stonecraftwolf

Where is the overleveraging now?

Out of curiosity, what don’t they understand about advertisers?

Paying for a VRChat+ subscription comes with an increased trust level, so possibly that.

Again, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You keep referencing talking points from ahistorical views of two societies as though they represent the entire world. I suppose to you, they do? You might be better served by reading about the world at large. Off the top of my head, Japan provides an interesting case study in views of homosexuality (and bisexuality) pre- and post- western influence.

The words themselves are modern inventions, reflecting the western medicalization of the concepts, which in turn reflected bigotry — declaring something an “illness” is a great way to get people on board with eradicating it. But gay people and gay relationships existed in pretty much every society for which we have records, long before the British decided to coin a new word. (And in fact, so did trans people.)

A rose by any other name smells just as sweet, etc.

Your ignorance on this is truly stunning.

Something like less than 1% of trans people regret transition, and of those half of them regret it because of social costs, i.e., bigotry from transphobes, and another big chunk regret that they transitioned as binary when they were in fact non-binary or vice versa. Fundamental to your argument is the idea that we should not trust trans people about their lives or their feelings. It’s bigotry.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, your argument is disingenuous, unscientific, gaslighting propaganda pushed by bigots, and it has the direct result of harming trans people.

You have no idea what you’re talking about. “Gender critical” people (they are not feminists) regularly harass trans people, including kids, to the point of suicide. They lobby for discriminatory legislation that makes life-saving medical care difficult or impossible to access for trans people. They are instrumental in spreading bewilderingly unscientific anti-trans propaganda with the deliberate effect of harming and demonizing trans people, with the predictable effect of inspiring more hate crimes. They organize in order to harass and abuse trans people out of employment and housing. They just straight up lie. And if you were to peruse that subreddit, you’d also see them regularly joke about lying to AFAB trans people in order to exploit them for sex because those were the “hot butches” in a way that was incredibly hateful and, honestly, pretty rapey.

These people are abusers and bigots. They’re no different than any other hate group, except that they often use the language of victimhood to cloak their primary mode of social aggression. (This is the mode of aggression that it is most acceptable for AFAB people to express, so they get really, really good at it. It has a lot in common with the dynamics of emotional abuse, and, for lack of a better term, mean girling (which is, especially after adolescence, a particularly effective form of abuse)).

So you have no idea what you’re talking about, but based on your other comments in this thread — you genuinely seem to think homosexuality is a modern invention? And that it came out of some sort of predatory behavior? — it seems this is a willful ignorance that accommodates the hate and disgust you already feel for certain minorities.

Holy sh*t there’s a movie??

Thank you for making my day!

I bet you will. Try to be kind to yourself as it happens. My experience is that it can be very painful — like when your leg falls asleep and then you suddenly get circulation back, but for emotions — but worth it.

Reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. spoiler warning

The MC is a conman, given new life and a job resuscitating the postal service after a corporation has taken over and gutted the Clacks (in-world version of the Telegraph). The MC meets the financial architect who masterminded the takeover of the Clacks and is struck with immediate recognition: this guy is just like him, only infinitely better at it. He plays three card Monty with entire companies, and the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake is massive.

If you do it with enough money, it’s not a crime anymore, it’s just business.

I would add that this can be extremely challenging (and possibly triggering) for people who had traumatic childhoods. In those cases it is best to start with loving compassion towards a beloved pet, for example — something simpler, that is not so emotionally charged.

Either way the metta instruction I’ve encountered has often failed because it failed to emphasize the sensation of emotion. It’s not lying there thinking about how much you love something. It’s thinking of the thing or person you love and trying to locate the specific sensation in your body, and then grow it.

Many people mistake ritual dissociation for meditation, which can be really really harmful.

I’m curious about why you talk about Apple as though it’s a monolithic entity making coherent decisions. Tim Cook doesn’t need to have signed off on his himself as part of a grand strategy for it to have happened, and indeed the only evidence we do have available indicates that monopoly abuse of power is a tactic Apple has deliberately used before. Even if this is, as RileyJames posits, just the head of one team asking another for a favor in pursuit of an acquisition, it speaks to the corporate culture at Apple. Regardless, given the balance of actual evidence, it seems more absurd to extend the benefit of the doubt to the corporation that has abused market power in the past.

And while I don’t know if this was deliberate or a mistake, I think the more interesting point is that even if it was a mistake it demonstrates the danger of monopoly. The problem is structural. When a company has the market dominance of the FAANG companies, abuse is inevitable.

Fuck I hope not. I just googled the CWD occurrence map in the US. It’s...very scary.