4 ms·

So weird. Of all the important causes, all the things in this world to really genuinely be angry about, these lunatics are angry about public libraries - calm

So weird. Of all the important causes, all the things in this world to really genuinely be angry about, these lunatics are angry about public libraries - calm, quiet gentle places of peace and learning. Absolute lunacy. If you are going to be a terrorist at least target something big and important.

soligern 3y ago
[flagged]
- hackermatic 3y ago
  Hi, trans person here. My main concerns in life are having a job, a home, health, family, and friends. When I go out in public, I have the same hopes and fears as anyone else I know, except I also worry about being accosted on the street or in a public restroom while I'm minding my own business. Since you brought it up, at what point do you view transgender people's lives as becoming ideological?
  - soligern 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - WanderPanda 3y ago
    I would like a world where this does not happen but I also think that none of the things you say are issues of politics/equal rights. While not nice, these things seem to be well within the rights of the other people and I don‘t think you should try to force to change their minds through political means/power. I actually think the US has quite a good way of dealing with this by allowing a lot of differences between the states. In that way you can go where you‘re treated best and the other people can go where they like the lifestyles of the others the best. Forcing a national average is a recipe for disaster/division.
    - hackermatic 3y ago
      It's easy to say that someone should "go where you're treated best", but I have done that, and besides the cost and logistics, I still grieve that I don't feel safe in the city where I grew up, where friends and family still live, and that I still call home. If I told the other people that they're the ones who need to move away, not me, they'd feel just as torn. We all have to figure out a way to live next to each other.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      > While not nice, these things seem to be well within the rights of the other people and I don‘t think you should try to force to change their minds through political means/power. I actually think the US has quite a good way of dealing with this by allowing a lot of differences between the states. In that way you can go where you‘re treated best and the other people can go where they like the lifestyles of the others the best. What if that logic was applied to other disregards for human life and rights such as segregation or slavery ?
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Hi! As a trans person, what is your take on the cancellation of JKR and when someone got fired for IIRC just using the term "woman" in UK? I'm not in US or UK but I see those issues as ideological. The issues you listed are completely fair but some think trans people being safe, having a job and being generally equal can coexist with the concept of a woman, but some don't think so. I guess/hope the above comment referred to that.
    - hackermatic 3y ago
      I think that J.K. Rowling's public statements show that at the very least, she has a strawman conception of what most trans people are like and what our motives are, that a much greater proportion of us are dangerous predators than actually are, and that trans rights activism as a whole is in her words "offering cover to predators." She's also platformed a lot of people who use phrases like "reducing" the number of transgender people, which is ominous. I'm not familiar with the UK incident you mentioned (I'm in the US), but Rowling in particular is concerned about a lot more dire things than an abstract concept of who is and isn't a woman. That being said, she is still rich, has movies and games in active production, and many of my friends consume that media without even being aware of her controversies, so cancellation is the wrong word for what's happening to and around her.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        I thought said incident is how attacks on her began but it looks like the trigger was her sarcastic objection to phrase "people who menstruate". Either way I can't really blame her if making a tweet about media allergy to word "woman" prompted death threats. Platforming, don't know enough to comment right now (though AFAIK people are not going out on protests against Joe Rogan like they did against her and we all know the characters Rogan is platforming...) I consider myself mostly left but I think the world should be big enough for both trans people and women-referred-to-as-women (who have their own long going battle for equality) to coexist. If it is wrong please let me know why. But for now if someone treats using word "woman" as equivalent to attacking trans people then I write that off as "ideological issue" since it's obviously not attacking trans people. Looks like Rowling couldn't write that off and needed to comment because she was personally attacked and also felt the need to defend women as she is one. Hope that helps clarify how people can be completely pro trans equality and yet be frustrated with some of what's happening as ideological agenda pushing.
  - bunglefly 3y ago
    The ideological part is the basis behind changes to policy and law such that single-sex spaces become mixed-sex spaces. For example, opening up women's locker rooms to men who say they are women. This is to the benefit of the men who desire such access, but to the detriment of women who want to keep their female-only safe spaces. Whether cases like this constitite a justifiable change in policy or not is where the ideological divides lie.
- JellyBeanThief 3y ago
  If you want moderate views to prevail, you need to be working for ranked choice voting. The system we have now rewards extreme candidates. All the internet does is supercharge that. If we don't adopt a voting system that enables voters to punish extreme candidates instead of having to choose between the least undesirable of them, we're just going to keep on having despairing comment threads about the state of politics.
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Transphobia isn't cool. Sorry human rights are too "leftist" a position
  - soligern 3y ago
    What human rights? Sure killing or harassing cross dressers is abhorrent but otherwise no one has been bothering these people to begin with.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Other than (killing or) harrassing no one has been bothering ... ?? Just how blindly dismissive can a single comment get? I'm not on any tran bandwagon but it's plain they've been persecuted in western culture for centuries to date.
    - camus_absurd 3y ago
      This comment clearly comes from a place of ignorance. This attitude is part of the problem too. You just need to listen to them and they can tell you all they ways that people have been bothering them. Just because you can’t conceptualize how life can be hard when you have an incongruity between your physical body and mental self, it doesn’t mean that you can hand wave away other people’s struggles with this attitude of “ahhh they’re fine no one’s bothering them”. Shift your perspective to see the problem
    - IntelMiner 3y ago
      Ah, they're not trans now. They're "cross dressers" You're very much arguing in good faith already :)
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
[flagged]
- soligern 3y ago
  Isn’t social justice a good thing? Isn’t this agenda people trying to be the best they can?
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    I mean, if George Soros or the Koch Brothers want to fund a chain of libraries, then perhaps they can be hubs and platforms for whatever flavor of social justice that their funding demands. But municipal libraries are a public resource funded by taxpayers, and as such, all taxpayers deserve to benefit equally from such a resource, regardless of who they vote for, or who the librarians vote for. Carrying extremely biased, social-justice oriented events and collections in a municipal library is an exclusionary practice. It repels and alienates those with different beliefs, and thus reduces community diversity by cleaving off a large portion of taxpayers who have no use for this resource that they're supporting, thereby causing an imbalance and inequity in access to information and community resources.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    [flagged]
PostOnce 3y ago
[flagged]
DrFlipper 3y ago
[flagged]
anigbrowl 3y ago
If you are going to be a terrorist at least target something big and important. In the security space this sort of attack is referred to as 'resilience targeting', as it impacts a community resource and each such episode (even when it's a hoax) imposes a not-insignificant economic cost - shutdown of the facility, use of police resources to cordon off, sweep, and investigate the hoax threat. It's hard to assess exactly how much but I'd imagine it runs into the tens of thousands of $ per incident. A similar phenomenon is the wave of computer-generated hoax active shooter calls against schools, a pattern which has prepeated in multiple states over the last year or two, eg https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/live-updates/police-across-the-area-respond-to-computer-generated-swatting-calls-claiming-school-threats/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/live-updates/police-acros...
gmerc 3y ago
If only there was a political party aligned with burning books appealing to increasingly unhinged followers that could explain it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- somsak2 3y ago
  what are you implying?
  - davely 3y ago
    I believe OP is implying that there is a political party aligned with burning books appealing to increasingly unhinged followers that could explain this.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- Etrnl_President 3y ago
  In the U.S. there are at least two (colloquially known as the left/right uniparty), and several smaller radical unsupported parties, willing to burn books and delete websites.
2-718-281-828 3y ago
> these lunatics quite possibly only a single lunatic
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  It's possible, but searching for news about bomb threat arrests turns up lots of people, so I think it unlikely that all those directed at libraries come from a single individual. Terroristic threats are depressing common nowadays.
- esalman 3y ago
  How do you know?

soligern 3y ago

[flagged]

hackermatic 3y ago
Hi, trans person here. My main concerns in life are having a job, a home, health, family, and friends. When I go out in public, I have the same hopes and fears as anyone else I know, except I also worry about being accosted on the street or in a public restroom while I'm minding my own business. Since you brought it up, at what point do you view transgender people's lives as becoming ideological?
- soligern 3y ago
  [flagged]
- WanderPanda 3y ago
  I would like a world where this does not happen but I also think that none of the things you say are issues of politics/equal rights. While not nice, these things seem to be well within the rights of the other people and I don‘t think you should try to force to change their minds through political means/power. I actually think the US has quite a good way of dealing with this by allowing a lot of differences between the states. In that way you can go where you‘re treated best and the other people can go where they like the lifestyles of the others the best. Forcing a national average is a recipe for disaster/division.
  - hackermatic 3y ago
    It's easy to say that someone should "go where you're treated best", but I have done that, and besides the cost and logistics, I still grieve that I don't feel safe in the city where I grew up, where friends and family still live, and that I still call home. If I told the other people that they're the ones who need to move away, not me, they'd feel just as torn. We all have to figure out a way to live next to each other.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > While not nice, these things seem to be well within the rights of the other people and I don‘t think you should try to force to change their minds through political means/power. I actually think the US has quite a good way of dealing with this by allowing a lot of differences between the states. In that way you can go where you‘re treated best and the other people can go where they like the lifestyles of the others the best. What if that logic was applied to other disregards for human life and rights such as segregation or slavery ?
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Hi! As a trans person, what is your take on the cancellation of JKR and when someone got fired for IIRC just using the term "woman" in UK? I'm not in US or UK but I see those issues as ideological. The issues you listed are completely fair but some think trans people being safe, having a job and being generally equal can coexist with the concept of a woman, but some don't think so. I guess/hope the above comment referred to that.
  - hackermatic 3y ago
    I think that J.K. Rowling's public statements show that at the very least, she has a strawman conception of what most trans people are like and what our motives are, that a much greater proportion of us are dangerous predators than actually are, and that trans rights activism as a whole is in her words "offering cover to predators." She's also platformed a lot of people who use phrases like "reducing" the number of transgender people, which is ominous. I'm not familiar with the UK incident you mentioned (I'm in the US), but Rowling in particular is concerned about a lot more dire things than an abstract concept of who is and isn't a woman. That being said, she is still rich, has movies and games in active production, and many of my friends consume that media without even being aware of her controversies, so cancellation is the wrong word for what's happening to and around her.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      I thought said incident is how attacks on her began but it looks like the trigger was her sarcastic objection to phrase "people who menstruate". Either way I can't really blame her if making a tweet about media allergy to word "woman" prompted death threats. Platforming, don't know enough to comment right now (though AFAIK people are not going out on protests against Joe Rogan like they did against her and we all know the characters Rogan is platforming...) I consider myself mostly left but I think the world should be big enough for both trans people and women-referred-to-as-women (who have their own long going battle for equality) to coexist. If it is wrong please let me know why. But for now if someone treats using word "woman" as equivalent to attacking trans people then I write that off as "ideological issue" since it's obviously not attacking trans people. Looks like Rowling couldn't write that off and needed to comment because she was personally attacked and also felt the need to defend women as she is one. Hope that helps clarify how people can be completely pro trans equality and yet be frustrated with some of what's happening as ideological agenda pushing.
- bunglefly 3y ago
  The ideological part is the basis behind changes to policy and law such that single-sex spaces become mixed-sex spaces. For example, opening up women's locker rooms to men who say they are women. This is to the benefit of the men who desire such access, but to the detriment of women who want to keep their female-only safe spaces. Whether cases like this constitite a justifiable change in policy or not is where the ideological divides lie.
JellyBeanThief 3y ago
If you want moderate views to prevail, you need to be working for ranked choice voting. The system we have now rewards extreme candidates. All the internet does is supercharge that. If we don't adopt a voting system that enables voters to punish extreme candidates instead of having to choose between the least undesirable of them, we're just going to keep on having despairing comment threads about the state of politics.
IntelMiner 3y ago
Transphobia isn't cool. Sorry human rights are too "leftist" a position
- soligern 3y ago
  What human rights? Sure killing or harassing cross dressers is abhorrent but otherwise no one has been bothering these people to begin with.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Other than (killing or) harrassing no one has been bothering ... ?? Just how blindly dismissive can a single comment get? I'm not on any tran bandwagon but it's plain they've been persecuted in western culture for centuries to date.
  - camus_absurd 3y ago
    This comment clearly comes from a place of ignorance. This attitude is part of the problem too. You just need to listen to them and they can tell you all they ways that people have been bothering them. Just because you can’t conceptualize how life can be hard when you have an incongruity between your physical body and mental self, it doesn’t mean that you can hand wave away other people’s struggles with this attitude of “ahhh they’re fine no one’s bothering them”. Shift your perspective to see the problem
  - IntelMiner 3y ago
    Ah, they're not trans now. They're "cross dressers" You're very much arguing in good faith already :)

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

[flagged]

soligern 3y ago
Isn’t social justice a good thing? Isn’t this agenda people trying to be the best they can?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I mean, if George Soros or the Koch Brothers want to fund a chain of libraries, then perhaps they can be hubs and platforms for whatever flavor of social justice that their funding demands. But municipal libraries are a public resource funded by taxpayers, and as such, all taxpayers deserve to benefit equally from such a resource, regardless of who they vote for, or who the librarians vote for. Carrying extremely biased, social-justice oriented events and collections in a municipal library is an exclusionary practice. It repels and alienates those with different beliefs, and thus reduces community diversity by cleaving off a large portion of taxpayers who have no use for this resource that they're supporting, thereby causing an imbalance and inequity in access to information and community resources.
- rayiner 3y ago
  [flagged]

PostOnce 3y ago

[flagged]

DrFlipper 3y ago

[flagged]

anigbrowl 3y ago

If you are going to be a terrorist at least target something big and important. In the security space this sort of attack is referred to as 'resilience targeting', as it impacts a community resource and each such episode (even when it's a hoax) imposes a not-insignificant economic cost - shutdown of the facility, use of police resources to cordon off, sweep, and investigate the hoax threat. It's hard to assess exactly how much but I'd imagine it runs into the tens of thousands of $ per incident. A similar phenomenon is the wave of computer-generated hoax active shooter calls against schools, a pattern which has prepeated in multiple states over the last year or two, eg https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/live-updates/police-across-the-area-respond-to-computer-generated-swatting-calls-claiming-school-threats/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/live-updates/police-acros...

gmerc 3y ago

If only there was a political party aligned with burning books appealing to increasingly unhinged followers that could explain it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
somsak2 3y ago
what are you implying?
- davely 3y ago
  I believe OP is implying that there is a political party aligned with burning books appealing to increasingly unhinged followers that could explain this.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
Etrnl_President 3y ago
In the U.S. there are at least two (colloquially known as the left/right uniparty), and several smaller radical unsupported parties, willing to burn books and delete websites.

2-718-281-828 3y ago

> these lunatics quite possibly only a single lunatic

anigbrowl 3y ago
It's possible, but searching for news about bomb threat arrests turns up lots of people, so I think it unlikely that all those directed at libraries come from a single individual. Terroristic threats are depressing common nowadays.
esalman 3y ago
How do you know?