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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This is a mix of the composition /division fallacy, slippery slope and the false cause fallacy.

    False cause draws a comparison between two things that are not nessisarily connected. Constitutional gun rights and freedom of speech and association. There are a lot of countries where gun rights are non-constitutional that still have freedom of speech and freedom of association. Not all federal law is constitutional and there are a lot of freedoms and protections only actually protected beyond constitutional law.

    The slippery slope is more well known. In this case it’s sketching out a senario that could have plenty of other possibilities. If gun ownership had limitations they wouldn’t nessisarily be each of the limitations mentioned here. It assumes no protections for this kind of thing would be in place despite an increasing world wide stance that this sort of thing is a violation of human rights.

    The composition /division fallacy - that one part of something has to be applied to all or that the whole must apply to its parts. That if one part of the Constitution is rethought as an unnessisary and even harmful thing that the entire document will be treated that way.

    There are a lot of countries which have rethought their rights charters and constitutional documents and updated them to suit a changing world. The US Constitution is particularly paranoid because it was written during a period when it represented a rather large democratic experiment that seemed incredibly tenuous. They even still modeled the President off of a King because Monarchy was still very much the norm and there wasn’t a lot of examples of government that didn’t just change who was the king. Not a hundred years prior England had decapitated their king, essentially replaced him with a guy who was basically a king for life in all but name and reverted to a constitutional Monarchy the second he died. It made sense to be paranoid that everything they worked for was temporary and needed to be protected with a show of force. Since then democracy has spread to become the majority system of government and variations on the 2nd Amendment are incredibly rare. Only Mexico, Guatemala and the US has constitutional gun rights. By contrast Freedom of Speech is granted protections by International Law, is considered a corner stone of Human rights and around 150 countries have freedom of speech protections. One of these things is not like the other.

    A constitution is not a document that you never change. That’s just another fallacy - an appeal to tradition. The US has removed bits of it before too, you get to drink alcohol because somebody rethought your 18th amendment. Your freedom of speech rights aren’t going anywhere. Nobody wants that.

    It’s really okay. You can put the guns down. Most of the world has.




  • Technically there are different dialects and a lot of unique slang, idioms and specific descriptive words.

    In the trans and non-binary community for instance there’s a lot of terms regarding how people identify and express themselves that unless you know the actual function of how they work aren’t easily indistinguishable from slurs to outsiders. Take “Femboy” and (please forgive me mods) “Shemale”. The former is a perfectly socially acceptable description of a guy (cis or otherwise) whose gender expression is very feminine…the latter is a slur that places emphasis on the birth sex characteristics of a trans woman and implies heavily they are guys just pretending to be women and the term originates from the porn industry that fetishizes trans women.

    You also have the usage of neo-pronouns. In languages with more gendered components than English sometimes what words are chosen either reflects the gender of the speaker or the person being addressed or objects can be given a gendered connotation. Some languages are actually very gendered and the usage non-binary folk using those languages make whole new conventions. English speakers whine a remarkable amount over they/them singular pronouns are confusing but ain’t seen nothing. A lot of places your job title and status has no neutral gendered term or culturally there are sentence structures that differ down entirely binary gender lines. Are you latino or latina? Guess we need a new word… Latinx!


  • It’s easier to veiw these gun statistics less by a side by side comparison of total population and more by gun related deaths per every 10, 000 people. That allows an adjustment for population.

    The US in 2023 had 10.89 gun deaths per every 10k people. Denmark had 1.08 per 10k. So roughly Denmark would have had to have roughly 10x the number of gun deaths to draw parallel with the US.

    This metric does cover all homicides and suicides. For a better picture homicides only made up 7% of all gun related fatalities in Denmark in the US 43% of gun deaths were homicides. One interesting difference is that Denmark accidental gun deaths is a much bigger slice of their piechart than the US.

    Strong social welfare programs and measures to check extreme wealth aggregation are also things the US would have money to manage. Technically speaking the ratio of Government wealth per adult in the US is greater than Denmark’s meaning Denmark is doing more with less.

    Also poverty crime is still pretty high in Denmark. The social safety net means you don’t starve so much and have a place to come home to but it’s a very lean existance. A lot of people there are barely making ends meet. Technically speaking the poverty rates between the two countries are actually very comparable.






  • It’s something that I have gotten used to hearing even within the “community” particularly from “centrist” gay, lesbian and bi folk. This idea that my freedom to live my life is an impediment to wider acceptance. The implications being that our time is just a little further down the road once things are secure for them then we can have our turn. Maybe… If they feel like it.

    Like that means people I know might not get stranded for years between surgeries stuck in pain, have their medications revoked making their endocrine system a fucking mess, be subject to violent crimes because we are not respectable enough to listen to or fight for… That we have to exist with the battery of hope that things could be better running quietly out… To ask yourself if someone you know is going to die in the next election cycle. And then you see the gay guys on the picket lines of the anti trans rallies flaunting their gayness as a weapon to say “even we think they are crazy!” or who act like utter feces when a gay trans man enters a gay club.

    The reason the LGBTQIA+ has their no person left behind solidarity is this. The recognition that there is a fight on many fronts and that no one is a fungible pawn because once someone’s got theirs then having gratitude and empathy for the past help of those still fighting is the right thing to do. When people talk about the left abandoning the identity issues they are openly discussing sacrificing us and thankfully some notice and take them to task. True allies understand that to us we are stuck in a Catch 22 and just like the book says “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”



  • This is an inadequate summation I am afraid. Most of the world right now is experiencing a mental health crisis. A lot of the countries with similar populations and cultures to the US with primarily English speaking approximations - Australia, UK, Canada and the nordic nations… All of them are experiencing massive mental health and economic issues on a systemic level. There is something unique to the United States… The guns. Not just the lack of public safety measures to control guns but the culture of entitlement to weaponry and maintaining the fantasy of utilizing them against other humans in some sort of nebulous future extralegal event when some sort of universal concensus is reached that war is declared on the US government by it’s rag tag highly individualist citizenry.

    Unfortunately you cannot divorce the mental health issue from the gun issue in the States but neither can you solve the issue without actually addressing that guns at that level of saturation are a nightmare that causes a unique presentation of crisis. Calling for it to be addressed strictly as a mental health issue will go no where… And it’s designed to go no where because as long as we are having this debate of whether it’s a gun or a mental health problem neither get addressed… And quite frankly there are simply not enough mental health professionals in the field to address that demand. The burnout rate is real amongst professionals.

    There were also mass school shootings before Columbine. The Ecole’ Polytechnique massacre for instance in Canada had 22 victims in 1989 and was committed with a semi automatic weapon and it spurred a massive surge in gun regulation and restrictions for automatic weapons and maximum clip size capacity. The US is unique in that it is the only country to experience these mass shootings and yet refuse any wide ranging gun control reforms at a federal level in response.

    The problem also spills over borders. 85 percent of weapons found to be used to commit crimes in Canada have been traced to purchases made in the US.


  • Yup, but queer and minority persecution has been tied to conservative and authoritarian politics world round over the past 100 years and it isn’t even America’s first go round. McCarthy’s lavender scare sought to tar queer communities with the same brush as communists. Prohibition era Christian Temprance Union policies hit the queer communities by design. They used to hold police raids regularly of queer clubs which were often owned by the same criminal syndicates who were rum running. Those links ran deep. Stonewall was owned by the mob who saw the need for underground spaces to charge protection money, utilize the informants to give heads up before a raid and charge exorbitant prices just so you could slowdance in public… Other queer establishments were raided as illicit all the time because if you were caught out in the street in drag it was a crime. The Stonewall riot did not take place on the first raid. Fuck, it wasn’t even the first raid that month.

    Saying nobody cluched their pearls over drag shows in the past 100 years isn’t exactly truthful. American history is a lot uglier than that. Whenever a country gets scared and wants to dress itself up in Christian nationalism it’s meant queer persecution and genocide. America isn’t particularly special in that regard.




  • Not a matter of “how we proceed” but a matter of maybe having a little empathy and urgency? I am trans and gay and an a little under forty. I realize being gay has come a long way. I grew up during the time gay rights were expanding and “gay” was a slur. Right now I am a minority where bashing is happening with protests in the hundreds. There is a decent amount of transphobia I encounter within the gay community itself much less in public. I am not saying not to press the advantage but saying “some liberals get upset when we should be celebrating” is trivializing a lot of the pain happening under the surface and just comes across as tactless to those of us still living our version of the “80’s”.

    I get told a lot that maybe the Liberals would be more successful if they just sacrificed our cause to appeal to the Conservatives who might swap sides… As if waiting another four year stint to address things isn’t going to mean wondering if anybody I know is going to die giving up hope things will get better. Heck I have heard variations of this from the gay community as though I am simply an obstacle to greater acceptance and that our moment is gunna be further down the line. "Oh, Not now of course but hold off for that sweet reward that could mean your life gets better… eventually… Once the gay thing is in the bag and we’ve got ours and then can maybe consider if you are actually worth the effort from a place of safety and privilege. Meanwhile get out of our establishment will you? Your desperation isn’t quite matching the vibe. " The number of gay folk flaunting their gayness on the anti-trans picketlines meanwhile is still a thing. The LGBTQ+ no man left befind mantra is deliberate because we know that callousness has a cost. To quote Catch 22 "The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on. It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.’

    “You are a pawn get used to it” is not the talk of an ally, it’s the sound of someone openly discussing the opportunity to make you a martyr.


  • From the queer perspective the attitude isn’t charming. When open season gets declared on us talking about it as a “financial loss” or an unpopular move that is a win in the long run ignores that we are being used as fungible tokens in a game rather than people seeing the human cost. When we have to leave a community because we fear for futures losing all our support structures and having to rebuild it is a cold comfort that some politicians might not get elected this month or this year. The brazen hate towards us is treated as classless rather than actually threatening. It is becoming more brazen and in places it is becoming more commonplace…more normal.

    Looking at this strictly from an our team vs their team dynamic over who proves morally superior in the end trivializes a lot of the damage done along the way. How often have we been told that we should just give up hope of things getting better and stop bringing immediately life threatening issues to the table because it isn’t politically convenient? We are not pawns we are people.