Oh look, a cute friend!

I don’t want to say “I told you so”, but I told you so.

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20240412122244/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/cass-report-youth-gender-medicine/678031/

Interesting quotes:

At the request of the English National Health Service, the senior pediatrician Hilary Cass has completed the most thorough consideration yet of this field, and her report calmly and carefully demolishes many common activist tropes. Puberty blockers do have side effects, Cass found. The evidence base for widely used treatments is “shaky.” Their safety and effectiveness are not settled science.

…

We also don’t have strong evidence that social transitioning, such as changing names or pronouns, affects adolescents’ mental-health outcomes (either positively or negatively). We don’t have strong evidence that puberty blockers are merely a pause button, or that their benefits outweigh their downsides, or that they are lifesaving care in the sense that they prevent suicides.

…

We don’t know why the number of children turning up at gender clinics rose so dramatically during the 2010s, or why the demographics of those children changed from a majority of biological males to a majority of biological females.

…

Medicalized gender treatments for minors became wrapped up with a push for wider social acceptance for transgender people, something that was presented as the “next frontier in civil rights,” as Time magazine once described it. Any questions about such care were therefore read as stemming from transphobic hostility, full stop.

No, but they make my male lizard brain fire up. So I feel the need to provide engagement by updooting and leaving a silly comment.

Omg, woman showing skin! Updoot!

That is all true. The way to fix this is by always being pro-active, it can mean:

• Voting with our wallets. Show that you will always spend on the more privacy-respecting option, even if no perfect option exists.
• Raising our voices, to family and friends. Elaborate why we need open tech.
• Lobbying for open hardware and software initiatives. The goal is to make openness and freedom more profitable than closed tech.

Pro-activeness is important. Assume that our generation was perfectly privacy-demanding, that this was truly a core value that everybody held. If the next generation became lax on this issue, and didn’t care as much, things would start to deteriorate. Totalitarianism would creep in. So the current generation are always the torchbearers of freedom, we have to do our part.

Why would you panic more from #3 than #1?

I understand that this is a meme, but dismissing one of the best distro family because snaps are included is dumb. It is easy to uninstall snap entirely.

The only serious bummer is that the Firefox deb-package is now fake and only installs the snap version of Firefox. Go get Librewolf, which is basically a hardened Firefox, and use their repository.

It is fun to meme around when it is with people that are familiar with Linux. But some Windows/MacOS users who are interested in Linux might take you seriously. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-like distros are really good in terms of ease of use, support and compatibility. My first recommendation for a new Linux user is Ubuntu or variations thereof.

You don’t have to decide between riding a car or riding a bicycle to work

black guy thinking meme

when all you use are your feet

deleted by creator

I think you’ve got it backwards. If we can’t acknowledge that both are bad before talking about banning them, then what justification do we have for banning them?

That could help. But then we need:

1. More instances.
2. A more uniform distribution of users. (as opposed to people flocking to just one or a couple of instances)

There are issues that simply cannot be resolved without switching away from Windows. For example inefficient drivers, old hardware, telemetry and privacy issues in general. I’ve several times seen how Linux can bring new life to old computers, make the PC cooler, and the fans spin less or not at all under low workloads.

The primary instances where wouldn’t recommend Linux is when the person is:

• Using DRM-heavy games that (on purpose) refuse to run on Wine/Proton.
• Using Windows-only proprietary software or drivers.
• Isn’t ready to learn a new system (e.g. an older or disabled person).

If these issues don’t exist, I think Linux can bring benefit to a Windows user. If they are not ready to do a complete switch, they can dual-boot and try it out.

The dangerous part is that he can start bribing admins of large instances to federate Threads. I’m not sure how one would practically defend against something like this. The only way I can think of would be for an admin to be so ideologically opposed to Meta that they would refuse even $1m to federate. But such people are rare.

Mass media are at their core propaganda tools. Their mission is to further the agendas of whoever finances them, they are not driven by the pursuit of truth, justice or anything related such as the defense of privacy.

Can’t we just say that both are bad?