they didn't say 'not like' they said 'demeaning'

unless you're saying you want to be demeaning towards a trans person for liking those things?

personal anecdote that anzac day always reminds me of: used to write for a yearly "satire" paper based in WA (quality is extremely questionable), whose main purpose most years was just pissing people off. We'd started going on a very left-leaning tilt around 2012, and I remember in 2015 we ran an article conflating ANZAC day with Participation Trophies

we got a number of calls that day calling us unaustralian, calling for us to be expelled, threatening us and all sorts lmao

ofc nothing came of it, all empty threats in the end but still it doesn't take much to poke the aussie patriotism bear

so long as we acknowledge that bad things are bad and no one gets blamed for it, we'll never have to understand why these things happen and by God I'll do whatever it takes to keep it that way!!!

fuck leaving the cave !!! all my homies hate understanding the world 😤😤😤

i remember once, a year or two into my transition - I was having dinner with my family, when some Rugby news came up (family of Rugby players, living in Australia) and both my brother and my dad took a whole aside in the conversation to explain to me who certain players were, about who the captain of the local team is and why such and such news is a big deal

I had to remind them that I, too, was a rugby player and had been sitting literally right next to them at every game the last few seasons since all three of us were season pass holders of multiple years, something that literally never happened prior to me coming out

and while it might've just been coincidence, my dad is one hundred percent the kind of English, smug-loving Thatcherite who would absolutely mansplain to anybody without thinking twice lmao

thank you for your service

its very evident from their other replies that their metric for 'good' art is 'is it beautiful?' and their definition of 'beauty', in turn, is simply 'does looking at this release dopamine or not'

deeply unserious person

its not even that they don't have the creativity - its that people have been so poisoned by commodity capitalism that they feel like their art 'doesn't count' unless it looks like 'real art' that can make money

people are so isolated from the creative process that they think they can dump it entirely, as if all it is is just knowing how to scribble on a page

its more like the pizza shop calling you out when you're cooking frozen pizza and calling yourself a chef

all power to you if you want to just consume slop, but dont complain when you turn around years later and the quality of everything across the board has gone even further to shit cos you were so happy you could type in words and see anything you wanted for all the 15 minutes of dopamine it gave you

sounds like a good move tbh, as someone who plays a lot of Scrabble and Bananagrams there's a reason 80 percent of the time I reach for the latter. The scoring in Scrabble is probably the most annoying part of it - the "meta" that forms around specific placements thanks to 3X scores, the amount of times you will all just sit there in silence trying to find the maximum score instead of having fun

very keen to try an updated Scrabble

at the risk of being called a reddit atheist, i have to say it's frustrating that this discourse keeps abstracted to 'is religion compatible with communist ideology' and not 'is being reactionary compatible with communist ideology'

because that's what it ultimately comes down to - a lot of the issues people have with religion stem from reactionary thinking and actions, which on a surface level seems like it can be separated from religion as a whole, but I would argue that the two functionally can not be unlinked. At the end of the day, at it's very core many religious beliefs rely on, and encourage, reactionary behaviour - and while some are better and more communal minded/liberation adjacent than others, I would say that this is by coincidence and we cannot make the mistake of trying to make reactionary ideologies 'work for us'. You need only look at stupidpol to see what happens when you throw people under the bus in order to not turn away what you might see as potential comrades - you will not drag them left with you, you'll only poison your own well and create yet another avenue for reactionary ideology to bolster itself.

This is not to say that no religious person can be a revolutionary, or that religious people cannot be our comrades - but they would have to be communist first and religious second or else I'd be wary that at some point some oppressed group is going to be thrown to the grinder, and I'll be honest - anecdotally, not a lot of religious people are like that, nor a lot of religions encourage such a relationship with their faith, no matter what denomination.

I wouldn't say you lose a huge portion of the community, as someone who's post bottom surgery - but there is definitely a strange feeling of under-representation. I can't speak to a strict divide necessarily like your girlfriend's talked about, but there is a popular image of 'what a trans woman is' that is very focused on being penis-centric for better or worse, and it is a definitely a recent phenomenon too so maybe itll pass and correct itself

holy hell