reluctance to murder is not a weakness

Feminism is a complicated, overarching movement that holds many competing and often mutually exclusive ideologies and movements within it. Several branches of Feminism are highly objectionable, and frequently disavowed by adherents of other forms of Feminism. However, if someone called themselves an Anti-Feminist you'd rightly assume that they were a misogynistic chud, woefully uninformed, or both.

Zionism is a complicated, overarching movement that holds many competing and often mutually exclusive ideologies and movements within it. Several branches of Zionism are highly objectionable, and frequently disavowed by adherents of other forms of Zionism. However, if someone called themselves an Anti-Zionist you'd rightly assume that they were an antisemitic chud, woefully uninformed, or both.

[ID: a rectangle flag made to mimic the progress pride flag. The flag is horizontal, equally sized, and 9-striped with the colors lavender, magenta, red, orange, yellow, green, teal, indigo, and purple from top to bottom. There's a layered Star of David on the left of the image with the colors black, brown, blue, pink, white, and yellow from outside to inside. The yellow part has a small purple Star of David that makes the yellow part mimic the intersex flag. /End of ID]

When Rebecca Archer's five-month-old daughter Renae got a temperature, turned pale and struggled to breathe, she called an ambulance. They were taken to hospital straight away, where Renae was diagnosed with measles. The next day they were discharged and Renae went home with a drip. They isolated for a week and Renae fully recovered. That was in 2013 and there was a measles outbreak in their neighbourhood near Manchester in England's north-west. Vaccine uptake had dropped and cases were spreading fast among infants because they are not usually vaccinated against the virus until they turn one. Rebecca wanted to vaccinate her child, but she was too young. Now, with some preventable diseases on the rise again in Britain, Australia — where diphtheria has broken out — the United States and other countries, Rebecca has a warning for other parents: your child could die without a jab.

When Renae got sick, it did not take long for her to recover. Rebecca did not think much more of it. What she did not know at the time was that measles can cause life-threatening complications, some of which can take years to surface. For the next decade, Rebecca says Renae developed normally. She said her "kind" and "bubbly" daughter excelled at school and made people laugh. But the measles virus she had contracted as a baby stayed in her body. It was silently replicating in her brain, with deadly consequences. "In the July before her 11th birthday, I got a call from the school to say she'd had a seizure," Rebecca said. That was the first sign that something was wrong. Doctors thought it was epilepsy and referred her to a specialist clinic. "She kept complaining of a headache and the kids being too loud around her … then the following week she had another seizure," Rebecca said.

The seizures continued and her behaviour was changing, becoming increasingly uncharacteristic. She started snapping at her brothers and sisters, needed help showering and was hallucinating. For two months, Renae was in and out of hospital, but doctors were stumped. "She was just getting weaker. She was struggling to keep her eyes open; she slowly stopped eating," Rebecca said. "She was in ICU for around a week. She had a breathing tube and she was no longer talking." An MRI showed swelling on her brain, which worsened within a week. But it was not until days before her death in September 2023, that doctors finally worked out that Renae had subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).

The disease is a rare but progressive — and fatal — complication of measles and usually takes seven-to-10 years to produce symptoms. The answer came after a lumbar puncture and blood tests showed the measles virus was still in her body. Heavily pregnant with her third child, doctors told Rebecca and the family they had to think about turning off Renae's life support. She had a C-section the next day then returned to Renae's bedside as she slowly slipped away. "She was struggling and was distressed. I think that was the worst part," Rebecca said. "I was sat in the room thinking I just want her to be at peace.

While this is a rare complication of measles, many others are much more common and severe in young children. Of those who contract the virus, a fifth of children will be hospitalised, one in 20 will get pneumonia, which is the leading cause of death, while one in 10 will develop an ear infection that can lead to permanent hearing loss. 'Vaccines a victim of their own success' The UK is again in the throes of another measles outbreak with vaccination rates dropping every year since the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) has taken away Britain's "elimination status", which means the virus is now spreading locally.

As a consultant epidemiologist at the UK's Health Security Agency, Vanessa Saliba has been at the forefront of the measles resurgence in the country. She said most of the cases were unvaccinated children under the age of 10. "What we have seen in the UK over the last decade is a year-on-year decline in uptake for our routine childhood immunisation programme," Dr Saliba said. She described measles as the "canary in the coal mine" because when vaccination rates fall it returns with a vengeance, given its contagious nature. "It will show up when your vaccine uptake rates fall, even if it's a small decline, and it will show you the communities and populations that are not protected by the vaccination," Dr Saliba said. "The drivers for the fall in uptake are complex and multiple, and the evidence suggests that one of the most important drivers for that fall and uptake is actually access to health services and access to information about immunisation." Turning around the downward trend and regaining Britain's measles-free status, Ms Saliba said, would take years of public health work rebuilding trust in the community and improving access to vaccines. The government has now reduced the age for the second dose of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to 18 months to ramp up protection for young children.

The United States is on a similar path to the UK, with its worst measles outbreak in decades last year resulting in the deaths of two young, unvaccinated schoolgirls. Professor Margie Danchin, from Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, says the same trend is playing out in Australia, which now has the lowest measles vaccination coverage for children in a decade. "This is now a serious threat in Australia; we don't want to see a death of a child or adult in Australia like we've seen in the US," she said.

The federal government's Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) shows under-vaccination hot spots in northern NSW, the Gold Coast and parts of WA, with pockets in Melbourne and Sydney. Since the 1970s, Australia has had a nationally funded vaccination program for measles. Over four decades of public health messaging, the country finally eliminated the virus and gained measles-free status from the WHO in 2014. But Professor Danchin said that, with recent research showing vaccine hesitancy and misinformation on the rise, those decades of work were being undone. "The main barriers were loss of trust in the information that was provided by their doctor or nurse and concerns about vaccine safety," Professor Danchin said. "In terms of access last year, it was mainly parents not being able to afford the costs associated with vaccination but also, concerningly in Australia, not being able to get an appointment with a GP," she said. Low measles vaccination rates are alarming for paediatricians like Professor Danchin and other public health experts and the AIR shows numbers are down for many diseases. "Vaccines are really a victim of their own success. We've seen and enjoyed such low rates of vaccine-preventable diseases like the measles … and now we're seeing whooping cough, flu, diphtheria, measles cases coming back," Professor Danchin said. "As a paediatrician of 30 years, I had never seen a case of diphtheria and yet now in Australia we have 267 cases of diphtheria already."

Their mother picked up after them. They were not required to take plates the kitchen or do the dishes or anything like that.

My mother, who would tell you she is for equality, came home one day, sighed at the mess of dirty dishes scattered about, and said, "Gayle, help me pick up."

"Those aren't my dishes," I said. "I picked up my dishes."

My mother sighed again. "Just help me pick up."

"No," I said again. "I didn't make that fucking mess."

She never approached my brothers and said, "Boys, in this house, you take your dishes to the kitchen." She did not tell our dad, "Hey, tell the boys they need to pick up after themselves."

It was, "Gayle, pick up the dishes."

And when I refused because it was not my fucking mess, I got lectured about being difficult.

See also: My brothers--in a classic dick-move of all siblings--figured out they could pop the lock on the bathroom door and throw it open, and I would freak out because I was in the shower and trying to get five fucking minutes of peace.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Also they DID account for contamination in WET sample preparation, because they’d already learned previously that the nitrile gloves could contaminate wet samples, but this was the first discovery that they were contaminating DRY or AIRBORNE samples as well.

All of this was very clearly laid out in just the last provided link - i didn’t even have to read all of them to learn this, I read like 3 paragraphs of the nautil.us article and I was able to learn what happened and why it hadn’t been accounted for.

Like, I understand the frustration, but this is the sort of thing that has to be DISCOVERED before it can be accounted for, and this is what that kind of discovery looks like, and berating scientists for not already knowing something science hadn’t yet learned is kind of a pointless and bad faith approach to things.

“Oh? [X thing] has a documented extremely negative impact on a large group of people?? And you’re critiquing it? Well I did [x thing] and that horrible thing never happened. I guess you’re just PERSONALLY ATTACKING me.”

“Have you considered the nuanced reality that if something is beneficial to me in any way then everyone who has been deeply harmed by it should simply eat shit? Also if they criticize it it’s because they hate me specifically?”

“What about those of us who actually ENJOY AND LIKE [x thing] and also feel entitled to never have access to something that I like restricted? Hmm? What about us?”

It’s not actually possible to have a functioning society where everyone does whatever they want all the time. You can’t just trust that your populace is going to do the best possible version of everything. I’m absolutely sure there’s a lot of responsible gun owners in the US — unfortunately, the negative societal impact of guns means that in a sane, effective society (which ofc the US isn’t) they’d still be banned. There are some things that are more important than you and what you like and what is beneficial to you. Some things are worse than other things, like objectively worse. Some things are more important than you.

heated rivalry gif meme