I’m doing it!

short but sweet

“For example, if you’re trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didn’t see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldn’t make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT — even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to “this is important, so do WHATEVER I SAY”; they want to be convinced that what you’re proposing will work.”

Also from above:

Somewhat related, my favorite comic strip of all time:

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

there will always be a calling with your name on it. always. maybe not today. maybe not next week. maybe not while you’re sitting in that uncomfortable posture staring at the your screen, disassociated, mourning the person you used to be at 17, back when the future felt ENORMOUS. but eventually something will tap you on the shoulder and you’ll have the epiphany: a book or a person. some city. could be the literal wind before a storm, a random stranger smiling. a patch of saturated light on the floor.

Is anyone else starting to feel kind of wary about the increasingly common narrative that "women's bodies are so different to men's that modern scientific recommendations do not apply to them"?

And that's how grifters de-politicise what is a highly political problem (and not an isolated one: medical misogyny relates to medical racism relates to medical ableism relates to medical transphobia). By not acknowledging medicine's status quo as political and capable of being changed through sustained, collective action, they make being (or more truly, looking) healthy seem like just another aestheticised consumer choice. That's why so much wellness bullshit looks aspirational in advertising terms, with visible ageing and disability as sticks, and Eurocentric beauty standards and the easeful performance of apparent health as carrots. At the core of "wellness" as an industry is the idea that we can buy our way out of the health inequalities imposed on us by inequitable systems of medical research, education and practice. Wellness gurus don't want us sitting down and thinking about how our historic exclusion from studies has skewed the data, but we can get better data by pushing for more representative studies - as is already happening, e.g. the growth of scholarship (increasingly led or coproduced by people directly affected) on subjects like perimenopause, autistic health inequalities (and their often gendered nature), and Black maternal health inequalities.