Notices by The Dread Slender Gnome (gnomeshatecheese@spinster.xyz)

@RadicalCartoons @HebrideanHecate @Flick The donors whose names have been leaked are probably not all rich people, since the news referred to those who donated over £50 in the past two years.

I do hope the scheme falls flat on its face and discourages nobody from donating. Even if it's a small amount.

@Flick And I would make sure to tag Bash Back in my announcement on Twitter. Or Bluesky, because I bet they're exactly the kind of gits to be on that site instead.

@Flick I haven't donated to them because different country, but if I had...

I would totally be this guy.

@Flick Conspiracy theories about linguistics???

I LOVE IT!!

@FeartnTired I would add to this Daniel Lismore that your generation is in fact not advocating for people existing outside rigid boxes. They're advocating for making tons and tons of more boxes, which are no less rigid, even if one is allowed to occupy several boxes simultaneously.

Our lot wanted to do away with the boxes. If someone can't see the difference, I don't know what to tell them.

@FeartnTired For context, here's the original whine El Gato Malo is responding to. From a Daniel Lismore (blue tick).

I genuinely cannot understand how generation above me ended up here. We grew up idolising David Bowie and through him discovered Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. We lived through punk and post punk smashing gender norms in public. We watched Prince blur masculinity and desire. We danced to Boy George. We worshipped Grace Jones. Then came the flamboyance of the eighties where androgyny excess and self invention were celebrated. Gender bending was not a threat. It was art. It was freedom. It was cool.

So how did the same generation become so hostile to people simply existing outside rigid boxes. How did we go from celebrating difference to fearing it. This backlash does not come from culture or history. It comes from forgetting who we were and what we stood for. None of this is new. Get over it.

I'm reposting this with the original text quoted here, because it is that good.
From el gato malo on the tweety site, handle boriquagato, in response to someone whining about why people who grew up in the 70s-90s are turning against identitarianism in general, but gender identitarianism in particular. And it does apply to more things than just the gender identity nonsense.

if you'd like to understand why the generations above you have so little respect (and increasingly so little tolerance) for your cohort, it's simple: everything we made was optional and opt in.

Interesting people did interesting things and if you liked them, you got on board. and that was cool. and if you didn't, you didn't. and that was cool too.

but you took the awesome stuff we built for you and you politicized it all.

you turned it from the ask of "accept me?" upon which our culture was based to an institutionalized demand of "accept me!" backed by the force and institutions of the state and indoctrinated into curriculums and cancel culture.

bowie just did things and offered them up for people to like or ignore or criticize as they saw fit.

you passed laws that if we didn't like you it was a hate crime.

you were neither inclusive nor interesting.

you did not make offers, you made demands.

you became performative crybully assault artists wielding absurdist identity like a mace against anyone you did not like or sought to dominate.

you made it into a post-modern kafka trap and force-fed it to a nation who was not allowed to say "no."

you hated the cool kids so much that you made the worlds they built into joyless bataan death marches of avolitional aggrievement worship by incredibly marginal people.

you mistook the surface and seeming of a thing for the substance of it and a self-serving cargo cult of theater kid histrionics for identity and worse, for meaning.

and you dragged the rest of us into it against our will and tried to demand a respect and acceptance you were unable to earn.

it's been one big "everyone gets a trophy day" cum pity party, invitation by gunpoint, thrown by a group of hyper-demanding, entitled brats.

and the fact that you "do not understand" how we "ended up here" or see why the distinction of choice vs force matters is exactly why everyone is so terribly sick of you and does not want you around.

i grew up in the very cultures you describe.

and you wrecked them because you were too lame to handle freedom.

@Flick Next up:

Suttee and foot-binding. Should never have been abolished, because to do so was western sensationalism. Or internalised western sensationalism.

It's not like the widow being burned alive actually suffers any trauma from the act itself.

@KeepTakingTheSoma I always think of things like that as more of a summer thing, when all the berries and fruit are fresh and in season. Having said that, oranges and mandarin oranges are now in season and they are lovely.

I should make that orange "salad" with pomegranates and mint some time soon again...

@KeepTakingTheSoma Well, seeing as there are just the two of us... 😆

I'm not terribly partial to tiramisu for some reason. But something in that vein (pudding out of biscuits liquid and flavour agent) is definitely a possibility.

Another Christmas dinner pondering: need to decide on a dessert. I've previously gone for something like a posset, or a fruit salad with my family, seeing as it's a heavy meal. But I'm not sure I feel like making another lemon posset (maybe for New Year this time), so I'm considering maybe a small sample of truffles.

But is that really "a dessert"?

Himself loves a creme brulee, but I've never tried one, so unless I do a trial run, it'll be a risk. And if I do a trial run and it works out, how could I then make the christmas CB special, and not "oh we just had this dessert a few weeks ago"? That is, without adding something insane like popcorn. Yes, I have seen that on a restaurant menu.

It'll have to be something I can mostly do one or two days beforehand in any case.

I think I'll go through one particular cookbook tonight.

Maybe creme brulee garnished with fine slices of pears poached in jasmine tea? Drizzled with tea syrup? Maybe...

We’ve never called them ‘epileptics’ – we call them ‘people with epilepsy’ because they are people who happen to have that disease. “Whereas now the trend is to say ‘I am autistic’, rather than ‘I’m a person with autism’.

I honestly see no point in this particular language game.
I'm not going to stop saying "I'm allergic" or similar, and it in no way implies I'm incorporating allergy into my personality.

If people are going to incorporate a given condition into their personality, they are going to do it however you spin the words around.

Also, it seems to me that identifying with a disease or a condition to the point that it becomes a key piece of one's mental identity is a new thing, while saying "epileptic" or "autistic" is not. So I don't think that supports the writer's argument either.

@KeepTakingTheSoma Let me know what they're like. I'd be interested to know how big a departure they are (now) from the historical baroque style versions.

@KeepTakingTheSoma I linked a Red Priest video in a chat group once years and years ago. Someone in the group didn't take to it, I can't remember exactly what she said but it was something to the effect of "ruining Vivaldi's Four Seasons with stupid wannabe shit". I suppose this person thought the piece should never be played in any style except saccharine romanticism.

I do have to say that ultimately I prefer the more regular baroque style versions, but at the time that Red Priest recording was an amazing breath of fresh air.
And of course, they ARE very good at what they do.

... he was trying to engage people in debate, and didn't peddle violence or advocated for the dismantling of democracy. ... He was partaking in the liberal democratic process of exercising free speech trying to change people's minds when he was shot.

That's exactly the problem.
I've watched some of Kirks's videos on YT, specifically those in which he talks about the Trans issue. Whatever I may think of any of his views, I never saw him to be anything less than courteous and reasonable towards the people he spoke with.
That such a behaviour can be seen to merit deadly violence as a response, is really, really not a good thing.

@sim @taylan I was just thinking about those comments.
What those people are actually saying is that certain views justify killing a person.

This is no different than islamic fundamentalists saying that leaving islam deserves death. That if you have certain opinions, let alone if you speak them out loud, you have it coming if someone kills you.
Such attitudes are in contradiction with the very idea of free, democratic societies.

@taylan @jeffcliff Sounds like a new market for identity thieves, who buy stolen ID cards or photos of passports.

Photographing someone's ID would be ridiculously fast, and could be done by any customer service person at a place that requires ID. It would be a pretty easy illegal side hustle.

Maybe it would be best if the government weren't lazy and offered the service themselves.

It seems to me this still wouldn't remove the incentive to illicitly photograph other people's IDs and sell those photos to criminals, who would then sell them further. The weak point would be the user uploading A photo of AN ID, and there not being a way to ascertain the authenticity of the ID.

The only way to verify an ID's authenticity, whether the system was run by government or not, would be to somehow unequivocally connect the user behind the screen to THIS ID, and there we immediately start having grave privacy concerns.

Granted, online systems already exist that have such privacy concerns, like online shopping (my online banking being directly connected to me), but I think there's a good argument that as few systems as possible should carry such concerns.

My personal opinion is that the likely outcome is to limit kids' access to smartphones. I'm already seeing noices being made to this effect, and I think it'll be the action many bodies will find easiest to implement.

@TriptychTwinsRidesAgain Owen Jones and now this?

...

Are they FINALLY starting to faintly grasp the 3-metre-high writing on every damn wall?

@FeartnTired I think many of us live in the vain hope that they would actually go and arrest Rowling.

And I bet that includes Rowling herself.