nicki

anti-authoritarian, secular humanist academic • RTs are not endorsements • 🇨🇦

[nicki @nitpickette]

A: "I really like lime daiquiri sorbet"

B: 'WHY DO YOU HATE CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM?!'

[LUCIΞN | DARKTIMES @LucienDorman]

Hi Hannah,

Your comment is not just wrong. It is deeply disrespectful and genuinely inhumane.

Please, before speaking with such certainty, look at the recent medical literature on ME/CFS. This disease is not psychological. It is a serious, multi-system biological illness involving the immune system, nervous system, autonomic function, metabolism, circulation, and energy production.

I’m university educated. I was a tech founder and CEO. I had a beautiful girlfriend, a full life, ambition, independence, and every reason to want to be out in the world.

I snowboarded, fly-fished, hiked, travelled the world, worked relentlessly, and lived in the mountains because being outdoors was one of the great loves of my life. From my bedroom window, I can still see the peaks I would give almost anything to hike again.

I would cut off my arms and legs if it meant having the physical capacity to live normally again.

I now have very severe ME/CFS with extreme physical, cognitive, and sensory disability.

I lost my work. I lost my partner of seven years. I lost my ability to have sex. My ability to speak is greatly diminished. I cannot tolerate light, sound, television, podcasts, reading, touch, human presence, or even emotional expression. Crying, laughing, or pushing slightly too hard can leave me with severe physical symptom exacerbation for days. Sometimes, if I push too far, the worsening is permanent.

This is not anxiety. This is not deconditioning. This is not a lack of motivation. This is not a belief system.

Yes, the CNS and autonomic nervous system are profoundly dysfunctional, but that is only part of the picture. The depth of biological disruption in ME/CFS is staggering.

The suffering is almost impossible to describe. It is not tiredness. It is not burnout. It is a state of being trapped inside a body that punishes basic human activity.

Words like yours are not harmless. They contribute to the stigma that leaves severely ill people dismissed, neglected, and abandoned while they are already living through something close to hell.

Please open your eyes. Read the science. Listen to patients. This disease is real, and the people suffering from it deserve basic human respect.

The opinion you have is outdated and lacking any serious scientific basis.

Please, just for a moment, imagine that you might be wrong.

Imagine that the people living with this disease are not lazy, anxious, deconditioned, or mistaken about their own bodies. Imagine that they are describing a real biological illness that medicine has failed to properly understand for decades.

Because that is the reality.

[Róisín Michaux @RoisinMichaux]

Single-sex services for women are disappearing in Europe. Here's how it's being done:

There are two main ways via which single-sex spaces and services are slowly going extinct in Europe. The first one is, obviously, by allowing anyone to identify as the opposite sex. Once a male person is in a female-only space, let’s say a youth hostel dorm room for example, it is no longer a women-only dorm room. It is a mixed-sex dorm room. He may have had his nads removed, or he may even be wearing a dress covered in flowers. It is a mixed-sex dorm room once both males and females are allowed to sleep in it.

If you tried to get such a man out of the room, and return it to its status as a women-only space, you would be accused of discrimination against him on the basis of his gender identity (though depending on your legal jurisdiction, which in turn depends on the speed at which your country’s equality legislation is being transed, this may still be called discrimination on the basis of “gender” or even sex-via-gender reassignment, even if the “reassignment” involves nothing more than the flowery dress).

If a company, or service of any kind, tries to maintain a single-sex policy, they will likely have to battle it out in court as soon as a disgruntled transvestite sniffs out their heresy. And so in order to avoid being dragged to court by such men (and such women), companies and services are pre-empting legal action by just making everything mixed-sex, like the Germans are planning to do in new building regulations. Problem solved.

And while the end of women-only yoga classes might not bother you that much, there are some services that really (really really) need to remain sex-based, and they are underpinned by the same equality laws that are currently under threat.

First a little background: equal treatment laws are mandatory in EU countries. I can’t refuse to sell a man an ice cream from my ice cream van, just because he’s a man. You can’t refuse to polish a woman’s Fabergé egg because you only polish men’s Fabergé eggs.

Except, and this is crucial, sometimes you can discriminate on the basis of someone’s sex. And I bet you can guess what those circumstances are. It must be, as the TERF Islanders put it: “a proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim”. This teeny tiny caveat, variously worded, carries the weight of women’s safety and dignity in public spaces and services in European countries. You can deny a man access to a women’s prison or rape crisis centre, and you can refuse to hire a man for a job in (for example) a residential care home if that job involves washing the intimate parts of delirious old ladies or intellectually disabled children (whose families can request female-only intimate care).

Do you know why a family of an old checked-out woman might wish for their mother’s genitals be tended to by someone female? You bet you do. Not All Men yadda yadda yadda. Save it for yer wife. Enough men are . that even gender-equal Scandinavian utopias can legally advertise for those jobs for women only. And men also have the right, for privacy reasons, to wish only to have men tend to their bits. And that’s utterly reasonable.

But by expanding equality protections to include men masquerading as women and vice-versa, the burden is on the management of such facilities to justify why they are excluding variously-identified people. The only country that has gone to court to establish in law that sex refers to biology, not identity, is the UK, but service providers eager to please noisy activists are ignoring it, leading to a bit of a crisis. Oh you’ve not read about this major policy issue in the newspaper, or seen a debate about it on the news? That’s not an accident.

Men stayed out of women’s spaces because both society and the law punished them if they did not. That norm is disappearing, and the law is disappearing — or being tortuously reinterpreted into nothingness — along with it.

[Captain Dick @CaptainDick12]

Doug Ford has racked up the largest subnational debt in the world. No province, state or small country has as much debt as Ford. Ontario's net debt is projected to surpass half a trillion dollars, sitting at around $507.1 billion and he goes off on vacation for five months?

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

Dear Brits, libertarian millionaires are setting up charter cities that use land and resource grabbing, privatization of utilities, and when locals object, they do things like switch off the water supply. Know your enemy. Sunak’s 74 SEZs will ape Honduras
https://t.co/HD5XvxsKxU

[Lovable Liberal and his Old English sheepdog @DougWahl1]

I am impressed!

I was sure Donald Trump would never post anything about pride month. And then he posted this!

Clearly, I was wrong!

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

BBC PAID A WOMAN HALF A MAN SALARY FOR THE SAME JOB AND THOUGHT NO ONE WOULD NOTICE

Carrie Gracie spoke fluent Mandarin. Ran the @BBC Beijing bureau. Thirty years of service. One of four international editors at Britain's most prestigious broadcaster.

Then the BBC was legally forced to publish salary data in 2017. Gracie looked at the list. Her male counterpart covering North America was on up to £249,000. She was below £150,000. Not even on the published list. Neither was Europe editor Katya Adler. The two women. Funny that.

She had explicitly made equal pay a condition of taking the China role. The BBC said yes. Then paid her nearly half anyway and apparently hoped she'd never check.

She checked.

She asked for equal pay. The BBC, with the confidence of an institution that had been getting away with this for decades, offered her a raise that still left her short.

She turned it down. Resigned from the post. Published an open letter to the licence fee payers explaining exactly what their public broadcaster was doing with their money.

The BBC's response was to put her through nearly a year of their own internal grievance process. Run by the same institution she was complaining about. Investigating itself. Shockingly, it went nowhere.

It took three separate meetings with the Director-General and the concrete threat of an employment tribunal before the BBC caved, issued a public apology, and paid her £361,000 in backdated wages.

She gave every single penny to the Fawcett Society (@fawcettsociety).

A publicly funded broadcaster. Breaking equality law. Caught red-handed. Dragging a 30-year employee through a year of institutional theatre. Paying up only when a judge became a realistic possibility.

[Christine 🌻 Guenter @ChristineGuent8]

“There are studies coming out saying that if you give air purifiers to patients, they end up in the hospital less, with fewer respiratory infections…”

[Dr. Daniel Grossman @DrDGrossman]

Ectopic pregnancies (i.e., when an embryo implants somewhere other than the uterine lining) are never viable & can be life-threatening.

Despite this, doctors in Arkansas & Oklahoma tried to discharge a patient with an ectopic pregnancy without treatment. https://t.co/t5IsdNOaf9

[POLITICO @politico]

A judge said the Trump administration can’t dismantle a weather research center. The damage may already be done. https://t.co/LiakIdTYBW

[Nathaniel Arfin @ArfinNathaniel]

Was this raised in the Legislature by a single MPP this year? Sincerely. Why the hell are we letting this government skate on INCINERATING billions of dollars?

[BirdieBittern @BirdieBittern]

Outbreak of fungal infection at laser eye clinic blinds patients

The patients were infected with Purpureocillium lilacinum

The outbreak was likely due to contaminated equipment such as saline bottles, refrigerators and surgical devices.

https://t.co/2BJpbecMsg via @DailyMail

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

The Trump administration is sending ships to rip 900 ocean sensors out of the Atlantic and Pacific — and Congress already told them twice they couldn't do it.**
They're doing it anyway.

[Tara Blume @tcblume]

Science gasps for breath. They are removing all the ocean monitors to understand changes in currents and climate, and the excuse is a master class in obfuscation & double speak . (1/2) https://t.co/vs782YbcI3

[Karen Lister @KareBearLister]

Pentagon bars journalists from its press office after designating it a ‘classified space’ - MS NOW https://t.co/SNNGksyMP9

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

🚨 DISGUSTING: Absolute bombshell on Fox News. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent openly admits the Trump administration is plotting to gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

When asked about slashing these vital lifelines, he calls it the next step in their agenda.

[Farah Sovereign @FarahSovereign]

@emkenobi These guys!!!

[Shoebutton -Nasty Canadian🔬 🇨🇦 🦠🌈ally 🗿🌻 @sock82]

@emkenobi It makes sense when you realize it was never about the fetus
It's always been about forcing women to subjugate themselves to men
-Withholding life saving medical procedures from women
- Removing choice by removing birth control
-Normalizing r*pe: men choose when woman have sex

[MaDukes 🇺🇸💔 @madukes529]

@emkenobi @DeniseO6229 The co-sponsor for the bill is Ben Moss. Call these sons of bitches.

[𝓔𝓶 ♡ @emkenobi]

Republicans in North Carolina just proposed a bill that says if a woman is caught with an IUD or attempts to get an abortion then men are allowed to use DEADLY FORCE to try and stop her. They are proposing a bill that will allow men to kill women for using birth control. It’s House Bill 1232. Keith Kidwell is the Republican who proposed the bill. He claims it counts as self defense to use deadly force to stop abortion. This is a man who claims to be pro life. Feel free to give his office a call and let him know how you feel about his opinion.

And for anyone who says “obviously this will never get passed” that’s not the point. The point is it’s fucking insanity that a government official would even try to make a law like this. It’s insanity that there are men out there who are trying to make it legal to kill women for making decisions for their own bodies. This is real and it’s happening right now in front of our eyes.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

We are now in a weird era where a guy gets publicly shamed for running his sprinklers on a Tuesday, while a data center the size of a Costco quietly drains a reservoir so AI can generate a picture of your cat as a medieval knight. And the data center gets a tax incentive for it.