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“No, you’re wrong, and should suffer for it”.
How very Abrahamic of you. Indeed if you didn’t continually and loudly bleat your politics from talk like this I’d assume you were a fundamentalist Christian.
“No, you’re wrong, and should suffer for it”.
How very Abrahamic of you. Indeed if you didn’t continually and loudly bleat your politics from talk like this I’d assume you were a fundamentalist Christian.
Liberals decisions are based on marginal benefit and rational decision making based on a combination of large and small scale unbiased data and historical outcomes.
[citation needed]
Liberals have their own idiotic biases and foolishness. Biases and foolishness that have led to the “disappearing” of many LGBTQ+ activists in China, incidentally, which is why so many such groups in China are distancing themselves from their western counterparts.
WTF is “ammenmend” supposed to communicate? I have genuinely no idea what you’re on about.
This would be your straw leftist, I assume? 'Cause I’ve never seen a single leftist anywhere who says that.
I find it equal parts of entertaining and disturbing that you’re trying to drum up hatred just so you can feel less lonely. Here’s a genuine question, but don’t answer it. Well, don’t answer it to me (or anybody else here). Answer it for yourself.
Why are you so fucking dead set on hatred?
The answer to that question is for you and your therapist to work out. (If you don’t have a therapist FUCKING GET ONE STAT!)
Say “I’ve never read history” without, you know, saying it.
To amplify from the other side of the world:
善為士者,不武;善戰者,不怒;善勝敵者,不與;善用人者,為之下。是謂不爭之德,是謂用人之力,是謂配天古之極。 —老子
A good scholar is not a warrior; A good fighter is not angry; Those who are good at defeating enemies will not compete with them; Those who make good use of people are inferior. It is called the virtue of not competing, the power of using people, and the extreme of matching heaven and ancient times. —Laozi
Enough to block the instance now. (I’m so glad Lemmy provides that to users now!)
Personally I’ll embrace the technology by putting tire puncturing strips all over the place.
OK, so I did a bit of research (as is my obsessive self’s wont) and can answer for “gender”.
Our modern understanding of sexual matters is far more subtle and nuanced than the old-fashioned notions most of us grew up with¹. What follows is a simplified take on things. The reality is more complicated and has many more axes than I’m highlighting.
At the lay level you can think of there being three axes of sex-related issues:
Gender is in most cases oriented to match your sex (cisgender) and in opposition to your orientation (heterosexual). Because, however, the body, and various parts of the brain grow at different times, it’s possible for these three axes to differ due to hormonal differences in the mother’s body (external factors) or to activated genetic influences (a mix of external and internal factors). If one of these factors activates at one point in development, the part of the brain that regulates sexual desire flips the switch and your orientation is different². If one of them activates at another point in development, the part of the brain that models your internal view of your sex flips and you now have that thing called “gender dysphoria”.
And after literally centuries of trying to “fix” people with gender dysphoria through abuse, through religious counselling (c.f. “abuse”), and through therapy, it’s pretty much well-established that gender dysphoria has no talking (nor abusive) “solution”. Thus the kindest thing to do is to let people whose gender doesn’t match their physical sex to present the gender they feel themselves to be by behaviour, manner of dress, and ultimately, as far as is practical, physically. Anything else is abusive and cruel.
Note, again, I stress this is the very simplified model, and it’s filtered through my inexpert, non-practitioner understanding of things. (I’m open to correction by those with actual expertise in the field, obviously!) As such it doesn’t address the huge forest of orientations (which I alluded to in the footnote below), it doesn’t address intersex issues, and it doesn’t address gender issues like the “non-binary”. And indeed I don’t, to cite Orwell again, “bellyfeel” gender dysphoria, enbies, aces, etc. … but in the end it doesn’t fucking matter. There is literally zero impact on me if someone wants to call themselves “non-binary” or “trans” or “ace” or whatever. So even if I don’t “get” it, what I do “get” is that these people are profoundly unhappy in the circumstances they find themselves in and if transitioning helps them, all the fucking power in the world to them!
¹ Why “most of us”? Because there are cultures out there that have more nuanced models than the strict binary. Look up terms like “hijra” for the Indian sub-continent, the role of eunuchs, M→F gender-swapping actors, and F→M cross-dressing characters in heroic lore in ancient China, the กะเทย/kathoey of Thailand, the whole allure of “fox spirits” all over the east Asian sphere, the “two-spirit” peoples of North American natives, etc.
² For instance that part of my brain flipped me to a “2” on the old-timey Kinsey scale (nominally heterosexual), though on more modern classifications that the kiddies would use I’d be a het-leaning pansexual.
I need to work out a quad-lingual joke sometime: English, German, French, and Mandarin.
This is not even slightly true.
Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.
There is literally nothing “natural” about base 10. Indeed it’s not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.
(Western) base-10 needs two hands. Base-12 is one-handed. (There’s a base-10 system used in China that’s one-handed, mind. Or, rather, it’s one-handed until you reach 10.)
Also some maths operations can be done fairly easily (like division) with the base-12 finger-counting system.
Binary finger counting is a pain in the ass, though. Too complicated for most people.
There are a great number of ways you can count on fingers. You can easily support base 4, base 5, base 8, base 10, base 12, base 16, base 19, and even higher (144, say) with finger counting. There’s nothing particularly “natural” about 10.
I hate you. So much.
I think anything that I could say on this subject has already been said with far greater clarity by Orwell. Should that not be enough, or if you’d like it worded in a more punchy way, Northrop Frye has got you covered.
All these high-quality puns in response are leaving me kinda blue.
“Liberal” means “the left” almost exclusively in North America (specifically the USA and Canada). In most of the world the term “liberal” means what Americans call “libertarians” (read: capitalist assholes).