You are living during the time of masculine emancipation my friend. Men are allowed to be cute af these days and more and more women are catching on that this is a good thing. Some of the guys I know who register this way have found a lot of success dating in the non-binary scene where gender expectations are more generally negotiable. Non-binary circles are encircled with exterior connections of cis communities who have a more dynamic understanding of gender so if you are in a market to find likeminded souls that’s where I would look.

And also… Cute is sexy. It’s not everyone’s vibe but there’s definitely a desire out there for true gentlemen emphasis on the gentle. Most of the cis ones I know are married to ride or die partners whom exude an aura of sweetness out to 20ft.

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.

Violence tends to be a double edged sword. Whether or not things get better as the result of an outbreak of violence is hit and miss. A lot of authoritarian regimes in history just get replaced with new authoritarian regimes that have a better PR team and create a leniency period before cranking back the progress once people figure everything has been fixed. Long term it’s not great prospects. Anarchist activities tends to create this sort of thing. It creates a power vacuum to which the first one to break the faith and assemble a new loyal hierarchy while murmuring a smokescreen of empty hymns of the old cause is rewarded by becoming the new tyrant. Oftentimes there is a promise of whatever state of oppression being a transitory period. You aren’t supposed to notice that the transitory period after which they say that they will surrender their stranglehold to the rightful inheritance of the people never comes to fruition and instead just becomes a new dynasty of effective monarchs living it up.

But other times it’s just another tool in the box of movements that are fighting against occupation. It usually helps if there’s a peaceful arm of the movement who will get most or all of the credit after the fact whom can hold the dialogue space. Every Civil rights fight that had a non-violent movement leader also had “unrelated” people in the field under a different banner solving some problems with violence. Black Panthers, Butterfly Brigade, bomb weilding suicide suffragettes, indigenous anti colonial movements… These are part of the landscape and the actions they took were given space to be picked over by contemporaries because provocative acts lend punch to rhetoric. If you have no legitimate means to solve the violence done to you other than violence then the problem still needs solving so violence it is. What is effective in this model is collective directed action with planned objectives to fit into existing systems or that come with fully drawn up replacements for old systems. Not as sexy as anarchy but the wins are on the whole more stable and enduring. If you want a democracy then your problem solve should at least should have a true core of people whose ultimate intention is to operate democratically. Violence has a seat at that table too but weilding it justly is a commitment.

I recognize that speech is never free when the place it is conducted is owned by shareholders.

It may sound odd but this could actually be a sea change moment for a lot of people. Having been stuck around far right coworkers enough a lot of them have hung their hats on the whole “free speech” lynchpin. That’s the thing they condemn leftist spaces for doing, that’s the hill thwy will die on. Their sycophantic love of Musk is bound up in the idea that he’s some kind of champion of free speech. This likely is the rude shock some of them might need to realize that was never true.

Is it going to get them to revisit their whole worldview? Probably not. But it’s a crack in the facade.

In the articles I have read the terms “raised alarms” does a lot of work. Yes a lot of Christian groups “raise alarms” but that’s a little toothless when there is a history of a lot of sects believing that suicide, regardless of it’s circumstances, is a gateway to hell. The median age of people taking up the offer on assisted suicide is at age 78.

We as a country have a massive die off occurring as the youngest of the Baby Boomers, one of the biggest ever generations in our country’s history… Is now reaching retirement age. There is a steep change in how the body ages and metabolizes things around age 60 and there’s a bit of an expected die off that accompanies that change. Considering the Canadian government and population is particularly sensitive to watchdoging any potential genocide or eugenics programs the system is designed with a lot of checks and balances. You need two doctors who are unrelated to each other’s practice to sign off on even starting the process which takes about a year to complete if you are not terminally ill. Any particular spikes in pairs of potentially colluding doctors who sign off together on the paperwork too often trigger an investigation.

Part of the cultural development of the last two decades has been fallout from the government admiting that they and the Catholic Church were jointly responsible for a genocide of the indigenous peoples. While keeping a weather eye on the program is merited a lot of the controversy is more towards the end of people wanting a scary bogeyman to point to in order to erode faith in the Government when really the system is one that was heavily advocated for and was very carefully designed. While concern is natural… It’s also good to do the reading to explore the depths of the system’s design and implementation and know that it was from the get go in conversation with ethical watchdogs and is under review since it’s inception to monitor the effect it is having. “Somebody warns scary numbers are scary” is basically the imperative of the media who only gets paid when you pay attention to them and scary, half explained things is one of the noisemakers that is effective.

As a Canadian who has watched a loved one die very slowly and spent a fair amount of time in hospice I changed my mind about wanting to fight to the bitter end.

My mother in law was a lovely lady, but unable to really face her death. Seeing what others were going through she begged us to not let that be her but the rules are she and she alone needed to sign off on the paperwork while she was lucid. We couldn’t set that up for her, she needed to do it herself… And she couldn’t face it and she missed her window.

The last week of her life was hell. She was so weak from not eating due to her cancer that she fell and hurt her hip. Thing people don’t really tell you about wasting away is your brain essentially becomes too energy expensive to run. She lost the ability to understand what was going on around her and had to be restrained in the bed so she wouldn’t try to get up and she, unable to interpret what was happening, started making escape attempts throughout the day and night frequently crying in pain. She begged like a small child for us to help her and looked at us like monsters because we couldn’t. She had been one of the most staunchly independent people I had known and she spent her last week in agony and all of us were powerless watching knowing it was the last thing she wanted.

I was so thankful for the Hospice care. I realized it could have been so much worse if her care was expensive or wasn’t handled with such an incredible standard of compassion… But the experience left all of us close to my MIL more than a little traumatized.

It’s important to realize that these decisions are intensely personal. I would not wish what happened to my MIL on my worst enemy. Depictions of death in media do not adequately prepare you for the potential realities of every situation. That perceived duty to live as long as you can isn’t always a kindness.

Kinda reminds me of the time Ken McElroy was murdered in the middle of Skidmore Missouri during an altercation where most of the town was present and “nobody saw anything”.

So he’s fine if we remove all toilet paper from bathrooms. How he wipes his ass is his parent’s responsibility right?

You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don’t know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.

It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.

That the tech has evolved to be better actually is an assumption. The novel data problem hasn’t been meaningfully addressed really at all so mostly we assume that progress has been made… but it’s not meaningful progress. The promises being made for future capability is mostly pretty stale hype that hasn’t changed year to year with a lot of the targets remaining unchanged. We are getting more data on where specifically and how it’s failing, which is something, but overall it appears to be a plateau of non-linear progress with different updates being sometimes less safe than newer ones.

That actually safe self driving cars might be decades away however is antithetical to the hype run marketing campaigns that are working overtime to put up smoke and mirrors around the issue.

Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn’t really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.

I didn’t think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.

Honestly don’t know about the specifics to verify or checked the sources but on first blush it feels pretty correct.

My mental situation is such that I have a very strong memory recall and approach learning pretty voraciously. Around topics I enjoy I build a sort of mental map to compare and recall things creating a sort of landscape of understanding over a wide range of topics. I pick up a lot of fabrication based tasks quickly in part because I’ve realized that my imagination renders things in full three dimensions allowing me to imagine builds in stages and troubleshoot at the concept stage… which as I have come to understand it isn’t ubiquitous for most people and is tied into the form of dyslexia I have.

All in all though it’s a pretty isolating experience being this way. I chose a career that is non academic and a lot of people at some point or another imply that it’s a “waste” of my mind. Some people react to me as a threat, as though I am judging them or showing off or lying about my interests or must be exaggerating the things I demonstrate some small mastery over. Listening to those who have known me over a long period of time describe me to other people is often sobering. While it’s often flattering the impression is that I am sort of a sort of wonderous jack of all trades eccentric who operates on a different scale of time than other people.

To experience it from my perspective though, I have a sense generally of the line where most people are likely to absorb or remember things and know from people’s reactions exactly how much of a weirdo I come across as when I step past that boundry. Neurodivergance is a neutral term, it just boils down to “a different brain”. The more different one is generally the harder it is for other people to intuit your needs. My experience with teachers in school is that I could understand as a child that the system of reporting progress required me to do things that I found intolerable so that essentially the system could report metrics back to measure things in a systemic way. But that system wasn’t serving me what would have been personally tolerable by actually challenging me and also didn’t particularly care about me as a person. I figured out that most of that scorecard was meaningless while I was beholden to the system. A number of teachers realized I was imbibing the lessons I just wasn’t playing the game and their reactions to that were often pretty sympathetic.

On the next episode of “historical figures who were gay as fuck”… Leonardo Da Vinci.

There is a fair amount of speculation that being bi is actually way more common than is generally thought but because current cultural rules of compulsory heterosexuallity codes being bi as being something you must act on to actually be considered that identity a lot of people believe that they are straight simply because they never acted on the attraction.

For guys the comp-het mindset also tends to discount basically any situation where they feel dominant because “straight” and “masculine” to them basically means that as long as they are the petetrative element in a place of absolute control via power dynamics or violence then it doesn’t count as “gay”. Essentially since as long as it holds no emotional attachment to them it doesn’t count. As long as they can’t code their behaviour as “feminine” it doesn’t count.

Which to the rest of us is fucking bonkers…

I would say less than on reddit but still a thing. Being cisgender still is treated as a norm and the sort of folks who openly display misogynistic tendencies are fewer and farther between… But any innocuous mention to being trans will very get you a couple of dedicated downvoters or people who use gender essentialist arguements, silencing tactics (oh you’re just being devisive) or transphobic rhetoric.

Not to say that it is bad comparatively. This is one of the most trans neutral places on the internet. It’s not “trans friendly” mind you, I would categorize that as places where concensus about trans people being a normal thing to be has been reached and attention has shifted away from our basic rights as being up for debate… But trans neutral spaces are important too. We need holding spaces away from places where trans people talk openly where people can get to know us where the majority of support shuts down open hostility towards us prompting more nuanced interaction.

A lot of trans hostile spaces exist out there where being openly trans or advocacy for our needs invites a lot of death threats, calls for suicide, doxxing attacks and so on. If you see a comment section on youtube on a queer creator for instance that’s overwhelmingly trans positive that generally means there’s heavy moderation at play because they are trying to create spaces safe for their queer audience to interact with each other. What you as a casual visitor generally don’t see is the mental cost being taken on by that moderation team to artificially create the illusion of that positive space. Here on this instance that level of moderation is unnecessary because generally speaking the volume is manageable.

I dunno if anyone is interested but of you got some spare coins laying around the Canadian based charity Rainbow Refugee has been helping get out threatened LGBTQIA+ folks from multiple countries including Russia for quite a while now by arranging sponsorships and legal support and advice for LGBTQIA asylum seekers. If you know anyone looking to get out or would like to donate here’s a link :

https://www.rainbowrefugee.com/

It’s not censorship. Censorship is something demanded of by a government. As a business owner if you use the assets of my business I am passively participating and enabling you to spread your message. If I find out what you do is horrible I have the right to retract any level of my participation from your endeavor. You are still allowed to say whatever you want but I am NOT compelled to help you even passively.

We have protected classes to stop people from uaing this right to exile vulnerable groups from being able to use all servicea in society this way as a counter measure to this right but if the form of removal is not based automatically out of what body you are walking around in or what your religious beliefs are and the ban doesn’t apply unilaterally to all members of your group for that sole reason - then it is valid.

In an ideal world people would be disqualified from these positions if they were bigots. But good luck getting any trans friendly protections on the books. People over the past decade have become way more comfortable in harassing trans people in public in a general sense. Enforcement is also spotty. Airline security particularly is given a lot of benefit of the doubt and not an amazing amount of oversight. Systemic persecution of Muslims has been an issue for decades and surprise - people still get hassled. Police, police unions and the courts of law they serve are also often very good at covering for each other.

In reality these issues apply on a worldwide scale. If you are traveling by air and have even a layover in a country where it is not safe to be openly trans you are in danger every time someone asks to see your documents.

Also every border guard or police officer in every country is a patchwork. All it takes is one particularly bad one and you could end up with PTSD, injured or dead. There is good reason why police officers in uniform are generally not welcome at Prides. It is a known trigger that causes folk who have experienced this kind of violence to have involuntary flashbacks or panic attacks.

It is ultimately safer to give someone the tools to be safer than to trust every official in every country you might ever want to risk visiting to be a good official. Even if you are going to one that is supposed to be safe.

The issue is that listed sex on a birth certificate has actual effects that limit the options available to trans people. Like if you otherwise pass as your gender but say your passport lists your birth sex you are immediately recognizable as trans to immigrations officials in airports or border officials will treat your documents as suspicious which means chances are way better of you being detained, harassed and abused by security personnel.

If it’s on a driver’s licence then that immediately opens you up to bigoted behaviour by anyone you need to hand that document over to. Cops can decide that maybe they want to find something worth arresting you for since they already have you pulled over, that apartment you were applying for to rent? Well you’re noticeably trans on your documentation so maybe they just put you to the bottom of the stack.

A lot of trans folk look at being able to pass as their window of hope to walk the world more safely. If you have a full on beard, deep voice, male sounding name but an F in the sex category on your passport travelling becomes an absolute misery.