To be honest, when I was younger I would have said that I wasn’t a feminist for the reason that I found such generalized criticism to be hypocritical. Since then I’ve kind of grown to be pretty numb to such statements, since I think I understand the intention behind such generalizations (I think being important here, when it comes from strangers I never feel certain whether they’re being hyperbolic or not when they’re generalizing things). There’s additionally the whole punching up vs. punching down argument and, personally for me, such generalized statements do make me reflect and reconsider my behaviour.

But this article is seriously making me think again whether I should be numb to these things. Does such comments, no matter how well intentioned, contribute to making young men vulnerable to getting influenced by people like Andrew Tate? I can see how folk could become more drawn to someone who seems to care for them above a group of people who appear to hate them.

I’m going to have to reflect on this some more, certainly.

Edit: I’m sure there’s many in the 16% of 16 to 29 year olds quoted in the article who are just… nasty folks where it would be incredibly difficult to convince them that women deserve rights in the first place. But if even a small number of these men were otherwise reasonable folks but have grown up to be nasty due to being turned off of feminism in their formative years, then that’s just… well. It makes me feel like I’ve failed them and humanity as a whole.

I was once a huge fan of Nintendo. If there was ever a brand which was one of my personality traits, it was Nintendo (cringe).

I only say this to highlight just how much Nintendo has disgusted me recently. I haven’t financially supported Nintendo for the last year or so and will continue to not do so. The Switch is going to be my final Nintendo console.

If you believe men are having a hard time, then feminism is right up your alley, isn’t it?

Yes, this should be the case from what my understanding of feminism is.

That said, I think there’s an increasing confusion as to what feminism is. There isn’t really one “feminism”. Not all people who call themselves feminists have the same set of ideals. There are lots of different types of feminists (of which some I would say are absolutely not feminists e.g. TERFs).

So when someone says they think feminism is harmful, such as in this survey, I don’t really have a clear idea as to what exactly it is that they’re opposing.

My understanding of feminism is, to put it briefly “we need to destroy the current status quo that certain genders should fulfil certain roles or exhibit certain behaviours, which is something that negatively impacts everyone regardless of gender”. I can’t imagine any reasonable person would think this is a harmful goal.

Wow Sonic and Shadow are dating now? So proud of them. Wishing them all the best.

Microsoft often imposes some additional hardware requirements on major PC makers that sell Windows on their devices, beyond what is strictly necessary to run Windows itself.

Is this another of many examples of Microsoft asserting an unfair market monopoly?

I recently switched to Linux and it only just occurred to me within the last few weeks or so that’s it’s very strange that every keyboard I’ve used has a “Windows” key (often branded with the Windows logo).

There’s certainly an important discussion that should be had around whether keeping cats indoors is cruel or not. I am not knowledge enough to provide valuable input on that though.

I’m of the opinion that if it really is cruel to keep cats indoors, then we need to reconsider whether people should have pet cats at all.

Yeah fair. i’ll update it to domestic cats make things clearer.

Not really a “stinker” but I was disappointed with Tears of the Kingdom and have dropped it after 100 hours.

I don’t think it helps that I’ve been playing this whilst sat next to my fiancee playing the Witcher 3 on our Steam Deck. The difference between the two games is like night and day, despite the Witcher 3 being almost a decade older.

Tears of the Kingdom is just okay, in my opinion. I enjoyed it enough to get 100 hours out of it. I dropped Breath of the Wild after a similar amount of time too. They’re just not for me I guess, they don’t immerse me like other RPGs do.

I think that golf-course lawns are lame anyways.

Everyone in a neighbourhood having a sterile golf-course lawn helps to contribute to the destruction of local ecosystems. But people care more about their grass being neat over trivial things like that, I suppose.

Edit: Clarity

That’s the difference between the two sides.

When generalizing millions of people like you are, the amount of differences between one group of millions of people and another group of millions of people will be negligable compared to the amount of similarities they have. One similarity will be that any group of millions of people will in itself have varied opinions. The responses to this war are varied no matter what group of people we select. Your statement is wrong, unfair, and racist.

For just one example of how you are wrong check out this article about a gathering of Muslim and Jewish women in the UK, united by their similarity of both their holy texts teaching “love thy neighbour” and a desire for peace.

Many people on all sides want peace. We are similar, not different.

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Thank you for linking an additional article. I’m going to be focusing in on some particular parts of this article which relate to my original concerns, though certainly reading this article and getting more detail about what exactly transpired at the event was distressing. The behaviour demonstrated is completely unacceptable, and would have definitely made me feel unsafe, especially the physical shoving.

I am going to be arguing again that I’m worried that some trans and nonbinary folks are getting misgendered as cis men. However, even if some of these folks were trans or nonbinary, if they were partaking in the behaviour that was detailed in this article, then what they were doing was still completely unfair.

many reported seeing male-presenting attendees with he/him on their nametags

This doesn’t mean for a certainty that these individuals are cis men. Nonbinary folks don’t exclusively use gender-neutral pronouns or neopronouns, many nonbinary folks are comfortable presenting as their AGAB and using those respective pronouns. These people could also be closeted trans women or nonbinary folks.

“There were just a lot of men in the comments on anonymous profiles being like, ‘Well Don’t hate the player, hate the game,’” Barman said. “Basically proving that they are men, they’re not actually non-binary, and that they very much came [to the conference] in an aggressive nature to take space.”

These people were commenting on anonymous profiles. How do we know that these people were lying about their gender identity? They could have very well just be the attendees who self-identified as male.

Adding this as a reply since it’s a completely separate point but:

The idea of gender-specific events (as a generalization) is one that is conflicting to me. I certainly understand their value and importance, and as it stands today they are probably necessary. I, personally, am someone who benefits from them and enjoys them.

In the long-term though, as this event shows, it’s difficult to actually confirm that someone is the specified gender without being extremely invasive or excluding folks who aren’t performing the specified gender enough (whatever that would mean). The only unproblematic way to run an event like this would be to assume the good faith of the attendees, I think.

To me, in this situation, having a gender specific tech job fair feels like a bandaid solution to a wider issue that needs tackling: which is that we need to make tech recruitment less intimidating and more inclusive of women and non-binary folks in the first place. For example, how can we improve the existing mixed-gender job fairs?

I’ve also been seeing discussions that job adverts for tech jobs themselves are often worded in a way which is intimidating to AFAB folks. And I certainly feel like this is true based on my personal experiences.

For example: https://www.stemwomen.com/the-importance-of-inclusive-job-adverts

I must say as an (AFAB) non-binary person in tech, the title of this article makes me uncomfortable as it obscures the fact that this event was for both women and non-binary people.

The article notes that Cullen White, AnitaB’s chief impact officer (AnitaB ran the conference), said that “some registrants had lied about their gender identity when signing up”. I would appreciate more detail on how they determined whether people were lying or not, especially considering there would be no advantage to lying since the article mentions that self-identifying men were permitted to attend the event.

However, I’m not confident that women and non-binary folks arent getting misgendered as cis men here. What about trans women or non-binary folks who are still in the closet? What about AMAB non-binary folks who are comfortable presenting as their AGAB? What about AFAB nonbinary folks who pass as cis men?

It gives me the impression that this event is only really meant for AFAB people who present femme enough rather than really including non-binary folks (which is something I encounter a lot personally in my tech career) and trans women. It makes me uncomfortable to think I would only be an acceptable person to attend if I present femme, or because I’m clearly AFAB.

Just to clarify I’m sure that many cis men attended this event in bad faith, which is certainly an issue which warrants discussion, I am just focusing on on one part of this debate and raising my concerns as a non-binary person.

Edit: Grammar

Thank you too, for listening and for all the work you put in. And, of course, just to say explicitly I will respect whatever decision you come to even if it’s not one that caters to me and my weird social media habits. I wish you the best of luck with whatever you decide to do with Beehaw, I hope this community thrives wherever it goes.

What if we started out not federated with anyone, but clearly actively working towards it? Would you still follow?

Yes, definitely. I think it would make sense to start out this way on a new platform. With my preference for whitelist federation over blacklist federation, it feels right to me to start from zero and slowly add other instances to federate with after determining that another instance holds community values which align enough with ones own.

By federated, do you mean decentralized and interoperability with other platforms (TBD), or specifically federated with Lemmy, Kbin, etc?

I mean decentralized and allows interoperability with other platforms. It wouldn’t have to be Lemmy/Kbin/etc.

Do you desire ActivityPub (aka mastadon) federation or others acceptable, as long as it’s not just Beehaw here?

I’m most familiar with platforms on ActivityPub so it would be my personal preference but honestly it could be any distributed social networking protocol.

I’m primarily on Beehaw because I want to support federated platforms and help them grow. If Beehaw was to move to a centralized platform I wouldn’t be following, but I would if the platform was federated. I do really like the community and admins here.

Personally I have no attachment to Lemmy as a platform. Only within a day of joining Beehaw I discovered that the developers of Lemmy were… the way they are. So my intention has always been to bail Lemmy as soon as a viable alternative appeared.

Hearing about the issues you’ve been having with Lemmy as a platform and the Lemmy devs, and that you are considering leaving… doesn’t surprise me at all. Feels very sensible to bail I think.

Going on a bit of a tangent now. I’m struggling to put into words my opinion on blacklist vs whitelist federation but I’m going to try…

Blacklist federation feels as though it runs as an antithesis to what I seek in my internet communities. For me, I like that Beehaw required some text to be submitted before registering. But blacklist federation gives people an easy means to bypass that. It just seems impossible to maintain a safe community and productive conversations at least until these federated platforms are very mature, which will probably take years. Whitelist federation just feels like a must for me.

I’m not here to have a constant stream of content at all times. I am here for good content and deep discussions. Federated platforms are interesting to me not because I want to see everything that’s happening across the Fediverse at all times but primarily because it allows for even just a handful of communities who have similar priorities to spread out the technological, financial, and moderation load across one another.

Has anyone here ever thought “I would like this game more if it had encumbrance in it”? Or “I would like it if I couldn’t pick up this item right now?”

Admittedly these might not be the right questions I’m asking here as I understand there’s a “realism” and “challenge” aspect to this debate (which honestly are two things I’m just not that interested in when it comes to video games I play).

Maybe it’s a delayed gratification thing…?

I’m not trying to be accusatory, I’m just genuinely curious. Everyone has different tastes after all.

I honestly believe that modern social media and “the algorithm” has conditioned us into this kind of behaviour.

It’s already quite easy to forget we are interacting with other humans when we are behind screens and keyboards. This has always been an issue on the internet.

But when the internet is fuelled by algorithms which only want engagement, it is going to encourage behaviour which drives this. This is often extreme, sensational opinions and language. I feel like the algorithm constantly tried to show me content that would upset me. “What’s hot” is basically always “what’s controversial”, and controversy drives engagement. It certainly engaged me and I’ve had to make a conscious effort to just rip myself away from it.

Furthermore, social media doesn’t encourage long-form discussion, and it also conditions us to seek immediate gratification. Twitter especially wants us to summarize our points in just a few words, which doesn’t lend itself to mature, thought-out discussions.

I often make long posts here on Lemmy which I often feel aren’t really read by people or responded to because TL;DR. Me writing out paragraphs of analysis about Starfield isn’t going to get as many responses as someone simply saying “Starfield is the game of the century” or “Starfield is dogshit in every way”.

My intention is not to dogpile here, but I do have to agree with acastcandream’s comment that the tone of that paragraph is probably an example of the kind of behaviour you’re frustrated with.

This is not a criticism of you. You have provided two valid reasons for this, that English is not your first language and that you are upset. I personally relate a lot to the emotion you’re communicating, and to the points in your original post. It upsets me too.

I think it’s worth remembering whenever we see unfriendly comments on the internet that these too might be people who are frustrated and people who may be unable to articulate themselves properly due to language barriers or even health difficulties. We are all flawed humans behind these keyboards and screens in the end.

It does make me realise that for people whose English is their first language, such as myself, we have a responsibility to try our best to communicate our thoughts in a productive way so that people who learn English through interacting with people on the internet can learn from us :)