laŭra

yeah, fair enough. it is very annoying that i almost wrote "socially sanctioned" which apparently means "socially approved", when i actually wanted to express "socially punished"

sanction is a really stupid word, why does it both mean "punishment" and "explicit permission to do something (that you would ordinarily be punished for)"

you'd never see social sanctions like this against someone tossing out a CV because it has an "exotic" name on it, or for spreading bigoted rumours to ostracise a minority, or even against someone who commits a violent hate crime, because those forms of bigotry dont lend themselves to callout posts

it is sociologically interesting that among all the legal ways be bigoted, directly insulting a minority is by far the most socially punished, when it's not even in the top 10 of most harmful things you can do, probably bc it's easy to punish compared to anything more insidious

its less personal because an org or a politician has interns doing the Poasting for them. it hits different if you're personally hanging out in the nazi bar and chumming it up with the regulars and being manipulated by the algorithm that studies have shown make you more right-wing

i guess if anything, twitter shows that network effects are literally unbreakable and any tech boss could turn any website into 8chan tomorrow and we'd all be so addicted that we'd just scroll past the cp and keep dopamine chasing. depressing. we need to regulate social media yesterday

the commons that is owned by one guy who keeps giving megaphones to his racist buddies and excavating under the paving stones for mythical atlantean treasure. i really wish people stopped treating twitter like it was ever anything more than a C-tier social media site with an unusual amount of nerds

i assume its a type of drug but its funnier to imagine theyre talking about like. cloves and nutmeg

that was depressing (complimentary)

oh, wait, it's her. i deleted my awareness of her in my brain it seems. and here i was being charitable in the replies lol

other than taking video game metaphors too literally, Map Game Brain is also characterised by an assumption of omniscience, omnipotence, and rationality on behalf of the "spirit" of nebulous complex institutions

the way she says it it doesn't even sound like transphobia (though I'm sure she hates us), it just sounds like she has Map Game Brain but for electoral polsims instead of paradox games

i think these guys are too stupid to have thought any of this out but I'm sure they don't mind

even though it will irreversibly damage what passes for my career, the ai bubble must be popped as fast as possible

I first articulated this idea, like, less than a week ago on a group chat thinking I had an epiphany, but now more and more are saying
to be clear, I don't personally think they can end personal computing (for long), but they sure as hell will try

Tweet by Max Dubler, 2/8/25 That old saw about how "good times make weak men" is true in the sense that stable times with material abundance create reactionaries who want to destroy the systems that protect them because they're too sheltered and stupid to understand that things can get meaningfully worse. True decadence looks like people who are three generations removed from the cultural memory of polio refusing to vaccinate their children against deadly communicable diseases because they don't like needles and don't think there will be any consequences, not queer dance parties.

the classic

im gonna be real, the whole thing came across as deeply weird instead of funny or convincing and I am primed to believe YIMBY talking points

oops, misread the post, sorry 🫡 im gonna keep the post up tho because i like doing this spiel at every opportunity

of course, medical care is also extremely important, but I like bringing this up because of how insanely bad anti-trans employment discrimination is. out of over a dozen trans people I know, only one of them is employed despite all of them being very highly skilled!

i would argue well-enforced discrimination protections is even more important because, in order:
1) its the #1 material issue affecting us
2) it allows normies to be exposed to us at work and realise we're not actually the Other™
3) polls well (not that it matters much, this is all near-0 salience)

on a related note, whomever churns out these 100-million dollar transphobic political campaigns for right-wing politicians is also grifting the buyer just as much as the public

to the extent that it's not just a way for transphobes to drop the mask, this is classic lobbying, and a kind of scam played on electeds. we don't fully see the informational environment that decisionmakers are being subjected to that makes them fall for it, since we are not the ones being targeted.

my country is a weird example because the left was forced to get behind a status quo homophobic centre-right-wing-populist who displaced all the actually progressive political forces, but our current government is insanely anti-lgbt so they're still a relative improvement

i would imagine that by now the people/institutions "convinced" by stuff like this were not too fond of us either way and were just looking for a permission structure to drop us, yeah. but it's important to note that this is not actually happening in most countries, including in the US centre-left

also important to note here, developing countries have housing crises too, worse than we do! if the official production of housing exceeds demand, you get informal settlements with no services and atrocious living conditions. which is a giant problem in most global south cities!

was trying to steelman since while the guy was ironic, it comes from sincere YIMBY sentiment (why are developing countries outbuilding the US?) and the truth is that while sensible reform helps, poorer countries can build things cheaper for reasons we shouldn't imitate so the comparison isn't 1:1

transphobia is not something that actually can be measured quantitatively because it's a fuzzy intangible insidious thing, and as we've seen, few people vote on anti-trans issues so these things essentially communicate nothing of use, just despair-porn for trans people and FUD for leftish elites

it's difficult for me to take issue polling on the topic seriously considering how many people support the ACA but not Obamacare
people don't know the first thing about us so it's easy to both manipulate their views and to frame things in a way that makes them answer in a more conservative manner

and that is assuming that north korea's numbers are reliable, which I doubt but also I don't think they matter, because YIMBY only really makes sense in high-income, high-regulation countries, and even then it's primarily applicable to the anglosphere

i would consider myself YIMBY-adjacent, but as far as YIMBY agitprop goes north korea is probably the worst thing you could have posted about. construction economics in developing, authoritarian countries works completely differently and people will point out that the comparison is wrong