Unruffled [they/them] @ Flatworm7591 @lemmy.dbzer0.com

wiki-user: unruffled

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2 yr. ago

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Even the fact the word "news" is in their name is a misnomer tbh.

I personally agree with you about the "misgendering is misgendering" point, and that's Ada's position for Blajah, but most folks on our instance don't seem to share that perspective when it comes to certain types of neo-pronouns, so I feel some distinction is still useful. And even if someone generally supports trans rights and the right to be correctly gendered according to an individual's preference, according to this thinking they are labelled "transphobic" if they don't extend this acceptance to include identities like "dragon fucker"? To me, that seems unfair. Those folks are at least trying to be trans allies for all intents and purposes, just not to the degree that you would like. To lump them in with folks who genuinely hate trans people is imo wrongheaded at best, and it seems counterproductive. For those folks who are on a journey towards a broader acceptance of diverse identities, you are basically adopting a "scorched earth" approach towards them simply because they share 90% of your views and not 100%.

“paraphrasing”

yea, i did a bit i suppose. however i think the intent of the above cw is pretty clear. or maybe i’m just trying to take offence. ¯(ツ)_/¯

The CW differentiates between "misgendering" as usually understood by mainstream folks (i.e., calling a trans-man a woman or vice versa) and the more inclusive concept of "misgendering" (maybe I used the wrong term here??) Ada posted about which includes imaginary identities and pronouns, such as fantasy creatures etc. I think the first meaning is widely accepted (at least among social progressives) but the second is perhaps not, which is why I made the distinction. If you can suggest a more appropriate wording for the CW that will be understood by most folks then I'll be happy to consider revising the wording. I also reminded our users to respect pronouns no matter what they are, even if they don't understand or agree with them.

you allowed a user to come and say a bunch of gross shit in your comm, you fostered a space for transphobia. drag is absolutely an irredeemable troll but drag’s pronouns shouldn’t factor into that.

FYI, I'm not in fact a mod of that community. I only stepped in because I got a lot of reports about this topic and thought it was going off the rails. And generally I prefer to leave user comments intact in that community rather than removing them, since I think it's useful to keep a record of the discussion for future reference. Thus the CW approach on this occasion.

in any case, the conversation above was about PugJesus’ post, which you hadn’t locked when you replied here. if you were choosing to leave one of the two posts unlocked, you could have said so, but you acted like the issue was definitively resolved.

The actual chain of events was 1. receiving a bunch of reports about one post (the first one I locked); 2. coming across this post and expressing solidarity with Ada; 3. receiving a message about the second post; and 4. locking that post too. PugJesus was in fact active in both posts and there was a lot of topic overlap.

I'm sorry I didn't act sooner, but it's xmas and I have other IRL stuff going on. I'm also sorry you folks at blajah have received so much abuse simply for trying to be an inclusive and safe space for trans people. I do my best to be supportive of trans folks and of your instance, but I totally acknowledge I'm not an expert on the topic and may have worded things poorly. If you want to attack me for that, then go ahead I guess, but on a personal note, I am a 50yo gay man who has also faced discrimination and abuse in my life, so please have some consideration for my feelings too, because being (imo) unfairly accused of being transphobic is hurtful. Thanks.

This is a bad faith comment tbh. I locked the second post on this topic soon after I was messaged about it. It didn't seem as heated as the other post I previously locked which is why I'd left it unlocked originally. Perhaps it took a while for that lock to be federated to the blajah instance?

And for the record, that's not what I said, you are (inaccurately) paraphrasing. I do think that drag is a irredeemable troll, but I have always used drag's pronouns to the best of my ability. Just because drag might be trans doesn't excuse drag's behaviour towards other users. We adopt a "fuck around and find out" rule towards trolls and drag fucked around one time too many.

I don't have any opinion on the validity or otherwise of neo-pronouns, I'm not interested in litigating the topic because the discussion always turns toxic - I simply reminded our members to respect pronouns even if they don't agree with or understand them.

If my actions seem like "currying favour" to you, then I can only say that you seem to be determined to take offense.

Please refer to my comment on this related post: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/34327347/15649022

Hi Ada, I stepped in to lock the post and put a stop to the drama, but maybe I should have acted sooner. Our admins have got no problem with respecting drag's pronouns or anyone else's. The social conservatives seem emboldened since Trump was re-elected imo. It sucks.

Now that everyone has had a chance to argue all day about this, I'm gonna lock this post so you can go touch grass.

I agree that Drag is a massive troll and that user has been banned from many instances over the past few months, including this one.

Maybe try leaving it up to the folks at blajah to decide what they want to be called and maybe just play along with it, even if you find it weird. "Normal" is so fucking boring anyway. If you really can't cope with occasionally coming across an unusual pronoun and being asked to simply accept it without having a meltdown, you probably don't belong on blajah anyway. Just move on.

The "gatekeeping" bans seem like a BPR to me given the context in which it was posted. Having said that, I don't entirely understand the rationale for blajah's rule, since the effect seems to be that you either need to be 100% behind fantasy neo-pronouns and identities (including drag? dragonfucker??) or cop a ban, but if that's how they want things then that's up to them. Not every space is for everyone, and diversity of communities and instances is mostly a good thing.

As far as our instance (dbzer0) goes, malicious/intentional misgendering of users is not permitted, similar to blajah. However, like others in this thread have argued, I agree that someone who literally identifies as a dragon fucker does not deserve to be taken seriously about anything, and it's entirely reasonable to simply assume the choice of pronouns is just another form of trolling. The context and drag's extensive mod history (along with previous alts) are important factors here too.

It's also concerning to me that people are being attacked and reported for being "bigots" or "anti-trans" in the comments just because they have hesitations over what are effectively contentious edge cases involving neo-pronouns and an infamous troll. I know for a fact that many of the commenters in this thread are very supportive of trans people, trans rights and respecting a person's chosen gender pronouns. They just have a problem with this particular dragon-fucker, not because Drag is trans, but because Drag is a narcissistic troll and a community wrecker who thrives on all the drama.

I'm leaving the comments intact for the record, but will add a CW below:

CW: possible misgendering in comments below, at least if you agree dragon fucker is a gender

Most of the anti-Snopes claims appear to have been debunked, i.e. see comment: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20139932/12171049 from the same post you quoted. There appears to be a concerted effort to spread disinfo about Snopes and Wikipedia right now. Musk/Trump & their clownshirts don't seem to want anybody fact checking their constant stream of lies.

I'll start by saying this is an anarchist instance, and my politics tend towards that direction. I'm not a journalist, and I'm not making any claim to be impartial. That much should be obvious to anyone who has read my profile or post history inside or outside of this community. But having said that, you are correct that I don't usually post much in the way of editorialized content since I usually prefer to re-post from (at least arguably) authoritative sources. I really only did so on this occasion because I find myself mostly posting about Russian and Chinese disinformation and propaganda campaigns (because they are some of the biggest culprits, admittedly) but US propaganda tends to get off more lightly than it should, simply because it isn't reported on as much (after all they are the "good guys", right?). My motivation here was to provide some balance, not to push "an agenda" other than keeping the bastards in power honest (there I am editorializing again!), no matter which country they come from.

As you haven't really gone into detail, I have little idea what (if anything) you find counterfactual or misleading about my comments, or what you find disappointing about posting an opinion piece, except for the reason you provided that it isn't a fact-check. My take is that so long as an article is relevant to the topics of astroturfing, disinformation or propaganda, and has something interesting to say, then it probably belongs in this community. There's nothing in the community rules about only allowing fact checks (although I do post a lot of these), or only allowing re-posts from specific websites. At the end of the day, you are completely free to select which posts you find useful/interesting or not. You might not have found this particular article to be to your taste, but it seems like it was a fairly popular post for the broader community compared to the usual fact checks, so presumably most other folks didn't take the same issue with it that you did. Hopefully it provided some much needed alternative perspective for them on this massively propagandized topic.

Having said all that, I appreciate you taking the time to leave some feedback.

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. E.g., when Netflix was actually a good value proposition (i.e., high quality and quantity of content for the price), it was incredibly popular and nobody complained about their pricing. Now that barely anything looks like good value (thanks unfettered capitalism!), piracy is a more and more attractive option. That's why the big corpos are trying as hard as they can to shut down piracy, so their customers have nowhere else to turn while they keep bumping up the prices for a shittier and shittier selection of content.

In a wide-ranging interview, Gabe Newell dishes about Steam, piracy and Half-Life 3.

The CEO and cofounder of Valve is never short on opinions. As the creator of some of the most beloved games titles (Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half-Life) and owner of the most pervasive online gaming portal for the PC platform, Gabe Newell has earned the right to express them. In an interview for the University of Cambridge’s school newspaper, Newell said that the way to end piracy is to provide a service that’s more complete than cracked software, and that restrictive DRM only encourages more piracy.

“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”

The proof is in the proverbial pudding. “Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become [Steam’s] largest market in Europe,” Newell said.

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem/

IMO it's important for pirates to stay up to date about things like DNS blocks etc so we can develop or implement workarounds as needed. For every story about some issue, the community will usually find a workaround pretty quickly. As you would have read recently, several of the major DNS players like Cloudflare, Google and Quad9 have all started enforcing court ordered DNS blocks on certain pirate streaming sites and indexers, because of repeated court cases against them by copyright holders and industry bodies.

But we already have good workarounds for this, e.g., spinning up a docker container with pihole-unbound or similar for access to root DNS servers, bypassing the need for downstream DNS providers like Cloudflare. A big part of the value of this community is that (almost) every time a problem crops up, someone will be able to suggest a fix, and often there's already something available. Just use YouTube's campaign against ad blockers as an example. ublock Origin and FreeTube (for example) usually release patches within hours or at most a day or two after each new crackdown attempt by Google.

Maybe we don't do a good enough job of showcasing this, but piracy is alive and well in 2024. Torrents have been around for decades at this point and are still going strong. Same for Usenet. Pirate streaming sites are comparatively easy pickings for law enforcement, but that's more of a game of whack-a-mole than anything else, as a new site will always turn up to replace whatever gets shut down.

So yes, there's been a lot of shutdowns lately but it has barely affected the availability of pirated content overall. And with constantly improving tooling, like with the *arr stack of applications, piracy can now be automated and in many ways (i.e. functionality, not just pricing) provides a much better experience than most paid streaming services do.

It's always ethical to "steal" from greedy corporations. It's just a form of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor. If we can't achieve that outcome legally, then the whole system is unethical, including the legal system.

That topic is probably worthy of its own post, e.g., "Is the US government gaslighting it's own citizens about the National debt ceiling in order to defund public services? [true]"

💯

If you are using Plex, you can also configure jellyseerr to monitor the Plex watchlist and it will then auto-grab any missing media via sonarr and radarr. That way they potentially don't have to learn any new software. Not sure if overseerr can also do that as I haven't used it, but may also be an option.

You aren't gonna freeze to death in the 60 seconds it takes to get from your car to your front door. If the sun's out and snow is on the ground, it's still t-shirt weather in my book. (Canadian here, lol)

Oh right, it's obviously a "woke" problem, not a profiteering corpo trying to milk every last cent of value out of the franchise. Fuck right outta here with that bullshit.

I'm glad you are finding it useful! :)

Very interesting read! And looking at the chart, it's easy to see which countries are most targeted by these influence campaigns.

This manuscript introduces the Resurgent Authoritarian Influence (RAI) dataset, a pioneering effort to quantify foreign influence by Russia and China on aid-receiving nations. RAI provides a comprehensive view of influence activities across multiple dimensions, including the exercise of economic and military power, diplomatic efforts, and domestic interference, allowing for unique insights into the specific tools used to shape global dynamics. This represents a significant contribution for the empirical study of foreign influence by major powers.

Edit: it's just a shame they only show Chinese and Russian influence campaigns. What about other countries (e.g., the US)?

I'm now using this docker image. It has a really simple setup. https://github.com/origamiofficial/docker-pihole-unbound