One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville? I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. “Gimme five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…

The SJWs aren’t the ones abstaining, it’s the centrists on lemmy.ml

Y’all straight people who only just heard of this discourse should spend more time listening to asexuals

They’re just being puritanical or shy with their movie watching company.

Or asexual and sex repulsed, or sexually traumatized. Why do you jump straight to calling people reactionaries when there are perfectly good legitimate reasons for their behaviour? It’s almost like you don’t believe in asexuals.

Can’t you red card the bullies?

Humanity has never built anything that has intentionally lasted 10,000 years

You don’t know what those cave people were thinking when they drew those pictures.

These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.

Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.

Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.

There’s not 0 indication of tone through text. I’m autistic and even I know that. Watch this:

Hey, mate! Good to see ya. How’s the missus doing?

Hello Richard. Thank you for joining us today. Is Selena settling in well?

tbh I thought it was satire

Would you define a long distance relationship that’s lasted for multiple years with daily video chats as online dating?

I know someone who, when it’s having a panic attack and is asked a question, it asks the person asking what the correct answer is. Even if they have no way of knowing.

I have a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to politics that convinces people I’m some sort of troll when I say completely reasonable left wing political views. I guess other leftists feel the need to qualify and speak softly and really try hard to make themselves understood by the other side. I don’t care about making my views palatable to reactionaries, and I guess for some reason that makes them unpalatable to other leftists as well. It’s really fucking weird.

I think they’re lashing out. Coal is very harmful to the environment and to other people. They should pick a less violent hobby.

But he doesn’t want different neighbours. He loves Sponge and Pat.

If you like the tactics soulism adds to the leftist arsenal, you should read the soulist manifesto at http://soulism.net. There’s only a few dozen of us, but after reading the manifesto, I saw some pretty huge failures in the mainstream leftist worldview. Most leftists want to win a material victory against Capital, but they categorically refuse to deconstruct the social reality created by Capital to control us. Socially, they’re reactive. They take the way their opponent describes the world at face value and only disagree when the scientific method disagrees. But most of our reality is social, not scientific, and the scientific method doesn’t help you with that. The mainstream right is much better at crafting realities - a process we soulists call magic - than the mainstream left is. Escaping the body prison doesn’t really help if you can’t even begin to challenge the mind prison.

I thought so. As a soulist, I’m interested in deconstructing and remixing social constructs into forms that benefit social justice. I noticed the hypocrisy of transphobes crying wolf about kids going through irreversible changes, and figured out it takes next to zero effort to use their own language. In appropriating the forms of our enemies’ arguments, we reduce their disagreement with us down to its fundamental form - in this case, a religious belief in genetic destiny. That’s the only thing setting their arguments of “for the children” apart from my arguments of “for the children”. And this is a much harder thing for a bystander to accept unquestioningly than “for the children”. I like showing bystanders what’s really setting our enemies apart from us.

Think of it like rhetorical kung fu. Using the opponent’s force against them

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It’ll start right back up again completely naturally as soon as you stop taking the pills. The pills are hormone blockers. The gonads still produce sex hormones, but the blockers react with the hormones and render them inert. The inert hormones are passed as urine like any other waste product in the blood. A few days after you stop taking the blockers, they’ll run out and the sex hormones will start expressing themselves just like they would in someone who never took the blockers. Puberty will begin (or resume) just as nature planned.

The only side effect is that you won’t go through puberty. Unfortunately, this does mean you’ll have a child’s amount of bone density, which is not good for a lifetime. But there’s absolutely 0 risk in delaying puberty until age 18. You’ll just grow up slower, the same as any late bloomer.

Hormone blockers are actually a component in an adult trans person’s hormone replacement therapy. To take me as an example, I have a pair of testes which produce testosterone. So I take an antiandrogen; a testosterone blocker, to suppress the effects. And I take estrogen pills so that I have a female blood chemistry. When I started taking hormone pills, my body reacted just like any teenage girl’s body. I got softer skin, mood swings, and better hair. I tell you what, having the emotions of a teenage girl as an adult is an absolute trip. I’m glad they’ve settled down since then. Some trans women I know even got period cramps, despite not having a uterus. I don’t envy them.

The body is genetically programmed to respond to sex hormones in a certain way. It doesn’t matter what you were born as, everyone’s organs, muscles, bones, and brain have a genetic programming that responds to estrogen one way, and testosterone another way. The potential is already inside every living human. That potential remains there for your entire life. Puberty blockers can’t do anything to take it away.

If I ever stopped taking my testosterone blocker, I’d start growing bigger muscles and hair in strange places. My body would resume functioning like a male body. One day I’ll get my testes removed, and I’ll never have to worry about that again. But that surgery is only available to adults, and it requires a psychiatric assessment. I’ve been openly trans for years and years and I’m still not allowed to do it yet. There’s absolutely no risk of a child going through the procedure without the absolute greatest caution, and a very urgent, life-saving need. And even if a horrible one in a billion mistake was made, they could just give the kid hormone pills the same as I take in order to restore their original sexual chemistry.

Cops don’t care about road safety. They’re playground bullies with guns who get to terrorise the people who actually passed high school, as long as they protect Capital from protests and uprisings, and keep black people beneath white people in the social order by catching slaves for the prisons.