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The American democracy is an outdated shambles that has fallen into ruin and I will not be bound by it by choice.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.

C-3P0, our translator for R2’s boopspeak uses he/him pronouns for the little guy and so does at least Luke so he’s effectively masc presenting. One could argue he’s a man but the society he’s in effectively classes sentient droids as property without the reserve they do for non-artificial species and are unlikely to confer the other cultural aspects “manhood” onto a droid.

There are limited examples of this effect working in reverse. Take the word “Nice” for example. Nice back in ye old medieval times used to be a synonym for “stupid” or “simple” so saying someone was “nice” was insulting. Then there was this prolonged long fad where things being very plain and straightforward was considered a good thing and “Nice/simple” gained a positive connotation. Saying someone is “simple” or a “simpleton” retains this original sort of vibe but “Nice” now just means pleasant.

As a Set Dresser/On set dresser - any set build before a director sees it/ wideshot films it.

How it generally works is we get a bunch of stuff and… Something. This something can be as exact as a blueprint (techpack) that clearly marks where furniture is supposed to go or as vague as a one sentence long description of what the set is supposed to be. We are usually given a bunch of options for virtually everything that is used. Then we make up the set.

Then the waveform goes nuts. The Heirachy goes Set Decorator, Production Designer, and then Producer. They will randomly visit or call in sometimes separately and whatever plans that existed immediately cease to matter. The set may completely change a random number of times back and forth as anyone above us in the hierarchy demands unless it countermands a specific demand made by someone above the demander in the hierarchy.

That is until shoot day. Once the Director has the floor all of that prep goes immediately out the window and the director may change whatever they please about the set and while there’s usually too much time constraints to change everything it could mean getting rid of anything. The waveform only collapses to depict a singular reality once the wideshot is in the bag which means there is now a continuity that must (okay “must” is a strong word) be obeyed.

You do you. Everybody’s circumstances are different and if you think that they give no positive value to your family life then that’s the way to go. This would only be a potential strategy if you didn’t want to give them up.

Baptism is also a hard line a lot of Christians get on because they think it’s basic hell proofing moreso than the average rituals. It’s not like they will stop their general pressures if you agree… but on this particular point people have been known to risk it BIG because they believe the mortal soul is imperiled and it comes at a point when the kid is at their most physically vulnerable being practically newborn.

Risk assessment should be holistic. It’s not necessarily compromise and framing it that way risks it becoming more about a battle of egos. it’s about recognizing and having a real situation assessment free from personal emotional triggers about how best to respond to potential dangers that center the baby’s safety first in a way that can stop the police from getting involved because faith is not reasonable.

While I realize that hard boundry setting is the new norm sometimes harm reduction is a better strategy. While a lot of folk have religious trauma to deal with that makes them want to do exactly zero church stuff one aspect of not believing in God is that a lot of the ritual aspects are pretty low stakes once one you strip away the mysticism. One way to handle the worry of your Mom wanting to do something dangerous to essentially just splash water on your kid is to participate in the silly ritual safely so that it’s done with minimum risk.

There definitely are hills to die on but if you give an order you know won’t be obeyed because the stakes from your Mother’s perspective are incredibly high then one way to look at it is baby’s safety comes first. Not because of the possible existence of the soul but because risking kidnapping to perform at end of day a boring nothing ceremony that ultimately means nothing isn’t a good idea. If it is distasteful to participate because of trauma then recognizing that you can deputize somebody you trust to get the hurdle over with is an option but realistically, your kid will never gain that same trauma from this. They will grow up with a completely different belief system as their basic. If them simply being baptized is a personal trigger it is wise to unpack exactly why because whether they are or not isn’t something your kid is likely going to care about. Having grown up in an agnostic environment and having a number of friends in the same situation some of us were baptized for the sake of family peace but for everyone I know it’s a complete non-event. One advantage of these things actually meaning nothing is that there is no change of state. A baptized baby and a non baptized baby are the same.

To my crew anyway a lot of us our parents aversion or reactions to church stuff seems out of proportion due to them having a history. Theirs is a more volitile strongly opinionated atheism as opposed to the more passive naturalized one we developed because we do not feel betrayed by belief. Sometimes their aversion causes them to do things which from the outside display that they are still letting their rejection of religious upbringing effect their judgment in an outsized way because they didn’t ever really heal.

There’s a hidden usage of “hon” from the history of the toxic trans communities message boards to mean “trans women who don’t pass” and is used condescendingly. That usage is basically dead in the water and barely known outside of a pretty narrow sliver of the queer community but it can still get you a side eye in some places.

I feel like I have watched in real time as Y’all has gained usage up in the Canadian Queer community.

I am old enough to still regard “hon” as demi hostile but “dude” seems to be drifting more and more gender neutral. At heart we may all just be ninja turtles all the way down

To be honest no… Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.

I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…

But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.

… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…

Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.

“The Cat Who Walked through Walls” by Robert Heinlein…

Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth’s moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.

Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like… A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving…

Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for… reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?

First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.

Alberta adopted this model and saw an increase in public health wait times and a sharp increase in the required government spending required to run the public system.

Creating a two tiered system means that it bleeds doctors, nurses and admin into the private sector which is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy that everyone deserves the right to life sustaining care. If the rich want to dodge the cue then they can quite frankly afford the plane ticket. If the system is being undermined by politicians - oust the politicians. Let them know that that system is of the highest priority and should be first to see reinvestment.

But we should all be aware that Canada is one of the most challenging landscapes for delivery of any kind of health care. We are diffuse over a large landmass and the commitment to the system means that if you live in a remote place 2 hours away from the nearest surgery then the government is on the hook to spend an outsized amount of budget to uphold the commitment of care for you. The temptation to cut corners is always there and each Provincial trust is its own battleground. That we have the level of service we do is a credit to the efficacy of public health systems… Which means upping the costs to create competitive private sector development hurts us all.

It may be a step up for Americans to have any system at all as a right to health safety net but it’s a sharp step down for anywhere running a full public system.

That is actually one of the major issues at play. One of the kind of predatory things about right wing politics is it plays into a fallacy that the truth is simple, easily recognizable and can be rendered down into axioms a child can understand. Anything that doesn’t fall under these parameters cannot be the truth.

But science moved away from big axiomatic stuff like 50 years ago. It became the study of variation and nuance.

The left attempts to have a aspects of this simple explanation stuff in sections by adopting almost slogan-like things - take “Trans women are women” as an example. That easily digestible slogan sits on top of a whole bunch of consequentialist based philosophy, psychological research with a focus on harm reduction, a history of uphill public advocacy to just put trans issues on the radar and being trans itself isn’t easy to explain. It is simple and quippy - but not axiomatic. So a lot of people on the right tear into it as a target because the optics of defending a short quippy but nuance laden argument in slogan form while keeping it short and easily digestible is basically impossible.

This issue is throughout progressive political thought. Any short form word we use to describe practically anything has a whole swack of addendums, hidden complications, edge cases and multiple historical definitions. If you use very technical language you can be more specific but then you can easily talk over the heads of your audience.

Well… Short answer talking about “the left” and “the right” is effectively doing something called “constructing a public”. These are are not just political constructs, they are political constructs that do certain things. Neither of these constructs have hard boundaries and throughout time they shift.

But there is a distinct difference. When you look at the right, while the presentation changes they have a fairly straightforward citable group of guiding philosophy traceable through a small handful of writing. If you read Thomas Malthus and Edmond Burke they will sound like slightly more archaic versions of modern pundits on the right. When you listen to the modern pundits you will notice that they are very repetitive and what differentiates one from another is more or less just presentation style. That repetition of talking points changes it’s arguements but never it’s foundation. Since it’s mostly in service of protecting a status quo where hereditary privilege is upheld it doesn’t have to get complicated. It just has to justify the world as it has been and that humans are sneaky, fundamentally flawed and morally defunct but that by structuring society as a winnowing process where playing the game the rightful and just few will rise to the top.

But when you look at “the left” it’s not an easy gradient, it’s a loose scattering of little clusters of very different ideologies and guiding philosophies. Since it largely works of a guiding concept of dissolution of established aggregated personal fortunes and radical anti-supremacist framework of various forms it’s not uniform. There’s anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-monopolist, anti-capitalist, anti-discriminatory, pro-neurodiversity, expanded personal rights, pro public service, pro democratic and anti democratic groups, pro freedom of movement, anarchists, and acedemic political theorists each with individual theories about how to bring about a state of all these things when none of this has in living memory existed. It’s not generally trying to defend a status quo but trying to feild test different ways of doing things… So basically everybody and their dog has a slightly different opinion of what is a good idea.

It’s kind of hard to see " bad faith actors" as it were because any two leftists might have almost no ideological overlap as far as praxis. They might not see each other as being part of the same tribe even if outsiders looking in would classify them as “left” and they might all claim to be “left” themselves… It’s not that it’s contradictory, it’s that the branching paths of divergent evolving philosophies have rambled off in a whole bunch of different directions and effectively become whole other creatures entirely.

Love the idea… But let’s be real, Conservative rhetoric has depended on attacking peoples trust in acedemia, administrative government positions and anyone who is an expert who doesn’t reinforce the vibe of being a “dissenting voice”. Fact checks make those of us who understand sourcing feel like we’re owning the idiots, but for the Conservative audience iit very rarely shifts people out of their steadfast adherence and instead tends to make them distrust the medium the debate is held in.

Conservative rhetoric has been a poisoned well for a long time. To play by their game one has to look more at a vibes based playbook. Their voting block generally have a misplaced overconfidence in their own ability to read body language and tone. It’s literally not the words and definitely not the facts, it’s the affect they are delivered in.

It’s part of why they dunno how to think about Harris and have conspiracy theories about her earrings piping her answers. She is outperforming Trump on affect of delivery based on their playbook and they don’t know how to interpret that.

Dunno what to tell yeh mate, it’s about as oldif not older than Furry culture. Weeki Watchee springs started a whole thing with their Mermaid shows and the subculture basically took off from like the early 60’s… And was probably about as horny as a lot of other subcultures that started around the same time.

Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.

That’s the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it’s root in other people’s perceptions. There’s a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project “manliness” as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces…but doesn’t well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.

It’s a difficult knot to dig down to it’s source but I think it’s a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it’s so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.

To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn’t really happening because cis people don’t really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don’t really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can’t just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate… And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.