It’s less about giving money to the woman herself and more about how HP and JK Rowling are used as memetic weapons. Every release of a new property has seen a rush of transphobic actors invading trans spaces for years. Invoking the name of the author and showing solidarity in a lot of contexts is a not subtle way of showing support to the veiws expressed by the Terf ideology during a time when being trans is becoming criminalized in more places. The news isn’t generally covering it well but Texas is passing laws where it is a criminal offense to misrepresent your birth sex at work or in public government spaces.

“Oh but it’s just money” isn’t so much the problem. It’s the cover this entire conversation about ethical consumption or the lack thereof in daily life is providing to people throwing up open flags of anti-trans bigotry in public and using that as a tool to band together to attack the community and send open messages that trans people are not welcome in ways that the average cis person will dismiss as just “they like kid wizards”.

It isn’t for “no real effect”. Harry Potter is a merchandise empire and it’s important to see how that empire is being utilized. Open fan support of Harry Potter is often used as a direct open signal of anti-trans support and Terf ideology. Here in Vancouver where we have a larger than average population of trans and non-binary folk and more open accommodation to the community a billboard was put up saying “I❤️ JK Rowling” downtown because it’s a more nebulous dogwhistle that wouldn’t immediately ping Canada’s hate speech laws so that the whole “Freedom of Speech” ploy could be envoked.

Whenever a new HP franchise item comes out there’s a wave of people who flood online and sometimes in person trans spaces who use the barest veneer of support of the franchise as a means to say some truely awful things about trans people. Some don’t even bother mentioning the franchise they just participate in the storming because they have the opportunity. Those spaces are often filled with vulnerable people seeking support and solidarity and these rushes can leave isolated trans people without community for weeks.

Here in Van someone wearing HP merch in any queer space is throwing up a flag that says “I am potentially an unsafe person.”

Article of the billboard.

http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5722244

You don’t have to give up your books. All we ask is that people do not white knight the author or the publication and merchandising empire which keeps making her influence into an active memetic weapon.

It’s not Canada or Denmark which will suffer the most from-it, but US themselves

I get what you are saying but at the same time as a Canadian that comes across as more American-centric myopia.

We are a small country in terms of people with only nominally more people than the state of California spread out over a landmass 1.6% larger than the US. Our energy infrastructure doesn’t fully connect through our own country and due to American strong arming a lot of our manufacturing industry is not super robust. It’s the Goose next to the Eagle. We’re tough enough to defend ourselves and make it hurt to attack us but we aren’t getting anything out of this fight. For us it’s a fight for our lives not a fight we can profit off of. Whatever wounds we take in this fight will soften us up for the regular problems we fight. The forest fires that have become exponentially worse through climate change that have erased entire cities off our map. The healthcare crisis of a mass of retiring boomers needing more care in a system that has constantly under fire from Americanizing rhetoric that has caused disinvestment from an ethically better system. The protectionist rhetoric that comes with conflict which will erode the systems of government and create legal precedent for more autocratic means of operation that will need to be later undone. The pausing of reconciliation efforts with indigenous nations. This conflict, even as it is now, will cause real trackable losses of life and livelihood some of which will not come back.

Our existence and future as a sovereign nation is threatened but nope “The US will be the real victims of this”? Bloody fucking tonedeaf mate.

Are you talking about the NATO shortfall? Because the Canadian government has a number of places where it is scrambling to find budget for a lot of things. Consider

• An expanded commitment to rehoming and financially supporting refugees from Ukraine. Processing and approving 962,612 submissions starting from 2022

• Reconciliation efforts with notoriously under served indigenous nations to improve dismal conditions of services support, locate and providing funding to document the Residential school genocide and providing better support to survivors.

• Reinvestment in one of the most challenging Public health care landscapes in the world due to the sheer landmass the government is constitutionally on the hook to cover.

• A history making sized population of people now reaching retirement age and requiring more drastic critical health interventions and social supports than ever before.

Static commitments like NATO spending are a bit like rent. If you are financially struggling through other financially challenging problems the landlord cannot often be convinced to give you a temporary forgiveness for extenuating circumstances. All of the above things are challenges that are either in service to international peace against the encroachment of Russia, the thing NATO was created to do, or they represent inflexible commitments the government has to serve the needs of it’s people as written into it’s own laws… But a NATO landlord has a contract with a number and the number doesn’t change no matter what.

Read their stories yourself. They are right there. You want me to do all the work for you? Piss off.

Honestly a lot of news doesn’t actually cover this stuff as it should. Covering trans topics is usually something that causes backlash or requires a high degree of finesse in reporting and explaining so these modern lynchings go largely uncovered by the big mainstreamers except when they think they have a winner that’s straightforward enough to report in a short quippy segment.

Who the hell says “transsexuals” anymore except folk who were out in the 90’s?

If you would like to read some articles how about Forbes?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiewareham/2023/11/13/beaten-stabbed-and-shot-320-trans-people-murdered-in-2023/

NBC?

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna125783

Congress? Bonus points they give you the stories of a bunch of the victims.

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117016/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20240321-SD015.pdf

How about a long term view over ten years? Statista

https://www.statista.com/statistics/944726/murders-transgender-gender-diverse-people-us/

And these are the murders we know. They are difficult to find because a lot of coverage buries the lead on the trans nature of the victims so we only learn about them being trans after the fact. A lot of newspapers use dead names and pre transition photos and don’t mention current names and identities so in some of our communities we only know when someone has died except through word of mouth because when they show up in the paper they aren’t recognizable. This is also why articles tend to use the words “at least” or have inconsistent counts per year. New ones are always coming to light as friends and family struggle to get the word out.

You do not see these news articles because your news silo filters them out. There are vigils every year where the names are read out. The circumstances of those vigils are that the main reason for the violence was because of the victims gender identity. You asked for sources. Have at em.

One could say the same thing about Christianity. Jesus basically ripped his notes from the Stoics.

But the answer is that in both cases there’s a lot of supernatural stuff in the texts. When you look at the totality of the scriptures and appended lore Buddha isn’t just some wise man who had and epiphany, while early scriptures were closer to that interpretation a lot of the later scriptures that describe enlightenment and elaborate on it… it’s basically more describing that people who reach enlightenment get superpowers, mostly omniscience but also like a bunch of other stuff. There’s also a lot of writings and different sects that elaborate on the afterlife and how one earns their place there. Like there is legitimately a Buddhist version of hell and it looks fairly familiar to the Christian one because both got cross contaminated with Hinduism’s Naraka and depictions of the Greek afterlife just like Christianity did.

A philosophy I think is a discussion about observations of life and how it is lived and particularly opinions on how it is lived well. When you start appending supernatural rewards and punishments to that discussion you get a religion or a cult.

It is probably the case that if your friends do veiw you as a friend and aren’t made aware that this isn’t because of something they did but a way you are then this behaviour is likely hurting them to some degree or another. Your discription of how you interfsce with friends is fairly consistent with cluster B personality disorders but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad. It does mean that if you want to become a safe person to associate socially with you are going to need to put in more work than average to learn what other people generally need out of relationships and to recognize pain that is going to be difficult to empathize with… And if you decide to become a safe person it will mean being more open with your friends about parts of the human experience that are assumed but in your case not shared.

Most people have needs out of friendships that if they are not met and they cannot identify why they are not met they can sort of look inwards and self emotionally mutilate, picking themselves apart to find what it wrong with themselves to warrant cold behaviour. People’s first instinct is to ask “what about me makes me undeserving.” and are very good at populating a list.

Guilt and shame for most of us is the fastest emotional response. It is way faster than reason. People who think they may have wronged you or are being rejected by you will feel guilty first and then have to pick the emotion apart to figure out if they should actually feel guilt or shame… and then even if they realize they did nothing wrong might still feel guilt or rejection. A lot of being a safe person regardless of whether one has disordered emotional issues or not involves making sure they have the tools to not feel guilt, shame or rejection for very long. The faster they can rationalize and compartmentalize what is happening isn’t about them it is about you the more likely it is to not stick and develop into a longer term emotional injury or weakness. Once someone has been put in a position to effectively bully themselves that creates possible long term damage. A lot of the time, particularly for young people first experiencing this who have not learned how to be safe around people with cluster B disorders the outcome resolves as long term anger towards the person who made them question themselves.

If your friends are growing apart it may be because they already think you do not care about them and have already gone through this self bullying process but have now started to trade notes to see if they are the problem or not. If they reach a mutual concensus about you being emotionally unrecipricative then they might withdraw to avoid being hurt further. A sense of being valued in some form is a nessisary portion of friendship for most people. They will project that assumption of being valued and emotionally cared for onto you by default if you act like a friend because that is something they do when they act that way and even if they logically know it isn’t reciprocated they might not give up on you if you show effort to keep them in your life. Someone who acts like a friend but never did show signs of caring is more often than not going to be falsely attributed as once caring but withdrawing that care for a reason, which is in some relationship circumstances is inflicted as a punishment. So even if it’s not your intention people might interpret your behaviour not as rude but as a deliberate act of cruelty.

If you want them to stick around then letting them know that you like the experience of them as people in some way is key. Like if you find them more entertaining than most or recognize their good qualities then letting them know is what is going to keep them around.

What nobody tells you is that people before the age of 25 tend to make closer relationships where they emotionally risk more and become closer faster. Generally speaking it is more difficult to make as dedicated friends as an older adult as people are less likely to latch and a lot of people when they fail to make these types of high risk close friendships later in life interpret themselves as deficient as a person. You are in the prime age of emotionally high risk but high reward friendships. That does mean that the way these friendships resolve might become formative to the people around you as you might be one of the first non-safe relationships they have as they have not built adequate defenses. Wounds suffered in youth have an outsized effect and if things go particularly south without adequate explanation they may particularly remember you long term as a source of personal anguish.

Remember this, vulnerability is a bonding behaviour, your vulnerability just works a lot different than other people’s. People might reject you if they can’t figure out how to interface with your type of vulnerability but some will genuinely recognize it as you risking something because you ultimately value them not being hurt over their usefulness and function in your life. There are a lot of people out there with empathy above and beyond the median… But I would recommend therapy for lessons on how to navigate relationships in a non-standard way.

Yup, already had the “flee or stand and die” convo with my partner a few weeks ago. I am firmly willing to risk death to defend the progress we’ve made as a Province and Nation. We aren’t perfect and are early in the process but we’re trying to recon with our history of colonial genocide and embrace a truer multiculturalism which the US refuses to even acknowledge. We have made commitments to the health and well-being of all citizens, not just the productive bodies which fuel the markets. It’s incomplete but aspirational and walking it back would be a disgrace.

The American democracy is an outdated shambles that has fallen into ruin and I will not be bound by it by choice. There is no freedom or opportunity the USA can offer us. Only more oppression on rights we already have enshrined.

Elon Musk has a well documented track record of supporting far right causes that mirror Nazi ideology. At the Inauguration he performed two Nazi salutes (one to the crowd and one to the flag). He routinely promotes the methods of genocides of trans people and Palistinians through both verbal parlance and through direct funding and uses well known euphemisms in support of white supremacy causes. He has authoritarian leanings tasked with removing from government service entire administrative arms that previously were not electable or apointable positions (because they were staffed with experts whose task is to stick to their guns of scientific or proven best practice and not simply be yes men telling the administration what they want to hear).

He also has never denied making a Nazi salute in the days since it’s happened instead deciding to make Holocaust and Nazi featured jokes.

At this point what evidence can be put forward that he is not a Nazi?

It may seem like a pedantic difference but you are missing a key part of what’s going on here. Nobody is challenging that gender dysphoria is a bad thing to experience… This policy is saying it’s kosher to proclaim “transness is a mental illness” which means in effect that encompasses gender euphoria and all expressions of gender incongruity as symptoms of a mental illness. It’s a subtle linguistic difference but one makes it possible to publicly derride trans people as being delusional or harmful to people around them or dangers to themselves and push for “curing” all transness by approaching being trans as a failure state.

As a Set Dresser/On set dresser - any set build before a director sees it/ wideshot films it.

How it generally works is we get a bunch of stuff and… Something. This something can be as exact as a blueprint (techpack) that clearly marks where furniture is supposed to go or as vague as a one sentence long description of what the set is supposed to be. We are usually given a bunch of options for virtually everything that is used. Then we make up the set.

Then the waveform goes nuts. The Heirachy goes Set Decorator, Production Designer, and then Producer. They will randomly visit or call in sometimes separately and whatever plans that existed immediately cease to matter. The set may completely change a random number of times back and forth as anyone above us in the hierarchy demands unless it countermands a specific demand made by someone above the demander in the hierarchy.

That is until shoot day. Once the Director has the floor all of that prep goes immediately out the window and the director may change whatever they please about the set and while there’s usually too much time constraints to change everything it could mean getting rid of anything. The waveform only collapses to depict a singular reality once the wideshot is in the bag which means there is now a continuity that must (okay “must” is a strong word) be obeyed.

Oh this is funnier than that.

Awhile ago my partner and I discovered there’s a combined work “Woke Advisory List” of videogames compiled by these backwards grognards. It roughly places games into categories of “Do not play, tis too woke” and “mild Trigger warning - has woke elements”

There is no small matter of quality of game that seems to influence which category the game is put in. Generally blah games with like a non sexy female protagonist and a single gay person randomly existing as a character you optionally meet might classify as “Holy shit! Too woke too WOKE!”… But then LIFE IS STRANGE is only categorized with the mildest of warnings of “some gay themes”… Like bro… “some” ?

It is equal parts hilarious and disheartening to go through and look at all the shit they decry as woke collated in one place and to recognize what counts as “exceptions” because they cannot bring themselves to cast games they love onto the burn pile.

While I realize that hard boundry setting is the new norm sometimes harm reduction is a better strategy. While a lot of folk have religious trauma to deal with that makes them want to do exactly zero church stuff one aspect of not believing in God is that a lot of the ritual aspects are pretty low stakes once one you strip away the mysticism. One way to handle the worry of your Mom wanting to do something dangerous to essentially just splash water on your kid is to participate in the silly ritual safely so that it’s done with minimum risk.

There definitely are hills to die on but if you give an order you know won’t be obeyed because the stakes from your Mother’s perspective are incredibly high then one way to look at it is baby’s safety comes first. Not because of the possible existence of the soul but because risking kidnapping to perform at end of day a boring nothing ceremony that ultimately means nothing isn’t a good idea. If it is distasteful to participate because of trauma then recognizing that you can deputize somebody you trust to get the hurdle over with is an option but realistically, your kid will never gain that same trauma from this. They will grow up with a completely different belief system as their basic. If them simply being baptized is a personal trigger it is wise to unpack exactly why because whether they are or not isn’t something your kid is likely going to care about. Having grown up in an agnostic environment and having a number of friends in the same situation some of us were baptized for the sake of family peace but for everyone I know it’s a complete non-event. One advantage of these things actually meaning nothing is that there is no change of state. A baptized baby and a non baptized baby are the same.

To my crew anyway a lot of us our parents aversion or reactions to church stuff seems out of proportion due to them having a history. Theirs is a more volitile strongly opinionated atheism as opposed to the more passive naturalized one we developed because we do not feel betrayed by belief. Sometimes their aversion causes them to do things which from the outside display that they are still letting their rejection of religious upbringing effect their judgment in an outsized way because they didn’t ever really heal.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

I dunno if anyone is interested but of you got some spare coins laying around the Canadian based charity Rainbow Refugee has been helping get out threatened LGBTQIA+ folks from multiple countries including Russia for quite a while now by arranging sponsorships and legal support and advice for LGBTQIA asylum seekers. If you know anyone looking to get out or would like to donate here’s a link :

https://www.rainbowrefugee.com/

Played a lot of games… But the NES didn’t really have that many standouts for me. I could write an extensive list of games I played for a lot of hours but out of the raft of games there wasn’t many that particularly were a favorite more like a dichotomy of whether each bit of the list enjoyable and not. The SNES was definitely Super Mario RPG, Donkey Kong Country and Chronotrigger but it was the N64 that got me games that I replayed like crazy.

Zelda Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Super Smash Bros, Harvest Moon 64, Snowboard Kid’s 2 and Diddy Kong Racing made the top of that list. Those were fucking awesome games.

By the time I got a PS2 I was technically an adult and Nintendo never really recaptured my heart like it did when I was a kid. I have been a playstation loyalist since then but that N64 still has a spot in my basement.

You see this all over the place with how things are culturally counted. Like how driveby shootings are not counted by a lot of US statistical data as mass shooting in the US because they are more interested in the phenomenon of a targeted usual murder suicide of a very specific terrorist style execution… but other countries will record drive bys as notable mass shootings for their data.

A lot of places have law enforcement that are very invested in not participating in things that could harm their reputations so not participating in recording data points that assist in the conclusion that a genocide is occurring makes it easier to sweep issues under the rug.

Horrible… There is some S-tier evil in the world. That we must take additional risks if we ever want to make a difference is such bullshit. It will take an investigation to tell if it was political, personal or a gender hate crime but that the assumption that hate crime alone is sufficient reminds us how far we need to go before we are not at war.