Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don’t want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make “nature” arguments (like “evolutionary psychologists”). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I’d have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that “regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others”. That’s a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.

Humans are animals, and this shows non-human animals can be queer too.

I don’t think it shows anything more than that the animals in question engage in same-sex intercourse. Claiming anything more than that is, to me, arbitrary anthropomorphism. I am not prepared to accept that whales can be “queer” until whales start writing sociological papers for us to find out how they understand homosexuality in their system of norms and values.

The fact animals have some behavior shouldn’t, alone, be a justification to punish or encourage some behavior.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but I’ve been in plenty of discussion already where animals engaging in same-sex intercourse was used as an argument to defend queer rights - e.g. my local queer association did hold such a panel discussion at the zoo last May.

To see this news article in /c/lgbtq_plus instead of /c/biology or /c/science does make me extrapolate that this is somehow understood as being relevant to human sexuality.

I dunno, I’m still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

I don’t want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.

Why was there this law in the first place?

In Europe at least, it was often explained as “same-sex marriage and parenthood are not allowed, and a legal gender change cannot be a loophole to that”. But it appears to be a post-hoc rationalisation since the forced sterilisation programmes have many more targets in the past until it was progressively abandoned for more and more groups. It was also becoming untenable since more and more countries were legalising same-sex parenthood.

So, if we are being more honest, it’s eugenics.

Thunderbird’s Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It’s the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

I think this article totally (but only implicitly) ignores young men and boys being sexualised by other men in ways that are as dangerous as the way young women and girls are sexualised.

Aside from that, I agree with the comment from @Pons_Aelius@kbin.social that it’s about misidentifying sexualisation as positive attention and seeking the latter by ways of the former.

I have been very disappointed that Fedora stopped making changelogs accessible for years. It used to be that you could easily toggle them on in Yum, but with DNF it’s always “no info found”.

Looking again, it seems like more packages are available for the Tumbleweed stream, compared to Leap. I was testing Leap.

Oh, that’s a great idea. The whole concept of immutable OSes passed me by - I’ve read the terms before at some point, but I have no idea how they work and which problems they solve. Definitely ideal candidates for my experiment.

To the best of my knowledge, the convention is based on history. In previous decades, neo-pronouns like xe were proposed to serve as gender-neutral alternatives to he and she, and since they were new coinages, they didn’t have commonly known objective and possessive forms, so all three forms where listed.

The pattern was so established that it carried over to he, she and they even though their declined forms are commonly known.

There have been a lot of articles in press about TikTok being responsible for the rise of interest in literature by young people, as the article also mentions.

At the end, it probably was either a planted story, or memetic evolution triggered by one journalist noticing something in their environment that wasn’t a general trend.

I gave Jami a very extensive go with family, and sadly it didn’t deliver a usable experience if your device is a mobile one or the network is not a fixed, high-speed connection.

I don’t find automatic reposts ideal when I subscribe to communities, especially since there’s an RSS feed so people can rely on that to receive updates.

I find it more worthwhile if another user shares a post intentionally, because they believe that particular post is relevant.

Indeed, it appears that the open-core of LanguageTool is the only FOSS option still going. Only a couple more abandoned projects come up.

I’m going to take “favourite” at face value, i.e. that I actually like, not just that I am forced to use because the alternative doesn’t exist (e.g. my bank’s app or the post-office’s app) or isn’t viable (PDF editors on Android).

Libby, the lending library app. I could avoid it and stick to physical media and piracy, but it’s a well-designed app with a decent catalogue and given that it’s a library and not me purchasing DRMed files, I found the ethical proposition there tolerable.

Back on Reddit’s equivalent community, I enjoyed reading how straight men relate to and experience their masculinity in all those context of life where the default script would be provided by patriarchy. Basically reading about how straight men find ways to overcome that default script. This may be somewhat voyeuristic and I hope it doesn’t make any straight guys uncomfortable to hear, but it is, in some way, healing to witness such instances of non-patriarchal masculinity. It offers hope.

Secondarily, I liked that it served as a compassionate space to talk about sexual and domestic abuse against men of any sexuality. As a gay guy back on Reddit, I found that the gay male subreddits were horrible places to talk about abuse experiences because the patriarchal script was performed to a tee. The MensLib community was far better on this topic.

In summary:

What sort of content and which men’s issues would you like to see more of?

Advice and personal discussion posts, and posts tackling abuse against men.

At least in Germany, especially here in the eastern part where right-wing radicalisation is very prevalent, the lack of adequate street-work (in this sense) and youth centres offers is discussed as a contributing factor. More generally/systemically, I’ve seen arguments that the sudden and wholesale disappearance of previous social structures that engaged youth[1] left the space open for neo-Nazi groups to basically be “the people who are there, who give us something to do and a reason to do it”.

As to what that kind of street-work looks like, even if not offered at nearly enough capacity, here’s an example. It ranges from organising leisure activities to helping kids who have trouble with the law - so that neo-nazis aren’t the ones who are the first to offer their help and win their trust.

[1]: Such as the Protestant Church and the state-controlled youth organisation of the GDR - reminder: what was previously keeping kids engaged doesn’t have to necessarily be good. Something bad can be replaced by something also bad. The point is to replace it by something good.

My question is this. What could your manager do to better support you at work?

This one is something that my manager thankfully understands and is very supportive of: many of us, because our sexuality and/or gender identity were not accepted growing up, became adults who need to come to terms with stuff through regular therapy sessions.

This means: flexible options to take time off and attend such appointments, even on a weekly basis. Ideally, you understand that what is more valuable to the company is me doing my job (rather than clocking a certain number of hours) and for that my good mental health is a productivity boost and so you don’t even ask me to make up the time.

Second best is that you allow me to flexibly make up for that time later during the week.

Another thing that would be nice, especially in the context of tech, is that any queer group in the company is not just there either for networking (which is fine) or for being used for promotional material exploitation (which isn’t fine), but you also make us part of product design when relevant.