Agreed, fantastic story but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t moved to tears.

Hey, Robin! I know you have to vent sometimes into your works, but give the poor guy a break, won’t you?

• Hyperion Cantos.

• Neuromancer.

Thanks!

More interesting is the origins of that phrase to designate prostitution.

Fortunately, I found an article in worldhistories.net, that shows the first documented time of this phrase. The person who coined the phrase was none other than Ruyard Kipling (“The Jungle Book”):

Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith was her very-great-grandmamma, and that was before the days of Eve as every one knows. In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved. In the East where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice, and that is a distinct proof of the inability of the East to manage its own affairs.

- On the City Wall, in In Black and White (Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler & Co., 1889), page 78

If you want to know about actual prostitution, we should go far back to ancient Mesopotamian texts.

According to “The Epic of Gilgamesh” (the most ancient epic in the world), the gods created a savage man, Enkidu, who lived in harmony with the animals in the woods. Gilgamesh wants to tame Enkidu, and is told to bring a “harimtu” (a “sacred prostitute”) to him.

and he [Enkidu] possessed her ripeness. She was not bashful as she welcomed his ardor. She laid aside her cloth and he rested upon her. She treated him, the savage, to a woman’s task, as his love was drawn unto her.”

Later, as he regrets joining civilization, Enkidu curses the harimtu:

“I will curse you with a great curse… you shall not build a house for your debauch you shall not enter the tavern of girls…. May waste places be your couch, May the shadow of the town-wall be your stand May thorn and bramble skin your feet May drunkard and toper (ed note: someone who drinks alcohol to excess) alike slap your cheek.”

Researcher Gerda Lerner, in her article “The Origin of Prostitution in Ancient Mesoportamia” (Signs, 1986, pp. 245-6), says:

The nature of this curse tells us that the harimtu who mated with Enkidu lived an easier and better life than the harlot who has her stand at the town wall and is abused by her drunken customers.

This would confirm the distinction we made earlier between the women engaged in various forms of sacral sexual service and commercial prostitutes. Such a distinction was more likely to have existed in the earlier period than later.”

So yes, there were prostitutes in ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization.

EDIT: typo

Even then, you’re still a bigot. Dude, grow up and touch some grass.

Thanks for the info.

Okay you’re being a bigot. You know why? Because people aren’t demanding to be called “your highness”. They are just asking to be called with their preferred probouns. Putting neo pronouns aside, it’s not a heavy burden to be called he / she / it / they.

And this is the internet! The are no bodies, only usernames. Why do you care if a person claiming to be a girl demands to be called a she? Oh my fucking god,what a scandal! The oppression imposed upon you, a free citizen, demanding that you have to use a pronoun different than “he” on the internet! The world is doomed! 😱 /s

What you’re really asking for is the “right” to harass trans people (by misgendering them) because you don’t like them and abhor the idea of women having something extra down there. (it’s not like they’re plotting to force sex you, just leave them be, okay?) Not only that, you’re so obsessed with hating them that you went out of your way to post your biased opinion ON A LINUX FORUM.

You’re being a transphobic asshole, and the mods were perfectly right in banning you.

Just accept that there are different people in the world. If you have a problem with that, maybe it’s you who needs professional help.

I read a Twitter post of hers a few years ago where she was extremely apologetic towards China, saying that Americans listened to a lot of propaganda and so on. Now I’m starting to wonder if it was really her who made that twitter post.

New domain name proposal:

queer.asf.uk 🤭

Workers: How about this? Better salary, fewer hours.

Big execs: Noooooo ANYTHING BUT THAT! 😭

CW: Trump, uspol

Trump separating families at the border. Children being put in cages. Americans waving the fucking nazi flag.

It’s one thing to read about genocide. Another thing is to see it with your own eyes, even on TV.

And if any of you fuckers tries to tell me that both “sides are the same” or that “democrats did the same” or something in that vein, they are obviously doing this in bad faith and they can go fuck themselves. 🖕🤬

It’s just another Mastodon-compatible server where you can log in.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, is a federated network, meaning the more servers there are, the better things are for everyone. Huge servers with millions of users are harder to maintain, and moderation does not scale. There’s more noise, abuse is harder to spot, and harassment is harder to punish. Having many small servers is a better approach.

On the other hand, new servers might be unstable: the admin needs to both maintain the server and moderate the community, and there have been cases of admins doing crappy jobs at either. Servers are born and die regularly on Mastodon; you might want to see how things go before opening an account there.

Wrong. degeneration might be the ONLY way to prevent Faceboom from pulling an EEE.

You just don’t invite a vampire into your house. Consider the nazi bar analogy.

Finally someone gets it!

Just, for the love of god, make sure to make it opt-in. Don’t scan people’s posts without their consent.

Also, if you’re going with this, make sure to respect people’s requests for removal, e.g. deleting their posts from the engine when they delete them from their instances. Otherwise you’d get in trouble with the EU regarding GDPR…

The very nature of the fediverse makes fragmentation part of it. Since it’s not centralized, control is distributed to the different instance admins. It’s only natural that people with different opinions will want to split from each other, and that’s without taking into account the levels of toxicity allowed by different moderators.

Is an instance allowing racists to thrive in there? Of course it will be blocked by leftists, since banning is a concept that no longer applies.

Let me repeat for clarity: You CANNOT ban someone from the fediverse, you can ONLY defederate from them.

And don’t tell me it’s that much different from reddit, I’ve seen political subs denying access to people simply based on what other subreddits they’re subscribed to.

Would you rather have a single hierarchical “network” where an asshole dictator decides who is and who isn’t allowed to post? Of course not, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.

Federation implies defederating instances you’re not comfortable with.

And that’s perfectly fine, because safety comes first.

My freedom of association necessarily implies that I’m free NOT to associate with people I don’t like, and my insurance admin should be able to make sure I’m free from harassment by those same people.

Want to solve this issue? Solve human nature first.

If that were the only argument I might consider your point, but there’s also the point of troll farms. You can easily identify a third party troll farm fedi instance, but Zuckerberg will keep them anonymous as long as they keep paying him. Are you not aware of the amount of shills and trolls we got on reddit advocating for:

• Russia
• Conservative republicans
• Conspiracy theories
• Corporations such as Monsanto

I’m not fucking kidding, if you paid ANY attention to what happened to Reddit in the years after Spez took control, you’d realize that amplifying voices funded by corporate or foreign government money is bad for fucking everyone.

Facebook has shown, time after time, that they don’t give a shit about actual free speech, democracy, human rights or even complying with the law.

Why do you keep treating them as if they were only a social network? Have you been living under a fucking rock?

If you like corporate social networks so much, go back to reddit.

It’s the same network.

The difference between a conspiracy theory and an actual conspiracy is evidence.

Remind me again why Zuck was called to testify before Congress?

Actually that was a rhetorical question. But here is a video you all need to watch.

https://youtu.be/G272R50v6ww

Noe consider how the number will increase AFTER they start federating!