I don’t think the consumer is primarily responsible for determining how animal agriculture operates. Even the demand for meat and dairy was and is coercively and artificially manufactured.

(Small example: a Tyson executive uses university ag programs to setup chicken farming in rural parts of Africa, and the locals there do not eat chicken and are forced to eat chickens under the contract as a condition to get access to the capital - the goal is to setup the whole market, generate both demand and supply for chicken meat in this rural part of Africa.)

The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.

Veganism is not primarily helpful by reducing the demand on the individual level, but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws.

1. Talk to your local trans community, find multiple people who have actually had surgeries and who like their results, figure out who their surgeon was (they may have traveled to get the surgery, it’s not uncommon to have to travel).
2. checkout reviews online of surgeons in your area or region, you could start here for example: https://old.reddit.com/r/TransSurgeriesWiki/wiki/srs/usa-west#wiki_arizona
3. If the above two options don’t work, and you have a trans healthcare provider (like an endo overseeing your HRT), they will sometimes have a list of referrals to people in urology who accept trans patients.

I recommend seeing someone experienced in performing gender-affirming surgeries for trans patients, and who has a strong track record of good results.

I would even recommend going with a surgeon who performs vaginoplasties and who will know how to perform the orchi in a way that preserves the scrotum so you could use it for a skin graft in the future.

Sometimes surgeons don’t know to prioritize the scrotal skin for later surgeries (or just have particular methods and preferences that could conflict with future surgeons), so having a skillful surgeon who routinely performs orchiectomies before vaginoplasties on the same patients will hopefully know how to preserve and treat that area better than a generic urology surgeon who performs orchi’s on men or outside the context of trans healthcare.

Also, if you later use the same surgeon for the vaginoplasty, having had an orchi from them before creates more trust and confidence they will be able to use the scrotum as a skin graft, etc.

when you learn to cook food that tastes really good and that other people enjoy, it becomes much more than a survival activity and more like a hobby, though once you start you can’t stop, I do all the cooking and baking at home 😅 To be honest, cooking gives my life most of its meaning, I am a cook more than anything else.

It does get harder to go back to poorly prepared meals, and you start to become dependent along with everyone in your family, as nobody wants to go back to box meals or restaurant food. You realize at some point you can’t buy the kind of foods you can make at home. And it can be a lot of pressure to perform and deliver every day, but that provides its own rewards. In the end, I like working and producing something others value, and cooking is a rewarding kind of work.

cooking meals 😁

thank you!! 🫶

fleeing leaving the South (in the US), worried I’ll have to flee the US too

Villa, who was born in Russia and raised in the U.S. from a young age, moved to Moscow seeking refuge from American discrimination after an unsettling encounter with the police. She shared footage of her injuries after the attack, which she said was racially motivated. The assault adds cruel irony to her story, as she had previously lauded Russia as a racial haven compared to the U.S.

To be fair, she was born in Russia, so maybe that played a role? Either way, I agree - Russia is hardly progressive on racial politics let alone a safe place for ethnic minorities:

Racist attacks and killings of foreigners and ethnic minorities are reported with shocking regularity in Russia and, disturbingly, their frequency seems to be increasing. Victims whose cases have come to the attention of Amnesty International include students, asylum-seekers and refugees from Africa and Asia, as well as people from the south Caucasus, from South, Southeast and Central Asia, from the Middle East and from Latin America. However, citizens of the Russian Federation are no less at risk of physical attack. Anyone who does not look typically ethnic Russian, for example, individuals from ethnic groups of the North Caucasus, in particular Chechens, as well as members of the Jewish community, Roma and children of mixed parentage are at risk. Even ethnic Russians who are seen as sympathizing with foreigners or ethnic minority groups, for example, fans of rap or reggae music, members of other youth sub-cultures, and campaigners against racism, have also been targeted as they are perceived as “unpatriotic” or “traitors”. Attacks have been reported in towns and cities across the Russian Federation.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/eur460222006en.pdf

I wonder why she thought Russia was free of racism … the article didn’t really cover that, other than suggesting Russia state media pushing the narrative could be an explanation 🤷‍♀️

It’s just wild to me that people are invested in Marx’s “scientific” application of Hegel’s dialectic, esp. considering how badly Marx’s theories have failed (even before his death, Marx found “primitive communism” in anthropological accounts he was reading, which invalidates the “evolutionary” way he and Hegel thought about history as linear), and even worse, how little relevance Hegel and German idealism in general has maintained … Of course Mao didn’t invent these ideas, but they’re not even great ideas to begin with, Marx is a terrible philosopher tbh. He was much better for his sociology and analysis of capitalism than his ability to predict the arc of humanity.

Mao is poetic in ways Marx and Lenin are not, though - I agree with that.

Either way, I am not a Marxist-Leninist, and as far as I can tell Marxist-Leninism is a misnomer since it seems to betray both Leninism and Marxism 🤷‍♀️ It’s a bit of irony, really, that Stalin would name his state ideology “Marxist-Leninism”, esp. as he lost in the power struggle to Stalin.

I’m always open to being wrong about this, but my past experiences with Marxist-Leninists have generally not been productive, and I have yet to understand why people are MLs today other than as a kind of pragmatic alignment against Western imperialist powers, though even then I don’t understand the ML love of contemporary Russia, since Russia does not even promise itself to be socialist the way China, Cuba, or North Korea do. I’d love to hear your thoughts, though!

😳

never expected Mao Zedong to be cited as someone’s inspiration to take an empirical approach to beliefs, lol

don’t you have great knowledge of your ignorance? It’s a simple thing to know, in a sense, since it is derivative from not knowing. I don’t know most things, ignorance is established as the baseline state.

(((genentically modified human * drawBlood) * clotting) * takeSeparatedSerum) = superhuman serum

not sure what you’re going to do with blood serum, though - it’s not special

I think so! At least those are things you can actually dig into and get the know the bodies of evidence, but it does seem like accepting them on authority is the default. I also don’t have much knowledge about many areas of science I still accept as true, but at least with both vaccines and climate I am familiar with the basic evidence, e.g. I know how the COVID mRNA vaccine generates the protein cap that your body then attacks and trains to help recognize COVID, or with climate the way carbon emissions heat the Earth through the greenhouse effect.

admittedly I’m not too keen to reevaluate that particular belief, it has value even when false

congrats, does that mean you’re no longer in the hospital and were discharged early?

is this like an attempt at “this sentence is false” or something, or did you forget to finish your thought?

this is a good one, tbh a lot of science I just accept uncritically, e.g. The Big Bang as an explanation- though it seems unlikely to be false, maybe I should educate myself more on this topi, thanks!

so not strict bed rest?

do you have to use a bedpan, or can you go to use the toilet?