’… but that the rise of this manosphere is damaging to all - men and women, and should be addressed systemically. Be that by parents paying closer attention to their kids content consuming habits, regulation for social media giants, laws against those who encourage sexual assault or violence, enshrining rights and protections more clearly into law, and so on - multi-pronged. The trouble is, a huge amount of guys commenting on this very article didn’t bother to read it and went straight to the usual talking points. I don’t think that’s you, but I think you can see the comments I mean.







  • If China wants to keep escalating skirmishes and expanding ownership claims then it forces world powers to travel via the strait to demonstrate that it’s still a regular legal channel of international naval transit, owned by no-one. The channel is 130kms wide at its most narrow section ffs… the closest passing ships come to land is ~65kms. That’s a pretty large buffer.

    China just sailed a fleet of their own warships around Australia three months back, crossing into Australian territorial waters a number of times and even conducting live firing tests in the waters between Australia and NZ. None of which was done with permission, or necessary to be done near Australia or NZ. There are enormous uninhabited sections of ocean that would have been less travel (and cost) for them to reach - its just done to flex muscle and could just as easily be framed as “intentional provocation” and “undermining peace and stability”. So its ‘rules for thee, not for me’.



  • Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.

    The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.




  • Broadly scientific consensus is that at least bony fish likely experience pain in all of the same quantifiable ways that humans do. They exhibit avoidance learning, they have a central nervous system, nociceptors, opiod receptors, exhibit reduced avoidance responses to noxious stimuli when given analgesics… Etc.

    The few scientists that have argued over the years that fish likely do not or cannot experience pain have been in the minority in the last 50 years, and each passing year finds decreased evidence for their claims. Dismissing it all as ‘complete speculation’ is… Very inaccurate.

    Worth reading:

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

    Also - there already is “something dirt cheap to kill them faster” - hardwood fish bat. Lasts forever and instantly stuns, and with a couple of strong well-aimed blows will definitely kill.


  • TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.

    Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?

    This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.

    At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??

    Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.


  • Very resonable (imo) response from Gargron (lead developer of Mastodon):

    I’ve forwarded your question to our legal help and will provide an answer as soon as they give it to me. What you must understand is that our lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms, and we don’t have experience with law, so we meet somewhere in the middle. Meta presumably has an in-house legal team that can really embed themselves in the problem area; our lawyers are external and pro-bono and rely on us to correctly explain the requirements and community feedback. The draft has been around for something like a year and none of the community members pointed out this issue until now. I’ll add one thing:

    “My assumption, {… shortened for brevity …} is that when you post content it gets mirrored elsewhere, and this continues until a deletion notice is federated. So I’d assume if an instance somewhere mirrors my content they can’t get in trouble for it, and I’d also assume that if there is a deletion or maybe a block and a reasonable interpretation of the protocol would say that the content should be removed, I could send them a takedown and at that point they’d have to honor it.”

    The goal of the terms is to make assumptions like this explicit, because assumptions are risky both sides. Just because luckily there were no frivolous lawsuits around this so far doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of one.

    Cory has had a much more calm response on a fediverse post, offering to reach out to the EFF’s lawyers for assistance in drafting a better ToS for Mastodon, and other experienced lawyers have offered help also. Amongst the usual negativity from some users.

    I’ll be keeping my eye on the outcome but so far it looks positive.