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Cake day: February 9th, 2025

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  • stickly@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlFounding Pedos
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    2 months ago

    I get that a lot of this linked article is written to (correctly) change the narrative around slavery erasure but some of it delves into baseless hyperbole that can’t be anything but counter productive.

    For example:

    Evidence suggests that sexual abuse of slaves was so fundamental to chattel slavery that it’s reasonable to assume any histories of “kind” slave owners are complete fabrications designed to preserve the legacy of the masters.

    That is either playing fast and loose with wording or an absolutely incredible claim requiring incredible proof.

    On one hand, the “kind” slave owner is always a fabrication because the act of owning slaves is inherently immoral and reprehensible. This view makes the claim a borderline platitude; perpetuating an institution that enables rapists is very obviously unkind.

    On the latter interpretation, you’re claiming that rape was so universal that any slave owner was almost certainly a rapist (especially if they claimed they weren’t). This would require some sweeping evidence, think studies on the demographics of mixed race slaves or on medical records tied to sexual assaults.

    So what evidence follows? Excerpts from Frederick Douglas giving second hand accounts of rape and of Harriet Jacobs giving her first hand account. Nothing that incriminates slave owners broadly beyond Douglas’s phrasing “…in [rape] cases not a few,…”.

    I don’t even deny that the evidence might exist, and I would love to see it brought to light if it does. But the thing about slavery, and specifically the USA’s commercial cotton slavery: it’s fucking awful enough if you just list verifiable facts without aggrandizing. Even if everything in this article were true, it doesn’t move the needle much farther beyond the baseline of American slave ownership.

    If you’re going to broadly claim “America’s founding fathers were sex traffickers that raped children” then please, name names! Bring receipts! You can’t open with…

    These facts are not debatable. [Child sex trafficking] happened.

    …and then lay out a single link rehashing that Thomas Jefferson was a massive piece of shit. What do we know about the other 54+ Founding Fathers?



  • Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won’t impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won’t impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

    • Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users. Reddit wouldn’t be suing to stop this if they didn’t think it was a major threat to their platform.
    • The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
    • A cohort aging up doesn’t mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren’t tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn’t married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
    • Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

    Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc…).



  • IIRC master was the normal ass English word for your superior in any type of subservient role (employees, servants, indentured, school children, etc…). In the “Master Bedroom” instance, master makes sense as the title of a household patriarch.

    As soon as they started forcing non-whites into new world chattel slavery, all tiers of white classes suddenly thought it was degrading to use the same word they forced on the lesser races. This is where English started adapting new words for the old usage of master, such as boss from the Dutch baas.

    If anything, refusing to use master in any context is far more racist than normal usage. You’re perpetuating the idea that a word’s use by slaves automatically (and retroactively) sullies it for all time.



  • I’ll take a crack at it:

    • It’s a massive privacy/surveillance concern. Look at the issues that come with doorbell cams and now multiply the number of cameras and scatter them all over
    • It’s another platform for mega corporations to track and sell data to advertisers or any malicious actors, but at an entirely new intrusive level. They no longer have to approximate what’s getting your attention when they literally know what has your attention. Good luck anonymizing or hiding your usage when you can’t spoof the real world in front of you.
    • It’s unnecessary e-waste, at best providing the exact same functionality you’d get from your phone with the added benefit of… not reaching into your pocket? You still need a free hand to use it…
    • It’s a distraction in a way that other tech can’t touch. Pedestrians/drivers getting notifications shoved directly into their eyes won’t end well.
    • It probably has all the same inherent problems as previous generations of smart glasses. Primarily: your eyes aren’t designed for extended/repeated focus on an image less than an inch from your face and at the edge of your vision


  • Weird way to “listen” by suppressing their voices. Zero Covid was the “right call” in a narrow lens of limiting direct disease transmission, but it was completely untenable as a true long term strategy and had no foresight.

    The protests weren’t due to solely to the restrictions on personal freedom, it was also the total lack of sane administration and fallback plans. The enforcement, quarantine logistics and vaccine rollout were entirely scattershot. The government had no realistic approach to the problem beyond rigid policing.

    When their authority to enforce the policy was stretched to its limits they did an about face and pretended the problem didn’t exist, leaving their vulnerable populations in the lurch with no offramp. The core problem of inept administration was completely unaddressed. I wouldn’t give them credit for “listening to the protesters” any more than I would give Tsar Nicholas credit for listening to his striking workers.


  • COVID lockdowns when minor protests broke out

    “Solve” is an interesting verb for suppression of legitimate mass discontent at being physically locked into their apartments. That “solution” worked so well for those “minor protests” that they decided to do a 180° turn from the Zero Covid policy to no restrictions overnight.

    Truly a bastion of free speech, except for any real discontent is labeled capitalist subterfuge so we’ll just disregard that.



  • Never claimed to be any kind of China expert but it’s absurd to claim “much more open discourse” if you’ve spent any appreciable amount of time in the countries being discussed. You can literally just walk + talk in public and see the difference.

    Like all these asserted freedoms it just magically happens better and free’er but you definitely can’t verify it because “media”. The open political discourse I see and hear in major EU/US cities pales in comparison to the uh… hidden… open discourse in T1/T2 Chinese cities? Definitely heard some first/second hand political discourse but it was never, ever, ever a public forum.

    By all means, give me evidence to the contrary. Maybe I just keep catching China with a bad case of the Mondays. Have you been? Can you point to any discourse on domestic politics? Where is the asserted diversity of opinion on hotbed issues? Can you show me any strong opposition to the party line on a public stage?