alyaza

alyaza, 10 months ago

i have absolutely no idea what we're gonna do with that one to be honest. my personal opinion is that it's probably not worth the headache if people are going to make it a battleground and that's been the tendency since we announced it, but the other mods are substantially more optimistic on it than i am so we'll see

alyaza, 10 months ago

So you might have got a bunch of answers that the expectation would be “non white” but wasn’t.

by the very nature of the question we have no expectations about how it's going to be answered so i'm not sure this is actually an issue--and if it is i doubt we can really design around it anyways without manually assigning people the categories "white" or "non-white"

alyaza, 10 months ago

while i get how "Please look up the concept of colorism, which is a form of racism." comes off, you are the only one escalating this and this person was obviously responding to you in good faith and edited their post to clarify their intent. you do not need to be this aggressive

alyaza, 11 months ago

I’ve never visited this site before today and don’t know who Bari Weiss is.

ah, lucky you! Weiss apparently runs this site (just checked) and is generally infamous for being what amounts to a free speech concern troll. she most infamously resigned from the New York Times (where she previously was an op-ed columnist) over what amounted to people criticizing her takes both inside and outside the newspaper. i'd generally characterize her as interested in free speech only when it's conservatives saying heinous things being shut down, and never when the aforementioned queer people are actually having their free speech and right to exist threatened by an entire political party. she's also a very ardent, self-described Zionist and seems to suspend that interest in freedom of speech when it comes to people critiquing Israel. it's... corny, to say the least.

alyaza, 11 months ago

my point here if you want to call someone holier-than-thou and be understood correctly in the context of this post, you should probably just use "holier-than-thou". this is a moral subject in which the OP is morally introspecting and asking for moral opinions from other people--the original meaning of the word moralizing. in such a context you scoffing about people in the thread moralizing is generally going to be interpreted as you being weird, not as you saying people need to get off their high horse. i am hardly the only person who found your phrasing strange, judging by upvotes.

alyaza, 11 months ago

that's a solution--but i'm guessing that'd singlehandedly double the additional overhead and complexity for printing and sending out ballots, on top of what those already have to account for.

alyaza, 11 months ago

Based on this and other reporting on the subject, I am fairly convinced that the aviation industry cannot and will not become carbon neutral - we’ll continue to see these performative bits of PR as the industry tries to reposition itself, and meanwhile jets will continue to spew greenhouse gases into the sky.

yeah it's probable we'll just have to offset their much-reduced carbon footprint, since i'm doubtful we can get to literally zero flights. there's just too much utility (and not enough utility/versatility with other modes of transit) to flying to completely get rid of the mode.

alyaza, 11 months ago

at the level of "people have heard of them", probably reasonably well. beyond that though, kind of dubious.

alyaza, 11 months ago

i mean in most of the circumstances that these have been used to this point, i'm going to guess oceanic piracy is not a very large concern. not a whole lot of pirates in the Southern Ocean, or skirting hurricanes

alyaza, 11 months ago

it would be very tempting...

alyaza, 11 months ago

i'm reminded of going looking one time through Arizona's state constitution and finding that to this day they have an entire subsection of it devoted to, in effect, "debunking" communism and banning the Communist Party. there's a good chance many communities and states still have laws of this sort if you go looking--and it's quite an experience to find them.

alyaza, 11 months ago

Which products specifically? From what I can ascertain, the vast majority of vegan options are better for the environment for several reasons. Even though some vegan products are better than other vegan products (e.g., oats and soy beans over almonds), they all beat out their animal alternatives by a mile.

vegan options do not stop at food, please do not have a one-track brain here. many vegan product items have many well-described issues such as relying heavily on plastics that degrade poorly or contribute to environmental pollution, in addition to being less resilient than animal-based counterparts (and thus needing to be more frequently replaced).

alyaza, 11 months ago

test

alyaza, 11 months ago

yes, as far as i can tell (assuming you registered with the same username)

alyaza, 11 months ago

thank you for the additional input, as someone actually in the field!

alyaza, 11 months ago

i don't think we should be giving attention, clicks, or time to the Daily Caller, a far-right rag with nothing interesting to say

alyaza, 11 months ago

crossposting can be done with this icon between the star and the flag for reporting

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/8f658cb9-38b5-494b-b7e9-5016c55ab9fd.png

alyaza, 11 months ago

I’ve been waiting for June with such dread and to see this news, thank goodness. I had to read on multiple news sites to believe it.

the great thing too is it was a 7-2 verdict, so not a close one here. (obviously Thomas and Alito are fucking ghouls--and unsurprisingly they dissented)

alyaza, 11 months ago

every time i look at Texan urban planning, i die a little inside. most US urban planning is bad, but it's so uniquely bad in Texas that it's not even funny, and there's almost no way to systematically improve it short of nuking the suburbs and starting over because of how bad the sprawl is

alyaza, 11 months ago

The best thing Beehaw can do along those lines is to have clear, comprehensive guidelines about defederation; enforce them consistently; and be ready to update them when unforeseen variations arise.

yeah, we're in a very early stage but already rethinking some of our priors here thanks to federation and the lack of granularity with tools we have at our disposal

alyaza, 11 months ago

Graeber is basically "must read" as far as i'm concerned; for anarchists and would-be anarchists, i'd say a comparable figure is Peter Gelderloos.

on the more obscure end, i've found the bibliographies of Walter Rodney and Amílcar Cabral to be quite good; perhaps not broadly applicable to modern socialism, but both definitely profile worthwhile international and historical perspectives (Rodney with Caribbean, Guyanese, and Black socialism; Cabral with the liberation war fought in Guinea-Bissau against the colonial Portuguese) that shouldn't be forgotten. since they're lesser-known you probably can't find their stuff in print, but most of their works can definitely be found on libgen

alyaza, 11 months ago

Hypothetical example: am I allowed to take a socially conservative stance on gender-affirming healthcare or would that be considered ‘hate speech’?

we're not going to suddenly deviate from doing our One Rule thing and break out a legal contract and definition for what hate speech is and isn't--and frankly, even asking this is already kind of a self-report.[^1] this reply also heavily implies you don't really get why we've structured things the way they are here. as for the other question: if you think that gender-affirming care is wrong or immoral or whatever or that trans people are freaks (because that is basically always the unstated implication of such a belief) then no, this really isn't the instance for you.

[^1]: because let's be very clear: the vast majority of people do not have to ask this question.

alyaza, 11 months ago

In terms of lemmy as a platform, having small communities that can develop shared norms and knowledge is what will make it worthwhile and avoid the general feeling of being “over run” with low quality content. the big tent groups will always be lowest common denominator. Also the general topics do not want to get full of a specific kind of common but boring post. Like /r/apple (IIRC) didn’t allow tech support type question; there is a separate space for that.

on these points: Lemmy has no shortage of small communities--and those have overwhelmingly gone poorly and/or not really developed in that way (nor have the "big tent" groups, which you must remember are hundreds of orders of magnitude smaller than Reddit's) in the past year and a half on the platform. it's possible the new influx of users will breathe life into some of these, but most of them are completely dead and will always be, and basically just clutter the experience. i'm also not really sure what we can do objectively about the "common but boring" post you describe, since that's going to always be a subjective measure, but we do already prune comments people report as low-quality so it's not ridiculous to me that we'd also try and apply some baseline level of quality to posts.

In your position I would consider making a “new group request” section where people can post their ideas and others can express interest. You could request for people to do a bit of work such as writing up community guidelines to show some effort. When a group is rejected by this instance and they form somewhere else; in most cases you could allow them to link to that (unless it is you know terrible) so it can be found by others in the future. I understand that would entail a whole lot of work and headaches to run and people will be mad about it but over time it could shake out to allow actually communties.

this is not to shut down this idea, but in my honest experience: i don't think most of the people requesting communities will put this much effort in, which would just be a headache for us (because we'd probably just have to ignore it) and for the suggester (because i mean... where else are they asked to justify, on that level, a proposal for an internet community?). the vast majority of suggestions we've gotten to this point have been one-line or very brief suggestions, not a pitch package, and i expect that to not change.

in any case i don't think this will happen in the immediate term if we do it. that would be another space we have to really keep an eye on, and we're already covering a lot with not very many people.