If you omit conspiracy theories and lies, the only critique of trans youth healthcare is that more research should be done, a truism that could be said of basically anything in science that has never before led to bans on care.

Fun fact: did you know that the fascism that's taking over our country is enabled by car-centric design? Our rural and exurban areas are deep red and full of Trump voters. That's because places designed around cars isolate us and make us suspicious and hateful of our neighbors. What happens when […]

That article in particular focuses on filtering out tire wear particles AFTER they've entered the environment. Which is very much a band-aid, and it filters them AFTER we've breathed in the airborne particles. We can stop them from ever being released by designing cities not for cars, but we […]

As part of their project of power consolidation, dictators change and rearrange what scholars sometimes call the "memoryscape." This refers to the monuments, memorials, statues, and place-names that the leader and his regime erect/install to give an account of the past that legitimates their […]

@pluralistic I got an idea. that surveillance technology they’ve been building out guess who it could be used on? Remember, pervasive surveillance puts everybody on their best behavior. :ablobgrin: “While they're at it, the Nuremberg Caucus could publish a plan to hire thousands of IRS agents […]

TL:DR; The Salesforce CEO at a company's annual all hands gathering asked international employees to please rise in the audience, then made a "joke" that ICE agents were in the back of the room ready to nab them. Guillotines for billionaires is the moderate choice at this point

A line from Kant that’s been ricocheting around my head a lot for the past year: “Whoever wills the end wills also the necessary means.” We’re going to get a lot of doe-eyed protestations from folks who “just wanted immigration laws enforced” & couldn’t be bothered to contempate what that entailed.

Schumer: ball’s in your court Republicans: stab the ball, tear it apart, set it on fire, rip up the court and sell the turf to Bahrain Schumer: hey you guys are out of balls Republicans: we’re gonna kill your families Schumer: ok we’ll pass funding for new balls but you’ve GOT to read the rules

It is deeply distressing that Democrats open negotiations with "ICE should follow the constitution" the GOP is like "lol nah" and that's the story. I see people defending Democrats sometimes like "what are they supposed to do?" Our constitutional republic is falling. Act like it, for starters.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/116045968768099650 This is so true. I would highly recommend that every white man commute to work or around town on a bike once a week or so. You get just a taste of the kind of vulnerability everyone else feels much of the rest of the time, and that we so […]

Families in these desperate straights deserve the right to try desperate measures. And it's not like top surgery is an untested, unstudied option - there's published, peer review research suggesting that top surgeries help and nothing showing harm. www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

Families watching their beloved child struggling, harming themselves, failing to engage in the life of a teen and becoming increasingly isolated and unwell are as desperate as families of children with cancer or other terrible diagnoses. It takes over the whole family. Awful for everyone involved.

The idea that top surgery is more extreme, more risky, than repeated inpatient hospitalizations or increasingly hard core psych meds is a fallacy. No, the surgery may not be fully reversible. Neither are those other things.

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

My first grader (a US citizen) came home from school crying because a friend from class (also a US citizen) hasn’t been coming to school because his parents (one of whom is not a citizen) are afraid of ICE. Little kids don’t have concepts of racism and xenophobia. That has to be taught. Or imposed.

I wonder if anyone has cross referenced Epstein files with Panama files and other major hidden wealth leaks.

'There's no reason to ban us from playing': Analysis debunks notion that transgender women have inherent physical advantages in sports https://www.livescience.com/health/theres-no-reason-to-ban-us-from-playing-analysis-debunks-notion-that-transgender-women-have-inherent-physical-advantages-in-sports

Once, we had a naturalization department and a customs department and that was it. The whole Department of Homeland Security is post-9/11 America Fuck Yeah stuff

You won't see it in a million years, to the point where it feels unthinkable, which suggests that perhaps people should stop expecting it of the left when the roles are reversed.

In the UK, a united center/left making hard but pragmatic choices to ensure the fascistic Reform Party won't gain power would look like Labor standing down in favor of the Green party, who have more momentum and aren't hampered by an unpopular incumbent leader the voters want out.

RE: https://mountains.social/@Coho/116030974034638646 I would watch this. It would be particularly karmic (is that a word), if the leader of the team were played by Ashley Judd.

yeaaah... Substack is a bad idea. Look into Outpost or Ghost, and stop supporting literal Nazis. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters

Amazon was thought it was cute to call their webservices "the mechanical Turk" after the fraudulent chess-playing robot with a person inside. But these revelations about Waymo, and also Amazon shops... the fact they they hide and must be forced to admit "what we claimed was software is just […]

This is always the complaint of sophists who never seem to grasp that art! is! political!

Do you see that the fact that CLERGY showed up to a meeting and pushed her is a NEWS STORY and the story is "rep in colorful hair is coward people repping God in Pious Religious Gear say 'Abolish ICE'"? that is the story that is the story we need to keep getting out in a thousand ways.

If someone needs to be employed to drive you around that person should live near you and make enough money to live comfortably. This is not extreme, this is basic concern for the life and dignity of your fellow human beings.

The scheme to replace underpaid gig drivers in America with even more severely underpaid gig drivers in even poorer countries is bad. Americans should drive themselves or pay someone a living wage. Disabled Americans should have access to taxpayer funded services that pay drivers a living wage.

But we are now in a frankly cartoonish situation. It really just sort of IS good vs evil. There aren’t actually many good points worth considering on the MAGA side, and it really is all just lies and bigotry. And people who thought their job was teasing out nuance are having trouble adapting.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot/116021368620450502 You know what makes me really angry? Walz apparently has a Master's in Holocaust education. He's brought up Anne Frank. Well and good. But for all the rhetoric, he's got state troopers PROTECTING those goons from... a noise demo. All i […]

If you won’t say this, you should not hold public office

i will never stop thinking about the intersection of epstein and the shitty media men list

RE: https://mastodon.world/@signalapp/116019252423429339 I do worry about this undermining my own privacy though. If any of my contacts run a Windows system that's backed up to Microsoft's cloud, or runs the Recall feature, Signal messages won't be very secure at rest. This is always a concern […]

The proud vulgarity, the anti-intellectualism, the hostility to art & high culture aren’t just a faux-populist aesthetic but intrinsic to the agenda, because the core of the agenda is anti-civilization, a repudiation of everything the best art embodies and celebrates.

So my toot about helmet laws increasing heart disease has got a few replies by people wondering wtf. The way it works is that mandatory helmet laws reduce cycling, fewer people cycling results in an increase in obesity related illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. One of, if not rhe best […]

This should be the mainstream #marketing position.

The spirit of this is right, but “the press” as shorthand for “journalists” did not come into vogue until decades after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. The “freedom of the press” is the right of anyone to publish as well as speak, not a protection for a specific profession.

Related: A lot of folks think having the maximally cynical read on everything makes them savvy, but a reflexive cynicism is just a kind of inverted naïveté

Trans women in sports is a losing issue bc it untaps people's prejudices in an arena that feels low stakes, one where they're used to being allowed to opine w/o possessing any great knowledge.

RE: https://social.coop/@ideogram/116011738908439602 I love this chart. But I would also be very interested to see where a freight train and a container ship fall on this chart.

Something snapped into place in my mind. There is an anti-AI position that has absolutely nothing to do with luddism, or any other anti-tech position. AI is cognitive suburbanization. Think about it. Architecting everything so that I can't do even the most basic thing without gratuitously […]

For the record: Despite significant progress, there remain serious, exploitable vulnerabilities in parts of our election infrastructure. There’s also no credible evidence to date that any election outcome has actually been altered this way. That’s unsatisfying to just about everyone, but it’s […]

Also makes me so annoyed that people like to suggest punitive immigration measures against immigrants they don’t like. Yeah, denaturalize Elon, surely he lied. I hate that guy. But I know who won’t lose in that type of immigration enforcement: those guys. Who will lose: immigrants with less […]

I’m so bothered by all of the people who are supposedly on the ‘good’ side who use these things against their political opponents: - making fun of people’s accents (make fuck, get green card is not funny even if you are mocking a horrible person) - making fun of people’s weight - making fun of […]

This is absolutely insane: DHS claims the right to subpoena your emails and to send investigators to your house. In this case, because a retiree sent the mildest possible criticism to a prosecutor. No judges involved. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

This point is definitely less popular with a lot of people who really want everyone connected to Epstein to have been child rapists. It isn't that simple, and you shouldn't demand it to be that simple.

The reality that there are blurry boundaries between the two sexes and one can move from one to another more or less by choice is a deeply destabilizing one for people who believe in natural, unchanging hierarchies.

Trans women threaten patriarchy bc seeking to live as a woman voluntarily is anathema to the idea that men are superior. Trans men threaten patriarchy bc if women were naturally inferior it would show - someone assigned female wouldn't be able to easily pass as male with a bit of testosterone.

On trans Bluesky, there are many posts circulating describing Epstein's anti-trans views and ties to prominent transphobes. Anti-trans politics fit neatly into all of this because the existence of trans people threatens the idea that men are naturally superior to women.

They don't draw a distinction in their minds btw trafficking children, raping adult women, and taking advantage of women in ways that fall short of rape. They don't distinguish btw donating to political parties, funding propaganda, paying bribes, or assassinating dissidents either.

I'll add one thing: The Epstein files show he was a fully accepted, integrated part of the billionaire class culture. That's important NOT bc pedophilia binds that class together but bc THEY THEMSELVES understand his crimes to be of a piece with the abuse, domination, and impunity they practice.