In all seriousness, we all appreciate your work. These are the growing pains that are to be expected, and your hard work and transparency (and writing it up at a level that even I can understand) is welcome.

When another trustee asked Dungan if she personally objected to an illustration of cross-racial friendship, she demurred, simply declaring that she was just trying to avoid "situations like that." Situations like what, exactly? She didn't say. Dungan's behavior is a perfect illustration of the "anti-woke" tap dance. The person alleging nefarious wokeness never admits to their own bigotry, instead pretending that they're reacting to "woke" people who are "pushing" an agenda, in this case through innocuous poster art. Of course, the entire premise of the argument is rooted in bigotry, as this example shows. It presumes that the feelings of real or imagined bigots who might take umbrage at such an image are of paramount importance, and that everyone else's freedoms must be curtailed to appease them.

Fucking thank you, Amanda Marcotte. Nail on the head.

And thank you for using the word “innocuous” because my god it’s a picture of people holding hands in a school. It probably had something like “teamwork makes the dream work” on it because holy fuck these people probably boil their eyeballs in piss before they stick them in their sockets.

Yeah, I agree with this suspiciously named man. Whether it happens sooner or later, Reddit’s death is on the horizon, as it will keep making the wrong choices and so steadily lose those communities and content that built it in the first place.

“We can always tell!”

They can’t, but that’s not a flaw: the stated aim is to terrify and harass trans people out of public venues, but the side effects, of policing ANY behavior or presentation that is outside of cultural norms - autistic people, short haired women, effeminate men - the point is to use cruelty to enforce homogeneity.

“What a lovely forest, pity there’s trees in it.”

Naughty toddlers get sent to the Sky Prison.

Watch people build a graveyard of dead 3rd party apps, which gets wiped every so often by admins.

Which then gets covered up by a vague drawing that oscillates between a middle finger and a pixelated penis.

At this point if we go back to messenger pigeons I half expect to see spam tied to the other leg.

So here’s what we do: we start a TikTok challenge. “Nickname November” or something like that, where you use a different name every day of the month for maximum confusion. Get a couple classes doing it, especially if there are any trans kids in the school, and you can see how far you can stress the system.

For the schools that require physical signatures, that’ll piss people off right quick. For the ones that just use an automated email and call it a day, toss in a twist: have each student loudly announce their new name at the start of every class, AA style. Heck, get the school announcer in on it. “Chess club on Wednesday has been cancelled, and Squidward Jones is now going by Jackie McJackson Johnstone.”

They want a ridiculous law to be followed? Okay, here you go.

Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.

“There are 150 ICBM missiles that are being controlled by that Air Force base and by these individuals.”

“I do not want someone who doesn’t know if they are a man or a woman with their hand on a missile button.”

His “argument” is that trans people are inherently unstable because they are trans (really, questioning, but that distinction doesn’t matter to him).

This is what queer people are dealing with: the constant pathologizing of our very existence to the point where we’re viewed as a threat. This is why I can never accept people who continue to vote for these dangerous assholes: they either benefit from or are indifferent to the suffering this rhetoric engenders. It’s not a difference in opinion and deserves no such protection.

While TikTok has removed multiple videos depicting James narrating his abduction and death in Kirkby, England, many remain available to view on YouTube.

This is fucking ghoulish.

Does this constitute psychological torture? I’m serious. This is so much eviler than what Westboro does.

Christ. I already hate these people.

For any lurker out there: a lot of it is just mental. It can be a hurdle to get over the first few times, but once you start posting and getting responses it feels more like a conversation than a feed, and you can get more out of it.

I lurked exclusively on Reddit because there were too many people to be able to talk to anyone (there’s a Yogiism for you). It’s all just a series of comments there.

So give it a chance, see if you like it some more. There are plenty of nice, knowledgeable and talkative people here to meet.

Referring to the potential starvation deaths of a large group of people as a positive for climate change is like saying you’re glad someone died early from a car accident instead of suicide.

Right? “May cause bisexual yearning” is supposed to be a warning?

Here’s a condensed version:

“It’s not that mistakes were made, you just got angry. Spontaneously. Weird how that happened, when we love you just, like, so much.

Anyways, let’s move on. Fill out a form to become a member of an unpaid focus group.”

The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.

I’d imagine that there are a lot of users and communities on here that want law enforcement as far away from the Fediverse as possible…

America is harder to live in the poorer you are, and it’s on a steeper scale than in other industrialized nations because there are fewer and less robust social services, especially health and child care, and declines in union membership have paired with a rapid increase in wealth inequality that is forcing the shrinking middle class downward and stomping on the poor even harder.

You can live a comfortable life (for now…) if you are firmly middle class and up. Your higher salary than your counterparts in Europe is eaten away at by higher costs, and you deal with risks that they don’t in the form of transportation being car dominated (more accidents and less walking exercise) easy access to guns (the most dangerous being the one in your own home, to you) and less strict food safety laws. Compared to those in Eastern Europe, however, your likelihood of suffering from a foreign attack is drastically lower, not that it was ever very high to begin with.

One thing that Americans take pride in (and rightly, mind you) and full advantage of is our First Amendment right to not have our speech be curtailed, so a large amount of the bitching about America, and especially in English, is Americans bitching about America(ns). So there’s a cultural element to it that may or may not exceed the truth.