on principle I don’t use apps, their website seems to work fine though! Maybe this is showing my age, but I feel like researching restaurants is a task for being on a real computer 😄

For vegetarians & vegans: Happy Cow

It’s surreal to me that there are people who don’t know what life before Wikipedia was like, lol.

Maybe it’s relevant to understand that the increased access to information hasn’t always translated to people being more informed. There are many people in my life who don’t actively look things up and who don’t have the curiosity or willingness to even check Wikipedia.

So it is still now a bit like what it was like pre-Wikipedia - people mostly relied on other people for knowledge, and knowledge was thus local and socially shared, not necessarily that factual or based in books. I still think this is the dominant way people live, but now social media is an extension of that “local” socially-mediated knowledge. TV and radio were sorta like social media before, it was the way things became “viral”.

I think now like then, looking something up on Wikipedia sets you apart from a lot of people, it makes you bookish, nerdy, or pedantic - as if the folk knowledge wasn’t good enough for you and you have become a traitor to your people by seeking something more from the stacks.

The meme uses the “man checking oven” template to mark Trump supporters as stereotypically “gay” and contrasts this with a picture of the assassin in which there are no stereotypical signs of sexuality, which of course implies straightness in our heteronormative society.

Sure it is entirely possible the assassin could be gay IRL by coincidence, but this isn’t a helpful for understanding or interpreting the meme, since contrast between gay and straight is clearly created and this contrast is used to make a normative claim, i.e. Trump supporters are gay (i.e. bad) for being hypocritical, while the CEO killer is based by living up to the Punisher anti-hero vigilante ethos and thus not gay (i.e. straight, normal, good).

Maybe the meme uses homophobia because it will upset homophobic Trump supporters more, since they don’t want to be associated with being “gay”. Still, it appeals to and uses homophobic logic by associating the marked-as-gay traits with something villainous and the “unmarked” (which is the heteronormative default of “normal” straightness) with a hero.

I read it as straightforwardly homophobic, it’s not a top vs bottom as much as gay = bad, cowardly, weak, inauthentic while straight / “normal” = good, heroic, principled.

hm, I do think what I meant by “yay” is some kind of supportive or positive emotional response, which is still happening when you are upvoting terrible news for being informative, i.e. what you are responding to with “yay” is being informed and wishing others to be informed, not the content of the news itself.

(For context I’m drawing on the metaethical theory of emotivism here as a framework.)

I think this has been covered already.

Sometimes. I think the meaning of the arrows are somewhat contextual.

Downvoting spam for example isn’t “disagreement”, but it is a kind of disapproval.

Upvoting your post isn’t “agreement”, but I do it because I think it’s an interesting question (maybe a kind of approval)?

If we generalized I guess we could ask whether upvotes are always relating positive emotion (approval, agreement, joy, etc.) and downvotes always relating negative emotion (disagreement, disapproval, anger, etc.)?

That is, are upvotes “yays” and downvotes “boos”?

a lot of trans folks live in extreme denial, it’s very hard to accept

Hi! I know this might just be the wrong context at this point as you are already getting flak, but I was curious and wanted to ask why you have exclusive sexual interest in cis women?

For example I would imagine some heterosexual cis men would have a hard time dating a trans woman who haven’t had bottom surgery or who are early in their transition (in which case sometimes the sexual preference is phrased as a genital preference rather than about exclusively dating cis people).

Some women who for various reasons pass well as cis are not distinguishable from cis women, and in that case I assume based on your statement you still would have a hard time dating that person if you found out they were trans.

For example, based on your statement I assume you wouldn’t date or be attracted to Nava Mau.

I understand if you don’t want to answer, it’s not like this is the best context and it is a vulnerable topic - just wanted to extend an olive branch in case you wanted to talk and think about it with less judgement.