ondoyant

ondoyant, 4 days ago

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

i’m sorry, but putting the blame for war crimes on individual soldiers is just deflecting from the institution that is arming and deploying those soldiers. you don’t get to bomb hospitals, aid workers, mosques, and schools and then defer the blame from that kind of abhorrent destruction onto your soldiers. if they’re using IDF guns, bombs, and uniforms to kill tens of thousands of people, displace so many from their homes, and prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering the region to the point that famine is spreading, then the IDF, and by extension the Israeli government, is responsible for those deaths. as for there being no evidence of a “master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it”, if you’re genuine in that belief, actually look at what the people who are accusing Israel of genocide are saying. there is credible evidence of both a genocide in practice and in intent. israeli and jewish scholars of genocide and the holocaust disagree with you. the UN disagrees with you. the ICC disagrees with you.

ondoyant, 4 days ago

this is not “think of the children”. its “tens of thousands of children have died, and will die, as a result of the actions of the Israeli government”. we aren’t appealing to the potential harm that might come to children, we are recognizing the current and ongoing slaughter of children and adults happening in Gaza.

ondoyant, 4 days ago

whose rockets have been raining down on whose homes? the appeal of a potential future threat to Israeli lives outweighing the current, present threat towards magnitudes more Palestinian lives is played out. people here aren’t ride or die for Hamas, they just acknowledge that leveling cities, hospitals, and schools, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and preventing them from getting food is both not likely to lead to less rockets on Israeli homes, and is in itself an act of genocide. when did appeals to not killing innocent Palestinians become support for Hamas to you? when did persistent, unending violence against the Palestinian people become “self-defence”?

ondoyant, 3 days ago

again, deflecting blame. it doesn’t matter who started it, it doesn’t matter what “every single nation on Earth” would have done (although I think there’s plenty of examples of other nations not doing the kinds of things Israel is doing in response to a terror attack), its doesn’t even really matter whether we call it a war or a genocide, we can see it, and it is wrong. killing tens of thousands of children is wrong, inducing starvation and famine is wrong, destroying hospitals is wrong. if this is war, than i want to kill war, if this is what nations do, then there should be no nations.

i’ve heard this talking point from other Zionists and Israel-apologists. that this is just what war is like, that casualties are inevitable, that against an enemy like this that Israel’s actions are necessary. fuck that noise. if this is what war is like, it is our obligation to seek peace at every opportunity. if killing doctors and journalists, families and childrens, if that is justified in your worldview, then that worldview is not worthy of respect, not worthy of consideration. whatever you call what Israel is doing, however you rationalize it to yourself, these things are useless platitudes. it does not matter who threw the first stone. it does not matter that Hamas has done terrible things to Israeli civilians, any logic, any excuse that leads us to accept mass starvation as an acceptable practice is not worth following. i want to live in a world where no children die of hunger, where people can live and die in peace, and the state of Israel has positioned itself against those goals, is pursuing an agenda that has and will kill innocent people.

if you can recognize that this is what war is like, can recognize the harm being done to the Palestinian people, you are morally obligated to oppose it, if only out of self interest. i don’t want to die of starvation. i don’t want my friends and family to be bombed, driven from their homes, killed in the streets. jailed and tortured. and if i want that, i cannot stand by as it happens to others, cannot accept the platitude of necessity. because if it necessary here, it can be necessary elsewhere. if we can justify war, we cannot expect to find peace.

ondoyant, 3 days ago

you’re constantly trying to frame opposition to Israel as a failure to understand. i’m sorry, but you’re just wrong. we understand the conflict. we understand the players. we understand that Hamas is a far-right organization, and would do harm if they were to come to greater power. we just don’t think that justifies the kinds of violence being leveled at the Palestinian people. i’m not pro-Palestine because i don’t understand the stakes, because i’m blindly following the underdog. i’m doing it because i object to the death of innocent people, because i oppose war, apartheid, displacement, and destruction in all its forms.

ondoyant, 2 days ago

“idealism” is a funny way of saying “opposition to war”. you are making excuses for a country raining death on a civilian population. you are drawing a line in the sand, saying that we cannot have a better world than this, and actively defending an organization that is killing children. war is the problem i want to solve, and your “solution” doesn’t solve that problem.

the world is not “wretched”, it does not “work” in some predefined way you expect it to. you have just decided not to advocate for a worthy cause, because it falls outside the bounds of what you have arbitrarily decided it is possible for the world to be, even as larger and larger groups of people fight to obtain that which you call a “fantasy”. there is no use in accepting the world as it is, in presuming that things cannot change for the better. we can’t know if its impossible without trying, again and again, as many times as it takes. progress was never made by accepting the status quo. it was never made by limiting the scope of our ambition.

stop speaking as though deflecting blame from the IDF, deflecting responsibility onto a terrorist organization, and making excuses for why a famine should continue are the “realistic” outer bounds of what we can do. the world you say you want doesn’t come about by aligning yourself with forces that are currently driving war, injustice, and suffering in Gaza. it doesn’t come about by abdicating the IDF of the responsibility of the war crimes you admit its soldiers are committing. you are seeing the alternative, you are seeing a principled opposition to war unfolding around you, and deciding that it is unobtainable, deciding that it foolish, and aligning yourself with the war-makers.

I will not do the same. I recognize the history of anti-war movements, the ways in which they have failed to achieve their goals. I do not have delusions that war is easy to kill. I just don’t have the arrogance to assume I know what the outcome will be. Even if we fail to create a world without suffering, at least I can know that we tried. Free Palestine.

ondoyant, 5 days ago

Typical woman

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

ondoyant, 5 days ago

beardown

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

ondoyant, 8 days ago

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.

ondoyant, 9 days ago

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.

ondoyant, 9 days ago

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.

ondoyant, 9 days ago

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.

ondoyant, 11 days ago

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.

ondoyant, 13 days ago

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.

ondoyant, 24 days ago

single use plastics? there are tons of plastic materials that are embedded in things we only use once and then throw away. we don’t need the plastic on string cheese to last for longer than a few months. or plastic bottles. or bubble wrap. or the plastic coating on cans. from what the article says, its not water soluble, so it needs to be actively colonized by bacteria to break down. if we built it into reusable plastic objects, they’d just need to stay clean and dry. most natural clothing fiber is biodegradable, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna fall apart, it just means if you leave it outside something might come and eat it. the idea all the things we discard are made from things other living creatures can’t eat is a huge bummer. it would be fucking cool if we could compost all our garbage again!

ondoyant, 25 days ago

i have a general distaste for the mind/computer analogy. no, tweets aren’t like malware, because language isn’t like code. our brains were not shaped by the same forces that computers are, they aren’t directly comparable structures that we can transpose risks onto. computer scientists don’t have special insight into how human societies work because they understand linear algebra and network theory, in the same way that psychologists and neurologists don’t have special insight into machine learning because they know how the various regions of the human brain interact to form a coherent individual mind, or the neural circuits that go into sensory processing.

i personally think that trying to solve social problems with technological solutions is folly. computers, their systems, the decisions they make, are not by nature less vulnerable to bias than we are. in fact, the kind of math that governs automated curation algorithms happens to be pretty good at reproducing and amplifying existing social biases. relying on automated systems to do the work of curation for us isn’t some kind of solution to the problems that exist on twitter and elsewhere, it is explicitly part of the problem.

twitter isn’t giving you “direct, untrusted” information. its giving you information served by a curation algorithm designed to maximize whatever it is twitter’s programmers have built, and those programmers might not even be accurately identifying what it is that they’re maximizing for. assuming that we can make a “firewall” that maximizes for neutrality or objectivity is, to my mind, no less problematic than the systems that already exist, because it makes the same assumption: that we can build computational systems that reliably and robustly curate human social networks in ways that are provably beneficial, “neutral”, or unbiased. that just isn’t a power that computers have, nor is it something we should want as beings with agency and autonomy. people should have control over how their social networks function, and that control does not come from outsourcing social decisions to black-boxed machine learning algorithms controlled by corporate interests.

ondoyant, 1 month ago

puberty blockers are used explicitly to delay having to go through puberty. they are used for kids who have precocious puberty (puberty that starts too early), as well as for trans kids. there are some marginal risks associated with them, you might grow a bit shorter, or just generally develop differently that you might have if you had allowed puberty to progress on time, but there aren’t specific health challenges people who use them face. the reason you take them is to explicitly prevent somebody from going through irreversible changes they might not like before they can make an informed decision, or before it is healthy for those changes to occur.

interestingly, most of the poor health outcomes of precocious puberty are psychological and social, not physical, which is, i think, an interesting parallel to the trans experience.

ondoyant, 1 month ago

no, it wasn’t “more data”, it was just data. blood letting and mercury are pre-scientific treatments that were in use during the 1600s. puberty blockers were developed with a modern understanding of hormones, and extensively tested before they saw use in a clinical setting. you might as well have brought up magic as a legitimate medical practice that we eventually proved wrong. like, no duh, but it also has basically no bearing on the safety of a chemically synthesized hormone inhibitor invented in the 20th century.

ondoyant, 2 months ago

“extra rights” being what? the right to immigrate? people should be allowed to live where they choose. you almost certainly could live and work in a European nation without being forced to leave in the way these people are. just because you don’t think of that as a right doesn’t mean it isn’t one.

ondoyant, 2 months ago

people do nothing unless motivated

this is an assumption worth challenging. the evidence suggests, in fact, that people are almost always doing things!

ondoyant, 2 months ago

if you’re a person who has any kind of sympathy to queer people, poor people, people of color, women, men, disabled people, immigrants, recognize the verifiable facts of climate change and its effect on our biosphere, are even vaguely interested in a better world, or are just baseline concerned for the health and wellness of your kid, right wing ideologies are self-evidently a problem.

the world that right wing politicians want is bad, the things they think about other people are cruel, and only people who already believe the stupid, evidence poor bullshit right wingers believe would look at the shit online right wing communities get up to and not immediately be concerned for the welfare of their child. i mean, even being a mom is explanation enough. right wing ideologies treat women poorly. its not complicated, and most people reading an article like this are not seriously examining whether or not “equal rights”, “feminism”, and “human kindness” are things to be debated. they aren’t.

ondoyant, 2 months ago

sure buddy. expressing my resentment towards a set of ideological principles that have directly harmed me and the people i love, and are continuing to pursue even greater harms towards me and my loved ones right now, that’s the real problem, not the ideologies that are pushing for those harms!

i don’t buy your marketplace of ideas bullshit. if you vote for or associate with modern right wing political movements? you are in action a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, climate denialist, book burner, and christian nationalist, because the people you are putting in power are actively pursuing policy which is verifiably all of those things, and the people doing them are not shy about saying what they believe. it’s not a debate, its not a matter of opinion.

i flirted with right wing politics when i was young, i think a lot of people do, but there’s a reason why boys specifically are falling for the bullshit, and its because men are the beneficiaries of the systems of oppression that we’ve built up over the centuries, and oligarchs are pouring money into bolstering fascist movements that see democracy explicitly as a barrier to their supremacy. that just isn’t an attractive political perspective for people who aren’t already on the top of the hierarchy. its not because left wing people aren’t more attentive to the precious little feelings of people who can’t see beyond their own personal comfort, its because right wing ideologues can piggy back on hundreds of years of patriarchy to convince impressionable teen boys that they should strive to maintain their supremacy over all the people who aren’t like they are.

ondoyant, 2 months ago

“extremist rhetoric” eh? was it the mere recognition of systemic oppression that got you? or am i supposed to play nice with folks who are actively trying to make life worse for me? i’m expressing political perspectives that are informed by the modern realities of life for people like me. queer people are fleeing red states. right wing politicians are actively stripping away peoples’ rights as we speak. there’s nothing neutral about your position, there’s nothing “moderate” about standing at the sidelines and turning away from the ongoing human cost of the politics you are right here making accommodations for.

your refusal to recognize the clear and present danger that right wing politics and policy poses to the lives of people worldwide is a kind of radicalism. there is proof, exhaustive bodies of academic literature indicating that so many common right wing positions do not align with observed reality. to presume “moderation” in your politics is to deny that evidence, and that is a deeply political act.

ondoyant, 2 months ago

the assumption i’m making is if you’re broadcasting “any position right of center”, that you’re voting for politicians right of center. and if you’re doing that, then you’re supporting people who are actively pursuing all the things i am describing, especially if you’re in the united states. trying to attribute hate, bigotry, and violence to that assertion is wholly projection. you do not tolerate intolerance. no matter how much you fearmonger about how “violent” this rhetoric is, the stats are clear. it ain’t lefties who are shooting up schools, storming the capitol, and showing up to queer community events with guns and nazi flags.

ondoyant, 2 months ago

there isn’t a problem to solve. the fact legislators want to do this is the problem. quibbling about how exactly they’re gonna implement the torment nexus is secondary to the goal of resisting the torment nexus.

like, if your whole thing is “this is happening, its self-evidently about surveillance, and we can do nothing to stop it” and you start proposing ways for us to be surveilled “safely, securely, and privately”, you are pro-surveillance. you are supporting the bills, right now, with the rhetoric you’re using. like, imagine doing this about any other political issue.

“i don’t support the death penalty, but we can’t stop the government from implementing it, so here’s the way I’d murder prisoners.”

“we can’t stop them from banning abortion, and I hate that, but I’ll suggest we put the limit at 10 weeks. that seems reasonable, right?”

your idea for “solving the problem” involves doing the thing that both restricts what information people can access, and tracks their legal identity, but in a way that is maybe marginally less stupid than tech illiterate legislators can manage. the fact that you would be fine with the bills if the intent was just to ensure kids can’t access “pornography” in a private way kind of reveals your biases here. it would not be a good idea even then.

what counts as pornography is socially defined. a tool which allows the selective restriction of pornography is also by definition a tool that encourages the redefinition of pornography to encompass whatever it is governments don’t want people to learn about. especially in the US, it would become a tool for the censorship of minorities, the banning of books, and the removal of queer people from the internet. that’s why these laws are being proposed. its not ambiguous at all. like, even if it is inevitable it will pass, the priority doesn’t then become “how do we make this bad idea more efficient?”, it becomes “how do we subvert this unethical restriction on our communications?”. assuming that we can do nothing to stop this ensures that we won’t. its a good thing nobody’s buying your bullshit.