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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • millie@beehaw.orgtoJokes and Humor@beehaw.orgBBQ
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    1 month ago

    I mean, you shouldn’t expect anything particular at a BBQ that you’re not bringing yourself or like helping with the planning of. Like, hamburgers and hotdogs are pretty standard, but if I showed up at someone else’s BBQ and all they had was ribs I’d be kind of an ass for whining about it.

    But like… why are vegetarian options specifically a problem? Is this something that’s coming up? Is there like, a rash of vegetarians throwing a fit about it? Did someone get invited to a BBQ and ask if there’d be a veggie option? You know, like, so they could participate in a social event with their meat-eating friends?

    This kind of stuff usually feels to me like people who eat meat and don’t want to think about the cost in suffering pointing a finger at people who abstain so they don’t have to think about it. Like, I personally do eat meat. I find that my brain functions better with a little animal fat than without. Buuut I’m also well aware of how much torture goes on in the process of making that meat, and I at least try to minimize the calorie to suffering ratio.

    That’s not to say that I’m going to spend my days criticizing people who don’t choose to push against the horrific system of factory farming that supports our societal penchant for meat, but I do think about it. And I have noticed that certain meat-eaters seem to be pretty defensive about it, which generally translates into being shitty to people who don’t eat meat.

    Posts like this coming unprompted certainly seem like that kind of defensive behavior to me.

    Anyway, food for thought.







  • Yeah. We probably should.

    Changing our behaviors isn’t a binary, though. It takes effort. Sometimes it takes changing the world around us first to accommodate new behaviors, or waiting for the right opportunity. And given all the other things we should also be changing, prioritizing matters.

    Finding a Lemmy alternative is somewhere on that list. Is it anywhere remotely near the top? No. There are a great many other things to do. It’s probably closer to the top of alyzaya or Chris’s lists than mine; close enough, it seems, to be carried out even.

    But it isn’t about trying to figure out who’s a shit and point fingers at them while loudly demonstrating non-shit behaviors. If we actually want to make the world better, we need to figure out how to work together rather than just glue everything in place.

    People are so defensive about being wrong. And why wouldn’t they be? Whether you look at how things are set up in school or the cruelty and corruption of the prison system, or the poverty-reinforcing measures set about in our banking and credit rating systems, the elements that we need to grow past push this tendency to categorize people and sort of socially compartmentalize their various experiences.

    End up in the right categories and you don’t really have to worry. Companies will throw free cellphones at you just for breathing. End up in the wrong categories, and you’re going to have to struggle against a system that’s built to keep you from getting back up.

    We can spend eternity playing with the categories, moving around between them or building or diminishing their relative social power. We can change the criteria that we categorize people by, or try to keep them the same. But in the end we’re not really going to make much forward progress until we let go of thinking we know the potential of every human being at a glance. We don’t.

    What we can do though is be patient, speak our minds honestly, set boundaries, allow others their own autonomy, and try to help ourselves and other humans open up and grow rather than close off and shrink.

    In any case, the world is complex. It’s silly to try to boil it down into absolutist binaries. It’s also probably really bad for your cortisol levels.


  • People talk about forking open source projects as if you just push a button and it happens on its own. I mean, okay, that’s the first step, but maintaining an repo is a whole thing. Saying ‘well just fork it then’ is only a viable solution if you have the the means, the time, and the inclination. It isn’t really an exclusive alternative to criticism, but another, much narrower, potential additional path.

    It would certainly be good if people would fork all the useful projects made by devs who are interested in promoting social conservatism masquerading as ‘apolitical actions’ that attempt to reinforce the existing status quo of power. I’m not sure how likely it is, though. Certainly less so than bringing criticism to the table.




  • I mean, the whole point is kind of that the problem is getting defensive rather than making a change.

    That’s the root of a lot of these problems. People are intimidated by ‘wokeness’ because they think that caring about how they affect other people means that if they have the wrong idea they’re irredeemable. Clearly that isn’t compatible with continuing to feel alright about themselves, so they become defensive and double down. But the reality is, if they’d just like, quit it with the callousness and cruelty they’d be eliminating the problem to begin with.

    Lack of acknowledgement of there being an issue becomes the primary motivator for making the issue worse.

    It’s like becoming a hoarder because you’re too embarrassed to acknowledge what a mess your house is to clean it. Rather than pick the trash up off the floor, they shout about how clean their house really is and how deluded we all are for talking about the smell.