Heracleum Mantegazzianum

Your ex boyfriend is not a "narcissist". He's a typical misogynistic douchebag who treats women like shit because society allows him to.

Your boss is not a "narcissist". They're a typical classist dipshit who thinks workers' entire purpose in life is to generate profit because society allows them to.

And even if they happen to be a "narcissist", that's not what gave them the power to get away with abuse.

Infants are given a vitamin k shot at birth because they cannot synthesize vitamin k or get it from their diets, it is vital in preventing vitamin deficient bleeding which can cause death or permanent brain damage. Administering the injection is a bog standard preventative measure done on newborns immediately after birth, usually automatically. More and more parents are denying it and more and more babies are having totally preventable complications in their first 6 months of life just because the vitamin k shot has a black box warning. Doctors are repeatedly trying to explain to parents that babies need vitamin k and parents just keep asking “Why? Why are babies born needing vitamin k? Humans survived for thousands of years before it was invented. This must be a conspiracy.”

Infants, the human life stage notorious for randomly dying with no easily discernible cause. I don’t say that to be flippant, human babies are so incredibly fragile that before the modern era, about half of them died before adulthood. That is a natural 50/50 of making it. Humans did not evolve to be perfectly designed and efficient, we are just functional enough for some of us to survive to adulthood and reproduce. We don’t have to live like that! Looking at the human body through the lens of infallible intelligent design and allowing that to inform your medical decisions is so fucking dangerous.

The "problem" is that in the last hundred years or so our medical advancement has been meteoric. So people (in rich countries) forget, how easy it is for a child to die. We have built incredible scientific infrastructure to make sure that kids don't die of diseases like polio. But over time those advancements fade into the background. They become routine.

We are just far enough removed from diseases like polio, that people don't remember how devastating they were. You're not afraid of your kid dying of polio because you don't know any kids who have died of polio.

yes! there's a really fascinating history here that I think parallels the current internet. Le Tigre actually sings about this briefly in their song "My Metrocard."

one manifestation of Giuliani’s quality-of-life crackdown was enforcement of rigid zoning rules that negatively impacted sex shops throughout New York, but particularly in Times Square. Under the premise of protecting children, hundreds of independent businesses were forced to close their doors (or completely revamp their operations), starting in 1995.

Of particular concern to Le Tigre, apart from the puritanism underlying these policies, was the job loss and deskilling that especially impacted women workers at these establishments. As the New York Times reported in 1998:

At least 23 topless bars and strip clubs have closed since Aug. 1, when the police carried out a highly publicized raid on Wiggles in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, making it the first casualty of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign to curtail the sex industry in New York severely. The Mayor, who has called adult establishments a threat to public “health, safety and welfare,” has vowed to shutter two dozen more by the end of the year. On Tuesday, a judge ordered four more closed in Queens. But others say the sex industry jobs are irreplaceable, especially the estimated 3,500 dance jobs that, before the crackdown, provided the kind of income unavailable to many unskilled women. “These jobs are safe and for a lot of women, especially single mothers and those who haven’t had the opportunity to learn other bankable skills, there’s no legal work out there that pays as well,” said Juliette Widoff, director of outreach for Frost’D, (From Our Streets With Dignity) an organization that provides social services to sex industry workers.

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)