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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • There’s a lot of baggage with the term “woke” as it’s levelled here. In North America presently it is the brush that is used to tar anyone who is not white, “conventionally attractive”, skinny, cis, heterosexual or a narrow range of subtypes pandering to those audiences as a means to blanket criticize and apply pressure to remove them unilaterally from public. It’s such a politicized term used for years by an outright supremacist movement and levied as a dogwhistle in outright genocidal political spheres that it has no nuance. If you want to convey nuance it doesn’t work as a term.

    Your views do not appear to strictly align with the movements who use “Woke Propaganda Cringe” as a tool of linguistically signaling this cluster of held beliefs in a space. It’s a bit like if you walked into a space where gangs are active and started throwing up specific gang signs. Where you come from those signs might have nuance and usage that is lighthearted and non serious or specific but in spaces where those gangs are active and enacting violence those signs are strict affiliation markers with implied buy in to violence and little allowance for misinterpretation.

    If your intention is to not be deliberately incendiary towards the targets of the American far right when dealing with the people in North America it’s probably best to drop the usage of “woke”.


  • It’s not Canada or Denmark which will suffer the most from-it, but US themselves

    I get what you are saying but at the same time as a Canadian that comes across as more American-centric myopia.

    We are a small country in terms of people with only nominally more people than the state of California spread out over a landmass 1.6% larger than the US. Our energy infrastructure doesn’t fully connect through our own country and due to American strong arming a lot of our manufacturing industry is not super robust. It’s the Goose next to the Eagle. We’re tough enough to defend ourselves and make it hurt to attack us but we aren’t getting anything out of this fight. For us it’s a fight for our lives not a fight we can profit off of. Whatever wounds we take in this fight will soften us up for the regular problems we fight. The forest fires that have become exponentially worse through climate change that have erased entire cities off our map. The healthcare crisis of a mass of retiring boomers needing more care in a system that has constantly under fire from Americanizing rhetoric that has caused disinvestment from an ethically better system. The protectionist rhetoric that comes with conflict which will erode the systems of government and create legal precedent for more autocratic means of operation that will need to be later undone. The pausing of reconciliation efforts with indigenous nations. This conflict, even as it is now, will cause real trackable losses of life and livelihood some of which will not come back.

    Our existence and future as a sovereign nation is threatened but nope “The US will be the real victims of this”? Bloody fucking tonedeaf mate.



  • Are you talking about the NATO shortfall? Because the Canadian government has a number of places where it is scrambling to find budget for a lot of things. Consider

    • An expanded commitment to rehoming and financially supporting refugees from Ukraine. Processing and approving 962,612 submissions starting from 2022

    • Reconciliation efforts with notoriously under served indigenous nations to improve dismal conditions of services support, locate and providing funding to document the Residential school genocide and providing better support to survivors.

    • Reinvestment in one of the most challenging Public health care landscapes in the world due to the sheer landmass the government is constitutionally on the hook to cover.

    • A history making sized population of people now reaching retirement age and requiring more drastic critical health interventions and social supports than ever before.

    Static commitments like NATO spending are a bit like rent. If you are financially struggling through other financially challenging problems the landlord cannot often be convinced to give you a temporary forgiveness for extenuating circumstances. All of the above things are challenges that are either in service to international peace against the encroachment of Russia, the thing NATO was created to do, or they represent inflexible commitments the government has to serve the needs of it’s people as written into it’s own laws… But a NATO landlord has a contract with a number and the number doesn’t change no matter what.


  • This is actually in part an issue of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of one of the situation law enforcement and people forced into dangerous circumstances face. Ever played that game where you have your hands out and a person puts their hands under yours and you have to withdraw your hands before you get slapped? It’s the same principle. Reaction is slower than action. When someone states they have a weapon and they reach for it you could be dead in about a second, maybe two if they pull it and instead fire at you. This means your “safe” reaction space is about a second to a half second long.

    If you duck out of the way you get a person with a weapon who can choose to turn it on bystanders or retaliate by getting you into another situation where you have even less reaction space. While it is realized that cops, particularly US ones tend to escalate situations more quickly in part that is because in the US there’s a higher chance someone is packing heat and in part because of a culture of standing one’s ground. When we are talking about ACAB events a lot of the time those deaths occur in circumstances where the cops either should not have been there at all, escalated far too quickly or the death happened when the person was restrained and no longer an active threat. In Canada for instance improper use of force applies to everyone. If you had to be violent as a citizen, including as a cop then you are vulnerable to legal reprocussions unless your use of force was judged appropriate to mitigate damage to life. Not property, only life. If you exhaust every other de-escalating option only then you are cleared to use violence but the initiation of this reaction window is the point of no return. People who experience this window basically operate strictly on instinct and often are traumatized to some degree after the fact.

    In this instance the officer’s life was at risk the moment the gun was indicated to be in the vehicle and the person in question stated they would use it. Could the entire traffic stop have been a series of inappropriate escalations on behalf of the officer, yes. Is there zero justification for an officer shooting this guy? No. We don’t know the first part, you would have to pick apart the senario starting from when he stopped the car. But if you end up in a situation where you have a gun trained on you and you escalate the situation further by saying you are reaching for a gun then basically this is effectively how you suicide.


  • Nope, this tracks. Travelling while trans even before the Trump presidency means hastle. Gender markers on passports often mean very little aside from potentially outing passing trans people to asshole agents when they don’t match what you look like.

    Normally it looks like variations of this : You go through the body scanner and a guard makes a determination based on basically vibes and pushes one of two buttons, a pink or a blue. If you have boobs and the blue button is pressed or a dick and the pink button is pressed you get flagged as having something “unexpected” on you and then are subjected to a body search during which they might just stick you in a holding place for as long as they feel like while they figure out who to send to perform a rather humiliating discussion about your medical history while your privates are checked over by strangers.

    Or, someone just looks at you, looks at your passport flags the sex marker or your photo as a “suspicious error” and pulls you out of line. It’s remarkable how poorly the whole bureaucracy suddenly operates when you don’t immediately fit someone’s exact expectations of what a trans person looks like. Most of the time this just wastes a lot of time as you wait around for someone to have a long ass conversation and they run the papers to check them.

    These delays can mean missing a flight but the person who missed the flight could be in a place to sue if they don’t offer a solution hence… Standby flights. So this is more or less just going back to being the old sucky forms of travel discrimination versus an even worse form. The bar is in hell and folk are gunna feel about it based on what the bar was before it was lowered. Whether that’s “oh thank god” or “fucking hell life is shit” is a glass half full/empty reaction. Both are valid.


  • Yup, already had the “flee or stand and die” convo with my partner a few weeks ago. I am firmly willing to risk death to defend the progress we’ve made as a Province and Nation. We aren’t perfect and are early in the process but we’re trying to recon with our history of colonial genocide and embrace a truer multiculturalism which the US refuses to even acknowledge. We have made commitments to the health and well-being of all citizens, not just the productive bodies which fuel the markets. It’s incomplete but aspirational and walking it back would be a disgrace.

    The American democracy is an outdated shambles that has fallen into ruin and I will not be bound by it by choice. There is no freedom or opportunity the USA can offer us. Only more oppression on rights we already have enshrined.



  • The whole thing with trans health is that being trans is not considered a mental illness but gender dysphoria still has a diagnostic rubric and has health problems associated. So saying trans people who have transitioned aren’t sick anymore isn’t quite accurate because they were never considered sick in the first place. One of the ideas behind this way of thinking is a trans person’s issues aren’t caused because they are trans, it’s caused largely due to the lack of acceptance and support in the society around trans people. Framing transness as a mental illness also ignores the flipside of dysphoria - gender euphoria which is a very specific joy experienced by trans people expressing themselves healthily, it’s not simply from lessening pain around dysphoria, it’s basically something mostly unique to the trans experience that is overwhelmingly positive.

    Also there’s not a one size fits all response to dysphoria. Some chose to physically transition and others choose to use other management techniques to help. There isn’t a “cure” to gender dysphoria. There are limits to what can be achieved through physical transition even if one goes all the way. One can have dysphoria around stuff like not having periods and child bearing capabilities even if they are fully transitioned or there are things that are irreversible if the transition happens too late. Being trans can be a kind of complicated state of being where one needs to learn and implement how best to be supported. Framing it not as an illness removes the stigma of looking at the experience entirely clinically as something to be solved. The fix isn’t to be “less trans” as it is when one approaches something as a disorder to be removed and minimized.



  • Umm… I hate to tell you this but this is propagating some pretty harmful misinformation…

    The reactions to medications are actually more closely tied to the hormone balance and body fat distribution of a person than their sex. It’s a common issue in the trans community where birth certificates are non-updatable that a doctor will prescribe meds for a person’s birth sex but because they are fully transitioned through HRT they get the effects more common to their phenotype presentation. This means that treatment is more commonly in line with their gender identity because of their hormonal medication and other procedures like an orchiectomy that make a person more similar to where they transitioned to then where they transitioned from.

    With trans paitents by and large the safer way to behave is to go with the “if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and talks like a duck… If you are in a pinch and can’t ask them for specifics because they can’t talk - treat them like a duck.” While a lot of doctors aren’t super well versed in trans specific healthcare it remains a huge problem inside the community for trans women particularly being dosed like cis men which often means they respond like cis women to a lot of different things which is on average a little more scary because meds often linger longer than is expected in trans women’s tissues just like cis women. Sometimes this causes some cascading problems.

    Pharmacology wise the way trans folks react to different medications is still a bit of a frontier science… But dollars to donuts “just treat em like their birth sex and call it a day” is way too simplistic a take. The lived experience and often physical nature of gender do not stay nicely behind a cordon marked “politics”. Trans ignorance in healthcare can be very scary for someone whose endocrinologist has informed them what they should be given and treated like and then some hotshot resident could just decide to not listen should the trans person in question be placed in a position where they are in extreme distress and have to self advocate and educate the person caring for them on what may be the worst day of their life.