alex @alexthecamel@schelling.pt

seems difficult to draw a principled line between it being ok to tie kids up (assuming clothes remain on) and it being ok to tickle kids, except people are much more familiar with one of these things

"let's teach kids how to do kink (for some values of kink)" seems like an excellent weirdtopian proposal at the very least tbh
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RT @niall_gooch
Love it when you get articles solemnly intoning that "The Right is waging war on literature", & claiming that conservatives just hate book-larnin', then you check which volume has actually been removed from a school library, & it's "Bondage: A Guide For 9 Year Olds" or something.
https://twitter.com/niall_gooch/status/1626340452340273152

lets maintain a sense of proportion mk

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RT @alexandrabotez
Over the years I’ve heard many stories from girls in the chess community regarding often prominent men in our industry. When encouraged to speak up, most are worried that the backlash and lack of consequences will render doing so pointless. 1/5 https://twitter.com/jenshahade/status/1625873098581983232
https://twitter.com/alexandrabotez/status/1625993900690182144

even if it's against newspaper policy you run into the "so fire me, i am sure that will give you a reputation for being very free speech" problem

tbh this seems like an enormous improvement on the previous method of complaining about media bias which was "i will quit this newspaper and urge no trans person to talk to you so you can't write positive pieces even if you wanted to"
that seemed ... counterproductive

generally very annoying when the overton window on this stuff is the result of a bunch of chinese whispers rather than talking to boots-on-the-ground folk

(i think people who do the "we interviewed randomly selected people in an attempt to work out what is going on" thing probably get slightly too much shit though)

in general this feels less like a "we interviewed people involved who were randomly selected to give a good picture of what this looks like" kind of line and more of a "we must take a Centrist Even-Handed Approach" kind of line

eg see this thread

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RT @KelseyTuoc
People might think Matt is overstating this but I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553
https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

this is of course different from the claim that they are unusually unscrupulous about reporting true things

i mean aiui compared to most mainstream media the nytimes has a pretty topdown driven culture where they decide what they ~editorial line is and search for stories about it
this is known fact about the nytimes?
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RT @mattyglesias
Am open letter demanding that you stop covering a subject is pretty anti-persuasive.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1625962816627740673

like just because *my* subculture phrases this as "we broke up for mono-poly incompatibility reasons" does not mean everyone will see it that way...

oh shit this is really going to be a Discourse isn't it

maybe there's some worrying that people being aware happy poly people might cause relationships to break up in the same way people worry about this for gay porn
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RT @pawnofcthulhu
im not sure how easy it is to stop people feeling pressured into mono or poly given these are like ... moral visions of what healthy relationships should look like which are completely at odds with each other
https://twitter.com/pawnofcthulhu/status/1621690458908020736

feels like it sort of comes with its own solution to "oh shit i can't remember their pronouns" problem: well, you shouldn't be tu-ing them then

how do we feel about the "gendered 3rd person pronouns vs 'they' are a T-V distinction" solution

this is clearly a problem that will be solved by banning teenagers from social media and insisting their parents keep tabs on them at all times & make the only way they can get places using their parents as a chauffeur

wonder why teenagers today might not feel like they are architects of their own life
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RT @mattyglesias
Among other things I agree with @JillFilipovic that we are probably reaping the fruit of teaching kids to emphasizing their own fragility.

https://jill.substack.com/p/fear-of-a-female-body
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1625211076454322181

imo the strategy of "trust people/try to form a model of people's beliefs when they tell you how they think about the world" is very rationalist, a good way to identify new ideas, and also a surprisingly effective way to identify terrible people who shouldn't be in your movement.

the one time i've seen the 'people being pressured into poly because it's the enlightened thing to do' failure mode the person responsible was a radfemmy friend who didn't really know other poly people.

similarly bdsm is great but you shouldn't be learning to do it from porn.