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silveradeptLet us begin with a headteacher calling for other teachers to encourage their students' desires to make a better world, rather than mock them for being unrealistic or 'woke'.
The ease in which moral panics can be sparked off by nothing at all, just the insinuation that someone heard something somewhere. Especially if it is something about the virginity (and "purity") of girls and women. The United Kingdom makes pledges and claims to ban hymenoplasty and to require GPs to have training in women's health issues, but we'll see how that turns out and whether it's taken seriously as a requirement.
If you are looking for a way to punish the United States Supreme Court for their decision to allow bounty hunting for people who might have even a whiff of abortion in Texas, Abortion Funds will find you a local practitioner or mutual aid fund that you can support, if you have the spare monies, because those funds are the people who have the best networks and the most direct access for helping people in a world where abortions have become functionally illegal, even if not yet de jure illegal.
The Galve Goat got burnt, which would not normally be a thing that got much attention, but given the last two years that have happened, it seems like a lot more people are remembering the etymology of the word 'scapegoat' with regard to the destruction.
The world no longer has the wisdom of bell hooks with us, on her passing at 69 years of age.
The "working-class" hero, as an idea, would be much harder to corrupt into what right-wing radicals want if the "working-class" were perceived as much more than a white male factory worker. Because if the working-class included a much bigger swath of potential workers, including lots of women, it would be a lot harder to create the image of the True Scotsman (or the Real American) as only being a white man. We can blame Marx for some of this, too, since he had opinions about whose labor was valid and whose wasn't that split along fairly gendered lines.
The US, as a society, has not shifted its economic policy significantly toward the new reality of less people getting married and less people staying married. There are a lot of potential factors to get at least part of the blame for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some blame that can be laid at the feet of the loud minority with outsized control over government that continues to insist that marriage (with the man in total control of his, her, and their childrens' lives) is the only acceptable outcome for men and women to live in. And the way that the court system and the laws are structured to punish someone who gets divorced, because the court would very much like married people to continue to support each other. (In fairness to the article, it is massively unfair to the person who is doing all of the work to have to continue to subsidize a person who decided to shirk their responsibilities or who demands inordinate compensation and recognition for their inadequate work. And not everyone comes into a relationship as their true self and lays out to a prospective partner all the bad behaviors and terrible decisions they're going to make.)
On islands like Vanuatu, there are people from the West who want to take up the mantle of being a prophesized savior of the people, although there may not be as much social justice in their desires as to have the trappings and lifestyle of calling oneself royal. And it seems like there are at least some people there who have social acceptance on the order of Joshua I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
The job of a historian is to paint an accurate picture of what happened before, but politicians who are on the bad side of an accurate history often desire greatly to abuse their power to make sure their preferred history is the one taught and made official. Much like how liberation and equity are going to feel like discrimination and harm to the privileged, accurate history is going to make some people and some groups of people out to be oppressors for generations on end, even if some of their descendants might be trying to do less oppression and work toward frameworks of liberation.
The Criterion Collection has a Black Film Archive, created by Maya Cade, which showcases (as with all other media) the complexity and multiple perspectives of Black cinema, rather than the belief that only trauma narratives are appropriate to see Black bodies in.
A Michelin-starred restaurant did its very best to be a parody of the avant-garde, serving extremely tiny portions of odd things in questionable choices of presentation, and then, when reviewed scathingly in the link above, had a response from the chef that would absolutely have run afoul of Poe's Law, were it satire. And also makes me think about The Man You Wish Your Man Could Be.
A supposedly truistic insight into how we treat people with mental illnesses, which is that you treat them as people with mental illnesses, as there's already plenty in place to treat them as mental illnesses embodied in people. This isn't a blanket permission to let them hurt themselves or others, but that a lot of the people who you see as problems might become less problematic if you can find their human parts.
Trying to keep the curlew from extinction in its native habitat, hedgehog highways going through a community's garden space, which gathers data about hedgie migration and other useful data that keeps the hedgies alive and thriving, chitons have true eyes that can create focused images, the creation of hydrogel by welding together DNA taken from salmon sperm and vegetable oil, studies showing that major Antarctic ice material is melting, which could mean significant rises in sea level,
A rare 18th century portrait where a woman of color is the subject. It's a very nice portrait, additionally. A mostly intact Roman era mosaic found in a farmer's field, which may lead to further excavations and hopefully even more useful finds. The repatriation of more than 900 stolen artifacts to Mali.
Looks like getting boosters helps produce a faster immune response, since the body has been getting a lot of instructions on how to deal with the many variations of fork hands. On the other side, individual action isn't going to be enough to beat back the virus or move it into an endemic state. It's already been the case that we either figure out proper cooperation or the people who have been shouting about their freedoms to their last breath will end up taking their last breath shouting about their freedoms. (After having killed many more of the people around them who would have preferred to work together to fight the virus.) And even if things get an endemic status, if it's anything like flu is endemic, that still means a lot of people dying from communicable disease. So, as usual, everybody needs to get their shots as fast as possible, since the new variants seem determined to try and avoid getting caught out by current vaccinations.
Which means we're back in situations where we have to make calculations about what our risks are and whether something is really worth it. And possibly, we need to re-consult our guides to find a mask with enough games to still be effective and/or apply some specific modifications to our mask-wearing to make them more effective. Because good fit and filtration is important in keeping yourself from getting or giving infections to others. (If only everyone believed in such precautions, and for those who can't, we had truly robust options that would allow them to get necessary services affordably without exposing themselves or others.)
Even if you've gotten all your shots, if you go to large gatherings, there's a good chance you'll get COVID, which would normally mean a second holiday period without seeing people in person, but at this point, I suspect more than a few people believe seeing their people in person is more important than catching or spreading the virus. Even though the experiments in what spread is like in very close quarters and contact don't bode well. (Rikers is a terrible place for reasons other than this, but because of the way Rikers is administered, it's providing us with lots of real-world data.) And there are families whose lives are irreparably changed when someone dies from COVID. Even if they're trying to pick up everything again, there's still the tragedy of the loss and all the things that person was doing that now need to be picked back up again.
If you are not currently symptomatic, and you live somewhere where obtaining tests is easy and inexpensive,brainwane suggests that you go through the testing process as a drill. Much like preparing for emergencies, if you already have the procedure practiced while you are calm and observing it, you are more likely to be less panicked about doing the thing because you already know what to do. Additionally, the rapid antigen test is a spot check to see whether you can do the thing you're planning on doing, and the PCR test is good for determining whether you've been infected recently.
There are things that people can do now to prepare for the likelihood of getting COVID that will help in the long run when it happens to them.
A Minnesotan who went to New Zealand to play hockey is instead a rapping doctor trying to get the last few percent in that country to get their vaccine shots.
To determine whether treatments are working, you often need large-scale clinical trials, and the UK's National Health Service makes it very easy to get those kinds of participants, where the Recovery Trial has been effective to both debunking snake oil cures touted by politicians and in discovering things that do appear to work against serious cases. That's one of the benefits of socialized medicine that doesn't necessarily get touted all that much.
Also, for those people who cannot get vaccinated, or who still believe conspiratorial nonsense over the evidence of their own eyes and lives, there are now two pill-form treatments for infection, meant to be taken within the first few days after being infected. Which, even if it's someone who refuses to take the vaccination, hopefully keeps people out of the still overwhelmed hospitals.
In technology, A proposal to electrify many of the remaining gaslamps of Westminster has garnered opposition from those who wish to keep their gaslamp fantasy, Sparks and Clanks optional. Many of the reasons mentioned in the post for electrification are climate concerns and energy efficiency, and those against are about the aesthetic of the historical space and the type of light the lamps cast.
The increasing lack of public toilets in our public spheres means less participation in public life for everyone, even more so for people whose disabilities require convenient toilet access.
After Nigeria banned Twitter in their country for removing posts by the Nigerian president, an enterprising man tried to raise money for a social media startup—by getting people to deploy ransomware against their network from the inside in exchange for a cut of the ransom. Which, y'know, that's both the "someone's got hustle" and also "insider spying and corporate espionage is a thing that most corporations are very interested in finding and ferreting out.
The United Kingdom is going to require Internet of Things devices and smart devices to come with strong passwords by default, so as to reduce the ability of bad actors taking advantage of insecure default passwords that people might not take the time to change or otherwise make stronger. It would also help if they removed arbitrary elements from passwords that make them less secure even if someone wants to make them more secure.
Finding condoms in the manuscripts, which have, y'know, dried and are much worse the wear for their time in the books, but are still pretty likely to be such things, rather than a mystery. The inventor of the Ograsmotron, an implant device that stimulated nerves that would lead to climax, never saw the invention become popular, much less the vaunted sextech that would allow for perfect sex and orgasms. (Because, despite advances in technology, good sex has a lot to do with things that aren't bumping genitals.) What was first marketed as therapy for many things collected a significantly sexual meaning as vibrations stopped being about personal massage and more about sexual freedom. Which has then, sometimes, been twisted around in pretty ugly ways. People who wanted to sell ineffective drugs that claimed to help women with low sex enjoyment co-opted feminist language to try and get their drugs approved, instead of creating something that actually worked.
The recreation of early modern recipes, with their tendency to look like a Bake-Off Technical Challenge's instructions, is often more about the process of making the thing as much as it is about the product that results.
Genre conventions and the need to look at them, from the perspective of people who have accessibility needs, so that it's just as easy for the disabled to have a pleasant and enjoyable convention experience as it is for the abled.
Last for tonight, The concept of Weird Pride, in taking pride in the things that make someone a weirdo, within the limits of not transgressing boundaries in creepy ways. Weird Pride seems like it would primarily appeal to the neurodiverse and their weirdnesses, in the same way that other forms of Pride are about being the person that you are without apology, within the space of not transgressing boundaries in creepy ways.
And When Harry Met Santa, a celebration of the fact that it's been fifty years since Norway made a decision that made it possible for more people to enjoy the company of others in the way they desire.
Finally, there should be deeper conversations about the ways that corporations and other entities have basically required that everyone continue working, even as disaster after disaster stacks up, instead of finding ways of reducing the mental and physical risks that workers are taking, including, perhaps, telling them all to go home on paid leave for a while. Or at least not making them work through extreme weather events hat are likely to kill them.
(Materials viacmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, firecat, jadelennox, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, sonia, thewayne, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
The ease in which moral panics can be sparked off by nothing at all, just the insinuation that someone heard something somewhere. Especially if it is something about the virginity (and "purity") of girls and women. The United Kingdom makes pledges and claims to ban hymenoplasty and to require GPs to have training in women's health issues, but we'll see how that turns out and whether it's taken seriously as a requirement.
If you are looking for a way to punish the United States Supreme Court for their decision to allow bounty hunting for people who might have even a whiff of abortion in Texas, Abortion Funds will find you a local practitioner or mutual aid fund that you can support, if you have the spare monies, because those funds are the people who have the best networks and the most direct access for helping people in a world where abortions have become functionally illegal, even if not yet de jure illegal.
The Galve Goat got burnt, which would not normally be a thing that got much attention, but given the last two years that have happened, it seems like a lot more people are remembering the etymology of the word 'scapegoat' with regard to the destruction.
The world no longer has the wisdom of bell hooks with us, on her passing at 69 years of age.
The "working-class" hero, as an idea, would be much harder to corrupt into what right-wing radicals want if the "working-class" were perceived as much more than a white male factory worker. Because if the working-class included a much bigger swath of potential workers, including lots of women, it would be a lot harder to create the image of the True Scotsman (or the Real American) as only being a white man. We can blame Marx for some of this, too, since he had opinions about whose labor was valid and whose wasn't that split along fairly gendered lines.
The US, as a society, has not shifted its economic policy significantly toward the new reality of less people getting married and less people staying married. There are a lot of potential factors to get at least part of the blame for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some blame that can be laid at the feet of the loud minority with outsized control over government that continues to insist that marriage (with the man in total control of his, her, and their childrens' lives) is the only acceptable outcome for men and women to live in. And the way that the court system and the laws are structured to punish someone who gets divorced, because the court would very much like married people to continue to support each other. (In fairness to the article, it is massively unfair to the person who is doing all of the work to have to continue to subsidize a person who decided to shirk their responsibilities or who demands inordinate compensation and recognition for their inadequate work. And not everyone comes into a relationship as their true self and lays out to a prospective partner all the bad behaviors and terrible decisions they're going to make.)
On islands like Vanuatu, there are people from the West who want to take up the mantle of being a prophesized savior of the people, although there may not be as much social justice in their desires as to have the trappings and lifestyle of calling oneself royal. And it seems like there are at least some people there who have social acceptance on the order of Joshua I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
The job of a historian is to paint an accurate picture of what happened before, but politicians who are on the bad side of an accurate history often desire greatly to abuse their power to make sure their preferred history is the one taught and made official. Much like how liberation and equity are going to feel like discrimination and harm to the privileged, accurate history is going to make some people and some groups of people out to be oppressors for generations on end, even if some of their descendants might be trying to do less oppression and work toward frameworks of liberation.
The Criterion Collection has a Black Film Archive, created by Maya Cade, which showcases (as with all other media) the complexity and multiple perspectives of Black cinema, rather than the belief that only trauma narratives are appropriate to see Black bodies in.
A Michelin-starred restaurant did its very best to be a parody of the avant-garde, serving extremely tiny portions of odd things in questionable choices of presentation, and then, when reviewed scathingly in the link above, had a response from the chef that would absolutely have run afoul of Poe's Law, were it satire. And also makes me think about The Man You Wish Your Man Could Be.
A supposedly truistic insight into how we treat people with mental illnesses, which is that you treat them as people with mental illnesses, as there's already plenty in place to treat them as mental illnesses embodied in people. This isn't a blanket permission to let them hurt themselves or others, but that a lot of the people who you see as problems might become less problematic if you can find their human parts.
Trying to keep the curlew from extinction in its native habitat, hedgehog highways going through a community's garden space, which gathers data about hedgie migration and other useful data that keeps the hedgies alive and thriving, chitons have true eyes that can create focused images, the creation of hydrogel by welding together DNA taken from salmon sperm and vegetable oil, studies showing that major Antarctic ice material is melting, which could mean significant rises in sea level,
A rare 18th century portrait where a woman of color is the subject. It's a very nice portrait, additionally. A mostly intact Roman era mosaic found in a farmer's field, which may lead to further excavations and hopefully even more useful finds. The repatriation of more than 900 stolen artifacts to Mali.
Looks like getting boosters helps produce a faster immune response, since the body has been getting a lot of instructions on how to deal with the many variations of fork hands. On the other side, individual action isn't going to be enough to beat back the virus or move it into an endemic state. It's already been the case that we either figure out proper cooperation or the people who have been shouting about their freedoms to their last breath will end up taking their last breath shouting about their freedoms. (After having killed many more of the people around them who would have preferred to work together to fight the virus.) And even if things get an endemic status, if it's anything like flu is endemic, that still means a lot of people dying from communicable disease. So, as usual, everybody needs to get their shots as fast as possible, since the new variants seem determined to try and avoid getting caught out by current vaccinations.
Which means we're back in situations where we have to make calculations about what our risks are and whether something is really worth it. And possibly, we need to re-consult our guides to find a mask with enough games to still be effective and/or apply some specific modifications to our mask-wearing to make them more effective. Because good fit and filtration is important in keeping yourself from getting or giving infections to others. (If only everyone believed in such precautions, and for those who can't, we had truly robust options that would allow them to get necessary services affordably without exposing themselves or others.)
Even if you've gotten all your shots, if you go to large gatherings, there's a good chance you'll get COVID, which would normally mean a second holiday period without seeing people in person, but at this point, I suspect more than a few people believe seeing their people in person is more important than catching or spreading the virus. Even though the experiments in what spread is like in very close quarters and contact don't bode well. (Rikers is a terrible place for reasons other than this, but because of the way Rikers is administered, it's providing us with lots of real-world data.) And there are families whose lives are irreparably changed when someone dies from COVID. Even if they're trying to pick up everything again, there's still the tragedy of the loss and all the things that person was doing that now need to be picked back up again.
If you are not currently symptomatic, and you live somewhere where obtaining tests is easy and inexpensive,
brainwane suggests that you go through the testing process as a drill. Much like preparing for emergencies, if you already have the procedure practiced while you are calm and observing it, you are more likely to be less panicked about doing the thing because you already know what to do. Additionally, the rapid antigen test is a spot check to see whether you can do the thing you're planning on doing, and the PCR test is good for determining whether you've been infected recently.There are things that people can do now to prepare for the likelihood of getting COVID that will help in the long run when it happens to them.
A Minnesotan who went to New Zealand to play hockey is instead a rapping doctor trying to get the last few percent in that country to get their vaccine shots.
To determine whether treatments are working, you often need large-scale clinical trials, and the UK's National Health Service makes it very easy to get those kinds of participants, where the Recovery Trial has been effective to both debunking snake oil cures touted by politicians and in discovering things that do appear to work against serious cases. That's one of the benefits of socialized medicine that doesn't necessarily get touted all that much.
Also, for those people who cannot get vaccinated, or who still believe conspiratorial nonsense over the evidence of their own eyes and lives, there are now two pill-form treatments for infection, meant to be taken within the first few days after being infected. Which, even if it's someone who refuses to take the vaccination, hopefully keeps people out of the still overwhelmed hospitals.
In technology, A proposal to electrify many of the remaining gaslamps of Westminster has garnered opposition from those who wish to keep their gaslamp fantasy, Sparks and Clanks optional. Many of the reasons mentioned in the post for electrification are climate concerns and energy efficiency, and those against are about the aesthetic of the historical space and the type of light the lamps cast.
The increasing lack of public toilets in our public spheres means less participation in public life for everyone, even more so for people whose disabilities require convenient toilet access.
After Nigeria banned Twitter in their country for removing posts by the Nigerian president, an enterprising man tried to raise money for a social media startup—by getting people to deploy ransomware against their network from the inside in exchange for a cut of the ransom. Which, y'know, that's both the "someone's got hustle" and also "insider spying and corporate espionage is a thing that most corporations are very interested in finding and ferreting out.
The United Kingdom is going to require Internet of Things devices and smart devices to come with strong passwords by default, so as to reduce the ability of bad actors taking advantage of insecure default passwords that people might not take the time to change or otherwise make stronger. It would also help if they removed arbitrary elements from passwords that make them less secure even if someone wants to make them more secure.
Finding condoms in the manuscripts, which have, y'know, dried and are much worse the wear for their time in the books, but are still pretty likely to be such things, rather than a mystery. The inventor of the Ograsmotron, an implant device that stimulated nerves that would lead to climax, never saw the invention become popular, much less the vaunted sextech that would allow for perfect sex and orgasms. (Because, despite advances in technology, good sex has a lot to do with things that aren't bumping genitals.) What was first marketed as therapy for many things collected a significantly sexual meaning as vibrations stopped being about personal massage and more about sexual freedom. Which has then, sometimes, been twisted around in pretty ugly ways. People who wanted to sell ineffective drugs that claimed to help women with low sex enjoyment co-opted feminist language to try and get their drugs approved, instead of creating something that actually worked.
The recreation of early modern recipes, with their tendency to look like a Bake-Off Technical Challenge's instructions, is often more about the process of making the thing as much as it is about the product that results.
Genre conventions and the need to look at them, from the perspective of people who have accessibility needs, so that it's just as easy for the disabled to have a pleasant and enjoyable convention experience as it is for the abled.
Last for tonight, The concept of Weird Pride, in taking pride in the things that make someone a weirdo, within the limits of not transgressing boundaries in creepy ways. Weird Pride seems like it would primarily appeal to the neurodiverse and their weirdnesses, in the same way that other forms of Pride are about being the person that you are without apology, within the space of not transgressing boundaries in creepy ways.
And When Harry Met Santa, a celebration of the fact that it's been fifty years since Norway made a decision that made it possible for more people to enjoy the company of others in the way they desire.
Finally, there should be deeper conversations about the ways that corporations and other entities have basically required that everyone continue working, even as disaster after disaster stacks up, instead of finding ways of reducing the mental and physical risks that workers are taking, including, perhaps, telling them all to go home on paid leave for a while. Or at least not making them work through extreme weather events hat are likely to kill them.
(Materials via
cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, firecat, jadelennox, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, sonia, thewayne, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
