There are some good and some bad international news I’d like to talk about: In Germany, a self-id law is likely to pass parliament in the next days. It’s not ideal (mandatory consultation for minors, no binary passports for nonbinary people, no transfem gender marker change during wartime, some dogwhistle-y sentences without legal meaning), but at least they struck the part about automatically reporting every gender marker change to the police. It replaces an older law which required two psychiatric evaluations costing thousands of Euros, so that’s good.

On the bad side, in the UK the Cass review was published. It’s a “systematic” review of gender care for minors and unsurprisingly, it comes to the conclusion that minors should not get gender-affirming care. Even social transition should not happen without a doctor supervising it. It was obviously planned as a hatchet job from the very beginning by choosing unqualified doctors with clear anti-trans position to write it. As always, the media is failing its duty to accurately report on institutional transphobia while Labour is loudly embracing it. The NHS is now planning to do the same thing with adult gender care, so I can only express my horror at the continuing decline of TERF island.

One thing people on the Internet do that I really hate is claiming authority on their basis of their (usually white-collar) job. I don’t mean, like, basic daily tasks belonging to that job but big cultural criticisms. Just today I saw a museum administrator loudly declaring curators and art historians to be worthless obstructions or a cemetery worker expound on the wrongness of morbid bone decorations. It’s just so blinkered to believe that your personal work experience has revealed universal moral truths to you specifically. Maybe it annoys me because of my experience in academia, where the most experienced and respected people are very often complete incompetents that can’t even form a single informative sentence.

I realize the solution to most of my problems is touching grass, but I have no friends and moderate social anxiety so I’m really not making progress on that front.

But the document also says that poverty and war is bad! I’ve never ever heard an influential person utter such – dare I say it – leftist positions!

Just sent an email that may result in a phone call and now I’m so nervous I can’t concentrate

I always felt that it’s the worst type of polemic: directed against a vaguely-defined group of people that are presented as having no redeeming qualities or even reasons for what they’re doing, and all that hidden behind an evocative metaphor. It’s just a cowardly way to not engage with actual feminist criticism while not coming across as anti-feminist.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy, but that could change.

I know it’s almost cheating to use Dan Quayle, but this quote really says something about the liberal imagination of history as a march of progress that sometimes just goes in the wrong direction for a bit.

Really want to do some sociological hermeneutics on the name “9mmBallpoint”. Guess Americans have trouble keeping guns off their mind

Did myself a favor and blocked my computer from accessing Substack. I just don’t need that Nazi-supporting website in my life. I’ve never read anything on it worth my time.

The laws are actually written down in a book, instead of having to be constructed from the last few hundred years of judges’ decisions, so that’s a plus. Also, it decriminalized homosexuality and gave more civil rights to Jews, so it was surprisingly progressive, as far as I understand it.

Not trying to sound conspiratorial, but I feel like summer and winter have been getting longer the last decades. Surely it didn’t always take heavy coats to go outside in March?

Yes

Had another bad day in terms of mental health today. I don’t understand how I can literally sit here for hours, just wasting time, and then beat myself up for not doing anything. I guess it’s just depression, but it really fucking sucks

This website, “The Insider”, totally looks like some fed stuff. No masthead, no owners or editors listed anywhere, but an acknowledgement that they are funded by several EU grants. Also, they’ve literally got an international list of enemies titles “Fakesperts”, which is comically incongruent with a serious journalistic outlet both in tone and in its violation of journalistic standards.

No president in our history has done worse.

What a statement. Forget the Native American genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dozens of wars of aggression the world over, or, on an individual level, raping women and owning slaves (sometimes both at once): that’s nothing compared to riling up followers on social media.

Besides, these platitudes about how important stating the obvious truth is are the kind of propaganda any side can claim for themselves. Real lack of media analysis on display here.

Reminds of a German TERF who tried to advocate for “sex-based rights”. But her English wasn’t very good, so in her translation, it came out as “sexual intercourse-based rights”. Nevertheless, she still got a number of votes because no one pays any attention to language if hate is on the menu.

Someone needs to do a socio-linguistic study on Internet German, because it’s the most grating way of writing I can imagine. It sounds like someone talking to a bureaucrat, a police officer and their close friends all at the same time. It’s a policy paper crossed with a teenager. “Should the instance be blocked, users would lose access to a great amount of content. And I’m just wondering to myself, how can you solve issues like that?” How can anyone, let alone a whole country, stand this style of text?

Don’t forget: Only by voting can the people of NATO be saved from their enemies abroad – and at home!

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On a related note, have Israelis reached level of Apartheid delusion where they larp as the people they despise and constantly demand to be called Palestinian/Mena?

It’s sometimes done in relation to the whole claim about being “indigenous” to the Middle East. Read this article for some particularly embarassing examples, featuring the appropriation of Native American headdresses for a double slam of racism.

So you’re white, an American, and do not consider yourself a colonizer. Quick question: How did your family enter the country?