sophibug

Found a video of a girl showing off Diet Soda detector strips (if there's any diabaddies that see this and want it I can link them, they're super helpful), and half of the comments were "you're diabetic you should just be drinking water..." First of all, not only are you just wrong, but you seriously expect diabetics to just never enjoy themselves? Ever?.

Saw another comment under a video about type 1 saying "you did this to yourselves. you ate too much sugar and you got yourself into this situation." And it's just so funny because they're Wrong™️. Type one diabetes is autoimmune and fully hereditary, and not at all effected by diet.

I mean, I know the answer. It's diet culture. People on their fancy diets think they're a superior human being because other people are "unhealthier" than them, and they hear diabetes and think "big fat and lazy with a bad diet" and think they're allowed to walk all over them since they're so superior. Despite the fact that it's a completely false stereotype that doesn't apply to most diabetics.

A lot of type 2's start out as hypoglycemic -- their pancreas is over-producing insulin, causing blood sugar crashes. Insulin stuffs sugar into fat cells, causing people to get fat, if there's too much of it. The overproduction of insulin is a response to slow-growing insulin resistance. Because sugar is a vital part of human energy, people who cannot easily process sugar due to insulin resistance and insulin over-response may crave sugar in order to have enough energy to function.

And now going back to the top point, I know exactly what video op is referring to and she made a different video a few weeks prior specifically about harmful comments to t1d’s and instead of getting the point, heaps of comments were basically to the effect of “but we can bully t2ds bc they brought this on themselves, they deserve to be mocked”. HUH. DO YOU HEAR YOURSELVES.

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

An entitled man with a deadly weapon will not help this situation.

The suspiciously hungry and round bug:

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.