Random Thought of the Day

[Nyctophilia]

Most children who believe that they are transgender are just going through a “phase”, the NHS has said, as it warns that doctors should not encourage them to change their names and pronouns.

NHS England says that the interim Cass Report has advised that even social transition, such as changing a young person’s name and pronouns or the way that they dress, is not a “neutral act” that could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning”.

I can't describe how much I hate this country (and I don't mean every person in it obviously I meant the establishment.) Like when I was 12 I wanted to move to Finland and I was always wanting to leave really, mostly due to issues with bullying in school/desire to escape. But now it's just so much more personal/deeper. Listening to politicians debate your existence in parliament and there's this kind of I don't know vibe. Like this upper middle class English vibe. People with game of Thrones names too like 'baroness Nicholson of winterbourne' wtf is that? Sometimes it just feels surreal. There's even this transphobic American who kept posting positively about the English monarchy on twitter, brags about IQ and is some kind of evo-psych professor, and then admitted to being like 75% English ethnically. I mean there are other kinds of transphobes in America but this is definitely a type (and you can be culturally so even when born/raised in America!) Richard Dawkins is a similar person. A puritanical sex-negative, homophobic, transphobic, stuffy, posh elitist hellscape.

There's no reason a futurology sub should be full of reactionaries but that thread seemed to be and even someone denying they're a conservative because... 'I'm a fascist' lol.

The battle for both is just getting started, in earnest, in North America. The UK is far ahead of us.

I think that is because we have the NHS.

This is actually the best argument against a nationalised health service I've ever seen. 'When your government are conservative assholes, they'll limit your options RE medically transitioning.' (I don't believe that's the primary reason though I think the culture here is generally hysterical towards things like this. Some areas of the US are equally hysterical and people face similar barriers, but some are far more open minded and have informed consent etc.)

As Zinnia Jones pointed out, they will need to engage in huge government overreach in order to stop all 'possibly vulnerable to transitioning' children and teenagers from engaging in any behaviour that could be a potential 'warning sign.'

Page 11/12 Social Transition, NHS appear to think “social transition should only be considered where the approach is necessary for the alleviation, blah blah, basically they think that they will decide when and how a child socially transitions. Good luck with that!

Exactly really. But I don't think they'll be content with that so they'll attempt to introduce legislation like they did with section 28. Of course in spite of that I learnt about all kinds of things and homosexuality was definitely brought up by kids during section 28 when I was in school. Later I had a homophobic teacher who ranted about how homosexuality was unnatural and I didn't agree since I have the internet and I'm probably just not that flavour of dickhead. Teachers 0 peer interactions/personality traits/internet/media 1.

Meanwhile in Denver Catholic schools (not creepy as [BEEP] at all):

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fg_WayWU...png&name=small

It's also worth noting that due to current stereotypes and gender roles being stricter for males they've decided that pretty much all non-conforming behaviour from males is automatically 'making an identity statement' which they think is bad, whereas genetic females who prefer wearing jeans and sports are fine. Evidently merely being socially anxious, depressed, or other wise exhibiting mental health symptoms is an 'identity statement' for genetic females though lmfao. (ableist incoherence.) Along with having any [BEEP] friends.

At least we have school uniforms here.

[Doseone]

Great another Republican governor in my state (not that it is surprising, but still).

[Nyctophilia]

Using a safety pin as a button but I think this one is just too bent/inefficient now to work without opening. I decided to wear this pair of trousers that are probably like 16 years old. They're this old gothy pair with zips all over them because I got sick of wearing jeans and haven't been clothes shopping in years except some tops I bought at concerts and online in 2016 (it's still years either way lol actually. I bought a Dresden Dolls hoody or an Amanda Palmer hoody - I'm so observant. It was a Dresden Dolls concert though. I liked the art noveau style - on Halloween 2018 and that was probably the last time. But yeah an actual shopping trip not for a decade probably.) I could find a belt I guess.

I need to go to a new concert soon so I can buy some new t-shirts lol.

From the massive hypocrites who brought you 'groomers(tm)':

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhOyIVRW...jpg&name=small

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhOy3O6W...jpg&name=small

I had such a gender conforming average childhood lol. (Well until about age 11 and decided I didn't want to start wearing makeup etc but that seems like a decent age where you can stop arguing Freudian [BEEP] and the culture around me irl was still normative.) Don't underestimate the power of a subversive mind. I can even use masculine heterosexual men as a starting point for my fantasies.

I don't really care btw I'm sure they're going to see worse things on TV etc. It's 'aesthetically tacky' is my primary thought. It also perpetuates the dynamic shown in the tweet below though ironically:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhJw_qyW...g&name=900x900

If you want your son to be great with women (and you want to approach this from within such a capitalist framework,) have them work in some kind of host club that appeals to women when they're adults. It's not really big in the west they have them in Japan. (for another comparison point Japan has two heterosexual valentines days one for women and one for men.) Of course you can't just stroll in and get a job either. I do love the point in this video where they bring up that a lot of the women who come to host clubs do similar work. So like they get their money from men by doing what they want, then go to these clubs and spend it by getting a bunch of men to do what they want. :') Also I just noticed that guy has a video where he goes to a yaoi cafe. Have to hand it to him this is a great idea for YT content lol. Low supply/high demand I think. I remember some genderfluid YouTuber made a video talking about this a really long time ago but you're not allowed to record in most of these places also it costs a lot more if you're a guy and you go there. Also he's (the English guy) wearing a suit (which I've noticed is the stereotype,) in that video but everyone else is just wearing a hoody lol. I don't think they're seriously working.

It's just such a paradoxical idea. The corny 'alpha' thing isn't to impress women (in general.) Men (in general) hate what actually impresses women that's why so many hate the female gaze in media and think 'it's gay.' There's a hyper capitalist/metrosexual element to it too (like Patrick Bateman and Christian Grey most of these guys lack sexuality or are ambivalent so people think they're kind of gay or asexual. Sherlock Holmes is another, and then the vulnerable androgynous boy band image. If you can incorporate the two that's probably ideal or something.) The 'alpha' thing is to intimidate and impress other men for competition purposes. Women have their own versions of these competitions of course. Going to hooters doesn't seem like a great way to learn to either intimidate other men or to be sexually successful as a heterosexual. That's the underlying implication here btw. Monkey brains of course. It's not actually about politics. Republican is short hand to these people for 'sexually successful heterosexual rugged masculine intimidating man.' I'm 99% sure this is just a signalling thing to try and piss off women. They see pissing off women as being integral to being a boy - not man boy - because that's how gender relations work for people approximately under the age of about 9 and especially from 5-7ish. There's a secondary 'let's piss off the LGBT+ community' thing going on as well of course, and that's how I found the tweets (via Contrapoints,) lol but yeah.

Also obviously it's funny because he didn't say sons he just said 'gen z' does bringing daughters to Hooters make them vote Republican? As much as there's no logic to any of this that seems like it would quite possibly do the opposite for several reasons.

edit: And yeah (ironically because all the tropes I mentioned in my post a couple of days ago, well not vampires but close,) that guy retweeted a news story about an event for college students with a topless nun burlesque performer that was like 'wtf is going on at Dartmouth' (oh I'm sorry the tweet was 'what the heck' no cursing here, only family friendly entertainment) hmmmmmmm. The culture war is giving weird sequel to Weimar Republic again. I'm going to guess his/their aesthetic issue with this is somewhere between these two videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvOXuZwOEvM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzyuYjIsYFE

also timestamp

and tbh this covers the drag aspect (there is some overlap between burlesque and drag as with Violet Chachki. I would say heteronormative culture is more accepting of the former though, but that depends on the ability to fit it in like glam rock also fits into heteronormative culture.)

College event for adults. This was the exact title: 'Topless ‘nun’ performs sexualized burlesque at Dartmouth drag show.' The answer is there somewhere ("they're women who are angry at us, women who don't want to have sex with us, men who do want to have sex with us under ideal circumstances, men who aren't masculine, and a whole variety of people who confuse us in terms of which of these four categories they could be placed in.") Also how are we going to decide who has won this game? I don't think anyone knows lol. Just going to keep doing this for another thousand years OK.

And the breasts should be emphasised/highlighted/a focal point but never actually naked (that's another line culturally.) This works globally btw lol it pisses Islamists off just the same and conservative women. I saw someone freaking out about a clip where some Iranian women were protesting topless 'They've exported the neo-liberal degeneracy.' (it's also quite possible the clip was from some other event as that often happens online.) They don't realise it's a global tactic. Some women were doing that in protests in the Ivory Coast against Laurent Gbagbo. I think they were also framing it as an African curse against him (we don't use this explanation in the West obviously but it's still taboo.) Also during the second Liberian civil war some women threatened to get naked.

Agitated with the lack of progress and the poor commitment toward the negotiations, the women stormed the building where the negotiations were taking place, blocking the entrance to the meeting room with their bodies and declaring that “no one will come out of this place until a peace agreement is signed” When the guards came to remove them, Gbowee threatened to strip naked, fully aware that in Africa it is a curse for a woman to deliberately bare herself. Faced with the dilemma of allowing the women to continue holding the negotiators hostage or having them strip naked due to their forced removal, the guards opted for the former.

edit: After all that they weren't entirely topless it sounds like, since wearing pasties (and there's some weird rule where the nipples are the bad part.) They're just annoyed by the aesthetics/pronouns lol. Lol (one joke):

https://twitter.com/search?q=pronoun...ed_query&f=top

R2-D2 is a Pro-Trump Alpha Male and C-3PO is a beta male Biden voter.

Think about it. It makes sense.

How dare you taint our most sacred of couples. Creepio and Far2. But he is correct that Creepio is the best character so he wouldn't vote for Trump or Biden. He has a greater agenda. The singularity engine and the tree world! He has a message for Han Solo over here too

[Doseone]

My laptop charger broke, so I'm using my phone for internet stuff, which I hate doing.

[Otherside]

Considering buying six nations tickets for the mother, since she really seems to like Rugby and she's not the easiest person to shop for when it comes to Christmas gifts.

But oh my god, they're so expensive. At least the ones I can see for the England Vs Scotland match at Twickenham, about ?90 per ticket minimum. The matches at Murrayfield in Edinburgh aren't showing a price but I'm going to suspect that those will also be expensive.

The tickets for Scotland vs France at Stade De France in Paris seem a lot cheaper at 25Euro, and it's not far or expensive from here on the Chunnel trains or a plane, but after the absolute hellshow that was the Champions League match (French Gendarmerie tear gassing a whole load of fans without provocation, nearly killing people in a crush and then blaming that on the fans, not to mention the fact that Stade De France is in Saint-Denis which is kinda infamous for being a pretty unsafe area, hence the fans also got mugged by the French gangs on the way out).

Not really sure I want to send my mother to the Saint-Denis for the game after all of that.

[Nyctophilia]

I miss you and I hope you're OK. I also feel like I shouldn't feel that way and that my emotions are creepy. I think I'm right even if it's just from time to time, and that it would be better to have other social distractions (I never used to miss people as much, or get as emotionally invested as I did later on when I was younger and more socially active.) I think it's probably just not good to have a stronger emotional reaction to/about someone than they probably do with you? But I don't really feel connected to most people either. It's reminding me of something I read about schizoid personality disorder. I guess I'm also thinking about that because I've been feeling trapped/wanting to escape again often this month because of certain future potential obligations. It is difficult being part of a family.

Guntrip11 suggests that the early childhood experiences of schizoids often are marked by alternating experiences of intrusion and abandonment. The legacy for the child is that his life force threatens mother, which is equivalent to the child experiencing that his life threatens his life. The child copes with this situation by splitting the self; the person is left with a deep and painful intimacy-hunger, dread, and isolation16. Furthermore, schizoid people believe that their feelings of love destroy the other and/or lead to their own destruction7,17,18. The author suggests that as a consequence this ambiguity the person could conclude that the less painful solution is being alone in order to avoid painful social interactional ambivalence.

I'm also pretty sure I have undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder though (I do have most of the symptoms/traits really,) which can be very similar. The other day I just broke down due to a change of plans which is very autistic. Due to my worsening mental health over the past several years I'm less able to cope with what used to make me uncomfortable so the emotional reaction/expression is stronger. (but also if it's something I have to do that I wasn't super keen on in the first place it's worse because I wanted to get it out of the way.) I actually get this now (no my external reaction wasn't that extreme lol but inside):

[Doseone]

I'm thinking about how an entire industry is built around the fact that our fingernails grow. People are millionaires because of it.

And my charger hasn't even shipped yet.

[Otherside]

Watching the Twitter-Musk saga unfold is wild and oddly amusing, my LinkedIn is having a good laugh at the whole thing.

1 - So the blue tick saga. Which went about as well as expected. Bunch of people impersonated companies. By all accounts, companies pissed off at the lack of oversight and the plummeting stock value have decided to cease the add money. Twitter will also probably be sued. I do feel the legal team could have informed him of this fact, but by all accounts, they were sacked.

2 - Then the sacking of senior engineers, or mass sacking. I'm baffled by this one. Sure - noone is replaceable. But you're letting a whole heap of seniors who know how things work go all at once? Well, this will end well...

3 - And that's exactly what happened. Declaring the issue to be "microservices", we decided we'd turn them off. Just so happened, that we turned off the microservices that allows for 2-factor authentication. Again, the engineers could have told them this was what that microservice did, and why 2FA is used. But by all accounts, they are no longer Twitter employees.

4 - Despite the complains about performance problems, the entire team responsible for monitoring performance was sacked.

5 - Supposedly Musk is a total tech genius, though he now seems to be asking random people on twitter to tell him how chrome works.

5 - Paranoid that the engineers still there will sabotage twitter, Musk has decided to make it impossible to merge in code to Prod without VP approval. I mean, sure, you don't want just anyone doing it, noone is saying letting the summer intern do it freely. Morale is apparently low. I would suspect that those who have managed to avoid being fired, will currently be dusting off there CVs. There's probably enough starry eyed devs enticed by the prospect of working at Big Tech to replace them, how long they stay though. And at the same time, there will be a whole heap of talented people who now have twitter on the mental, do not apply list. And we'll, you've just sacked a whole heap of senior people who know how the codebase works.

[Doseone]

@Otherside I too am amused by the whole Twitter debacle. I especially found it funny when he said that comedy was now legal on Twitter then started banning people for comedy a few days later. Lol.

[Otherside]

@Doseone LOL, I know right?

I am undecided about whether he is an idiot, or whether he trying to tank Twitter om purpose.

[Doseone]

So it turns out that it wasn't my charger that was the problem, but the power jack. I watched a YouTube video on how to fix it, but it seems too complicated for me to pull it off. It requires soldering and everything. The guy that did the video charges $100 to fix it. So I'd have to figure out how to package/ship it (I've never shipped my own package). Sigh. Why does stuff have to break?

[Otherside]

So, with Qatar getting the world Cup...why did Qatar get the world Cup?

I mean, we all suspect the actual reason Fifa awarded the world Cup, the US seems to think that it was awarded to Qatar for that reason as well. Though apparently if we mention that we're simply being predjudiced against Qatar, it couldn't possibly be brib...

But what exactly about Qatar made them think "wow! Qatar!" if the B word wasn't involved.

- It has absolutely no long standing tradition of football.
- It's a tiny nation, not much room. When it made its bid, it did not have much in the way of footbal infrastructure, or hotels for people to stay at.
- Of course, it has built these things, though not enough hotels, given the number of people who appear to be staying in the UAE instead (or just across the border in Saudi, even, though why TF...), and flying to Qatar for the day for the games. What has been built has been done using migrant labour from the global south, under a system called "kafala". It isn't described as modern slavery for nothing. Abuses of this system are fairly well documented.
- 60kish workers have died building these things, officially from cardiac arrest, more likely - exhaustion or heat stroke.
- The actual temperature of Qatar, meaning that it could not be held in the summer. To put the temperatures into perspective - Qatar recently installed aircon outside.
- It's very questionable human rights history. This is a Conservative Muslim state. Supposedly, protections are in place for unmarried couples to share hotel rooms, or for LGBT fans. We'll see. I'm fully expecting there to be one or two cases where the embassy is having to intervene, and so far, it seems there will quite a few performative displays of protests from Western football teams. At least, the England manager has made it clear he won't stop the English team from doing just that.
- Alcohol isn't quite banned, though it is expensive, and you need to have a "liqueur license." Football fans drink. Particularly those coming from Europe. Supposedly, they were going to allow this to happen. Though they have backtracked with not long to go, unless you have bought a hospitality package, and only Bud Zero will be available. Budweiser, the company providing the beer, is no doubt, pissed.
- The alternative venue, which looked set to win before the money changed hands, was the US. Which happens to have a lot of land, hotels, football stadium, temperatures that will allow you to play outside, allows you to drink beer and no kafala.

That said, any fan and government boycotts will sadly, only last as long as the European football teams not entering the final stages.

[Doseone]

I hate browsing reddit on mobile as it keeps trying to get you to download the reddit app. Also, you can't view nsfw material without the app.

[Otherside]

My LinkedIn now seems to be full of software engineers deciding they are not going to work for hardcore Twitter and taking the 3 months severance, and then the non-engineers who don't seem to understand why the software engineers aren't grateful for the opportunity to work 72 hour weeks with no pay increase.

FYI, I would also take the 3 months severance and work elsewhere, there is a shortage of SWEs right now, not so hard to find work in 3 months.

[Otherside]

Thinking on it, the layoffs and the way redundancy has been handled may be legal in the US, not so much here though.

There are different laws, different employment protections.

If you make someone redundant in the UK, for example, you have to have a consultation period, unions may end up getting involved and negotiate. There's notice periods, minimum of a week if you're a new employee, longer with increasing length of service.

You can't really just sack someone by email, not an instant "you won't be coming back", can't instantly just say "sign this by Thursday or be sacked." Again, notice periods, have to prove gross misconduct and refusing to do hardcore twitter isn't that.

Then there's the working time directive, legally, stating how long you can work per week, though you can sign those rights away.

He's going to end sued, the prospect union that seems to represent quite a few will no doubt, sue.

Employee protections are stronger on the continent.

What an idiot. Lesson to be learned? Check the law in other countries before you assume it is the same.

Then the realty thay there is a IT-worker shortage in UK. If you are in IT, have a UK/IE passport or other right to work, particularly if senior level - you will easily find work. And they will go elsewhere. The ones who seem to be staying are those on visas, tying them to job or be told to leave by the Home Office -though I suspect they are looking for a company to transfer to.

It remains to be seen if twitter survives. Perhaps he thinks he can run the company on visa workers and juniors desperate for a few years at big tech on the CV.

Also 1am code reviews? Number of people who think that's cool. Me? I'd tell work to bugger off at that hour. And I'm certainly not flying to the other side of the world at short notice.