Very specifically, this is in response to EPIC City, a master-planned community north of Dallas that’s being bankrolled by a group of Muslim real estate developers. But you can see it echoing the disgust conservatives have for Minneapolis and Dearborn, Michigan, with their own large Muslim populations.

A lot of this is a tacit attempt to control Muslim municipal populations be restricting how they govern themselves locally.

So you can step in at the state (maybe federal, if Chip Roy gets his way) level and announce this mayor or judge or city council is illegitimate because the leadership isn’t Christian.

Very specifically, this is in response to EPIC City, a master-planned community north of Dallas that’s being bankrolled by a group of Muslim real estate developers. But you can see it echoing the disgust conservatives have for Minneapolis and Dearborn, Michigan, with their own large Muslim populations.

We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume

I’d be curious to meet someone who wasn’t.

300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:

How do you have a conversation about whether or not god exists and we are all subjects to his teaching? How do you debate with someone who shows up wearing the sin of misguided faith?

And the answer, largely, was “you don’t, you burn them as a heretic”.

Again, this takes us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. We don’t want a large movement of deeply religious reactionaries burning people at the stake. So we nip the impulse in the bud by censoring individuals and organizations that propagate hysterical beliefs about The End Times and Eternal Damnation of the Human Soul, as a means of goading them into enforcing a theocratic dictatorship.

In the same vein, we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) don’t like ICE banging down people’s doors and dragging them off to concentration camps. And I’d posit we wouldn’t be living in this moment if the anti-immigration firebrands had been isolated, muzzled, and neutered before they could propagate a bunch of reactionary misinformation to the general public.

The flip side of this is the Israeli censorship of Palestine, which we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) generally don’t like. Not because we have some contrarian attitude towards censorship generally speaking, but because we believe propagating information about the genocide is a primary means of changing the policies around our country’s support of it.

And then there’s the flip-flip side, where we (generic Lemmy Libs) are perfectly happy with censoring Chinese/Russian media, if we believe this media is somehow being weaponized to weaken the US or turn the population against itself.

300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now.

We fucking better be. The notion that modern public education, mass media, and online social discourse hasn’t granted us any new useful information is pretty bleak. Sort of raises the question of why human language exists at all, if it’s just white noise and nobody is gaining any kind of material benefit.

(Although, check out Peter Watts’s Blightsight if you want to chase that rabbit down the hole).

But part of the appeal of censorship is that you’re gating your social circle from regression. You’re not going back to re-litigate settled issues with any kind of seriousness. You certainly aren’t going to tolerate reactionary quarters of your population that try and reinstate them.

My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes.

I would argue that it is cruel to indoctrinate someone else with misinformation and a kindness to spare them from delusion. Similarly, bigotry can turn verbal harm into physical harm very quickly. Even benign communication can be weaponized if it is used to drown people out or deafen them.

So I’ve got three general categorizes of communication that it would be compassionate to spare them from.

I mean, he’s a journalist in the same way Josef Mengele is a doctor.

See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology.

I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.

You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored.

Every system has its gray areas and decision points.

That said, I see a lot of anti-censorship absolutists who seem zealously in favor of open debate until… they get swamped by spam posts or drowned out by monied interests or sea-lioned by people who are just being annoying.

Hell, Charlie Kirk died with a debate on his lips. And TPUSA’s love of campus debates appears to have died with him.

How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.

YMMV. But if you volunteer regularly for campaigns, your number/address inevitably ends up on someone’s suckers list. And then election season means getting your phone blown up by these as the voting deadline closes in.

Why can’t the boy ask his priest about his most serious doubts regarding god, and receive an honest answer back?

Why is the priest allowed to just make shit up with nothing more than a bronze aged poorly translated manuscript to back him up? The boy should be able to ask away. It’s the priest that should be censored.

There is so much fear, so much bias, so much identity tethered to ideology

Crazy factoid I learned recently. Children younger than 18 are prohibited from participating in religious activities and receiving religious education, even in schools run by religious organizations within China. If you’re too young to consent, you’re too young to be indoctrinated into a religious tradition.

They’re illegal to do with consent.

And the event led to over 100,000 power outages in the region, most of which came back in a day or two. But that paled beside '21, which took out multiple major metro areas statewide.

People who recommend negging are evil.

I see people read “negging” on a spectrum from “playfully tease someone you’re interested in” to “ruthlessly abuse someone you consider your inferior”. And one of those is a lot more evil than the other.

And negging is ALSO endorsed by, that’s right, none other than Jeffrey Epstein.

Cause he read it in the same book that everyone else did.

I swear, the actual original material - the biography of a guy who goes out and lives with a bunch of California douchebags, learns how to navigate the nightclub scene, and comes out of it thinking much less of the community than when he went in - is one of the most damning indictments of the PUA community you’ll find.

But because people can’t seem to get past the third chapter… It’s like hearing someone say Hunter S. Thompson loved the Hell’s Angels.

Figuring out how to be comfortable around people in a way that doesn’t isolate you is a simple idea to vocalize, but a pretty massive undertaking.

It’s a skill that develops with practice.

“My girlfriend is also my best friend” is a thing you see often in healthy relationships.

Please elaborate on how Type IIa

defined as the removal of the labia minora

two hairless, highly sensitive cutaneous folds located within the labia majora, surrounding the vaginal and urethral openings

:-/

I think banning circumcision runs you into many of the same problems that are encountered with banning abortion or gender transition. Or tattoos and ear piercings, for that matter. Or drinking.

You can scare physicians/professionals into refusing to perform it. But then you deal with all the amateurs and their consequences.

Really can’t be overstated how different “female circumcision” is from the male version.

Like comparing ear piercings to ear cropping.

Obviously no. Prior efforts at invoking this kind of legislation in Oklahoma failed and the federal court struck it down fairly quickly.

Texas actually already has House Bill 4211, the “Sharia Compound Ban”, which states

The purchase agreement and any other agreement or rules governing the residential arrangement or the ownership interest in the entity may not require that a dispute concerning the arrangement or interest be brought before a tribunal other than a court established under the laws of this state or the United States.

This was intended to prevent the completion of EPIC City, a master-planned Islamic community-centered residential development project just north of Dallas. Although this mostly seems to be focused on investment and ownership stake in residential and commercial properties by a large pool of wealthy Muslim investors.

If there’s any effort to invoke this law at a functional level, it will likely be targeted at the minority Muslim Texas residents, with the intent of depriving them of their property and possessions.

The AI companies put out a presser a few years back that said “Um, aktuly, its the humans who are bad drivers” and everyone ate that shit up with a spoon.

So now you’ve got Waymos blowing through red lights and getting stuck on train tracks, because “fuck you fuck you stop fighting the innovation we’re creatively disruptive we do what we want”.

If censorship is what’s being criticized, it’s no different.

Paradox of tolerance

I hate when censorship comes for people I do like.

I love when censorship comes for people I don’t like.

it’s just become such a nanny instance that jumps on everyone’s shit.

Admins are fighting a flood of instances and users more interested in getting attention than participating in the community. Consequently, you’ll have power users ballooning the front page with click-bait. You’ll have instances choke full of reactionary content specifically intended to bait a flame war. You’ll have spammers plugging their own brands or working on behalf of some third party. And you’ll have the odd bot-farm or other automated account that’s just probing the Fediverse for gaps.

“Ah, but the individual users can always block what they choose”

Sure. Technically. But nobody wants to wake up every morning to a front page that’s full of shit. The spammers can bloat your inbox faster than the individual can flush it out. So Admins who step in and do a little public house cleaning - the Nanny work you hate - makes the website cleaner and friendlier for lay users that pop in now and then.

Is it easier to secure, monitor fewer, bigger reactors or thousands of* small ones?

A moot point when we don’t build new ones anymore.

But the big appeal of the molten salt reactor is that it doesn’t require continuous manual interventions.

Solar, batteries and long-range transmission infrastructure just makes too sense I guess.

Sure. Obviously.

But that’s WOKE, so we hate it.

Nuclear definitely has a role to play. Integrating SMRs into our global shipping fleet would eliminate the enormous waste and emissions of bunker fuel, for instance.

And areas that don’t have reliable sunlight or wind (far north/south regions) or that require high steady output in confined areas (large factories, urban centers, major metro arteries, etc) can see real benefits, relative to gas or coal power.

It’s a technology we should have invested more heavily in 60 years ago. Obviously, Texas will fuck it up. But that’s not an indictment of the technology, just the capitalist dipshits that run the state.