The best way to combat anti-vax isn’t with logic or facts or debate. It’s by launching our healthcare system into the sun and building something compassionate, universal, and affordable.
Conspiracy theories about health gain traction when everyone accurately associates formalized healthcare with bankruptcy, surprise medical bills, and organized crime. There’s no trust, and I don’t blame them.
The reason Republicans go after trans people, CRT, etc is they have professionals who have done polling & focus groups & examined the psychology telling them there are effective targets.
As with everything they do, the goal is to get the public to move power to them so they can use that power to benefit their benefactors.
Tax cuts, get kill regulations that protect the public but impede profits, privatize public goods, etc.
This is why they do it.
Libraries are civic marvels.
Besides lending books and providing internet access, the Chicago Public Library lets you check out fishing poles, telescopes, cameras, knitting supplies, sewing machines, puzzles, tools, cooking equipment, a (model) human skull, sheet music, instruments, toys, museum passes, laptops, wifi hotspots, craft kits, seeds.
You can book meeting rooms or 3D printers. Some branches have teachers on site for homework help. Story time for kids, literacy programs for adults.
For the most part, this place has been great. And in part due to that, my expectations of people here were higher than Twitter. Over there, hate is normalized and easier to dismiss. Here, I hadn't seen much hate or unpleasantness.
So when someone says something really shitty, it's a lot harder to ignore. I don't fucking care if "it's a joke." That's not something anyone should joke about, regardless of your opinions. Is kindness really so hard? Or even simply remembering that other people have emotions and lives too?
@AnarchoNinaWrites Actually, I'm writing a song titled "*redacted*ing nazis and why creepy rich eugenicists mean to boil us all to death even if I don't think they can *actually* escape to Mars", and it's going to be a pretty good one.
So Berlusconi, Italy's precursor to Trump and Johnson, has died. No tears shed here. He was a deeply malign toxic influence on Italy.
"When cis people try to understand what it is to be trans, I think they often try to imagine what it would feel like to want to be 'the opposite sex'. What they should be trying to imagine, instead, is how it would feel to wake up and find that the whole world insists they *are* the opposite sex. That would be a much closer scenario to how it feels to be trans." Sage
(Alt Text: Picture of Sage's feet in the water. Text as above)
For #WorldOceanDay - a recommendation:
I've been reading this book by @al_humphreys with my kids and it's not only a pretty engaging read, by turns funny, informative, serious and gripping, it also deals very sensibly with the massive issues facing the ocean, though with a light touch.
Pollution, plastics, overfishing, marine biology are all covered but never preachily*.
Highly recommended to introduce some difficult issues to 8 year olds +
Economics: Humans only value things monetarily.
Sociology: Uh, I don't ...
Economics: Humans are always rational and value is calculated by a complex inner calculus.
Sociology: Uh, Psy, can you help?
Psychology: That's not how humans ...
Economics: ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!
Physics: *drops teacup*
LOTR trilogy but just the scenes where two female characters interact.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CqdDUTsNDwc/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
@morgthorak I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.
Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.
I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.
And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.
Vocation: Oceanographer developing numerical modeling/data assimilation/coupled ensemble forecast systems on #HPC platforms mostly using FORTRAN/ksh/python.
Avocation: Mentor/coach for grade 7-12 FIRST #FRCrobotics and #FTCrobotics competition teams, so jack of all trades in/adjacent to closed-loop control and navigation, computer vision, digital graphics, CAD/CAM, 3Dprinter/laser cutter/CNC router and other shop fab. #omgrobots