Bob Kerns @BobKerns@qoto.org

@futurebird How about an iPad tablet with a keyboard? That’s what I’m using right now..

So it’s got touch screen, touchpad, keyboard.

Is presence of a touch screen more important than absence of keyboard?

I’m not going to use it much w/o a keyboard, but I use the touch screen more than the trackpad.

@ct_bergstrom The photo would seem to be the answer the question!

@farooqkz @freemo @tonic
Thank you for a well-written explanation. The paragraph about Sahih/Mutiwater/Aahaad is entirely new to me.

Consider this: two men have sex. Nobody is harmed. Usually, nobody even knows.

I you kill someone, they are harmed, their families are harmed, their employers are harmed, the shopkeepers where they spend their money are harmed.

Society is harmed.

So society bans murder. In some places, the punishment is death.

So who should carry out these punishments? You?

Best to leave punishment to Allah, and not concern yourself with acts that have no effect on you whatsoever.

@ambihelical Thank you! My life is better now.

@arborelia @ct_bergstrom

That LBNL effort to facilitate name updates is really cool! I remember asking a trans fiction author on occasion of releasing their first book after their legal name change, what they could do about the prior books in the same universe. I don’t think they’d really worked out an answer. A reader might only know their deadname or lived name and not find the rest of the series!

Every time I look at Google Scholar, I feel like I’m looking at something out of the dark ages. I compare it to PubMed…

@ambihelical I’m looking for an iPad one, since I’m finding the web app’s Federated feed unusable.

#StopTheScroll!

With Thanksgiving (US) behind us, it’s time for my old friend Kent Pitman’s poem “A Christmas Peril”

Also available in Spanish.

#christmas #climate #poem

@Pat @freemo @farooqkz @tonic
I’m regretting the choice of the word “male”. I mean sports which are divided into boys’ and girls’ versions, or men’s and women’s versions. (Take note of the order, universally used, reflecting a subordinate status, sigh…)

@arinbasu @freemo My promoting #qoto on Twitter is one way to bypass the gatekeeping, and I encourage others to do so as well.

An alternate curated list would also be possible, but a lot of work, and you’d have to find a way to get it front of people who just know “mastodon” and type it into their search bar.

@Vivernu @Pat @freemo @farooqkz @tonic

In the context of school sports, fatigue is a side effect of puberty blockers, but if we’re talking college or pro, you have to take hormone withdrawal into account. In addition to fatigue, withdrawing from T you lose that extra muscle mass.

I don’t feel like a good faith discussion is possible without a clear understanding of the purpose of the competition and a clear understanding of the impact of trans people’s participation.

Arguing broadly on the basis of hypotheticals just serves the transphobic agenda. I’m not accusing you of having a transphobic agenda yourself.

But fear that trans women might participate in girls sports, in the abstract, is clearly trans phobia (deliberately two words).

Discussing it on the basis of what might happen, divorced from all context, pushes for broad trans exclusion where it’s not needed, and where perhaps separate boy/girl sports aren’t needed at all.

And the emphasis on who wins needs some reexamination as well. Children’s sports where parents come to blows…

A large part of the furor over this topic, to the extent it’s not pure transphobia, is a symptom of this unhealthy obsession with winning.

Anything that’s left over might be worthy of a serious discussion.

@FediThing
Ask yourself this: What is the purpose of a block?

Is it to prevent me from seeing something, to hide it from me?

Or is it to protect me from having it shoved in my face, to harass me?

I’ve been on the net for 50 years now. I’ve seen a lot of crap. I’ve moderated large groups, dealt with a lot of attacks and ban evasions.

IMO, Qoto gets this exactly right. It empowers the potential victims. It doesn’t enable reaching potential recruits. These don’t appear on the federated feed, they’re just not inaccessible.

There’s nothing wrong with a full ban for those who choose to shelter from the threats. You should keep your policy and Qoto theirs. You are both protecting people in different ways.

Those of us who want to keep an eye out for danger, however, cannot if we’re blinded “for our protection”.

I won’t get the harmful content unless I look for it or it is being discussed. I can block it from my feed if I need to. Qoto supports blocking entire domains, and I have done so.

We’re on the same side of the real issue here. Can’t we recognize different people need different tactics for dealing with threats?

@trinsec I kind of wish Wednesday had less of a character arc. It did serve to motivate a lot of the plot, but it lost a lot of what makes her uniquely Wednesday. It’ll be hard for a second season to deal with that I think.

@Pat @freemo @farooqkz @tonic Ban American football, and you’ve got a deal!

Especially since male sports hog the attention and other rewards.

@arinbasu @freemo (I have plugged qoto on Twitter, and I plan to do so again soon).

@arinbasu @freemo The reason this matters is that the joinmastodon list is not itself federated, but it is what people encounter when they wish to join.

I would not have found it if I had joined a few days later.

And I wouldn’t have been happy with any of the choices I was presented with. That’s not good for the #fediverse, and it’s not good for people fleeing Twitter. Often #qoto is exactly the right place for them.

@Vivernu @Pat @freemo @farooqkz @tonic

1) What is the purpose of school sports?
2) The physicality to which you allude is based on hormonal differences. If we’re talking about high school sports, it’s puberty blockers we’re talking about.

This would put trans women at a disadvantage.

So to your question: what is the context? Are you attacking a trans athlete? Are you seeking to impose your opinion?

Do you seek to exclude trans athletes from high school sports? If so, do you believe that high school sports should be about finding who is most physically capable?

If so, does that even support your argument? (Personally, I reject that role for high school sports, but any trace of unfairness in who wins pales in comparison to the unfairness of not even being allowed to compete.)

Have you even met a trans woman?

But here’s a formula for you. Ask—does this speech do harm? To a group? To individuals?

Is the purpose of the group, or the actions of the individual, to do harm to others?

These questions should help you work out an answer.

I just post here. I can’t interpret the rules for you, especially out of context.

@farooqkz @freemo @tonic Just because you narrate such a Hadith doesn’t keep it from being hate speech. The Hadith are not the Quran. Their oral narratives collected and recorded long after Mohammad’s death. If the King James Bible, long the cornerstone of much of English-speaking Christianity, can speak of unicorns and misread Jewish Sheol to become Dante’s Inferno, surely we can picture some early Shia or Sunni cleric let his own hatred’s leak into his interpretations. AFAIK there’s zero evidence of Mohammed taking a stand against homosexuality at all, and there is certainly evidence of his preaching forgiveness.

What you believe is a choice. If you believe you must hate, you chose hatred.

Using religion to justify hatred, even genocide, has a long history. Some religions make this easier than others. Calvinist ideas of predestination make it easy to justify almost anything as a manifestation of God’s will. The followers of Jacobus Arminius reject that interpretation.

Similarly, Shia and Sunni have different Hadith, different interpretations of Mohammed’s teachings, each wrapped in their own onion layers of reinterpretation. Each layer was someone’s choice. None were approved by Mohammed’s own hand.

So don’t pretend you don’t have a choice in whether to hate, to speak words of hatred, or commit acts of hatred.

The Crusaders applied a similar logic to justify their incursions and looting, Muslims used it to justify invading Persia and forcing conversions, suppressing Zoroastrians.

But religion was not WHY they did these things. They chose paths of gain and glory, and chose their beliefs to match their plans.

Would you justify the Crusaders? Because they believed they should drive you out, or convert you to their religion?

Do you want to believe in a world where a religious belief justifies every harm against people who have not harmed them, pose no threat to them?

Perhaps every harm to YOU?

These rules constrain you—but most of all, they protect you.

I have no desire to see you subjected to the sorts of online harassment that members of the LGBTQ community have suffered, even at times spilling over into lethal real world encounters.

I call on you to reject such beliefs. But at least accept that you must not speak words of hate or commit acts of hatred.

@freemo I have some empathy for the situation Eugen finds himself in, but caving to Nazis is never a good idea (not to mention, never the ethical choice).

@farooqkz @freemo
What is your real purpose in asking this question?

Surely you don’t need to ask if advocating killing people is hate speech.

A more interesting question is whether this is hate speech against Muslims.

Consider this view is far from universal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_in_Islam

Consider that Leviticus 20:13, in at least the King James translation, calls for the same thing.

I can’t speak to the Jewish view here, but Christians view the Old Testament to have been supplanted by a less-harsh message of the New Testament.

(Before making assumptions about the Jewish view of Leviticus, keep in mind that the King James translation contains 2 references to unicorns—down from Tyndale’s 4).

Are you trying to incite hatred of Muslims from the LGBTQ community?

I don’t think that’s your intent, but I do think you need to reflect on why you would present the #Muslim religion as a threat.

Is defaming a religion a ban-worthy act? I don’t know. I’m new here.

But I don’t approve of it.