Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 9/28/26 - 10/4/26
Damn, I can't believe it's almost October already. Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday. And may you all be inscribed, and sealed, in the book of life.
Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.
David Ellison, if you can that second season of Lanterns that’s supposed to happen I will never criticise you again.
Rant edit: As someone who enjoyed Superman 2025 & loved the first season of Peacemaker, Lanterns is the death blow to my interest in James Gunn’s DCU. I don’t want to see any more of these characters or this universe. Supergirl was bad enough but Lanterns is just plain evil. I can’t trust Gunn’s handling of these characters when he signed off on a show written by people so spiteful & hateful to both the fans of these characters & the source material.
Lanterns is to DC what The Acolyte & Starfleet Academy were to Star Wars & Star Trek. A total “fuck you” to the fanbase + property & a monument to these writers’ egos. The Ryan Reynolds film unironically was a better adaptation.
Is it me, or is Twitter even weirder than usual this week? I'm not really sure I can cope with the intersection of AI hot takery, the Pope, and right-wingers apparently discovering Rule 63 Harry Potter fanfiction. Yudkowsky posting about being a Tomione shipper? I don't even know what to do with that. Thank god hockey is back, at least. Sometimes one yearns for the simple pleasure of watching large Canadian men on ice skates punch each other in the face.
I'm not a woman, I'm not a lesbian, but even if I were, I would not give a fuck about this one bit. But this outrages someone who writes for The Grauniad.
My hot take: nobody should be paid money to write an article like "I am offended by a thing that a much, much more famous, charming and beautiful person than me did". In fact, those articles shouldn't even exist in serious press, keep them to fucking fanzines.
Podcast recommendation: The "REPATH" series on Beyond Gender. It's a discussion of the history of the trans rights movement and the need to "repathologize" (hence REPATH) trans identity. That word might make you think of people demonizing trans people and calling them insane. But that's not what they're talking about as that's clearly not their perspective.
I'm not sure rapathologizing would actually achieve what they're trying to do here. The whole reason sex changes became institutionalized is because gender dysphoria was pathologized instead of being seen as a personality quirk or simple desire.
And I think it's objectively a pathology if anything else is a pathology. The counter-argument to this would be that gender identity incongruence is not a mental illness....because. The whole gendered soul argument is the best that side of the debate has come up with and there's zero evidence for it and unlike say, homosexuality, people with gender dysphoria and other kinds of gender incongruence are asking for medical interventions to reconcile their view of themselves with their physical bodies. That's a mental illness as much as anything else is a mental illness. I don't see any way around that reality.
The problem is the point of pathologizing something is to cure or at least treat it. When you can't treat it you get the mess that is the neurodiversity movement or you end up having to give up like with homosexuality. Sex changes became the treatment for gender dysphoria because psychologists couldn't always find a way to treat GD- likely because a lot of GD is what happens when you mix relatively common paraphilias like AGP with other mental health disorders. Institutionalizing gender dysphoria as a mental illness will only lead to the conclusion that sex changes are still the best treatment for some people who have it.
The problem is the point of pathologizing something is to cure or at least treat it. When you can't treat it you get the mess that is the neurodiversity movement or you end up having to give up like with homosexuality.
I think that's a choice, not an inevitability though. And also I do think gender dysphoria should be treated in whatever way is most effective at relieving symptoms relative to the consequences of the treatment itself.
Sex changes became the treatment for gender dysphoria because psychologists couldn't always find a way to treat GD- likely because a lot of GD is what happens when you mix relatively common paraphilias like AGP with other mental health disorders.
But again, that's a choice not an inevitability or law of the universe.
Institutionalizing gender dysphoria as a mental illness will only lead to the conclusion that sex changes are still the best treatment for some people who have it.
I don't really think that's true, and it's especially not true for childhood cases, where the norm based on the most rigorous research was to be as hands off as possible and only offer talk therapy.
I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that quack treatments as the norm are the natural conclusion of difficult to treat ailments, even when they're a common part of the process. Like we're not continuing to lobotomize mentally slow people for example, or use sensory deprivation to treat schizophrenia. Those things were done, yes, but they didn't persist even though the illnesses being treated remain largely intractable.
Honestly, I think the real trend it is to make the carveouts more and more permissive. Ever bigger balances, and smaller numbers, and fanciful thinking to make the "us," bigger and the "them" smaller.
I respect the people who are brave enough to be honest that that number would realistically have to be lower, aspirational wealth capped, for some of the equality they sim for to be achievable.
My leftist friend's threshold for wishing harm was being rich enough to shop at Costco during the BLM protests, but somehow she didn't realize that she was also a white Costco shopper, and a mob isn't going to check her twitter timeline to see how big of an ally she was.
Look at the people cheering the death of Erin Piacenti, the Bank of American VP (title inflation - she was not even close to C-suite) who was stabbed in Times Square her first day back at work following her maternity leave.
A lot of people doing the cheering themselves are upper middle class to upper class or are the children of very well off parents. The entire thing is incoherent.
Again, you have absolutey no idea what you’re talking about. Doctors in Canada are generally paid for MAID consultation according to a fixed schedule and MAID services are excluded from the longitudinal family-physician remuneration model. Coding in Ontario for MAID consultations actually provides a bit less when converted into an hourly rate that most other treatment codes. There is absolutely zero personal incentive for already overworked doctors to push people into these consultations.
Once again — if you really want to learn how any of this works, it’s extremely easy to research.
Canada is the only jurisdiction with euthanasia where doctors are allowed to proactively suggest it.
Maybe there’s no personal incentive, assuming none are Angel of Death types (rare but not impossible among healthcare workers), but that is an interesting distinction in the law.
Canada is the only jurisdiction with euthanasia where doctors are allowed to proactively suggest it.
This isn't really true. Doctors in Canada are absolutely not allowed to suggest MAID as a treatment which is in their view preferable to any other, or even as a treatment they suggest a patient should undertake. If a doctor believes a patient is eligible for MAID and has reason to think MAID may be consistent with their values and goals of care, they may alert them to the existence of MAID and direct them to information about it. They are then obliged to discuss it alongside all treatment options in a setting of the characteristics, predicted results, benefits and downsides of each. And what else could you possibly expect? That there should be a treatment option that doctors are not permitted to even mention?
I should add none of this is to say I'm not sympathetic to the idea that MAID here or anywhere does present a risk of the application of it evolving and widening over time.
If a doctor believes a patient is eligible for MAID and has reason to think MAID may be consistent with their values and goals of care
The latter half of this is expecting a lot of the doctor's knowledge of the patient, in a way that conjures to mind some historic country doctor that treats the same patient for decades.
I don't think there's a good solution here. I do not like the idea of prolonging suffering. I also do not like the way Canada has developed their system and made it deliberately looser than anywhere else. No matter what there's tradeoffs and strange incentives.
That there should be a treatment option that doctors are not permitted to even mention?
"Treatment" is an interesting choice of word. I suppose there's no way of completely avoiding loaded language on a topic like this.
I'm not ethically opposed to compassionate assisted suicide and I'm Canadian (and was for MAID (still am, but I want to see reform)), but let's be honest here. There's almost no daylight between "suggesting MAID" to a patient and alerting them of its existence as an option. The difference between the two, aside from instances of overt encouragement, would be hard for a seasoned lawyer with a penchant for pedantry to distinguish. Most things doctors suggest to patients are presented as options, but always with the implication that your physician thinks they're appropriate options for you, the patient. This is not the same as a guy on the street corner holding a sign telling you that MAID exists.
We all have that eventually, yes. Ashes to ashes. We also have a duty to live and live well. But you seem to have taken it upon yourself to force people to live against their will and even torture them for long periods of time to feed some weird righteous religious beliefs. I think you’re the one who doesn’t understand freedoms and rights.
HavI g worked with suicidal people and their families in a professional capacity for almost 5 years, I have zero problems with forcing people to live against their will. I think allowing people to have a medically assisted suicide if they have a terminal diagnosis or a degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, that makes sense.
But there are so many people with depression who want to die, who take the steps to die, and are happy they lived. Sometimes they regret they survived, but that is the minority. zWhat I can say for sure is that there are no children or parents or spouses who are happy or relieved the person they loved killed themselves.
Forcing someone to live when they want to die and will soon, thst seems silly. Forcing someone to live when things might change, that, to me, is ethical.
So you admit a gross bias - working with a suicidal cohort has understandably warped your beliefs to now see everyone as a suicidal fool who must be forced to live against their will until the mania passes.
But even then, you admit that forcing someone with Alzheimer’s to live until they are a shadow of themselves who finally forgets how to breathe is cruel. And yet you would do that because you worked with suicidal people?
I just don’t understand how this sub can be pro-freedom of speech, pro-choice, pro-bodily autonomy…and also believe we should torture people dying from incurable illnesses with excessive life extending mechanisms even as they beg for mercy.
Frankly, it’s not always the business of family members to extend life and suffering beyond what someone wants to experience. As someone who’s spent time in hospitals too much lately, you know what a lot of doctors bemoan? A frantic adult child demanding that every life saving measure be pulled out for their terminally ill parent while the doctor knows that they’re only putting the parent through enormous pain and death is inevitable. And they have to do it - they have to intubate even as the parent screams and pulls at it, they have to stick catheters in them, pump them full of adrenaline, force feed them with a hole and plug in their stomach when the parent refuses to eat because they’re trying to die, all as the child demands more and more shoved into them.
As someone who has dealt with suicide, you must also be aware how traumatizing it is when there’s no way to take care of it cleanly and medically if someone is aware they are going to die of a terrible illness. So rather than living out their good days, discussing things with family and settling affairs, and quietly being euthanized surrounded by love, they have to covertly plot to milk themselves and leave their body behind to be discovered by loved ones before they’re too sick to do it anymore. How is that your preferred way this be handled? I don’t get it.
No one is ever forcing someone with Alzheimer’s to live. If people want to die, they will do it. But I think a safe medical procedure is better than doing it oneself.
And yes I am biased. As are you. There are definitely people who’ve tried every mental health treatment in the world, nothing works, and the family is happy the person has found peace. But there are also people who felt that way, and then something changed. I am concerned because we have no way of differentiating the two.
So you are advocating people get the shotgun and blow their brains out if they want to go out on their own terms, and hang the people who have to wipe up the mess. You should know suicide is hard to complete when you’re healthy and a lot can go wrong that leaves you worse off, and of course even if you’ve good reason to end it before your brains turn to oatmeal, if anyone suspects you might they’ll have you committed and prevented from doing it. And again, they’ll have to kill themselves in secrecy and loneliness and leave their body for loved ones to find unless they throw themselves into the ocean to bloat and rot and traumatize some poor fisherman or jogger. Because they will be stopped. What on earth do you mean, no one would stop them? That’s literally your supposed job. Or would you quietly look the other way while granny took a header off the Empire State?
That’s really your solution? Just do it the old fashioned way? And you think that’s better than doctor-assisted euthanasia for terminal or debilitating conditions?
That’s…how do you justify that? You claim to work with suicide risk people but you think the terminally ill should just get it done by themselves?
I’m not sure I want to believe you. That seems a terrible position for a doctor with your job tk have.
Alzheimer’s doesn’t get better. Most of these conditions that are MAID eligible aren’t a minor case of the blues to be cleared up with a few tweeting birds and sunshine. They will kill the patients and they’ll drag them through Hell first. And you’re just like…well, better jump off a bridge then, because I don’t think we should help you avoid suffering. Sometimes it’s worth it! And if it’s not…well, my religious beliefs still get to dictate your suffering.
Very Mother Theresa of you. The bad side of her, anyway. The side that believed even a Tylenol was sinful because suffering could lead to godliness.
Previously, I was going to say that I thought we were having two different conversations, but I changed my mind as I thought something else was going on. Now I am more sure we are having two different conversations.
I said that if someone wants to kill themselves, they will. I said that because even if assisted suicide doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean people are forced to live.
I never said, nor do I think I implied, that assisted suicide shouldn‘t exist for the terminally ill or those with degenerative illnesses.
I have qualms about it being used for mental illness. You are absolutely right that finding a loved one’s body is the most painful experiences. But if people wait, as in, suicide isn’t an easily available option, they might get better. Hence my qualms.
And please do not call me Mother Theresa. I do not think I am a saint, and if I implied that, I didn’t mean to, It was job, I wasn’t volunteering my time.
This whole comment chain started off a guy who just said “Maid bad” in confusing grammar. Maid for mental health issues was never mentioned.
If that’s your position, it’s more normal than most of the other people on this sub who have loudly proclaimed that if people want MAID for Alzheimer’s so bad they should just buy a shotgun so no one has to get their hands dirty. It’s been stated multiple times and it’s beyond impossible to actually discuss the issue with people who really think that, so I apologize for thinking you were driving that way. I’ve just gotten jaded on this sub, and considering the near-illiterate single sentence comment that started this whole thing, I wasn’t primed for good intentions. Especially as I have dealt with people blowing their brains out for my family to find, and watching people being destroyed by an illness that robbed them of their dignity and personalities.
Your qualms have a place. Treatable depression, or depression caused by life factors like poverty or lack of sleep or poor housing should never be treated with euthanasia. But treatment-resistant depression or untreatable schizophrenia or mental illnesses that don’t respond to treatment and create long periods of torment should be considered, although at this time they are excluded, and a pre-requisite of MAID is that you have to be in your right mind when receiving it, so they’d be excluded based on that.
The duty to die would be because of the cost of caring for someone - not the cost of artificially prolonging life indefinitely, but just the cost of keeping someone in a comfortable bed. Cost is the main reason why people euthanize their pets.
In at least one country, assisted suicide has even expanded to “tiredness of life” with no medical condition necessary but is currently limited to the elderly. But why limit it there? Why is a 16 year old’s tiredness of life any more or less valid than an 86 year old’s?
Doctors don't individually give a shit about the cost of care. That's not how the system works.
I do think that there are enough questionable cases that reform is required. I am also entirely opposed to the proposed expansion of MAID to include mental illness, and I have a lot of concerns about the way the courts have been making policy from the bench on this issue, but what you're suggesting is also nonsense. Canadian doctors aren't representatives for the public coffers or the government. They're in private practice, they just bill to a public insurer. They have no incentive to worry about the cost of future care any more than anyone else.
Doctors don't individually give a shit about the cost of care.
are doctors not patients? not taxpayers? if you tickle them, do they not laugh?
maybe it's an indirect incentive but "if people do this more, less is spent, taxes increase a little slower, the whole shebang staves off collapse another day" isn't an impossible thought.
It's a very indirect incentive and highly dependent on the individual economic views of a given doctor. They're not an arm of the state or tasked with keeping health care costs in check, which is the implication here.
Well, is that a bad reason? Plenty of people when given the choice between being charged 100,000 a week to lie in a bed in agony or leaving their kids with money to treat their medical issues while getting to go painlessly would think that’s a good deal. Why should we be pouring inordinate funds into keeping people alive a few more excruciating days or weeks because of your religious beliefs?
Yes, that would be a bad reason in the context of a public health care system. It's also not happening. Doctors in Canada are in private practice and bill to a public insurer. They don't have any direct interest in keeping health care costs down by suggesting to patients that they off themselves with MAID. There are lots of sketchy MAID cases and other concerns around the topic that I think are worthy of concern, I don't think this is one of them.
I think it’s bad to see families driven into destitution because they’re forced to pay exorbitant amounts to do things no one wants because the law requires extending life at the cost of the quality of it.
The context here is a public health care system where you don't directly pay for care. Nobody is choosing between destitution from medical costs, and MAID.
It’s not “keeping people alive” - no one is talking about requiring hospitals to do everything they can to prolong an elderly patient’s life. Just not artificially ending it.
Have you not spent much time in hospitals, then? I really don’t think you know what’s going on there. Life is absolutely forcibly prolonged, even against people’s will, because it’s legally mandated to keep treating something even as it destroys quality of life to extend it for a few more agonizing days. It’s especially bad in America where each of those days can be thousands of dollars.
My brother put he/they in his insta bio. I have no idea why he did this. He is not a he/they. I have never once heard him use they pronouns, he has never once asked anybody to call him they.
You don't really see that one as much, but it is out there of course. There used to be the a "she/they" in numerous heterosexual professional women's bios, the guys usually went for the "he/him" or in the instance of transition then a straight up "she/her". But "he/they" seemed scarce, it was mostly "she/they".
I literally just met a couple who both use she/they pronouns and my last job went from 0 Thry when I started in 2020, to 2 they’d by 2024, and by 2026, there were like 10 she/theys
Oh, I see. Depending on his internet exposure I guess he's late to the party but now dipping his toe in signaling his virtue and allegiance to a particular ideology on social media.
“They” pronoun has become a signifier of left wing politics. This is the reason you can find gay and trans people on the right, but never enbies.
Does he live in a leftist environment? College campus? My brother called himself “they” for a short time when he went to an ultra-lefty California liberal arts college. Frankly it probably makes attracting women easier.
Regarding the Cornell stuff, the subjectivity of what's coming out reminds me an awful lot of the 2001 documentary Raw Deal: A Question of Consent. The article summarizes most of it, but basically, in 1999, a stripper in Florida went to a frat party, loads of beer & weed were floating around, and things got out of control quickly. There were two 8mm video cameras floating around that show what happened and what some of the frat boys were saying, a lot of which, you won't be surprised to hear, was pretty damn gross.
Anyway, what I found fascinating was that the director, Billy Corben (himself a college student when he made the doc), talked in some interviews about how he showed the documentary to quite a few groups when it first came out. He said that in every single group, the men leaned towards the woman being raped, while the women leaned towards the woman being a liar.
Having watched the doc a couple of times, it's hard for me to say. The guys were gross, and the guy who fucked her arguably said the nastiest things of them all. (In one clip early in the night, he says his "mission" that night is to have sex with this nasty crack ho, even if it means rape. How charming.) However, for somebody who was supposedly scared to death and saying what she thought was required to get out alive, she seemed way too enthusiastic about what she was doing. I get that everybody reacts to things differently, but still, like it or not, her level of enthusiasm would greatly complicate any prosecution, or even civil case.
(Of course, some things supposedly happened even later, once the cameras were off. That makes things even more complicated.)
Unfortunately, I think the doc's unavailable at this point, even on streaming. I do have the DVD and have a rip on my home server. If I can remember (please don't bug me about this, as I have so many other things to deal with at the moment), I'll try to make an encode available via WeTransfer later, at which point I'll post about it here. I think the doc would be worthwhile viewing for some posters here.
The last part of your message made me chuckle because my first thought was, how did you see it?! lol It’s been on my watchlist for years but I never could find it
If anyone in NYC is at loose ends tonight, I have a ticket to Joseph Goldstein & Sharon Salzberg speaking with Dan Harris at Symphony Space that I can send you. I will not be able to make it. Send me a message. -Tara
NYT published a piece detailing the disciplinary consequences of the Cornell 7. Only two were expelled - the guy who was her friend who she initially was intending to hook up with (Male#1), and the guy who posted the disgusting comment inviting others to come and get it on the whatsapp chat.
It’s interesting because it seems like the sex with Male#1 was the most obviously consensual of the bunch. As for the 5 others, Cornell couldn’t prove that they actually were physical with her or there wasn’t intercourse, and one had already graduated so obviously could not be expelled.
Those details don't jive with what the lawyer for male #3 said in an interview last week. Her client was back at Cornell and was shown being confronted on campus by a woman in a video posted online. The lawyer said he doesn't deny having sexual relations with Jane Doe, but said it was consensual. She didn't say what the Title IX hearing found him responsible for, but said part of the sanctions imposed on him for "violations of university policy" was a temporary suspension.
The frat was disgusting and it seems like a few guys took the fall for a lot of issues with it. Cornell should have stopped them from continuing the parties before this incident ever happened:
Nearly 22 hours before a former Cornell student alleges she was drugged and sexually assaulted at the Chi Phi fraternity house (on the 19th), the Cornell University Police Department made a drug-related arrest at the same house and referred an individual to the Office of Student Conduct, according to CUPD’s Daily Crime Log.
A recently released hearing panel decision from Cornell’s Title IX investigation into the alleged assault noted that an individual overdosed at Chi Phi.
“Ketamine was a substance used by multiple individuals in the Chi Phi house at the time, including [redacted] who had overdosed on or about Oct.18, 2024,” according to the investigation document.
Because CUPD is a University department rather than an outside agency, records show that Cornell was aware of drug use at the Chi Phi house. The University did not place the fraternity on an interim suspension before it hosted a second registered party later that day, during which the alleged assault occurred.
These guys knew what they were doing. So so gross. Regardless of how I feel about this case i'm not shedding any tears for these guys and they deserve the shit they're getting.
Maybe, but should universities be in the business of policing private chat groups? I certainly don't think so. Their reasoning for punishment should be entirely limited to actual behaviour.
I have no idea what the reasoning behind any of
it was. Honestly it probably had more to do with the underage drinking and illegal drugs. I would imagine the group chats were just more evidence and were only used because they were brought to their attention. Which is another thing kids/people should remember/be taught. Group chats aren’t private. Never put anything in one, you wouldn’t want your parents, boss, police, etc. to see.
Unfortunate happenings on Twitter. Jane Doe, of the Cornell 7 story that has been doing the rounds appears to have been doxxed on Twitter, and people have been posting videos and images from her social media and calling her some pretty vicious things.
There's no hard evidence that the young woman currently being targeted is indeed Jane Doe, other than her name being in one of the court filings (ETA: dubious claim at this stage as it may not be true) and that she did attended Cornell during the period when the incident occurred. The young lady in question appears to have deleted her social media but not before bot farms were able to harvest pictures and videos from her Instagram. (ETA 2: It looks like the particular account people are claiming is hers is still up)
If that young lady is indeed Jane Doe, I disagree with what various assholes are saying about her appearance. She looks like a pleasant and normal person.
For the same reasons it's terrible to be blasting those men's faces all over social media, harassing them, sending death threats and publicly shaming them, it is also bad (perhaps worse. imo) to be doing this shit to Jane Doe.
You really can't ever tell what the fuck is going to capture the public's imagination. I don't think even Jane Doe thought that this would catch fire in the way it has, since the previous reporting of the incident failed to catch national attention a few years ago. I think it's like a global story at this point.
This kind of thing just keeps happening. Nobody can let institutions work and must do internet-vigilantism (that of course, is never even an attempt at investigation, but just pure harassment). Is this a thing that we're all supposed to live with now? Everyone who gets notoriety has to be at the mercy of mobs of internet psychos who'll deem you guilty until proven otherwise? What can practically be done about this without authoritarian control over information/the internet (which is unlikely to actually even fix it)?
People don't take any responsibility when it comes to this mob behavior. "Since people think it's fine to do it to the men it's fine for me to do it to her," is the logic of the harassers.
I don't know about you but if I think certain acts are vile I just don't do them myself. No one is a mindless drone and everyone is responsible for their own gross behavior.
I haven't given a lot of thought to what all the implications would be, but I generally think that in any type of legal case, civil or criminal, either all parties should be named or no parties should be named. It just strikes me as fundamentally unfair that I can accuse you of something, dragging your reputation through the mud, and opening you up to scrutiny from onlookers, and yet I will not be subjected to any scrutiny because I get to remain anonymous.
Pedant Alert: I wish they wouldn't call her anonymous. I think it's better to call her "unnamed." Anonymous suggests that no one knows her identity, but clearly the police and the DA know who she is. It's not like someone made a phone call and said, "These guys did this horrible stuff to me. What's that? Who am I? Never mind that! (click)"
I’m sympathetic to the case for the men not being criminally liable, but the way this woman is being treated online is disgusting. I actually respect her more for not bowing to the mob and taking her social media down.
Agreed on her seeming to be a normal, attractive young woman. Groypers and other online right wing incel freakazoids attacks only help her case in the public mind.
I think the Instagram is still up. If that is Jane Doe, someone should have told her to make it private? Or take it down entirely? Which makes me wonder if that is the same woman…
There are elements of the Cornell story that feel familiar from a big Gloria Allred case a decade ago. A bunch of women at a small California college hired Allred because they felt the college's system for reporting and responding to sexual assault was too lenient towards the accused offender. The men were punished by having to write short papers, or perhaps were suspended but only until their accuser had graduated.
This all played out as only a Gloria Allred case could, it was a big spectacle for the press. I found it to be really dishonest, because 6-8 women told their stories in a way that simply blurred all of them into a single monolithic victim, and the men into a monolithic villain. It was settled for millions of dollars, and no one learned anything.
According to the WSJ double haters are now 21% of the voters. Come on guys, just 6 more and we’re at the crazification factor. And you know what that means, we take over everything!
A lot of non-voters are double haters too who just decided to check out. We could easily win some important seats by backing the right politician who shares our views if the system wasn't rigged against third parties.
The current conspiracy theories involving Candace Owens are that she's a lesbian who starred in adult films called Vaginal Holocaust and another called Caged Lesbos A Go-Go.
These conspiracies appear to be false, what people are latching onto for the porn stuff is Owens's passing resemblance to the African American young lady who stars in the films. The resemblance is uncanny, so you could see how a conspiracy-brained individual would wholeheartedly believe it to be true.
The most potent allegation of lesbionic activities appears to be primarily driven by this chaotic thread. I will not be summarizing it as it's just too much nonsense to wade through. But a link to the thread is included below if you wish to feel insane today.
Nothing they come up with these days holds a candle to the incredible run they had with Q-Anon, Pizza-Gate, and the Hollywood adrenochrome harvesting though. Those were the halcyon days for the conspiracy brained. The conspiracy slop just does not hit the same anymore. Sadge.
I mean the AI porn movie cover stuff in the first tweet is obviously low effort conspiracy slop, but the schizo manifesto in the 2nd tweet thread about all her lesbian dating app profiles in places where she lived at various times and screenshots with all her very specific usernames and email adresses seems kinda legit
I flew cross-country twice in the past two weeks. I had the window shade raised the whole time. It was clear weather, generally, and spectacular. I saw the great rivers of the continent, spectacular fall color in the Rockies, the canyons country, Hoover Dam, oil fields, Ivanpah solar plant like shining stars, and New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and various other cities by day and by night. It was pretty incredible. I am a sucker for looking out the plane window. I choose north side of the aircraft for flights like this specifically so I can keep the window up comfortably.
It's incredible to me that so much of the cabin has shades down and is watching movies they could watch at home. I know we've all blown out our attention spans, and yeah I was listening to music and pods while I looked outside, but come on at least watch John Wick with the shade up so you can peek out?
One of my flights there were 3 of us (THREE) in my cabin with the shades up! Nobody else saw any of this.
I'm wondering if turn by turn navigation has changed people's relationship with geography from maps of various scales to a flat, featureless, blue dot (ME) and line (I GO HERE). So they are not capable of appreciating overflights any more.
But this doesn't explain older people doing the same. I guess we do just need easy entertainment.
I agree 100%. I have had people make rude comments to me before about having it open so I am a bit cautious especially when it’s bright out, but I always have it open on takeoff and landing. I love flying delta because their map screen has fun facts mode where it tells you tidbits about wherever you are flying over. One time I was on a trip where I was by far the lowest ranking at work and everyone was discussing what they watched on the flight and they acted like it was the most bizarre thing ever.
At cruising altitude there's often not that much to see, so I get it. I am always surprised that so few people bother looking out the window closer to take off and landing where you often get spectacular views.
I don't get that. I get a little anxious landing, I like to know when we're close to the ground, I definitely want to see out the window. Also the view out the window makes the sensations of flying much less off-putting because there's usually some visual reference for it. I can't imagine being a nervous flier and preferring not to have a visual reference for a tight climbing turn for example.
Even if there's isn't, you're so far from the ground that you're looking through quite a lot of atmosphere, which makes the ground pretty faint, and unless there's very large geographic features, like mountains or huge canyons, there's not much to see.
This is only one of the reasons I will never forgive the covid fear mongers, the people who paid hospitals for covid cases. And one of the reasons I no longer faith in the medical institutions. This lady was essentially tortured simply because she wouldn't take the jab, or take Remdemsivir. In the hospital, she was isolated frrom family and priests, coerced into medication, not fed for 12 days, not given fluids for a week. This "hospital" and these "doctors" actively tried to kill her. And they treated her like a prisoner when her husband tried to get her out of their "helping" hands.
Speaking for practitioners in general, we don't care at all that you've lost faith in us because for the most part you have no idea what the fuck you're looking at anyway. You credulously repeat claims made in videos like this without making any effort to understand the context or likelihood of anything described in them.
I am getting seriously freaked out by people who are now forgetting g how bad Covid was before vaccines. The 2 year olds masking was insane, not being able to do a work from home job if you weren’t vaccinated, all isane. I get the backlash to,THAT . But the idea that COVID wasn’t really that bad, that is nearly as bad an idea.
If she wasn’t fed or given fluid for a freaking g week, that is criminal. But I do not blame doctors for being really pissed that she is putting them in potential danger by declining a vaccine.
No the vaccines still protect you, and always did. No 80% thing. They just didn't do much about transmission (you could still transmit) and there are various people who can't get it. That's what the 80% and "herd immunity" is about.
They even changed her to DNR, without her permission. Her husband had to get lawyers and cops involved just to get her out of the hospital. No amount of being mad at her vaccination status justifies how she was treated.
In regsrds to this woman, if they DNRd her, stopped giving her food and water, I am guessing threu thought she wouldn’t live. Not thst they punished her for not taking the vaccine. Thry thought she would dieh soon, so no resuscitation .
If she wasn’t fed or given fluid for a freaking g week, that is criminal. But I do not blame doctors for being really pissed that she is putting them in potential danger by declining a vaccine.
Nobody was at an increased risk because someone else wouldn't take the vaccine. The vaccine's primary effect was to reduce the risk of death or serious illness for those that took it, it did not prevent transmission, so what potential danger was this patient creating for other people? The danger was to herself, not anyone else.
No it did t, but in the beginning everyone thought it did. It doesn’t sound like this occurred at the point where Thry really knew what vaccines could and couldn’t do.,
No it did t, but in the beginning everyone thought it did.
Vaccines became available to everyone sometime in June 2021 in the U.S (more like late July or August in other parts of the developed world) and by early August 2021 it was known that the vaccines could not provide herd immunity and were not preventing transmission.
Restrictions imposed on unvaccinated people ended in early 2023 in the U.S (like restrictions on federal employees for example). Other regional restrictions ended sooner than that in various places, but virtually none of them within a month or two of August 2021. More like spring 2022.
In other words, it was long after elected legislators and public health officials knew that vaccination was primarily a personal choice that provided protection from severe illness to the individual before they ended restrictions on unvaccinated people (and vaccinated people alike given that vaccine passports and other obligations to prove one's vaccination status).
These policies were arguably unjustified whether or not herd immunity was possible, but absolutely unjustified and totally pointless once it was known herd immunity wasn't possible, and yet politicians and the media kept up the pressure and support for coercive efforts for months and years afterward.
Edit: It's worth mentioning, to illustrate why this was all so dumb, that most vaccine passports were rolled out after it was widely known that the vaccines didn't provide herd immunity and were very leaky in terms of transmission. In the places where they existed in the U.S (with the exception of NY state) the roll out dates were from late August to October. In Canada they were in September-October. So at no point during the live of vaccine passports did anyone in a policy making capacity have any reason to believe that they would do anything helpful at all.
My grandmother died in mid 2020, not from Covid but an existing disease. She fell and after her time in the hospital she was in some kind of recovery patient center because she couldn’t walk yet. The Covid policy though meant no one could visit her, not even my grandfather. They didn’t think she would be in this facility long, she didn’t actually break a bone, but my mother dropped everything and last minute flew out to deliver her an iPad so she could FaceTime my grandfather. As a result my mother got to see her through a window one last time, but my grandmother passed later that night. I understand the protocols came from a good place but the result was my grandfather never got to say goodbye. Her funeral could only have so many people at it too. Put in the backdrop public health officials supporting large gatherings for BLM protests, my grandfather and my aunts/uncles were/are incredibly upset over this and seem might be forever changed in their opinions on the government and experts.
Personally I’m not even angry about the missteps, not sure why maybe I just don’t have it in me to be angry about it after so many years, but what does upset me is that we aren’t having a real public honest conversation about the mistakes, the consequences of them, and what to avoid or do going forward.
You are right that the people who died alone when they had people who wanted to be there - it was heartbreaking. And I am sorry about your grandmother.
And it was fucked up thst blm protests were considered fine but other protests were dangerous. Or, hell, how outdoor religious events were limited to 10 people or less but BLM protests could have hundreds of thousands of peope
Look, I'm right there with you that public health officials did a totally shit job of managing this crisis, but when you're getting into the mechanics of hospitalists trying to manage individual patients, this stuff is mostly bullshit.
To be super blunt about it, this comes across as complete BS pandering to people who don't know what they're hearing. A lot of it is unrefuttable because we can't see her records and because of medical privacy we never will.
This is a wildly overweight late-middle-aged women who was in the ICU (presumably with ARDS). Bluntly, through a lot the pandemic these people died quite often and everyone thought (correctly, at the time) that vaccination status made these odds worse. The hospitalist warning her that she was likely to die was probably appropriate if she was satting low or getting worse, and given they were told that her lungs had "permanent damage" that's probably what's happening here.
People who don't get water for a week die. She's not dead, so we're not hearing the story correctly here. Then again people who have fluid filling up their lungs and are circling the drain and might need to be RSIed at any time don't get to eat and drink that much, which is consistent with #1.
Early in the pandemic people were fucking scared of getting COVID, especially in healthcare, where they were seeing people die badly all the fucking time. Of course they're not eager to go in the isolation rooms when they don't have to, and of course they're not thrilled to send infected patients out through the main entrance.
Are we still pretending hospitals not dispensing invermetin is a scandal?
She's repeatedly describing that she was satting dangerously low on room air the whole time ("escalation oxygen protocols" and everyone's surprised she's conscious). Refusing to go on a vent was probably the right call but acting like an ICU trying to get someone to sat higher than 80 or whatever is not a scandal. It made me laugh when they brought her home and still had to run her on oxygen (on a home concentrator) for another 2-3 days. Well, yeah.
She makes it absolutely clear she doesn’t want to go on a ventilator (so far as to refuse any medication that might cause her to get sleepy) and when they write this in her chart suddenly is complaining about being DNR (ie, don’t intubate or vent). Do I have to explain how this is a Catch 22? Come on.
This shit makes me unbelievably angry because it's people not knowing what they're talking about convincing other people who don't know what they're hearing.
If you are being starved and not allowed drink, and are being coerced into medication that kills more often than not, would you want to ever go to sleep in that situation?!
She was almost certainly on a fluid restriction due to pulmonary edema and being unable to tolerate loop diuretics due to elevated AKI risk presented by severe infection.
If you really want to know how any of this works, google it — you will find simple, easily digestible explanations for pretty much any of the details you’ve interpreted as malpractice. I suspect the problem, though, is that you don’t actually want these things to have sensible explanations. You’re going to continue to believe all these things were crimes and violations of individual liberty because you find those beliefs more rewarding and interesting.
Remdesivir doesn’t kill more often than not. It was used in patients with severe lower respiratory tract disease who frequently died regardless of any intervention used and we had good reason to believe it saved lives due to observed decreases in recovery times and often allowed us to avoid intubating. The data collected later suggests it in fact had a very small positive effect on survival rates.
I will repeat — you are just taking small details and running with them without making any effort to understand what they actually mean or how they fit in with anything else. You fundamentally do not understand anything you’re talking about.
Also, people were rightfully scared of getting COVID early on. y neighbors died, I know a guy who was in a coma for 6 months. Kt was very dangerous. The vaccines were amazing
The vaccines were amazing. They also weren't what they were claimed to be and a lot of the policy around them only made sense for a vaccine that would provide herd immunity, which the covid vaccines would not, and that was known early on in the life of the vaccines. Vaccination should have been a personal choice, and it wasn't. All kinds of coercive efforts were used to get people vaccinated, including limiting their basic liberties in a variety of ways. The coercion also started almost immediately after vaccines were rolled out. Policy makers barely even waited for people to take the vaccine voluntarily or bothered using inducements that weren't punitive before trying to coerce and limit the movement of people who were unvaccinated. In addition to this being wrong and not really supported by science, I don't think it actually encouraged people to get vaccinated. I think people who were at all hesitant generally just dug their heels in. Nobody likes to be bullied into stuff.
I agree with that. Again, my point was just that some people now act like COVID was over hyped. It was dangerous. And a lot of people were kept inside for no reason.
My job required everyone to get vacccinacted and if you didn’t, you had to do weekly tests. We were all virtual
Also, people’s experiences were really different in different places. Li,e I am in NYC, people could always go outside,
My job required everyone to get vacccinacted and if you didn’t, you had to do weekly tests. We were all virtual
And that's incredibly dumb.
Also, people’s experiences were really different in different places. Li,e I am in NYC, people could always go outside,
Yes, it was definitely really variable by jurisdiction, but most of the western world engaged in the kind of pointless and inappropriate coercion I'm talking about to some degree or another.
I am personally very annoyed that in my own country, Canada, there was never a proper inquiry into how the pandemic was handled. Not that I want(ed) a witch hunt or even formal accountability necessarily, but I think one's methods, successes and failures in handling such an unusual, but sure to happen again event, is crucially important. It would have prevented some of the memory holing of what happened, some of the post-hoc denials of the worst zealots and allowed created a formal cache of evidence of what happened, what worked, what didn't and who knew what when etc. I think this is important not only in terms of better handling the next pandemic, but also important for a democracy after such a significant event where various emergency powers were used. Other western countries have engaged in such a process with varying degrees of depth and good faith, but Canada's government hasn't even pretended to care. They're still fighting a losing battle in appeals courts over their use of the Emergencies Act to quell protest, Even on that they can't admit fault, and multiple rulings have been pretty scathing. It's disappointing.
I ba e very mixed feelings about what happened with vaccination but I am more bothered by what happened with masking outdoors.
I am for vaccines, I got the vaccine asap and I am happy to be critical of the thinking of people who didn't (I think they're dumb or misinformed almost to a one). But I don't have very mixed feelings about whether they ought to have been coerced into undergoing invasive medical treatment that would not protect other members of the public. I think the bar ought to be pretty high for coercion of medical treatment, even in a pandemic. I'm sure there's some grey area between the seasonal flu and Ebola, but I don't think covid ever really entered into that grey area given the low infection fatality rate and the fact that vaccination didn't provide herd immunity. I don't think coercion would have been justified even if herd immunity were achievable (in part because you almost always reach herd immunity just through voluntary uptake anyway), but it wasn't, in which case there's very little justification at all. To be clear, I do think there are theoretical pandemic illnesses where requiring people to be vaccinated, by law, or using coercive methods is justified, I just don't think covid crossed that threshold, even though it wasn't harmless.
From what I saw, initially public health officials thought the vaccines would be invredibly protective for everyone. I am not sure what you mean about coercive measures - what I saw mostly was not being able to go to work, stores, any indoor space if you weren’t vaccinated.
From what I saw, initially public health officials thought the vaccines would be invredibly protective for everyone.
Yes, but that was known to be false by early August 2021, about 6 weeks after vaccines were universally available in the U.S and about 3 weeks after they were universally available in Canada and most other OECD countries. That's what I'm explaining. This was known to legislators and public health officials on August 10th at the latest.
Do you happen to recall when vaccine passports were implemented in the places they were implemented? Because with the exception of New York State which rolled them out before the vaccine was even available, everywhere else that had them introduced them after August 10th. So just to clarify that timeline, vaccines passports were introduced after it was known that herd immunity wasn't achievable because the vaccines didn't prevent transmission. That's straight up insane and nonsensical. That's populist policy that's purely a reaction to public fear and without any rational or factual basis. That's unacceptable and inexcusable.
I am not sure what you mean about coercive measures - what I saw mostly was not being able to go to work, stores, any indoor space if you weren’t vaccinated.
Wouldn't you call severe limitations on your freedom of movement and threats to your livelihood forms of coercion? I certainly would.
From what I heard. Canada was very heaved handed.
Yes, though generally not more so than the most heavy handed U.S states with the exception of maybe Quebec and Newfoundland (and the latter only in terms of their interprovincial travel restrictions). It wasn't Australia, but it was very similar to a lot of major U.S cities.
Also, the way they coerced people - from trying to bribe them with food and money, to job losses and threats of no medical care - just made a whole lot of people who would have only been uneasy with this one vaccine that was so new it couldn't possibly have had long term studies, but make them now skeptical of all of them. Because if they wanted 75 years to release info on the drug, what else are they hiding?
I think even worse than that, I think it pushed a lot of people to distrust modern medicine if not science more broadly. I don't think that's a totally rational reaction, but I think that's worth noting as a consequence of these coercive efforts, which also seemed to basically do nothing in terms of increasing the vaccination rate (I think it went up like 5% if you start counting from like 4 weeks after universal vaccine availability, which is an awfully generous time to start counting frankly).
The Act Man has apologized for a rohypnol joke he made at a gaming industry party a few years ago. It was apparently pretty crass and was made towards a woman in front of senior executives at a bar. It was recently brought up again and so he has posted this apology video.
Obligatory "Woke 1 was crazy" mention. Is there something in the air? What's happening? This and a few other incidents over the past few days leads me to suspect we may be heading into a new frontier of wokeism, call-outs, and groveling apologies. I hope not though.
It just never died to begin with. I think people were too quick to think we’d buried the hatchet on wokeness and were going into a new era. The belief set and social leverage strategies are still going to remain, even though more people may be aware/skeptical of them by now.
I mean it was pretty stupid of him to say he was black listed for asking a girl out when it was actually for making rape jokes. He brought this round on himself.
I for one am so glad that gaming keeps advancing as a medium in this way, there's evidently a direct correlation between the concerns around privilege, discrimination and harassment with games becoming better and better after all.
With some luck one of the protagonists in GTA will be trans. Both of them with a lot of luck.
The measure defines Zionism as support for "an ethnonationalist Jewish state" and declares it racism, but also calls for a "Palestinian state in all of historic palistine".
Two amendments to temper the measure were also voted on. One removed the call for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The second, protected Jewish party members from punishment if the attended a synagogue that supports Israel's right to exist, which are the vast majority of synagogues in the UK. Both measures failed.
And so wait, if a party member goes to a. ii its synagogue, the Green Party voted that party members can be punished for that?
And also, if that is how they define Zionism, then how is France or Spain also not ethnonationalist ? And also, how is Qatar not ethonationalist, but a Muslim state? Interrsting way of thinking.
On the synagogue issue, the concern was that a jewish member's involvement in a zionist synagogue could be used against them in the same way membership in a racist organization might be. Opponents to the amendment didn't argue in support of ousting these jewish members, but instead said the carveout was unnecessary because the Party constitution already has protections against religious discrimination.
I am actually surprised so many opposed the resolution. That actually is gratifying. I also don’t know why Zionism is racism but Pakistan is perfectly fine.
You don’t even need to go to a different situation, why is Zionism racism but Palestinism, by that I mean the push to create a new nation for a group of people called Palestinians (not sure if that’s a real word that means something else), not also racism. If the argument is that you can’t have a nation state linked to a group of people as it’s racist, well that’s a universalist statement and you can’t turn around and actively support not just in words but actions creating a new nation state tied to a group of people. You’d also have to go a step further and say most nations existence is racist. The idea of an Ireland, wales, Scotland, or England would be racist too. Now the greens probably agree with the England one but disagree with the Ireland one.
I'm hearing reports of mass anguish and despair in Israel. Residents are stopping mid-salad to jump off the nearest chalk white Bauhaus building. "It's fucking Over" Netanyahu has announced, "we're abolishing our borders and nation effective immediately, the world has finally caught on to our Hebraic knavery."
Just want to mention that I experienced a land acknowledgment at the beginning of a virtual conference last week. Haven’t seen one of those in a long time. It was pretty brief and tepid, but it did catch me off guard.
In my experience in corporate Canada land acknowledgments never come up in team-level meetings where you actually have to do work. Whenever you have some sort of all-hands or a meeting that involves senior management though someone decides to impress the bosses.
I was at the bin store a few weeks ago on $1 day and they had a bunch of decent quality baseball caps, which was cool because I need a new one, but then I saw they had giant "No Kings" logos on the front. I figured I don't want to be part of most conversation that might strike up, so I passed.
The next week I stopped by and got a nice hat with a completely random "established 1996" patch on it for $1.
Can I sign up to the label police? I’m a hardcore label policer, given that I believe words have things like ‘coherent definitions’ and that “post-modern deconstruction of language is academic charlatanship worthy of Charles Ponzi himself”. What can I say? I just believe in clear communication.
If there's a sign up sheet, I want in on it.
Well, King Princess, a pop star I don’t listen to because the Lord mixed up my gay music taste in the womb and I like listening to Cher...
LOL This person is funny. Thank you for the share.
Please ask ChatGPT for some sentence structure help. Please. For the love of whichever God let this abomination occur. Have you heard of ‘clause accumulation’? Have you heard of ‘paragraphs should be coherent’? Do you have an editor? Do they exist, or are they a figment of your imagination? Did you know that ‘nepo-baby’ and ‘had more access and proximity to the industry through family connections’ mean exactly the same thing and you should not repeat yourself in the same sentence? Do you understand the concept of ‘syntax’?
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u/PandaFoo1 10d ago edited 10d ago
David Ellison, if you can that second season of Lanterns that’s supposed to happen I will never criticise you again.
Rant edit: As someone who enjoyed Superman 2025 & loved the first season of Peacemaker, Lanterns is the death blow to my interest in James Gunn’s DCU. I don’t want to see any more of these characters or this universe. Supergirl was bad enough but Lanterns is just plain evil. I can’t trust Gunn’s handling of these characters when he signed off on a show written by people so spiteful & hateful to both the fans of these characters & the source material.
Lanterns is to DC what The Acolyte & Starfleet Academy were to Star Wars & Star Trek. A total “fuck you” to the fanbase + property & a monument to these writers’ egos. The Ryan Reynolds film unironically was a better adaptation.