The real question is the hell did people downvote me?
You shut someone down without informing or educating them on a text based discussion centric community with an academic stick up its ass. A one word response to a complex technical question is terrible etiquette in this sort of social environment.
Eh. If you can take the appropriate opsec steps to keep yourself anonymous, using the darkweb can be surprisingly safe. You can find darkweb dealers with a full decade of reviews across numerous markets. People sometimes freak out when I say that's where I used to get my weed, but I always had the best weed in town, and I never had to deal with a creep, and I never had my money stolen. I was using a site that was crazy strict on quality control.
my car is a metal horse that should go as long as I put gas in it
This one is fun because horses require so much more effort and upkeep than cars. Your horse can suck because you made it sad.
Barbie has had her controversies, but she had always had feminist messaging, even if it was less mainstream feminism at times. She has always sat at the crux of a feminist debate: does she impress upon girls that they must look a certain way? Or does she impress upon girls that they can be capable and successful regardless of their traditional femininity. When Barbie was developed and released, the masculine, unattractive woman making it in a man's world was a relatively common trope. The artifices of famininity were seen as signs of weakness and incompetence, while denying your femininity and emulating men meant a chance at more respectable, mainstream success. Barbie was a response to that idea, to the idea that a woman has to become like a man to succeed like one. Barbie can do everything, and she can do it in a dress and heels. Barbie can be an airline pilot and homeowner, and her plane and house can be as entirely feminine as her wardrobe. When times changed and the toxic femininity tropes shifted to slutty women using their bodies for success, Barbie was sometimes accused of playing into that trope. But that perspective misses the original context of Barbie's disruptive femininity.
Nah. It just gets you to all the places. That would be akin to calling a car an everything store. You get in the car to go places and do things, but the car isn't the place or thing. You can have a direct connection to a website or app that doesn't go through a browser. Likewise, you can directly call a business to connect and interact without a car. The browser is the vehicle. The internet is the street.
If you leave mainstream, radio country even just a little, it becomes apparent that progressive gays are taking over country and Americana. If there are people and places in your life that need country music, bring S.G. Goodman, Melissa Carper, Orville Peck, Iris Marlowe, and none of these people have what I would call a niche sound. (I don't expect to convert anyone to the cult of Little Mazarn, but that's maybe my favorite country act.) And some of them are blowing up! They're making country music for me these days, and I fucking love it. It's all I listen to lately. Folk, country, and Americana are for everyone.
“Well someone has to be the king.” That is their only constant, and it is a thought process baked into the human brain. It is our default.
Fun fact: if you're raised in a chaotic environment of abuse, distrust, and neglect, you can go blissfully free of the need for leadership for the low, low price of CPTSD! I assume that this leaderless way of thinking can be imparted to children without truama, but I only know how I got there. For better or worse, I've never trusted or craved authority because my formative authorities were infinitely untrustworthy and unsafe.
Come to the Midwest. A crazy number of people smoke here, like straight up cancer sticks smoke. I moved here from Florida, where I felt like you: was a low class thing of the past. In Missouri the booze is cheap and the tobacco plentiful. It's wild.
Personally, I stopped using Firefox when mobile became my main computing device. When I had shitty phones and mobile browsers were newer, Chrome was much more stable for me than FF. I should try to break the habit and go back to FF now that they are both structurally sound, but by now I have years of stuff saved to and remembered by Chrome. It would be a hassle to switch, and somewhat more control of a portion of my data isn't worth the trouble to me. I'm still gonna use Instagram for professional networking and personal posting, so I'm gonna be in packaged data anyway.
Tbh, this doesn't feel like a response to my post. All I was getting at is that gender is more complex and inherent than just social structures. There are social, psychological, and physiological aspects to gender. A lot of people reduce it to a social/cultural phenomenon, which inevitably leads someone to question the necessity of medical transition. Many trans people, myself included, will/would permanently struggle with chemical dysphoria our whole lives if we relegate the condition and its treatment to psychology and sociology. That's all I wanted to say. To me, HRT is that science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. Spironolactone was a revelation in me, and my first few estrogen injections were all but religious experiences.
Totally not me clicking your link entirely because I know there's gonna be a hot guy behind it >_>
I pretty much agree with your second sentence/point, but this is bullshit. I got so many downvotes on reddit for literal descriptions of my perceptions and experiences as a gay woman. Half the time there wasn't even a debate or argument happening. As reddit culture skewed more and more conservative, many technical and nerdy communities became actively hostile to the basic facts of my existence. Then there are all the downvotes I got for believing in human and minority rights while downthread with some bigots. My more visible posts on the same topic would be solidly upvoted, while everything below the arrow was smashed below zero because only angry little shits followed the discussion that far. I agree that the system on Lemmy isn't meaningfully different and will inevitably have the same effects, but sorting by voting over-centralizes the meta and destroys real discussion and diversity of experience and opinion. It literally only works in limited circumstances within subjects that have objectively correct answers. Anywhere else it introduces so much chaos.