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in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

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Well, you know, some bathroom graffiti offers insight.

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It's my 13 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

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Anyone interested in American history, government, or rhetoric may be intrigued to learn about Catiline.

The founders were *obsessed* with Catiline’s plot to overthrow a republican government, both by conspiracy and by violence.

As products of the American Enlightenment, they referred to a parallel in ancient history.

They talked about it.

All the time.

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A meditative injection on cybergrunge first principles

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“The Civil War begun in 1861 had for years its premonitions…but they were not understood by the wisest of observers.

The increased alarm among the friends of the institution of slavery for safety, would alone have been ominous for strong fear of losing possessions, tempts to rash and violent means of relief.

There were other signs of coming evils the growing desire, especially a politicians in the south, who were extremists, not only to preserve slavery, within its existing limits but to fortify its perpetuity by extending its area, and also the widened direction of an intense and long-cherished animosity against abolitionists.”

- Thomas Humes, Loyal Mountaineers, 1888

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These "expert" pediatricians were paid by a far-right legal group to come up with evidence to attack the WPATH transgender standards of care

What this is: Leaked documents show the anti-LGBT legal group Alliance Defending Freedom paying manufactured experts to attack WPATH’s transgender standards of care, asking them to find evidence for harmful anti-trans myths that they knew were baseless and unsubstantiated. This is an original finding and report by Zinnia Jones (she/her), a transgender Florida resident of 11 years whose access to HRT is now jeopardized by the enactment of state law and policy based on work from these same experts.

Detailed summary: From 2019 onward, states across the US have been faced with an intensely active wave of reused anti-trans experts, recurring characters who keep repeating the same spurious arguments against gender-affirming care in court cases, legislatures, and other policy bodies. Where did they come from, and why did this start happening?

Due to the Florida-based anti-LGBT hate group American College of Pediatricians choosing to set one of their Google Drive folders to be publicly viewable by anyone, files were released this month showing the contents of their staff’s communications and other working notes over several years.

These documents included records of the Alliance Defending Freedom - another hate group who are also responsible for bringing the mifepristone case with ACP as a plaintiff - approaching ACP's leaders in 2018 and 2019 to offer them a grant of $10,000 or more. The ADF wanted the pediatricians “to draft a white paper that refutes the WPATH Standards of Care”, “for use in litigation and should also benefit many other allies at State and Federal Level”.

ACP’s president Quentin Van Meter and executive director Michelle Cretella promptly got to work on this “Special Project”, and the ADF hosted expert witness workshops at ACP's conferences. ACP members including Van Meter went on to present anti-trans testimony in several ADF-litigated cases and ADF-involved trans youth care bans.

In May 2022, Van Meter authored a sham report for Florida Medicaid to justify their trans coverage exclusion, mostly drawing from previous ACP position statements; court filings later revealed Michelle Cretella was recommended by the Florida governor’s office, and she pointed the way to all the other anti-trans experts hired by Florida in 2022 to support the Medicaid exclusion of transition care.

One notable document found in the ACP’s drive contains “Transgender Research Requests”, with the ADF asking Cretella and other ACP leaders to “substantiate” now-commonplace anti-trans talking points. These included bizarre claims by the ADF such as “it is normal during adolescence for children to go through a phase when they identify (to some degree) with the opposite sex”, and “For those who have undergone hormone therapy and genital change surgery, a paper that says they are no happier (and perhaps worse off if the research supports it)”.

The ADF was asking this anti-trans group to come up with anything that could support the arguments they were already planning to make.

This appears to be one of the very sites where those baseless myths about suicide, social contagion and other supposed harms, now regularly repeated in court cases and testimony and uncritically accepted by the mainstream right wing, were conceived and gestated.

These same experts then substantially reused these work products in their reports for Florida Medicaid, a public health agency whose accepted standards determination process is supposed to be a transparent and open-ended evaluation of peer-reviewed medical evidence.

Altogether, these documents appear to demonstrate a paid smear by a hate group and right-wing law firm against a leading professional transgender healthcare organization following the best available evidence and medical practices, as well as misconduct on the part of ACP experts who reused this work in their reports for a Florida public health agency.

(asks are open)

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Dour Humanism

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“We like to look to the horizon instead of to the soil because we bury the people we do not care about in the South.

It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people.

It is where we put the social problems we are willing to accept in exchange for the promise of individual opportunity in places that sound more sophisticated.

But the South is still a laboratory for the political disenfranchisement that works just as well in Wisconsin as it does in Florida.

Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope.”

💯🔥❤️‍🩹

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Sense-making 101

There is an audience of colleagues paying attention.

They are employees of very large - publicly traded - companies with more than 5-10k employees.

This demographic is *not* the economy, but it dominates the national conversation and news.

——

This type of enterprise has a sane and ambitious board.

The board empowered a committee to draft human resources policies.

Covered employees are subject to policies designed to limit human capital risk to the enterprise.

Colleagues are incentivized to conform to such policies.

If not, they run the risk of over-sharing to professional networks, attracting the wrong kind of attention, and a labor lawyer needing to explain how termination is like being temporary “canceled”.

——

Following the Pareto Principle, 80% of users on LinkedIn fall into the casual-to-never segment of the attention algorithm.

That same cohort is not at liberty to speak (i.e. comment, post, create content) without potentially risking their career, vocation, and livelihood.

——

Now’s the time to post your epic fails, demonstrate gratitude, and be kind to yourselves.

Let your freak flag fly, or the algorithm will infer you’re not human.

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Oh, you thought you weren’t in the Cultural Cake Wars show?

Das funny.

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10 posts!

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“The crisis is not just happening in San Francisco [or California]. Housing costs are perverting just about every facet of American life, everywhere.

What we eat, when we eat it, what music we listen to, what sports we play, how many friends we have, how often we see our extended families, where we go on vacation, how many children we bear, what kind of companies we found: All of it has gotten warped by the high cost of housing.

Nowhere is immune, because big cities export their housing shortages to small cities, suburbs, and rural areas too."

via The Atlantic

#housing #wealthcreation #shelter

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It oughta be a never-ending premise for comedy that Enlightenment Era settler-colonialists funded extractive public-private partnerships for the sake of spices to improve their privileged culinary experience and now the descendants of their sensitive palates can’t hang.

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I wonder how much of our political weirdness is really just the legacy of Baby Boomer influence on society and culture and public policy.

A child born in 1959 would have been 21 years old in 1980, with 11% interest rates.

At 31, an ex-CIA director is president.

At 41, the information superhighway is blowing up, and at 51, the world is stumbling out of a Great Financial Crisis.

At 61, he may have non-communicable disease making him susceptible to a respiratory pandemic.

And, by the time he’s 71, he may have 20 more years of life expectancy thanks to advances in medicine, science, and technology, but Social Security is drained, so hopefully he saved enough to not die.

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Weekly image, meme, and photo dump