It's like they got together to try to find a policy designed specifically to please absolutely no one.

Somehow i missed this excellent thread before and with the hand-wringing happening on twitter right now about "trans activists silencing critics" I would like to offer the minor counterpoint that our critics have a soapbox the size of the internet and maybe that's more than enough.

Birth rate discourse is like “It turns out if you give women more choices, they’re less likely to make ones that make their lives harder.” Which is really helpful in figuring out how we can improve society somewhat. But instead people are like wow giving women more choices was a mistake

“Obviously, this law is a disaster for families like ours,” he wrote ... “We can no longer take a road trip across our beloved state, or even enjoy a family night out at a restaurant, or a movie, without running the risk of Eve being charged and sent to a prison merely for using the facilities.”

Bill Cassidy could have chosen to live in reality and recognize that he’d never win re-election and instead do the honorable things when they counted most. Instead he clung to delusion and ego, and single-handedly inflicted RFK Jr. upon us for a likely 3rd-place finish. I have no sympathy for him.

New — I spoke to parents whose kids are former patients of NYU Langone's trans youth health care program about the Texas criminal subpoena for their private health records. "I was furious. I was in disbelief. I was scared for my child's well-being." Read my full report:

This Reuters article is one of the most sycophantic pieces of pro-war agitprop for an American incursion that I’ve read since the start of the second Iraq invasion, after the GWOT became widely unpopular. The headline: “Trump says Iran war is worth the economic pain. These rural voters agree.”

I share the worry of trans people at the prospect of PM Wes Streeting. At Health he ignored the voices of young trans people and restricted gender-affirming care, causing harm to a generation. It is up to Labour to choose its leader, but members must also choose a better direction on trans rights

The damage he’s done will take a lifetime to undo, but good riddance. May he never know peace.

And the tech companies wonder why people hate them so much.

At some point, we are going to have to face the fact that the people in charge are trying to kill off a large number of the population. Because that’s what’s happening.

In related news, here’s a map of wildfires across North America.

I was today years old when I learned that the very end of two songs on the the Nine Inch Nails album "Year Zero" have images encoded into them that are only visible via spectrogram.

It is kind of a tell when they're like "we're trying to reduce your access to SSRIs and family-planning medications and also food and the vote"

Fascinated by subreddits like “is this AI” where people are picking over photos pixel by pixel sent by partners and family members looking to see if their loved ones are defrauding them. We went through something like this with photoshop but this feels different?

The President focused attacks on a specific high school track and field athlete by name and that in itself wasn’t treated as notable news.

I simply cannot imagine how I could have survived having my name and face broadcast to the entire country at 16 just because I wanted to run track with my friends

Thanks today and every day to all the moms of trans youth out there fighting like hell for their kids. When the stakes feel like they're rising by the hour and everyone tells you you're wrong no matter what you do, thanks to those who stand between their kids and a world that doesn't deserve them.

Grateful every day for the SSRI that keeps my anxiety from running my life. There’s no shame in needing after-market chemicals to make our brains work better.

One of the most pernicious developments of the trans sports panic is the mainstream normalizing of major nationwide media outlets naming and shaming minors with no consequences whatsoever. Kids are having their lives ruined daily and it’s become so common I rarely see people comment on it anymore.

Which is always the way. Want to reduce abortions? Provide better support for expectant parents. Want to reduce use of illegal drugs? (Well, legalize, obviously, but.) Better housing, working conditions, etc. But it's never about actually addressing a root cause, only attacking the "undesirables"

Some of my favorite leftists are doing this with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and it is making me lose my mind. Yeah, they hate Israel, but they don't love Palestine, and they sure don't love most of the people of the US, either!

Marjorie Taylor Green isn’t a known antisemite because she criticizes Israel, she’s a known antisemite because of all the talk about secret cabals, Jewish space lasers, Great Replacement theory, and Jews killing Jesus. Hope this helps some leftists who are mad at AOC for being right about her today

This is the exact situation we mean when we say the center is ultimately just a landing strip for the far-right. Only a few years ago, everyone recognized she had some of the most extreme views in politics. She’s not moved an inch since then, and the DNC is ready to send her a fruit basket.

Incidentally, much of the HHS focus on gutting “DEI” grants in science was in part a reaction to the success of social epidemiology research by women who demonstrated unequivocally that social determinants are far and away the biggest drivers of health. It really was capitalism and racism all along.

Prozac, therapy and HRT are the three reasons I still draw breath. And I’m so over the moon about it that I’m telling thousands of strangers about it on a Saturday morning.

There’s no medical reason to reduce the use of SSRIs just for the sake of doing so. They save countless lives daily, including mine. The HHS preoccupation with reducing their use is an intentional misdirection away from the true problems facing mental health: the world they’ve created is unlivable.

I had naively assumed that Liberati was some random hopeful rather than being a former rep and the brother of a current one. The more I read about this, the more disgusting the whole situation is.

How could anyone think these decisions about citizenship, autonomy, voting, representative democracy, and the now nonexistent limits of executive power are political?

Trevor Project released its annual LGBTQ youth mental health report. The results are shocking. 40% of trans youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. Trans youth who wanted hormones but couldn’t access them were nearly twice as likely to attempt suicide than those who could.

One of the most useful mythologies of modernity is the idea that there is an economy which exists totally independent of interested parties. Who is saving this money? Does “the economy” just store it under the mattress?

It recasts all the cruelty of capitalism as a sorting of the well-resourced righteous versus those who are merely poor. As if the former had no role in creating the latter as a permanent underclass to support their self-indulgent lifestyles. It’s Whole Foods Calvinism for the influencer age.

It’s refreshing to see an essay about this terrifying clown show where punches aren’t pulled and there’s no attempts to frame him as a man who just really likes steak. Adrienne lays out the horrific cost and the overtly theocratic fascist underpinnings of health policy under this regime.

<-- Feminist public health professor here and the only elected union leader in the race for U.S. Senate in Maine I'm in my second term as chapter president where I represent adjunct professors at all of Maine's community colleges. So strange that the boys' club doesn't want to let me in.

This product should not exist. www.wsj.com/us-news/chat...

Homicide is the leading cause of maternal mortality in the US. You know what helps drive that number down? Mifepristone.

SURE DOES.

This is an absolute travesty. The 5th circuit is imposing a nationwide restriction on accessing abortion medication. This is such a blatant power grab and perversion of the law. www.reuters.com/world/us-cou...

“‘Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that “every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,”’ the ruling states.”

Scientific institutions have consistently insisted on neutrality and clinical remove, reticent at best to wade into political debate. But there will always be those within the sciences who possess neither this ethos nor scruples who will speak falsely for us. Which is why silence isn’t an option.

NEW: Seven new lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI by families of Tumbler Ridge school shooting victims. The families say OpenAI was negligent in its failure to report the shooter's disturbing ChatGPT interactions — and has since misled the public about safeguards. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Somehow i missed this excellent thread before and with the hand-wringing happening on twitter right now about "trans activists silencing critics" I would like to offer the minor counterpoint that our critics have a soapbox the size of the internet and maybe that's more than enough.

Authoritarianism is just domestic abuse writ large.

People who perpetrate abuse learn to refine strategies throughout their lives and it should be fairly uncontroversial to suggest that many of the more anti-social aspects of the Trump regime are very much informed by a lifetime of hurting women.

I think about this skeet every time I find some new unwanted AI features in some app I use and need to Google how to turn it off.

100% genAI is a component. Automated aggregation and LLM regurgitation helps to force trends in news indexes, creating ad hoc topics once enough outlets reproduce the same story with marginal tweaks. Especially crime stories that post in rapid succession within less than an hour of an event.

Found this last night in a clinical hypnosis book published in 1990. This is a textbook still used today in some schools of psychology, the author of whom is a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine. In case you’ve ever wondered how we got the satanic panic.

look, i was minding my own business and listening to old outkast records in the dark.

How long before this is allegedly our fault too?