it’s so fucking frustrating and upsetting seeing people like you speak over trans people, lie about us, and erase us when it’s inconvenient for you constantly like this. you are seriously a massive piece of shit

We’d rather not take risks. Plus, we’d like to not accidentally contribute to the spread of disease ourselves if we can help it.

Key word being occasionally, and also not with a disease that causes serious health complications, cognitive decline, and that itself damages your immune system.

COVID linked to 65% of new onset cognitive impairment, dementia

Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including significant drops in IQ scores

Every COVID Infection Increases Your Risk of Long COVID, Study Warns

SARS-CoV-2 infection weakens immune-cell response to vaccination

Yes, Everyone Really Is Sick a Lot More Often After Covid

Cognitive performance of post-covid patients in mild, moderate, and severe clinical situations

Incidence of diabetes after SARS-CoV-2 infection in England and the implications of COVID-19 vaccination: a retrospective cohort study of 16 million people

Mask. N95 or better. My wife and I never stopped, and she never gets sick despite being immunocompromised. I work in a place where illness is common due to the environment and I’ve been sick once in the last year, meanwhile all of my coworkers come in sick like twice a month. Apparently they’d rather be sick and miserable all the time than wear a mildly uncomfortable thing on their face.

By “neat and easy” I mean, “The root of all evil is capitalism and we solve that with revolution”.

This is exactly why they are responding to you as they are. This is not an accurate summary of the marxist position. You’ve built up a strawman to knock down to justify calling us cultish.

Some basic questions that marxists are concerned with:

• Why is a revolution necessary to begin with?

• Who is exploited, and who is the exploiter?

• What material conditions are necessary for a revolution to be possible?

• How do you organize society post-revolution?

• How do you prevent those who oppose the liberation of the proletariat from taking over your post-revolutionary society and destroying it?

• How do we learn from the successes and the failures of history so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes?

If you don’t understand the marxist position on these questions, yet continue to criticize us, then of course you will come to nonsense conclusions and just piss people off. You’ve made up a guy to represent us and then mock them.

So when people constantly call us deluded, cult followers, bots, shills, brainwashed, fascists, bigots, trump supporters, and any other number of dehumanizing insults, often coming into our spaces to do so, all the while themselves defending some of the most violent and evil people in history in the name of "lesser evil", are we supposed to just turn the other cheek and never respond in kind? When we witness the regular defense of the people ensuring the destruction of Palestine continues, are we supposed to just patiently and calmly explain how genocide is bad, actually? When dot worlders accuse me of faking being trans and being a privileged child, am I not justified in losing my temper? Y'all do not even try to understand where we are coming from, constantly use strawman arguments and put words in our mouths, but we're supposed to smile politely while you spit in our faces? Like this is literally a thread spawning from an OP that is just an ableist insult, and yet some of us are still in here trying to talk things out despite that!

And it's not like it's limited to Lemmy, right? Literally everywhere I go I have to either tolerate anti-communist red scare bullshit, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, etc., or I have to try and have stressful and exhausting conversations with people who never, ever take me seriously. So yeah, we're kind of on edge! If you get shit on for that when it wasn't deserved, then I'm genuinely sorry, and I wish it wasn't something that happens. But can you at the least understand that it is not a one-way street here?

I wonder what that something is?

I highly recommend you give Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism and On Authority a read. At least On Authority, as it's a very short piece, but the two combined should give you a basic understanding of the historical and theoretical basis of why marxists defend the use of authority. I can understand where you are coming from, I was more than a little skeptical of authoritarianism when I was younger and still identified as an anarchist, but I think if you take the time to honestly engage with our position then you will at least understand why our stance is what it is, and how we are diametrically opposed to fascism, even if you don't agree with us.

Lol yeah the west is so pro LGBT. Just ignore the hundreds of proposed anti-trans bills in the USA, or the mass incarceration/prison violence towards trans people, or the widespread medical gatekeeping, or the fact that being LGBT (especially T) makes you way more likely to be homeless, or how even the supposedly left Labour Party has taken a huge rightward swing under Queer Harmer. If you actually think there’s any hope of freedom for LGBT people in the western world you are a fucking idiot. Go read a book and you might yet be able to pull the worms out of your brain. Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba by Leslie Feinberg is a great one if you want to see what a country actually trying to improve the lives of LGBT people looks like.

Regardless, women’s sports were definitely created to exclude men, if not explicitly, then by necessity, since prior to that there was only one category that men or women were allowed to compete in, but women couldn’t truly compete in those sports against the men.

I'm pretty sure we are talking about the same thing here, but you are attributing it to women being physically unable to compete versus men, which while it can be a relevant concern depending on the sport, was historically not really the reason they were excluded. Women were heavily discouraged by men to participate even though they were technically allowed to. There's actually some really interesting connections between women's sports and feminist movements that help make this connection more apparent, particularly biking and the suffragette movement. I don't have anything to link on hand but I definitely recommend reading about it. It's still easy to see this in the modern day if you look at competitive activities where there is no possible argument of a biological advantage, like e-sports or chess, where women could easily be just as successful as men, if the cultures of those games weren't so dominated by men who view those spaces as theirs, and who view women who come to participate as invaders.

and yet they definitely have a genetic advantage over the vast majority of women, to the point where certain events could conceivably be dominated by people with their condition

Do you have a source for this? Here is a study that came to a very different conclusion.

Key Biomedical Findings

• Biological data are severely limited, and often methodologically flawed.
• There is limited evidence regarding the impact of testosterone suppression (through, for example, gender-affirming hormone therapy or surgical gonad removal) on transgender women athletes’ performance.
• Available evidence indicates trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.

The category was literally made to exclude a segment of the population from competing (men).

Women’s sports weren’t invented to exclude men, they were invented to include women. This may seem like a minor distinction, but I don’t believe it is because of the clear connection between cis women being excluded from sports due to misogyny, and trans women being excluded from sports due to transphobia.

(I made this comment on my lemmygrad account originally, but realized you wouldn’t see it then, so I’m reposting it on this account.)

He sure is effective at killing brown people at least! Good at disabling as many people as possible with COVID too. He's quite effective at opposing the rights of trans people as well. Oh, and he's the best at deportation, can't forget that!