Fiona

This is a completely artificial US problem that has been completely solved in Germany and many other countries by requiring a 1€ deposit to unlock the cart and returning it when you relock it. So, complain to the store for failing to use basic countermeasures.

I’m not saying it’s an easy line to draw because you obviously don’t want to create incentives for bad journalism, but don’t want to make it too high of a bar to get into in the first place. I think you’d need to take things like the number of readers, the factuality of headings and content, the originality and the investigative value into account and be able to at least temporarily cut of bad outlets that spread fake/hate/… while at the same time ensuring that inconvenient truths make it out.

It’s not an easy task, but I feel there is more room to get somewhere useful than with the current model of billionaire-owned media that outdo each other with rage-bait and inaccurate/misleading/falsly balanced/biased reporting…

The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

I’m willing to agree partially: AFAIK the usual classification of the economic system of the SU is “state capitalism” which is indeed distinct from capitalism and socialism and I’m even willing to grant it that, if well executed (in the SU it mostly wasn’t) it has the potential to be better than capitalism in a few aspects.

That said, I agree about the notion that fascism is a form of capitalism: The two are often associated with each other, but at the end of the day quite distinct and orthogoanl systems. Fascism is about having a powerful leader who oppresses the population and the SU very much had that in an almost textbook-manner with Stalin, though I will also acknowledge that there were of course detals in hwo it differed from say Naziism in Germany at the same time.

No it’s more likely that they are an actual leftist. China and Ruzzia are (and the SU was!) fascist hellholes that have nothing to do with socialism and/or communism besides screaming it of the windows all the time.

And people who delude themselves to believe something else are really annoying…

I call bullshit on this kind of product! This just reminds me too much of the phytoestrogens that ruthless scammers sell on places like Amazon to trick uninformed trans girls into giving them money and believing they receive some medication, when it does nothing whatsoever for them.

The only “phytoestrogens” that actually do something are “phytoestrogens” sold by trusted homebrewers that are labeled that way to avoid seizure at the border.

In order to achieve medical effects, you need proper medication, in this case probably Prolactin. (I’d have to check to make sure, but there are plenty of reports of trans women who succesfully induced lactation medically to feed their kids and had no problem whatsoever after that point.)

The criminal part is that woman-specific options are underconstructed and overpriced compared to men’s clothing. That, and the lack of pockets. Seriously, my heart goes out to anyone who wears clothing targeted to women. I’d be fucking lost without pockets.

Trans girl who sews her own clothing here: I’ve honestly stopped bothering to add pockets to my clothes, because my handbag has REALLY grown on me and takes care of most of the need. Seeing all the guys doing pocket-checks, when I just grep my handbag and have everything in it is almost getting funny at this point. 😊

That said: Fuck the fashion industry, for so many reasons, including for what they did to fashion! Like: Even if we ignored all the human-rights abuses, the trash quality that they produce, the needlessly bad impact on the environment and all of these things, and we really shouldn’t(!!), I just assume most people here have already heard about those, that industry still has no fucking idea of what personal style is and how to support it. It’s a bunch of business-assholes that decide that some thing X is “in” and then you get only that, with the difference between X and the previous X being minute details in the cut, but it still remains the same concept of short, narrow skirt for example.

You are looking for a ankle-length circle-skirt (=flat lying skirt, very wide)? Tough luck, sew it yourself, nobody offers that! You want a long dress with long sleeves? Yeah, that doesn’t exist! (Unless you sew it yourself, like I have, which gave me the most comfortable piece of nightwear I’ve ever owned that I’m even somewhat comfortable to wear in public if I add a visual seperation with some form of belt.) I could go on…

In short: The fashion industry has sold people on the insane idea that jeans with a slightly different cut are a different clothing-style. They are not!

You don’t need quantum computers for that.

Okay, but if I compare my Ingo to Pfister’s Riverside the first thing I notice is this:

I very early on made a very conscious decision that I wouldn’t put much effort into keeping it in pristine condition and would instead allow it to develop some character; if some liquid leaves a stain by embedding itself into the wood, then that would be a part of the tables story. Burnmarks? The same. And not only does that attitude make you much more relaxed, it gives the table character and it has been dealing with it very well. When I wanted to have a power-strip in the middle of the room I just screwed it to the underside of the table and brought the cable with some cable-holders that I nailed into it, to one of its feet and have been extremely happy with that ever since.

Very few people, and I am very much not one of them, would be comfortable taking that kind of approach with a ≈1000€ table and I can assure you that I would be less happy for it.

And yes, I care about the table being reasonably durable (which it is), but it being cheap is a feature beyond price too, and the largely untreated pine from which it is made is something that I like: I really enjoyed the smell that it had when it was still new.

The scientist in me is sooo tempted by the idea of setting up a website where people have to classify pictures of cis and well-passing trans people by AGAB to really drive the point home that no, those fuckers CANNOT tell. They can usually only tell when the person in question is in the progress of medical transition which is an instance of “no shit Sherlock, why do you think we want to get this done as quickly as possible”. And yes, Enbys are a bit of a different story, but even a lot of them pass very well as the opposite of their AGAB, even though they often don’t even identify as that.

The big issue with this is that the vast majority of people making those kinds of statements are incapable of thinking rationally and instead just continue being bigots.

Misandry is sadly extremely widespread and often not even recognized as a problem: Erin Pizzey who invented modern women’s shelters quickly found out that women were just as capable of being violent to their partners and logically tried to start men’s shelters as well.

What she had not expected was that instead with the support that she previously got with women’s shelters, the same did not happen with men’s shelters; instead she received insane amounts of hate, victim-blaming and death-threats from radical feminists. She had to repeatedly flee her countries because of material safety-concerns as a result of that.

In some way the peak I encountered of this kind of hate was some Fedi-site that had a rule banning misandry (good!), because it also harms trans people. Now the second part is very much true and as a trans girl I agree that it does and that that is bad, but that should not be the primary argument for why it is bad. That’s like saying anti-judaism is bad, because some Jews are white or saying misogyny is bad, because it also affects trans men or saying anti-black racism is bad, because it might affect white people with a strong tan: The statement is true and the secondary victim group fully preserves protection, but by making that statement you betray an incredibly bigoted mindset that doesn’t even respect the primary target-group enough to care about them at all.

There is a lot feminism that really just amounts to men-hating and that is why I do not use that label for myself. I believe in equivalent treatment and rights and so should everyone;