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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoAnnouncements@lemmy.mlLemmy needs more donations
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    2 months ago

    The information is in the thread you are replying to. And no, you actually don’t, becauae what we are discussing is your paternalistic liberal response to others refusing to donate to a transphobe and then your leaning on debatebro fallacy misunderstandings when I explained what was wrong with it.

    If you can’t self-criticize and adapt then just don’t respond.


  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoAnnouncements@lemmy.mlLemmy needs more donations
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    2 months ago

    Why do I need to prove a negative? Get your fallacies in order! I also recommend against relying so much on trying to identity fallacies, as we are not exactly engaging in formal modus tollens here and what I am saying to you is intended to get you to critically engage with what you are saying, not be an unassailable treatise on resistance that covers every eventuality.

    Societal liberalism reinforces the status quo, or I should really say, reinforces capitalism, and that tends to mean reproducing oppressions that can be leveraged by capital. Even the existence of reactionaries who marginalize others is often in the interests of caputal. “Don’t blame the people firing you for losing your job, it must be the immigrants doing this to you! Hey, don’t complain about your life, at least you’re not [oppressed group]” These serve very practical functions for disunity among people that could otherwise find common ground against the interests of capital.

    The liberal tut-tutting of what is supposedly ineffective opposition is part of this as well. It comes from op-eds from ghoulish warmongers, those complicit in genocide, and a political class invested in you not actually aligning against oppressors in any meaningful way. Notice the complete lack of action from yourself in doung anything about this transphobe. Just pushing against those who do. Ask yourself what role you are playing.


  • Rejecting someone that aligns with oppression is a great way to build against oppression, actually. Do you think Jewish Germans should have donated to the Nazis to build up “good faith” with them? Surely if they just acted like, “good Jews” they would have been spared, right?

    This logic is typical status quo liberalism that tells you to tut-tut every oppressed group for not fighting back “the right way”. Of course, liberals have never succeeded using the methods they suggest, so this really amounts to telling the oppressed to shut up and die. This talking point is promulgated so that you and others will refuse to work in solidarity with the oppressed. Don’t let yourself be manipulated this way.


  • You have certainly met a trans person if you’ve met, say, 100 people. You just didn’t recognize them from their appearance or voice, either because they are closeted or because they convinced you they were cis from their appearance and voice. Presumably your country is so oppressive towards trans people that they are too afraid of being out, there are no trans events for you to attend in solidarity, or you are just making excuses for reactionary positions.

    Trans visibility is not just in the United States. Out and self-identifying trans people are visible around the world, including the two largest countries, China and India. You can’t visit either imperialized county without meeting someone that is self-identifying themselves as trans. And one of those countries is run by a communist party.

    These responses just sound like a reactionary unwilling to self-crit. And I don’t see much in the way of any alt accounts: the people criticizing thoss non-apologies and continued ignorant statements generally don’t have any replies.

    Do open self-crit and try to learn from those who know better.



  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoAnnouncements@lemmy.mlLemmy needs more donations
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    2 months ago

    Having separate women’s teams at all was about access to organized sports activities because the existing men-only leagues banned them from participating. Rather than simply break down that barrier, legal and social compromises were made for women to participate but with the patriarchical addendum of only in separate leagues. Sometimes it was laws requiring women’s leagues to exist where men’s did. Sometimes it was women making their own leagues because they were excluded by men’s leagues.

    The idea that women have separate leagues for “fairness” because they simply all wanted to be separate from men when competing is historical revisionism and a talking point largely concocted for the sole purposes of misogyny and transphobic exclusion, such as your comment.


  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoAnnouncements@lemmy.mlLemmy needs more donations
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    2 months ago

    Exactly.

    I will consider contributing financially to Dessalines but not nutomic so long as they spread and maintain reactionary positions against trans people. To be honest I’m even on the fence about Dessalines for maintaining a public relationship with nutomic in light of this.

    “Give money to a transphobe so we can have open source Reddit” doesn’t have a great ring.



  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    Employers in the US often include “morality clauses” that mean they can fire you because they deem you to be harming the reputation of the company due to behavior outside of work.

    More importantly than “the rules”, though, US employers can fire you for basically any reason they want and then just lie about it. Nobody is going to force them to be truthful. Not even if they are union busting. The Biden-Harris NLRB, which the president dragged his feet staffing and staffed with wet blankets, has even upheld the Trump NLRB Electrolux decision - and the vast majority of people never get to the point of launching a lawsuit that would be relevant, as it costs tens of thousands of dollars.

    If you want power in the workplace you need to organize a union competently and develop capacity real leverage (direct action, community support, naming and shaming).



  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoComic Strips@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 months ago

    The constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery in the US provided one exception: anyone convicted of a crime.

    This was a tool of Jim Crow to maintain a sizeable black slave labor force via disproportionate criminalization of black people and poverty (newly-freed previous slaves were very poor, often illiterate). It was and is a tool of modern racialized hyper-exploited labor via the prison system. And it is likely a tool that US authorities are keeping in their back pocket for the mass criminalization of the homeless.


  • You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

    This is something I’m very familiar with.

    As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

    This is largely the case, yes. Research universities do the basic research that industry then turns into a product and makes piles of cash from. And you are also correct that subsidizing STEM education is a subsidy for industry. It very specifically is meant to do that. It displaces industry job training and/or the companies paying to send their workers to get a degree. It also has the benefit of increasing overall supply in theur labor market, which helps drive down wages. Companies prefer having a big pool of potential workers they barely have to train.

    We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

    That’s good!

    In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

    I think your approach is better. I also prefer to write better-quality code, which for me entails thinking more carefully about its structure and interfaces and using best practices like testing and CI.


  • If the government is the US (federal), I think you are technically supposed to release your code in the public domain by default. Some people work around this but it’s the default.

    But anyways, the example you’ve given is basically that you’re paid with government funds to do work to assist industry. This is fairly similar to the people that do the work for free for industry, only this time it’s basically taxpayersl money subsidizing industry. I’ve seen this many times. There is a whole science/engineering/standards + contractor complex that is basically one big grift, though the individual people writing the code are usually just doing their best.

    I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus.

    Perhaps it makes the world a better place, perhaps it doesn’t. This part of the industry focuses a lot on identifying a “social good” that they are improving, but the actual impact can be quite different. One person’s climate project is another’s strategic military site selector. One person’s great new standard for transportation is another’s path to monopoly power and the draining of public funds that could have gone to infrastructure. This is the typical way it works. I’m sure there can be exceptions, though.

    Anyways, I would recommend taking a skeptical eye to any position that sells you on its positive social impact. That is often a red flag for some kind of NGO industrial complex gig.

    Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

    Well you’re paid so of course it wouldn’t be that.

    Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

    Sometimes the industries will open bug reports for their free lunches, yes. A common story in community projects is that they realize they’re doing a lot of support work for companies that aren’t paying them. When they start to get burned out, they put out calls for funding so they can dedicate more time to the project. Sometimes this kind of works but usually the story goes the other way. They don’t get enough money and continue to burn out. You are paid so it’s a bit different, but it’s not those companies paying you, eh?

    You aren’t harmed by closed source derivatives because that seems to be the point of your work. Providing government subsidy to private companies that enclose the derivative product and make money for their executives and shareholders off of it.


  • Oh no I mean that there are companies that just don’t care about licensing and plod ahead hoping it’s never an issue. Like having devs build a “prototype” that they know uses AGPL code and saying, “we will swap this out later” and then 6 months later the “prototype” is in production.

    Personally, I make a lot of my personal projects’ code closed because I specifically don’t want it to be useable by others. Not for jerky reasons, but strategic ones. IMO common licenses don’t achieve what a lot of people hope they do.




  • The MIT license guarantees that businesses will use it because it’s free and they don’t have to think about releasing code or hiding their copyright infringement. The developers I’ve seen using that license, or at least those who put some thought into it, did do because they want companies to use it and therefore boost their credibility through use and bug reports, etc. They knowingly did free work for a bunch of companies as a way to build their CV, basically. Like your very own self-imposed unpaid internship.

    The GPL license is also good for developers, as they know they can work on a substantial project and have some protections against others creating closed derived works off of it. It’s just a bit more difficult to get enterprise buy-in, which is not a bad thing for many projects.