The Death of the Internet as a Haven for People with Autism
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With regard to Western politics, I already get all that from a range of news sources, I have no interest in reading about it on social media. It is also easy to feel left out when people insist that the politics of the USA or their other, Western country is of paramount importance, but no one would care to discuss the politics that concern you. For my own reasons, I am interested in politics in Senegal right now, but that almost never appears on Mastodon. (In fact, it’s easy to feel that most of Sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t even exist for Mastodon.)
Activists appropriate the voice of some group, then marginalize people who don’t fit into that prescribed worldview — often telling people they’re a “bad X” for not being obedient.
This is part of a broader trend to divide-and-conquer by segregating people into identity based groups, who are permitted only a single view, lest you be denied that identity and ostracized — one that we’ve seen corporations and politicians only too happy to exploit.
It could be said "oh, it's harmless, they're just RPing", and if that were the case, so be it. But no, on most servers it is generally considered sacrosanct and that merely questioning these numbers, and the preponderance of supposed DID on Discord (orders of magnitude above the general population) is offensive and insulting.
I don't get why there's so much hate on trans people these days. It's even blown over to Holland. It's very sad to see that a country that was once so progressive in embracing homosexuality is now becoming so backwards. It's very sad to see.
Most people were willing to be tolerant when there was a perception of negligible negative impact to others. But now that there are so many well-publicised incidents showing otherwise, such as male inmates attacking women in the female prison estate [1], males invading female-only lesbian events [2], males dominating in women's sports [3], and many, many other transgressions mostly harming women and children, there is an increasingly negative sentiment towards both the trans-identifying and the belief system of gender identity that has enabled all of this.
All of this may seem like a surprising outcome to some, but feminists of the radical school of thought predicted most of it way back in the 1970s, when the concept of a 'male-to-female transsexual' was being popularised, making the astute observation that this was just yet another manifestation of patriarchy, a way for men to dominate women.
[1] https://womensliberationfront.org/womens-prisons
[2] https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/lesbian-speed-dating-e...
[3] https://reduxx.info/male-cyclists-take-home-first-second-pla...
There is no reason to be opposed to transsexuality because of this. It's not ok to hate a whole group of people due to the transgressions of some of them. This is true for religous people, people of colour, heritage, and of different gender identities. Though for some reason people find it harder to see this for the latter group.
What we do with speed dating here is we simply match people by their interest. Trans people can come but other participants can indicate whether they are open to dating trans people. So we simply don't match those who don't want to. This is a simple and effective solution. In the same way they don't match me as a cis male with other men (or lesbian women for that matter). I guess there previously were Lesbian speed dating events where no such matching was necessary but it's not as if it's a huge deal to ask each participant their preferences. By the way, in general most trans people overwhelmingly end up dating other trans people anyway.
For the sports thing society simply has to figure that one out. I don't have the answers either and I don't care about sports. But people being trans is not the problem.
Women shouldn't have to put up with this violation of boundaries that has been forced upon them. There's no reason why males have to be incarcerated in women's prisons, compete in women's sports, or indeed be in any space for women. Your proposal for speed dating is part of the problem too, as you again ignore the impact upon women and consider only the male perspective. Lesbian women should be well within their rights to draw a boundary that says no males allowed, and not be punished for it.
> But people being trans is not the problem.
Technically, you are correct. But as I'm sure you know, it is very, very rare that you'll find a so-called 'trans women' who doesn't use female spaces and has no intention of ever doing so. For the rest: each and every one of those males who use or demand to use female-only spaces is a problem.
As for politics on Mastodon, if you follow the daily top posts, a good half of them will be on political issues in a small handful of countries. It is no different from any for-profit social network.
I am in a few Discords, and all of them are full of people who are even more aspy and weird than I am lol
They remind me of the PHP forums of yore.
One Discord I am thinking of here is focused on a video game, and the other major one that gives me that vibe is a functional programming Discord (I believe it's the one linked to from the Haskell subreddit).
I was talking about a Discord (https://discord.com/) server.
I should probably check out the Discourse more. Discord servers for communities like this become very hard to follow, and I feel like a good chunk of the questions people post in the Discord could be easily answered by an LLM.
All the HTTP-alikes (gemini, etc) are cool but you can achieve the same thing on the actual web just by actually making a website in HTML. There are still plenty of actual websites out there. You just won't ever encounter links to them from within the walled gardens. And in their own more benign way, gemini and the like are walled gardens. Hiding in small niche protocol communities isn't going to "fix" things.
As for finding others: you have to surf. And that's something people don't do anymore generally. Google becoming crap has made it harder but it's still possible. We need a new searchlores for the modern era.
It's just fundamentally a different scale of enterprise than social media.
I'm sure there's a proper name for these types of coincidences.
“In short, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a frequency bias. You notice something new, at least it’s new to you. It could be a word, a breed of dog, a particular style of house, or just about anything. Suddenly, you’re aware of that thing all over the place.
In reality, there’s no increase in occurrence. It’s just that you’ve started to notice it.”