niph

Face wash, toner, a serum with hyaluronic acid, and a neutral light moisturiser. SPF sun cream in the summer. I’m not really an expert but keeping your face clean, moisturised, and protected from the sun are the most important aspects, and a lot will depend on if you have dry or oily skin, what climate you live in, etc.

It’s depressing, but it’s cozy because it feels like the only place on the English-speaking internet where people aren’t exclusively lapping up and spewing out NATO and Western propaganda

Western intelligence has been hampered for decades by an obsession with more tech and more data, to the detriment of quality analysis. Just a bunch of spreadsheet nerds with no brain for context or application

Jeez, I was not aware that we were already at the “compulsory conscription of refugees” stage of collapse. Or maybe the s have been watching too much Attack on Titan??

And Italy will pay for it!

But aren’t those two reasons contradictory? It honestly just seems from the outside like “gossip” was chosen because the mods felt that tank posts about celebs were becoming frivolous rage bait, and wanted to give a dismissive label to that kind of content, didn’t foresee the misogyny issue, and are now taking the reclamation line because they refuse to admit they were wrong.

To be honest I have some sympathy for the stance that the million “Musk is stupid” posts per day were frivolous, but you need to realise that the majority of complaints are (and have been throughout this debacle) about

1. Poor communication of reasons behind decisions
2. Seemingly capricious, arbitrary, and impulsive mod actions
3. The perception that admins/mods want to impose changes to site culture based on personal preference and not the needs/wants of the user base

It’s about the way issues have been handled more than the content of the problem. The arguments about the content of the problem are easily comprehended and have been politely discussed by everyone. The continued insistence on imposing a generally unpopular decision is contributing to the impression of (3).

Having said all that I do want to say thank you to both admins in this thread for making massive improvements and an effort to communicate better. I think your most recent formulation of the intended content of the new comms works well and should be pinned somewhere more prominent than in Nth level replies.

There isn’t an elegant way of saying it but we use “people of marginalised genders” as an umbrella term. When talking about misogyny specifically I would probably say “femme people”.

Agreed (and I agree with your comment above as well), another reason why it’s just not a good name.

I have a speculative, probably bs theory that the rise of Abrahamic religions with their emphasis on patriarchy, erasure of female deities, and “man has dominion over the land and other species” is directly responsible for the way Western cultures have treated the planet and other civilisations

The mods of the dunk tank and dredge tank requested the name c/gossip. While there are some legitimate arguments being made relating to misogynistic societal perceptions of that word, the mods include women and enbies who disagree and specifically requested this name.

A few thoughts on this.

First of all, I don’t think this was intentional but using the phrase “women and enbies” in this context can come across as erasure of non-binary identity by implying that it’s akin to “woman lite” - I run a space for people of marginalised genders and this was one of the early lessons we learned, so just passing it on.

Secondly, that female and NB mods suggested a name does not absolve it of flaws or reduce the perception/propagation of misogynistic implications. The majority of people using or seeing the comm won’t know the backstory behind it, and valid concerns about how off-putting the name is shouldn’t be swept aside for these reasons.

It just doesn’t do a good job of describing the intended content of the comm. “Gossip” generally means interesting stories about celebrities’ lives, and isn’t really precise enough imo. Having a comm called “gossip” that is entirely full of dunks would probably contribute to the perception of a toxic site culture rather than detract.

Obviously there’s a lot to unpack here and it sounds like your issues go deeper than what internet discussions can fix, but I would recommend the following:

• stop making assumptions about people. Everything you’ve said suggests that you are making judgments about people’s entire world view and personality based on fleeting interactions. You don’t know shit about them.

• people are nuanced and contain multitudes of thoughts, opinions, behaviours, emotions, etc. their outward expression on any given day is dependent on a bunch of stuff like hunger, tiredness, stress level, etc.

• take a dialectical view. The whole point of leftist theory is that things, including people, can and do change. Implicit in your hatred is the assumption that negative things you observe are the natural or sole state of someone, which is contrary to leftist thought.

• actually make connections with people. Empathise with them. Think about why they are saying what they say. Think about how you would respond if you had the experiences that made up their life. And if the answer is “my life was similar but I made it out”, try to turn that into empathy and not condescension. Not everyone is as capable of throwing off the shackles they were born with by themselves.