Net Neutrality - crying faggots and the_donald go berserk

[Herbert Hoover]

not a terribly convincing argument...

Oh shit. It's 2000 all over again

 

[UY 690]

I'm done....

 

[CIA Nigger]

Attack of the Troons:

https://archive.fo/VLUVn

If it hadn't been for the world wide web, I may have never realized I'm trans. And even if I did find out, I would have known next to nothing about how to transition. Without net neutrality, there wouldn't have been a world wide web in the first place. And without the collective of trans people like me who've managed to discover ourselves, who've managed to organize, who've managed to fight for our rights, mostly through connecting and getting together online, the trans rights movement could not exist in its current form. It would be weaker, less sustained, less populated with a diversity of voices. It's possible, even likely, that without net neutrality, the current trans movement in America wouldn't exist at all.

For trans people and their loved ones who have navigated gender transition in the current age of increased trans awareness, it's hard to imagine what it was like trying to find resources online in 2000, when stirrings about my own dissatisfaction with my gender first entered my consciousness. There was no social media then, no Facebook groups, not even Myspace or Friendster. Sitting in my bedroom where I thought of myself as a gay man, a web search on Altavista led me to a website and chat room called TGForum.

I didn't personally know any trans women before TGForum. I'd read articles and seen talk show episodes, so I knew about women like Caroline Cossey, Christine Jorgensen, and Renée Richards, all of them describing how they've felt they were meant to be a girl since they were kids, that this feeling had tortured them most of their lives.

But I never had that sense of thwarted destiny, nor did I wake up from nightmares that I had a male body and to the bigger nightmare that I actually did. I was okay, just dissatisfied in a way I couldn't name — like a bud in the dark, unaware that there was light, or that there were even such things as flowers.

When I spoke to actual trans women in TGForum, I learned that many of them didn't think or feel the way I thought they were supposed to. There were those who'd lived for years as women but didn't want reassignment surgery; those who shacked up with other trans women; those who lived their entire lives post-transition without anyone knowing, even their own husbands. And even if I wasn't like many of them, the fact that so many kinds existed meant that maybe I could exist too.

It was a self-identified shemale named Stacy who advised me over chat that, whatever I felt about myself or my identity, I needed to tell one “approved” story to get past the medical gatekeepers for hormones, testosterone blockers, or any kind of surgery. Being transgender, like being gay before it, was still defined as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in 2000. We couldn't get trans-related medical care unless we agreed we had a disease that needed to be cured, and that our only desire was to look and act like “normal” women — not like Stacy who got breast implants but had no intention of losing her penis.

It was a girl named Gwen, pretty with auburn hair and an oval face in her avatar picture, who gave me pointers on how to be more femme for my therapist interview, and encouraged me by telling me I was beautiful enough to go stealth like her, whose own boyfriend didn't know she was trans. She taught me to look and act like a GG — that's what we called cis women back then, genetic girls — and walk into that therapist's office looking as passable as possible, because that was the only way he would write me an approval letter, my ticket out of no-hormones jail.

Another woman, whose name I no longer remember, told me about the one DMV in a Massachusetts suburb — 45-minutes from Boston where I lived — that granted gender-marker changes on state-issued IDs without reassignment surgery. Yet another pointed me to Transsexual Roadmap, which was how I charted my course through transition, from getting contact information for my therapist to picking the Thai surgeon who performed my reassignment surgery. It was because of these women online and the road they paved that I was able to get out of a cage I didn’t even know I inhabited, and yet I’ve never met any of them in person.

But TGForum, Transsexual Roadmap, and other invaluable online trans resources could never have existed in a world without net neutrality — or if they did, they would have only been available to people who paid their monthly subscription fee to the internet service providers that chose to carry them, and only if they were lucky.

To imagine a world without net neutrality, it’s useful to remember the early internet. By the time I got an AOL account around 1998, the web existed, but it was chaotic and disarrayed, and many users preferred the fancy, private “walled gardens” of services like AOL, which had rich interactivity and complex design at a time when provider-neutral web pages were capable of little more than plain text and low-fi images. The capabilities of the web were improving, gradually, but what its main advantage was freedom: anybody could build a web page, whereas AOL exerted strict control over who was allowed to say what on their service.

AOL might not have liked the web’s rapid growth — but if they didn’t give their users access to it, you could always switch to a competitor who did. Whatever service provider you used, you connected to them with a modem, over a telephone line — and the phone company didn’t care what service you used. In fact, the law said they weren’t allowed to care. And so, competition among service providers allowed the nascent web to thrive, despite containing subversive content that many would prefer to cover up.

But these days, the lines into our homes are owned by the ISPs themselves, not a neutral provider like the phone company. And last week, the FCC said that these ISPs are not held to the neutrality standards of the phone companies. Most Americans are only served by one ISP, so if yours decides not to grant you access to a service — whether because it competes with a service they offer, or because they decide it violates their ethics — there’s not much you can do about it.

At a time when being transgender was considered a mental illness not just by the medical establishment but by broader society, what might service providers have done with web pages that questioned that establishment? Or with discussions that encouraged people to take actions that were then not only considered irresponsible but potentially illegal, in order for trans people like me to receive medical care and legal recognition?

I was able to get hormones without a "real life test,” the waiting period of at least a year that trans people were typically forced to undertake in order to begin medical transition. I obtained a state ID and so was able to present identification without risking harassment before surgery, a legal requirement in Massachusetts, my home state at the time. I obtained insurance coverage for hormones and testosterone-blockers because my trans-affirming doctor only because classified me as having an endocrine condition, since I would have been denied coverage had he specified I was trans. I obtained information on how to find the people who would take these unsanctioned and potentially illegal actions for me, and knew how to persuade them to take those actions, because of information I found on the world wide web, a web that wouldn't have existed, and wouldn't exist today, without net neutrality.

Given the environment around transgender issues in 2000, I highly doubt that the corporations who would have fully controlled the internet would've allowed this information to circulate in their walled gardens. And without this information, I would have never had the resources to transition, nor would have many others in my position, who as our numbers grew were able to coalesce into a movement, buoyed by the internet, so that we ourselves got to be the models for others who didn’t recognize they were trans until they interacted with us. Sure, maybe if the web didn’t exist, I would have seen myself in another trans person eventually and still transitioned. But just as likely, I would have never met such a person, and I wouldn’t consider myself trans today, even when this understanding of my gender became a fundamental part of my identity as soon as I was able to name it.

Apart from corporate greed, I wouldn't be surprised if this desire to prevent people like me to realize who we are is a motivating factor in the FCC’s decision to end net neutrality. There are many people in America, especially those sympathetic to the current government, who would rather that people like me not exist: people who grew to understand ourselves apart from the social norms that have been imposed upon us; people who fight to be who we are and be true to ourselves. Because it costs so much for us to reveal ourselves in public, it has been the free Internet that has allowed us to congregate and organize, to share information freely and support each other through the difficult times. And in turn, our existence in larger numbers has led to the widespread recognition that our lives must be protected, that our place within the LGBTQ+ rights movement must remain secure.

I would not be here without the online friends and resources I found on the open web, who allowed me to discover myself, and gave me the courage to act upon that discovery. If the challenges to the FCC decision fail, I will only have one choice of internet provider where I currently live, and if that provider chooses to censor queer content or anything else it finds objectionable, I would have little recourse. This might seem far-fetched until we remember that only yesterday, the Trump administration banned “transgender” along with six other words from Centers for Disease Control documents, as well as those of other agencies, including the State Department. In a country where the government itself endorses authoritarian censorship, the possibility that corporations may use this power to censor ideas they object to doesn’t seem so remote.

As I and other queer people continue to grow into our identities and our lives, I wonder how a world without net neutrality would affect new generations of queer folks and other marginalized groups. Because of the free internet, we’ve been able to more fully understand ourselves and our motivations, the ways we want to conduct our sex and romantic lives, the relationships of our minds to what society considers normal, and the intersections between our identities and orientations.

That process continues, for me and so many others, yet the government’s threat — to snuff out the light of information that net neutrality enables — means that many of us may lose the nourishment of that light, in ways that are impossible envision. Yet it’s clear to me that without neutrality, there will certainly be queer people — whose queerness may not even be recognizable to us as queer today — who will never find the light they need to flower. But I will not mourn those who might spend their lives unnourished by the light of information a free internet provides. Instead I resolve to fight, as I hope the broad swath of LGBTQ+ people will too, so that net neutrality can continue to be a source of nourishment and freedom not just for trans or queer people, but for every single person in America, especially those who have yet to discover who they are.

 

[Shokew]

Attack of the Troons:
View attachment 337183
https://archive.fo/VLUVn

Yeah - boo hoo... You can still be a troon (and we can continue to laugh at you for it and suggest you off yourself, son...) - the net isn't going anywhere, even if it is getting crappier (and that was before this BS, honestly.).

 

[AnOminous]

Attack of the Troons:

Dafuq. I now hate net neutrality as it spreads the troon contagion.

 

[Shokew]

not a terribly convincing argument...

Yay - more salt...

I can easily wave "Good Riddance" to most of the stuff that we're saying goodbye to here. Too bad we're not, as lovely as it would actually be to, despite what these r.etards think - after all, YT / Streaming is not a career thing, nor should trying to be famous on the internet ever be considered decent work.

Saying hello to those first two things is a problem, yes - but that's the result of people NOT standing up for themselves; don't get me started on what a disease Affirmative Action is for people who want to stand up to bullies! UGH. The other 3, however - I'm just about A-OK with - shopping on the internet for everything isn't what it's all cracked up to be (unless looking for lower prices on stuff, of course.), anyway.

 

[Press_Play2002]

not a terribly convincing argument...

Oh no! We now have to GO OUTSIDE to watch movies. Such a heartbreaking reality. Also, apparently not being able to shill on the internet is a bad thing.

Also, the whole "bullying" thing makes no sense as that would be more prevalent if the net in North America was LESS restricted. 'And don't normal people book their flights at Aeroports already? If anything that is just another small 1st World Problem that dwindles in disruptiveness overtime as fewer people give a shit.

Also, Ajit is one of the best unintentional trolls I have ever witnessed. He manages to produce salt from almost every venue and website. Mainstream and "Alternative". Social Justice and Anti-Social Justice. He's even rustled the jimmies of Wikipedians, who vandalised his article because of the rectal pain he has managed to inflict upon. This guy deserves a glass.

 

[Computery Guy]

you say 'internet service providers' but the vast majority are for net neutrality

do you think they just have greater morals or do think there's a financial reason behind that

I don't think everyone on our side needs to be doing it for perfectly moral reasons for us to be supporting Net Neutrality, my dear bulge noticer. We're not really thrilled that we have to turn to big companies here.

 

[ono]

Just a sample of the kinds of comments you can find on the Change.org Net Neutrality page if you sign, because as we all know Change.org petitions totally make a difference.

Also,

 

[Shokew]

View attachment 337528 View attachment 337529 View attachment 337530 View attachment 337531 View attachment 337535 View attachment 337536 View attachment 337537
Just a sample of the kinds of comments you can find on the Change.org Net Neutrality page if you sign, because as we all know Change.org petitions totally make a difference.

Also,

Common sense dictates that Shit like this from immature brats are why petitions rarely ever work.

 

[CrunkLord420]

This isn't really salt, but alpha-nerd-man Luke Smith has an anti-net neutrality argument.

 

[Xerxes IX]

peak

Legend says that if enough neckbeards tip their fedoras at once, their combined wizard powers will save Net Neutrality.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

View attachment 337535

I take it he isn't aware that AT&T is having second thoughts on supporting Pai, is he?

 

[NumberingYourState]

I'm done....

This guy does literally nothing all day, not even taking up writing from the safety of his government checks.

He has no fuel to discuss Net Neutrality to any capacity.

 

[Press_Play2002]

He has no fuel to discuss Net Neutrality to any capacity.

A vast and growing amount of people who are currently shitting their pants, virtue signalling and signing useless petitions(as well as threatening/intimidating Ajit and his family [who, by the way, have nothing to do with this salt-storm or Ajit's actions] with multiple empty and lulzy tactics such as bomb threats and death threats as well as some rather pathetic and racist diatribes towards Ajit, despite the fact that insults are not the best way to help the cause and arguments of the side they're supporting) have no fuel to discuss NN and anything relating to Communications/Telecommunications Law in any capacity deeper than a small puddle.

But, of course, EVERYONE is an expert on the Internet! So they can sperg, threaten and intimidate as long as they like. Because "my free interwebz". Classic! Also, some fresh sources in regards to the aforementioned salt-storm(around 3-10 hours old): https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19...y-open-internet-history-free-speech-anonymity https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/19/net-neutrality-bill-ban-blocking-throttling/ Two sides to the same sodium-rich coin('and I need to stop using salt-related puns in this post before the cancer becomes terminal).

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

A vast and growing amount of people who are currently shitting their pants, virtue signalling and signing useless petitions(as well as threatening/intimidating Ajit and his family [who, by the way, have nothing to do with this salt-storm or Ajit's actions] with multiple empty and lulzy tactics such as bomb threats and death threats as well as some rather pathetic and racist diatribes towards Ajit, despite the fact that insults are not the best way to help the cause and arguments of the side they're supporting) have no fuel to discuss NN and anything relating to Communications/Telecommunications Law in any capacity deeper than a small puddle.

But, of course, EVERYONE is an expert on the Internet! So they can sperg, threaten and intimidate as long as they like. Because "my free interwebz". Classic! Also, some fresh sources in regards to the aforementioned salt-storm(around 3-10 hours old): https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19...y-open-internet-history-free-speech-anonymity https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/19/net-neutrality-bill-ban-blocking-throttling/ Two sides to the same sodium-rich coin('and I need to stop using salt-related puns in this post before the cancer becomes terminal).

Realistically, none of these people really have any right to have internet, much less be on it if they're making death threats to (an admitedly shitty) man's family like they are. But of course, they won't stop unless Ajit's either removed from the FCC, repeals the repeal, deported back to India, murdered (other republicans or Trump and/or Pence optional), what have you.

Frankly, the only positive thing Ajit's done is show how gutless and autistic the internet at large is with all these people being r.etards. But at the same time, is also acting like one by hiding evidence from officials and using dead memes.

 

[Press_Play2002]

and using dead memes.

I thought all memes are dead on arrival. Granted, Ajit's no saint. However, he's not really worth sending threats of any kind to. Let alone his aforementioned family members who are only in the crossfire due to some exceptional savants taking the collateral route of things when they can't handle defeat of any type/category.

Though, the tantrums will end by next May I blindly estimate(maybe sooner). As so much Autism can only be produced in constant supply for so long.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I know, it sucks. And it will slowly affect how we look at the internet. But a lot of people are freaking out in the most autistic ways possible over this instead of looking for a roundabout to get past it if it takes effect.

I really don't understand what's hard to follow about Net Neutrality. It's all pretty straight forward and it's been a roaring debate going on for decades. Don't tell me there's a majority of users on the net today, a whole generation of people who grew up using the internet, that are only just now learning what this is.

 

[AnOminous]

I really don't understand what's hard to follow about Net Neutrality. It's all pretty straight forward and it's been a roaring debate going on for decades. Don't tell me there's a majority of users on the net today, a whole generation of people who grew up using the internet, that are only just now learning what this is.

Most of the fucking retards screaming about never even heard the phrase until some right wing nutjob site started yelling inarticulately about it once Obama presided over some incredibly ineffectual measure under the banner of the name "net neutrality."

Same for the pro side too because they just knew this Pajeet the shitting street guy was doing away with something Obama had done, like he had invented TCP/IP personally, when everyone knows Al Gore did that.

 

[OwO What's This?]

Most of the fucking exceptional individuals screaming about never even heard the phrase until some right wing nutjob site started yelling inarticulately about it once Obama presided over some incredibly ineffectual measure under the banner of the name "net neutrality."

I got banned from the_donald for being anti-NN like four or five months ago lol