Here I am trying as hard as I can to find a political take on this post, just to troll.

Let’s go with a meta one : attention is limited, trying to orient peoples attention towards meaningless memes actively participate in silencing more important topics.

Many many things, but the main one are probably :

• Many French activists, from orgs like “framasoft”, “la quadrature du net”, or just from group of people like “les exégètes amateurs”
• the Aaron Swartz “case”
• the Alexandra Elbakyan “case”
• Snowden, Wikileaks, etc.
• Self hosting and how I think I information should be managed.

Bonus story : I dislike religions a lot, so I don’t talk about it often. But one day, I and a heated and interesting debate with a christian. First time in month where I talked so much about Jesus. The next hour or so, the first ad I get on YouTube (before I knew how to block them efficiently) was evangelist bullshit. First time I ever saw something even close to this. I didn’t even imagine such ads existed.

This post is a copypasta from a chatGPT generated description of the John Mastodon meme, that came from an error in a news article like some zone else pointed out.

Of course. Tbh, US imperialism made it more difficult to get rid of their surveillance than China’s one (at least in western countries). And Europe have a lot of trouble acting politically, and I think it is mostly because they are so liberal. Even more so than the US, that limit liberalism to the thing where it is an advantage to them, but are very protective and prostate control when it benefits their political objectives.

I have to admit that Europe is not 100% passive, and some regulations do try to limit US dominance on Europe, but it is very far from being enough, or even close to what could be done with a real political will.

Great news for them ! It’s a great start ! Now let’s do the same for US surveillance !

I’m a freshly recruited teacher, and discover the joy of marking ~150 papers ! Yeah sooooo cool /s

Depends on what you call a “thing”. If a “thing” can be any system, in all it’s complexity, then no. There are everyday system (man-made or not) that are just to complex to fit in a single mind !

This would be at the same time the saddest and funniest thing to ever happen here 🤣

Yes ! Plus “looking for alternative” can be surprisingly difficult for non-tech users. Let’s be kind to everyone trying their best <3.

Thanks, good perspective. Even if the history behind the two services are different.

OK, I see a lot of post/shitpost about that, but is it that real ? Do you think migration toward Mastodon will last ? Will it be enough to create a long lasting positive momentum ? Or will people slowly leave to other proprietary social networks, or even back to Twitter ?

I think it is voluntarily weighted more heavily towards time than upvote compared to other sites like reddit. The reasoning being (I think) that it allow more diversity and less “snowballing” where the most active user just arrive first, get the upvotes, and stays on top. Effectively killing the possibility of a late very pertinent comment to ever climb up.

I think this is a very difficult equilibrium to find, and it has serious implication on how discussions are built. But I really think Reddit has the opposite problem. Come to a post a few hours/days late, and you will never be heard. I create FOMO and pushes user to come back often. This is to me a business model for sure, but not the best way to organize online asynchronous discussions.

I think I agree with you. I would go as far as saying this is true for everything, not only for science. I think we need to have categories to be able to grasp complex problem. And almost all of the time, those categories are arbitrary and only useful at specific scales and in specific context. It is the only way to think about large scale problems, just because we cannot handle every individual information in too large quantities.

Those categories are always “wrong” in some sense, but can be “useful” to understand our world. And I agree with you, at individual level, in our society, for sure sex at an individual level is not only useless but harmful.

Sorry, I recognize my position was unclear and could be taken for quite essentialist. Hope this clarify my position.

In everyday life, not much to be honest. Gender is the useful information in society. Male and female are useful in biology, and therefore in medicine. They are useful broad category that should be use as such. Broad tendencies that have many exception and complex interactions. But are nonetheless pertinent to understand how our body works and how to treat some diseases.

But of course 99% of every uses fall outside of what is pertinent, and it should become a technical scientific term only.

Of course not. It is a very very useful concept here and today. Even when applied to humans. But the problem is how those words are used way even in fields and discussion where they are not only not useful, but even harmful.

These concepts, like any scientific concept, is taught to us with heavy heavy simplification when we are young. It seems simple, most people think it is simply two groups, and with a very easy criteria to discriminate them. But it is complicated, and only mostly useful in biology.

I would make a (not so good) analogy with hot and cold. Is it outdated ? No. Is it useful ? Yes. Does it define completely what it is talking about ? No, pressure, colors are other characteristic. There are adjacent concept that get confused like heat and hotness, but are scientifically very different. There are things where talking about hot or cold is irrelevant (is a distance “hot” ?).

Of course, the main limit of this analogy is that the battle around the usage of “biological sex” is very political. Transphobes put many humans in grave danger (and not only explicitly trans persons). They are very close to the essentialism used by racists and fascists. And they try to manipulated science to make it says what it doesn’t, also just like them.

Let’s hope you are right. I agree that things can change, but I have to admit I’m quite worried.

If I had to guess I would say it is bas ant power abusing structures in history. Words are powerful, especially if they have a strong importance in cultures where they are used. “Voting” or “referendum” are very powerful words in the modern liberal capitalist “democratic” countries.

No matter if this words describe accurately the reality or not, their simple existence in public debate are enough to be used as a base for propaganda. For example, if you accuse Russia of acting as the imperialist nation it is, people will say “referendum”, and you will be locked in an endless discussion about whereas this vote is legitimate or not, and the critic is killed in the egg. If you refuse this debate, it will be pointed out as a proof that you " have no source/proof" of what you are saying.

It is not that simple. There are some of things that one can own but that is illegal to sell in some countries. Drugs for example. You can own the pills you take, without having the right to sell them. And on the other hand worker kind of “sell” (or at least “rent”) their bodies.

As someone pointed out in another comment this question depends heavily on the definition you give to “own”. In fact it is more a question about that than about anything else.

I love the question you ask around in Lemmy, they are often a potential base to really interesting discussions. I think it is a shame you don’t spend more time discussing the answers with us. Especially since those case where the definitions of the words you use are important, which is often the case when you try to build a short, punchy, but still interesting question.

To begin an answer, if owning is taken in a very liberal definition of “you are free to do everything you want with it”, then clearly no. For example, being violent towards others. Or having Nazi/fascist symbols tattooed. These things you are not free to do. But if we add a clause resembling “as long as it only imply yourself or consenting of any person involved”, then we get clauser to something I would agree with. But even then, it is not satisfactory. Example : being openly in an homosexual relationship and displaying it in public is perfectly OK to me. But I recognize it has an impact an homophobes. They are technically impacted. But to me the solution is of course not to criminalize homosexuals, but to fight against homophobia until it is not a question anymore.

So yeah, a specific and perfect definition is quite hard…

For sure that’s why I’m still here. I have a much friendlier disagreements with people’s here than the ones I would find on reddit for sure. (I never spent time there so I’m just guessing.)