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

@HebrideanHecate Right, here's one of their clips on this.
Describes the reasons behind knife attacks on kindergardens and middle schools. In short: it's a way to hurt society and the elder generation.
Also shows an ad for a kindergarden containing footage of an attack drill.

https://youtu.be/0UfAvx-YBfs

@HebrideanHecate Apparently stabbing attacks against children are a "thing" in China.
According to these two youtubers I follow, it's a very China-specific way of disaffected men (of whom China has plenty) to attack against society. I can see if I can dig up a video where they discuss this, but if I remember right, the impetus is not just that one-child-policy families put massive resources into their single children, but also the importance of children as carriers of family name and providers for their parents.

It's enough of a thing, that daycare workers and school teachers run drills on what to do in case of a knife attack, and facilities have all kinds of security measures in place to stop would-be attackers.

@HebrideanHecate Isn't it just.

And one of those things you'd never know about, unless you go out of your way to learn stuff about modern China. Everyone talks about U.S. school shootings, but Chinese kindergarten stabbings might as well not exist.

@HebrideanHecate Funny familial anecdote time:

My half-brother went to study in the Soviet Union when he was young. I don't think he ever was a real communist of anything, but back then the opportunity was there and he took it.
When he left, he was a vegetarian, because of course he was.
However, apparently the only (!) easily available vegetable over there was cabbage.

After a couple of months, he was very effectively cured of vegetarianism.

@HebrideanHecate Politically motivated free passes have been around for a long while.
In the 70s there was a type of student who thought the Soviet Union could do no wrong. Free paradise of peacenik workers, dontchaknow. And that's just a fresh example I was reminded of because of the stuff I've been reading lately.

@HebrideanHecate Ah, slipped my mind, that.

My bad, as the kids say these days.

@FeartnTired This video isn’t strictly about the bottle return scheme, but about waste management in Finland in general. It’s from the environmental centre, and kind of advertis-y, but I have no reason to suspect they’re misrepresenting basic facts.

A coupld of take-aways, which aren’t explicitly stated in the video, but are a clear subtext.
One, these are very complicated systems that involve a lot of different laws and rules, as well as a lot of infrastructure that has to be in place for the laws and rules to work properly.
Two, these systems were developed over a long period of time, they weren’t put in place by a decree within any one, or even three terms of office. The groundwork started in the seventies, arguably even long before that. I’m sure the development process involved mistakes and bad ideas along the way, but over time the systems were refined, mistakes fixed and problems solved.

For example, the town where I used to live in built a massive waste processing facility, that turned out to be nearly useless. At the time it was quite the local scandal, and I’m sure it’s not the only one of its kind. What local officials get right in one place, they screw up through political wheeling and dealing in another, and vice versa. But the overall goal wasn’t abandoned, just because some people were being idiots.

Any government that thinks it can achieve results similar to those depicted in the video in a few years, or by a decree, or both, is on a fool’s errand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i1EoqMTRaY

@EmmyNoether @Piss_Ant Yeah, I’m leaning towars him being wrong on this as well.

For one, Finland implemented full housing first programme, and as far as I know the results are that it actually helps get addicts off drugs, rather than the other way around. And the same seems to be the case with trials elsewhere.

And of course quite apart from that, I think in a country where not having housing can be an effective death sentence at least part of the year, it’s just plain ethical to offer housing to anyone willing to stay under a roof.

You may be correct of his liberal fallacy. I don’t actually know what he bases his opinion on, but from what I’ve heard there’s actual proper data that it’s not the case.

@Piss_Ant Doesn’t seem that far removed from Boghossian’s argument against housing first-programmes, namely that they enable addiction.

Logic being, I think, that if you give an addict a roof over their head, they have less incentive to get dry and they’ll be more able to keep using.

@LostInCalifornia Much more plausible. Though the women’s movement has been much more muted in the countries I mentioned as far as I can tell. Or rather not explicitly visible in the same way.

In several of his recent discussions, Peter Boghossian has brought up the substitution hypothesis.

That is, that the reason genderism and other similarly cultish ideas have had such success, is that organised religion has been pushed to the wayside. According to the hypothesis, this has left a vacuum because most people yearn for, essentially, religion. Genderism and other similar fads have then moved into this vacuum.

I have several problems with this hypothesis, but I think the biggest one is the following.
It doesn’t fit the data.

If it were true, one would expect genderism et.al. to have the greatest sway in the most secular countries, quite possibly even originating in them. Yet, this is not the case. In several polls the most secular country has been found to be Estonia, if measured by the population’s lack of religion. Yet, Estonia is not even on the scene when it comes to genderism. Nordic countries are also well known to be highly secularised, yet they have been adopters, not leaders in genderism. And Sweden and Finland were first ones to officially announce they would stop giving endochrine disruptors for adolescents.

Instead, the “patient zero” of genderism, as Helen Joyce put it, was the U.S. A country which I would argue, is one of the least secular western countries.
Ergo: the data doesn’t fit the hypothesis.

@Jennifer_Lee @LostInCalifornia This could almost just as well go into the discussion I was having with @Cousin_Isobel about antifa…

@LostInCalifornia Maybe the Americans just like fads and fashions more…?

@kj00 @KissAnne Ticks. Fucking ticks.

@mk
Spinster weirdness.

Spinster is for some reason only intermittently showing all the posts that should be on my Home tab. It jumps from only showing posts to 6d ago, to 1d ago, and only shows the latest ones after realoading the page. It reverts to the incomplete view if I leave the home tab and come back to it.

ETA: And after posting this, it showed the home tab with messages up to 4h ago, missing several I had posted since. After reload, it showed everything again.

@Piss_Ant @AbolishPregnancy Doesn’t help that there actually seem to be hordes of teens and post-teens online self-diagnosing into mental illnesses, in plural, for … clout I guess. Or even neurological disorders. Like that one woman who became quite big on TikTok pretending to have Tourette’s.

@kj00 @Piss_Ant Do you get to name your characters?

I looked the game up and am actually considering buying it. I have to say your vignettes are doing nothing to dissuade me.

@kj00 @Piss_Ant Well if I decide to buy it, I’ll name one character in your honour.

I am really tempted. I love CIV and other such games, and this looks like it could run on my old home laptop. Not that many games of this sort do, and I like the idea of the game generating stories.
Does it take a lot of continuous attention, or can you leave it running and come back once in a while?

@kj00 @Piss_Ant What game is this?

@kj00 @Piss_Ant I think you probably should know about this.