Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don’t want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make “nature” arguments (like “evolutionary psychologists”). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I’d have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that “regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others”. That’s a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.

Humans are animals, and this shows non-human animals can be queer too.

I don’t think it shows anything more than that the animals in question engage in same-sex intercourse. Claiming anything more than that is, to me, arbitrary anthropomorphism. I am not prepared to accept that whales can be “queer” until whales start writing sociological papers for us to find out how they understand homosexuality in their system of norms and values.

The fact animals have some behavior shouldn’t, alone, be a justification to punish or encourage some behavior.

Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but I’ve been in plenty of discussion already where animals engaging in same-sex intercourse was used as an argument to defend queer rights - e.g. my local queer association did hold such a panel discussion at the zoo last May.

To see this news article in /c/lgbtq_plus instead of /c/biology or /c/science does make me extrapolate that this is somehow understood as being relevant to human sexuality.

I dunno, I’m still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

I don’t want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.

Why was there this law in the first place?

In Europe at least, it was often explained as “same-sex marriage and parenthood are not allowed, and a legal gender change cannot be a loophole to that”. But it appears to be a post-hoc rationalisation since the forced sterilisation programmes have many more targets in the past until it was progressively abandoned for more and more groups. It was also becoming untenable since more and more countries were legalising same-sex parenthood.

So, if we are being more honest, it’s eugenics.

Thunderbird’s Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It’s the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

I have been very disappointed that Fedora stopped making changelogs accessible for years. It used to be that you could easily toggle them on in Yum, but with DNF it’s always “no info found”.

Looking again, it seems like more packages are available for the Tumbleweed stream, compared to Leap. I was testing Leap.

Oh, that’s a great idea. The whole concept of immutable OSes passed me by - I’ve read the terms before at some point, but I have no idea how they work and which problems they solve. Definitely ideal candidates for my experiment.

To the best of my knowledge, the convention is based on history. In previous decades, neo-pronouns like xe were proposed to serve as gender-neutral alternatives to he and she, and since they were new coinages, they didn’t have commonly known objective and possessive forms, so all three forms where listed.

The pattern was so established that it carried over to he, she and they even though their declined forms are commonly known.

There have been a lot of articles in press about TikTok being responsible for the rise of interest in literature by young people, as the article also mentions.

At the end, it probably was either a planted story, or memetic evolution triggered by one journalist noticing something in their environment that wasn’t a general trend.

I gave Jami a very extensive go with family, and sadly it didn’t deliver a usable experience if your device is a mobile one or the network is not a fixed, high-speed connection.

I don’t find automatic reposts ideal when I subscribe to communities, especially since there’s an RSS feed so people can rely on that to receive updates.

I find it more worthwhile if another user shares a post intentionally, because they believe that particular post is relevant.

Indeed, it appears that the open-core of LanguageTool is the only FOSS option still going. Only a couple more abandoned projects come up.

I’m going to take “favourite” at face value, i.e. that I actually like, not just that I am forced to use because the alternative doesn’t exist (e.g. my bank’s app or the post-office’s app) or isn’t viable (PDF editors on Android).

Libby, the lending library app. I could avoid it and stick to physical media and piracy, but it’s a well-designed app with a decent catalogue and given that it’s a library and not me purchasing DRMed files, I found the ethical proposition there tolerable.

Very much on point, and this is where the age-old tension between “a duty to come out” versus “a right to choose if and when” remains still relevant.

I do not want to take the position that there is such a duty, but I have to admit that I’m uneasy that our 2010s-present queer media does not even acknowledge the tension.

The article reads so generically, as if it’s soul it isn’t there and it’s only forced to talk about this issue but it rather it didn’t.

But the issue is existentially important. Seems like I’m not ready to write in which ways, but definitely it’s not so clinical and buzzword-heavy like the article presents it.

Did I miss the line in the linked article where it says that one or more of the affected families actually previously supported the extreme-right government, or is your meme simply totally misplaced?

Homophobia was so widespread in the ambient environment for my entire life, so it’s not easy to say. The earliest incident that I specifically remember which fits the textbook definition was during a high-school Physics class, were a teacher known to go on about her personal views on anything all the time once, and one day homophobia was on the menu.

The reason it didn’t stink as much as other incidents was that a group of kids that recently found out I was gay immediately started challenging her (with very naive arguments, but their heart was in the right place).

For clarity, I refer to an emphasised line in OP where I very clearly write that it occurred to me that it doesn’t have to be meaningless and that I’m looking for examples where the better-case scenario happened.