If you squint, you can see Death standing over his shoulder tapping his watch and looking very impatient with the whole situation. Just like the rest of us.
hi, i'm anna phylaxis; organizer, activist, Board Member, Boston Dyke March; founder of Boston Dyke Patrol She / Her ⚧ 🏴🔞 p&h by @dataerase.bsky.social FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE
13,439 followers 1,191 following 9,888 posts
view profile on Bluesky
If you squint, you can see Death standing over his shoulder tapping his watch and looking very impatient with the whole situation. Just like the rest of us.
it’s “shut up and play ball” but for every affected minority group
and while not everyone here is from the United States, a lot of people here ARE from the U.S., and of course the 2025 Bad Vibes are permeating a lot of other places globally, too
i just don't think it's at all mysterious why the website that's massively dominated by the exact kind of people that Trump 2.0 is actively persecuting might have more depressing vibes in 2025 than it did in 2024
i, uh, tend to think that has more to do with the billions of dollars spent on their projects and the full backing of a wholly owned and subordinate media apparatus, but...
"if the left didn't believe in anything, didn't fight for anything, had no moral center and was never strident about it, they'd win a lot more often" yeah, man, i guess that's true. centrists whose only ambition is to take money from donors to create public-private partnerships do win more.
Uh subscribe to The Onion, by the way. For like one more week you also get a tote bag. membership.theonion.com
Anyway, my friends at Bluesky proper should start marketing this place with these kinds of quotes. It makes this website seem like the fucking Thunderdome when in reality it's a place where I post pictures of Viscous Brown Food-Like Substance On A Plate solely to unnerve people.
"Blueskyism" helped make The Onion one of the largest newspapers in the world in less than a year. If we had spent all of our time on Twitter, we'd be poorer, dumber and terminally ill with internet poisoning. He's just angry he's wasting away over there in a nazi agnostic lane that doesn't exist.
I’m all for “viewpoint diversity” but let’s not let vague language mask what’s happening. Meanwhile my CA mom is getting mailers from the GOP telling her to “protect California’s independence” and keep existing district lines.
Mid cycle gerrymander when they drew the original maps. Every article should have that front and center.
This is a country living in terror of a non-existent crime wave, getting rid of vaccines which saved millions of lives, and indulging in economic policies which we saw fail 100 years ago. It's a deeply disordered place.
The thing that often blows by is not only is crime the lowest its been for any non-senior citizen's life, it has been roughly that safe for *fifteen years*. We have had fifteen years of steady, low crime while the irrational freakout over crime has relentlessly grown to a fevered, disordered pitch.
NEW: The world’s largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide just voted overwhelmingly in support of a resolution declaring that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. apnews.com/article/geno...
there's one thing RFK could do to improve my mental health, and it involves strangling an unnamed person with his bare hands.
I realize I have been living in a permanent state of crisis and alarm due to a perfect storm of personal stuff and world news since 2017, if you count trump's first year in office -- and I gotta say, it's wearing thin.
Michelle Obama: kids should have healthier school lunches RFK Jr: maybe if we let the plague run wild we can build a master race Media: wow these are the same thing
A misdemeanor with no jail time for killing a man while trying to play a hate video in his car. Only a cop could get this treatment. Only a cop would ever get offered this kind of deal.
This is the cop who was watching an anti-trans video when he hit a cyclist. According to this reporting he won't face any jail time.
i, uh, tend to think that has more to do with the billions of dollars spent on their projects and the full backing of a wholly owned and subordinate media apparatus, but...
"if the left didn't believe in anything, didn't fight for anything, had no moral center and was never strident about it, they'd win a lot more often" yeah, man, i guess that's true. centrists whose only ambition is to take money from donors to create public-private partnerships do win more.
At the Boston Labor Day parade
very direct evidence that video game piracy is important in the preservation of video games
People rightly point out that this school aerial shot looks like there are no viable walking paths. I have seen similar suburban mega schools — chosen for cheap land, parent control, etc — that do at least have sidewalks and bike paths.
There's a lot of mention of buses as a solution, but no mention of kids walking or biking because, of course, the infrastructure around the school makes that impossible.
In Chicago, thousands protest against threat of ICE, National Guard deployment reut.rs/4newN2y
The domestic corollary of the Iran paradox: always simultaneously on the brink of regional domination and collapse.
I've never seen such a disconnect between Dem elected/staff/consultants and actual Dem voters. The latter understand what's going on. The former are awash in right-wing brainrot, hence @schatz.bsky.social blaming COVID mitigation and BLM marches for the GOP's wanton destruction of public health.
![@EsotericCD It was in this moment that many of us hanging on to a thin sliver of trust in our institutions irrevocably lost faith in them. One of the most poisonous blows to public trust in living memory - worse than the effect of the Iraq War in many ways. RFK Jr is a direct result of this. Quote Steve Guest @SteveGuest · Aug 31 Politico 5 years ago: [screenshot of article falsely claiming public health officials lied about COVID measures then abandoned them for BLM protests] Views](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ddvus7otnqtlh7fdooxm6qat/bafkreihsypwydo5rcis7mc54cwct6h33l5co477nvh7g7hs7na2fz4jl3q@jpeg "Click to view full size")
The Tea Party was covered in the press like it was a spontaneous eruption of populist anger, but those protests drew far fewer people than the recent protests against Trump's administration. The "Tea Party" was just a well-funded organized, right wing movement promoted by friendly media outlets.
The George Floyd protests radicalized a lot of white people AGAINST structural racism. In response, the right tapped into frustration over Covid restrictions (imposed by Red AND Blue states almost equally) and white resentments to organize an old fashioned, racialized backlash against the gubmint.
This is "the one big trick" that the right has mastered. They present their movement as just "the authentic voice of the volk outraged by Democratic overreach," when really what they're doing is just old fashioned political mobilization. Organize a passle of pissed off people & call it a movement.
What these Schatz posts say to me is that Dem elected officials like him seem incapable of perceiving the right as a *political movement.* The response to Covid mitigation and the Floyd protests was not a spontaneous reaction...it was a right wing backlash organized by a reactionary movement.
i remember chapo will talking about how if a million people died, they’d have to rename corona extra beer but people just threw ironic corona beer parties instead. that made me think about society, honestly…
just an unfathomable number of bodies left in the wake of a lethal virus we chose to pretend wasnt as bad as it was because idk. we didnt want to be cringe or something or we view getting sick as a moral failing or whatever
then think about unexplained deaths like healthy adults randomly dying of heart attacks and strokes, suicides caused by long covid symptoms, and deaths caused by vaccine misinformation fueled by covid conspiracies. if someone you know skipped a flu vaccine and died from it, thats a covid casualty
1.2 million people have died of covid *that we know of* in america which is 1/250~. if we factor in deliberate misreporting, information gaps from mass death events, and death from an unrelated illness exasperated by covid infection, it goes even higher
remember when we had a 9/11 death toll a day for like a year straight because of covid. probably not cuz everyone stopped talking about it but its sorta insane to think about right
Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
The irony/idiocy of this banner screaming "American Workers First" is that Trump has forced more than 199,000 federal workers out of their jobs since Jan. Nearly 1 in 10 federal workers gone. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
Photo passed along from a federal employee from inside the Dept of Labor building, where a giant Orwellian image of Trump's face is now draped outside. Big Brother is watching.
We just live with it. We live with it every day. We don't have the ability - the luxury - of repression, because we are still dealing, every day, with an active risk to our health and well being, one that has been made omnipresent by the total societal abandonment we experience.
It is, honestly, incredibly surreal. (Also a societal divide: more marginalized groups still mask at much higher rates).
It makes me emotional to see Judge Sooknanan showing that she values each individual child’s life at a moment when this administration is doing exactly the opposite
If you have not been, now is a really good time to start tracing your multi-size patterns instead of cutting them out. This is a resource we'll never have again.
Sometimes I feel like those of us who still mask, those of us who are still forced to take precautions because of our high risk status, are some of the only people who can still clearly remember the early pandemic, because for us, the state of emergency NEVER ended. We didn't get to pack it away.
In many ways, children are at *higher* risk for Long Covid than adults, as we know the risk of permanent damage scales with number of infections and severity of infection! The younger you get infected, the more *often* you are infected, the greater the risk of lasting harm we cannot yet cure!
I invite you all to look up the effects of ongoing trauma on focus, attention, memory and retention. I'll give you a spoiler: the effects are massive! There was no world in which these children would not be harmed by the unchecked pandemic raging across the world. We acted to preserve LIFE.
Yep a good-faith critique of learning loss would lead to proposals for a massive, New Deal-scale investment in public education. The people pushing the narrative are doing precisely the opposite.
No one is "disregarding" this, it has been the subject of relentless coverage from media and politicians since 2020. Everyone knew school closures were going to be very hard on kids. The trade-off was that not closing them was going to result in mass death. No win-win scenario was on the table.
Of course it affected an entire generation for the worse! They watched millions of people drop dead, all around them! We've buried it deep in the places we store memories that we cannot bear to revisit, but almost none of us escaped a death in our social circles. That is trauma!
Compare the murky, indeterminate data on school closures to the stark, decisive findings on vaccine hesitancy. Republican policies and rhetoric killed hundreds of thousands of people! We don’t need to bolster this fake narrative. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
California and Florida are on opposite ends of the school-closure spectrum and the differences in test scores are a wash. Some individual schools and districts definitely stayed closed too long but it just isn’t the case that this is some huge, obvious, foreseeable blunder.
Also, children repeatedly infected with COVID-19 have the same chance of experiencing permanent side effects as adults! "A new study (...) found common patterns of lasting symptoms in school-age children and adolescents who previously were infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19."
Exactly, the entire argument for this narrative is that kids rarely die of COVID. That’s true, but it wasn’t the justification for the policy. Teachers *do* die of COVID and kids *do* spread COVID. Some studies find school closures were the most effective intervention for preventing cases!
The right is pushing this narrative because it’s the only place they can blame liberals — their actual goal — and gain purchase among elites. The *actual* mistakes during the pandemic all originate on the right: lax lockdowns, weak mitigations and low vaccine uptake
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
Rufo, who is the 4-star culture war general in charge of transphobia for the past 4 years, previously worked on a thinktank that pushed Intelligent Design - aka, “My Religious Dogma Must Be Taught In Science Class”. Transphobia is yet another religious wedge attempt
The thing is when people say "biologically male/female" in contexts like this, they don't really mean in the sense of observable, empirical biological features (b/c that would inevitably produce some results they don't want), they mean what you "should" be, what you're divinely "designed" to be.
The 'biological woman' dogwhistle is particularly galling, because my transition literally altered my fucking biology.
I know these requests are endless but if you have a little something pick a family and help
DeSantis was at Guantanamo, overseeing forced feedings of prisoners, only God knows what he’s guilty of. Ruthless, loveless tyrant.
chatGPT 5 is like having a bunch of phds in your pocket, but the phds are handcuffed to a radiator in a Saw-like bathroom, and the only way out is to guess what you want it to tell you and then vigorously commit mass fraud to support that exact thing
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro: “Venezuela is confronting the biggest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years. “A situation like this has never been seen.”
When the boss is definitely doing great and just taking a casual photo with a buddy and nothing weird is happening in the room at all, even a little.
so, like, was the entirety of Red Planet rancid?
They will not expel him, there is zero point waiting for that to happen. They knew who he was and they appointed him anyway. If they won't make a party statement of support for trans people and welcome a transphobe into the party, they are telling you all you need to know.
If you've added yourself to the Your Party email list, they count you as a supporter. Might want to think about that...
If, in fact, you believe that trans ppl should embrace Newsom, you're actually opposed to Newsom's plan to piss us off to prove his centrist bona fides. The person you should be made at is Newsom. And welcome to the club.
THIS! OMG I've been SHOUTING THIS. It's Newsom's fucking PLAN to piss off trans ppl to please centrists to make himself more electable. If his plan works to make trans ppl not vote for him but doesn't pick up centrist votes, that's not our fault. We followed the plan & the centrists didn't.
Yes. The “guys, tone it down with the trans stuff, it’s not polling well” is just beyond stupid. They should be staunchly supportive and ALSO focus more on things like deploying the military against citizens and cost of living. Most Dems know someone trans and want them alive and well and free.
1) the idea that there are more people who would vote for dems, if only they'd just let trans people be eliminated than there are trans people is delusional. 2) allying with us then throwing us under the bus the minute we started polling bad makes them look much weaker than sticking up for us.
The thing that keeps me coming back to the Newsom stuff is that Democrats who object to our saying we'd never vote for him are refusing to treat us as ordinary voters who need to be won over, like any other demographic.
5. For New York, I have multiple reports from clinics in the state either closing, closing to new patients, or not allowing patients to progress to HRT/Blockers. Including from some of the clinics that have "reopened."
4. As for California, California has seen both major clinic closures, no enforcement of state laws against clinics that are discriminating, AND some trans athlete restrictions. It obviously is "moderate risk" at this point. NY and IL have likewise seen major closures and no enforcement yet.
3. Legal risk for trans youth now has to take into account the way state laws interact with federal threat. In the darkest blue states, there have been no clinic closures and no sign of capitulation. Moderate risk fits very well here for states that HAVE seen major closures.
2. Light red is moderate risk. States in light red have shown major closures. State AGs can enforce state law to ensure hospitals don't discriminate against trans patients. In NY and MI, AGs have threatened - but have not actually enforced it. Major clinics remain restricted for new youth patients.
A few people had questions of some of the states on my map such as NY/CA/IL moving up in risk for trans youth. If a state has moved up in risk, it's because of clinic closures at major clinics. I cannot in good faith keep a state low risk if state laws are not being enforced to keep clinics open.
I have to keep looking at these maps to remind myself that my position, as an adult trans person in Massachusetts, is by far the most stable situation for a trans person in the entire country. The threat to trans people is not future or speculative. It is here, ongoing, spreading, and worsening.
I realize news outlets are sensitive about defamation lawsuits but this is a pretty clear case. He’s flatly lying about recent history if he says he’s not an anti-vaccine activist. There’s video!
ABC News is still calling RFK Jr. a “vaccine skeptic.” The dude was one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists for decades. There’s video of him in 2023 saying that there’s no vaccine which is safe and effective. You can call him an anti-vaccine activist!
First paid gig was freelancing for Game Shark, recently acquired by Mad Catz who for some reason wanted to stand up a game review site. $50 for 750 words, back in 2003. I’d been writing for fan sites for free, before that.
I'm in favour of religious tolerance but I think this one time I might have to make an exception
Indeed, and that was a real problem! My brother worked in a nursing home and couldn't go remote, so my SIL had to get my nieces through remote school (which did happen in SD for those two months from March to mid-May). But at no point was it "closed."
I think for a lot of people, it's easier to keep re-litigating schools being 'closed' rather than talk about the complex underlying factors that made remote schooling hard for some parents, particularly for the large number of parents whose jobs remained in-person.
When Misk first messaged me she always was asking to raise money for school now she is trying to survive
People literally bled & died fighting against corporate interests, robber barons, corrupt local & state politicians, cops & hired killers, & the federal government & US military for better working conditions for the rest of us so reflect on that today for just a bit while you're doing whatever else.
But when modeling the long term effect, it’s incomprehensible. www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-04...
This is when we were talking about just “pausing” PEPFAR funds. Note projections here are for only 7 countries— not globally.
![new infections to reach about 103 thousand [95% UI: 81-126 thousand] under the Executive order—realistic scenario, and about 81 thousand [95% UI: 64-98 thousand] under the Executive order-proportional scenario. Even under both Waiver scenarios, excess new infections reach 50 thousand [95% UI: 37-65 thousand] when PEPFAR is resumed after 8 weeks, and 35 thousand [95% UI: 19-50 thousand] when PEPFAR is resumed after 4 weeks (Appendix Table A3).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:v4jfgpnpcxd2be2hekn5iocf/bafkreidp2njc6z74kha7nulxczqje22tp5kdhhoi6kxlwbdvyagrf46k4y@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Just the 90 day freeze on funds was staggering, with tens of thousands of excess deaths.
The number of children expected to die from policies that have already been enacted is unimaginable in isolation, even before factoring in the other concurrent and compounding threats from this new epidemiological landscape.
PEPFAR for AIDS, USAID programs for TB/HIV, the US support to WHO and GAVI, which provides vaccines like polio & measles to the poorest kids on earth. HIV and measles both cause serious immune system damage, so any epidemic that follows will be deadlier & harder to contain.
The evisceration of CDC is happening at the same time global disease prevention funding like PEPFAR dries up after being line-item deleted by the WH and DOGE. If we can’t contain something we already eradicated and have no more global infrastructure, we have no defense left against another pandemic.
Even with the drastically reduced disease surveillance and deliberate undercount, official CDC sources are already reporting the highest number of measles cases in more than 30 years, after it was officially declared “eliminated” in the US in 2000. Also, school is about to start.
I’m sharing a Palestinian account every day and today is Najla. Najla is the mother of 3 children, Reema, 14, Saif, 10 and Mohammed, 7. Before this Najla was studying psychology. She lost her university, her home and also her dear mother. Najla has a really bad ear and toothache and needs care.
like i guess what I'm trying to say is that we've allowed a lot of conservative voices to drive the narrative of what we all lived through and it feels like I'm being gaslit when people talk about what was open versus what was closed.
Yes, to be clear, I'm fully aware of this! But that's not the complaint Schatz is referencing and the way he just accepts "schools were closed" is honestly pretty telling of where he's at on that.
I'm extremely tired of the "schools were closed!" The physical building, yeah, but people were still working and trying to teach your kids. You just had to deal with it more directly for like, two months.
My friends who are teachers didn't like, get a vacation. People are upset that they had to keep their kids at home. That's what this is. Schools didn't close. They pivoted to online, and then the summer started.