The opposition (Labour) isn’t much better, especially when it comes to equalities. I am not looking forward to this Thursday, and having to think a lot about how grim it all is.

Gin, I think.

It’s debatable about whether this counts for the question, but I’m commenting because this wasn’t a case of “drank too much, was very sick” kind of story, which many people have about alcohol. Basically I was at a small party and I downed a shot of clear liquid that I believed to be vodka. It was not.

I didn’t even know there was any gin in the house, I hadn’t seen anyone drinking it. I wasn’t keen on the taste of gin before, but the unexpectedness of the taste was so bad I was sick. People were concerned because they worried I was overly-drunk, but it was entirely the flavour that did it. Now, anything that tastes or smells remotely similar to gin makes me feel sick.

Though even if we are counting gin as a food here, this is very much gin not being consumed in its normal way - I have never met anyone who would choose to do a shot of neat gin.

I’m not trans, but your question reminded me of something my ex told me about her family supportiveness that I wanted to share. To use your numbering scale, her family were probably 2/3, but they thought themselves to be 1. She said that even though she knew she was pretty fortunate, and that coming out hadn’t been as bad as she feared, she sometimes wondered whether it would be easier if her family were less supportive, but also were authentic in how much they supported.

The thing that really stuck with me was that she felt like she didn’t know where she stood with her family, because instead of it being a team effort where everyone is working to understand something big and still fairly new, she often had to bite her tongue when she had issues with what they said or did, having to measure her words carefully because they were liable to feeling hurt at any criticism of their behaviour.

What I mean by working as a team is that she was fairly early on in her transition and was navigating what gender dysphoria, and euphoria meant for her. If they were truly level 1 supportive, as they believed themselves to be, she’d be able to say “hey, that comment made me feel bad” without it being a While Thing, and maybe they could’ve had a productive discussion that would’ve led to an increased understanding for all.

Another side of this is that we speculated that they adjusted to consistently using the right pronouns way slower than if they just sat with their discomfort when they got it wrong and were corrected, rather than making excuses. My ex said that she never expected them to be 100% understanding and supportive right off the bat, but that she hoped they would grow into that — unfortunately, as long as they perceived themselves to be maximally supportive, there was no room for improvement.

The rough shape of this is an all too familiar pattern: people being more concerned with being considered transphobic than actually acting in ways that are harmful to trans people. It’s sad because regrettably, I used to be like that and so in them, I see alternate versions of myself — I was a queer person who very much considered myself a trans ally, without much understanding of what that actually meant because I didn’t know any trans people, often scared of saying the wrong thing, but in a self-centred way. I only grew beyond that because let myself be humbled and I chose to put in the internal work to be better, and my world is all the better for it; Intersectional solidarity is literally the main thing keeping me afloat nowadays, hope-wise.

We don’t talk much nowadays, but I hope her family have found the strength to challenge their internal biases and sit with their discomfort because this kind of improvement is uncomfortable and imo, the biggest “Level 1” thing is not treating it like a static level of supportiveness that is reached, like a max level i.e. understanding that what support is needed will change as life itself changes, and beyond the basics of “how not to be an asshole”, there is no guidebook on how to be supportive

Yeah, stuff like this is messy. I like that we’re all muddling along and figuring things out as they go. Much of this is a problem with distributed social media — but not “problem” in a bad way, but something to overcome.

Practically, I don’t know if there’s a better way to do it, because as you say, there’s not a one size fits all solution. I just wanted to say thanks because I probably wouldn’t have read the article myself if I had to get a no-paywall link myself, so the little conveniences help.

Which they would know, if they had read the article, right?

Edit: I shouldn’t comment just to express salt at someone, so actually also, thanks OP for the no-paywall link.

Fracking already is unprofitable now, if we account for the slimy corporate practices used to avoid paying for spent wells to be properly plugged.

Propublica has done a lot of good reporting on this topic, this is just one article of many, but this one explains aforementioned corporate slime quite well https://www.propublica.org/article/the-rising-cost-of-the-oil-industrys-slow-death

Some android phones have the ability to long press on a notification, click on settings, and alter what kinds of notifications you receive. I’ve had a few instances like you describe, but where I’ve been able to turn off “special deals” or whatever. I think implementation of this is done by the app developer though, because I’m sure I’ve had some apps that had no useful settings. Example screenshot of Gmail settings:

Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

Scientists’ words will always be twisted, regardless of what words they use. I agree that some words seem to sow confusion even within research fields, but I worry that attempting to change things may lead to an

A book that has really stuck with me is “Merchants of a Doubt”, which looks at how often the muddying the waters comes from a handful of scientists, who are presumably getting paid a bunch to do so, but not in a way that’s easy to debunk. The problem is that science is muddy by nature, so scientists learn how to wade through mud (ideally) and work around and through it. I’m of the belief that the way forward will require for science in general to become more accessible to people in general, because I think the epistemically privileged nature of science is deepening distrust i.e. we are taught to trust science™ and only scientists are allowed to challenge other scientists. This makes sense, but I think it fosters a sense of distrust in people who I honestly can’t blame for feeling like the system doesn’t care about them.

I’m feeling like maybe blind trust in institutions might just be an untenably bad situation, because I’m a scientist and I don’t know whether scientific education in the model of "scientific communication happens when the Scientists™ come down from their ivory towers and gift the common folk with knowledge, who are not allowed to question or add to this knowledge, unless they become a member of Science™ (or they are a person to whom science is done to

Thanks for this comment, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I had realised about how being gay is framed as a thing you do rather than a thing you are, because I have a friend who is an ex-benedictine monk, and they explained about how their vow of chastity meant they were basically “one of the good ones”. A large part of why they left was because their rhetoric was “everyone has sinful desires in them and turning away from those is an important challenge”, but the unspoken part was that his gayness made his desires extra bad, like there was just some innately bad thing in him.

And of course they would apply this same logic to gender. As you say, it makes more sense when you try to see it from their angle. I think that’s important to do if we hope to ever refute them

A few posts above this one, I saw a post about how German bridges are falling apart, so your comment has done me psychic damage. Man, things feel grim.

Theme Hospital is one of the greats of an era. (N.b. there’s a mod called CorsixTH which fixes a lot of issues with the original game (mostly age related clunkiness)

You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1

(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll

Oh damn, I just lost the game too, and now I’m thinking about the game as if it were a virus - like, I reckon we really managed to flatten the curve for a few years there, but it continues to circulate so we haven’t been able to eradicate it

I saw some previous news coverage of the Devs saying they’d rather players pirate it than have it spoiled for them, and I went in blind and bought it full price. I don’t generally play this kind of game but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Finland is very good for people who hate smalltalk.

I love stories like this because it makes me reflect on random people I’ve seen who have stuck in my memory for years who probably never noticed me. Makes me wonder if anyone remembers me for something random like this

I’ve not heard that quote, who said it?

Well that’s a horrifying way to think of things, thank you for that (not sarcastic)

Social constructivism applied to science argues that an objective, observer-independent reality doesn’t exist, (or that if it does, it’s not accessible by humans, which is functionally the same thing). Under that framework, then whenever we talk about gravity, we’re not talking about some objective truth, but our attempts to model what we perceive as an objective truth. Hell, the only way we’re able to have this conversation at all is because I wrote “gravity is a social construct” and you understood what I was referencing enough to disagree.