I'd been wondering how reactionary Protestant would-be theocrats and reactionary Catholic would-be theocrats were able to maintain a political coalition for so long, but it never occurred to me that the explanation was that they'd forgotten what "Protestant" means.
@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Apr
FCC floats idea of special ratings for TV shows which have trans content seeking public comment on adding warnings to its current ones for sex and violence.
"we make life incredibly difficult for a whole group of people, so wouldn't it be better if they didn't exist at all" is a fucking WILD thing for people to say unironically and not realize how evil they sound.
(I am aware they probably believe everyone can have their own *instance* of robot heaven where you can like mute all the people you don't wanna interact with or live among simulations of whatever kind of people you do wanna interact with, but, um, it made for a better skeet this way.)
Anyway yeah I haven't *trusted* their robot god and their robot heaven for a while but I hadn't specifically thought how much the company in robot heaven would, bu itself, make it unbearable.
(And my assessment of their robot god and their robot heaven felt like conceptually distinct questions.)
DC statehood is only the first, easiest, and most morally imperative step in the necessary process of packing the Senate.
... there are no shortage of people I know in that space who I've been, uh, worried about and unnerved by for some time.
I just hadn't gotten as far as specifically imagining how *annoying* robot heaven filled with them would be.
There are details I do not wish to discuss in public, but suffice it to say that although nobody I know in that world is implicated in any murders, and although some people I respect and admire identify with that subculture for one reason or another...
I mean I've been freaked out by rationalists for a while but I feel like it never hadn't occurred to me to think of the situation in exactly these terms.
The "surrounded by rationalists" is load-bearing here. Without them, robot heaven would be a lot more tempting.
Though I also wouldn't trust any robot heaven designed to rationalist specifications, and I *certainly* wouldn't trust any brain-uploading technology built by techbros.
I think I just had the epiphany that I would rather live one life and die one death than be condemned to an eternity in robot heaven surrounded by rationalists.
the way this makes sense for RFK is that "healthy people" and "sick people" are ontological categories.
3. However, some clinicians have raised concerns about the conference’s sole panel dedicated to trans health care. The workshop will be stacked exclusively with academics who have been tied to a SPLC-designated hate group—the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, or SEGM.
1. Major alert: Trump's anti-trans co-author Moti Gorin will be presenting with Kaltiala and Montante. These are conversion therapy advocates with intense anti-trans ties to hate groups around the world.
Now they'll be teaching pediatricians THIS FRIDAY.
Subscribe to support our journalism.
If you *are* counting variolation, that dates back some centuries earlier. Wikipedia says there's solid evidence of it being a thing in China in the 1500s, if not earlier.
... so too late for the revolutionary war, but in time for Adams and Jefferson to remark on how awesome it was.
... which conferred reasonable cross-immunity to smallpox but was itself much less dangerous. (This gave us the word "vaccine" - compare Latin "vacca", meaning cow.)
This protocedure has a complicated prehistory but first became a *thing* in the 1790s ...
Variolation is usually not considered a vaccine as such, since it was pretty much just "try to give someone a mild case of the disease under controlled circumstances". Vaccines as such are usually described as having originated with the innovation of using the related *cowpox* virus ...
Whence "vaccine", cf. Latin "vacca", meaning cow.
RIGHT!?
And the news seems to be reporting the kid as transfem, which means that reduction-type top surgery - the thing that might come closest to almost kinda making sense as a story - isn't even a little on the table as an explanation.
Knowing what I do about how (a) cross-border custody disputes and (b) executive law enforcement on foreign territory work (not to mention the current state of US-Cuban relations and Trumpian anti-trans animus), this story has gaps so large you could fly a whole flock of DoJ planes through them.
Of all the things that didn't happen, this didn't happen the most...
Like I am open to entertaining another story about this as more evidence comes in, but until then I'm operating under the assumption taht this is Cuba betraying refugees.
Is there even a possible trans surgery that makes medical sense for 10-year-old on a technical level? Even if there were, is there any conceivable way the Cuban medical system could have given the impression that they were offering it?
Much like, yes.
Vaccination with cowpox did not become widely available until a bit later (Jenner did his famous grossly-unethical-but-empirically-compelling experiment in 1796). Variolation involved exposure to actual smallpox virus in a manner calculated to produce a mild but immunity-promoting infection.
Also, speaking as a trans person who cares about my friends' ability to access abortions, since when does this administration care about medical autonomy?
bsky.app/profile/denv...
That is, when General Washington ordered his troops to receive a preventative treatment against Smallpox, he was asking them to take relatively small but still pretty distressing risk of lethal complications, much greater than any risk associated with flu vaccines.
