Unacceptable Opinion

My job tends to push me well beyond 8 hour days & 5 day weeks. I feel like my job requires a ton of emotional labour, and I find that super draining. Normally when I'm working, I'm falling behind in sleep and self-care. If I have free time, often times I need to just chill out and rest. I tend to put something pointless on YouTube or Netflix just to relax.

When I have some time off, my body stops screaming to slow down. I catch up with sleep and exercise. I can read as much as I want to. I touch base with old friends who I haven't talked to in a while. I can do much more IRL activism. Basically, I become the person I wish that I was normally.

God I wish I had some passive income coming in so this could be my life. Everyday would be a vacation. I'd probably go to the office and waste my employees time with meetings so I'd feel like I was doing something. I'd go to a Global South country, pretend I'm volunteering, and meet other trust fund kids who think they're making a difference. If I had enough capital, I'd found some NGO that makes freedom maps, and the DPRK would get a very sinister colour. I could go to cocktail parties and brag about how my NGO is making a difference. That it's all funded by the exploited labour of my workers is easily forgotten after 3 martinis.

Looking back at the past, I can't see any path that I would become a capitalist, as there was no chance of me getting capital, except becoming an especially evil sort of grifter. Maybe I'd be a very different sort of person if my parents left me a 5 million nest egg.

But the pro-Palestine activists are anti-semites. I'm waiting for the ADL to condemn this.

> A Conservative student association has been condemned after attenders at one of its events were filmed singing a Nazi marching song.

>Footage showed a group of people at a black-tie dinner hosted by the University of Warwick Conservative Association dancing to Erika by German composer Herms Niel.

>The song was frequently played at military events in Nazi Germany and has also been used by modern white supremacist movements. Its lyrics are not explicitly political, but Niel was a member of the Nazi party and personally conducted bands at Nazi rallies.

>The Sunday Times, which published the clip, reported that it was shot at the association’s annual chairman’s dinner at a hotel in Leamington Spa. Just before the clip ends, someone out of shot can be heard saying: “Don’t film.”

>The Union of Jewish Students described the clip as “utterly abhorrent” and said it showed “blatant and unchallenged support for nazism”, adding: “Glorification of the Nazis has no place in our society, especially on campus. It is in no way acceptable and must be widely condemned.

>“We expect swift and decisive action from the University of Warwick and the Conservative party. Actions must have consequences.”

>The association told the MailOnline that it “wholeheartedly condemns the behaviour exhibited during this video and apologises for any offence that has been caused”.

>It said Erika was played for a “brief period” after a request from one member to the DJ and was “not included in the preplanned music selection handed to the DJ”. The clip was taken at a dinner of the University of Warwick Conservatives Association.

sorry I keep posting today

!covid-cool

OK this is my list. But first, I need to say that this isn't a condemnation of those into such thing. They just don't vibe with me.

1. Cannot get into ASMR. I've tried. Often its women 20 years younger than me, rubbing their fingernails on hairbrushes. The intentional sounds they make with their lips and fingers are things that would make me want to change seats on a bus.
2. Instagram. I was maybe the last person to get a smart phone. It was probably 2016. I'm just fully lazy to take photos of stuff. This is a real issue when I'm single and I need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things.
3. My students' taste in anime. I try to be all cool and show off my cool taste in anime, maybe drop a Azumanga Daioh clip. It's all ancient history for 17 year olds.
4. Photo and videos done in portrait mode. I guess I don't watch videos on the go. See #2

Things that the kids these days do better:

• Usually better opinions on current events than people my age
• I wish that cosplay existed when I was a teen. The default when I was younger was drugs.

If anyone insults the kids, I will visit you at your home and do an !adventure-time

> Jailed gay soldier: ‘Return of cap badge is a proud moment and it has given me closure’

> Veteran talks of his pride and says he would now encourage any young gay person to join the Army

> A former member of the Armed Forces who was jailed for kissing a fellow serviceman in the 1980s has become one of the first gay veterans to have his ceremonial cap badge returned to him.

> Stephen Close, 61, was court-martialled, discharged with disgrace, imprisoned and placed on the sex offenders register for having a relationship with a fellow soldier.

> Earlier this week, he was invited to the Royal Fusiliers’ regimental headquarters at the Tower of London to re-receive his military cap and badge, 40 years after his discharge.

> Mr Close, from Salford, Greater Manchester, said: “It was a proud moment for me. It took a lifetime, but it came and it has given me closure.”

> Mr Close was stationed in Berlin in 1983 when he became romantically engaged with a fellow male soldier after a night out. However, they were seen by a colleague who reported them. Restoring cap badges to discharged service personnel was among the recommendations made by an LGBT independent veterans review

> He said he was questioned by the Greater Manchester Police and swabbed for a DNA sample before being paraded around the base in front of his colleagues. He was then charged for gross indecency, jailed for six months, and discharged from the Army.

> Mr Close and his boyfriend served their time in separate prisons and never saw each other again. While in prison, he was forced to wear a red ribbon to mark him out to guards and fellow inmates.

> “In Nazi Germany, gays had to wear pink triangles, I had to wear a red ribbon,” he said.

> “I suffered with anxiety for a long time. It was frustrating really, it took a toll on my mental health. It wasn’t just the court case, it was the total abandonment from my military mates, who knew who I was. That hurt.”

> Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967, but it remained an offence in the Armed Forces until 1994. A ban on homosexuals serving in the British military was not lifted until 2000.

> Following Mr Close’s release from prison, he remained on the sex offenders register and was unable to work with children or vulnerable people until he was given a royal pardon in 2013 – the same year that Alan Turing, the mathematician and code-breaker, was posthumously pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II. ‘Too ashamed’

> Restoring cap badges to discharged service personnel was among the recommendations made by an LGBT independent veterans review last year.

>Mr Close said that for years he had felt “too ashamed” to attend Remembrance events and had found it too painful to attend regimental reunions.

> He said: “There were a lot of people in the room that day that came in after the ban was lifted.

> “My battalion has been quite proud to recruit LGBT recruits to demonstrate they’re openly accepting of gay people. I would encourage any young gay person to join the Army now, but it’s taken a while. Even a few years after the ban was lifted, I wouldn’t have, but I would now.

> “People are accepting it more now, eventually it will just become the norm. It’s a good thing.”

I've had a few events so far where the discussion/feedback part had 1-2 white guys doing longgggg monologues about something unrelated to the main topic. Last time had some stoner guy ranting about the confusing service at airports here (the event was about Gaza). Before that it was some boomer guy trying to explain Madonna to the non-white teens in our group (the event was about trans rights). Sometimes it's just two white guys monologuing back and forth. It's super counter productive and cringe.

I'm just thinking of a hard rule. Like "if you're a white guy, you're welcome, but please try to listen more and keep unrelated monologues to a minimum."

For the record, I am a white dude.

I follow this person on Twitter, and I'm sure she means this literally, and I'm OK with it.

My centrist parents put this own nonstop. The songs play in my head nearly every day.

> “Intel has been aiding and abetting Israel’s apartheid for decades, feeding its war chest, and now it is directly feeding its war chest while it continues its unspeakable genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. Intel is complicit in Israel’s genocide and its underlying system of apartheid. Intel’s M.O. seems to be, ‘Make Apartheid Great Again!’”

Please buy another chip. If possible, avoid positive coverage of Intel on social media, including Lemmy. Thank you.

I know a couple reddit mods IRL, and they're both business owners who can take time away and volunteer for hours a day on their phones. I've also seen enough Facebook mods, where you can see the uni and school they went to and its posh as fuck.

I'm definitely very supportive of modding. I think it's super that people volunteer their time to make communities safer. I just see that often those with the free time time have more income. One obvious example is Wikipedia, like the administrators are often there for much of the day. I know that there's a lot of Amerikan funding of Wikipedia editors, and this just makes it worse. I can't give up hours of every day to correct an obvious error, because there's some chud that's online 16 hours a day, who will revert any edit, and flood any noticeboard with tediousness.

I guess it applies to a lot of democracy "leadership" positions. Ideally workers would be filling those roles, but often we're too worn out to do much other than just show up.

I get this because people in my wider wider circle post or talk about their riding, and people in the comments treat horse trainers like they're doing a public service, taking those poor lovely animals out for a stroll or a obstacle course run. And the hobby is such an Instagramable activity because posh people do it, therefore it's cool. There's something attractive to rich people about someone on a horse with tight horse gear clothes.

I need to stress it: riding and owning a horse is expensive af. Even the lessons are absurdly expensive. No one in my circle of friends or even extended family does it. And the hobby is basically just golf in terms of environmental costs. Horses require a fuck ton of water and create a fuck ton more of shit, and they require an ungodly amount of land. I just assume that the labour for feeding and cleaning is done by immigrants, and white people get to to do the cool jobs like training.

Horse people like to brag that many/most of the world's monarchies and aristocracy is really into riding. To me, that should be a massive slight. If Elizabeth and Charles's favourite sport was horsing, that should be a big red flag.

And what gets to me is how horse people are all like "I love my horses". Like I'm sorry, Brett, but if you loved that animal, you wouldn't put a bit in their mouth and make them carry you around. Horse injuries with riders are very common, especially spinal injuries because weight has been placed on where it wasn't designed for weight.

I get in trouble because I point this out and every middle class person in the room gets super upset that their lovely horse hero got their hobby attacked.

Note: this post is only for white horse people. I don't know about nor have an opinion on non-Western horse activities.

I'm not even talking 5D chess, mid-tier bigotry that people used to get past censors before 2020. Now it's all x ethnic group = violence shit, and FB/IG gets the report and says that it doesn't violate their hate speech rules. And a lot of my lefty friends are complaining about this too. With a war going on, clearly it's in !amerikkka 's best interests to dial up the racism. I just fucking hate it that Meta is allowed to do this.

> Ukraine is cutting off consular services for its male citizens who live outside the country. The measure aims to force men back home to serve in the military, but some doubt its efficacy — and legality.

> "Good thing that I got my passport last year in Cologne and don't have to go back to the consulate," said Oleg from Kyiv, who didn't give his last name. Today, he lives with his wife and three children in Germany. That was his reaction to a statement from Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announcing that male citizens of military age who currently live outside Ukraine will no longer have access to full consular services. The measure is primarily aimed at individuals who have not registered with the military.

> "Living abroad does not relieve a citizen of his or her duties to their homeland," Kuleba wrote Tuesday on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, adding that he called for the measures to guarantee, "fair treatment of men of mobilization age in Ukraine and abroad."

How the fuck do we defend something as a "just war" when the citizens are desperately trying not to die in it???

Like everybody in France under 45 is fluent in English, and who the fuck wants to talk to an older European. Every single French colony without exception is phasing out or has phased out the use of French as France was such an awful colonial power. Did you know that Eclair is pronounced aey-clare? This does nothing for me. I guess some people want to read Les Miserables in the original Foot Mold Language, just like random people enjoy reading Ovid or Cicero in Catholic script.. And just like Latin, fuck that everything has genders and complicated conjugation.

I swear, the French teachers in school were trying to impart the vibe that if we know the French language, French women would have sex with us.

I refuse to defend any facts that I asserted in this essay.

Don't be nice, be honest. I can take some critique.

I actually used to do the no plastic thing until COVID, since then I've been paranoid about sharing the same public water thing as people who aren't careful. I'm not saying that's a good reason, the risks are certainly much lower than breathing in infected air, and probably pretty low in general.

I'm also aware that the whole personal responsibility thing is pretty neoliberal. I think there are limits to that argument, like I'm a vegan, mask wearing, public transit taking human.

Edit: I have a cup of coffee in the morning and another bottle of water at lunch.

I fell down the rabbit hole with that last NY Times article. The scientists involved are all part of the wider anti-trans movement, and the methodology is pretty shit.

Some tidbits:

>The final Cass Report has been out for less than a week, and already several groups such as Trans Actual[1], Trans Safety Network[2], and Transgender Action Bloc[3] have issued statements pointing out its worrying implications and shaky grounding. And now instead of talking about how the NHS has failed and is still failing trans children through long waiting lists and a lack of certainty, we have to talk about this review which failed to meaningfully address any of those issues.

>Our aim here is not to outline the contents of the report in full. Others have produced summaries and highlighted major takeaways, such as in these articles by PinkNews[4] and the Guardian[5]. There has also been reporting on the flawed methodologies[6] underpinning the report’s supplementary research, and how the people involved[7] in conducting the research may have biassed its conclusions. Unfortunately this report has huge implications for what the NHS is going to do next, and what life will be like for trans people, especially children and young people, in the coming years.

>We contend that the Cass Review is not fit for purpose. We suggest that it was not merely knocked off course by a flawed methodology. We believe the Cass Report is a deliberate part of a political project aiming to reduce the availability of trans healthcare, possibly eventually in its entirety. It is imperative that we understand this and act on it. The people who made it happen and are taking action based on it must be held accountable. For all these reasons, we believe the Cass Report must be thrown out entirely.

>An ‘Independent Review’

>The Cass Report has completely failed in its remit as an independent review. The research underpinning the review and its conclusions has fundamental flaws in its methodology which have led it to exclude a huge swathe of the relevant evidence and experience that exists in the field of trans healthcare. The review also has connections to prominent anti-trans figures and groups at a variety of levels, including conversion therapy advocates, who seem to have influenced the report from its rhetoric down to the design of its research.

This article puts non peer reviewed press releases above peer reviewed research and multiple recommendations by professional health bodies. Not once does the article mention "peer review". The article calls the A.A.P. "left-leaning". The article also uses sciency sounding words such as "systematic reviews", but the authors of the studies in the links are all ppl who ask co-write the same non peer-reviewed "gender care for teens is bad" articles.

Oh, NHS England is funding all this shit.

Another website calls out the article author for her regular transphobia. It seems she's pulled shit a few times.

I don't want to shit on doctors, but an individual doctor is not a researcher. Quite a few of them have had bad opinions, especially on topics that are outside their specialty.

Edit: people with much more knowledge than me have debunked this much better than I could have.

https://whatthetrans.com/cass-review/

I bought a vegan, coconut milk chocolate bar. It melted in the heat before I could finish it.

I tried typing this into Google, but it returned 20 pages of "My wife gained weight and I don't love her. How can I convince her to start an eating disorder?" FFS the West.

Comrades, I wish to fuck that my gf gaining a few kilos was even in my top ten list of problems right now. I tell her that's she's fine. We're getting older, and we both put on a few kilos. I try to be supportive, and just let her feel comfortable with the new reality. It's like a major stressor for her. I guess some of her workmates and relatives have made comments. I tell her to tell those people to tell me. What kind of person comments on another person's appearance?

Just a final rant. Both me and me gf work sorta stressful office jobs, and we both end up doing a lot of overtime. Stress, anxiety, and a lack of time contribute to a less than ideal health situation. I know IRL a few venture capitalist types that spend hours in the gym everyday, but they're the worst humans imaginable. My gf comes from a working class background, and she's one of the kindest people I know. I don't mean to shame anyone that loves the gym, but spending adequate time on fitness isn't super easy in late stage capitalism.

Anyhow, if any of you comment on anyone's weight ever, I will literally claw your face.