adderaline

India was Britain’s favourite colony and it’s clear. All of North and South America was colonised and it’s clear, as are Australia and new Zealand. Not to mention all the countries that colonised them.

when did these countries become “clear”? do you know? it wasn’t a billion years ago, lemme tell you that, and it isn’t all sunshine and roses in the modern day. as it happens, there are quite a few queer people from all the places you’ve mentioned who would probably disagree with this perspective, myself included. queer rights and queer liberation is an ongoing process in all the places you’ve mentioned. we’ve not reached some post-homophobic utopia by any means.

If you think that ex colonies aren’t capable of changing, then you are a racist, plain and simple.

right. so you don’t want people to think about the ways that colonialism impacts the cultures of the colonized people (that’s racist, apparently), and just straight up deny the fact that a great deal of these laws are, as written, directly sourced from British colonial law codes, to support your particular interpretation of Islamic depravity. many of the states on the list are majority christian, especially the ones in Africa, but its whatever. don’t let nuance get in the way of your Islamophobia.

Religion is the problem and it always has been. Some religions are worse than others. The abrahamic religions are particularly bad. Of those islam is by far the most draconian. Seriously pull up the map.

yeah, right, a single image of a map “proves” your extremely common right wing opinion beyond refutation. and the whole “religion is the problem” bullshit. as if the ills of the human condition can be reduced to a single solitary source. i get it, you like Sam Harris (or maybe Richard Dawkins, considering your spelling). you’re an Atheist. but the world is more complicated than that, and injecting your own biases about people that aren’t like you does nothing for nobody. religion didn’t happen in a vacuum. it’s not some outside force that warps us into a state of conflict and subjugation. religion is just culture, power, and hegemony. it was made by humanity’s stupid monkey brains, and is shaped around the biases inherent to our cognition. we’d find a way to hate each other without it.

the world won’t automatically be better by its absence, and rhetoric pushing Islam as somehow quantitatively worse than others is just fuckin’ bigotry. that’s why people give you shit about this. you aren’t some free thinker by thinking Muslims are icky, you’re just reproducing dominant cultural narratives about the backwardness of people you don’t know, narratives built by Christian nations to justify conflict and conquest, just as modern Muslim nations have identified themselves in contrast to secularized formerly Christian nations.

in short, learn more about the world, and stop relying on the baked in biases we all inherit from our culture to decide which quarter of the world population has the bad evil religion. its not a good look.

British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago

lol. lmao, even. British homophobia has not ended. Britain is a modern hotbed for anti-queer bullshit. the consequences and effects of British colonial rule have not magically been wiped clean. we aren’t “blaming dead people”, we’re talking about the impact that colonial and imperial oppression had on the cultures of oppressed peoples. the structure and politics of the British Empire are inextricably linked to the world we live in today, and attributing modern queerphobia to the oppressive and cruel politics of the one of the largest imperial powers the world has ever seen, who directly imposed anti-queer laws onto the people they oppressed, is not about “fixing” things. its about recognizing how the past has shaped our present.

its funny, i think, how willing Islamophobes are to bring up the present anti-queer stances of religious nation-states as reflecting upon the religion of Islam itself, with all its 2 billion adherents spread over every continent and nation in the world, while failing to recognize the role of the Christian church in both the historical and modern anti-queerness of the British empire and the modern european state. somehow, you see clearly the monstrous power of religious authority in one hand, and dismiss it in the other. you propose anti-queerness as an essential quality of Islam, and seperate it from the essential qualities of european nation-states.

somehow, Muslim homophobia is special in its qualities, rather than a modern trait that arose in the same period of the 19th century under which the Christian hegemony was exported throughout the world by the British empire and its contemporaries. somehow, it is always the case that the religion that is foreign to you is the true danger, what should be the focus of our attention.

it is important to “oppose” whatever’s present now. but Islamophobes diagnosis for whats “present now” so often fails to acknowledge the immense influence and power that european religious institutions have had and continue to have over the anti-queer policy of their former colonial projects (like Uganda, for example), and their prescription for what “opposition” looks like happens to look a lot like religious and racial discrimination. funny how that works. singling out Islam as the true danger to queer people does nothing to help queer people. in fact, the mechanism by which Islamophobes identify a whole fourth of the world’s population as uniquely dangerous, violent, and backwards is exactly the same mechanism by which queer people are identified as perverse, deviant, and predatory. prejudice.

the acronym LGBTQ+ arose out of solidarity. people with different experiences, extremely different in some cases, coming together because they recognized that their struggle was alike. that they were together subjected to the violence of prejudice and discrimination, and that they were stronger together than alone. that is what needs opposing in the modern day. the violence of states. the violence of hegemony, dictating to us what we ought to be and what we cannot be, wherever it is found. not a diverse religious tradition that contains the same number of queer people as any other population of humans.

or maybe you don’t have some especially well considered, enlightened perspective, and people here believe the things they do for reasons that align with their life experience and education, just as with yourself. taking a centrist stance is not some objectively superior position from which to view politics. you aren’t endowed with special insight for choosing the midpoint between ideologies that contradict each other.

its not completely wrong. getting cosmetic veneers is a pretty common practice in hollywood. they don’t cause your teeth to decay or whatever, but lots of celebs have them.

Open models is the way to battle that.

This is something I think needs to be interrogated. None of these models, even the supposedly open ones are actually “open” or even currently “openable”. We can know the exact weights for every single parameter, the code used to construct it, and the data used to train it, and that information gives us basically no insight into its behavior. We simply don’t have the tools to actually “read” a machine learning model in the way you would an open source program, the tech produces black boxes as a consequence of its structure. We can learn about how they work, for sure, but the corps making these things aren’t that far ahead of the public when it comes to understanding what they’re doing or how to change their behavior.

link! i didn’t know Internet Archive had a merch store.

plenty of people?

this isn’t necessarily true. patterns in data aren’t by nature proof of an underlying system of logic. if you run the line-fitting machine on any kind of data, its going to output a line. considering just how much data is encoded into these transformers, i don’t think we can conclusively say that it has a underlying conception of how language works, much less an understanding of the concepts that language represents. it could really just be using the vast quantities of data it has to output approximately correct statements. there’s absolutely structure there, but it doesn’t have to have the kind of structured understanding humans have about language to produce language, in the same way a less sophisticated machine learning model doesn’t have to know what kind of data its fitting a line to to make a line.

its from the DMX track “X gon’ give it to ya”. it came out in 2002.

whoops! i was pretty high when i wrote that. guess i just felt like sharing.

not to dig this hole any deeper, but the defining characteristics of a chicken aren’t like, easily identifiable. we can build a hypothetical in which two proto-chickens are genetically capable of producing offspring that is “chicken”, but that’s kinda rube-goldbergesque, there must have been some extremely specific series of genetic coincidences required to produce something chicken enough to be a “chicken” in that scenario. genetics, and evolution more generally, tends to be more complex. the specific genetic markers that distinguish chicken from non-chicken, if we say they exist, are probably not in and of themselves what makes a chicken, because single gene changes don’t usually make creatures incapable of interbreeding with their parents’ species, and that’s a defining feature of the taxonomic category “chicken” belongs in.

like, if we grant that the chicken came from a proto-chicken egg, because the chicken has a special chicken gene, its really really likely that the next generation of “chickens” came from our progenitor chicken mating with a proto-chicken. taxonomically, that means that proto-chickens are chickens, because species is commonly defined by the ability to produce fertile offspring (eggs). so for every step in the process towards chicken-ness, we can’t really say that the egg came first in a taxonomical sense, because the first member of the species of “chicken” (as defined by whatever genetic marker we claim indicates chicken-ness) was almost certainly able to reproduce with things that didn’t have that genetic marker!

maybe there’s some other sense in which the chicken and the egg can be discretely separated, but if we are talking about species, taxonomically, anything that can lay eggs to make fertile chickens must be a chicken by definition, barring some really weird edge cases that probably didn’t happen.

fun fact: plants can do the weird edge case, and do it quite often. plants can duplicate their chromosomes without catastrophic consequences, unlike animals, and they can reproduce without sex with another individual, so a plant can produce offspring that aren’t fertile with their parent species, and can reproduce independently (called polyploidy). so a seed can come before the grass (as with some kinds of wheat, and many other plants). this can also happen in reverse, where a polyploidal offspring can start reproducing with a species it couldn’t before!

corporate governance structures are anti-democratic by nature. framing corporate capture of innovation, economic opportunity, scientific research, and our most critical services as a positive thing is grotesque. nobody should own lifesaving research. nobody should own our houses, our hospitals, our livelihoods and our parks, corporations shouldn’t be able to decide what causes are worthy, what challenges can be addressed. we should. the people who do the work, who make the products, who do the labor that serves others, not unaccountable boards of ultra-wealthy assholes who think they get to make our decisions for us, and are using that power to actively kill the fucking planet.

if you wanna lick the boot, have fun with that corpo.

beardown

did… did you make this account just to insert racist bullshit into the bear meme?

Typical woman

as always, the people most upset about the bear thing just so happen to also be sexists.

cop got on the news and used a bike lock chain that was used to barricade the building as “proof” that the protestors were infiltrated by professional agitators, because it was an “industrial chain” or something like that. its the bike lock that Columbia University itself recommends to students.

so, the only way to address the problem of sexual violence in hospitals is just to divide the population in two? this is just like the bathroom bullshit. if you’re assuming that trans women are rapists, you are a transphobe. if you’re assuming that sex-segregated wards are a useful deterrent to rape, you’re an idiot. the thing stopping people from hurting patients in the hospital is the hospital. the staff, the doors, the nurses, the help buttons beside each bed, the check-ins by doctors and nurses.

so should we segregate our hospitals too? i’m sure you could find some examples of interracial violence if you cared to look. maybe the poor people should get their own ward, we all know the poors are more likely to be criminals! the argument you’re using right now is one that has been used against minority groups since antiquity. all people are capable of violence. that you focus only on the violence of a single case, and use that to justify discrimination? that is not “common sense”. it is prejudice.

its not nonsense, its a well documented part of trans discrimination. trans people are commonly treated as if they are cis, and many doctors just don’t have the kind of awareness of HRT’s effects that you seem to think is commonplace. like, more than half of trans people have experienced medical discrimination. trans people are routinely confronted with medical professionals that refuse to acknowledge their medical histories. trans people have quantifiably worse physical health outcomes even when they do get care. i have not met a single trans person who hasn’t experienced at least some kind of barrier to care. doctors refusing to perform mammograms, doctors who haven’t even heard of HRT, doctors turning trans people away at emergency rooms. there is tons of data out there about this problem that you’re refusing to believe even exists.

i’d like to see how you’d be measuring “performance” in this context, or what you consider to be worthy of merit, because those things are not the objective measures you seem to think they are.

people who are contributing to open source projects are not a perfect Gaussian distribution of best to worst “performance” you can just pluck the highest percentile contributors from. its a complex web of passionate humans who are more or less engaged with the project, having a range of overlapping skillsets, personalities, passions, and goals that all might affect their utility and opinions in a decision making context. projects aren’t equations you plug the “best people” into to achieve the optimal results, they’re collaborative efforts subject to complex limitations and the personal goals of each contributor, whose outcome relies heavily on the perspectives of the people running the project. the idea you can objectively sort, identify, and recruit the 50 “best people” to manage a project is a fantasy, and a naive one.

the point of mandating the inclusion of minority groups in decision making is to make it more likely your project and community will be inclusive to that group of people. the skillsets, passions, and goals that a diverse committee contains are more likely to create a project that is useful and welcoming to more kinds of people, and a committee that is not diverse is less likely to do so. stuff like this is how you improve diversity. in fact, its quite hard to do it any other way.

language changes. we don’t speak like people did last century. gay used to mean happy. we can make english “nonsensical”. we have, and we are, and we will. and you can’t fucking stop it any more than you can stop kids from making slang. as much as you hate it, you know how the singular they works, and have no reason to be a little bitch about it. its in the dictionary. suck it up and stop whining.