As of right now, Nexus Mods and Reddit are enforcing these new laws. I don’t use either site very often (the latter not since the API exodus). My understanding is that it’s mandatory for platforms of a certain size in the UK after the 25th of July.

The UK is kind of a perfect exit node country (everything is in English!)

I don’t feel too offended because I’ve been lurking on Hexbear for over a year now, I understand the culture here is a bit more Twittery. I don’t think every individual here is super catty, just that there’s a lot more Twitter influence than most of Lemmy/Piefed, and as someone who fled Twitter in like 2012, it’s a bit of a damper on an otherwise fun time. I’m all for building bridges with the Only Funny Instance™, even if we do disagree on like 20% of leftism stuff.

The general federated (mostly libby) “big tent” Lemmy/Piefed culture is much closer to tech forums or early R*ddit, which is pretty pleasant most of the time. But it does come with a handful of Zionists etc. That can only be annoying, but when their pitiful replies get downvoted, contrasted with waves of support from all over the world under my posts about day to day life being terrorized by Natenyahu’s murder machine here in Lebanon, it’s reassuring to see how insignificant they are. They can keep barking.

I’ve been aware of Contra’s issues for a long time. I’m not queer so some of the controversies weren’t intuitively “big” or “insignificant” to me. But like five six years ago, when the only message successfully being boosted to consistently reach my young mind was Jorkin D Peanitson, she really was one of the first voices of reason that put the brakes on me falling into the wrong pipeline. FWIW I haven’t seen any of her videos in years.

I do expect better from one of the (formerly?) biggest and most accessible leftie video people than I expect from Mastercard, personally. Is she that comparable to [pop star] or [tv show]?

I feel like being whipped with this tweet as a reply to something I’ve written should be a sign to go outside, but I really don’t see myself in it. I really don’t follow anyone particularly closely, not in the way I’d need to to feel targeted by this, I don’t think.

I usually don’t give a fuck when someone I follow online decides to become a vocal spokesperson for awful shit, online or in person, you have to expect some number of the agreeable people around you to have skeletons in their closet that you are just not okay with.

Contra’s collapse I didn’t call. This one is really unfortunate. It was her videos that got me out of “I don’t know about this trans stuff, I don’t care, just keep it out of my face” to something a bit more understanding. Nobody was putting anything in my face, etc

This is one of the few “celebrity” “betrayals” that really sting. Her, Ethan Klein, Steven Wilson, I can’t think of too many.

Can’t wait to wake up tomorrow to news that Grant Imahara personally signed the Ottoman horses that were used by officers rounding up Armenians or some shit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratothoa_oestroides

Geographically given where I am, it’s probably this one

A foundational memory for me was a fish dissection in middle school in which we respectfully sliced the innards of one of these bad boys only to find this exact parasite inside. All the other groups just had a fish to dissect, but we also took a supercurricular lab detour to dissect that other thing too, as my classmates from other groups gathered around with real curiosity.

Frankly haven’t thought much of it in years. Would be cool to know what this is actually called.

There’s a reason the top insult is “fuck you, you fucking fuck”.

See, that’s part of why English feels unserious, at least to me. I feel like the impact of insults in English are limited, like the spectrum ends at 25%, compared to other languages. You can make up for a lot of it with wit, but “you fucking fuck” is playground-level, come on. There’s a degree of unflavored spite that needs a ton of semantic scaffolding in English that can be wheeled out with very few words in Arabic.

Insulting someone in Arabic is a poetic exercise. It’s much less clunky to just chain as many ideas as you want, invoking whatever cudgel you want to beat someone over the head with. Just let all your prejudices rip in one swift tsunami of syllables. Appearance, sect, multiple family generations, genitals, town, inadequate upbringing, God, nothing is safe. People tend to be very sensitive about respecting their religion here until it’s time to verbally slap someone, which they do by racking up a month’s worth of sacrilege. It’s fantastic. There’s also a one-word insult for women in Arabic that makes my skin crawl, that’s not a thing in English. I’m not even a woman.

A few years back an English-language religious broadcast started up here in Lebanon and it made my fucking skin crawl. Sure they were singing the same stuff I hear in Arabic all the time, but contextually it was so different. One is something that is being intentionally chanted in an elevated form of language, the other is almost talking down to me in the same candor Barney the dinosaur did when I was four years old. I can’t explain it. It was fucking weird.

There’s a bit of prejudice in here, I’ll admit. I don’t think I think I’m better than others based on their native language lacking emotional punchiness. But I am compelled to explain it. There are parents who never cared about their little kids saying English swear words because they practically don’t count. “Fuck you fucking fuck” is just a more petulant (and less fun to correctly capitalize) “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo”.