paninid - Tumblr blog

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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

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Low-key obsessed with watching storms die on the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

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How to have a good internet experience in 8 easy steps

#1 - Stop having a bad faith interpretation of every thing you read

If you think something someone said might have been something you disagree with, instead of starting an argument, ask them to clarify or ask them specific questions about what they said

You will be so surprised to find that half the people you assume are being shitty or negative just didn't phrase what they meant very well

#2 - Learn to block people

It's free, it's easy, and it will save your life. Tired of someone tagging your stuff with characters from a fandom you don't like? Don't try to control them by telling them not to, just fucking block them. Less upsetting to them, less work for you, less inflammatory, more effective.

#3 - Don't share your entire backstory with strangers on the internet

No one is entitled to your information - not your pronouns, your age, your sexuality, your location, nothing.

Share the things that you're comfortable with, but remember that the more you share, the more vulnerable you make yourself to attacks. Like, do not share your triggers in your bio. You are giving abusers and harassers a to do list. Keep that shit private for your own safety.

You can get harassed, you can get stalked, you can get doxxed. Internet safety is real and necessary and the less we care about it, the more we set up future generations to get hurt through the internet

#4 - Learn to say, "It's none of my business."

Don't understand someone's desire to use neo pronouns? None of your business. Can't understand why someone is a furry? None of your business. Curious about how someone who talks about being poor can have a Starbucks in that last selfie they posted? None of your damn business.

If you don't like certain things on your dash, unfollow or block people. If you don't understand how someone can identify a certain way or do a certain thing or like a certain thing or feel a certain way or literally anything, just remember, it's none of your business.

If you have genuine questions from a place of good faith (i.e. what inspired you to use neopronouns?/what do you pronouns mean to you?) Go for it. But if you're only asking questions to draw negative attention to someone or make them feel bad or to other them, you're just being a nosy asshole.

Minding your own business is also good for you because - and I mean this genuinely - feeling entitled and superior is fucking exhausting. I know, because I've been 20 before. You will have a way better time online if you just stop caring about shit that doesn't concern you

#5 - Learn to lurk

Lurking is frequently seen as a bad thing, like someone who's lurking is somehow being creepy. The truth is, lurking is a great way to learn. More people should do it.

For example, if you're new to a community, spend some time consuming content and information from that community without saying anything. This goes for fandoms, queer spaces, disabled spaces, cultural spaces, etc.

Nothing is worse than being in a community for years and someone popping in for the first time in their life and airing their opinions loudly and with zero respect for the space. A great example of this is that post someone made about the leather pride flag. You know the one.

(If you don't, basically, someone said that the leather pride flag is embarrassing and insulting to the queer community and has no place at pride and then got schooled by hundreds of people about how the leather pride flag is one of the oldest flags in the queer community and leather daddies and leather dykes were the people on the front lines protecting other queer people from cops back in the 80s and 90s)

So basically, learn the history of a community, research your opinions before you decide they're your opinions, and keep your ignorance to yourself until you're not ignorant anymore. Not only is this better for community spaces, you won't have 9000 notifications of people telling you to shut the fuck up

Learning to lurk to educate yourself about a space also makes actually speaking in that space a lot easier

#6 - Stop believing everything you read

I'm not talking about stupid funny stories. Believe them - it's not hurting anything to get a laugh out of something that may or may not have happened.

I'm talking about news and current events. If you hear that some celebrity did something and there are no receipts, go and find the receipts or discard it. People spread misinformation on here all the damn time. It's like a game of telephone and, unfortunately, a lot of small creators end up getting slandered and canceled because of it.

#7 - Quit wasting energy on hating random shit

Being annoyed by a certain fandom is one thing, but actively hating things that other people do just because you're not into it is such a waste of your energy. Not only are you actively putting more negativity into the world, you're wasting your own time on things that upset you.

Focus your time and energy on the things you do like and quit scrolling through Tumblr user AnimeIReallyHate7648's discourse blog. You might think it's fun, but there comes a point where hating something goes from kind of fun to actually obsessive and unhealthy for you as a person.

#8 - Unlearn purity culture

This is a big one guys. What is purity culture? It's referenced a lot, but I think a lot of you don't know what it is.

In short, purity culture is when people take many nuanced situations and try to divide them into black and white categories. There's the Good category and the Bad category. The problem is, life is not in black and white. You can't put a neat line down the middle between good and bad. This kind of thinking is extremely regressive. Ask any therapist alive and they will tell you that black and white thinking is unhealthy and often a Symptom of Something.

So, what happens is, someone sees something on the good side and spots something they think is morally objectionable in it and says, "this can't be here, it needs to go to the Bad side." (Cancel culture). The problem is, people are always on the lookout for anything wrong in the Good - constantly looking for impurities so that they can completely sanitize things and therefore be free of sin. So they will look harder and harder and harder and keep moving things to the Bad side of the line until there's basically nothing left on the Good side.

This ends up meaning that perfectly good media is canceled because every character in it didn't make the perfect, right choice every time. It damages media in that it demands characters be completely flawless - something no human is. When a character does something that's actually problematic, even if the media doesn't condone the behavior, instead of engaging with it and using it as an opportunity to learn and teach other people why that wasn't okay, people who subscribe to purity culture throw the baby out with the bathwater, saying the entire piece of media should be canceled because its creators support the problematic action of that character (even if they don't).

This entire line of thinking is extremely unhealthy, heavily informed by Christianity, infantilizes adults, assumes no one can distinguish fiction from reality, and promotes censorship, which has a long and sordid history.

I could go on about this at length, so if anyone wants a full post, just let me know. But the point is, purity culture is bad for community, it's bad for media, it's bad for healthy emotional and intellectual development, it's bad for interpersonal understanding and empathy, and it's bad for you.

Unlearn purity culture and you will be a happier person. If all else fails, remember step #4.