Mein Deutsch ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei, aber es geht.

Bekannt? aus /r/germany, /r/german, /r/greek und /r/egenbogen.

  • 31 Posts
  • 197 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • You seem to he framing it as, “scientists went to nature to find out how humans should act,” and in my view you are missing quite a lot. I could be wrong, open to hearing more.

    What is important, imho, is what I wrote in my top-level comment: I don’t want to find myself in the same camp as other groups who make “nature” arguments (like “evolutionary psychologists”). If I accept their premise, I will have to accept their conclusions too -otherwise I’d have to be cherry-picking naturalist arguments only when they are politically expedient for me.

    So to me, this argument is a retort against lazy, commonly used, longstanding, nonsense arguments.

    I believe that this argument is best countered by saying that “regardless of what you think is natural or not, a person has the right to do what they want to do so long as their actions do not violate the freedoms and integrity of others”. That’s a moral value you can reason yourself into and you can be consistent about.


  • Humans are animals, and this shows non-human animals can be queer too.

    I don’t think it shows anything more than that the animals in question engage in same-sex intercourse. Claiming anything more than that is, to me, arbitrary anthropomorphism. I am not prepared to accept that whales can be “queer” until whales start writing sociological papers for us to find out how they understand homosexuality in their system of norms and values.

    The fact animals have some behavior shouldn’t, alone, be a justification to punish or encourage some behavior.

    Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but I’ve been in plenty of discussion already where animals engaging in same-sex intercourse was used as an argument to defend queer rights - e.g. my local queer association did hold such a panel discussion at the zoo last May.

    To see this news article in /c/lgbtq_plus instead of /c/biology or /c/science does make me extrapolate that this is somehow understood as being relevant to human sexuality.


  • I dunno, I’m still not comfortable with with linking human queerness with biologism and the natural argument. Other animals also regularly do unsavoury things and those urges might still exist in our biological programming but we have reasoned our way of them them.

    I don’t want to accidentally make strange bedfellows with other groups who point at animal behaviours to justify their problematic shit. Such studies on animal sexuality should stay a matter of science, the queer movement should not take them on as political arguments.







  • I’d say for me it would depend what the monument stands for.

    The problem with this is that there’s often multiple interpretations. Is it a monument to the celebrate the defeat of Nazism, or to glorify the paternalist role of the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact countries? You can’t really say it’s only one or the other - you can only decide which one matters more to the society at a given point in time.

    I think that when there’s no consensus about an interpretation in a society, a good place to start is with contextualisation. A high-profile but contentious monument should come with a small open-air museum that provides the context of what the monument was intended to stand for, what where the motivations of those who built it, and how it came to be seen as the time passed.

    Then, time will tell if the society decides to interpret it one way or the other. At some point it will be clear if it should stay or go.










  • And if the strike spreads to Germany, which it very well could, it could mean the cease of operation of the Model Y factory in Berlin, which would be devastating to them.

    A big problem is that Germany’s labour laws do not allow sympathy or political strikes. A strike can only be legally called in association with a collective bargaining agreement negotiation/dispute.

    Germany will be the weak link in this cross-country wave of strikes.