and then theres me who can’t remember my childhood. was there signs? probably, i just cant find any because i dont remember anything. before started transitioning i was just some hollow husk or shell, some pound of flesh.

which is the best evidence for me being trans, i guess.

reading this at first i was thinking of things other then hasan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIr8Bk8QOHE 3:45 is when he starts talking about his “frustrations with the vocal minority of FOSS cancer”

Watching the video, he doesn’t seem too found of FOSS or any type of anti-capitalist approach (at one point, he uses the word “communistic” in his descriptions of FOSS) Unfortunately the clippy symbol (as also seen in the post we are commenting on) seems less of a “We should move to an internet we control” and more of a “im nostalgic for when corporations were nicer to us” as if control like this has never been the end goal.

I know that it is common to turn a symbol initially built against you into one which now benefits you, but I don’t think that’s whats going to happen with Clippy primarily because of message here isn’t “Clippy wants us to move into a future where we own our tech/social infrastructure” but instead “man, im really nostalgic for the way corporations used to treat us”

I have no problem using a symbol developed my Microsoft to spread anti-big tech messaging. The problem is that to a lot of people, the messaging doesn’t feel ant-big tech or anti-capitalist so much as it is just nostalgic. Microsoft was never a nice company. Even in the 1990s they were exercising their E.E.E (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) strategy to beat federated and decentralized platforms and technologies. The goal of these companies (and you can see it now in their attitudes towards AI) is to own as much social infrastructure as they can. From where you get your news to where you get your friends. The only way to work against this is to work against big tech. There is no other way.

Part of me wonders if the message behind the current Clippy symbol can be bent into something more forward facing, but I also feel that that would be hard/would feel artificial because of the fact that Clippy is just now so connected to nostalgia.

in most contexts here ive heard “liberal” used to describe neoliberalism rather then leftism or libertarianism (though I know many conservatives in the US use it as a catch all for the left)

who says the enemy has to be foreign?

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues – namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.

George Orwell

same thing for policy that antagonizes and oppresses trans people; “Guys, just think, this will affect cis woman!” often either means “This is yet another case of Republicans using gender as a means to control yet another aspect of womens lives and gender presentation” or “guys, actual woman might get hurt!”

guy who knows nothing about the spanish language, musicals, mexico, or being trans writes spanish musical centering around a trans person from mexico.

smh fake internet leftists

No, I think people are more than just themselves, you need other people, you need community (and dick, dick works too)

This is really helpful, SearxNG looks pretty good, might also check out Kagi

I would be skeptical of this, I haven’t been able to find a source for it and most of its seems written in a way that creates the strongest emotional reaction in laypeople who don’t know much about health insurance or chemo (e.g: me)

Actual sorcery