This is the effect of having an authoritarian in charge. The propaganda that gets produced is done to convey a sense of power of the person/party, its popularity, and the scale of the internal and external “enemy threat.”
I think a lot of people have their fingers crossed on this one.
I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.
First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.
The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.
The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.
Hamas never posed an existential threat to Israel.
Syncs can be really weird. I have an account on another instance which constantly runs far behind .world. I’ve made double edits only to have the last one take.
It feels like the pullback from the cable replication of needing to subscribe to ten different services is starting to feel pullback, judging from the layoffs and cancellations at other streaming services. Honestly, it was a great run for a bit, but then everyone wanted their own service and saw first party tv episode content as viewer lock in.
But then they started raising prices and cutting off family access, and I started cancelling services. I went from 12+ (because I’d sign up for them at $4.99 a month because they had a series or movie I wanted) to about 6 now and I’ll probably cut more. Although I might enjoy the show, I’m not changing my streaming setup for it. When money was cheap, they were throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks. Now that it’s not and in the wake of community and talent revolts, they’re pulling it back in. I’m not saying we need to get back to Netflix having rights to everything, but I don’t see the room for dozens of subscription services making their own content. Even if household budgets are willing to (again) spend $100+ per month for subscriptions, there’s just not enough time in the week. It was great to just randomly decide to watch something and have it available, but at one point you have to realize you haven’t watched Showtime in two months.
I’ve never been out in Russia, but I know we’re persecuted there. Same for Poland. I’ve never been out in Uganda (I haven’t been there yet), and although I’ve been to India the social circles I moved in meant I didn’t encounter anything like what the community members find there.
What I find curious is that Americans use this as a lash particularly against Islam, while at the same time a large part of their population not only supports LGBT-phobic legislation in the US, but also the evangelical community that actively lobbies for the death penalty for being LGBT in Africa. I can sympathize with the plight of Russians under the violent and murderous dictatorship of Putin without saying that the average Russian is correct on their opinion about the LGBT community. If Russia were to invade Uganda and kill 50k civilians, there would be an outcry against it and anyone who said “But they hate The Gays” would hopefully be ushered peacefully out of the room, as the two are orthogonal.
Is Israel killing 40-50k people to secure gay rights in Gaza? Or have they been supporting Hamas because it allowed them to avoid a two state solution?
Trust me - we are not strangers to the idea that other oppressed communities have parts that are still prejudiced against us. That neither justifies genocide nor does it relieve us as individuals from acknowledging such extreme moral wrongdoing. If an unarmed person shot by police turned out to have opposed marriage equality, that doesn’t excuse the moral requirement to oppose that action.
So unless you think that anti-LGBT legislation and violence justifies terrorist activity including the slaughter of civilians within the US (it does not), I respectfully suggest you review your premises.
Do Americans hate us? The only people I’ve been verbally and physically assaulted by have been Americans.
So are you saying that Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians aren’t transphobic, or that we should go Gaza on Texas?
There’s entire branches of research on this, but I think one of the easiest ways to approach it for starting out is to think of the word “womanly.”
having or denoting qualities and characteristics traditionally associated with or expected of women.
I would strike the word “traditionally” from that definition since we’re talking about a comparative and differential analysis and concentrate on the “qualities and characteristics” part. Although most people in the US today wouldn’t think of it this way, imagine the perception of a woman army officer commanding male troops in 1845. You can take the same approach when looking through history or across cultures. What roles, qualities, and characteristics are associated with “women” and how do they differ and evolve?
There’s some complexity when you get into the details - indigenous cultures change when they come into contact with, say, colonialism, and the people who studied them might themselves be observing through their own prejudices. History is replete with examples of British colonialists being unable to properly deal with things like the egalitarian democracies of the northern indigenous peoples or the matriarchal social structures. Picture the used car dealership where the salesman still insists on engaging with the man even though it’s the woman buying the car.
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, and semiotics is the study of symbology. When we’re talking about these things, we’re talking about how the ideas and symbols associated with the idea-token “woman” differ.
The reason why this is important is that this is the crux of the transphobic argument. Their argument is cultural, not biological (although like I said, even their biology is sketchy).
I think a great study that includes cross cultural anthropological analysis of the role of women, as well as politics and economics, is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything.
Biologist here. The main problem with this argument is that Rowling is trying to win her argument through scientizing, and is not only doing it in an inept way, but in a way that’s completely ironic.
She’s invoking biology, but infortunately she’s adopting an approach that incorporates a high school level of biology. When we start teaching science, we start with highly simplified presentations of the major topics, then build both in breadth and depth from there. If you really want to get down the rabbit hole of sex determination (and multiple definitions of genetic and phenotypical “sex”), you really need to get into molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. She’s been advised of this multiple times by multiple experts, so at this point it’s willful ignorance.
The painfully ironic part is that she’s relying on an area where she has no expertise in order to make her point, while ignoring the fact that, as a world-known literary figure, she should know that the applicable part of the definition of “woman” is linguistic and semiotic - which is to say it’s cultural. The definition of “woman” was different in the 1940s South, among the 17th century pilgrims, the Algonquin tribes, cultures throughout sub-equatorial Africa, and so on.
Lemmy is small enough that “brigading” doesn’t feel entirely appropriate. Maybe “platooning?”
In any case, we know from other sites that downvotes increase the probability of getting more downvotes, and nasty comments increase the probability of getting more nasty comments. The same goes for upvotes and positive comments. It’s just social dynamics. Some subs on reddit existed almost exclusively to call out other subs, but I think that Lemmy’s user base is small and spread out enough that it’s not a major contributing factor in voting.
I think it’s mostly just people scrolling along, running across a hot take, and interpreting it according to the voting.
In any case, I would suspect that people would be more impacted by hurtful comments than downvotes.
In my opinion, nothing will beat the OG scene where the black hero in NotLD is killed by the white “rescuers.” I never got to meet Romero himself, but everything about that first movie was just brilliant.
I think the Dawn of the Dead remake was more fun than the original (the only remake with that distinction), but it somehow missed the mark on the cultural critique that the original had. The opening sequence with Johnny Cash was among the best opens ever shot, though.
Similarly, I think the opening - basically the first episode - of The Walking Dead was brilliant in an anti-Oz, anti-Willy Wonka kind of world transformation kind of intro to the series. It added a flavor of magical realism to the world/series that equaled if not surpassed 28 Days (if only because, as a series, they’d have more time to establish everything).
It can be difficult to tell ahead of time what will trigger a flashback or other reaction. Marvel movies, for example, include a significant level of guns and violence, but I have never experienced a reaction from them. Other movies, like Blackhawk Down, can send me into a spiral for a couple of days. I also cannot stand movies where the Army Man is the superhero as a result of his elite training - which was and remains a trope in many horror movies. Those don’t cause flashbacks, they just piss me off.
This was just a NSFW type flag for those folks who might be subject to that kind of reaction.
Just a recommendation - this might be one to skip if you have combat-related PTSD. The scenes from the trailer were quite realistic, and that was on my phone.
I’ve seen this before. It’s humpback whales. We need to find the nuclear wessels.
Those are already built into the process.
Evolutionary biologist here. I’d argue that, in the same sense as we see homosexuality in animals, we see trans animals.
Some animals physically transition - there are fish that will change their physical gender based on the current gender mixture in their local environment. Some behaviorally transition, with males taking on female roles. Sometimes a whole species is trans - like the female hyena developing male appearing genitalia.
Sexual orientation in the animal kingdom is not strictly analogous to that among humans (which has a much stronger social construct), and the same is true of gender (that is, human gender is a social construct). Because the range of adaptations are so diverse and so widespread, I’m very sure of the fact that they have different causes from each other as well as from humans, but the same is true of animal sexuality.
One of my favorite videos is of two juvenile gorillas walking behind a silverback going into an enclosure. One of them gooses the silverback and then turns and runs, and the adult turns around and smacks the other.
All too often, taking the “evil” path in RPGs just locks content. Most of the NPCs end up against you and you lose side quests rather than getting additional ones to compensate.
I think the Elder Scrolls games did well with the Thieves’ Guild and Assassins. There was a fair amount of content that was unlocked, and depending on your playstyle (and how much you roleplay in single player RPGs) you could still do major quest lines.
It’s just that, after decades of playing computer RPGs, I will tend to default to an paladin type character until I get the lay of the land.
I believe that’s not the law though. The law outlines the conditions under which a person has an “expectation of privacy.” If you’re inside your house, you have an expectation of privacy and so should not be filmed. If you’re on the sidewalk in public, you have no expectation of privacy. If you’re in a private establishment (restaurant or store for instance), the owner or their representatives can ask you not to record and you have to comply.
All of street photography depends on this kind of legal framework.