Old media has become such a minefield because there’s just so much awful stuff that went over my head at the time. I’m scared to recommend anything that I haven’t rewatched/reread in the past few years.

It wasn’t all bad, though. One of my favorite TV shows is Babylon 5, a 90’s sci-fi that I watched as it aired but hadn’t seen again until late last year. All I really remembered were the cool space battles and devious political maneuvering, but it turned out to also be an incredibly progressive show. One of the main characters is first introduced while wearing robes that appear to have been partially made from a trans pride flag!

I was mentally halfway into composing a rant about how unfair you are being to Pablo when I got to that last paragraph. “He has ADHD! He’s obviously stimming and self-medicating and you are terrible for criticizing him for that! This is just what untreated ADHD looks like!”

I’m glad you were able to turn things around and I hope you can be a little easier on your past self now.

This is the Price Master.

I don’t think streamers and video creators are more likely to be sex pests. You’re just more likely to hear about a sex pest if their career involves trying to be seen by as many people as possible.

Oh, sorry, I had the wrong guy. I was thinking of Dan Vasc, whose red-faced screaming meltdown is embedded in the article you linked. Must have gotten the names mixed up.

Let me try this again.

Why am I not surprised that the guy who turned out to be a pedo also gets upset about other people having pronouns?

Why am I not surprised that a guy who had a full crying meltdown over the existence of pronouns would turn out to be a pedo?

I was raised by these people. We read the Bible every day, and the family had weekly study sessions where we would all read a portion together and discuss it. We definitely went through the entire thing.

The problem is not that they don’t read the Bible. The problem is that they have developed an obscurantist interpretational framework which allows them to ignore the plain meaning of the text and twist it to conform with their ideology.

“oh that’s from the old testament, and Jesus did away with all of that.”

Except for the one little verse that says gay people are bad. That part of the Old Testament still applies somehow because reasons.

I’m also always amused at the concept of a perfect infallible being not getting it right the first time and having to push out the revised new testament.

I think the intended idea here is that God is guiding humanity like a parent raises their children and you need different rules for different stages of development, but that would mean growth and change are actually good things and the Fundies really don’t like that.

I am plural myself and have been since at least as far back as my early teens. Many of the people I know are also plural, at least one of whom has full-blown DID. I speak of these things from direct experience. It has nothing to do with government psyops or alien experimentation, and it was the Evangelical Christians who abused me, not the mysterious black-robed Satanists they kept making up stories about.

I suggest you read up on dissociative disorders. “Multiple personalities” is absolutely a thing, it just doesn’t match the sensationalized portrayals found in popular media. These disorders (and non-pathological plurality as well) can feature “repressed memories” in the sense that members of a system may not have access to memories that are held by other members. In fact, the experience of “lost time” is a common indicator of plurality.

The fact that memories can be falsely implanted, and often were during a particular period of media-induced mass panic, is not proof that memories can’t also be repressed.

I really need to watch/read The Expanse.

Space Mom and Space Dad are fighting again and the kids are getting sick of their shit.

First, I would move into my own place so I don’t have to deal with the constant stress of conforming to the expectations of my bigoted family members. Then, for a while, I would probably do nothing. I’m burnt out and have a lifetime of shit to process and heal from. I need time to pick up all the parts of myself that the world has forced me to throw away.

Eventually, when I’ve gotten a little better, I’ll probably start wanting to accomplish things again. Nothing so ambitious as the dreams I used to have, but they were probably unrealistic anyway. And with my basic needs covered, I would be free to do what I find important and fulfilling instead of spending all my time making line go up for some asshole billionaire.

I’ve always wanted to write stories. I used to draw and paint, a long time ago before the depression got really bad. I’m starting to learn 3D modeling and gamedev, and it would be nice to do that just because I want to, not because I’m unable to work a regular job and am flailing for a way to pay the bills.

Maybe I would just organize get-togethers with my friends where we play tabletop games and eat food I cooked for them using produce from a little garden I made.

There’s no shortage of things to do if I’m free to pursue them.

So would a cisgender man with De la Chapelle syndrome, who has XX chromosomes, be required to compete with cis women? Would a person with XY chromosomes whose body was assigned female at birth due to Swyer syndrome or complete androgen insensitivity be required to compete against cis men?

Or would you just disqualify anyone who has any intersex characteristics, which are about as common as having red hair?

So… After they have been on HRT for a while? Periods are triggered by hormones, and there’s a lot more to a period than just bleeding. Many trans women experience cramps, bloating, mood swings, etc. on a monthly cycle. There are also some cis women who have irregular or no periods; would they still be allowed to compete or would you ban them as well?

A Pharisee (politically powerful religious faction) lawyer decides to test Jesus by asking what the most important commandment is. Jesus answers by stating two commandments: Love God wholeheartedly, and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. All the other rules are based on these two.

The lawyer asks for clarification: “Who is my neighbor?” (He can’t mean everyone, right!? Some of them are, you know…)

Jesus responds by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan: A story about a Jewish man, much like the lawyer, who is violently mugged and left to die in the street. A priest and a Levite (member of the tribe in charge of the temple), both highly respected leaders in Jewish society, pass by while pretending not to notice. The only person who stops to help is a Samaritan, a member of a hated ethnic and religious minority that had recently defiled the Jewish temple in an act of terrorism. (The Samaritans’ own temple had been destroyed a century earlier and the date of its destruction made into an annual holiday, they were hated so much.)

“Which of the three men was a neighbor to the one who was robbed?”

“The one who showed mercy to him,” the lawyer admits, unwilling to utter the name of his mutual enemy.

“Go and do likewise.”

It says to love everyone, especially the ones society hates.

All the “I like Republicans’ fiscal conservatism” people in this thread need to read this. “Fiscal conservatism” and “small government” are and always have been dogwhistles for racism and other forms of bigotry. “Government waste” does not refer to inefficiency in government spending, it’s code for programs that help the poor and minorities.

The core of Conservative ideology is a belief in the existence of natural hierarchy, where all people owe privilege to the wise and righteous beings above them and are obligated to punish those below for their inferiority. The Conservatives themselves, having designed this hierarchy, are oh-so-conveniently at the very top of it. Everything that Republicans do makes sense when viewed from this perspective.

Trans-women athletes are essentially testosterone doping.

Are you seriously suggesting that trans women, the people taking anti-androgens to suppress testosterone production because testosterone is literally poison to them, are doping themselves with testosterone to gain an advantage in sports? Is that really a thing you believe?

They’ve got more muscle mass, and a heavier bone structure. That doesn’t go away after the transition. The British Journal of Sports Medicine confirmed that.

Why don’t we take a look at what the British Journal of Sports Medicine actually said:

One of the most noticeable disparities between gender groups was in height and mass (table 1), with (cisgender men) and transgender women being taller and heavier than their cisgender and transgender counterparts (table 1). Body composition measures (fat mass % and fat-free mass %, table 2) between transgender women and cisgender women found no difference. However, transgender women are, on average as a cohort taller and heavier.

So you’re partially correct in that trans women do, on average, have more mass than cis women, but only because trans women tend to be taller. Does that translate to an advantage in athletics?

Compared with cisgender women, transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing. Regardless of fat-free mass distribution, transgender women performed worse on the countermovement jump than cisgender women and (cisgender men). Although transgender women have comparable absolute V̇O2max values to cisgender women, when normalised for body weight, transgender women’s cardiovascular fitness is lower than CM and women.

Apparently not. Trans women, despite being larger on average, performed worse than cisgender women. This is from your own source. Did you not actually read the study, or are you intentionally cherry-picking to misrepresent its conclusions?

When you’re talking about the Olympics and college sports where the girls have trained their whole lives for a given event only to be beat out by someone who got to take the equivalent of human growth hormones and testosterone is unfair.

Imagine a woman training her whole life for an event and being beaten by Brittney Griner. That actually happened, and I bet it was emotionally devastating.

Imagine training your whole life, and then finding out that you were born with a permanent medical condition that will require taking drugs that reduce your athletic performance to below the average of your peers, and this condition will also make lots of sexist chuds want to ban you from sports entirely. I bet that would really be unfair, wouldn’t you agree?

Let’s also not forget that a lot of those “lazy” people are actually struggling with illness, insecurity, lack of critical resources, discrimination, burnout from “the grind”, or just plain don’t see the point in contributing much to a system that never seems to contribute anything back. Guaranteed housing, food, and healthcare would fix a lot of the problems that cause “laziness”.

I used to believe the “shitpost that got out of hand” excuse too. Let me tell you about something I witnessed a few weeks after that story first blew up:

I was watching an Overwatch esports stream because I still played back then and Blizzard was bribing us players to inflate viewer counts. It was a home game for the Dallas Fuel, so the match was taking place in Texas. Unsurprisingly, this meant the vast majority of the in-person audience was young white gamerbros with a conservative aesthetic.

It also happened to take place on International Women’s Day, so between rounds they would have one of the women who worked on Overwatch give a short speech or interview. These were generally focused on their experiences as a woman (and often racial minority), the value of diversity and tolerance, etc. I remember one of the people they brought in to speak was Anjali Bhimani, an American of Indian descent who voiced the character Symmetra.

Every single time they announced one of these presentations, a large number of audience members (Remember: white gamerbros in Dallas, Texas) would immediately raise one arm, make the OK sign with their hand, and wave it around rapidly while frowning. I had never seen anything like it, and given the context it was obvious what they were doing it for.

Blizzard banned use of the gesture during esports matches a few days later. The subreddit was predictably full of posts like yours, downplaying what had happened and ridiculing the ban as an overreaction to a stupid prank. Maybe it really was just a prank at the start, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it now, but there was definitely a time when fascists were using the OK sign as a dogwhistle and relying on the “media fell for a 4chan prank” story for plausible deniability.