To put the US position more directly: “Almost everyone is going to get COVID [...] we have the tools to ensure that people [...] work.”

Bad article is bad and disingenuous. It mentions the current highly contagious strain but does not touch on the reason for its transmissibility: namely that Onicron BA.5 doesn't give a shit if you're vaccinated or boosted or have some natural immunity from a previous infection. Earlier talk of "herd immunity" is out the window because this mutant mofo is so good at immune system infiltration. Which leaves prevention measures like masking and social distancing, and we know how well the antivaxx pissbabies handled that the first time around.

That... changes literally nothing. What the fuck are you talking about?

The government coming out and openly saying that they plan for everyone to be infected with Covid, and refuse to do anything about it - even literally just fucking mask mandates - isn't somehow excused by a lack of effective vaccines. It wasn't acceptable at the start of the pandemic, and it isn't now.

'Herd immunity' was always a bullshit strategy - we've known, firstly, that there's no real lasting immunity to Covid, from since the first vaccines were developed; and, additionally, 'allow the virus to spread unchecked through a vaccinated population' is the exact course of action you'd take if you wanted to generate vaccine-resistant variants as fast as possible.

The only measure that has ever actually shown any effect has been lockdowns - actual lockdowns, not the 'you need to go to work, but please don't go out afterwards - also Starbucks is a critical industry' half-measures the west has had. The west refuses to have any actual lockdowns, because lockdowns sacrifice the economic performance of businesses in order to save lives. While other countries kept people at home and delivered free food, the richest country on Earth somehow couldn't even give people more than $1200 to live off for two years? There's nothing stopping them from doing something about the pandemic. The ruling class simply doesn't care about workers dying if it cuts into their profits.

What has gotten into you people? You see a criticism of Biden and you immediately start grasping at straws (that the article doesn't mention why a new virus variant is transmissible?) and, satisfied you've found a reason to not have to actually think about the issue, you declare that everyone else is either some disingenuous liar, trying to trick you, or 'lacks critical thinking'.

i'm not actually mad i just like the comedic delivery of righteous but pointless anger

STAR TREK: TOS- S1E21 | The Return of the Archons ↳ The original Landru programmed it with all his knowledge but he couldn’t give it his wisdom, his compassion, his understanding, his soul, Mister Spock.

EXTRAORDINARY ATTORNEY WOO (2022) dir. Yoo In Shik

Btw, if you have not had tragedy dropped on you before, grief does fuck you up in unexpected and physical ways. If you can’t sleep or sleep more than expected or have more or reduced appetite, or energy goes weird— your brain just had a bunch of emotions dropped on it and sometimes it reacts by hitting every button in your brain. It will pass. Just try to not get too frustrated with yourself.

It’s also fine if you feel normal. Grief literally hits everybody differently, and some people are made to be able to to keep the farm going the day after a death, and some of us turn into sleepless gargoyles and get really into trying to help, and some of us are just unspeakably sad. Grief is weird. Be kind to yourself.

Not like this hasn’t been happening in the military for years.

Yep! My dad was in the Coast Guard during the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell era and one thing he mentioned was gay and lesbian service members marrying each other both for mutual bearding, and because married people got better housing.

Additionally my grandmother married one of her guy friends because her job offered dental insurance to employees and spouses and he needed some dental work done. They got married, processed the paperwork, got his dental problems fixed, made sure all the insurance payments went through, and divorced.

Two people getting married for the benefits has been going on as long as we’ve had benefits to marriage, and if two women doing it is homophobic then I guess someone’s going to have to tell my grandmother she was heterophobic.

like the thing that’s an actual problem is that these benefits are dependent on marriage. that people need, as in the example above, healthcare and may not be able to afford it without insurance shared by a spouse (let alone the other rights only extended to those with a legal partnership)

Reminder: disabled people have the opposite. We can’t marry ANYONE or we risk losing our benefits. It can work out if we are marrying someone who can support two people on one income, but that basically isn’t a thing anymore, so.

Include us in your activism.

What a lot of people get wrong about the abortion debate is this- they want to argue "abortion is good/bad/ok but in whatever circumstances/etc".

But that isn't the question at all. The question is "is this the government's business?" And "are strangers entitled to make this choice for you?" "Legally, who gets final say on your pregnancy/medical choices?"

And regardless of how you feel about abortion, I can't imagine anyone wanting their govenor/senator/president getting to decide that.

Some abortions happen because a miscarriage goes wrong and leaves pregnant people bleeding out.

Used to be, if it happened to you, you’d be transfused blood while doctors interviewed your family to see if you deserved to live or die because of a fetus that was already dead.

The way these abortion laws are worded could and probably WILL, if allowed, make having a miscarriage illegal.

You know. That thing most pregnancies end with? That’s not a choice on your behalf?

Right or wrong, opinions on the act itself aside: I don’t know about you, but being arrested for the reproductive equivalent of pissing myself isn’t exactly high on my list of things I want the government to be able to do.

Over 10% of pregnancies end in miscarriage (detected pregnancies. The number that happen before the 4 week mark when they might go undetected is likely much higher.) There's quite extensive lists of things pregnant people are supposed to minimize or avoid to lower that risk, but sometimes it just happens. It's the body's way of dealing with a pregnancy that is unviable for some reason (Most are because of a genetic or developmental abnormality). Pregnancy is complicated and tricky and dangerous- miscarriages are one way our bodies try to minimize that risk. If a pregnancy doesn't seem like it's going well, sometimes the body will just... stop it.

And now, with the fall of Roe, people who can become pregnant face potential *felony* charges over this. Murder charges, if prosecutors think you induced a miscarriage on purpose, manslaughter if you did something on accident that you "should" have known not to do.

Drank a cup of normal coffee instead of decaf? Wore heels and tripped going up the stairs? Ate a bologna sandwich or an eggs Benedict? An extra multivitamin that had some vitamin A in it? *murder and manslaughter* charges. Reckless endangerment.

You lose a pregnancy, maybe one you really really wanted, and as you are grieving, already wondering if you could have done something that would have prevented this? (Mostly not. Mostly it's just genetics. Just a bad match between egg and sperm. You did nothing wrong.) Well now you get to go in front of a jury and have THEM decide if it's your fault. If that salad with raw sprouts constitutes reckless negligence. Let these strangers decide if getting blue cheese in that salad was intentional, TRYING to induce a miscarriage.

And this is *not* hyperbole. The fact is, that the truth is even worse.

People HAVE been prosecuted because of pregnancy loss already- even when Roe still stood. The loss of Roe will only make it worse.

Most of those prosecutions come from people who took drugs or medication while pregnant, even when those drugs DONT generally carry a miscarriage risk and/or are PRESCRIBED by a doctor. Medicinal Marijuana, prescription pain killers, adderall for ADHD.

These cases can't prove causation. They can't prove that the adderall, or doing meth, or smoking a cigarette, or having a coffee, or eating soft cheese, or cleaning the litter box, or holding a box Turtle, or taking a multivitamin that had vitamin A in it, or lifting a heavy box - caused a miscarriage.

But they can look at you, and they can argue that maybe you seem like the kind of person who would do this on purpose. And it's a *felony*

The ability to become pregnant makes us a uniquely vulnerable group of people in many ways. Now, we are legally vulnerable to a nearly unbelievable extent as well.

So, here’s my question. All of the above is horrifying, but there’s another angle to this too. Let’s say you’re a dentist cheering on your little tyke at a little league game. The woman next to you faints. Since you’re in the medical field you rush to assist - help her hydrate, maybe grab a snack from the kids’ snack bag, get her to cool shade, call an ambulance... Right, let’s say eventually she’s taken to the hospital and diagnosed with (among other things like heat stroke) having a miscarriage. Do you now have legal liability for ‘participating’ in the event? Is she now incentivized to sue you for either not stopping it, or for being the one who caused it? To shift the legal liability from herself? 

Or say you’re a high school teacher and a girl stands up and asks to go to the nurse because she’s bleeding and her normal tampon isn’t working. Or you’re a manager at {job} and you assign an employee to a normal routine task, but suddenly she’s lightheaded on her feet and you end up calling an ambulance. In these examples is the woman/teen miscarrying now incentivized to sue anyone standing around to try to shift the legal responsibility for inducing the miscarriage?

Do laws like these incentivize everyone in the medical field, or who works with people of child-bearing age and ability, to avoid those people entirely? Again if you’re a dentist out for an evening stroll and you see a woman collapse on the sidewalk across the neighborhood street, are you safer legally if you just keep on walking?

i don't want hannibal season 4 but i do want to see dilfs mads mikkelsen and hugh dancy make out so i think they should get together film that and then just call it season 4

I HAVE NEVER FELT SO BETRAYED

BY THE NINE

now i dont want to be rude but has this commenter only recently joined this world though interdimensional travel

i love when there’s trees

who else loves when there’s trees. clap

To all the people who constantly zoned out and daydreamed as a kid and probably told off for it, who learnt how to cry silently before the age of ten and maybe stopped crying entirely, who used books as an escape method and would constantly daydream about running off to a fantasy world, who is most likely now a burnt-out neurodivergent who didn't get diagnosed early so they self-diagnosed instead, and who now wants to groan at the thought of having to wake up another day,

how's the childhood trauma, deep-rooted love hate relationship with your parents, lack of self-esteem and sense of self, and raging queerness doing? you good?

HEY

Pretty fucking bold of this to target me with such unerring precision. 

my boyfriend is not any flavour of queer. he says he "wishes he was" because queer people "just seem to understand the world so much" by which i assume he means we by default actually consider society wrt sex and gender, but he is unfortunately both cis and het. he's checked.

he carries around a copy of "the little book of lgbtq" in his backpack at all times in case he needs to look something up.

a good chunk of his youtube history is queer history / queer media / 'what it's like to be x' videos. he thinks all of you with the less famous identities (ie not the L G B or T) are very cool and funky and hopes you have a good day.

he knows he's straight because he has kissed men on several occasions and was not into it sexually. one of those times was a gay dude who promised to buy him drinks all night in exchange for a kiss and my boyfriend is nothing if not a wee whore. one of the others was kissing his gay friend who was depressed about not being able to hook up with anyone, because he is a very sweet wee whore.

he would do it again because he is very neutral on the kiss itself (not into it, but not grossed out by it. it's just a kiss, innit) and because he doesn't want people to be so lonely and sad that they cry in the smoking area of the club.

I would like to point out queer isn’t just specifically a term for referring to oneself as on all the LGBTQ+ spectrum or not. It also refers to people who are uncertain, questioning or don’t fit into a normal sexual spectrum. Your boyfriend definitely reads as queer ( even if it’s just as a sense that he experimented at all). But yeah, not exclusive to be gay

i know that's why i said he isn't "any flavour" because "he has checked"

he has thought about it long and hard and come to the conclusion he is both cis and het and not queer at all. he is, as it were, no longer even questioning.

I'M still questioning because I am like 70% sure there is something that will click into place in that otherwise empty brain eventually and it isn't Just The Autism but until (if) it does

my boyfriend is not queer

I told him that most cishet people a) do not self-examine their gender and sexuality to that extent and simply just. exist like that without ever thinking about it and b) do not watch (by his own estimation) 4+ hours of queer history/theory/media content on youtube per week and he is, in typical himbo fashion, absolutely baffled "but how do you know you're cis and straight if you don't learn about all the other options and think about it" people just exist in default mode without opening the character customisation screen my love "but do they not think all of it is really cool?" not particularly. mostly they do not think about it unless they know a queer person, honestly. and for sure most of them don't think about all of this and then be sad they aren't queer. like. they don't wish they were. "why wouldn't you though? queer people are all so cool and interesting! i'm just boring! literally all of you have something cool going on" this is very much a you thing and i think it's the Big Spicy Autisms but i do love that queer people are your special interest. you're like that marge simpson potato meme. 'I just think they're neat!' "but how do other people not find it fascinating and want to know about it? it's all of human history! it's an innate part of humanity! it's being a person!" hun idk what to tell you but they just don't. you've done far more thinking about this and definitely far more learning than like. 99% of cis straight white dudes would ever even dream of. "i'm really bad at telling if people are, though" yeah you just simply assume everyone is queer until proven otherwise which is very funny but also the opposite of what everyone else does "not everyone. only people who look vaguely cool"

forgot to add the best bit of this conversation as he was on his way out of the door "i really like gay nightclubs though because everyone is really friendly and awesome" you're only saying that because the men all think you're an absolute primo twink and buy you drinks if you give them a kiss "i don't even have to kiss them, mostly. they just do that" but it helps "i am a slut for a rum and coke, i will not lie, and they are very handsome men. i am not ashamed to admit i know an attractive guy when i see one"

[ID: a reply by @.the-pigeon-king. It says: “He's just self examined on a way that most queer people do. He isn't cishet bc it's the default, but rather bc he really considered options and decided that those are the things that best suit him. So, like I'm a man on purpose so is he. It's queer in that it's deliberate, but not queer in actuality. You're right, it is the best form of ally, but also it's just good introspection. Wild how he does that but, like, didn't realize he was tall.” End ID]

[ID: a reply by fuocsniperbot98. It reads: “We found him, the cishets the ally flag is for”. End ID]

I’m living for the straight dude that said, no I’m definitely not gay but if all these super nice super hot dudes want to kiss me for drinks who am I to say no

local straight man "not above a bit of light homosexuality", according to reports

Ok. Wild. I’ve not seen such a good optical illusion before.

For those having trouble, here's a circle, circled.

LOLOL WHAT???

house treats a dog trainer who says she has a 100% success rate for helping angry dogs and make them quiet and nice. house argues about how it cant be exactly 100% and wont stop being annoying about it. He brings in a literally feral rabid dog and she like makes it calm and lie down . House is disturbed by this because he wanted to be right that she sucks at stuff. (B-plot: house and the team sees if house can be trained with a dog clicker.) they break into her house and they find loads of dog pheromones and learn she has been wearing it like a perfume to calm down dogs. she thinks this is fine and theres no link but they think she is having a freaky reaction to it. but they take the pheromones away and she starts dying harder. house is really mad and has dinner with wilson, where he is complaining about how this lady is a charlatan but he doesnt understand what’s going on while eating out of a bowl of kibble like nothings wrong with it. wilson is watching him intently, as is the rests of the team who is watching from afar. house says his food is really yummy and insists wilson tries some and wilson is like “NO I CANT.” and house is like no you have to. you have to eat it. and wilson is like HOUSE STOP WE’VE BEEN CLICKERING YOU TO MAKE YOU EAT DOG FOOD. and house MAKES him eat a spoonful and hes like “… cocoa puffs..?” and house smirtks smartly as he demonstrates that he knew about their silly trick. “i know you guys are watching…. come out.”(the team is slowly emerging) “don’t worry . i dont bite anymore —“ he pauses and does a house stare and walks away to the sick lady’s room. cameron pours wilson a little milk for his cereal.“20%.” he walks into the room smartly. the patient is miffed and is about to say she doesn’t want to argue about percentages literally on her death bed. but house is like “no. 20% actually refers to the number of dog bites that get infected. You got bit by a dog and never got treated for it and ingredients in the dog pheromone solution were slowing it down. (?? im not a scientist) “ and he says something stupid like “sometimes a dog’s bark really is worse than its bite” and walks out. music starts playing. chase expresses he is mad about what cameron pouring milk for wilson means for them because cameron used to pour milk for her dead husband and he thinks she isnt over him. house walks out and reaches into his pocket and sneakily eats a hand ful of kibble

"remember nbc hannibal?" i have never for one minute of my life forgotten about nbc hannibal

SNW Spock and Kirk run into a race of aliens that are so dangerous to humans they can’t look at/hear/make noise around them without taking severe damage. Spock also takes damage but at a less intense rate so he uses the mind meld to wordlessly get them out/ keep an eye on the alien. Also Spock is like oh no I’m having a feeling. There’s a bond in this meld.