sapient [they/them]

Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it’s own sources as well and provides a decent summary.

Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

Yeah because you’re from hexbear and I don’t trust you to engage in good faith or not immediately jump to the worst possible interpretation of something I said or missed (like you have done with the trans clinic thing), or do the whole thing where you assume only you are right and people can’t reasonably disagree on something, or always pivot to “but the us/uk did…” and act as if the inevitable and only correct conclusion to any debate or discussion is that the US and “West” (which is itself a messy concept) is worse in every aspect of every single thing than anywhere else in every possible action. And I, you know, can read the information and compare it with the uk/us pretty quickly, without listing every single tiny factor that went into my consideration.

Frankly, the behaviour of hexbear users has made me always check the accounts of people with square-brackets pronouns before engaging unless I’m in a community on an instance that has defederated. I should not feel this way when pronoun tags are a trans supportive thing and would usually make me feel more comfortable when talking with people. But blegh.

I will probably block after this because all engaging with 95% of hexbear users does is cause me irrational amounts of stress every fucking time because of the constant goddamn micro-nitpick and aggression on every fucking thing, constant assumptions of superiority and assuming they are always completely correct in ever single debate or discussion, it’s like they can’t even conceive of being wrong on something. Honestly this is just a vent at this point lol, not even something you specifically have done since you’re nowhere near the worst I’ve come across from hexbear.

Engaging just makes me feel the need to analyse every single thing I say to see if it will set the hexbear folks off on a tangent or completely dismiss you and do the weird misdirection and whataboutism and such. It makes me afraid to ever engage with hexbears in any manner, or overanalyse every tiny thing I say in case they use it to deliberately evade my main point like I was forced to do when younger in very hostile situations as an autistic person to avoid unpredictably angry people, and just like then it brings very little practical success because all my effort is spent trying to find any tiny way what I said might be interpreted in the worst possible way and there’s always some excuse anyway.

China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

True. This doesn’t change the other stuff I mentioned, and the UK also claims to be “improving” clinics for trans teens while doing the opposite, so forgive me for being a little skeptical of the persistency, especially since the hrt stuff is from 2022 and this is from 2021. It’s also only in a couple provinces. However, if it pans out, which it seems to from what you see, it’s a positive move, but again, it seems to be Shanxi and Beijing.

This was also explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia article and I did see it. But it was only a single province, compared to the entire government’s more negative actions >.<

The point here is that it is demonstrably obvious to trans people living in the US and UK that China is better to us than the US and the UK, one of which is currently performing a genocide against us and the other of which is transphobic on a near daily basis and is expected by the community here to follow in the US’ footsteps if it gets the chance.

China is pretty blegh actually.

They are actively making things worse w.r.t accessing HRT online, and require even more nonsense than the UK on changing legal ID, including shit like spousal approval, familial approval, and permission from various things like work, school, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_China

Access to hrt is also comparable to the uk by the looks of it. More importantly, the illegality of gay marriage combined with the massive approval process for id change means that trans people with different-gender partners can’t marry legally, and trans people with similar-gender partners are probably? in an unfortunate position here, though the page doesn’t include info on this >.<

The more sex-segregated components of various aspects of China also causes significant issues >.<

I’d say it’s worse in terms of being able to socially and medically transition, but there’s less overt hate. It’s more death-by-bureacracy and a need for even more extensive social approval to transition (I’m almost impressed that they managed a worse system than in the UK). The greater hold the Chinese Government has over their internet means accessing DIY HRT is likely much harder :/

People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong, they both have different issues. The UK in particular, most of the transphobia I experience is from institutions and media rather than “on the ground” (though this def. happens too), and the way the government is going with using us as a scapegoat is very concerning. But the - for now - lower amount of control over communications means I got started on DIY HRT pretty simply and pushed my way through the “official” system.

On a side note, stuff like this is one of the reasons opposing authoritarianism especially w.r.t communication is important, it makes it easier to do things the government has not approved of because the infrastructure is not in place to control communication and coordination as effectively.

The US is as always a clusterfuck because of it’s more federated nature, some of their states are trying to do genocide while others are acting as refuges and have things like informed consent HRT access and active protection against the more hostile states ^. - but fuck me if the dems aren’t spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.

Honestly most large states constantly try and censor the internet with stuff like this, though in the US/UK/Europe it has been a lot less successful at least. In this case it’s a more brazen attack on queer people, but this sort of stuff seems to happen every couple years. It’s very frustrating >.<

People definitely have some double standards though - maybe racism or the false idea that China is communist - but it doesn’t mean the Chinese govt is good on things, in my observation, just that people underestimate the things European countries, the UK, and US states do.

They may be better or worse and just because people often have double standards doesn’t make the Chinese government better (though it is often not worse in some respects, but the overall greater control of communication and computing infrastructure means it is harder to evade the subjugation or organise around it via tools like Tor, and the greater centralisation means that if the government decides to do something particularly awful it’s both harder for public dissent to occur and harder for regions to undermine efforts like that or even actively counter them :/).

IPFS is pretty neat (though I think bittorrent is better due to content locality and speed, but that’s just my experience). I’m more talking about starting up hardware for alternate network paths - for instance, chained together wireless or wired routers - outside the existing internet backbone to get across the borders of these countries that want to cut off the internet nya

Presumably, you’d do this in combination with some kind of mesh network router (like yggdrasil) capable of organising discrete connections into a proper network without a central authority, so that many people can autonomously build up this kind of alternate routing backbone.

Basically, right now, anti-censorship efforts are in a constant back-and-forth war between censors and the anti-censorship groups. This is because it is far too costly for a country to completely blackout communication from the wider internet, at the minute, but many of the countries doing this are continuously working to make that more viable. However, should it become viable for a country to disconnect all cables linking their internet to the outside internet, they have the technical means to do it by physically cutting the cables.

They know where the cables are and control them - that is part of how the censorship is implemented after all nya. Current censorship resistance techniques essentially are an armsrace between trying to make it so their filters don’t detect your “forbidden” connections, and the censors trying to improve their filters without unacceptable levels of economic and social damage (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom)

The less their economy and population depends on external services, the more aggressive and broad-spectrum they can be in cutting off external connections, because the harm from the collateral damage is reduced. What these countries want to do is reach a point where the collateral damage from cutting off the wider internet is small enough that they can cut the cables and block all connections. You can’t actually evade that within the current model of censorship/filtering resistance, because at that point it’s basically like those connections don’t even exist and hence can’t be traversed by any mechanism nya.

What I’m proposing is we build alternate pathways out that don’t depend on these cables. For example, either our own cables, or a chain of wireless nodes capable of building paths through the network autonomously (this is what a meshnet is). Because these alternate routes out would not be state-controlled, and presumably operated in a distributed manner which is hard for the state to locate, censorship becomes physically impossible without essentially containing your entire country in a sphere of RF interference (which would destroy basically all modern life), and building a massive, constantly monitored perimeter of sufficient depth to check that no-one has laid secret cables or whatever.

One other example of a potential route out is Starlink-style satellite internet, except a mesh network of satellites rather than it being controlled by any singular entity. But that’s essentially a larger-scale version of the “massive number of small-scale wireless nodes” idea. Hell, to improve censorship resistance you could do something with Li-Fi networking too, or mixed cable-wireless networks, or anything. The most important part is that you can build routes in- and out- of a country that the country’s government can’t easily locate or shut down ^.^

Yeah but it would add localised - and extremely high efficiency in terms of water, yield, etc. - food supply that’s more resilient to climate shifts, needs no pesticodes, etc., and for those of us on islands like the UK where we import lots of food it would be good.

Might also help those countries we import from build up more food supply resiliency because thry have more excess. Or massively reduce land use for food ^.^. And a lot of the places food gets imported from or otherwise farmed are also at large risk for climate change, so perhaps using vertical farms or other climate controlled farming techniques would be a good idea for them too nya

Furthermore it makes the supply chain more auditable, so you can reduce the reliance on questionably or very unethically sourced stuff. A controlled environment might also allow for even more automation.

I’m a pretty big fan of vertical farming for lots of reasons though to the point of writing an article on it, so I’m a little biased ;p. The main obstacles are land/building price and energy (and also some techniques for growing staples, though I think that is not a fundamemtal limitation, and I think the other two are solvable)

Edit: also I think it’s desirable to return agricultural land to less managed environments like forests. Moving more human infrastructure into cities would enable more of this sort of “rewilding” (though I think that’s a bit of a misnomer as environments everywhere have all been fundamentally altered by people, and a lot of people’s idea of “nature” is the very sanitised version that avoids the constant slaughter and death, like cityparks and stuff which are actually very human managed - good for mental health, but not really ““nature”” in the same way)

Yep! Im actually somewhat familiar with those :)

I mean more we need a way to run either cables or a very long series of wifi relays into and out of these countries. Perhaps using something yggdrasil-adjacent for route autoconfig ^.^ nya.

Alternate hardware outside of state control or influence :)

Turn them into vertical farms if its apparently too hard to turn them into housing ;p

What we need is some way to make a distributed/p2p alternate meshnet backbone across borders ^.^ - much harder to control the internet when other physical links are available.

Based haskell ;p