The average salary in Malta is under $25k. And with plenty of folks making far less than that. You’re talking about half a decade’s income for the average person. And that’s before you get into more coercive scenarios, like someone being deep in debt, about to lose their home, etc. Imagine you had been out of work awhile and were about to lose your home. The mortgage is past due and the bank calls every day. Meanwhile, you’re working odd jobs just to keep your three kids fed, while you skip meals. Someone comes to you and offers you a deal. They’ll give you enough money to pay your mortgage off in full. In exchange, you have to kill someone. (In this scenario, let’s assume your ex-military or somehow else have the necessary skills.) They even give you a long spiel about how awful the target is, and how they actually deserve it. Hell, this is an act of good, an act of vigilante justice, they tell you!

Would you take that deal?

I hope I wouldn’t. But I can imagine why people would.

If Jesus were to come back today, he would be born via a miraculous pregnancy to a Central American transgender woman living in an ICE detention facility.

I’m hoping for a good old-fashioned Pope/Anti-Pope fight. That’s where two men both claim the thrown of St. Peter at the same time, usually each with their own power base. And of course, the first thing they each do is excommunicate each other!

I stopped participating on reddit awhile back, but I still lurk on some trans subreddits. I always use old.reddit. It’s the only way to use reddit that doesn’t feel like using a another Fisher Price infantilizing app. If I can’t access old.reddit, I’ll stop lurking even on the subreddits I lurk on.

Show me a country that has engaged in cultural extermination that doesn’t couch it in terms of unity. That’s literally the core of fascism. You need one nation. One party. One race. One identity. That’s the definition of fascism.

Removed by mod

It’s just easier and more harmonic if everyone pulls to the same direction.

This puts the cart before the horse. Nations are supposed to serve the needs of people. People are not supposed to serve the needs of a nation. If your nation needs to go to the extreme lengths of forced ethnic integration to keep a region from breaking free from your country, maybe that region simply doesn’t belong in your country and never should have been a part of it. That’s not harmonizing a nation; that’s conquest and ethnic cleansing.

Sure, they can lobby state legislatures to legalize balcony solar. Yet if I try to go around and convince those legislatures to legalize balcony fission, they look at me like I’m crazy! 😀

I really disagree about fusion. It will have nearly zero impact on the electricity and power market. It’s dead on arrival economically. There’s no way a fusion plant is going to be cheaper than a fission plant. And it’s already far cheaper to provide base load power with solar and batteries than it is to do so via fission. And this is the state today. Imagine how cheap these will be when commercial fusion finally happens. Realistically, even for constant 24/7 power output, fusion will probably cost 3-5x what solar does. Fusion plants would have a smaller physical footprint, but no but no one really cares about that. There’s no shortage of space to put panels.

Fusion will have a lot of utility in the very far future. As humanity ventures ever further outward, it will be invaluable for true deep space colonization. Fusion provides the power necessary to expand to the Outer Solar System and beyond. 500 years from now, fusion will be a really big deal to folks trying to make it out there. Fusion allows you to turn any random ice ball in the Kuiper belt into a colony capable of supporting millions. And it would probably be a necessary prerequisite for interstellar colonization.

But for anyone living closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt, fusion will be of little use beyond perhaps niche isotope synthesis or as a neutron source.

Israel is an American colony. Traditionally, colonial masters are responsible for the actions of their possessions.

Israel is not really an independent country from the US. Israel is just an unofficial American territory.

Bunny doesn’t identify as a rabbit. Bun is non-binary and the pronouns are bun/bunny. Not a name. We use it like they/them and ze/zem. And not a child, a teenager

This is nonsense. And, as I said, a child.

Y’all got issues beyond being trans. And whatever it is, it has nothing to do with trans people or our struggles. I leave you to your demons.

Sorry, better bullies than you have tried.

That’s not a pronoun though, that’s a name. No one can know what social role this person is aiming for or how they want to be treated, as rabbits do not exist as free people in human society.

“I identify as a rabbit, treat me like a rabbit.”

“What, do you want me to lock you in a cage and raise you as a pet or source of meat and fur?”

If a child wants to play make believe, and the adults around them want to humor them, that’s fine. But we’re talking about adults in the real world here.

Again, the only way anyone knows how to treat this person is by learning their very specific “pronoun.” And if a word cannot form as a useful shorthand, it by definition isn’t a pronoun. This person doesn’t have “bun” as their pronoun. That’s just their nickname.

And what’s really odd in these conversations is that this has fuck all to do with trans people. Going by a quirky nickname you just made up doesn’t make you trans or anything other than a person with a quirky nickname.

If you have to explain it, it’s not a pronoun. If it has nothing to do with gender, it’s certainly not a pronoun. And gender isn’t just vibes. It has to have some actual relation to human sexuality and gender roles. Do you think your gender is a cat? I’m sorry, but you’re real gender is apparently clown. The purpose of pronouns is traditionally to indicate male and female. And pronouns should stick to that axis, though nonbinary folks fit neatly into that.

To me, a pronoun is something that:

1. Is a useful and practical shorthand. (A pronoun is not a nickname.)
2. Maps to a real gender that has some relationship to male, female, man, woman. (Could be various forms of nonbinary that say you identify between male and female, as neither male nor female, etc. But it has to actually have some connection to male/female.)

I just fundamentally reject the idea that the definitions of “gender” and “pronouns” are so meaningless that you’re basically using the word “gender” interchangeably with the word “vibe.” We have so many words to describe “bunself” without muddying the word pronoun. You could just say some has a rabbit-like personality or character. There’s no need for cis people to appropriate trans terminology for things that have nothing to do with trans issues or the gender spectrum.

I mean, I got to say, I think I can actually get behind this one. A broken clock is right twice a day. I don’t support the whole “cut the populace off from the internet” thing. But a population-wide smart phone ban specifically? That’s something I could actually get behind.

Sorry you have to deal with that clown. I follow your approach. If someone in my circles starts demanding that people respect their “pronoun” that is something completely ridiculous they invented from whole cloth? I don’t misgender them. I don’t call them by something other than what they ask. I just refuse to engage with or associate with people like that at all. I’ll just cut off contact. My response is just, “I’m not going to try and change you. You have your own issues unrelated to being trans, and you clearly don’t want help. I leave you to your demons.”

Performative victimhood helps no one. Your comically expansive definition of bigotry disgraces the memory of the trans people killed through acts of actual bigotry. You’ve just been pavloved into believing you can win any argument by shouting “bigot!” loudly enough. Frankly, I’m done with that shit. I have no patience for this kind of clown behavior among trans folks. I fundamentally reject your bullying.

They do. There’s a power-tripping mod for most of the big trans communities that loves to ban people for silly ideological reasons.

Look at this ridiculous shit. What did I do to deserve this? Did I go onto a trans community and start throwing around slurs? No! I would never do that. I’m trans myself. I’m active and help run actual trans support groups in the real world. No, I got mass banned for “gatekeeping” for completely innocuous posts like this:

Or another one here:

The person that moderates these communities is completely out of touch. If any discussion organically arises about the nature of pronouns or the bounds of who counts as trans arise, this out of control mod mass bans anyone that disagrees with her ideology.

Note, I didn’t go around harassing people who were using neo-pronouns. (Pronouns other than she/he/they.) It was simply an open discussion that organically developed. I personally find some neo-pronouns pretty ridiculous. Often they don’t even meet the definition of a pronoun. But I wasn’t forcing that belief on anyone or shoe-horning it in random discussions. I wasn’t even addressing anyone who use them. But I went against the party line, so it was time for a purge. These comments had very high upvote/downvote ratios, with greater than 90% of people upvoting rather than downvoting. So her views are clearly extreme even within the Lemmy trans community.

And worst, this power-tripping woman banned me from a bunch of other communities, all justified by the same childish “gatekeeping” bullshit. What’s worse is that it’s so sudden. Like, it’s not like they have a list of topics that are banned from discussion. The mods will allow discussions of these topics and then ban people who give answers they don’t like. If your answer to “what does it mean to be trans” is anything short of “it’s completely meaningless and has literally no real definition anymore,” then you’ll be banned for “gatekeeping.”

Yeah, I would say, “you have to hand it to him,” but you don’t get points for selecting the least-bad option for a situation you are entirely responsible for.

“We’ve filled the strait with a hundred thousands autonomous smart drones programmed to blow up any vessel they see. However, we’ll rent you this encrypted transponder that will keep the drones away. We’re not charging a toll. We’re just offering our anti-drone services for a reasonable fee. We won’t force you to pay it, you’re perfectly free to try your luck in the Strait.”