• 10 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • rah@feddit.uktoFeddit UK@feddit.ukTransphobia guidelines
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    15 days ago

    A conservative forum is a forum run by conservatives for conservatives and limits itself to conservative positions

    Says who?! It can mean whatever you define it to mean. You’re just making stuff up, you’re no authority.

    It’s a general purpose discussion forum that can touch on topics like conservativism, socialism or biking.

    This is not the way you presented feddit.uk before. You seemed to be explicitly excluding conservativism.

    I’m not going to list all the things this place is not as that’s an infinity long list.

    Of course but I would point out that social conservativism is the dominant political philosophy in the UK so it would be odd and in fact misleading not to be up front about excluding conservativism in an instance that advertises itself as a general UK instance. Hence my concern.

    Polite bigotry is still bigotry, do you think we should allow race realists if they mind their Ps and Qs correctly?

    Most definitely. How else could such views be shown up for what they are using sound reason and subtle but devastating wit, as is the British way? (As opposed to sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and shouting “LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU UR DUMB I’MA BAN U”.)

    even tolerant Britain doesn’t let them inject these believes wherever, social spaces like pubs and community events still limit what can take place in them.

    I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with this but I would note that with one exception, all the racist people I’ve had the misfortune of encountering have been in pubs. And moreover, I wouldn’t want to spend time in any pub where any kinds of ‘certain’ discussions were outright prohibited.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jssqYTMf9E

    I don’t see why we should be more accepting of transphobia

    Debating isn’t the same thing as accepting.

    The only things these guidelines ask you to do is not promote fear or hatred of trans people and that you aren’t allowed to say that a trans person’s gender identity is less valid than a cis person’s.

    It seems you’ve changed your tune:

    1. In response to the question “The instance is never an appropriate context and any such discussion whatsoever is prohibited?”: “Yes, …”

    2. “It’s about protecting a vulnerable minority. … I don’t want this place to be a contributor to these statistics and I’m going to prioritise the safety of our trans users over some notion of neutrality.”

    And also, to be clear:

    3. In response to the question “if someone created a linguistic philosophy community on feddit.uk and in that community members held a discussion on ‘a trans person’s “I’m a man” as less than a cis person’s “I’m a man”’, is that prohibited or not?” which is about discussion of whether a trans person’s “I’m a man” is less than a cis person’s “I’m a man” and doesn’t necessarily imply saying anything one way or the other: “no [yes] as that’s pretty clearly …”

    I wonder what reasonable ‘philosophical discussion’ this excludes

    There’s plenty. Wouldn’t it be great if we created a place where such wonderings could be explored honestly without concern over being banned? What a pity that instead there’s a place of dullness, with rules motivated by fear.


  • rah@feddit.uktoFeddit UK@feddit.ukTransphobia guidelines
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    16 days ago

    This not being a conservative forum isn’t the same as conservatives not being welcome, I believe we even have some around.

    This is irrelevant to the issue at hand. Whatever it is that feddit.uk is not, please state that up front in the “Who are we?” section. If feddit.uk is not a conservative forum, please state “feddit.uk is not a conservative forum” in the “Who are we?” section. That would at least give people more clarity on what feddit.uk is, who is here and what they can expect when they post from here.

    This is getting very tiresome for what is a very little ask

    By the same token, clarifying what feddit.uk is and is not in the “Who are we?” section seems to me like a very little ask.

    don’t be transphobic. This has been a rule on the site literally from inception.

    But the new “guidelines” and more importantly the statements from an admin (yourself) in comments under this post about what feddit.uk is not, are all new. As far as I know, philisophical discussion of trans issues had never been prohibited before.

    My understanding of feddit.uk until this post was that it would reflect general wider social mores of British society: tolerance, even of those who have what we feel to be reprehensible views, up to the point where it’s clear a person is uncivil or unreasonable. Now my understanding of feddit.uk is different: there are some areas of discussion which are not tolerated under any circumstances, regardless civility or reasonableness. There is now an ideological component, not to the makeup of the user population (which has always been obvious), but to the governance of the instance which is a whole different kettle of fish and very new. Now, feddit.uk has an official ideological position: not a conservative forum, social discussion, no philosophical debate about trans issues, etc.


  • rah@feddit.uktoFeddit UK@feddit.ukTransphobia guidelines
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    16 days ago

    This is pretty categorically not a conservative forum

    This comment along with others like

    This is a social discussion forum not a linguist philosophy one

    and

    That wouldn’t really change the fact this is a place for discussion of things with other people.

    make it clear that feddit.uk has an agenda: it’s for lefty social discussion.

    Adding @[email protected] @[email protected]

    Can I suggest making that agenda clear in the “Who are we?” section of feddit.uk 's front page so that people are aware of what they’re signing up for and that this isn’t just a general UK instance? In particular, it seems egregious to me that there is no mention of the fact that conservatives aren’t welcome.









  • I think I see what you’ve been trying to communicate now.

    as I said – they are saying one thing and doing another.

    Well the problem is you didn’t say that. You seemed to assume that readers would understand what you meant without actually saying it:

    my main point - that the EHRC is purposely pushing anti-trans advice to government bodies and dubiously using the SC’s verdict as vindication to do so, despite the SC’s verdict not actually changing anything.

    Notice that this sentence does not mention anybody “saying one thing and doing another”. The critical part is that with “the SC’s verdict not actually changing anything” you’re presumably referring to what the commissioner said in the article and what you wrote at the start of your first comment but you never made that link explicit.

    My assertion that your repetition of what the commissioner said undermined your main point was based on my understanding of what you had written, not on what you had meant but never made explicit.



  • This bill amendment that was submitted, but thankfully didn’t pass

    “to summarise, Amendment NC21 to the Data Use and Access Bill would require sex to be defined as “sex at birth” for all identity verification requests.”

    From what I can tell, this isn’t about creating a registry of trans people, this is about collecting “sex at birth” alongside other data for any “identity verification requests” which might occur. Also, without looking into it, I would expect any provided data would have to be deleted when it was no longer needed, in line with existing data protection legislation.

    • The Cass Report, a review of the science of trans studies the government bases many of its decisions on has been widely criticised by the international community. It was also found they tried to deliberately ban any subject experts from weighing in on the report during its construction.
    • The EHRC and other government bodies frequently consult trans hate groups while preventing any trans person from weighing in on decisions about them
    • Last year, the UK government banned the use of pubertymight blockers for adolescents, saying there is an unacceptable health risk to them, when in fact the risk is minor at best and witholding them is much more damaging to trans people (high suicide rate, for example).

    None of this is about creating a registry of trans people.

    I don’t understand how you went from this stuff you’ve linked to, to a registry of trans people. Where did that come from?


  • I’d say they’re not really:

    In 2001, Portugal decriminalised the personal possession of all drugs as part of a wider re-orientation of policy towards a health-led approach. Possessing drugs for personal use is instead treated as an administrative offence, meaning it is no longer punishable by imprisonment and does not result in a criminal record and associated stigma. Drugs are, however, still confiscated and possession may result in administrative penalties such as fines or community service.

    https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-portugal-setting-the-record-straight

    Their reform came in the face of the extraordinary failure of the previous approach, to the degree that it had an actual impact on the ability of their society to function. They still punish drug users, they just do it differently.

    They still see all drug use and getting out of your head as something bad, to be controlled and preferably eradicted, instead of seeing drug use as something which is any responsible adult’s basic human right.

    The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty-first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.

    There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list.

    https://grahamhancock.com/the-war-on-consciousness-hancock/