This is a very America centric veiw and even if it is a steel man it deserves a counterpoint.

After WWII most of the nations who were old empire builders were decimated. The general feeling was even those on the winning side didn’t feel like they’d won. The rebuilding was slow and economic austerity lasted for decades.

The American prosperity of the 1950’s and 60’s wasn’t “normal”. America didn’t have international competition it otherwise would have and that power gave them bargaining rights which made them both culturally dominant as they projected a sense of prosperity and politically powerful due to the resources at their disposal. Opposition to America was potentially disastrous and America threw their weight around like crazy. They expanded their military with these resources and established bases in countries too weak to oppose them.

America came out of the war with something of a Big Damn Hero complex. Communism, for all it’s perceived threat was also a handy excuse to pursue expansion and in keeping American supremacy in place. Whether countries wantes to be “protected” or not really has a lot of across the board nuance. A lot of American political will was coercive and a lot of the things done in the fight for “democracy” were disproportionate and horrific.

Really a lot of the American supremacy at bottom was might makes right. With the world finally recovering economically and now able to speak as equals the US is using measures that demand a return to that economic supremacy and stranglehold. The larger sore points are growing. The world doesn’t need one big power in charge. They don’t need a king with a standing army. They want to make their own choices and have freedoms to not conform to whatever America wants and the attitudes Americans show to disregard that will is garnering response.

Genocide is technically a process and a sliding scale. It exists by degrees. It may seem hyperbolic to classify some actions as genocidal particularly when they are slow or the number of deaths do not seem absolute but it is still genocide.

What defines a genocide via international Convention is any of five acts intended to diminish the population of a cultural community. None of these have to be a totality of the group it can be only in part. The important thing is victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. The five acts of genocide are :

• Killing members of the group

• Causing them serious bodily or mental harm

• Imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group

• Preventing births

• Forcibly transferring children out of the group

While a number of countries are full five for five in regards to trans people you only really need one to qualify. Things like the lack of reporting of Trans deaths, the removal of services needed by the group including medical care or critical mental health resources as is happening with the closure of LGBTQIA+ specific crisis support in the US, the labelling of Trans people as pedophiles or removal of children from the custody of supportive parents into state custody by labelling gender affirming attitudes as “child abuse”, the forcing of trans people to endure security risks because of laws that often get them arrested for following them such as bathroom bills… All of these are genocidal measures they just aren’t fast acting.

While it may seem like the point of the word is to be splashy and attention grabbing that need not be the point of it. The cultural expectations that genocide need only be wartime type measures of systematic elimination is a disservice to a lot of other genocides that are happening globally.

Her last name is Wilson… Is there some really terrible Wilson I don’t know about?

Really not looking forward to a repeat of the time of the Hogwarts Legacy game. Online Trans spaces were being brigaded with every reveiw or JKR tweet and comment sections filled unchallenged with tacit endorsements after the trans voices fell silent because we were all just hoping the abuse would stop. That the HP targeted adds and their companion transphobic political adds riding on the wake of the high on queer creators would dry up. The media, the platforms the people coming into places proclaiming they are gunna buy multiple copies of the game to show us what is what. The suicidal ideation of our most vulnerable friends as they deal with feelings of being targeted and feelings of being unwanted or ignored by the world…

Most people not caring might not be “valid” but it will feel like the truth again.

Trans person maybe, some of us are subject to our own personal problems just like anyone… But a concensus of trans people should be the marker. I don’t know how many times I have heard someone claim allyship when they are being called out by multiple trans people for something they said or did.

It’s interesting how fast some people will flip. Sometimes a well meaning cis person will suggest something as a work around for some trans engineered social convention or accommodation to try and make things easier for them without realizing how it interacts with the actual experience of being trans. When trans people try and explain exactly why it does not work based off of experience the cis person, upset their idea to solve a problem that they do not fully understand was rejected , suddenly start into the old transphobic gems - “oh you’re just trying to be difficult, play the victim, nobody will like you if you’re that sensitive”

End of day Trans allyship does involve a certain amount of trusting trans people to tell you what makes them comfortable and what they need because it really is a very different experience of gender at it’s core. Deciding what we need on our behalf or telling us how we should feel or giving us advice on how to approach transness happens a lot out in the world and it really isn’t helpful. It often just exposes how much the speaker does not understand.

Maybe? The fear of clowns is often rooted in the uncanny. The obscuring makeup of clowns makes their emotions and expressions either so overly exaggerated or difficult/impossible to read which messes with the lizard brain and makes them seem to some people, particularly ones who have issues with reading facial cues, as inhuman. It’s sort of the same principle that freaks people out about dolls and mannequins. That almost but decidedly not quite human alarm.

Drag makeup generally serves the opposite purpose. It is exaggerated but in such a way as to be easier to read the performer’s face at a distance.

The short answer is it’s not books. It’s mostly licencing deals in the form of video games and merchandise… However HBO is about to put forward a new series that JKR will have executive control and an executive sized pay check for.

It’s the “well it already exists and licencing deals are already paid, might as well watch it/play it/own it” that keeps the whole engine rolling on. Every time there’s a little bit of advocacy to disengage from the fandom it is always spun as “too late” or focuses on the books or death of the author… But all that’s really required is ambivalence.

Inevitably the new HP thing will come out and whether or not trans people mention anything people will drag up the controversy, use the reminder to brigade the spaces trans people connect online, try and goad their trans coworker for a commentary and set off yet another flurry of right wing backlash that makes elevating the franchise a patriotic duty to “stick it to the moralizing trans people to show them who is boss”. All of this causes more cultural pressure on a population already underwater with being chased out of the public sphere but it will be framed as a just retaliation for a perceived slight.

It’s a song and dance that will continue ad infinitum as long as it’s profitable because appearantly nostalgia is worth turning a blind eye to the where the money goes.

Your premise seems to have little regard for scale. Yes people are shitty but how they allocate the resources given to them matters.

Your argument here is nebulous fictional supposed evil people are probably doing bad things which allows you the comfort of not figuring out who is doing little harm vs a lot of harm because under your framework it doesn’t matter. As long as any actors real or imaginary in the system are bad you are absolved from participating in trying to alter market forces in your own small way.

To others on here there’s a difference between someone who did a shitty thing or has a shitty belief and one whom is tied into a direct political action block they are funding off of the proceeds they get from licencing their intellectual property to video-games and HBO series they are producing right now. This isn’t really about reading the books you already own or the DVDs you already have. It’s about killing the public interest that is keeping the author relevant and making her megaphone louder and the lawyers she funds to fight Supreme Court cases to disenfranchise trans people richer.

Scale is the main consideration.

Statement wise “I don’t want the government to tell me what to eat” or variations could mean basically anything. Most of the time it’s posturing on behalf of the idea that a lack of government regulation is a good thing which ignores a rather bloody history of food suppliers adulterating food with harmful substances in the name of preservation / cheapening production cost or using production practices that cause the likelihood of contamination of food.

Once you scratch the surface of the argument you can usually figure out more exactly what they mean and it often isn’t things like government subsidy programs publishing food pyramids based on shady science and economics rather than in the interest of health.

Often it’s based out of perceived personal inconvenience or the appearance of moral judgement such as when there’s some sort of health labelling initiative.

In Canada there are a lot of things that are not considered legal additives for food that are used in the US and the difference in strictness is in part because the Health care system in Canada is funded publicly. Producers of foodstuffs cost the government money directly if whatever they put in it has no nutritional value and causes known health problems. Rather than let companies create messes and tragedies which the government is on the hook to clean up when people’s health fails they remove the issue at it’s source. In the US there’s less incentive as these costs become scattered in the form of individual medical bills and oftentimes the savings are from food being shelf stable for longer. Shrugging one’s shoulders at the fallout or claiming its an exercise of “freedom” is in service to those who make money hand over fist.

Hey, Non-binary trans masc person in trades here.

I can tell you how I perceive different types of co-worker if it helps you want to dial in what it’s like on the other side of the experience. There’s layers to the whole situation and as non-binary folks we understand what we are asking for isn’t automatically going to click and requires people to figure us out.

First up : Most of us end of day aren’t going to rock the boat for anything less than fully agregious behaviour so calls to report other people for being mildly offensive are probably not actually going to go anywhere. Most of us are scared of being labelled “a problem” so we just take the hits when they come. If you are a boss and notice a non-binary person sticking closer to specific people and avoiding others there’s a good chance that they’ve found the people who are safe and avoiding ones who aren’t. A great accommodation that can invisibly help is just to recognize this strata and if a task nessesitates putting people together try and pair along these lines. A lot of co-workers wait until other people aren’t around to let their nastier behaviour shine.

Now to co-worker types. Aside from the full on transphobe or problem persons there’s a range of different stages of cool people.

The “I don’t really get it” Co-worker pays lip service to the polite aspects of using pronouns. They are the type to introduce you to others by misgendering you and then flap their hands and go “Oh no sorry ‘they’”. We know they don’t get it or don’t really care. The misgendering still hurts but they are fairly benign. They make these accidents non maliciously and are afforded grace. If they step in it we basically disregard because they aren’t really worth the effort of getting too comfortable around. We make these accommodations for strangers daily. Annoying but nessisary.

The “in training” co-worker is one whom is encountering their very first trans person. They want you to be their Obi wan and their enthusiasm is a bit of a double edged sword at times. It’s tiring to teach people to dance when they keep stepping on your feet but the job needs doing. Some of us veiw this as our own brand of service to the cause of normalizing ourselves more widely. Some of us just don’t want to be bothered. Either way, just wanting to learn is heaps better than ambivalence. If you fuck up something, don’t make a big deal about it. It’s not that you’re a terrible person and should have known better. Our stuff takes practice and we know it’s not intuitive.

The “A little too up in our shit” co-worker is excited to know the real you but looks at you as a beautiful creature in need of preservation. They might seek to advocate on your behalf or behind your back but the attempt is clumsy and often at odds with a non-binary person’s desire to just get through the workday as a regular human and not make waves. Good enthusiasm sure, we’re probably friends but for the love of God we’re adults and we can sort out our own shit if need be.

The “Understands the Assignment” co-worker is just comfortable to be around. They don’t have to be the most tuned in to all the nuance about our specific needs in ways we require more out of partners, family and friends but they treat our basic requirements as no big deal, maybe they occasionally ask questions to check in if they catch us struggling or reacting but aren’t going to narc to the boss on our behalf. They either avoid all stereotypes associated with sex or in the case of trans mascs/trans femmes they treat us like one of the boys/girls. Gold standard.

Hey, enby here. While I definitely benefit from they being a default I have enough binary trans friends who have this experience. What the person you are replying to is giving you is something referred to as nuance. A solve put forward by a well meaning cis person doesn’t automatically work just because it seems like it should to you. Sometimes it causes new problems and when someone tells you about them it’s a good idea to not assume it’s them trying to be a dick or difficult about something but actually explaining why that solve isn’t always a good thing.

If your intention is to make a trans person actually comfortable instead of getting defensive then listening when these things come up instead of telling them they are trying to be trouble on purpose is the play.

Not everything works for every trans person and inside the trans community there is something sometimes referred to as “the coward’s they”. It’s a well known phenomenon where a physical transition gets to a certain point the brain stops easily registering and sorting someone as being their birth sex because they seemlessly look and act as their gender so the automatic neurological system of assigning them a sex value flips fully to the new and desired setting. You see it on conservative media sometimes where they slip up and use the actual correct pronouns and have to correct themselves back over to using the wrong pronouns… Problem being is it causes the same mental redirect issues for a Conservative actively dodging the automatic reaction as learning to use Non-binary pronouns so as a compromise these people use “they” instead because it is easier to trick the sorter and strand themselves in the safe neutral ground where they can identify a person as “not actually a woman/man” without triggering their audience by using correct pronouns for a trans person.

When you use they/them pronouns for a binary trans person it’s interpreted by the brain of the trans person as you seeing and reacting to all the aspects of their body that makes them visibly trans and your brain’s automatic sex recognition system sorting them into this “not enough” category. It’s effectively less hurtful than full misgendering… But it still pings the bit of the brain that is seeing their own body through your perception via your words. It causes they same dysphoric reaction where their mind picks over all the parts of their body that would cause you to react by misgendering or degendering them. The whole point of preferred pronouns is to help us stop that mental reaction from happening as much.

It is perfectly safe to use they/them pronouns for cis people who do not have dysphoric reactions at all and for non-binary people who actively use those pronouns but if someone rocks up looking like they are trying to project a full binary situation it’s worth going for the full binary pronoun option because they are specifically putting in the work to be as obvious as possible so that people know that’s what they want.

I think you are placing the bar for facism a bit high friend. You don’t have to be in government or influential in any way to be a fascist. You can be a homeless person who hasn’t spoken to another person in a year and still be a fascist. You can also be a fascist without believing that you are…

Fascism is both a set of beliefs taken to an extreme and actions wittingly or not done that furthers the power or reach of an organized group who holds those beliefs. More or less it means facism can be something you do rather than something you believe strongly in. Your rank and file facist is tricked into the position.

Joe Rogan is either a facist or a puppet/ tool of facists that serves as a algorithm kidnapper into their pipeline to normalize their veiw points. Whether Rogan himself holds these beliefs personally is kind of irrelevant. It is the use to which he has been put and the damage is done.

Haven’t we all just been living under constant nuclear threat since we were basically born? It’s kind of hard to be anxious about it since it’s basically the background radiation we’ve been told not to prioritize or think too much about since we were kids but I would wager each one of us has a nebulous and ill defined “in case of bomb” plan.

Women who are like that usually change their mind after a couple of years buckled into the yoke. There’s currently a whole group of women stuck in golden handcuffs in the trad wife influencer community who are miserable in their relationships but making too much ad money to consider stopping.

Absolutely. I belong to a non cheating group. It’s just seems completely unfathomable that it could happen. Most of us are in 15+ year relationships and are friends with everyone. It’s not just a “the women are friends with the women, the men are friends with the men” situation. We got a blend of genders all participating in the same hobbies. There would be so much social cost to cheating it would be kind of insane.

Where I work though there’s a decent amount of drama in that regard though and I have noticed that one common factor is that the relationships are atomized. They either keep their old friends going in and there’s almost zero expectation of their partners integrating into each other’s friendships or there’s just this expectation that men and women are fundamentally different creatures. That whole men are from Mars women from Venus shtick. From the outside it seems like emotional distance where people look at each other like they aren’t targets of empathy - more like they play by a book as if they can just put the right inputs in they will get the desired outputs.

I know this is entirely anedotal and that anybody could theoretically cheat for any number of reasons… It’s just something that I noticed about the groups of cheats that I am aware of.

I don’t feel like digging through JKR’s body of work to find perfect quoted examples but if you feel inclined go back over Hermione’s advocacy yourself she is framed by author as “smuggly” shaking her collecting tin, cornering people in house common spaces until people acquiesce just to get her to go away. Every time her protest is brought up it is usually paired with some kind of value judgement device where the reader is made aware of the apathy of her friends or the people she’s advocating to or the annoyance she is on people in her space.

What Hermione does is a reasonable response for a person her age. What the author creates around that is a atmosphere of hopelessness where Hermione feels personally fufilled by the virtue of the cause but everything in the narrative conspires to make sure you know she’s tilting at windmills.

“By and large the system works” under most circumstances the system (elvish slavery) functions as intended/ without victims.

Probably not vaccinated for e coli. There’s very few options and most only work very short term. This smacks of reckless child endangerment.

I mean Cholera is kind of not the issue here. This creek has habitually tested high for e coli. An e coli infection makes cholera seem tame. You treat cholera it’s got a mortality rate of less than 1%… E coli infection has a mortality rate around 17% slightly less than one in five people who get hit die from renal failure. Those odds go up significantly for kids…

This idiot brought his grandkids to splash in this e coli laced stream. I am without words.

I mean when you look at Harry Potter through a magnifying glass it’s actually very pro status quo with a lot of issues breaking down to “the wrong people in charge” a lot of gestures made towards the sort of social problems of the society… Like look at house elves. We meet Dobby and everyone agrees that slave holding situation isn’t ideal but once we meet more house elves we learn that Dobby is kind of a weirdo and that they are effectively a sentient slave race with only exceptions like Dobby taking issue with being bound. Hermione sees this as a legitimate issue as any potential elf could be a Dobby but then great detail is placed about how annoying and virtually pointless her advocacy is but the rest of her society and the framing effectively informs the reader - “don’t think about house elves. Dobby is fine. It’s not your problem and shouldn’t be.” It’s framed as a problem to be solved on a small scale interpersonal basis because by and large the system works.

It’s generally difficult for people to critically read a narrative that throws up that many hairpin bends particularly when the set ups are made in the book that these things are social problems… but then never paid off. That it happens a fair amount innthe books is a fairly confusing yarnball. It feels progressive in the same way a company mission statement that is not being enacted in any real way feels progressive.