Why are facebook apologising to all LGBTs and not just Drag Queens?
Ok, there's a great deal of confusion I see here. It's a question of use-case.
Drag queens are performing artists. See Rue Paul or Pandora Boxx, neither of which iirc use HRT or intend to transition to adopting their performing identities as their own 24/7. Companies get FB pages, so why shouldn't their performing identities get FB pages in addition to their own personal pages?
I find it odd that FB is apologizing to drag queens or that they would even target drag queens. (I'd also like to add that one curious thing I read in Whipping Girl is that drag queens are often welcomed into the female restroom, but trans women are shunned from that place.)
In the case of trans men and women, if FB has targeted them (I haven't been), FB is clearly wrong and the apology is justified. Especially in the case of trans women, proceeding with a legal name change is a risk that can land one homeless in a gutter. I'd also like to add that in my personal experience that I'm gendered female by others quite often (just lucky I guess), however changing my real name without being able to go without a job for a year or two would be suicidal. Employers have this little habit of demanding documents that contain one's legal gender. If one's legal gender doesn't match with the gender of one's identity and the gender others assign to one, it's OMG fucking holy shit GTFO.
There's also the complication that a name change is not enough to get those documents to match one's lived gender. My state requires bottom surgery before the documents can be amended, although some clever trans women are able to get the gender on their driver's license changed at the DMV with a little social engineering (others aren't so lucky). Other states make it impossible to change those documents even with bottom surgery.
My friends know me by one name. My employer and clients know me by another. However, FB is not a network for professionals so instead I have a LinkedIn profile with one name and a FB profile I haven't touched in probably two years with another name (just a few more years and it'll be my real name), the one my friends know me as.
Why do drag queens get to have an alias and not straight people who wear straight peoples clothes.
What is straight peoples' clothes, exactly? Do homosexuals wear something different to the office? In my experience, gays and lesbians tend to dress just the same as their heterosexual peers.
Yes, I'm intentionally being obtuse. I hope I addressed the confusion about drag above. This is a question of identity.
I'd also like to give you something to think about. Currently I'm between genders, so it's all wibbly-wobbly. However, should I obtain bottom surgery after going full time as a woman, I will then be a heterosexual woman and indistinguishable from any other straight woman who cannot have children due to whatever medical problem.
Your head will asplode the day the procedure for a barren cisgendered woman to receive a transplanted uterus (I'm too lazy to find the link, but I believe the procedure involved transplanting her mother's uterus into her so that she could have children) is expanded to transgendered women.
If women wear trousers do they get to call themselves cross-dressers and get an alias?
Why would a cisgendered woman want to have a male identity? If this is a case of a trans man or somebody experimenting with presenting a male identity, then I would say it's justified.
I've met a few trans men, and the decision to undergo gender transition is an even bigger hurdle for them than trans women. There is no bottom surgery they can hope for, and they have to be absolutely certain before they expose their bodies to testosterone. Estrogen is easy, and its changes to the body can be hidden or even reversed. That's
It works, that's why. I believe given that [FUCK] BETA is going to happen, that we carefully question the validity of transphobia in greater discussions of gender.
On the one hand, there's Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. The Silence of the Lambs is actually a good movie if you can accept the premise that Buffalo Bill is not actually a trans woman (evidence provided by the character Hannibal).
However, there's the powerful feminist lobby (that's made of cis women and trans women who are grovelling to cis women to have their status as women of some kind at least).
The idea is that trans women, fundamentally, are Buffalo Bill, however that doesn't hold water. But then here come the feminists who are saying that trans women are Buffalo Bill, but perhaps on a metaphysical sense. Nobody knows that to believe because most individuals have a "cis blind spot;" that is, they cannot separate their mental gender from their reproductive gender.
The bane of the American system is freeloaders. The argument is that nobody would hire a trans woman because she would be masturbating all the time. Therefore, a trans woman wouldn not be able to pay for her own cosmetic surgery. Therefore, any arguments that being a trans woman has any basis in physical reality are clearly attempts to create communism. Q. E. D.
Thank you. I sitll intend to participate in the slashcott next week, however. I believe that there is a political element at Dice that would not mind seeing the wretched hive of men's rights activism and anti-feminism that is Slashdot in mothballs.
Godspeed to those who are working on altslashdot.org. I'm afraid that Code.org and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have given orders from On High that the community that questions feminism at Slashdot must be disbanded.
I've encountered sexism many times in my life before. Usually the argument is that because I was assigned the male gender at birth, despite the physical gender of the wetware between my ears, THEREFORE I am sexist. Q. E. D.
I wished many, many times during my male adolescence thatI had been born female instead. None of those wishes came true. However, if any of them had, I suspect that my school's administration would not have attempted to threaten me with FBI incarceration because I wanted to have a computer club nor would they have attempted to paint me as a plagarist because my code was "too good" for somebody of my age back then.
More assigned males are speaking out against this problem. There is nothing you can do, Dice or Code.org. More and more of us are becoming aware that the feminist narrative is wrong-headed.
As much as I wish more cis women would go into programming, I am not their mistress or their Borg queen. I do not control their actions.
I would be happy with [FUCK] BETA if it weren't for the superfluous sidebar that continues down the page to infinity and beyond, limiting space for comments and the various other layout issues. The font size is too big for another thing. Now I know I can hit ctrl+- a few times, but I mean, come on! I want comments to be the full width of my window, and I want to choose whether I want to see all comments when I'm moderating and whether I just want to browse at +1 or +2 depending on my attention span any particular day. In fact, I don't give a FUCK BETA whether a comment was modded up because it was funny, insightful, or interesting or whatever. All I care about is how many moderators thought the comment was noteworthy when I don't care to browse at 0 or -1.
FUCK BETA is like everything I hate about the mobile site brought to a desktop site. I even do "request desktop site" on my phone when browsing Slashdot because the mobile site is worthless. I once tried modding on the mobile site, and not a single mod ever took place! (Still had my mod points when I got home!)
We can argue about whether or not it's too AJAXy or whether JQuery is too onerous. All I want is the Slashdot I know and love for its threaded comment system and moderation/meta-moderation system. More power to Dice if they can realize a functional AJAXy vision of that in my opinion as long as it degrades gracefully for browsers such as elinks (yes, I actually do use elinks on occasion!) and screen readers, but FUCK BETA is not that.
It seems from some of Soulskill's comments that this is a change that's being rammed through from the Higher Ups and the Powers That Be.
It'll be interesting to see how this will play out, and I'm glad to see that there are people already working on building a new "slashdot." I was thinking about doing some hacking on slashcode or coming up with something new entirely this weekend when I'll be more free, but it looks like the initiative is well underway by individuals with better experience at such things than I have.
Something occurred to me today while browsing through all the FUCK BETA comments. I might need to loosen my tinfoil, but who knows. The way things go will be telling. I mean, I like the freaking MS Office ribbon and I'm looking forward to Wayland! FUCKing BETA is just an absolute disaster, but maybe it's intentional.
We know that Dice is a backer of Code.org, and Code.org has been involved in some proposals one might use the euphemism "affirmative action" for, but I prefer to call it what it is: sexism and discrimination based on assigned gender at birth.
This place is one of the few places I know on the internet I can come and participate in discussions about alternate theories about why there are no cis women in programming and whether that's even a problem or not (and get properly downmodded when I cross the line into misogynistic ranting). Personally, I think it is, although others disagree. All of those discussions are completely contradictory to the narrative that Code.org and feminism would like us to believe: that lack of interest from cis women must needs imply some kind of sexism and oppression on the part of all assigned males.
Perhaps the higher ups at Dice think that if they torpedo this site with a horrible excuse for a redesign (it looks like something I would design! and I'll freely admit I'm a terrible graphic artist!), that opinions such as mine and others that run contrary to the feminist narrative that constructs gender as a dichotomy of rapists and victims would lose their soapbox.
Maybe my tinfoil is on too tight, but Dice seems to be demonstrating that in the face of falling revenues from this property, they're willing to have it commit seppuku.
Hopefully I'm wrong and if the boycott next week goes well, Dice will see the light. However, I believe there may be a political element present in Dice that wouldn't mind seeing Slashdot in mothballs.
Try working in a nearly all female working environment. You will receive sexual harassment and be held accountable for the actions of others because you were assigned the same gender some other person was at birth. You'll hear all the same old jokes that "all men" are the butt of on a near daily basis, and you'll get as tired of them as feminists are of jokes about women drivers.
It took me a long time to learn to not act on the feeling of disgust that overcomes me when a woman is flirting with me and to also communicate to my co-workers that it was not acceptable to expect me to return the flirting.
Sexism and acting as a chauvenist pig are not things that are unique to any particular gender and are not things that being assigned the female gender at birth prevents one from engaging in.
Yes. You displayed a wonderfully forward-thinking application of the "one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself" version of the golden rule.
The dilemma is that religious fundamentalism and its various manifestations of Puritanism and Biblical literalism tend to work against that verson of the golden rule so we're left with "he who has the gold makes the rules" and "all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent" taking into consideration that money is speech. (The only problem I have with Citizens United is that I believe it's a misapplication of corporate personhood because a corporation is a legal construct and not natural. Therefore, a corporation has none of the examples of natural human rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights as natural rights, only privileges.)
Personally, I would be much more tolerant of religious fundamentalism and Puritanism if the limits of its intrusions into my personal life were a few crappy ice cream joints my money is no good at because I'm trans and some well-meaning witnessers that might walk by and strike up a conversation when I'm mowing the lawn. The US Constitution lays down a powerful framework for attempting to make that so. As is lamented in every NSA/DEA/FBI/Snowden thread, it seems that document doesn't mean as much as it did in that nostalgic yesteryear that never quite existed.
There's always a flux between authoritarianism and libertarianism (small L). The question I suppose is one of how to impede authoritarianism without violating the human rights of individual authoritarians. The problem is that authoritarianism by definition implies top-down enforced conformity, and the only solutions I can think of given the larger sociological picture are different top-down enforced conformities.
This has been seriously pissing me the fuck off. Where the hell do I sign up for one of these free Obamacare sex changes?
Is the right just misinformed and free phalloplasty and testosterone HRT are available and they assumed that assigned males would also be given free vaginoplasty and estrogen HRT?
I don't know and don't care. Unless that's the case, you are completely full of shit. At the very least it doesn't excuse this rhetoric that Obamacare is so evil that it's giving out free sex changes! My insurance won't even cover my meds because when estrogen and an anti-androgen are prescribed to an assigned male, it's cosmetic by definition, and no fucking insurance company will cover anything cosmetic.
Dipshits like you who want us all to believe that Obamacare is giving out free sex changes and the fact this bullshit works are telling. Transphobia is a better argument apparently against this train wreck of a law than logic, philosophy, and data about the 9,999 out of 10,000 (or 49,999 out of 50,000 depending on who you listen to) individuals who are not transgendered that are getting fucked by this law.
I'll admit, I was naive two years ago about how insurance companies were going to milk this. I knew it would be a hand-out to insurance companies, but from what I've been hearing, it's ridiculous. Nobody is giving out free sex changes you troll. You can't name one single actual insurance company that gives out free sex changes or any other cosmetic operation. Just die in a fire.
Two more things that will fucking blow your mind. First, not all trans people are liberal socialist commies. I vote Libertarian. I pay with my own cash for my meds, and I see no problem with that. Second, being trans is NOT a sexual fetish that revolves around scamming other people into paying for cosmetic surgery. This will blow your mind because there's a significant number of trans people who don't desire bottom surgery. Disclaimer: I'm not one of them.
I don't see why others should be forced to pay for a routine, daily medicine for me and a cosmetic surgery. I do however want to know why I have to pay for so much shit for so many of you straight folks so you can have your all important grandkids before your own kids are 20 like food stamps, free housing, birth control (that whoopies the Mother forgot to take the entire last month!), and the list goes on.
I give you free child support, give me this mythical free Obamacare sex change, and we'll be happy. No, I think it's better if you and your children starve because you couldn't afford birth control and condoms before having wild sex, and if I pay for my sex change with my own hard-earned cash. Get a damned job and be responsible if you want to have sex instead of having children you can't afford.
This law hasn't affected me personally one bit. It can't actually because as long as my employer even offers a health insurance benefit, I can't qualify for any subsidies. There is no insurance company that will cover a sex change. Well, the only concession I'll make is that perhaps one of those "platinum plans" might. Who knows, maybe. Except riddle me this: why would I get an "insurance" plan for the sole purpose of getting a sex change when the premiums would cost me more in a year than getting a sex change and implants?!
There are no fucking free Obamacare sex changes. You want to know why everything is falling apart in this country? It's idiots like you and the idiots who listen to you who are more concerned about somebody getting a free sex change and then going out and fucking a hot guy than you are about what's going on around you.
Pick a better argument.
I may not be much of anyone, but I'm getting sick of transphobia from the right. So much so that maybe it's time I give up even voting for Libertarians.
You should spend Thanksgiving with my ex-family. A typical Thanksgiving involved a debriefing about how my brother and I would go to hell if I we believed the differences in interpretation that my grandparents believed.
You get folks who believe themselves linguistic Biblical scholars. You get arguments based on whether that appearance of "is" comes from this Aramaic word or was later inserted by some monk by accident.
People get very serious about this and very emotional. I suppose that's what happens when one's been convinved that they'll go to hell and burn forever based on some nit-picky interpretation of the etymology of some word or whatever. Imagine meeting someone who can walk you through an argument that their god is mad at us because we don't practice racially-based slavery any more!
(From what I remember, it has something to do with how caucasians are the lost tribe of Isreal [insert scriptual evidence I never cared enough to memorize here] and because some guy got smashed drunk once in a tent and passed out without any clothes on.)
I don't know what the solution is. By the FSM, the country I live in will be a 3rd world country in 50 years because when the going gets rough, the tough turn to superstition, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Going way off topic here, but it was pretty harmful to me.
It's at best a cosmetic procedure. The troubling thing is that we perform this cosmetic procedure on patients who have no ability to report problems during healing. When something goes wrong, the patient has no way of knowing what's normal or not. I'm not the only person who went through a big chunk of their life thinking that something abnormal and utterly wrong was just a normal part of being a man. Hell, I didn't even know it had been done to me until I had already taken drastic measures to correct the physically painful problem I had that I had thought was a completely normal part of being a man.
And maybe it really is. I don't know. My doctor said that my female mind might have been interpreting something that should have felt pleasurable as intolerable pain. I'm not sure I entirely buy that. Despite the help he provided me, his idea of gender transition was Rocky Horror Picture Show. I've never heard another account like mine from another trans woman, and side effects that aren't cosmetic or don't revolve around sexual pleasure later in life simply aren't studied, so there's no evidence to support or refute his claim.
I feel sorry for my ex-parents. If they had just kept their hands off my dick, they might have had the grandkids they wanted so much. Well, shit happened, and now they'll never have grandkids.
"Mutilation" or not, the ethics are apalling. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the primary reason we do this to infants is to protect them from sexually transmitted diseases. How much sex does the typical infant have?
There's the UTI argument, but that barely holds any water. UTI is a routine condition that infants develop, and female infants have a higher rate of UTI. The way I see it, why can't we just accept that maybe male infants in their intact state just have a little higher rate of incidence of UTI than female infants? Why don't we research cosmetic surgeries to perform on female infants to bring their rate of incidence of UTI down in line with the rate of incidence for circumcised male infants?
If the evidence is to be believed, then it would be more ethical to perform the procedure on a child after 24 months. The foreskin is not fully developed until then, and many side effects such as skin bridges could be completely avoided if the procedure were performed after the foreskin had fully developed. It would also allow a better opportunity to administer local anesthesia, since any kind of anestesia is risky to perform on a newborn.
I don't see any kind of rationality surrounding the issue like what I proposed above. I mean, for FSM's sake, it's a cosmetic procedure at best. Nobody seriously believes that it's more effective at preventing transmission of STDs than a condom! Well, unless you're a victim of this practice in rural Africa. They do, and the results have been tragic. Relying on circumcision to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS/GRID and other STDs has led to widespread infection there. Clearly, circumcision is ineffective at controlling infection, regardless of the percentage point here or there that the AAP reported.
All I can figure is that the point of performing it on newborns is so that the patient never knows that he is missing a body part that is design to protect the glans from external irritation. The patient might protest and advocate against the practice if he were to be aware that before the body part was amputated, there was no pain or irritation, and afterwards there was. The patient might report more complications instead of beliving those complications are simply a part of being a man, and the rate of incidence recorded would probably increase.
Iirc the AAP currently reports that 1/500 circumcisions have complications. How much higher would that be if we preformed this procedure on 4 or 5 year olds the same way we wait until a child is about that age before removing their wisdom teeth? I don't know, and by performing
In Windows, win+R for the run box, win+D to go to the desktop, win+E for my computer. There are a few others, but those are the ones I use most frequently.
In Linux, it's much more useful. I have it set up as a 3rd level shift. I hacked together an XKB map that gives me greek letters; punctuation such as em and en dashes, typographical quotes, proper ellipsis, less than/greater than or equal to, etc; and arrows plus times and divide on my numpad. Combined with remapping capslock to the compose key, it makes for a versatile keyboard layout.
If one wanted, one could also map say some of the F keys (F1-F12) to things like volume up/down, play next track, pause, calculator, run, etc with 3rd level shift, but I haven't bothered.
On the topic of keyboards themselves, I'm loving my Unicomp black buckling spring USB keyboard. The trackball is wonky, though, and as far as I can tell the extra two mouse buttons are mystery buttons that do nothing (no middle click!), so I'd recommend skipping that to anyone who wants a decent 5 lb USB klacker. The thing in indestructable, and the tactile feedback from the buckling springs makes it a pleasure to type on, improving both speed and accuracy.
No other choice but to go back in the kitchen... that women would rather pole-dance than pursue a more dignified career because money is the only thing important to them... Your bias is showing.
Where can I meet this mythical womyn-born-womyn? I've observed what I've observed first-hand.
Hell, I've had girls (plural! multiple!) that my ex-boyfriend have dated that have offered to cook and clean for me if I'd let them move in! Every time I've said hell no, just move in if that's what you want to do. These womyn-born-womyn need higher aspirations. One who wanted to be an engineer before she learned she could dance on a pole and make good money just like her own Mother (I do have respect for the athleticism involved, but little else) I tried as best I could to tell to forget the cooking and cleaning and focus on taking classes. Well, last I heard about her, she had become a Mother, sights still set on retirement around 35. How can I blame her? Maybe I'd do the same things if I had been born with my reproductive system on the inside and had the opportunities and privileges that came with that.
Hell, I'd be happy if I even knew what life with intact genitals was like. You can't tell me womyn-born-womyn aren't privileged when it's illegal and gets us jerking our knees like there's no tomorrow at the suggestion of even poking a clitoris with a pin, but there's no recourse for all the physical pain circumcision left me with and there's no recourse for the discomfort I still suffer even after HRT eliminated the excrutiating pain that had me planning suicide.
lame misogynistic 4chan derogatory terms
There really are people who act as white knights and I know no better term for them outside of perhaps pro-feminist chauvenists or maybe just bigots. They believe that womyn-born-womyn are utterly blameless perpetual victims. That's an attitude that should be held in contempt, because it is at utter odds with gender equality. I mean, I'm a short person (fortunately for me given my other circumstances). No matter whether I have estrogen or testosterone in my system, most women are taller and objectively stronger than me.
Additionally, I've realized that the term "womyn-born-womyn" wasn't quite as well known as I had hoped. That term doesn't come from 4chan (unless somebody there picked up on the same hypocrisies that led me to start using it). It comes straight from the feminist movement. Feminists are extremely threatened by trans women (once one understands feminism is a religion and has nothing to do with gender equality, this is easy to account for), so they invented a term based on the term "womyn" to shame trans women with. It strikes me as a kind of no true Scotsman thing. After all, feminists who refer to themselves as womyn-born-womyn as a way of degrading and marginalizing trans women haven't had their genitals inspected Crocodile Dundee style. How else could anyone possibly know that the speaker herself never had a period or couldn't have children or had any number of other health conditions that would make her any different from this spiritual femaleness that we're supposed to believe is superior because it has a period and it can have children. Hell, if I wanted, after I get bottom surgery or otherwise if I were very careful, I probably could actually invade a feminist group, present myself as a womyn-born-womyn, and pull it off. I'm not a lesbian, so other "womyn-born-womyn" would have no reason to inspect my genitals. That feminists would draw a distinction and slander an entire group of people---trans women---based on the honesty of the individuals in that group by disclosing their past when discussing matters of gender, to me is utterly contemptable.
Then there's womyn-born-womyn who have manly features. You've seen one or two and so have I. I always wonder how often they're accused of being trans by a feminist while using a changing room or bathroom. They're not trans
I replaced nearly all incandescent bulbs in my house with bulbs similar to these from Lowe's the first few months after I bought it a few years ago. They cost a little under $3 per bulb, so you're off by an order of magnitude there.
They turn on instantly, and it wasn't difficult to get used to the color difference. Anymore, the color quality of incandescent looks odd to me.
My only real gripe is that when I started using CFLs, I learned that the equivalency rating to incandescents in power consumption just isn't right. A 13 watt CFL looks a hell of a lot dimmer than a 60 watt incandescent. Maybe it's just me. I've found 18 watt CFLs to be acceptable replacements for 60 watt incandescents.
You have a valid point about dimmers. That would be one application I'd probably keep incandescents for, but I don't have any dimmers in my house. If I were looking to purchase one, I'd seriously consider a CFL dimmer, but I haven't looked into how much more the upfront cost is.
That being said I don't need the federal government to get me to make decisions that will reduce my power bill, and I find it appalling that the federal government apparently has the power to prohibit the production of a product that does no more harm than eat a little over 3x as much power as a competing product.
What governments should be doing if they want to engage in market manipulation is subsidizing installation of solar panels for roofs. That would probably be more productive than forcing everyone who wants to keeps their incandescents to moving to a bulb that they're not happy with. Hell, it'd probably help the economy, too.
Another thing governments can do is investigate what we would need to build new fission power plants and move away from coal and natural gas. Perhaps some kind of anti-NIMBY legislation and some real critical thinking about how we safely build and operate fission reactors without allowing greed and bean counters from creating disasters.
A third alternative is stopping this nonsense with corn ethanol and promoting biodiesel. Petrolchemicals may be the best way to store energy, corn ethanol is not the best petrochemicals to use for that purpose, and maybe plants are the best way to harvest energy from the sun.
We're consuming energy at an increasing rate as a species, and we're only going to need more and more. That isn't a bad thing. The bad thing is being dependent on fossil fuels. Those are only renewable on scales measured in millions of years, which isn't of much utility to human progress.
Forcing people to use a bulb that, judging by comments here, even the thought of using causes visceral rage will probably be no more than a drop in the bucket compared the above.
At the end of the day, it's your power bill. It's not like you're somehow using incandescants and only being charged for the power consumption of CFLs. Hell, I'd bet certain individuals who seem to be physically incapable of turning a light off once they've left a room would see more of a savings from doing that than switching to CFLs.
Except for the problem that being a single parent is 100% an individual choice for individuals born with their reproductive systems on the inside.
Why would somebody choose to have children they can't afford? Perhaps it's because we have so many entitlement systems that having a child guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and perhaps another factor is how much we privilege Mothers.
I should amend that. I'm still not sure if he even wanted sex. He wanted to have a stable mother for his children who could provide. In many ways, he was a very progressive man.
Not only that, but I dated a guy once who wanted to use his EBT benefits to buy me food. There are always ways around the system to buy drugs. I don't think they're in common use, though. The guy I was dating didn't want alcohol or drugs (he wanted sex and oddly wanted me to be a mother for his children---but he couldn't see how a family court would have a field day with a trans woman caring for his children---I hope I did the best I could have for him by refusing).
I'd like to see some real sociological research from the right wing before they presume that anybody using EBT is trading it for drugs. I think it's a canard.
I must be getting old, or something. Personally, I believe that a woman should not have the right to choose if she does not have a career that would enable her to support a child. Or a husband, but that's archaiac. Sure, call me a baby-killer. I believe that we need to force abortions, and if that's too much trauma for a woman, then perhaps women who can't afford birth control shouldn't be having sex.
You're correct. That's not how it is in Michigan. I don't know why, but a lot of unhealthy, processed foods are cheaper to buy than healthy foods.
Personally, I've gone back to a primarily instant ramen diet. It's not healthy, but it keeps the stomach from grumbling. I don't know what I'd do if i had a child who was dependent on my ability to provide healthy foods.
It's easy to get things for pennies that will shut the stomach up, but it's not easy to get green veggies for the same cost. A nice salad is something that I've had to move to my "once in a while" category. A brick of ramen is now my "every day" category.
Its still there, and when paying out money, you don't know if the money was used for crack or crackers.
Most individuals I know who use food stamps are staunchly in support of incarceration of users of non-prescribed drugs and do not use non-prescribed drugs themselves. They do tend to use prescribed drugs such as addictive, opoid-based pain killers and anti-depressants, but those wouldn't be covered by food stamps. They also present themselves as highly suspicious of the evidence that cannabis is more effective than anti-depressants and opoid-based pain killers. I suspect this may be in part an attempt to counter the idea that if left unchecked, they would be supporting a drug habit due to some undefined moral failiing on their part.
While I think there needs to be something better than government handouts of these individuals, I also think the idea that they're using those handouts to support drug habits is unfounded. At least I've never seen compelling evidence that this is the case. Welfare queens do not need illegal drugs with all of the privilege that comes with being a Mother, and I've observed that welfare queens are the least likely to be using non-prescribed drugs.
What I do see is an acute moral failing in the tendency to have another child in order to continue benefits. That is a self-defeating side effect of handout programs targeted at children that must by design also benefit Mothers. It would be good if there were a way to decouple benefits from family size and encourage better family planning.
I'm even prepared to argue that perhaps it's not a human right to reproduce. Perhaps that's something that needs to be earned.
Sorry I came off that way. My thing is that we need to look closely at why individuals who were assigned the female gender at birth choose different careers than individuals with female minds assigned the male gender at birth.
I think what we'll find is that we extend too much privilege to those assigned the female gender at birth, and that privilege is the reason they don't choose careers like HVAC, mechanic, builder, etc. They have no need for those careers in a society that will give them a reasonable lifestyle and provide for a family while working minimum wage if at all. In fact, why should they bother learning those skills at all if having a wild night of sex is all they need to do to start a family and live a middle class lifestyle?
I think that's wrong.
Men and women are different, absolutely. Those differences on their own don't support the theory that women are staying out of CS and STEM because of estrogen or vaginas or something biological
My argument is that it's completely sociological, it's something that no amount of male bashing will fix because assigned males are not perpetuating the problem (or are too afraid of being seen as a misogynist for telling feminism that it's playing a big, big part in this problem), and it's something we can't solve unless we're willing to hold individuals who were assigned the female gender at birth accountable for their choices.
The fact that as a culture we've decided to make Mother a valid career for women while simultaneously destroying the father role and replacing fathers with sugar daddy government seems to explain a lot more. We have a horrendous anti-male bias, and the more I'm forced to live as a man, the more it becomes impossible to ignore.
The term womyn-born-womyn is used by feminists to shame trans women because trans women don't have a period and cannot have children and thus are somehow inferior according to them or a threat. I decided to start using it instead of "cis woman" because I don't see any reason to overlook the fact that feminism values animal functions over the body part between the ears.
At the very least, I need some term to draw a distinction between cis women and trans women to illustrate that the differences in career choice aren't hormonal or neurological.
Imo, if cis women were to take the energy they use to bash all assigned males and to complain that none of them make the choice to enter STEM and CS careers and just make the choice as an individual to enter STEM and CS careers... well... I suppose they wouldn't have a problem, then!
They also wouldn't be living a better lifestyle than working a minimum wage job or not at all and getting government benefits for being a Mother. That's the big difference I'm arguing that pressures cis women to make the choices they make, and I think that's a much bigger difference than any neurological or hormonal differences can account for.
Therefore, if this thing with a lack of cis women in CS and STEM careers really is such a problem (maybe it isn't), then I'm saying that the only way to solve it is to take the option of being a Mother away from cis women and take away their privilege of being presumed victims so they have the exact choices than men and trans women do.
If nobody wants to do that, then whatever. I see no other way to solve the problem, so if taking the option to become a Mother before a cis woman has a steady career is not something that we want to do, this "problem" will continue to exist.
Maybe some day feminists will either choose to be happy with the current cis female hegemony we have or choose a level playing field and not try to have their cake and eat it too.
An eye-opening experience for me was a co-worker I had a while back. She was kind, hard-working, and fair. She wasn't afraid to let me know when I was wrong about something and she didn't fly off the handle when I told her she was wrong about something. Then again, I don't recall many times other than when she was new that I had to let her know her perception of how something worked wasn't accurate.
Unfortunately, she get pulled down by the drama and decided to find another job.
It must be difficult working as a woman. Every other woman sees you as a target, somebody to claw down. The heartbreaking thing is watching this happen to somebody, watching things that are wrong and things that aren't even wrong or are sheer lunacy get thrown around just to smear somebody. Sometimes when it gets really bad I'll see things like official documentation get surreptitiously screwed with. One thing one has to be careful about in a workplace that's dominated by womyn-born-womyn is when one woman asks you to make one change to some software and then another woman asks you to make a very similar but different change.
Hoo boy, I've learned attempting to reconcile the two individuals requesting different things from me is a complete mistake when they're both womyn-born-womyn. I have a feeling that's what got the co-worker I liked working with in over her head. The most frustrating thing is that attempting to bring this to the attention of both individuals invariably is seen as picking sides. Sure, guys do this from time to time (just like having a vagina does not make one above sexism, having a penis does not make one above pettiness), but with a womyn-born-womyn you can count on it. It's not honest, but I've found the best way is to work through each nuance of the request, implement the parts of each that seem most correct, and then just tell both requesters it's all set. I don't know if they ever go back to check if I did what they asked, but the important point to a lot of womyn-born-womyn is that you were asked to do something so you did it without involving them in the details.
It's not important to be objectively correct to womyn-born-womyn. They have other priorities, values, and ways of knowing. There's a lot of what that article calls "Subjective Knowledge: The inner voice" going on. Unfortunately that "way of knowing" simply doesn't lend to success when you're writing a computer program. For many womyn-born-womyn, it's just simply unimportant to move to another "way of knowing," and why should they? What benefit would using "Procedural Knowledge: Separate and connected knowing" or "Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the voices" that incorporate both personal subjective knowledge and external objective knowledge have to a Mother?
That I think is a big problem. I cannot have children, and being trans I also have no family or any other way to influence a child with a reproductive system on the inside to have other aspirations than getting rich in sales or medicine or being Mother. Instead, it seems they continue to be influenced by Mothers and the increasingly womyn-born-womyn dominated elementary school.
The only solution I can think of is that we have to stop giving entitlement benefits to womyn-born-womyn solely on the basis that they got themselves pregnant. Require them to have a career or some other way to support a family before they choose Mother. Unfortunately, I think a lot of womyn-born-womyn would continue to limit themselves to being a Mother, but at least maybe they'd just be a lower-case mother and there might be a father involved instead of wage garnishment.
I look at you cisgendered people, and a lot of times I'm at a loss for many of the ways objectivity goes out the window when it comes to gender. Do I want women "back in the kitchen?" No, but I struggle to see any other outcome as long as all we do is blame anyone and everyone assigned the male ge
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, it's been a while, Green Site!
Why are facebook apologising to all LGBTs and not just Drag Queens?
Ok, there's a great deal of confusion I see here. It's a question of use-case.
Drag queens are performing artists. See Rue Paul or Pandora Boxx, neither of which iirc use HRT or intend to transition to adopting their performing identities as their own 24/7. Companies get FB pages, so why shouldn't their performing identities get FB pages in addition to their own personal pages?
I find it odd that FB is apologizing to drag queens or that they would even target drag queens. (I'd also like to add that one curious thing I read in Whipping Girl is that drag queens are often welcomed into the female restroom, but trans women are shunned from that place.)
In the case of trans men and women, if FB has targeted them (I haven't been), FB is clearly wrong and the apology is justified. Especially in the case of trans women, proceeding with a legal name change is a risk that can land one homeless in a gutter. I'd also like to add that in my personal experience that I'm gendered female by others quite often (just lucky I guess), however changing my real name without being able to go without a job for a year or two would be suicidal. Employers have this little habit of demanding documents that contain one's legal gender. If one's legal gender doesn't match with the gender of one's identity and the gender others assign to one, it's OMG fucking holy shit GTFO.
There's also the complication that a name change is not enough to get those documents to match one's lived gender. My state requires bottom surgery before the documents can be amended, although some clever trans women are able to get the gender on their driver's license changed at the DMV with a little social engineering (others aren't so lucky). Other states make it impossible to change those documents even with bottom surgery.
My friends know me by one name. My employer and clients know me by another. However, FB is not a network for professionals so instead I have a LinkedIn profile with one name and a FB profile I haven't touched in probably two years with another name (just a few more years and it'll be my real name), the one my friends know me as.
Why do drag queens get to have an alias and not straight people who wear straight peoples clothes.
What is straight peoples' clothes, exactly? Do homosexuals wear something different to the office? In my experience, gays and lesbians tend to dress just the same as their heterosexual peers.
Yes, I'm intentionally being obtuse. I hope I addressed the confusion about drag above. This is a question of identity.
I'd also like to give you something to think about. Currently I'm between genders, so it's all wibbly-wobbly. However, should I obtain bottom surgery after going full time as a woman, I will then be a heterosexual woman and indistinguishable from any other straight woman who cannot have children due to whatever medical problem.
Your head will asplode the day the procedure for a barren cisgendered woman to receive a transplanted uterus (I'm too lazy to find the link, but I believe the procedure involved transplanting her mother's uterus into her so that she could have children) is expanded to transgendered women.
If women wear trousers do they get to call themselves cross-dressers and get an alias?
Why would a cisgendered woman want to have a male identity? If this is a case of a trans man or somebody experimenting with presenting a male identity, then I would say it's justified.
I've met a few trans men, and the decision to undergo gender transition is an even bigger hurdle for them than trans women. There is no bottom surgery they can hope for, and they have to be absolutely certain before they expose their bodies to testosterone. Estrogen is easy, and its changes to the body can be hidden or even reversed. That's
It works, that's why. I believe given that [FUCK] BETA is going to happen, that we carefully question the validity of transphobia in greater discussions of gender.
On the one hand, there's Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. The Silence of the Lambs is actually a good movie if you can accept the premise that Buffalo Bill is not actually a trans woman (evidence provided by the character Hannibal).
However, there's the powerful feminist lobby (that's made of cis women and trans women who are grovelling to cis women to have their status as women of some kind at least).
The idea is that trans women, fundamentally, are Buffalo Bill, however that doesn't hold water. But then here come the feminists who are saying that trans women are Buffalo Bill, but perhaps on a metaphysical sense. Nobody knows that to believe because most individuals have a "cis blind spot;" that is, they cannot separate their mental gender from their reproductive gender.
The bane of the American system is freeloaders. The argument is that nobody would hire a trans woman because she would be masturbating all the time. Therefore, a trans woman wouldn not be able to pay for her own cosmetic surgery. Therefore, any arguments that being a trans woman has any basis in physical reality are clearly attempts to create communism. Q. E. D.
All that, and FUCK BETA.
Thank you. I sitll intend to participate in the slashcott next week, however. I believe that there is a political element at Dice that would not mind seeing the wretched hive of men's rights activism and anti-feminism that is Slashdot in mothballs.
Godspeed to those who are working on altslashdot.org. I'm afraid that Code.org and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have given orders from On High that the community that questions feminism at Slashdot must be disbanded.
I've encountered sexism many times in my life before. Usually the argument is that because I was assigned the male gender at birth, despite the physical gender of the wetware between my ears, THEREFORE I am sexist. Q. E. D.
I wished many, many times during my male adolescence thatI had been born female instead. None of those wishes came true. However, if any of them had, I suspect that my school's administration would not have attempted to threaten me with FBI incarceration because I wanted to have a computer club nor would they have attempted to paint me as a plagarist because my code was "too good" for somebody of my age back then.
More assigned males are speaking out against this problem. There is nothing you can do, Dice or Code.org. More and more of us are becoming aware that the feminist narrative is wrong-headed.
As much as I wish more cis women would go into programming, I am not their mistress or their Borg queen. I do not control their actions.
There needs to be a different approach.
Exactly.
I would be happy with [FUCK] BETA if it weren't for the superfluous sidebar that continues down the page to infinity and beyond, limiting space for comments and the various other layout issues. The font size is too big for another thing. Now I know I can hit ctrl+- a few times, but I mean, come on! I want comments to be the full width of my window, and I want to choose whether I want to see all comments when I'm moderating and whether I just want to browse at +1 or +2 depending on my attention span any particular day. In fact, I don't give a FUCK BETA whether a comment was modded up because it was funny, insightful, or interesting or whatever. All I care about is how many moderators thought the comment was noteworthy when I don't care to browse at 0 or -1.
FUCK BETA is like everything I hate about the mobile site brought to a desktop site. I even do "request desktop site" on my phone when browsing Slashdot because the mobile site is worthless. I once tried modding on the mobile site, and not a single mod ever took place! (Still had my mod points when I got home!)
We can argue about whether or not it's too AJAXy or whether JQuery is too onerous. All I want is the Slashdot I know and love for its threaded comment system and moderation/meta-moderation system. More power to Dice if they can realize a functional AJAXy vision of that in my opinion as long as it degrades gracefully for browsers such as elinks (yes, I actually do use elinks on occasion!) and screen readers, but FUCK BETA is not that.
It may not be Slashdot Media employees per se. I think we have to look higher up the food chain.
Just voted it up.
It seems from some of Soulskill's comments that this is a change that's being rammed through from the Higher Ups and the Powers That Be.
It'll be interesting to see how this will play out, and I'm glad to see that there are people already working on building a new "slashdot." I was thinking about doing some hacking on slashcode or coming up with something new entirely this weekend when I'll be more free, but it looks like the initiative is well underway by individuals with better experience at such things than I have.
Something occurred to me today while browsing through all the FUCK BETA comments. I might need to loosen my tinfoil, but who knows. The way things go will be telling. I mean, I like the freaking MS Office ribbon and I'm looking forward to Wayland! FUCKing BETA is just an absolute disaster, but maybe it's intentional.
We know that Dice is a backer of Code.org, and Code.org has been involved in some proposals one might use the euphemism "affirmative action" for, but I prefer to call it what it is: sexism and discrimination based on assigned gender at birth.
This place is one of the few places I know on the internet I can come and participate in discussions about alternate theories about why there are no cis women in programming and whether that's even a problem or not (and get properly downmodded when I cross the line into misogynistic ranting). Personally, I think it is, although others disagree. All of those discussions are completely contradictory to the narrative that Code.org and feminism would like us to believe: that lack of interest from cis women must needs imply some kind of sexism and oppression on the part of all assigned males.
Perhaps the higher ups at Dice think that if they torpedo this site with a horrible excuse for a redesign (it looks like something I would design! and I'll freely admit I'm a terrible graphic artist!), that opinions such as mine and others that run contrary to the feminist narrative that constructs gender as a dichotomy of rapists and victims would lose their soapbox.
Maybe my tinfoil is on too tight, but Dice seems to be demonstrating that in the face of falling revenues from this property, they're willing to have it commit seppuku.
Hopefully I'm wrong and if the boycott next week goes well, Dice will see the light. However, I believe there may be a political element present in Dice that wouldn't mind seeing Slashdot in mothballs.
Replying instead of modding.
Try working in a nearly all female working environment. You will receive sexual harassment and be held accountable for the actions of others because you were assigned the same gender some other person was at birth. You'll hear all the same old jokes that "all men" are the butt of on a near daily basis, and you'll get as tired of them as feminists are of jokes about women drivers.
It took me a long time to learn to not act on the feeling of disgust that overcomes me when a woman is flirting with me and to also communicate to my co-workers that it was not acceptable to expect me to return the flirting.
Sexism and acting as a chauvenist pig are not things that are unique to any particular gender and are not things that being assigned the female gender at birth prevents one from engaging in.
See what I did there?
Yes. You displayed a wonderfully forward-thinking application of the "one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself" version of the golden rule.
The dilemma is that religious fundamentalism and its various manifestations of Puritanism and Biblical literalism tend to work against that verson of the golden rule so we're left with "he who has the gold makes the rules" and "all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent" taking into consideration that money is speech. (The only problem I have with Citizens United is that I believe it's a misapplication of corporate personhood because a corporation is a legal construct and not natural. Therefore, a corporation has none of the examples of natural human rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights as natural rights, only privileges.)
Personally, I would be much more tolerant of religious fundamentalism and Puritanism if the limits of its intrusions into my personal life were a few crappy ice cream joints my money is no good at because I'm trans and some well-meaning witnessers that might walk by and strike up a conversation when I'm mowing the lawn. The US Constitution lays down a powerful framework for attempting to make that so. As is lamented in every NSA/DEA/FBI/Snowden thread, it seems that document doesn't mean as much as it did in that nostalgic yesteryear that never quite existed.
There's always a flux between authoritarianism and libertarianism (small L). The question I suppose is one of how to impede authoritarianism without violating the human rights of individual authoritarians. The problem is that authoritarianism by definition implies top-down enforced conformity, and the only solutions I can think of given the larger sociological picture are different top-down enforced conformities.
can get a gender change with insurance
Ok, I'm going to call you out as a troll.
This has been seriously pissing me the fuck off. Where the hell do I sign up for one of these free Obamacare sex changes?
Is the right just misinformed and free phalloplasty and testosterone HRT are available and they assumed that assigned males would also be given free vaginoplasty and estrogen HRT?
I don't know and don't care. Unless that's the case, you are completely full of shit. At the very least it doesn't excuse this rhetoric that Obamacare is so evil that it's giving out free sex changes! My insurance won't even cover my meds because when estrogen and an anti-androgen are prescribed to an assigned male, it's cosmetic by definition, and no fucking insurance company will cover anything cosmetic.
Dipshits like you who want us all to believe that Obamacare is giving out free sex changes and the fact this bullshit works are telling. Transphobia is a better argument apparently against this train wreck of a law than logic, philosophy, and data about the 9,999 out of 10,000 (or 49,999 out of 50,000 depending on who you listen to) individuals who are not transgendered that are getting fucked by this law.
I'll admit, I was naive two years ago about how insurance companies were going to milk this. I knew it would be a hand-out to insurance companies, but from what I've been hearing, it's ridiculous. Nobody is giving out free sex changes you troll. You can't name one single actual insurance company that gives out free sex changes or any other cosmetic operation. Just die in a fire.
Two more things that will fucking blow your mind. First, not all trans people are liberal socialist commies. I vote Libertarian. I pay with my own cash for my meds, and I see no problem with that. Second, being trans is NOT a sexual fetish that revolves around scamming other people into paying for cosmetic surgery. This will blow your mind because there's a significant number of trans people who don't desire bottom surgery. Disclaimer: I'm not one of them.
I don't see why others should be forced to pay for a routine, daily medicine for me and a cosmetic surgery. I do however want to know why I have to pay for so much shit for so many of you straight folks so you can have your all important grandkids before your own kids are 20 like food stamps, free housing, birth control (that whoopies the Mother forgot to take the entire last month!), and the list goes on.
I give you free child support, give me this mythical free Obamacare sex change, and we'll be happy. No, I think it's better if you and your children starve because you couldn't afford birth control and condoms before having wild sex, and if I pay for my sex change with my own hard-earned cash. Get a damned job and be responsible if you want to have sex instead of having children you can't afford.
This law hasn't affected me personally one bit. It can't actually because as long as my employer even offers a health insurance benefit, I can't qualify for any subsidies. There is no insurance company that will cover a sex change. Well, the only concession I'll make is that perhaps one of those "platinum plans" might. Who knows, maybe. Except riddle me this: why would I get an "insurance" plan for the sole purpose of getting a sex change when the premiums would cost me more in a year than getting a sex change and implants?!
There are no fucking free Obamacare sex changes. You want to know why everything is falling apart in this country? It's idiots like you and the idiots who listen to you who are more concerned about somebody getting a free sex change and then going out and fucking a hot guy than you are about what's going on around you.
Pick a better argument.
I may not be much of anyone, but I'm getting sick of transphobia from the right. So much so that maybe it's time I give up even voting for Libertarians.
Well, that's what you and I think.
You should spend Thanksgiving with my ex-family. A typical Thanksgiving involved a debriefing about how my brother and I would go to hell if I we believed the differences in interpretation that my grandparents believed.
You get folks who believe themselves linguistic Biblical scholars. You get arguments based on whether that appearance of "is" comes from this Aramaic word or was later inserted by some monk by accident.
People get very serious about this and very emotional. I suppose that's what happens when one's been convinved that they'll go to hell and burn forever based on some nit-picky interpretation of the etymology of some word or whatever. Imagine meeting someone who can walk you through an argument that their god is mad at us because we don't practice racially-based slavery any more!
(From what I remember, it has something to do with how caucasians are the lost tribe of Isreal [insert scriptual evidence I never cared enough to memorize here] and because some guy got smashed drunk once in a tent and passed out without any clothes on.)
I don't know what the solution is. By the FSM, the country I live in will be a 3rd world country in 50 years because when the going gets rough, the tough turn to superstition, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Going way off topic here, but it was pretty harmful to me.
It's at best a cosmetic procedure. The troubling thing is that we perform this cosmetic procedure on patients who have no ability to report problems during healing. When something goes wrong, the patient has no way of knowing what's normal or not. I'm not the only person who went through a big chunk of their life thinking that something abnormal and utterly wrong was just a normal part of being a man. Hell, I didn't even know it had been done to me until I had already taken drastic measures to correct the physically painful problem I had that I had thought was a completely normal part of being a man.
And maybe it really is. I don't know. My doctor said that my female mind might have been interpreting something that should have felt pleasurable as intolerable pain. I'm not sure I entirely buy that. Despite the help he provided me, his idea of gender transition was Rocky Horror Picture Show. I've never heard another account like mine from another trans woman, and side effects that aren't cosmetic or don't revolve around sexual pleasure later in life simply aren't studied, so there's no evidence to support or refute his claim.
I feel sorry for my ex-parents. If they had just kept their hands off my dick, they might have had the grandkids they wanted so much. Well, shit happened, and now they'll never have grandkids.
"Mutilation" or not, the ethics are apalling. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the primary reason we do this to infants is to protect them from sexually transmitted diseases. How much sex does the typical infant have?
There's the UTI argument, but that barely holds any water. UTI is a routine condition that infants develop, and female infants have a higher rate of UTI. The way I see it, why can't we just accept that maybe male infants in their intact state just have a little higher rate of incidence of UTI than female infants? Why don't we research cosmetic surgeries to perform on female infants to bring their rate of incidence of UTI down in line with the rate of incidence for circumcised male infants?
If the evidence is to be believed, then it would be more ethical to perform the procedure on a child after 24 months. The foreskin is not fully developed until then, and many side effects such as skin bridges could be completely avoided if the procedure were performed after the foreskin had fully developed. It would also allow a better opportunity to administer local anesthesia, since any kind of anestesia is risky to perform on a newborn.
I don't see any kind of rationality surrounding the issue like what I proposed above. I mean, for FSM's sake, it's a cosmetic procedure at best. Nobody seriously believes that it's more effective at preventing transmission of STDs than a condom! Well, unless you're a victim of this practice in rural Africa. They do, and the results have been tragic. Relying on circumcision to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS/GRID and other STDs has led to widespread infection there. Clearly, circumcision is ineffective at controlling infection, regardless of the percentage point here or there that the AAP reported.
All I can figure is that the point of performing it on newborns is so that the patient never knows that he is missing a body part that is design to protect the glans from external irritation. The patient might protest and advocate against the practice if he were to be aware that before the body part was amputated, there was no pain or irritation, and afterwards there was. The patient might report more complications instead of beliving those complications are simply a part of being a man, and the rate of incidence recorded would probably increase.
Iirc the AAP currently reports that 1/500 circumcisions have complications. How much higher would that be if we preformed this procedure on 4 or 5 year olds the same way we wait until a child is about that age before removing their wisdom teeth? I don't know, and by performing
In Windows, win+R for the run box, win+D to go to the desktop, win+E for my computer. There are a few others, but those are the ones I use most frequently.
In Linux, it's much more useful. I have it set up as a 3rd level shift. I hacked together an XKB map that gives me greek letters; punctuation such as em and en dashes, typographical quotes, proper ellipsis, less than/greater than or equal to, etc; and arrows plus times and divide on my numpad. Combined with remapping capslock to the compose key, it makes for a versatile keyboard layout.
If one wanted, one could also map say some of the F keys (F1-F12) to things like volume up/down, play next track, pause, calculator, run, etc with 3rd level shift, but I haven't bothered.
On the topic of keyboards themselves, I'm loving my Unicomp black buckling spring USB keyboard. The trackball is wonky, though, and as far as I can tell the extra two mouse buttons are mystery buttons that do nothing (no middle click!), so I'd recommend skipping that to anyone who wants a decent 5 lb USB klacker. The thing in indestructable, and the tactile feedback from the buckling springs makes it a pleasure to type on, improving both speed and accuracy.
Thanks for the reply.
No other choice but to go back in the kitchen... that women would rather pole-dance than pursue a more dignified career because money is the only thing important to them... Your bias is showing.
Where can I meet this mythical womyn-born-womyn? I've observed what I've observed first-hand.
Hell, I've had girls (plural! multiple!) that my ex-boyfriend have dated that have offered to cook and clean for me if I'd let them move in! Every time I've said hell no, just move in if that's what you want to do. These womyn-born-womyn need higher aspirations. One who wanted to be an engineer before she learned she could dance on a pole and make good money just like her own Mother (I do have respect for the athleticism involved, but little else) I tried as best I could to tell to forget the cooking and cleaning and focus on taking classes. Well, last I heard about her, she had become a Mother, sights still set on retirement around 35. How can I blame her? Maybe I'd do the same things if I had been born with my reproductive system on the inside and had the opportunities and privileges that came with that.
Hell, I'd be happy if I even knew what life with intact genitals was like. You can't tell me womyn-born-womyn aren't privileged when it's illegal and gets us jerking our knees like there's no tomorrow at the suggestion of even poking a clitoris with a pin, but there's no recourse for all the physical pain circumcision left me with and there's no recourse for the discomfort I still suffer even after HRT eliminated the excrutiating pain that had me planning suicide.
lame misogynistic 4chan derogatory terms
There really are people who act as white knights and I know no better term for them outside of perhaps pro-feminist chauvenists or maybe just bigots. They believe that womyn-born-womyn are utterly blameless perpetual victims. That's an attitude that should be held in contempt, because it is at utter odds with gender equality. I mean, I'm a short person (fortunately for me given my other circumstances). No matter whether I have estrogen or testosterone in my system, most women are taller and objectively stronger than me.
Additionally, I've realized that the term "womyn-born-womyn" wasn't quite as well known as I had hoped. That term doesn't come from 4chan (unless somebody there picked up on the same hypocrisies that led me to start using it). It comes straight from the feminist movement. Feminists are extremely threatened by trans women (once one understands feminism is a religion and has nothing to do with gender equality, this is easy to account for), so they invented a term based on the term "womyn" to shame trans women with. It strikes me as a kind of no true Scotsman thing. After all, feminists who refer to themselves as womyn-born-womyn as a way of degrading and marginalizing trans women haven't had their genitals inspected Crocodile Dundee style. How else could anyone possibly know that the speaker herself never had a period or couldn't have children or had any number of other health conditions that would make her any different from this spiritual femaleness that we're supposed to believe is superior because it has a period and it can have children. Hell, if I wanted, after I get bottom surgery or otherwise if I were very careful, I probably could actually invade a feminist group, present myself as a womyn-born-womyn, and pull it off. I'm not a lesbian, so other "womyn-born-womyn" would have no reason to inspect my genitals. That feminists would draw a distinction and slander an entire group of people---trans women---based on the honesty of the individuals in that group by disclosing their past when discussing matters of gender, to me is utterly contemptable.
Then there's womyn-born-womyn who have manly features. You've seen one or two and so have I. I always wonder how often they're accused of being trans by a feminist while using a changing room or bathroom. They're not trans
I replaced nearly all incandescent bulbs in my house with bulbs similar to these from Lowe's the first few months after I bought it a few years ago. They cost a little under $3 per bulb, so you're off by an order of magnitude there.
They turn on instantly, and it wasn't difficult to get used to the color difference. Anymore, the color quality of incandescent looks odd to me.
My only real gripe is that when I started using CFLs, I learned that the equivalency rating to incandescents in power consumption just isn't right. A 13 watt CFL looks a hell of a lot dimmer than a 60 watt incandescent. Maybe it's just me. I've found 18 watt CFLs to be acceptable replacements for 60 watt incandescents.
You have a valid point about dimmers. That would be one application I'd probably keep incandescents for, but I don't have any dimmers in my house. If I were looking to purchase one, I'd seriously consider a CFL dimmer, but I haven't looked into how much more the upfront cost is.
That being said I don't need the federal government to get me to make decisions that will reduce my power bill, and I find it appalling that the federal government apparently has the power to prohibit the production of a product that does no more harm than eat a little over 3x as much power as a competing product.
What governments should be doing if they want to engage in market manipulation is subsidizing installation of solar panels for roofs. That would probably be more productive than forcing everyone who wants to keeps their incandescents to moving to a bulb that they're not happy with. Hell, it'd probably help the economy, too.
Another thing governments can do is investigate what we would need to build new fission power plants and move away from coal and natural gas. Perhaps some kind of anti-NIMBY legislation and some real critical thinking about how we safely build and operate fission reactors without allowing greed and bean counters from creating disasters.
A third alternative is stopping this nonsense with corn ethanol and promoting biodiesel. Petrolchemicals may be the best way to store energy, corn ethanol is not the best petrochemicals to use for that purpose, and maybe plants are the best way to harvest energy from the sun.
We're consuming energy at an increasing rate as a species, and we're only going to need more and more. That isn't a bad thing. The bad thing is being dependent on fossil fuels. Those are only renewable on scales measured in millions of years, which isn't of much utility to human progress.
Forcing people to use a bulb that, judging by comments here, even the thought of using causes visceral rage will probably be no more than a drop in the bucket compared the above.
At the end of the day, it's your power bill. It's not like you're somehow using incandescants and only being charged for the power consumption of CFLs. Hell, I'd bet certain individuals who seem to be physically incapable of turning a light off once they've left a room would see more of a savings from doing that than switching to CFLs.
Except for the problem that being a single parent is 100% an individual choice for individuals born with their reproductive systems on the inside.
Why would somebody choose to have children they can't afford? Perhaps it's because we have so many entitlement systems that having a child guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and perhaps another factor is how much we privilege Mothers.
I should amend that. I'm still not sure if he even wanted sex. He wanted to have a stable mother for his children who could provide. In many ways, he was a very progressive man.
Not only that, but I dated a guy once who wanted to use his EBT benefits to buy me food. There are always ways around the system to buy drugs. I don't think they're in common use, though. The guy I was dating didn't want alcohol or drugs (he wanted sex and oddly wanted me to be a mother for his children---but he couldn't see how a family court would have a field day with a trans woman caring for his children---I hope I did the best I could have for him by refusing). I'd like to see some real sociological research from the right wing before they presume that anybody using EBT is trading it for drugs. I think it's a canard.
This, children, is what's known as the tragedy of the commons. Unfortunately, Americans see welfare as a lifestyle, not a tool.
I must be getting old, or something. Personally, I believe that a woman should not have the right to choose if she does not have a career that would enable her to support a child. Or a husband, but that's archaiac. Sure, call me a baby-killer. I believe that we need to force abortions, and if that's too much trauma for a woman, then perhaps women who can't afford birth control shouldn't be having sex.
You're correct. That's not how it is in Michigan. I don't know why, but a lot of unhealthy, processed foods are cheaper to buy than healthy foods.
Personally, I've gone back to a primarily instant ramen diet. It's not healthy, but it keeps the stomach from grumbling. I don't know what I'd do if i had a child who was dependent on my ability to provide healthy foods.
It's easy to get things for pennies that will shut the stomach up, but it's not easy to get green veggies for the same cost. A nice salad is something that I've had to move to my "once in a while" category. A brick of ramen is now my "every day" category.
Its still there, and when paying out money, you don't know if the money was used for crack or crackers.
Most individuals I know who use food stamps are staunchly in support of incarceration of users of non-prescribed drugs and do not use non-prescribed drugs themselves. They do tend to use prescribed drugs such as addictive, opoid-based pain killers and anti-depressants, but those wouldn't be covered by food stamps. They also present themselves as highly suspicious of the evidence that cannabis is more effective than anti-depressants and opoid-based pain killers. I suspect this may be in part an attempt to counter the idea that if left unchecked, they would be supporting a drug habit due to some undefined moral failiing on their part.
While I think there needs to be something better than government handouts of these individuals, I also think the idea that they're using those handouts to support drug habits is unfounded. At least I've never seen compelling evidence that this is the case. Welfare queens do not need illegal drugs with all of the privilege that comes with being a Mother, and I've observed that welfare queens are the least likely to be using non-prescribed drugs.
What I do see is an acute moral failing in the tendency to have another child in order to continue benefits. That is a self-defeating side effect of handout programs targeted at children that must by design also benefit Mothers. It would be good if there were a way to decouple benefits from family size and encourage better family planning.
I'm even prepared to argue that perhaps it's not a human right to reproduce. Perhaps that's something that needs to be earned.
Sorry I came off that way. My thing is that we need to look closely at why individuals who were assigned the female gender at birth choose different careers than individuals with female minds assigned the male gender at birth.
I think what we'll find is that we extend too much privilege to those assigned the female gender at birth, and that privilege is the reason they don't choose careers like HVAC, mechanic, builder, etc. They have no need for those careers in a society that will give them a reasonable lifestyle and provide for a family while working minimum wage if at all. In fact, why should they bother learning those skills at all if having a wild night of sex is all they need to do to start a family and live a middle class lifestyle?
I think that's wrong.
Men and women are different, absolutely. Those differences on their own don't support the theory that women are staying out of CS and STEM because of estrogen or vaginas or something biological
My argument is that it's completely sociological, it's something that no amount of male bashing will fix because assigned males are not perpetuating the problem (or are too afraid of being seen as a misogynist for telling feminism that it's playing a big, big part in this problem), and it's something we can't solve unless we're willing to hold individuals who were assigned the female gender at birth accountable for their choices.
The fact that as a culture we've decided to make Mother a valid career for women while simultaneously destroying the father role and replacing fathers with sugar daddy government seems to explain a lot more. We have a horrendous anti-male bias, and the more I'm forced to live as a man, the more it becomes impossible to ignore.
The term womyn-born-womyn is used by feminists to shame trans women because trans women don't have a period and cannot have children and thus are somehow inferior according to them or a threat. I decided to start using it instead of "cis woman" because I don't see any reason to overlook the fact that feminism values animal functions over the body part between the ears.
At the very least, I need some term to draw a distinction between cis women and trans women to illustrate that the differences in career choice aren't hormonal or neurological.
Imo, if cis women were to take the energy they use to bash all assigned males and to complain that none of them make the choice to enter STEM and CS careers and just make the choice as an individual to enter STEM and CS careers... well... I suppose they wouldn't have a problem, then!
They also wouldn't be living a better lifestyle than working a minimum wage job or not at all and getting government benefits for being a Mother. That's the big difference I'm arguing that pressures cis women to make the choices they make, and I think that's a much bigger difference than any neurological or hormonal differences can account for.
Therefore, if this thing with a lack of cis women in CS and STEM careers really is such a problem (maybe it isn't), then I'm saying that the only way to solve it is to take the option of being a Mother away from cis women and take away their privilege of being presumed victims so they have the exact choices than men and trans women do.
If nobody wants to do that, then whatever. I see no other way to solve the problem, so if taking the option to become a Mother before a cis woman has a steady career is not something that we want to do, this "problem" will continue to exist.
Maybe some day feminists will either choose to be happy with the current cis female hegemony we have or choose a level playing field and not try to have their cake and eat it too.
Yes. I am.
Too bad it's not untrue.
An eye-opening experience for me was a co-worker I had a while back. She was kind, hard-working, and fair. She wasn't afraid to let me know when I was wrong about something and she didn't fly off the handle when I told her she was wrong about something. Then again, I don't recall many times other than when she was new that I had to let her know her perception of how something worked wasn't accurate.
Unfortunately, she get pulled down by the drama and decided to find another job.
It must be difficult working as a woman. Every other woman sees you as a target, somebody to claw down. The heartbreaking thing is watching this happen to somebody, watching things that are wrong and things that aren't even wrong or are sheer lunacy get thrown around just to smear somebody. Sometimes when it gets really bad I'll see things like official documentation get surreptitiously screwed with. One thing one has to be careful about in a workplace that's dominated by womyn-born-womyn is when one woman asks you to make one change to some software and then another woman asks you to make a very similar but different change.
Hoo boy, I've learned attempting to reconcile the two individuals requesting different things from me is a complete mistake when they're both womyn-born-womyn. I have a feeling that's what got the co-worker I liked working with in over her head. The most frustrating thing is that attempting to bring this to the attention of both individuals invariably is seen as picking sides. Sure, guys do this from time to time (just like having a vagina does not make one above sexism, having a penis does not make one above pettiness), but with a womyn-born-womyn you can count on it. It's not honest, but I've found the best way is to work through each nuance of the request, implement the parts of each that seem most correct, and then just tell both requesters it's all set. I don't know if they ever go back to check if I did what they asked, but the important point to a lot of womyn-born-womyn is that you were asked to do something so you did it without involving them in the details.
It's not important to be objectively correct to womyn-born-womyn. They have other priorities, values, and ways of knowing. There's a lot of what that article calls "Subjective Knowledge: The inner voice" going on. Unfortunately that "way of knowing" simply doesn't lend to success when you're writing a computer program. For many womyn-born-womyn, it's just simply unimportant to move to another "way of knowing," and why should they? What benefit would using "Procedural Knowledge: Separate and connected knowing" or "Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the voices" that incorporate both personal subjective knowledge and external objective knowledge have to a Mother?
That I think is a big problem. I cannot have children, and being trans I also have no family or any other way to influence a child with a reproductive system on the inside to have other aspirations than getting rich in sales or medicine or being Mother. Instead, it seems they continue to be influenced by Mothers and the increasingly womyn-born-womyn dominated elementary school.
The only solution I can think of is that we have to stop giving entitlement benefits to womyn-born-womyn solely on the basis that they got themselves pregnant. Require them to have a career or some other way to support a family before they choose Mother. Unfortunately, I think a lot of womyn-born-womyn would continue to limit themselves to being a Mother, but at least maybe they'd just be a lower-case mother and there might be a father involved instead of wage garnishment.
I look at you cisgendered people, and a lot of times I'm at a loss for many of the ways objectivity goes out the window when it comes to gender. Do I want women "back in the kitchen?" No, but I struggle to see any other outcome as long as all we do is blame anyone and everyone assigned the male ge