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.

Okay, that explains the crowds.

That seems to capture the intuitive idea of discontinuity for me, thanks!

Thanks for the proposal. That gets us somewhere already, although only for non-landlocked countries. Using the perimeter also opens us up to the coastline paradox.

I guess you’d have to decide if archipelago nations are measured as the geometry of the sea they own, or as discrete islands.

I think that it might serve us better to consider them as distinct islands, to keep the measures comparable with landlocked countries.

Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.

I gave Jami a very extensive go with family, and sadly it didn't deliver a usable experience if your device is a mobile one or the network is not a fixed, high-speed connection.

Coming originally from a country where the blasphemy laws on the books are regularly used to harass even religious people who deviate from the dogma interpretation of their co-believers (and definitely used to harass irreligious people), I definitely do not want to see blasphemy remain or become a criminal matter.

We can work against the harassment of religion-defined minorities without resorting to blasphemy laws.

Btw would you consider crossposting to !health@lemmy.world too? You might get more varied opinions and get people to think. (Disclosure: it’s “my” community.)

At this point I would not, but only because I want to engage with all replies actively and the amount of replies I got here was already a positive surprise but also a number that is only just about manageable for me.

I hope you are able to access proper care soon.

I was an eager user of recreational drugs, and I never saw any of my drug experiences as “not real”.

I definitely think that some of my hesitations have to do with not having any experience of using chemicals that affect the mood before, so I don't have a mental model that I can re-use for antidepressants. I definitely drink caffeine though, so it's probably valid to say that I have constructed a fiction of me never having done anything like this, but it's a convincing fiction.

It may be worth talking to your therapist about the fact that you may have internalized these feelings as being a core part of your identity, something that you’re afraid to lose. I promise there’s more to the things that make you who you are.

Yeah, I think you are hitting an important point and he also tried to poke at it when I told him how I feel about the suggestion.

One aspect of it is definitely that I've been depressed since I had a personality. At some level, I think I believed that this could never change (and that's why I was so amazed when some of the CBT exercises started having the exact effects the theory said they would). Thinking of a potential me without all of the maladaptive patterns I developed since I was a kid is about as stressful to me as meeting a stranger.

Part of it is also that I don't understand the chemical mechanism behind the various antidepressants though, so I'll definitely need to talk with medical doctors about it.