sapient [they/them]

Autistic queer trans²humanist and anarchist. Big fan of dense cities, code, automation, neurodiversity, and self-organising resilient networks.

Pronouns: they/them, xe/xem, ze/zem

Favourite Programming Language: Rust

Alt-Account Of: @sapient_cogbag@sh.itjust.works

  • 3 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle






  • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pubtoLinux@lemmy.mlZRAM is insane
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    How does this compare to zswap. For me, if you still want a swap device on a real disk, this might be better? Idk >.<

    Edit: arch has zswap enabled by default https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap - someone below says it is better if you have zswap when you already have a swap device :)


  • tr*p

    This is generally a censor of the word "trap". While it obviously has several non-slur meanings, it is also used as an extremely visceral anti-trans (and in particular, anti-transfem) slur :/

    The implication is that transfem people are "secretly gay men trapping straight men into being attracted to them". It is associated with simultaneous sexualisation, homophobia, and transphobia >.<. If someone called me that IRL I would be seriously worried for my safety, as that's often the kind of thing people would say before either raping or killing or injuring a transfem person for """threatening""" their fragile sexuality, then using the trans panic defense.

    The term got it's start on 4chan, and people used it for femboy characters in anime (who are often poorly translated and may actually be trans in a lot of cases), but the kind of dehumanisation aspect of it means it very very quickly became a viscious anti-trans slur :/


  • Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

    Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it's own sources as well and provides a decent summary.

    Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

    Yeah because you're from hexbear and I don't trust you to engage in good faith or not immediately jump to the worst possible interpretation of something I said or missed (like you have done with the trans clinic thing), or do the whole thing where you assume only you are right and people can't reasonably disagree on something, or always pivot to "but the us/uk did..." and act as if the inevitable and only correct conclusion to any debate or discussion is that the US and "West" (which is itself a messy concept) is worse in every aspect of every single thing than anywhere else in every possible action. And I, you know, can read the information and compare it with the uk/us pretty quickly, without listing every single tiny factor that went into my consideration.

    Frankly, the behaviour of hexbear users has made me always check the accounts of people with square-brackets pronouns before engaging unless I'm in a community on an instance that has defederated. I should not feel this way when pronoun tags are a trans supportive thing and would usually make me feel more comfortable when talking with people. But blegh.

    I will probably block after this because all engaging with 95% of hexbear users does is cause me irrational amounts of stress every fucking time because of the constant goddamn micro-nitpick and aggression on every fucking thing, constant assumptions of superiority and assuming they are always completely correct in ever single debate or discussion, it's like they can't even conceive of being wrong on something. Honestly this is just a vent at this point lol, not even something you specifically have done since you're nowhere near the worst I've come across from hexbear.

    Engaging just makes me feel the need to analyse every single thing I say to see if it will set the hexbear folks off on a tangent or completely dismiss you and do the weird misdirection and whataboutism and such. It makes me afraid to ever engage with hexbears in any manner, or overanalyse every tiny thing I say in case they use it to deliberately evade my main point like I was forced to do when younger in very hostile situations as an autistic person to avoid unpredictably angry people, and just like then it brings very little practical success because all my effort is spent trying to find any tiny way what I said might be interpreted in the worst possible way and there's always some excuse anyway.

    China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

    True. This doesn't change the other stuff I mentioned, and the UK also claims to be "improving" clinics for trans teens while doing the opposite, so forgive me for being a little skeptical of the persistency, especially since the hrt stuff is from 2022 and this is from 2021. It's also only in a couple provinces. However, if it pans out, which it seems to from what you see, it's a positive move, but again, it seems to be Shanxi and Beijing.

    This was also explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia article and I did see it. But it was only a single province, compared to the entire government's more negative actions >.<


  • The point here is that it is demonstrably obvious to trans people living in the US and UK that China is better to us than the US and the UK, one of which is currently performing a genocide against us and the other of which is transphobic on a near daily basis and is expected by the community here to follow in the US' footsteps if it gets the chance.

    China is pretty blegh actually.

    They are actively making things worse w.r.t accessing HRT online, and require even more nonsense than the UK on changing legal ID, including shit like spousal approval, familial approval, and permission from various things like work, school, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_China

    Access to hrt is also comparable to the uk by the looks of it. More importantly, the illegality of gay marriage combined with the massive approval process for id change means that trans people with different-gender partners can't marry legally, and trans people with similar-gender partners are probably? in an unfortunate position here, though the page doesn't include info on this >.<

    The more sex-segregated components of various aspects of China also causes significant issues >.<

    I'd say it's worse in terms of being able to socially and medically transition, but there's less overt hate. It's more death-by-bureacracy and a need for even more extensive social approval to transition (I'm almost impressed that they managed a worse system than in the UK). The greater hold the Chinese Government has over their internet means accessing DIY HRT is likely much harder :/

    People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong, they both have different issues. The UK in particular, most of the transphobia I experience is from institutions and media rather than "on the ground" (though this def. happens too), and the way the government is going with using us as a scapegoat is very concerning. But the - for now - lower amount of control over communications means I got started on DIY HRT pretty simply and pushed my way through the "official" system.

    On a side note, stuff like this is one of the reasons opposing authoritarianism especially w.r.t communication is important, it makes it easier to do things the government has not approved of because the infrastructure is not in place to control communication and coordination as effectively.

    The US is as always a clusterfuck because of it's more federated nature, some of their states are trying to do genocide while others are acting as refuges and have things like informed consent HRT access and active protection against the more hostile states . - but fuck me if the dems aren't spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.

    Honestly most large states constantly try and censor the internet with stuff like this, though in the US/UK/Europe it has been a lot less successful at least. In this case it's a more brazen attack on queer people, but this sort of stuff seems to happen every couple years. It's very frustrating >.<

    People definitely have some double standards though - maybe racism or the false idea that China is communist - but it doesn't mean the Chinese govt is good on things, in my observation, just that people underestimate the things European countries, the UK, and US states do.

    They may be better or worse and just because people often have double standards doesn't make the Chinese government better (though it is often not worse in some respects, but the overall greater control of communication and computing infrastructure means it is harder to evade the subjugation or organise around it via tools like Tor, and the greater centralisation means that if the government decides to do something particularly awful it's both harder for public dissent to occur and harder for regions to undermine efforts like that or even actively counter them :/).





  • US has no freedom of the press because all media is privately owned and even state media is privately financed. The entire 4th estate is literally just an appendage of the ruling class.

    This is not the same as jailing "unapproved" journalists. The point is you can start your own paper/report/etc. without central approval of what you can and can't produce. The US is still a capitalist and authoritarian nation which causes some hindrances to this sometimes (see the recent police intimidation of that local newspaper), and makes it harder (but NOT impossible) to start things like coop newspapers.

    Secondly, I generally don't buy into viewing people's and organisation's behaviour in this sort of way, at least not exclusively. It's too oversimplified and highly reductionist, even if I do think class is an important aspect of behaviour.

    Refusing to acknowledge the differences doesn't mean they don't exist ., even if most are capitalist most of the time, they promote very different things and engage in different behaviours (and then there was that one Financial Times oped promoting the end of capitalism which was hilarious ;3, but it illustrates my point that these organisations are distinct).

    It also provides more routes for important information about abuses of power to get out, which is the most important aspect even if capitalism does seriously get in the way of this due to private accumulation of media corpos.

    Furthermore, the US generally doesn't censor social media most of the time, and in particular has very loose libel laws which make it harder for billionaires (other than the ones that own a specific social media platform) to shut people down, like JKRowling recently did to people calling her a TERF on twitter who live in the UK >.<

    Freedom of the press isn't private ownership of the press, it's independence and democratic oversight over the press, something that exists in no capacity in America.

    What I consider is "degrees of freedom". Private ownership of the press is somewhat more free because it isn't directly controlled by the government, but it is still much less free than autonomous and independent cooperatives or collectives or other groups taking part in the press, and capitalism also reduces the ability for journos to report on certain stuff in certain ways. The important aspect is that people can form new outlets autonomously and they usually can't get shut down easily .

    The fewer outlets, the less "free" the press becomes, and the harder it is for new, independent outlets to form, the less "free" it becomes, and the more hierarchical each individual outlet becomes, the less "free" it becomes ;p (which is why private and especially capitalist ownership and class dynamics do have pretty significant issues of press freedom) - really the thing I value is information freedom and transparency, press freedom and universal access to an open and anonymous internet are means to that end.



  • I agree with not tolerating tankies.

    This seems a little.... dramatic, however. Please take care of yourself - I know how drama can be and if you are anything like me the urge to reply ASAP can cause anxiety and stress and taking time to breathe may be helpful. Especially with tankies and a more general variety of internet folks who can make people feel the need to constantly watch anything you say cus they tend to pick up on some tiny thing and run with it or engage in bad faith :/ nya




  • Did I ever claim that capitalism is not authoritarian? I certainly consider it to be authoritarian >.<, and more specifically I consider the USA (varying by state and location) to be pretty authoritarian in a lot of ways, though they have decent press freedom (even if there are pretty severe issues with copyright and larger media conglomerates being owned by investment corpos), which is kind of an anomaly given many other things like drug laws and police militarisation and such :/ (many other things too)

    I could go on a whole thing about hierarchy & subjugation, organisational structures, top-down coercion, incarceration, prescriptivism and more rigid societal role-setting (including micromanagement and control of personal behaviour in particular, and government promotion of a culture of snitching and general obedience), information suppression usually by more violent means, and centralised governance often associated with strong cults of personality, but this would take ages and I have other things to do.

    These are all aspects of and related to authoritarianism and constitute a cluster of concepts I would consider a definition ., though lots overlap with each other nya, and I don't really feel like digging down rn to get an exact phrase.

    It's more than just about distribution of resources (though that is an aspect often used to enable it and one of the reasons I consider universal access to certain things the bare minimum on the route to true liberation), and related to the degree to which systems and ideologies micromanage people and prescribe roles and behaviours for them, as well as the degree to which there is concrete and direct influence of people on social structures and consensus building, plus high transparency in decision making processes ., and the less coercion involved in anything the better (and if there is coercion, transparency, scrutinisability, and routes for avoiding poor outcomes (as well as consensus based methods to alter any use of such) reduce the authoritarianism). There's more but this is a start.

    It's related to hierarchy and coercion, but it's not just that but also accountability, transparency, and consensus building without undue influence from smaller groups of individuals, plus lack of micromanagement and prescriptivistic roles and paths ;3. As well as encouraging people to think critically and come to their own conclusions (though this applies especially to people claiming to be "free thinkers" while parroting bullshit).

    I could also talk about groups becoming a new ruling class while claiming to liberate, or several other aspects too.