It is the historically consistent word, though. Colonial empires were always this cruel, everywhere.

Technically fascism is also often corporate-sponsored. But more to the point that kind of sponsorship means people get paid to do the sitting around in empty rooms bit. They still need to form gangs of brownshirts that trust each other enough to go out and do violence that might incur repercussions. And most of the members of those gangs don’t get paid at all.

There’s still no collective consciousness that “If they abduct Antibully for being an unapologetic trans inclusive feminist, I will be next. Thus I have to defend my neighbors as if it was me.”

You can help develop that in the process of getting to know your neighbors. If you’re hosting, at the very least I imagine you would be entitled to have a speech about why you’re doing it and what you hope to achieve with it in the long term.

Time for a friendly neightborhood potluck.

What I’ve heard of the founders of successful groups is that it takes a lot of sitting around being the only one at a meeting. As long as you’re advertising, some day someone will be in the right mindset to be curious and try something new, and two people can already help each other out.

Combine the meeting schedule and social events (even if similarly unattended to start with) and you can start slowly building out community. Even if you were “unlikeable” you can find unlikeable comrades eventually, that’s how fascists get started.

My take was to put myself in their shoes and consider why

This is called “rationalization”. People are very good at finding reasonable whys when they go looking for them, in a way that correlates very weakly to actual reality.

The number of bigots working the front lines is

If you think it takes bigotry to personally partake in systemic discimination, that is dangerous, and you will hurt people because of it.

If you care about people around you, especially if they are women or minorities, please read up on intersectionality, soft discrimination, microaggression, etc. Or better yet talk about it with friends and comrades.

These are all theory to describe lived experiences that are common sense once you empathize with the person who is a minority rather than with the nurse denying them medical aid.

edit to add: And to be clear, I’m not saying you’re a bigot. The whole point is that you don’t need to be a bigot to act discriminatory. Empathy for minorities (and people in general) is a constant practice, especially because every minority (and person) is different so the way society has taught us to disciminate against them is different. We all constantly need to unlearn stuff, and the sooner you start the better.

. If you’re encountering reluctance from medical folks to give you DIY resources, it’s most likely from the fear of giving you advice that’ll turn around and fuck you up. And we don’t want to fuck you up.

I’m sorry, but this is just naive. Many hospitals and doctors refuse to offer HRT based solely on self-identification even though WPATH acknowledges that it is just as safe as a psychological gatekeeping track.

And when HRT is provided, trans men are trusted to do testosterone injections bybthe same hospitals that require trans women to visit a GP for estrogen injections even though both are equally risk-prone. Anti-androgens can be more complicated, but that too can be taught in an hour.

Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of trans people across the world take pharmaceuticals from illegal and semi-legal suppliers with no bad batches that I’ve heard of. Like with addictive drugs, illegal suppliers tend to know their stuff.

Perhaps you’ve rationalized your fear at trans DIY as concern about people fucking up, but when and where that fear is applied is simply inconsistent, and systematically disempowers and provides worse service to trans people, women, people of color, and other minorities.

What people in medicine are afraid of is empowering minorities. Concern for our wellbeing if we were to be empowered is just the language to justify that feeling.

I’m not saying you’re deliberately setting out to be discriminatory, just that the medical culture has taught you to have a different gut reaction to a cis man regulating his own medication than to a trans nonbinary person doing the same.

edit: realized the joke 5 seconds after clicking ‘save’ -.-

The wide pedestrian street with an obsolete sidewalk curb and the elevated highway retrofitted into a rail line suggest a recent move away from motor vehicles towards sustainable modes of transit.

Rooftop gardens, rooftop solar, and wind turbines in the direction of sunset indicate emphasis on local production and mass acceptance of green energy.

The large communal dinner with live music and people running around doing their own shit is a disavowal of western individualism and formality, instead focusing on people’s emotional and physical needs, comforts, and efficiencies without involvement of the market.

It’s understated, sure, but this is as solarpunk as they come.

Same as with the rain. Have a waterproof barrier between the plants and the house. Sod, thatch, terracotta, asphalt, plastic, even concrete if you don’t plant rock-breaking plants.

Microsoft is betting on technofascism. On an economy where labor - and most importantly military-industrial labor - has been automated to such an extent that consumption is irrelevant. Consumers won’t have money to buy their shitty software anyway and governments and private military organisations will be running their increasingly automated mass murder programs on Azure servers. As they already did for the Palestinian genocide.

Depends on the model and training regimen. So likely no; it’s an engineering problem and they have good engineers and money to burn.

While true in theory, you only have so much effort to give. The capitalist/bureaucratic system is designed to exhaust us, to make free time feel like a waste so we have no time to reconsider our economic position and restructure our lives to benefit each other. Avoiding capitalist middlemen that can upcharge us and shape our cultural/material reality into something that gets us to contribute to the current oppressive structure.

The propaganda-cultivated sense of moral obligation to laboriously do some tiny individualist good by reducing your carbon footprint through consumer choice is meant to exhaust you and distract you. It doesn’t just shift blame, it expends your willingness to put effort into saving the planet in a way that doesn’t harm BP’s bottom line.

There are so many ways to benefit the planet that benefit you: saving money eating delicious vegan meals at a community kitchen (prepared with care by some of the best cooks in your community), getting access to better quality tools and appliances because your community has a well-stocked tool library and you can just borrow what you need for a fraction of the cost, decreasing medical waste by unionizing/protesting/rioting/revolting until you get high quality preventative healthcare, building/rebuilding neighborhoods to be walkable with high quality public transit to increase your physical and emotional wellbeing while decreasing emissions, or countless other options.

Or if you don’t have land, set up a community network for borrowing appliances and gifting stuff people are no longer using.

Things will get more expensive as the consequences of US foreign and domestic policy pile up. If your family can’t afford you to take a pay cut, understand that your family will be under water within the next few years regardless of what you do, and prepare accordingly. Given you will not be able to get what you need with money, how can you increase your chances of getting it through other means?

For me, at least, the easiest option is to join solidarity networks. Unionizing, sharing appliances, dumpster diving, learning trades and skills from each other, cooking communally to reduce waste and save time, squatting, etc.

And if you can’t afford to live given that, you’ll be far from the only one. So maybe join the others that are trying to change the system.

I’d like to see an increase of the welfare rate, but that seems to be a hard sell at the moment.

Daily reminder that welfare states save countries money immediately by preventing people from getting sick and becoming unable to work. You just need the country to capture a fraction of the increased profits companies make because they lose fewer people to illness and disability.

I’m not changing phone ecosystems, as I enjoy having some marginal level of control over* the hardware I fucking purchased*.

Open source android forks exist. Open source operating systems exist. Phones that natively run both exist. Do you mean that you specifically enjoy having maginal control, no more, no less?

It would be a big deal for someone to only come out as nonbinary when they’re old enough to be an ensign on a starship. How many times in high school did they say “No, I’m not nonbinary, I’m just a girl”? How many times did they insist to their parents on getting a girly thing because they wanted to fit in with a feminine friend group?

Social anxiety is always a valid emotion, even if you know the society is progressive enough that it isn’t really a big deal.

Thorium makes sense for supplying metropolises and 24/7 heavy industry between sunset and midnight. Uranium doesn’t make sense because it’s rare and hard to mine. Daytime nuclear doesn’t make sense because solar is cleaner, cheaper, and decentralized. And it doesn’t make sense for smaller cities, towns, and rural areas because you need to waste a shit-ton of electricity transporting the power of one reactor long distances.

It’s easy to forget how wasteful it is to lose 90% of your electricity transporting it long distances when that is what all the 20th century infrastructure was built around. But there are tons of energy storage methods that don’t require lithium that are more efficient, provided the electricity is generated locally.

For saving him from his antizioni *cough* pardon me, from his internalized antisemitism?

I mean, he can certainly try.

The Dutch postal service treats letters and packages differently, and electronic greeting cards are processed as letters. They probably didn’t formally recognize letters could contain electronics.

Dutch bureaucracy also tends to have a lot of tolerance/leeway (gedoogbeleid), where rather than fix bad policies everybody just sort of agrees to do things a “reasonable” way. Attempting to fix bad policies can be seen as an expression of mistrust, a threat to whatever people have been getting away with so far, or general narc/snitch behavior. So even if someone realized that electronic greeting cards could be a threat vector, it would have been rude/socially isolating of them to bring it up and deny everybody on board their cute electronic greeting cards from back home.

The chlorination of a public swimming pool is deadly to sperm, so I imagine the chances on a spaceship are a lot higher.

Also “easily seeing and avoiding” is just not realistic. You don’t have eyes on your vulva that are focused on checking for stray sperm globs 24/7.

• What’s that crater called?