There might be a few outside of here that know it, but they write essays about how George actually must have meant it to be the other way around to reassure themselves.

Wait, what's worse? For who? I'm not totally sure what you're saying here but as someone who has survived by doing sex work, who has been repeatedly sexually exploited*, and who has also been more than what I think most would just call exploited, I would not say that any of that was worse for me than being murdered on a factory farm. Can we just agree that exploitation and the objectification or commodification of sentient life is very bad and needs to be abolished?

*(Side note to make clear that sex work is not inherently exploitational either but that's a different ball of wax.)

I just got banned from ~~lemmygrad~~ c/genzedong on lemmygrad for calling out blatant sexism where a user was shaming sexworkers (as said by someone else, a sexworker, who literally talked about the shame a SWERF lemmygrad user was making them feel). But a comment where I expressed solidarity with that person and told them they shouldn't feel ashamed of the work they do was removed for "rule 2" which is... bigotry, sexism, etc. So rule 2 states you aren't allowed to call out bigotry and sexism I guess? These losers call themselves leftists?!

I'm sickened to see sexism and sexphobic rhetoric getting more upvotes in a place I thought was supposed to be progressive and not a reactionary shithole where misogyny is allowed and encouraged and people who call it out get banned with their comments removed. Yeah, I'm mad. Fuck lemmygrad, at least the SWERFs and apparently the SWERF-supportive mods.

I guess I've been spoiled by hexbear usually being so good about these sort of issues, I forget that other leftist spaces are often still rife with sexist bigoted SWERF assholes. Lemmygrad and hexbear overlap so much these days (which 99% of the time is great) I wasn't remembering that lemmygrad really does have its own distinct site culture, and at least one aspect of it is really... not good. I will not be shamed by SWERFs and I will not allow my comrades to be shamed by SWERFs when I can do anything to help it.

Sorry, just had to vent somewhere, but this wasn't worth a whole post.

FINALLY.

About goddamn time. Better late than never (I mean fucking obviously, I just wish it had been decades or even a century sooner).

I hope he died knowing that the empire he spent his life orchestrating atrocities for is also spiraling the drain.

🦀 all x 1000.

Tankies usually are bastions of political understanding though, whether you agree with them or not. They have to be to stand up to the mountains of propaganda we're all fed that people are trained since childhood to accept as "simply how things are." Many tankies only earn that title after developing a perspective that requires spending years reading, you know, actual books, on history and theory and working to honestly understand why things are the way they are, not how they wish they were, nor simply accepting what everyone is told for the sake of reinforcing existing power structures. Hexbear is way out there, yes, since the overton window is so ridiculously far to the right, by design, that it keeps most people from ever even understanding what leftism is. Hexbear is not divorced from reality so much as it is painfully hyper-tuned in to how dire reality actually is.

I'm not a Jewish person, but the imagery that immediately and involuntarily springs into my mind when I see a burning Star of David is that of people and industrial ovens. Personally, I couldn't just decouple a symbol like that in my head from the more notorious of Nazi atrocities any more than if I were to try not to think of fascism when I see a swastika. I thought this was a common if not universal association, and that's why we never had the emoji in the first place but I guess not.

Obviously, Israel as a state should burn and no one should have to hold back from showing their disgust and rage at it, at the fascist settler colonizers that make it up, and anyone who supports it/them. But expressing that rage by specifically using the most well-known symbol for Judaism on fire would, in a small way, be going along with the Zionist agenda to associate Judaism with Zionism.

@WhyEssEff@hexbear.net I'm totally with you on this, and I'm grateful you draw a hard line at not implementing that emoji. I hope the other mods and admins do too.

Possibly, but the article does mention that it jumped significantly even from 2020/2021 during "the height of the Covid-19 pandemic," though they are probably discounting the cumulative effects of covid since everyone knows it's all over and done with since Biden defeated Covid. Damaged immune systems could make sense at least for part of it:

Of the 10 leading causes of death for infants in the U.S., mortality rates increased for two: bacterial sepsis, or infection, and maternal complications.

I was assuming it probably has mostly to do with the sudden inability to access abortion (and other reproductive healthcare as a result) for so much of the US now. Here's what the article said about it:

One question the researchers had was whether the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion access, may have played a role in the latter. But because “maternal complications” encompasses a number of things that can go wrong in pregnancy, says Ely, the data aren’t granular enough to know if any specific state policies regarding womens’ health have impacted infant mortality rates.

relevant repost:

Are liberals incapable of discussing or arguing something without resorting to childish insults?

When you don't have material reality as the basis for your arguments, (or if you tried to argue based on material reality, you know you'd lose) what else is there left but bullshit like childish insults?

I keep getting psychoanalyzed by them and being told that I’m supporting Palestine because I want to be part of a group

Pure projection. They can't fathom having firm, reasoned, and consistent principles, so they assume that you, like them, are just being performative about who you support.

Really? They're rare but seems to be at least one a day. Got one from programming.dev just a few hours ago https://hexbear.net/comment/3867997

we got son of here.