Idk it’s not the worst name ever. Definitely sounds like a “kooky millennial parents wanted an interesting name” name. But there’s worse. Much worse. He should’ve told her where it came from though, kinda a dumb thing to not involve your wife in. You know. The name of her child.

Reports are seen both on the instance and community in which you are reporting and by admins of your home instance. I also believe admins of blahaj lemmy have means of blocking users from other instances. If you see someone being transphobic on other instances it is worth it to report them. I don’t know of many communities that are openly transphobic? Blahaj Lemmy doesn’t federate with instances that tolerate transphobia. Not that it doesn’t happen other places, but the admins of those instances are supposed to be dealing with it.

You might know someone who has, I sure don’t. I’ve been in rehab, I’ve been in women’s shelters. I’ve been in homeless shelters. I’ve met a lot of people who have been victims of violence. Loads who have gone to the police for help too. I cannot name a single person for whom the police did literally anything beneficial whatsoever. There are a lucky few. Mostly white mostly middle class people.

But that’s all besides the point. And you’re choosing to continue to ignore that this is not the purpose of the police. A side action that they are occasionally asked to perform, and which they very rarely do anything beneficial towards. More often than not police are themselves perpetrators of physical and sexual abuse (their daily job is literally commiting acts of violence and using the threat of violence, it’s not surprising). The primary purpose of their job has nothing to do with violent crime or with violent crime prevention.

My point being getting rid of them isn’t going to change all that much if they don’t actually do all that much anyway. Women get raped every day. Sexual violence is essentially a given for the majority of women in our society. The number of victims is staggering, especially when you poll people indirectly. Police do nothing about this. It’s literally not their job. I know a girl who was sexually assaulted at 15 by a man in his mid 20s. Not only did the police fail to do anything, but the justice system actually supported the man and absolved him of all wrong doing just because. She was harassed by members of law enforcement who were friends with the man and local members of her community to the point that her family literally fled out of the country out of fear for her safety. Hers is just one story in a mile high pile.

There are millions of women who have been victimized again when trying to report crimes that happened against them. Being a woman or a minority immediately dispels any fucking notion that the police are there to protect you. That’s not the point of their job. It literally isn’t that is literally not why police were conceived of nor is it what they spend their time doing. I don’t have to come up with a system that ends all violence. No such system presently exists.

If I’m being asked to replace the police then I’m sorry your question doesn’t actually make sense. I’m an abolitionist, I don’t believe that the police should exist at all. I’m also an egalitarian who believes every hierarchy is coercive and we should dismantle all of them. I think that dismantling patriarchy as a concept and giving women and non-binary people equal power and respect within every realm of society would do many times more to prevent sexual violence than any amount of coked up gun toting militaristic assholes with shiny badges will. When it comes down to individual instances of violence, I believe how it is handled should be decided by those in the community in question, those directly impacted. I believe that violent crime warrants some kind of response but it shouldn’t be up to some uninvolved unempathetic judicial system to decide how.

How do we deal with them now? Is dealing with serial killers the day to day of the police? Is that their primary function? Do they even really do anything about it without constant prompting from victims and the community?

I’ve been a victim of physical and sexual violence. Nearly every woman I know has been at some point. None of us have ever had any positive experience with the police. At most they hand wave us away, at worst we are accused of being liars and of wasting their time. Police don’t prevent anything. They don’t solve anything. They don’t address anything. They are only occasionally turned towards a specific person who has done something wrong and used a means of state violence against that person. That is an exceptionally rare occurrence. They are the perpetrators of violence many times more than they are the defenders of victims.

Essentially, what is being currently done about the john Wayne Gaceys of the world? What is currently being done about the Bill Cosby’s, about rapists and pedophiles? What are the police currently doing that actually prevents those things from happening? Nothing. They only do anything after something has already happened. And they don’t do anything to prevent those things happening again. Their daily job has literally nothing to do with the John Wayne Gaceys of the world. It is in the things I listed in another comment. In rent enforcement and eviction, in enforcing private property and means of production, in collecting menial tax from the impoverished, in defending the interests of the rich and of the state, and in harassing minorities while enforcing hierarchies of gender race and class.

No, I’m an anarchist and a police abolitionist.

I mean, it’s not a slur, but an insult? Sure. Liberals are not allies to leftists, and actively support the same systems we seek to dismantle.

ACAB as an acronym began in the early 20th century by workers who were striking in the UK. It is a term with a long, complex history behind it. Cops are the institution, so I’m not sure what you mean by individuals. Every member of the police force, from the top down, is a bastard. Every single one. There’s no exceptions to this. The very nature of law enforcement is being a bastard. It is a term that is meant literally. Law enforcement functions as a means to break strikes, to enforce private property and ownership of the means of production, to enforce rent and evictions, to terrorize the impoverished and the marginalized, to collect menial tax from the impoverished who cannot fight back against them, and above all else to act as the legal arm of state violence against working class people.

Individual cops may have done good actions. I’m sure there’s a cop out there who’s volunteered at a soup kitchen, sure. But that has nothing to do with him being a cop. That has nothing to do with the actual role he fulfills in day to day life, with the violence he enacts, with the system he supports.

The idea that police are holding back some tidal wave of horrifying crime is and has always been propaganda. Nearly every single woman I know has been a victim of sexual harassment or violence at some time in their lives, including myself. A lot of them have gone to police before. I don’t know a single person for whom that did literally anything good for them. I know 1 woman who was harassed literally across the country by people including police officers who said she was lying. The police don’t prevent murder. They don’t prevent violence of any kind that’s literally not their job. More often than not they are the ones committing acts of violence for which there are no repercussions.

I love how every acab post inevitably brings out a bunch of uninformed libs in the comments talking about how pigs are only bad in America (as though the term ACAB was invented in America…) or how a society without them is completely inconceivable. As though badges grow on trees, like police are just a natural thing that sprung out of the ground.

The primary function of the police is to protect private property and enforce eviction. They’re state agents who are allowed to use violence against working class people, and do so to prevent us from overthrowing the ruling class and redistributing wealth and the means of production. They protect class hierarchy. They attack protestors. They use state violence against the disenfranchised and the marginalized. The “just doing their job” of the police is to protect and preserve the unequal distribution of power in society. They do so by using violence against the working class. The rest of anything else they do is a small fraction of their job and entirely secondary to their primary functions.

I mean, there has definitely been a noticeable and significant decline in the quality of search engine results, particularly on Google. It used to stand out at least a little bit from Bing (a search engine that went very hard into inserting ads into results early on), but they’ve essentially become indistinguishable. Aesthetics and connections with other platforms like Gmail and YouTube have become the only real reason to stay with one over the other.

Played countless hours of TF2 between 2009 and 2012. Wild that in 3 years, it’ll be 2 decades old.

You’re awfully lucky then. That’s a form of socialism, assuming that your government is intervening and ensuring affordable rent even for homeless and those on assistance. And what are the quality of those rentals? Have you lived in one personally?

My rent is 50% of my income I will never get back.

No, renting is literally incomparably more stressful than owning a home would be where I could sell it at any time and get a portion of my invested income back.

If I could opt out of my landlord calling the plumber when I need one, I sure as fuck would if it meant I could keep my money. No, my rent goes straight into his pocket every month and a fraction of a fraction ever comes out to cover upkeep. I’d happily opt out and pay it myself.

You sound like you’re probably decently middle class. Which is fine and I’m not saying that you have no experience being a lower class renter. But you probably are not familiar with the same financial pressures we live under today.

Landlords should not exist. Nothing would be lost if we converted every apartment building into a co-op. We would all have much more disposable income and much more control over where we lived.

I do agree that grocery stores are morally wrong in some sense yes. People should not have to lend their bodies in order to eat. Hotels aren’t morally wrong entirely, because they’re only providing a place to stay temporarily. If they did provide long term stay and charged for it than yes that would be morally wrong. You’ll note that I’m an anarchist.

There is no such thing as a moral landlord. And the people you’re talking about downsized. The landlord does not do repairs, he hires handyman and trades workers to do repairs. The landlord collects a tax from you while giving you nothing in return. My rent is twice the monthly cost of a mortgage for a mini home in my area.

When you have a mortgage the money isn’t gone when you spend it, it’s used to pay off your loan. When you’re done you own the property.

I will never own this property. None of my money is returned to me. It is taken by a person or entity who literally does not provide me anything.

I’ll repeat, providing shelter isn’t a service. What the landlord is providing you, is not evicting you so long as you provide them a taxation of your wages that goes straight into their pocket. If all landlords died overnight nothing would materially change except for all the people renting could now keep their wages, and hire the handyman to do the work themselves. Housing co-ops also cover the costs of upkeep by pooling money to spend. No, landlords are 100% immoral 100% of the time and your buddy who’s a good guy and a landlord might be a good guy but it has nothing to do with his being a landlord. Some cops save dying animals and volunteer at soup kitchens I’m sure, they’re all still bastards by participating in a system of militarized state violence.

Being a landlord is morally wrong. Shelter is a human right, not a service. The service that they provide is not calling the cops to evict you so long as you pay them. They don’t otherwise provide you with anything.

Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d’etat. Government officials open commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.

But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I’ll admit I wasn’t familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.

I never said it wasn’t. I was originally writing this as a response to a commenter who said the error was ~15%. My comment initially started with “He was actually significantly more accurate than that.”

The degree of his error is slightly complicated by the stadia not being a historically exact figure, but his calculation showed the Earth to be 252,000 stadia in circumference. Accounting for the variability in the exact length of the stadia dependent on what definition was used in the calculation, that gives us in kilometers 39,060km on the lower end and 40,320km on the upper. The actual circumference of the Earth is 40,075km. This gives him an error range of between -2.4% and +0.8%.

He also didn’t just use a stick but used extensive geographic charts to calculate the distance between the 2 cities where he measured the shadow. It was a monumental achievement and is shockingly accurate.

Here is a picture visually demonstrating how he performed his calculation.

It’s hard to explain how significant the Voyager 1 probe is in terms of human history. Scientists knew as they were building it that they were making something that would have a significant impact on humanity. It’s the first man made object to leave the heliosphere and properly enter the interstellar medium, and this was always just a secondary goal of the probe. It was primarily intended to explore the gas giants, especially the Jovian lunar system. It did its job perfectly and gave us so many scientific discoveries just within our solar system.

And I think there’s something sobering about the image of it going on a long, endless road trip into the galactic ether with no destination. It’s a pretty amazing way to retire. The fact that even today we get scientific data from Voyager, that so far away we can still communicate with it and control it, is an unbelievable achievement of human ingenuity and scientific progress. If you’ve never seen the image the Pale Blue Dot you should see it. That linked picture is a revised version of the image made by Nasa and released in 2020. It’s part of a group of the last pictures ever taken by Voyager 1 on February 14th 1990, a picture of Earth from 6 billion kilometers away. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and it kinda blows my mind every time I see it.

Well, the US doesn’t even have a National curriculum, so I’m willing to be that there are probably many Americans who don’t know anything about Kent state.

Yeah I can definitely see how the argument about “original semites” is coming very close to outright hatred and antisemitism. We have to be more conscious of the language we use than that. We shouldn’t be making arguments in this vein but instead focusing on anti-colonial arguments. When discussing the colonialism of relocating European Jewish communities to Palestine there’s no reason to be using this kind of divisive “race politics” language.

The relationship between Ashkenazi jews and the communities that were already present in Palestine is not something I understand very well, and more broadly the history of Ashkenazi jews as a whole is something I’m only familiar with as it relates to early 20th century European politics. It’s something I’d like to do my own research on from reliable sources to better understand how these kinds of arguments feed into genuine hatred of Jewish people.

I’m not as educated on esoteric antisemitic arguments as I should be. I appreciate you adding context to why some Jewish students feel unsafe with the discourse going on at the moment. Anti-Zionist action has an obligation to protect Jewish people as much as it has an obligation to protect Muslim people and ethnic Palestinians. Our goals ought to be to separate ourselves from race hierarchy and protect human rights for all. It’s critically important that in advocating against the Israeli government and the IDF that we do not tolerate anti-semitism in any form and that we reject the support of ant-semitic people wherever it appears.