If You Have The Ability, Please Learn To Code.

If you have the ability, please learn to code.

I haven't seen many posts about this, but part of the reason radical feminists and women in general are getting effectively silenced is because men control tech, and there are few women with the skills to set up our own networks.

I'm not saying learn to code and get a job in tech, but your activism can be so much more effective if you have a solid coding foundation. Need a list of all the Crisis Pregnancy Centers (fake abortion clinics) in the USA, in a data format that's easy to track and update with new info over time? That would take hundreds of hours manually. I can write a scraping script, set up a local sqlite database, and get running in a weekend. If I want to make that list public-facing, but don't want the hassle of setting up a more robust database like PostgresQL or MySQL, I can export a JSON file and make a web page that generates listings for each entry in the file.

Automating manual data entry saves so much time. Web scraping saves so much time. Knowing how to access APIs to get the data you need saves so much fucking time.

I highly recommend Python as a beginning programming language. It's a mature language that is still updated, has wide support, has a lot of free learning materials aimed at people who are new to programming, has intuitive syntax, and it has a ton of libraries and frameworks that cover the spectrum of tech needs. If you want to do it, there's probably a way in Python.

it feels like a lot of the time people will use 'you're x-phobic' as a 'gotcha' and a way to be like 'if you don't do what i WANT you to do, you're being a BAD PERSON and EVERYONE WILL KNOW' rather than... genuine want for someone to change or question their views. it's so much mindfuckery.

It sure can be. People can't talk about some things with even a little nuance.

so a few hours ago I saw a woman post that she lives in a rural area and sees how tired the women in her area are and wants to know what to do to help them. and unfortunately I didn't save her post down to reply to but while I was biking thought of one answer which is, basically,

a friend of mine did a once-every 2 months barbeque, where each time she invited the usual crowd and asked them to bring sb new. She started with two coworkers (I was one of the coworkers). She made it really clear that it was okay to bring new friends, and the reason she gave was, "that keeps it from being boring!". if women wanted to bring a male friend, she would be like, "it's just more fun if it's just us girls, yanno?"

you don't use radfem language, you don't lecture, you don't explain, you don't try to do anything, you just, literally hang out with them, build connections, build relationships. women are naturally helpful to each other, and you'll start seeing women helping each other, and sometimes, late into the evening, someone might tell their story, and everyone will learn something.

now my friend did this in a city, but in a small enclave in the city, where a lot of people knew each other's business. and people would snark about the women's barbeque, but it wasn't really interfered with, it was just women having a beer.

anyways, this is how you begin. how the story goes from there depends a lot on you, on your community, the women involved etc. but at least, at the very least, you're creating a moment of lightness and solidarity in at least a few women's lives, and that is worth something you know? sometime's it's worth everything.

Mr Beast sidekick cycled through the trans to outed pedo pipeline at warp speed. Genuinely think a lot of male pedos know something is drastically wrong with them and get the idea that doing something as drastic as transitioning will somehow relieve the pressure. It's like they start getting the itch to wear their paraphilia on their sleeve and finally out themselves somehow and trans is the most socially acceptable way to do that.

Also going from dime a dozen disgusting pedo guy to protected minority/ vulnerable "trans girl" must feel like the purest crack. I could imagine them finding some relief in believing that like "ohhh this is what's wrong with me, I'm not bad I'm just secretly a girl"

I moral lesson I wish literally everybody would learn is this: the very same actions that keep you safe when you are powerless can be abusive when you hold power over someone. The difference between resisting subjugation and subjugating others is often more a matter of context than anything else. And when context changes, it can be hard to relearn one's behavior—it requires an active effort. Probably all of us have hurt others needlessly, in some way or another, by doing things out of a reactive instinct for self-preservation. Probably all of us have been hurt by others, sometimes very deeply, when they were acting out of the same instinct.

I don't like speaking about ethics in the language of blame, but insofar as blame is a coherent notion to begin with, I'll say this: neither is anyone evil for the failure to fully rework themselves and free themselves of bad habit after struggle, nor does the difficulty of reworking oneself excuse the abuse of others. Nor, though we may wish otherwise, is it always epistemically possible to our own actions with confidence in one camp or the other. We can only do our best to treat others well and at the same time ourselves, though it is often not clear how.

honestly i don't understand people who are like "you HAVE to read all these books or anything you say about your experiences is meaningless and unimportant" as someone who not only understands things better but is more easily convinced of things when people can point to real-world experiences and material consequences of phenomena. like if you just say a bunch of shit that sounds good and don't actually give examples or evidence i don't think i have any reason to trust what you're saying and i don't get why it seems to be the exact opposite for these people (people's lived experiences and evidence like statistics don't matter if they're not using the right words to talk about it), it just doesn't make any sense

They're ridiculous clown people who should be laughed at and ridiculed into giving up their terrible clownish behavior.