not everyone is able to nor should become an ambassador for their “group”.

it’s also not everyone’s responsibility

I’m not talking about moral duty or responsibility, I’m just saying the outcomes are better for the person doing the choosing if they engage with the world around them instead of shut it out.

you might find yourself laughing along with hurtful jokes when you don’t want to. Especially when it’s an old friend.

If it’s an old friend, then you especially need to make some effort, for your own sake if not theirs. People are using “nazi” and “bigot” as thought-terminating cliches, but in many cases you can have a normal conversation with the person you’d call a nazi for their online output about things not related to your or their identity or politics. You can learn woodworking from a nazi and go on to make furniture decorated with a hammer&sickle instead of a swastika. It’s an extreme example, perhaps, but in my view it’s also really extreme to peddle this extreme misanthropy as advice to people on the internet you don’t know about their friends you also don’t know. “Engage with them and try” seems to me like less of an error these days if we’re talking generalizations then “cut them off”.

cutting contact will help your mental health

I keep seeing this as self-help advice and it’s completely wrong in my opinion, both for a person in question and for all trans people around them. On societal level, if nobody engages one another things will just slide even worse. And on a personal level, you don’t always get to choose open-minded friends. If you just push everyone away waiting for more compatible people, you’ll be alone. Poptimism really oversells a strong individual standing alone in a world of bigots.

it also might teach your friend that those jokes hurt, and that her new choices have consequences.

A better way is to not cut the person out but explain it to them, over and over. You cut them out, the lesson they’ll probably learn is that they lost a friend to a biblical plague of gayness or something. Engaging is hard, but unless you try, you’re doing nothing.

It’s not even liberalism, it’s pragmatism. It’s simultaneously giving software as a commons and trying to restrict it, an extension of culture wars that’s so ineffective it gives the other side an easy win once they set up chudwhale as a script that forks the latest codebase but with no blocklist and a pepe mascot. Just time unspooling. I might be depressed.

I fail to see how it’s even possible for an open source project to dictate what content is acceptable. Also, the entire idea is contrary to rms’ FOSS goals (for any purpose), other than being completely ineffective. I can understand the need for agency and contribution to whatever resistance can be mustered, but this is larping.

Dots are spiritually unmetric

That’s what he meant by we’ll use sticks on the other side

Imagine pasting this LLM bullshit unabashedly as if it’s something people should sagely nod through recognizing how necessary it is to turn this poor man’s reddit into NSA internal messaging forum. “Better opsec around instance owners”, did you even read that before pasting? Who are you writing that for, instance owners’ handlers?