First you have an association of anything bad with excrements. This is cross-linguistically fairly common, and really old. To the point that I can’t help but quote Martial’s Epigrams, Liber III, Epigram 17 for 1st century Latin:

Circumlata diu mensis scribilita secundis urebat nimio saeva calore manus; sed magis ardebat Sabidi gula: protinus ergo sufflavit buccis terque quaterque suis. illa quidem tepuit digitosque admittere visa est, sed nemo potuit tangere: merda fuit.

A tart [scribilita], passed and passed around at dessert, cruelly burnt our hands with its excessive heat. But Sabidius’ greed was more fiery still; so forthwith he blew on it with his cheeks three or four times. The tart cooled to be sure, and seemed ready to admit our fingers, but nobody could touch it. It was filth.

I’m copypasting the translation out of laziness, but… it is not accurate. “Merda” is not just filth, it’s literally “shit” - Martial is referring to the dish as shit, to convey that it was awful.

From that “shit = bad” meaning, you got semantic amelioration generating the “the shit = the best”. English slang does this fairly often; refer to “sick”, “dope”, “wicked” doing the same. I’m not sure but I think that the underlying process is:

• “shit” as “extremely bad” →
• “shit” as “notably, outstandingly bad” →
• “shit” as “notable, outstanding” →
• “shit” as “noteworthy, good”

That also explains why “it ain’t shit” is generally negative - it conveys “it isn’t noteworthy”.

Good for you. It’s important for your self esteem to feel strong and powerful.

In the context, this implies “Ada is solely doing it for the sake of her own self esteem”. I don’t think so; a simpler and better explanation is that she’s building a safe space for trans people, and the sort of people who’d spout transphobic shite elsewhere would make that environment unsafe.

So the situation might look on the surface similar to the one in Reddit, but deep down it’s nothing alike:

• Blahaj - the admins are transparently dictating who does not belong to that instance, and that is done so the instance stays true to its goal, by manually removing disruptive elements.
• Reddit - the admins play make-believe that “erryone is welcome here!”, then you have mods outright contradicting what the admins say, for a thousand reasons (from the reasonable to the petty and anything in between), with a bot that boils down to “dat uzer posted in [sub], so I assooooome dat the uzer is [whatever]!”.

Apples and oranges.

That’s against the mod guidelines, as you can’t ban people based on what they do/don’t in other subreddits, even when it would be sensible to do so. Sadly, the mod guidelines are toilet paper.

Something similar could theoretically happen in the Fediverse, but usually this is handled through defederation instead.

Yup, I’m using it as a unit of length there. It’s clear enough in context even if the result is a bit silly.

Two* empty cardboard boxes. One is roughly the width and length of my desktop tower; another is ~1/3 of the size of the first.

My desk used to have two drawers, right below the surface top. I was always hitting those bloody drawers with my thigh. Eventually I had enough, unscrewed them, and threw them away.

…ok, but what about the stuff that I stored there? Inside the big box, that is now over my desktop tower. The smaller one and its lid became divisions for the bigger one. It’s organised, within the reach of my hands, and far from my thigh.

*actually three. One of my cats saw it on my chair, as I was organising the stuff here, and went into “if it sits, I fits, I call dibs” mode. It’s in my living room now.

I don’t think that the title is a mistake either; I was focusing solely on what the title says, on a language level, versus what the other user (Kairos) believes to be more accurate.

With that out of the way: yup, copyright was always like this. The basic premise of copyright is to not allow you to share things under certain conditions, and yet this sharing is essential for culture.

In English, the simple present often implies a general truth, regardless of time. While the present continuous strongly implies that the statement is true for the present, and weakly implies that it was false in the past.

From your profile you apparently speak Danish, right? Note that, in Danish, this distinction is mostly handled through adverbs, so I’m not surprised that you can’t tell the difference. Easier shown with an example:

Note how English is suddenly using a different verb form for the second one.

On itself, a simple claim (like “copyright destroys culture”) cannot be fallacious. It can be only true or false. For a fallacy, you need a reasoning flaw.

Also note that, even if you find a fallacy behind a conclusion, that is not enough grounds to claim that the conclusion is false. A non-fallacious argument with true premises yields a true conclusion, but a fallacious one may yield true or false conclusions.

The issue that you’re noticing with the title is not one of logic, but one of implicature due to the aspect of the verb. “X destroys Y” implies that, every time that X happens, Y gets destroyed; while “X [is] destroying Y” implies that this is only happening now.

Eh, sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Not really, even if false. It’s just a hypothesis.

It’s the kind of thing that would look really bad if it got out, but doesn’t have much upside.

We [current and former Reddit users] babble a lot about shit the admins do. If this got out, it wouldn’t cause much damage to the already barely existent reputation of that shithole; and as HelixDab2 said, the ones still in that shithole would outrage for 15min then go back as if nothing happened.

If it significantly affected profits, maybe, but this doesn’t register there.

I think that a system like this would actually increase the margin of profit, in the medium term. Because it would allow them to cut some slack to the cash cows, while you’re still removing some users who are pissing the others off.

Fair point - your ban hints that my hypothesis is wrong.

What I’m going to say is just a hypothesis from my part. It might be bollocks. But.

For a long time I’ve suspected that Reddit runs some sort of algorithm to predict the profitability of each user, based on factors like

• platform used (desktop vs. mobile)
• running / not running an ad blocker
• if not running an ad blocker, clicking on ads or not
• likelihood of that user to buy Reddit junk (e.g. the “coins” of the past)
• likelihood of that user to attract newer users
• etc.

and then the output of that algorithm is taken into account when handling rule violation. As in: you can go rogue and they’ll give you a short ban if you’re deemed profitable, or a small offence will give you a permaban if unprofitable.

With that said I don’t think that they manually review your earlier posts/comments before enforcing the rules.

Whoever enforces rules in Reddit has the same basic reading comprehension of a potato that has been hit multiple times with a hoe, and then left to rot under the Summer heat. In fact I bet “being functionally illiterate” is a requirement to work for Reddit, just like “lacking dignity” is to be a moderator there nowadays.

If what OP is narrating is accurate, it doesn’t really matter. OP was predicting what he believes that is going to happen, not telling people what to do. (“Inciting violence” would be the later, not the former.)

For my main thoughts on this matter, refer to this comment. I’ll only mention what’s different from this source to the other:

“We are more transparent than many players in this industry who have used public content to train their models and products,” Meta said.

“Since some people kill puppies, just kicking one is totally fine” moral reasoning might perhaps give you some breach in countries following Saxon tribal law, but not in countries following Roman civil law. In those, what matters is the law, not how the relevant organs handled other similar cases.

The law in this case being the LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados - Data Protection General Law). If it’s found that Meta’s activities violate the LGPD, well, cry me a river, “I dun unrurrstand, Google does it worse, I’m so confusion…” won’t save Meta’s skin.

Fuck no. A religion dictates:

1. what you think to be true or false. I’m a human thus an ignorant; there’s no fucking way that I’d establish a system of beliefs that would be completely true. And the very fact that people would sheepishly look at my religion and say “its chrue cuz our faith says so lol” makes it counter-productive.
2. what you judge as good or bad. Except that my moral values might not hold so well across the time. Worse - once you gather a thousand people, most of them braindead muppets, some will care about the letter of those moral rules instead of the spirit.
3. what you do or don’t. I’d be effectively removing agency from the people who follow my religion, telling them what they should be doing, be it on rituals or whatever.

Then I derped. My bad!

As a wise man once said, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t after you.” Oh wait, that was Kurt Cobain, not a wise man.

Jokes aside, don’t assume that a piece of info about someone else is fine to share, because it is for you. OP likely has their reasons and that’s to be respected. (NB: this is coming from someone who doesn’t mind even sharing their city online.)

The way that I interpret it, OP’s girlfriend was simply being hyperbolic. I don’t think that she’s genuinely asking OP to kill her hypothetical kidnappers; specially given that, as OP mentioned, they live in a safe place.

Instead I think that she simply wants to be reassured that OP cares about her and her security. And then started playing around with the “but what about our cat?” thing because come on, if you’re thinking on outrageous scenarios, might as well think on them properly!

I get that you’re trying to get more info to help OP out better, but I think that it’s better to drop this “where are you from?” talk. Privacy-wise it’s rather problematic, you know? [Sorry for the uncalled advice.]

You’re probably better off trusting your guts, and the guts of people around you, than what anyone in the internet says about this matter. Including me.

That said: I don’t think that she’s either gaslighting or guilt tripping you. I think that she’s simply feeling insecure.