A lot of what this administration will do is going to be illegal and nonsensical and dumb, but they will do so much of it that it will be impossible to effectively push back against it all. If you hear something that you care about, pick that and keep up with it. Don’t get overwhelmed by the torrent of stuff happening over the next four years.

This is especially true in the current media environment, where there’s so much noise that it’s really difficult to break in and sort through what’s true and what’s false and what’s missing context and what’s misleading and what’s technically true but there are other factors that change how it plays out in reality, etc.

It takes a lot of energy to keep up with it all, so pick something you care about and pay attention to developments about that. Maybe that’s trans rights, immigrant rights, democratic institutions, economics, geopolitics, military industrial complex, whatever. You won’t be able to effectively care about it all, so pick one and focus on that.

They are as well!

It’s reductive, but still close enough if you don’t know/interact with nonbinary or two-spirit people on a regular basis. At least to the extent of my understanding.

Most places in the world recognize two genders and their respective social roles: men and women. Some places recognize a third gender and its respective social and/or ceremonial role. This is the case for (some) North American Indigenous people, and two-spirit is a catch-all term to refer to a third gender role that they recognize.

It’s hard to map onto the more standard two gender system that most of us are familiar with. When you think of men as the breadwinners and women as the child bearers, some cultures think of an additional distinct third gender with a designated social/ceremonial role.

But as you might have thought while reading that, men being the breadwinners and women being the child bearers is already a fairly outdated view of gender and social roles. Turns out social constructs are messier than they seem when you start to really analyze them and attempt to strictly define them.

TLDR: two-spirit is a catch-all term for a type of queer identity recognized by some North American Indigenous cultures.

YouTube makes money by showing ads on videos people watch. If they show people the videos they want to watch, they get to show more ads before someone stops watching YouTube for the day. This incentives YouTube to surface the videos that people will watch for the longest time with no regard for anything but their advertisers’ willingness to have their ads played on said videos.

Also it’s expensive to moderate a platform so big that one in three humans uses it.

Also don’t defund the program like Portugal did. The conservatives there didn’t like that decriminalizing drug possession for personal use actually works, so they immediately worked to cut funding to the program by like 80% and surprise surprise the program stopped being as effective as it was at the start. Essentially every piece of data we have on Tough on Crime™ politics shows that the approach doesn’t work. If you want people to stop using drugs, make it easy for them to do so without fear of being arrested/imprisoned.

Moving out of hell is cheaper said than done. Most Americans can’t even afford an emergency $500 expense. Vacancy rates are near historical lows but housing costs are at all-time highs. Finding somewhere to live is hard, especially if you don’t have middle or upper class income. Most of the people risking their lives by not moving don’t have a choice.