“Which pronoun? TIP: Whichever they want.”
Exactly! 
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http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/glee/images/1/19/Duh.gif/revision/latest?cb=20130317061455
It ain’t rocket science…
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And yet, there are people who will make it so much more complicated than it has to be.
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Gotta convert that image:
lol…Haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Usually I just highlight the “https” line, hit “command C” to copy, then hit “command V” to put it on the page. That doesn’t seem to work on this site though…
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It does, but sites like riffsy use a different format aside from the usual gifs, pngs and jpegs
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Are you disappointed with bOINGbOING post formatting?
- Yes
- No
- Give me full HTML5 you bastards!
0 voters
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Nah, it serves its purpose.
Regarding HTML5, I don’t even know squat about it, but a tutorial link would be lovely.
I’m no programmer by any means, but I learn fairly quickly.
All right, this is a sidetrack, but I hate this bullshit about natural equilibrium/harmony etc. The purpose of living organisms is to reproduce. The checks are in the form of an arms race - there is no intent to let anybody else win, just a failure to crush all opposition. Nature isn’t harmony. It’s a meat grinder, where everyone wants to mash out all opposition and have their progeny dominate the earth. Just, most species don’t succeed very well at that…
Thankfully, the human strategy for domination/success involves a lot of cooperation, not just conflict, and so we’ve by chance ended up with a lot of mental tools that can be used to try and short-circuit our innate shortsightedness.
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This is a relatively new issue, but I could see people owning it and making it their own. Crap - I just used the word it right now and I didn’t even mean to. We use that word every day when ever we talked about something non-gendered or neutral. For example many people refer to cars or boats as female or neutral (start her up vs start it up).
But anyway, like I said we use other neutral pronouns besides it that already exist.
And, there is nothing stopping any new term from not being used by bigots and bullies to hurt people. For example, I self identify as a geek or a nerd, but was picked on at school and called those exact words in hurtful ways. Same with the n-word or fag. People use both as a term of endearment for one another, but they can be used as a slur in other peoples hands.
Ironically, coming up with a new term will lead to some people dismissing them as being “special snowflake”, causing them to write off any valid feelings and opinions they have, making it easier for all those bad things to be rationalized.
ETA - I wonder how this shakes out in Europe where several languages puts genders on EVERY THING. Like in German you use three different kinds of “the” when referring to something - male, female, and neuter.
I think it depends what happens with the paradigm and the language. For sure you are probably right now, but the reaction would be the same if you used one of the new neutral pronouns that no one has heard of. “What did you call me?”
If gender neutral becomes something mainstream is aware of, there will have to be a paradigm shift for any word. There is no reason “it” couldn’t morph to something positive, as so many past slurs have. OR like I said, we use many other neutral gendered terms already besides it.
Don’t hold back now; tell us how you really feel.
*lolz
I don’t believe that equilibrium, ie balance, automatically equates to “harmony.”
There’s just a certain logic to not perpetually destroying one’s natural habitat for material gain or out of sheer ignorance.
The “raw” files don’t display automatically as images like “gif,” “jpg,” and “png” do.
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I sound a bit harsh there, don’t I? Sorry, it was certainly not meant to be personal!
As for habitats being destroyed without human involvement, purely through the action of other organisms, the reason we don’t see it more often is because generally, it has already happened. Systems reach end point or get stuck in a certain state of flux, and we look at that and call it balance, when in reality it is just “whatever the fuck ended up happening”. Look at invasive species, that’s nature in full action. You just don’t usually get to see that part very often, because the arms race seldom breaks down that badly - it’s a rare occurrence, and often quickly over.
There’s a couple examples tho, like rabbit/lynx populations on this or that isolated island. Basically, they trail each other. Let’s start at a random point: rabbits are few. Since rabbits are few, the lynx population drops. With lower predation pressure and plentiful food, rabbit population now booms. This, however, leads to two things: increased lynx population, and degradation of the rabbit habitat - overgrazing and lack of food. Thus rabbit population soon starts to drop again, pushed even further since lynx population hasn’t had time to drop yet. Then, once rabbits are rare, the lynx population drops, and we start all over again. Nothing in this system works towards having any kind of sustainability, and it’s just random chance that neither rabbits nor lynx have gone extinct on this particular island, but instead continue on, cycling until something else pulls the system off kilter.
Humans are not the antithesis of nature. We’re a perfect embodiment of it: weird, out of the box, wanting to breed endlessly, yet with various traits that yield very unexpected results even so.
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With the number of trans people who end up getting “it” carved into them during assaults? Probably not gonna happen.
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No worries, I didn’t take your reply at all personally.
I’m just a silly smartass; it’s my thing, its what I do.
*lolz
That being said, you do make some valid points.
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In the examples you gave, I would be likely to say “tell that person that the coffee is ready” or “that person over there is looking for this book”. Sometimes I use gendered pronouns to refer to strangers, but probably less than half the time. Nothing to do with how they look, but rather the fact that for the purposes of what I’m saying, it doesn’t matter.
You are laboring under the assumption that sex/gender MUST be included in any conversation. Witness how distraught most people get if they can’t figure out which gender category an androgynous person fits into, or how angry (yes, angry) people get if you dress a baby or toddler in such a way that they appear to be of the other gender. That’s tough to overcome, no question, but it actually needs to be overcome.
In the Midwest, we often use the term “guy” to mean anyone, especially in the plural usage. I don’t think that’s necessarily the right choice, but it’s an entry point in showing how it can be done.
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Well, to be fair, their tea is basically undrinkable!
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When you’re typing your post, you’ll notice a thick line with an up arrow coming from the center of it in the middle of the editing bar above your typing: click on that, choose “From the Web”, and paste the URL next to it.
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