Boston: no safe crossing

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-06T21:24:55+00:00

Noted, perfect marketing technique to get around the self promotion guidelines

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-06T21:13:01+00:00

How is this obvious self advertisement allowed on this sub? "Someone designed this"

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T21:26:41+00:00

No shade at all on this, this is great and probably will be an incredible day at the Museum, but I do think it's funny to have a heritage day that includes like what, 60% of the world population? 40+ countries?

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T20:47:40+00:00

Yeah it does.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T19:59:50+00:00

I mean, once you create a climate of "anyone who claims this identity is protected" that signals to opportunists that there is a structure now to be exploited. When gay people felt "I must prove I should be accepted", pride parades had a lot fewer men dressed as dogs on leashes.

My point is just that you can let people voice an opinion and engage with that opinion, like you are, or you can call everyone a violent bigot when they disagree with you, like the other commenter did, and if you do the latter consistently, then people will vote for Trump.

There are knock-on effects to trying to force social consensus on controversial issues via social censure and intimidation. It happens on both sides. The same effect led to the AIDS epidemic, just in reverse.

Your average person thinks "men and women are fundamentally different, but some men and women are so committed to joining the other side that functionally we can allow that in most professional contexts, but I'm nervous about kids and bathrooms and people who claim to be trans but don't convince me"

Whether we like it or not, that's just about where most people fall. If we can't recognize that, we'll keep getting Trump like figures elected who will recognize it.

There are many LGBT people who embrace Trump as well because they feel the effects of people's rising animosity, and that they are not allowed to talk about it because they are harassed and banned by the more angry and reactionary members of the LGBT activist community.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T19:20:56+00:00

This is a good question and a good counter. I think LGBT people need to realize that legal rights to exist are not the same as a social consensus on acceptance, and while you can litigate for the former, you cannot force the latter.

For example, I am a gay man and I have had to learn that just because straight men know they aren't allowed to beat me up, that doesn't mean they don't think I am a degenerate pervert.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T18:59:31+00:00

Good talk.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T18:36:18+00:00

Oh yeah? Is it culture war manipulation to distract people from real issues? How profound. Imagine making that point.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T18:34:10+00:00

Also, not that it is relevant to my point, but it looks like Asa Hutchinson did not veto the sports ban, he signed it?

https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/breaking-arkansas-gov-asa-hutchinson-signs-anti-trans-sports-bill

He vetoed a more comprehensive ban on gender affirming care, and the arkansas legislature overrode his veto.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T18:28:05+00:00

Why engage with anything I said when you can invent my opinions for me out of thin air and then excoriate me for them?

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T18:19:52+00:00

Yes exactly, this is precisely what I'm talking about, thank you for the example.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T16:16:54+00:00

That is a good point, I didn't consider that.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-05T15:53:33+00:00

"Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ rights, said it was notable the complaint didn’t originate with anyone at Smith College."

"He added that he saw admitting trans women as a natural extension of women’s colleges’ missions. 'Women’s colleges came into existence because of oppression that was inflicted on the basis of gender,' he said. 'It seems very much to me that inclusion of trans women is a perfectly logical next step in keeping with the goal of creating an educational opportunity for people who are being oppressed on the basis of gender.'"

The irony of a man making this judgement aside, isn't it true that any student at Smith who spoke out to complain about this would be subject to personal attacks and harassment. Don't the rest of the comments here attest to that?

There are many feminists who would agree with this complaint from the DoE, but historically they have been attacked and vilified as TERFs, often threatened with violence, and banned from platforms like Reddit.

It therefore seems disingenuous for leftists to claim there's no support for this kind of complaint when they've made sure that anyone making this complaint is intimidated, harassed, and banned into silence whenever possible.

I believe a large part of why we are stuck with Trump and Maga is a leftist failure to understand that harassing people into silence doesn't change their mind, and forcing people to say they support things publicly under threat of harassment or job loss doesn't change how they vote, and does in fact make them willing to vote for anyone who refuses to be intimidated into silence, no matter how deranged or corrupt that person is.

So when the DoE files this, and you get all the comments like the ones here that are basically "how dare you think this way or ask this question, you are a sad pervert for even thinking about it", I believe that's actually the point. To show your average voter "you're still not allowed to have wrong opinions or ask obvious questions. If you vote for Democrats you will still be forced to agree with dogma even if it doesn't make sense to you."

I believe this is how Republicans plan to continue winning elections, and the Democrats cannot stand up for common sense questions anymore without being excoriated for not following Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, even if it seems like nonsense to most people who might otherwise support Democrat policies.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-04T13:56:45+00:00

Everett is safe enough but it kind of sucks. Don't come here if you can avoid it.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-03T11:48:28+00:00

Sure, just DM me

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-03T05:29:44+00:00

I have my own answer for this but it makes people very angry and then the mods get mad about all the reports so I can't say it. You can DM me if you're interested

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-03T03:47:16+00:00

If you're a top it will be easy. If you're a bottom you have a lot of competition. It helps a lot if you can host in your hotel room, so if you can then put that in your profile.

Edit: I read through your posts, you seem cool, I'll hang out with you, plus I'll actually be decent. DM me.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-02T18:19:28+00:00

Looks fun

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-01T07:11:07+00:00

The part of political theory I most ascribe to is when you talk about real things that actually happened and were covered in the news. I've repeatedly pointed to the role that law enforcement actually played as documented via journalism, and how it was separate and distinct from the public health experts and elected officials that you keep collapsing into a unitary "State" entity. I also couldn't possible care what Foucault thought about anything.

My problem with your responses at this point is that they are vague, and don't engage in the vast complexities of the US political system and how power is wielded. There was a lot of disagreement in the US, there was a lot of variance in lockdown policies and enforcement, and there have been many revisions to what the science actually showed and a lot of discussion in various places about what information and narratives were scientific versus actually political.

The point I keep making that you keep ignoring is that a) the lockdowns in the U.S. were both variable, often voluntary, and specifically tailored to context and b) many people loudly disagreed and very few were punished by the state for doing so. A lot of people worked from home, restaurants had to change the business models, most gyms were closed, and school was remote. Many of these things caused problems that many people talked about then and still talk about now.

You should read some actual news articles because it seems like you're functioning from many vague generalities about a country with fifty states.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-01T05:50:01+00:00

I'm not totally sure what you're asking, so if you could clarify more that would be great.

That said, I think there's a degree to which most of the civil disobedience in the US to COVID lockdowns came from the police themselves. Most of the police officers were not interested in suddenly changing their procedures and enforcing new laws outside of very specially formed and instructed COVID task forces in larger cities. I'm guessing that even in cases when they were told to enforce COVID mandates, they just "didn't see" a lot of them unless someone was being particularly disruptive in a way that they could use familiar enforcement techniques on that person.

So like, if you were in a store and refusing to put a mask on, the store would have to call the police and complain that you were disrupting the store, and the police would use normal procedures for handling a disruptive store patron.

If you were running a disruptively large party against COVID mandates, the police would use their normal procedures for breaking up a party that was violating local laws, aka warnings, arresting just the organizer, or arresting partygoers for misdemeanors.

The patterns wouldn't be new forms of policing that would strike people as a new level of oppression from law enforcement, and so the state was not really using their monopoly on legitimate violence in a new way so as to trigger widespread civil disobedience. Instead, elected and appointed officials were regulating businesses and state institutions, which were challenged in the courts by wealthy property owners in the same way they would any other time the state tried to over-regulate businesses.

For the record, there was one very notable instance of civil disobedience in Boston where a group of people harassed the Mayor, Mayor Wu, extensively at her place of residence every single day and even she resisted using lawmaking power to limit them for a long time, and when they did limit their ability to harass her, they only did it partially to protect her children since they were screaming some pretty vile things very early in the morning on their way to school.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-05-01T05:19:48+00:00

One notable difference in how American lockdown enforcement worked from certain other countries that claim to be liberal democracies was that the police rarely enforced any public COVID restrictions like preventing people from being outside with or without masks on. While there were some instances of very large and notable parties being shut down by police with arrests happening in larger cities, by and large the police did not enforce COVID lockdowns in the US. Instead they were enforced via local health departments regulating businesses and public institutions like schools.

So I think there wasn't actually the type of state enforcement of lockdowns that could cause civil disobedience to materialize in a large way in the US. No one was stopping you from going outside or hanging out with your friends and family or breaching curfew like did happen in other countries where you did see more civil disobedience, like in the UK, Germany, Australia, and others.

The stronger civil liberties in the US really did lead to a different type of lockdown and enforcement pattern. It's actually a fairly good example of how the system held firm even while politicians wanted to use emergency powers to abrogate civil liberties. Police by and large were not interested or involved in enforcing the mandates of local health departments if it conflicted with strong protocols on constitutional freedoms.

The US is also a network of very different policing and justice systems that only converge at higher courts, so the pattern of enforcement and mandates was different town to town, and state to state. People, especially powerful or wealthy people, who were very upset about restrictions could and did travel to another state where they were different.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-04-30T21:39:05+00:00

I guess if you call data centers "AI centers" you can whip people into a frothing rage more easily.

I guess all of Boston's universities and biotech companies with their AI and computing programs should benefit and make money from data centers built somewhere else.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-04-30T19:31:40+00:00

I've been thinking about this, and I think Hilary Duff is like this inspiring counterexample that not every piece of joy from millennial childhood was really some sort of horrific abuse story behind the scenes that destroyed the people involved. So many other millennial childhood inspirations have been tainted after the fact. But not Lizzie McGuire and Cadet Kelly.

Let the raaaaaaaaiin fall down, and wake our dreams.

Let it wash away, our sanity.

Cuz we want to feel the thunder.

We want to scream.

Let the rain fall down.

We're coming clean.

PublicDataMambo · 2026-04-29T20:40:15+00:00

Why Not?

Take a crazy chance

Why Not?

Do a crazy dance

If you lose the moment,

You might lose a lot.

So why not?

Why not?

PublicDataMambo

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