flamingos

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 1 points 55 minutes ago

What are you talking about, giving one of the only programming languages where binary sizes matters a tiny standard library is a great idea!

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 1 points 1 hour ago

This is Dragon Age Veilguard.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 1 points 1 hour ago

Is this about protecting the instance though or enforcing an opinion? This wasn’t a problem before Blahaj got upset.

It's about protecting a vulnerable minority. One in four trans people report experiencing abuse online personally directed at them and hate crime against trans people is at record highs. I don't want this place to be a contributor to these statistics and I'm going to prioritise the safety of our trans users over some notion of neutrality. That rise in transphobia I mention in the post we have experienced is real and I would've introduced these guidelines regardless of if they got use LBZ federation back, I didn't even know beforehand that it would.

cass report seemed to show

I cannot express how little respect I have for the Cass review, it is a piece of politically motivated sophistry mostly disconnected from the medical science it tied itself in knots to discredit. Like seriously, double blind puberty blocker trials? The participants are going to know they're on the placebo when they start growing facial hair/tits.

If someone were to be in a hospital, and the nurse needed to know if they were a man or a woman for medical purposes, an AMAB person saying “yes” would be different from an AFAB trans man saying “yes”. I don’t think it’s fair to claim their identity socially is less than or different, or that he is a second class man when it comes to drinking with his mates down the pub.

That just sounds like a bad question on the nurse's part, they should ask specifically if they're AMAB or not. I'm AMAB and I've been asked if I'm pregnant by nurses plenty of times, even before I realised I was trans, so it's not like this is out of the norm for the NHS. AMAB/AFAB are also term the NHS uses all over the place.

But if it comes to let’s say, a discussion of men’s rights issues, and it’s someone who started identifying as a man yesterday claiming that male mental health issues are overblown, compared to an AMAB person talking about life being a struggle, wouldn’t there be a difference there, even though it doesn’t make the trans man any less of a man?

That does sound like a lack of intersectionality on the trans man's part, and sure, a day is hardly long enough to understand the nuances of living as a particular group. I doubt a trans man would do this though, as from my experience, trans people are overly conscious about fitting in.

It also interesting how you frame society's lack of attentiveness to men's mental health as a men's rights issue, would you agree that society's lack of attentiveness to trans mental health is a trans' rights issue?

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, there is no appropriate place on feddit.uk to discuss if a trans person's gender identity is less valid than a cis person's.

The part you quoted was aimed at a Flax's comment as a whole, who expressed a disinterest in this particular debate.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

One, that would be a bad subject for a linguistic philosophy community, and two, no as that's pretty clearly within the stated definition of transphobia. I'm not going to let bigotry propagate because someone obstinately rule lawyered a comment I made an hour after waking up.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (4 children)

That seems a bit presumptuous? What if someone creates some !linguistic_philosophy@feddit.uk community?

That wouldn't really change the fact this is a place for discussion of things with other people. It would just be another place to have social discussion, but with a narrower range of topics than, say, an ask-a-question community.

Instance-level rules and guidelines are going to be general purpose.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 17 hours ago (6 children)

Yes, feddit.uk.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 12 points 19 hours ago

Damn, Jedward got old.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 14 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Some vetting process:

Cllr Broadhurst has previously posted an image to the platform which compared Islamic dress to bin bags.

A now-deleted post on his page included an image of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler saying he would have been a “legend” if he had targeted Muslims.

 

Labour has called on Nigel Farage to take action after an image emerged from a Reform local election stunt depicting female cabinet ministers as cows in an abattoir.

The roadside setup in Hertsmere, Hertfordshire, shows deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, chancellor Rachel Reeves and education secretary Bridget Phillipson depicted as cows waiting to be slaughtered.

The stunt, pictured by a passerby and passed to The Independent, was damned as “dehumanising” and “misogynistic”. Reform local election stunt depicting leading female cabinet ministers as cows in an abattoir.
[…]
Reform did not initially answer questions on the issue, but responding to The Independent at a press conference in London, Mr Farage said: “All sorts of appalling things get said and done by people fighting in elections, at local and national level, and we get it done to us.

“If one or two of our people do it to them, maybe they think it’s funny. It probably isn’t very funny.

“I can’t pretend we’re perfect. What I can tell you is that one of the ways in which we have professionalised this party is to put people through a vetting process. And I think we’ve come up with a slate of elected councillors and mayors and a new MP that we can genuinely be very proud of.

“If there is the odd lapse in taste, then I regret it, but it’s kind of called politics.”

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 11 points 22 hours ago

Apparently the game has AI generated CSAM in it. Something, something, every accusation is a confession.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day ago

I’m not sure about all of it and had to remove the racist/sexist stuff, just because I don’t know any software on the fediverse with controversies like this…

Soapbox, a fork of Pleroma, is made by a TERF who previously worked for Gab.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

This is pretty categorically not a conservative forum, so I don't really see your point. If you want to discuss the Biblical definition of man/woman and whether that includes trans people in a theology post then sure? That would be appropriate context.

What do you mean by epistemologically?

I mean that fundamentally, there is nothing more true about a cis person saying they're a man than a trans person saying they're a man.

 

Good day all, in response to the increase in transphobia we've experience since the For Women Scotland v Scotland Supreme Court decision, seemingly a mix of genuine malice and people tripping up with a topic they're unfamiliar with, I've taken the initiative to write some guidelines on how to engage in the topic and clearing up some common misconceptions.

https://guide.feddit.uk/politics/transphobia.html

I'm not all that happy with them, I want something more comprehensive but my time has been pretty taxed lately and I don't want my perfectionism to stand in the way of having these out. If there's any issues, glaring omissions or whatnot, then please let me know or make a pull request here.

 
 

Archive

Keir Starmer is at odds with his powerful chief of staff over whether to scrap a two-child cap on benefits, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, a costly policy move that the British prime minister is under pressure to make after bruising local election results.

Starmer favors lifting the limit as a way to demonstrate the ruling Labour Party’s commitment to alleviating child poverty, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal government matters. His chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, however, has been one of the main opponents of the move, contesting the estimated £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) expense ahead of the government’s most recent fiscal statement in March.
[…]
Starmer has faced repeated calls from Labour lawmakers to reverse the cap, which currently limits child benefit payments to two children per household. Rather than heed pressure to change the policy immediately upon entering government in July, the government delayed a decision by announcing a consultation on a broader child poverty strategy. McSweeney urged Starmer at that time to rule out scrapping the two-child cap, according to people familiar with the matter. He argued that polling shows that Labour voters view the cap as fair, the people said. Starmer pushed back and removing the cap has remained an option under consideration by the government.

Starmer, Chancellor of Exchequer Rachel Reeves and Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall proposed scrapping the cap in the March statement, according to the people, before concluding there wasn’t enough money to fund it. McSweeney was again opposed to the idea, the people said.

The Downing Street official said any suggestion that McSweeney had blocked a worked-up plan supported by three ministers would not be true.
[…]
Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown added to the pressure on Starmer on Wednesday, saying that scrapping the cap was “the cost-effective way of getting more children out of poverty” in an interview with ITV. He separately told Sky News that Reeves could raise £3 billion by either increasing taxes on the gambling industry or reducing the interest paid to commercial banks for their deposits held by the Bank of England.

One government figure in favor of the scrapping the cap countered McSweeney’s polling argument by pointing out that most Labour voters also don’t want child poverty to go up. Lifting the cap is the most financially efficient way of doing that, the person said.

 

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

 

Police have been issued guidance on how to search women’s homes for abortion drugs and check their phones for menstrual cycle tracking apps after unexpected pregnancy loss.

New guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) on “child death investigation” advises officers to search for “drugs that can terminate pregnancy” in cases involving stillbirths. The NPCC, which sets strategic direction for policing across the country UK, also suggests a woman’s digital devices could be seized to help investigators “establish a woman’s knowledge and intention in relation to the pregnancy”. That could include checking a woman’s internet searches, messages to friends and family, and health apps, “such as menstrual cycle and fertility trackers”, it states.

Details are also provided for how police could bypass legal requirements for a court order to obtain medical records about a woman’s abortion from NHS providers.

 
 

Dozens have thrown their support behind a letter urging the government to "delay" the proposals, which they blasted as "the biggest attack on the welfare state" since Tory austerity.

The MPs - who are restless after Labour's poor showing at last week's local elections - warned the prime minister that his plans to slash the welfare bill by £5bn a year were "impossible to support" without a "change in direction".

In the letter, seen by Sky News, the MPs said the reforms - which will tighten eligibility criteria for incapacity benefits - had caused a "huge amount of anxiety among disabled people and their families".

"The planned cuts of more than £7bn represent the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne ushered in the years of austerity and over three million of our poorest and most disadvantaged will be affected," they wrote.
[…]
A government impact assessment in March found an additional 250,000 people - including 50,000 children - could be pushed into relative poverty in the financial year ending 2030.

The MPs went on to say that while the benefits system needed reform, this needed to be done "with a genuine dialogue with disabled people's organisations".

"We also need to invest in creating job opportunities and ensure the law is robust enough to provide employment protections against discrimination," they added.

"Without a change in direction, the green paper will be impossible to support."

 

Keir Starmer has defended his plans to curb net migration after an angry backlash from MPs, businesses and industry to a speech in which he said the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers” without tough new policies.

The rhetoric was likened by some critics to the language of Enoch Powell, and the prime minister was accused of pandering to the populist right by insisting he intended to “take back control of our borders” and end a “squalid chapter” of rising inward migration.

Some politicians claimed that his words had echoed Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population “found themselves made strangers in their own country”.

When asked to respond to accusations he had adopted Powell’s rhetoric, Starmer told the Guardian: “Migrants make a massive contribution to the UK, and I would never denigrate that.”

But in words that could further enrage his critics, Starmer insisted that new migrants must “learn the language and integrate” once in the UK. He said: “Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.”
[…]
Starmer was speaking before the publication of a 69-page immigration white paper that sets out details of how the government intends to introduce restrictions across all forms of visas to the UK.

A new Home Office assessment showing the impact of changes to study and work visas and the introduction of English language tests said there would be about 100,000 fewer people entering the UK. It suggests net migration could fall to 300,000 by 2029, but the government declined to confirm a target.

Net migration, the difference between the number of people moving to the UK and the number leaving, was 728,000 in the 12 months to June 2024. Under the previous Conservative government, the figure rose to more than 900,000.

Starmer said that the current immigration system “encourages some businesses to bring in lower-paid workers rather than invest in our young people”.

Rain Newton-Smith, the Confederation of British Industry’s chief executive, said: “The reality for businesses is that it is more expensive and difficult to fill a vacancy with immigration than if they could hire locally or train workers … When considered alongside the large fees and accompanying charges, foreign workers are simply not the ‘easy’ or ‘cheap’ alternative.”

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