Mein Deutsch ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei, aber es geht.

Bekannt? aus /r/germany, /r/german, /r/greek und /r/egenbogen.

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  • 52 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • Although I never used it, I am aware that Calibre can serve books in your local network. I imagine that this offers some position and annotation sync.

    Also, a bit off-topic for this sub, but… how do you read? E-readers? Tablets? Software choices?

    Unfortunately, there was never great ebook hardware. I use a tablet with Android. KOReader for ePub, constantly trying new Android PDF readers but finding nothing decent.

    While not intentionally, running Syncthing between all my computers means that my PDF annotations get synced across devices. ePub ones do not; afaik KOReader uses its own metadata format that it stores as a standalone file.

    Before, when I was still in university, I used Zotero also for annotation management. Feels like an overkill nowadays since I only read for leisure.



  • 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.







  • Let’s not overstate Duolingo’s effectiveness for language learning.

    The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

    A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It’s killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn’t be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn’t know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).