How do I know I'm better than I was? I lost my car keys for a solid hour today, and I didn't freak out or have a nervous breakdown. I just methodically searched throughout the house

and found them as I was disassembling my recliner.

You're welcome, glad it stuck. Some of the stuff you've said stuck with me over the years (positively).

but the people trying the hardest to champion usually end up being the ones being corrected the most because they're willing to put in the work.

The important part about being one of these people is to be okay with being corrected. Every community I've encountered, or personally been a part of, has been very giving to people who fuck up, so long as you correct yourself and keep moving. "Sorry, my bad," goes a long way.

I did a bit of deep dive to see where this discussion built from, and I have to say I'm very disappointed that TNG posted an article by a person whose notoriety mostly comes from preferring that people like me don't exist. I think it behooves us to consider who writes articles, and what their motives might be, before we post them.

I would assert that this article is a much better read on the situation.

It's important to remember that trans people are, as has historically been the case (see Weimar Berlin, 1920s America, 1950s America), the canary in the coal mine of conservative attempts to pull the Overton window back in their direction. As a minority, we are easy to vilify, especially those of us who are gender non-conforming. We are not a part of regular experience, and so we are easily turned into a bogeyman. That's what the "Gender Critical" movement does, and it has reared its ugly head quite publicly in the UK.

The knock-on result of these current efforts (If they come for the trans people, and you do nothing because you are not a trans person) is that anyone who does not fit a conservative ideal of "man" and "woman" becomes subject to ridicule and lost opportunity. Already cis women are getting harassed by men for "going into the wrong bathroom". Fuck, my old masters teacher, a midwestern mom, has had this experience. the only "gender nonconforming" feature she has is a caesar haircut.

An incredible amount of the people who signed that letter are bad news. There have been some great rereads of Rowling's books with her current views in mind, and well, they get ugly. A race of human-like creatures who love to be servants and don't know what they would do if they were freed. a race of long-nosed caricatures who have few rights but control all the money. A woman who shapeshift but has "mannish hands" (a classic transphobic trope). Atwood has actively been part of attempts to silence women who accused a UBC professor of sexual assault.

These people are not good company. They have a right to say what they believe, but they don't have a right to freedom from criticism, or freedom from the consequences of saying those things, nor do they have a right to a public forum to say them. Free speech absolutism is the privileged opinion of people for which there are no actual consequences when they have an academic argument around "do Black people deserve to be beaten by police", and "Do trans people deserve rights". It is the privilege of those who believe they are unaffected.

Until, well, they are affected.

I mean, I literally just told you that I personally know people who are signal boosting these stories, who are involved in activism, who are the kind of people who tell all their friends before major holidays to save the fireworks so the veterans in the area don't have to find a dark, quiet place to hide.

The people in my community who are advocating for physical doctors to listen to women when they're in pain are the same people who are advocating for mental health doctors and psychologists to listen to men when they're in pain. The rate of suicide in men is absolutely gobsmacking. So is the rate of suicide for children under the age of 13.

What drove me to comment as I did is that so often, these stories come with an unspoken (or sometimes explicitly spoken) tag line of "and where are the feminists who say they're for equality?" When it happens, it always comes off to me like the News commentators who ask about black-on-black violence after a white cop kills a black kid.

And in some cases, it's well warranted because there are some shit people who claim feminism. Germaine Greer, for example, is a shit feminist. But again, I need to reinforce that the only people I see talking about these stories are intersectional feminists and queer people. These are the people I see helping people with mental health issues, helping veterans and sexual assault survivors with PTSD. And they're the people who I see get made fun of for creating "safe spaces" where people can talk about their shit, where they know and accept that the concepts like "manning up" are a result of toxic masculinity, a type of masculinity that says men are not allowed to show any emotion other than derision and rage.

And these are also the voices that mainstream culture and mainstream politics are doing their best to squeeze out.

The transport sector is so cutthroat, and so is the warehouse work. They force you to compete with your colleagues, and it's not in a "fun" way, it's a "whomever does the worst will get fired at the end of the week, or told by the employment agency that we don't need you." People end up sabotaging each other because they need the job.

But it's because they're forcing humans to try to compete with automation, on a broad scale. All of the companies who have the money are moving in the direction of automation because it's cheaper and better than labour, and all the companies who don't are bleeding their workforce dry trying to keep up.

And this isn't new either, it's just exacerbating an old problem.

This started when all the big marts started artificially lowering prices to attract consumers. What started as loss-leading became "let's see how we can have this price all the time." To do that, they have to tie their manufacturers into contracts where they will pay less than what it costs to make the item, but promise to buy in bulk. Then they tie the shippers into contracts where they will pay them less than what the mileage will cost, but promise to be exclusive.

Then, when those contracts come up, they refuse to pay more than their previous contract. Indeed, they usually offer less. If the shipper or manufacturer refuses, they just find somebody else who will take the old contract price and start again.

They squeeze blood from the stone to get more people in their doors, and that blood comes from the people on the bottom end of the totem pole - drivers, loaders, order pickers. All in the name of getting cheap consumer goods.

We're our own worst enemies.

This is not just an unpopular opinion - It's an opinion that actively leads to the death of thousands of people a year worldwide.

People just like me.

This is the only opinion here that i will actively say "go fuck yourself." to. There's having beliefs that are different from other people, and then there is having beliefs that get other people actively killed, and giving social disadvantage to those who it doesn't kill.

Like, what the fuck did I or any other trans person do to you, man? It costs you literally nothing to treat us like we're slightly above dirt, but it's "inconvenient" to call me a woman, or call my friend a man so you just won't do it. All I want is to look in the mirror and not hate myself and what I see, and then be treated with respect like anybody else. I don't see how that is imposing on you too unduly.

I will be honest, this is a sentiment that I saw over and over and over when i was in Ohio. I lived in Northeast Ohio which is okay as prosperity goes, but Akron, where I lived and went to school, was a town in the grips of a serious poverty problem.

But you would see the people who were themselves on social assistance being the most harsh on other people. "I'm having a tough time, I lost my job," "I'm having a hard time, my husband was diagnosed with a blood cancer and we have no medical insurance", "I'm having a had time, our son was born with brittle bones." There was always a reason that they were on social assistance, waiting in line at the food bank. But the next half of their line... "I'm having a hard time for x reason. But that guy in front of me? He just needs to work harder! he just needs to pull himself up by his bootstraps and find a job, work more hours."

Basically, "I have a reason and deserve this help, but these other people deserve their suffering."

I was told it comes from the concept that every poor American believes they're just a "Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire", combined with the other, more biblical concept that all of the other people in their situation deserve their suffering because of either something they did, or more commonly something they didn't do.

I have some of the same feelings about Alternative, or Gender Neutral pronouns that you do. I find that they can be exclusionary to people who are just trying to deal with you in every day life.

That being said, early in my transition I went by They/Them, which is a Gender Neutral pronoun, for my own comfort and because of my own insecurities.

Gender is on a spectrum, so there are a lot of gradients between the most Masculine and the most Feminine, and there are also people who feel neither masculine nor feminine. I accept all of these people, and think that their identities are valid - But trying to get our language as it stands right now to wrap around them is a problem.

We don't want to change the people, so we have to change the language. We just need to... y'know... agree on a gender neutral pronoun.

America hates poor people. To put an even finer point on it, America's poor people hate poor people - and the rich do whatever they can to facilitate that.

It will be interesting to see if there is a follow through from Unilever, who is not only the creator of AXE body products, but also Dove, which for a long time used the tag line:

"Strong Enough for a Man, Made for a Woman."

this was changed to the only slightly improved

"Strong Enough for a Woman."

the truth is that the only way sexist ads will disappear is if companies end uselessly gendered products. What makes a scent masculine or feminine? The answer is that there isn't one - Some masculine scents on the market are even functionally identical to feminine scents, just wrapped in different branding. or with ever-so-slightly different combinations - Say, instead of Vanilla and Coconut and Chamomile, it will be Madagascar Vanilla and Coconut, or some such.

I had an interesting experience when I went to a local scent shop and bought a roller bottle of perfume - Bergamot Orange, Sandalwood and Musk. The clerk asked her supervisor if this was a men's scent (I obviously was not having a good "passing" day) - who said it was fine for both genders.

Now, aside from the fact that It shouldn't matter, I'm a customer buying a product, this is interesting to me because i SWEAR when I was in university I had a tester for a Hugo Boss cologne (for men) that had Bergamot Orange, Sandalwood, and Musk.

Ain't that some shit.

I hope this event becomes an valuable learning experience for the Ethereum community and wish you all the best of luck.

Snarky fucker,aren't they? I guess the question becomes "how right are they?"

Here's where mine comes from. On occasion, if IRC is being a jerk and not letting me use it (or I just feel like it), I'll use LifeMeasurer for the same reason.

Here's the straight dope: Russia wants to protect their oil assets in the region, and Russia wants to protect their political assets in the region so that they can eventually gain access to a warm water port (that's not, you know, in the black sea) It's the exact same reason that Russia invaded Afghanistan, why the USSR held so many of the 'Stans. My brother, a history / Poli-sci major, once joked that America has a 4 year plan to take over the world, Russia has a 400 year plan.

Anyone interested in Russia's foreign policy in the area should have a look at War at the Top of the World, by Eric Margolis. It focuses more specifically on the worldwide actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, etc, but the concepts also apply here and elsewhere in the middle east and Asia.

fuck, i would buy this.

YAAAAAY!!!!

As always, don't read the comments, Kids.

I'm not going to even get started about how poorly-informed you are about the subject, mostly because a.) you've already made up your mind about how correct you are, and b.) I don't have to justify my existence to anyone.

I'll just leave this here, from the American Psychiatric Association, and point out a specific response from page 3:

Is being transgender a mental disorder?

A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability. Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder. For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures, and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression, or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.

Emphases mine to point out specifically how incorrect you are.

If you're actually interested in learning more about trans people, what it means to be trans, and how to treat trans people with respect, then let me know. Otherwise, I think we're done here.

I think the secret to finding content is

1.) being passionate about something.

2.) finding content about that something you're passionate about.

then

3.) being passionate about the content about that something to share it.

The great thing about the internet is also its curse - It is incredibly, incredibly vast. "rule 34" comes to mind:

If you can think of it, there is porn of it on the internet

what is true of pornography is also true of the rest of content. If you're interested in something, there is a greater than zero chance that there is not only some other dude, but probably a group of other people who are also really interested in it too - the challenge is to find them.

The secret to finding good content is the secret to a lot of things in life: being active, engaged, and passionate about something.

It's Canada Day!

I work for the first half of today, but then I have the rest off. It's raining cats and dogs outside, but you never know how many people are going to show up to this restaurant - Sometimes it seems rainy days are good for us!

Happy early 4th of july to all those south of the border, and Happy Canada day to us Canuks! Drink responsibly!

Hey, when I said drink responsibly I meant 3 things:

1.) don't drink and drive

2.) Don't get blotto if you need to take care of someone else

3.) try not to end up in the hospital.

... I have a liberal definiton of what it means to drink "responsibly."

You think that's cool? Go into your settings, and under "Aesthetics", turn on "Zen."