windowlicker
i love the thread in the comments where he had to look up the statistics around energy access in china, saw multiple sources saying 100%, and refused to believe it. its too hard for him to consider that a government would put lots of resources and effort into improving people's livelihoods, so that ALL of its citizens can have access to electricity.
also i just noticed this.
China just isn’t technologically capable of producing new viruses.
its obviously just blatant racism and sinophobia, but this is factually untrue. china ranks number 1 in the world for output of scientific research right now. when the pandemic happened, the initial research on it (and the complete genetic sequencing of the first strain) was done almost entirely by chinese scientists. i can personally attest that a large amount of the research being put out in my field currently are from chinese researchers.
wendy carlos. an early pioneer of synthesizer music (she was a part of creating and popularizing the moog and even made a few synths of her own). she has lived out as a trans woman since 1968 and did the soundtracks for a clockwork orange, tron (1982), and the shining. i also own a copy of her album switched-on bach on tape and vinyl and it's a masterpiece of synthesizer work. her website is also visually unchanged since the 90s.
beth elliott. a lesbian trans woman who was a folk singer in the 70s and made a lot of awesome songs. she was a huge part of her local lesbian/feminist organizing in her area in the time, serving in the leadership of many orgs. but in the orgs she served with, she was consistently harassed and attacked mercilessly by TERFs from within the orgs. i think her story goes to show that we have been, since the early days, instrumental in organizing these spaces with other feminists and lesbians and yet even back then they've attacked us for it.
i don't know much about her life, but there's a trans woman named linda phillips who wrote a little section about her life that ended up in feinberg's "trans liberation: beyond pink or blue". in it, she wrote a sentence that i think about every single day and one day i'll get tattooed somewhere. "i have actually had the best of any life i could dream of". in the face of medical professionals and transphobes and all saying how much it must suck to be trans and trying to define our existence by suffering, it is a bold statement that out of any of the lives she could have lived, this one where she lived out as herself was the best one she could have lived.
her music saved my life when i came out and as i was navigating life as a trans woman for the few years after coming out. seen her every time she's toured through my state with whatever band she's doing stuff with. her book is a really good read and she's a very inspiring person.
i've been wearing mine every day (which, by the way, ones made by hirbawi are unbelievably soft and beautiful) and have gotten quite a few hostile reactions to it. even people outright saying its "disturbing to see" and one guy yelling "fuck you". and they call the left snowflakes... they're offended over a beautiful scarf.
i always question why they even need all of that equipment. i've seen churches totally decked out with top-of-the-line mixers, huge PA systems, etc. and it leaves me wondering what the purpose even is. aren't churches built to have pretty good acoustics? they're just doing soft rock and sermons, it's not a fucking metallica concert. just get up there and sing with your acoustic guitar and get down.
just a free money glitch
i'm definitely "gayana"
this is so used soooo frequently in discussions about biology. the argument literally just boils down to "i think the biological mechanisms of life are too complex and so obviously some insanely intelligent thing made it". for some reason, it's easier for some to believe that a hyper intelligent god made biological mechanisms than that they occurred simply by chance and millions of years of trial and error that refined them. besides, they aren't even that efficient sometimes. mRNA synthesis begins with abortive initiation, where the RNA polymerase will try several times to begin synthesizing the chain but it will just fall off after a few nucleotides and the process has to start again, until it just, by chance, happens to make it past the first few. does that sound like the doing of a hyper intelligent entity? it doesn't, it sounds like something that has been hastily put together by nature and whatever works works. when you look at the whole thing, it can definitely look insanely complex, but when you start looking at the details it becomes obvious that its just nature trying to find something that works and then sticking with it with a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude.
in russia it has historically been very similar to the rest of europe. heavy suppression of homosexual activity (criminalization of sodomy, especially in the army) in the imperial era but with a queer underground that existed in traditionally masculine spaces and brothels. the tsarist code of law was abolished after the revolution, and with it the anti-sodomy law, but unfortunately the medical/psychiatric structure of the RSFSR and the USSR as a whole was plagued by conservative views that pathologized queerness. this queerphobia in the psychiatric system lead to it being abused for finding extralegal means to repress homosexual behaviors in the 20s. this kind of changed with the first five year plan and trans people were given a little more legal leeway but in kind of a strange spot. trans people were often allowed to exist and transition legally, and in one case a trans woman was permitted by a local people's court in kazan to obtain a female name and documents stating she was a female. though it was seen more with the lens of "there's something psychologically wrong with these people, but letting them change their gender will treat some of that psychological pain". if you're interested in more about this, homosexual desire in revolutionary russia has a lot of historical information thats been translated from original documents, just be wary of the looming liberal ideology that the author sprinkles in there. just stick to the historical information in there and make your own conclusions.
interlinked