“Matt Healy undoubtedly just made it worse for queer Malaysians who actually live here, and have to face the consequences because we all know our politicians are gonna use this to further their agenda,” Carmen Rose, a Malaysian drag queen and performer, said on Twitter.
No, he didn’t make it worse. The government is making it worse
Because keeping a low profile is how they can manage to survive in a homophobic society. Everyone is grandstanding while living in liberal western societies, ignoring how hard things are for less fortunate people.
As if events like Stonewall never happened in the west. How did those western societies became liberal? Because people fought back, blood has been spilled to reach where those societies are now. Unfortunately keeping a low profile will not progress society and will keep the community at risk. Jews kept a low profile in Europe for centuries and then were exterminated.
Muslim is not a static or homogenous thing. The majority Muslim bit doesn’t need to change - the majority of Muslims need to become more understanding.
They aren’t but they are the majority if the religious population by such a considerable margin that whether Christians supported equality or not it would not matter.
There are about ten times as many Muslims as there are Christians in Malaysia so in this case it is the homophobia of the Islamic population that needs to change to make the culture shift.
EhList said Malaysia can never be decent for LGBTQI+ as long as they are majority Muslim. Why can a majority Christian Country have decent LGBTQI+ rights but not a Muslim one?
This is about Malaysia though. Indonesia doesn’t have sharia law except for one region, called Aceh. Homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia though the LGBT do face intolerance from the state.
The west used to be all hardcore Christians and hated LGBT just as much as Muslims do today. Like homosexuality wasn’t legalized until 1967 in the UK. Before that time gay people, like Alan Turing, were chemically castrated. Change came because people stood up and fought for their rights and put their lives on the line. Not because everyone became atheist.
the rise in acceptance of LGBT rights is mirrored by less frequent church attendance in the USA. IIRC that was true fir the UK as well. In most societies the dominant religion is typically anti-LGBT.
Change takes time, decades, often centuries. You are asking a society that has norms similar to 100years ago in Europe to accelerate to where the West currently is. I dont think you understand how slow things improved for lgbtq in the West and how recent that change is.
Despite things not being perfect, lgbtq acceptance is 50%+ in most western countries. That means it usually isnt socially acceptable to go against lgbtq, neither for the people, nor for the politicians.
Now imagine a society whose people oppose lgbtq by 95%. Who is going to stick their neck out? Their neck will simply be chopped off. Change will take time. Slowly those lgbtq people will make lgbtq acceptable within their inner circle and then their inner circle will make lgbtq acceptable in a wider but small part of society(ie liberals) and that small part of society will slowly be able to make lgbtq acceptable as a societal norm by “converting” more and more people.
The structure does not exist in these societies for lgbtq people to fight for their rights. Their best hope is that their inner circle can accept them and they can live a normal life while keeping a low profile, they are still at stage 1.
Or to put it in a different perspective, what will happen to you if you go to a plaza in Pyongyang and demand democracy/human rights? Do you think that would be smart? Or productive? You will just get arrested and be sent to a prison camp. And it is even worse with lgbtq rights, because a lot of north koreans can get on board with democracy and human rights but in these societies, 95% of the people are actively against lgbtq.
PS I am not interested in debating about homosexuality in 1920s Germany or whatever because that is a niche that completely ignores actual societal historical facts.
True but they are still not at the pushing point. They are on “maybe i can get friends who accept me for who i am without anyone betraying my trust” stage. Once they can somewhat reliably do that, ie once there is a small part of non lgbtq allies, then with those allies they can start pushing.
10% is a when an idea is becoming mainstream and mass adoption is greatly accelerating.
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
It’s not like things are sunshines and roses for gay people in liberal western societies. Pride parades started in the US from a riot when they couldn’t take it anymore. The UK chemically castrated Alan Turing. Hiding is a good way for the individual to survive, but to forward progress for the group in the future, attention needs to be brought to these issues.
Attention is only beneficial when you have the correct political conditions to do it. Drawing attention at the wrong time gets you cracked down upon or worse, killed.
An absolutist position on this is how western liberals continually contribute to worsening matters for lgbt people in the global south. Stick to your fucking lane and let people from that country handle their local issues, they understand the local culture and the conditions better than you do.
As someone who lives in SE Asia, I agree. The west have no idea, they think they know it all, judging everybody from that ivory tower they call moral high ground.
It’s such a difficult topic. As an lgbt person I want the lgbt people in those countries leading the strategy to get change. Not a bunch of people that want to do regime change for the sake of US interests while weaponising marginalised peoples as a tool to create consent for it among the US home population.
All this does is make people in the global south see lgbt issues as a tool of US oppression. It actively harms efforts of local lgbt people in achieving the necessary cultural change in views because people see it as necessary to oppose it in order to protect their economic interests from becoming a US colony or vassal.
Alan Turing was castrated in the 1950s and has been posthumously pardoned at this point. The first pride parade in the US after Stonewall was in the 1970s.
Using examples half a century or more old as a comparison to what’s happening today is incredibly disengenuious.
Yes, stay hidden, try to curate and open up to your inner circle. They are still at step 1. They need to cultivate lgbtq acceptance slowly at this stage or they will be crashed.
Surprised Carmen Rose is able to tweet while licking authoritarian bigoted boots at the same time, impressive. They’d be stoked if Nazis came back I’m sure, they have some great boots.
Try reading the article. Homophobia is on the rise in Indonesia and bullshit performative activism is not going to positively impact that. Rose without question has a more informed perspective than a British “rockstar” douchebag who has done this performative shit in other nations and seen similar criticism.
As someone who was gay in the USA before it was safe to be out I get why Rose is concerned and Im flabbergasted at those who cannot see how incredibly fucking stupid Healy’s acts are.
This is going to need to happen anyway if these companies want to differentiate between human generated and ai generated content for the purposes of training new models
An Ohio-class submarine carries 20 Trident II D5 missiles, each of which can deliver up to eight nuclear warheads to targets as far as 12,000 km (7,500 miles) away.
Let me get this straight. Do these missiles split into 8 individual warheads that can hit individual targets? Or do they just pack 8 warheads together for bigger boom? Or is it more of a cluster bomb kind of deal?
On one hand, cool. On the other, especially considering what's hot in the movies recently, bloody hell that's a bit too many bombs, isn't it?
The Trident II missiles are MIRV-capable, so 8 warheads per missile, which can hit targets a few hundred kilometers apart (exact numbers are not available for the public)
Multiple independent warheads that can hit different targets. Also, they can actually carry up 12 warheads each , but the US limits the number deployed to meet treaty obligations. And each boat can has 20 missile tubes.
I have good reason to believe that the US government has abused their economic homogeny and taken on way too much debt to the point where other countries are doubtful that they will ever be able to honour that debt. These sovereign nations see the writing on the wall and China smells blood. I believe that the US dollar will collapse altogether and everyone else dollar along with it. At this point, China will come in and offer an alternative that is tied to gold, just like the days of old. Then China will take over this homogeny.
I really hope the western elites have a plan otherwise this is going to be some changing times.
Of course the watermark will only apply to their consumer versions of things, maybe their business things, and absolutely none of their government or internal things.
So I can’t stand it when people do the “reeeee” thing either, but this one kind of bugs me.
$11.4 billion in savings per year for 332 million people averages to $34 per year.
Here is a typical electric water heater. Cost: $439. Here is one with a heat pump installed as described in the article. Cost: $1,909 - a difference in price of $1,470.
At $34 per year, this water heater would have to last 43 years before any cost savings from the efficiency gains would be realized. I don’t know if you know much about water heaters, but this won’t happen by a long shot.
Gas units fare similarly, with typical units verses high efficiency units’ price differential.
It’s hard to be a homeowner these days. This will make it harder. I can accept it in the name of efficiency gains and saving the planet and all that, but the whole “this will save consumers money,” bit is pure gaslighting. It’s not true. This will cost consumers quite a lot of money.
Claiming there's savings just isn't true in reality. If they came out and said it's to help reduce energy consumption to save the planet I'd be all in, and I'm still in for this, but it just makes it hard to fully support with the gaslighting as you aptly put.
Part of the problem is that most people who would need convincing of this will immediately turn away as soon as they hear “save energy” or “save the planet” as they see these efforts as nuicanses and a vie for control. The second you frame it as “what’s in it for you,” they immediately start to listen. Look at what happened with solar panels once they crossed the magic threshold of affordability and actually functioned as a cost saving method. A third of the houses in my neighborhood have them installed now. The only reason I don’t is because I’m currently paycheck to paycheck, and my local power company is also doing a killer job of sourcing solar and other renewables.
It would be nice if they occasionally spent time making and enforcing stuff like this for the 7 or 10 corporations that cause most of the climate change problem. Asking all the citizens to spend and extra $1000 when they replace their water heater is just limate change theater.
I think you maybe responded to the wrong person or didn’t respond to the OP. My post was about how to convince people to buy in, whereas yours seems to be focused on the big businesses and how they’re not being held to the same standard. Though, the overlap here is basically what I originally said: frame it as cost-savings for the businesses or something else in it for them and they’ll start doing it with or without regulation.
reuters.com
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