Elf M. Sternberg

it's laughable to think you can create a world that's safer for feminine men without also making it safer for transfeminine people and all women / femme presenting people

just like ... what?

A pirate's life!

"... But it's not against any religion,
to want to dispose of a pigeon!"

once again, my encyclopedic knowledge of @penny-arcade.com strips allows me to provide extremely deep cut visual commentary on current events

A humorous cartoon depicts a domestic scene. A woman sits on a couch watching Heated Rivalry, smiling, with their feet up. A man appears frazzled in the foreground, cooking with one hand and holding two infants with the other. A tweet overlay by @quesadaaa_ reads, "So you admit that men's greatest fear is being treated like they have treated women? Hmm."

CLOCK IT 🤏

Sign on a public bathroom reading, "All are welcome to use the restroom that best suits their identity and needs."

Tremble, hetero swine!

Every trans person is like "I knew something was up before I had the words to describe it and had to fight for this for years" and every transphobe is like "one conversation with a doctor could have convinced me to get the walrus surgery from the movie 'The Walrus'"

Meanwhile, in Washington State, Goodspaceguy was allowed to run as "Goodspaceguy" on the ballot.

"The country that put a man on the moon can't connect San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds China reached last century."

China’s 450km/h bullet train is the fastest ever built Dart between Beijing and Shanghai in under four hours, with airline-like business class comfort.

China plans another high speed train, this one capable of 280mph. America can't build the rail needed to link two cities.

www.executivetraveller.com/news/china-c...

"The strongest evidence that sexual orientation is innate is the fact that so many women continue to be straight ... the missed opportunities straight men have had to like women baffle lesbians ... " - Jane Ward

I feel like there’s a parallel to the gay panics of the 80s and 90s, where they were (many still are) eaten up by fear that the sales pitch for gay is just SO STRONG that if allowed to flourish, all people will choose gay. And they took rising numbers of gay self-ID as proof of their theory (1)

These steps toward caution are wise, but an underlying problem remains: Society still has an irrational fear of effeminate boys, who should be free to live their life without altering anything about themselves. Gender-nonconforming children continue to get the strong impression from censorious peers and well-meaning adults alike that they’d be better off if they became something other than what they are.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

Where? How? These people have been pooping this stupid myth back and forth for so long that they don't even bother to provide basic evidence anymore.

It's the *premise* of the article, how did an editor not ask for specific numbers and peer-reviewed studies on this alleged phenomenon?

It was in those spaces, in the late 2010s, that I realized that the fundamentalist Christians I’d grown up with weren’t the only people enforcing rigid ideas about how others should think. After arriving in New York with mainstream Democratic views, I took classes heavy on critical theories that fixated on identity categories and reflexively decried capitalism and the West. Within influential LGBTQ organizations, gay rights had given way to radical queer politics, and academic theories about sex and gender had hardened into doctrine. Widespread revulsion toward Donald Trump had narrowed the boundaries of permissible discussion on the left. The more Trump and his followers opposed something, the more we were supposed to support it. The prevailing view was that any debate within our side would become ammunition for the right.

For a long time, I feared that if I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself, I would lose the only community I’d ever really belonged in. As controversy flared up nationally about pediatric gender medicine, though, I started voicing concerns, rooted in my own experiences, over what looked to me like a rush to medical treatment. For all the sloganeering about protecting trans kids, I heard no discussion about protecting effeminate gay boys from unnecessary medicalization. When I and others asked whether progressive norms might be nudging effeminate gay boys to think of themselves as girls, no one wanted to hear it. Instead of answers, we were given the LGBTQ community’s official line. “Gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things,” the Human Rights Campaign asserts. But the confidence with which people claim that the two have nothing to do with each other is hard to square with research findings: According to data collected mostly before the recent surge in pediatric-dysphoria diagnoses, most prepubescent children who experienced gender distress went on to experience same-sex attraction and ultimately did not pursue a gender transition. Of 70 adolescents whom Dutch clinicians subjected to puberty suppression from 2000 to 2008, the overwhelming majority were attracted exclusively to people of their biological sex.

Straightforward right-wing agitprop. The idea that thousands of kids were pushed into gender-affirming surgeries because the left shuts down debate is a laughable conspiracy theory. The overwhelming social pressure is to be cis, not trans!

reading over Malliotakis v. Williams and lowkey think New York courts/the NY Redistricting Commission should be like...since the Supreme Court clearly lacked jurisdiction to intervene in the case at this time, we are treating it as the nonbinding advisory opinion that it is, thanks for the input tho

Buck and Eddie from 911 with text post making a joke about fanfics having beautiful titles and then having explicit tags

Always check the tags.

📷 ABC

I feel like we typically see these sorts of completely outraged opinions from federal judges a couple times a year across the whole country, maybe a little more often in last few years. Now, in cases stemming from Trump's immigration crackdown, judges are ringing the alarm bell several times a week.

Says the secretary of state for a president that has bombed, invaded, and extorted treasure from more countries than any other, destroyed his country's health, science, education and emergency services, terrorized his own citizens and waged genocide against some of them.

"Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics."

This is an entire administration who believes that professionalism can be replaced with a ChapGPT account and a gut feeling.

Whenever I hear someone say, "Of course the boomers supported Trump. They're angry! They've been passed over by shifting attitudes toward gay marriage and trans children," I think, "So, they lived through a broadening of moral awareness and the moral franchise and they learned nothing?"

"Sight!" "SIGHT!"

And dammit, I can't even blame autocorrupt or voice-to-text or even Swype. That came straight out of my fingers onto the keyboard.

No, I got it. Appreciate the perspective, thanks. I'm reminded of how The Kingsman was deliberately crafted to make Obama look bad.

For the record, I usually write my commits first at work. Not so much on my personal projects, and almost never for story writing. Maybe I should?

"In this scene, Rhiane is dispatched to a troubling 'gated world' to adjudicate the disposition of a horrifying genetic engineering project."

I remember when "Write your commit message first" was intended to encourage developers to narrow down the task and plan for the size and scope of changes. Now it's to give the AI something to do. This is understandable, but sad: github.com/adamveld12/g...

"With the cloud, microservices, APIs, and everything else, most of what we now call 'software engineering' is bureaucracy with a pocket protector and a slide rule."

Amen.

Fame (David Bowie song) - Wikipedia

Today I learned that Bowie's "Fame" was co-written with John Lennon. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fame_(D...

Buttstuff: The Catholic Way to Say, "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!"

From the Christianity community on Reddit: Romance tips from an end-time pastor: Demons torture married couples who practice ‘woman on top’ Explore this post and more from the Christianity community

It is a day for demons. End-times pastor tells people that "the woman-on-top position invites demons into your home to torture you." So reverse cowgirl is a Satan-summoning ritual?

www.reddit.com/r/Christiani...

Reminder: If you're worried about demons in your life, HAVE GAY SEX. Demons cannot stand the site of gay sex.

"Demons cannot stand the sight of sodomy. The act is so heinous it even repels the demons who encourage it, for it strikes at them through their original angelic nature." - St. Catherine

We Automated Everything Except Knowing What's Going On The personal site of whom Kenneth has designed and built impactful systems that power global-scale operations, improve security, and drive efficiency. From leading infrastructure transformations at Cl...

Oh, man, do I feel this. BUT: it was inevitable that, once we started enhancing our intellectual capabilities with machines, "knowing what's going on" would stop being a personal issue and become a team issue.

The issue isn't AI. It's nobody having responsibility.

eversole.dev/blog/we-auto...