I’m going to vote ranked choice, because first past the post is antidemocratic!

4, 1, 2, 3

To be fair the blonde bombshell in a catsuit was initially nonbinary.

And then Janeway immediately gave it conversion therapy and told it to be a woman.

Yeah that’s the way it was before their job was automated. But now you don’t need them to work.

I’m a soulist. Soulists are always saying things like that. It’s the best version of leftism.

These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.

Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.

Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.

Proud luddite here. The original luddites destroyed machinery owned by capitalists which threatened their jobs. The choice was either destroy the machines, or stand by and become unable to feed your family while a rich man gets richer.

I have no opposition to technology which is used for good, and whose control is placed in the hands of the workers. Your self-hosted AIs are fine, although I do ask that you only use energy intensive processes if you have solar panels. After all, this planet is the only one we’ve got. At our current rate of pollution, soon the world will only be inhabitable to AI.

But I downvote anything promoting corporate AI designed to replace people’s jobs. I am all for replacing human jobs, if the humans get to relax and live comfortable lives afterward. But I am against replacing jobs if we choose to have a society where you need a job to live. That’s not nature, it’s a choice we make as a society. The minute you automate someone’s job, you do necessarily admit that society doesn’t need that person’s work to get by. The only reason they shouldn’t get to put their feet up and take it easy is political. And politically, we have decided instead what happens is they die. That’s unacceptable, and until it changes, we can’t afford to have job replacing machines.

If you like the tactics soulism adds to the leftist arsenal, you should read the soulist manifesto at http://soulism.net. There’s only a few dozen of us, but after reading the manifesto, I saw some pretty huge failures in the mainstream leftist worldview. Most leftists want to win a material victory against Capital, but they categorically refuse to deconstruct the social reality created by Capital to control us. Socially, they’re reactive. They take the way their opponent describes the world at face value and only disagree when the scientific method disagrees. But most of our reality is social, not scientific, and the scientific method doesn’t help you with that. The mainstream right is much better at crafting realities - a process we soulists call magic - than the mainstream left is. Escaping the body prison doesn’t really help if you can’t even begin to challenge the mind prison.

I thought so. As a soulist, I’m interested in deconstructing and remixing social constructs into forms that benefit social justice. I noticed the hypocrisy of transphobes crying wolf about kids going through irreversible changes, and figured out it takes next to zero effort to use their own language. In appropriating the forms of our enemies’ arguments, we reduce their disagreement with us down to its fundamental form - in this case, a religious belief in genetic destiny. That’s the only thing setting their arguments of “for the children” apart from my arguments of “for the children”. And this is a much harder thing for a bystander to accept unquestioningly than “for the children”. I like showing bystanders what’s really setting our enemies apart from us.

Think of it like rhetorical kung fu. Using the opponent’s force against them

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It’ll start right back up again completely naturally as soon as you stop taking the pills. The pills are hormone blockers. The gonads still produce sex hormones, but the blockers react with the hormones and render them inert. The inert hormones are passed as urine like any other waste product in the blood. A few days after you stop taking the blockers, they’ll run out and the sex hormones will start expressing themselves just like they would in someone who never took the blockers. Puberty will begin (or resume) just as nature planned.

The only side effect is that you won’t go through puberty. Unfortunately, this does mean you’ll have a child’s amount of bone density, which is not good for a lifetime. But there’s absolutely 0 risk in delaying puberty until age 18. You’ll just grow up slower, the same as any late bloomer.

Hormone blockers are actually a component in an adult trans person’s hormone replacement therapy. To take me as an example, I have a pair of testes which produce testosterone. So I take an antiandrogen; a testosterone blocker, to suppress the effects. And I take estrogen pills so that I have a female blood chemistry. When I started taking hormone pills, my body reacted just like any teenage girl’s body. I got softer skin, mood swings, and better hair. I tell you what, having the emotions of a teenage girl as an adult is an absolute trip. I’m glad they’ve settled down since then. Some trans women I know even got period cramps, despite not having a uterus. I don’t envy them.

The body is genetically programmed to respond to sex hormones in a certain way. It doesn’t matter what you were born as, everyone’s organs, muscles, bones, and brain have a genetic programming that responds to estrogen one way, and testosterone another way. The potential is already inside every living human. That potential remains there for your entire life. Puberty blockers can’t do anything to take it away.

If I ever stopped taking my testosterone blocker, I’d start growing bigger muscles and hair in strange places. My body would resume functioning like a male body. One day I’ll get my testes removed, and I’ll never have to worry about that again. But that surgery is only available to adults, and it requires a psychiatric assessment. I’ve been openly trans for years and years and I’m still not allowed to do it yet. There’s absolutely no risk of a child going through the procedure without the absolute greatest caution, and a very urgent, life-saving need. And even if a horrible one in a billion mistake was made, they could just give the kid hormone pills the same as I take in order to restore their original sexual chemistry.

I don’t think there’s anything cowardly about refusing to support Netanyahu’s antisemitic government, except that she wasn’t a bit firmer about it.

I think refusing to support an antisemitic government like Israel is brave.

That’s not true, but I wish it was. I wish everyone who tried to argue against saving children’s lives was pressured out of it by being called a murderer. Instead, murderers like Robert Galbraith are freely appearing in parliament to argue in favour of this legislation.

And I know you can’t tell from the headline, but this new rule against sex ed in schools also prohibits telling children what parts of their body are not okay for an adult to touch. Thanks to this new law, we will have a generation of children who are unable to report sexual abuse. Anyone who is in favour of this law is aiding and abetting pedophiles and getting children raped.

No, that’s not true at all. I was pretty clearly nonbinary growing up, but every adult told me that natural puberty was a good thing and there was no way to avoid it. They didn’t tell me that puberty blockers were an option. They should have. It would only be 2 years after reaching natural puberty that I realised I was trans. 2 years of puberty blockers might have made a huge difference to my life. I was sure as shit rushed by every adult I knew into transitioning into a man, just because I was born with a penis.

You’re a murderer of children.

Personally I think we should be giving kids a lot more support in not transitioning. And by transitioning, I mean transitioning from a girl to a woman or from a boy to a man. If the child isn’t 100% certain they want to go through with massive irreversible hormonal changes, they shouldn’t. I don’t care whether those hormones come from a pill or from a gonad. They can make an informed decision whether to continue with puberty when they’re 16-18

Trans people know they should be the other gender and that puberty causes massive permanent changes to their body they are horrified by. They often do not know that everyone else around them’s deepest fantasy isn’t to wake up one day as the other sex.

Can confirm. As a kid, I saw a lot of jokes about how horrible puberty is. I thought everyone felt the same way as me, since they all acted like it.

It means she’s transitioning femmewards. She wouldn’t call herself something she hates being, now, would she?

Does it have a headphone jack

I agree with you, electric bikes belong on the road.

… after all cars are banned