“Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits.”

Though with the textile mill thing, the quality of the cloth is much worse; I have a few historical reenactment friends who have been unable to find linen of the quality that even poor, working class people would have used (and Bernadette Banner has a recent YouTube video on the topic that my friends found validating and cathartic to see).

I’m not disagreeing with your point or anything — this is a bit of a tangent. I guess the point that I’m making is that textile mills did make everything worse, in terms of the availability of quality cloth, but this problem wasn’t noticed for a long time because the mills also made cloth cheaper for the average person. Whereas AI doesn’t even give us a benefit like this (which is why my comment is mostly irrelevant to your point and is just some bonus info because I’m a nerd)

“However, STEM folks tend to reassert the authority of science as an institution of capitalism and settler-colonialism by not recognizing that these are not “illnesses” or pathological conditions naturally. Yes, they are behaviours that we have no reason to believe are divergent or new from typical human life, and their status as pathological is conditional on the specific social and material conditions that are facilitated by this system.”

There’s a lot in this that I agree with, but in the past, I have been quite irked by people who take a hard line version of this stance, who say that I’m being ableist by referring to myself as disabled. Whilst the majority of things that being autistic and ADHD cause me to struggle with that are better understood as a function of our environment, there are plenty of ways in which I would consider to be independent of societal structure.

For instance, I struggle with sensory hypersensitivity, such that a bright sunny day, or loud sounds cause me physical pain, and also cause me to become fatigued quickly if exposed to them for a while. This sucks, and I think it would even in a society that was structured radically differently

Gosh, there are so many that I am struggling to retrieve one in particular. As someone with a long history of mental health problems (including chronic suicidality) and just generally shitty life circumstances, I can confidently say that I wouldn’t be alive now if not for the countless acts of kindness that I have been the recipient of. It’s led me to develop a personal policy of extending random kindness liberally, because I know from the recipient side that what might seem like a trivial act could literally save a person’s life.

It’s led to a nice reinforcing cycle, in which I have been inspired to extend kindness to people who needed it, even when I was feeling out of my depth or anxious. I don’t know if I’ll have saved any lives, but I am confident that there are a handful of times where my actions will have left a lasting impact on a stranger. That makes me feel more connected to people, and life in general, as well as making me more open to receiving help when I need it.

Edit: I do have one instance that comes to mind, though it definitely isn’t the best fit for the question — it just came to mind because writing my previous paragraph reminded me of it due to how this one small instance has shaped me so greatly.

Now I’m writing this out, it feels silly that this affected me so much, but basically when I was in 8th grade, when I was walking out from school, a cool girl in the year above me complimented me on my bright red trench coat I was wearing, saying that the colour really suited me. Although we ran in the same circles, I didn’t know her particularly well at all, so this really took me by surprise.

Additional (slightly cringe, but in a charming way, because I was a teenager) context is that my school had a school uniform, and because I wanted to be seen wearing this nice new coat I had, I had made specific effort to stuff my much more convenient blazer into my overfull school bag so that I could be seen wearing the coat on my way out from school (it was spring, so not super cold). Even by regular teenager standards, I was super insecure and desperate for validation, and receiving such a sincere and unexpected compliment gave me such a boost that the memory is seared into my brain.

The lasting effect on me is that whilst the vast, vast majority of my clothing is black, there are a few splashes of red to be seen, because of how I internalised that compliment. And every time someone compliments me when I’m wearing something red, I think of this girl whose name I can’t even remember, and I smile.

On top of this, I have become known amongst my friends as someone who is very good at giving compliments to people on their appearance, and who gives them freely, even to strangers. I developed this habit because of how impactful this super trivial compliment was on me when I was in an especially vulnerable place. And whenever I tell someone “I love your dress, that colour really suits you” or similar, I am reminded of how we all have the power to brighten another’s day, should we choose to

Based

Israel also benefits from the growing genuine antisemitism that arises from a combination of their weaponisation of the term “antisemitism” and their attempt to equate Israel with the Jewish people; Jewish people overseas feel unsafe (whether due to genuine antisemitism, or the exaggerated rhetoric of constant and extreme antisemitism everywhere), and thus more convinced of the need for Zionism.

It’s pretty fucking fucked.

I like that quote. Anti-zionist Jews who have been protesting Israel’s actions have my infinite respect. I have some friends in that scene, and the amount of work they have been putting into anti-zionist activism is honestly insane. I’d say that I don’t know how they manage to keep up such high amounts of protest up for so long, but I already know the answer to that: they find strength in their Jewishness — regardless of whether they actually believe in God (I know a couple folks who are fairly observant despite being agnostic/atheist), they know that what Israel is doing is an insult to the Jewish culture and ethics that shaped them. That, and they lean heavily on a community of other anti-zionist Jews who understand what it means to be Jewish.

I think the key thing is to have the conversations at the right time, in the right context. Like, the best way to avoid saying “I support trans rights but [valid tangential belief]” is to separate out those two clauses so that the valid tangential belief isn’t appearing to undermine one’s support for trans rights in general. Like, even rewriting the sentence so that it is two separate sentiments without the “but” can make a big difference.

A tangential analogy that comes to mind (and I want to emphasise that I don’t think your example comes anywhere close to this kind of behaviour) is when assholeish “Men’s Rights Activists” (MRA) will complain about feminists not caring about men’s suffering, but then be suspiciously quiet whenever feminists try to involve them in the conversation (I say this as a feminist who is passionate about understanding the ways that men also suffer under the patriarchy, and who has become a much more effective feminist through solidarity with men).

But then when a feminist (or any woman, really) starts to talk about things that has affected them as a woman (or someone perceived as a woman), then suddenly the MRAs will jump in to shout over whoever is speaking. It makes it blatantly obvious that they don’t actually give a fuck about men’s struggles, but just want to derail the conversation and suppress women’s voices.

Like I said above, this is a completely different scenario than the hypothetical you described, but they’re similar in that the more appropriate response in both cases is to show some grace and make sure we discuss our issues in the space and context that’s most appropriate. Like, if the phrase “I support trans rights” is being said, then the conversation is probably about broader issues, and is likely to involve some people who don’t support trans rights. Discussing issues like animal derived medication is probably more suited to an environment where everyone there is either trans, or a trans ally — and not just because of the harmful effects of the “I support trans rights but…” framing, but because if someone cares about whether people use animal derived medications, then the last thing one would want is for that point to be hijacked by anti-trans activists who don’t give a fuck about animal derived medications

Yeah, this is a big problem that I see a lot.

A tangential phrase that comes to mind is “I support women’s wrongs as well as women’s rights”. Well supporting trans wrongs as a subset of supporting trans rights means understanding that trans folk have the right to be assholes, and everyone has the right to challenge them on that, independent of their transness.

Even when the brand of assholery is specifically linked to them leveraging their trans identity to do harm to the trans community (Caitlyn Jenner has done some of this, but Blair White comes to mind as a better example of this), we can still attack them for this without attacking their transness

Because the thing is about rights is that they’re meant to be inalienable. If someone says they support trans people’s right to not be misgendered, but then they misgender a trans person they consider to be bad, then they’re treating basic human respect as a privilege that can be given and taken away at will — that is, they’re not actually treating this as a right

Because the journals existed as massive, financially powerful entities. There were negotiations over open access arrangements a few years back which led to things like “gold open access”, which involves papers being free to read, but costing a heckton for the researcher’s in “Article Processing Charges”. This happened because the journals effectively argued that “even though we’re functionally useless in the modern day, and don’t even provide services like copyediting or typesetting support for researchers, you can’t just make research actually be fully open, because then we would no longer be able to be absurdly profitable. Won’t someone think of the profits?!”. And then their influence meant the open access agreements were half baked and insufficient.

However, there is a continuing movement that is pushing for actual open access — “Diamond Open Access” doesn’t charge either the researchers or the readers of papers. It’s still small, relatively, but it’s growing, especially in the global South or amongst independent researchers who can’t afford absurd Article Processing Charges. Profit driven journals have prestige on their side, but I reckon that Diamond Open Access will continue to grow as research funding becomes more scarce relative to the amount of research being done.

“The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries “have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities”.”

(Source: the linked Wikipedia page)

And what’s worse, when there were some big negotiations on open access a few years back, the agreements were wholly insufficient and still disproportionately enriched the journals at the expense of researchers; “Gold Open Access” journals will publish the research unpaywalled, so anyone can read them, but will charge absurd “article processing charges” that are often thousands of dollars, shutting out researchers with less financial means (such as those in the global South or independent researchers).

Fortunately there is a growing movement who gives a fuck about actual open access; Diamond Open Access research involves no fees to either the author or the reader. This is how it should be.

‘The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries “have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities”.’^[1]

The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed

[1]: Source: the linked Wikipedia page

Whilst I always drew mine with a somewhat fuller figure, as someone who has done a heckton of hobbyist fashion design (which is to say that I sew clothes and costumes, and I’m shit at following patterns so I do stuff myself), I actually really like the stylised proportions used in fashion design.

At first, I started out drawing figures that were more anatomically correct, but I ended up switching to a more stylised design; it made it easier to think in the broad strokes that were helpful for the early concept design stage (for instance, figures a typically drawn 9-10 heads tall rather than a more realistic 7-10 heads). Although, like I said, I tended to draw mine with a bit more junk in the trunk (and the bust), the figures were still far more slight than I actually am. For instance, although I’m quite broad shouldered, I found that using a croquis (this is what they call the figure templates used — it’s French for “sketch”) with fairly narrow shoulders made it much easier to tell from the concept sketch whether the garment was going to include structured elements near the shoulders.

I did do sketches that were more anatomically realistic once I got further down the design pathway, and was beginning to think more about how to actually execute the ideas, but the stylised drawings were always the thing that made it easiest to see the overall idea I was going for.

This is a bit outdated now, because it has turned up a lot more in the scientific and medical literature, but the potential benefits of progesterone alongside estrogen for HRT. There was a point (gosh, probably around 8 years ago now) when endocrinology stuff I was reading were saying that there was no evidence for any benefit to progesterone for trans women, but DIY HRT communities were frequently discussing it in a manner that I wouldn’t call scientific, but with an impressive level of rigour despite this.

Define robot.

I don’t think I am a robot, but the world often makes me feel like I am (it’s the 'tism)

Great explanation. I’m a biochemist who loves nerding out about this stuff (and practicing science communication), so I came into this thread prepared to explain more about this works. However, your comment has left me with nothing to do but to be appreciative of your excellent comment

I’m glad to hear that. It sounds like the bit at the end of your original comment was just a hyperbolic joke. I commented because I had had friends who have said things like that in a context where tensions in the relationship did end up escalating to the level of physical violence, which is never okay.

Since learning about what they went through, I try to be more proactive in pointing out potentially problematic stuff, because for both of my friends, what got them out of that situation was the cumulative effect of people saying “dude, are you okay? That is not something you should be experiencing”. Fortunately, in this case, it appears that this was me being overly cautious

I’m a queer cis woman who knew a lot about how HRT changes the body due to also being a nerdy biochemist, but even so, it blew me away to actually see how much stuff changes when I had a partner who started HRT when we were together.

It’s super interesting because some of the changes I’ve seen trans folk report are things that are rarely, if ever, documented in scientific literature. It’d be real cool if we lived in a world where we could lean more into the insight we can collectively build if trans people are more actively included in research.

I say “lean more into”, because there are researchers out there who recognise the epistemic power to be found in respecting and valuing trans people. For instance, one of my favourite bits of research of the last few years was this 2022 study which used tissue donated by trans men undergoing phalloplasty surgery to show that previous estimates for the number of nerve fibres in the human clitoris was a severe underestimate.

Part of why I love it so much is the picture of the lead author in the press release I linked above. Behold, Blair Peters M.D., who looks exactly like the kind of person I’d expect to be leading research like this (affectionate tone). When I saw this, I checked their academic page to see if they had pronouns listed, and indeed they do.

Talking about this study is a wee bit of a tangent to my main comment, but I included it because it always makes me smile, and I hoped it would make you, the reader of this comment, smile too.

This is a supremely antiscientific comment of you to make — don’t you know that eCoNomIcS iS a sCiEnce!!!

And of course, as a science, it builds models that generate testable predictions, altering the model if the empirical data doesn’t match what’s predicted, right? …It does do that, right? (Spoiler alert: not particularly).

I do think that economics is a science, but most economists I have known were unwilling to acknowledge that it’s a social science. “But qUanTiTatIvE mEtHoDs!!!”, they say, as if that makes any difference to whether they’re a social science or not.

It irks me to no end because it’d be far more rigorous of a field if they just got their heads out of their own arses and properly understood the situatedness of their field. The more they insist their analyses are objective, the less I believe them

The same place we will end up if we let capitalism cannibalise human society.

For various reasons, things didn’t end up going well for these civilisations, but it’s not like we’re doing much better. Learning from examples of classless societies throughout history doesn’t mean trying to replicate their modes of doing things exactly, but understanding how they functioned in context (including why these civilisations are no longer around).

Oooh, pretty! I especially like the red dress, and the outfit on the bottom right, they really suit you.

I also love anyone who wears black lipstick. Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of men like a bold lipstick, and black is the boldest one can be in this respect

Edit: I totally know the difference between left and right, and definitely didn’t get those mixed up

I’m pretty good at doing makeup, but that’s because I had the privilege of being able to fuck around and find out when I wore makeup as a teenager, which was a context in which being bad at doing the makeup wasn’t as high stakes as if I were learning as an adult. I only got this good by a heckton of experimentation.

Whilst that’s probably little comfort to all my trans sisters learning as adults, I’m sharing this sentiment because I consider the struggle to figure out how the hell to do one’s makeup well (and hard mode: doing it well, but also being able to use it to express one’s personality) is a potential source of feminine solidarity, because the vast majority of women who wear makeup have gone through this frustration.

Though I would also note that when I was learning as a teenager, it wasn’t just the daily makeup that gave me lots of practice, but also times where I would carve out some time to sit down and practice with more ambitious looks. Have makeup wipes on hand, because you’ll probably fuck it up a lot, but that’s part of the journey. It is emotionally intensive, because there will be so many times when you look in the mirror and hate how things turned out (that was something I struggled with a lot, and I didn’t have gender dysphoria adding to my distress), but the only way to get better is to grind that XP

You don’t seem like you’re very happy in your relationship. Given you got married not too long ago, I can only hope that there are good parts to your relationship that made you want to be married to this person, because what you describe in your comment doesn’t sound healthy or okay. If you want to remain married to this person, y’all should probably try to work through this shit, because it’ll fester into resentment otherwise