Sylvaria

Public Transit Is an Under-Rated Experience

Much of the eastern US is experiencing a heat wave accompanied by high humidity, and I unfortunately see a lot of people engaging in "avoidance" behaviors (staying inside in overly air-conditioned spaces nearly 100% of the time and avoiding any exercise) that might actually increase their risk of health problems like heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

If you have trouble coping with heat, you might benefit from intentionally and gradually acclimating yourself to heat. One way to do this effectively is to go on a walk (initially a short one) outdoors during the hottest time of the day, which is often around 4-6PM. If this is too uncomfortable, start earlier by walking outdoors earlier.

Make sure to ramp up your activity level and heat exposure gradually, stay adequately hydrated, and also make sure you have enough electrolytes. A simple way to do this is to drink a glass of water and eat a small amount of salty snacks and some fruit or veggies.

When you walk, it increases your body temperature. It's not super strenuous exercise, so it's not going to be exhausting or dangerous the way it might be to do something vigorous like running or vigorous cycling in the peak of the heat, but the combination of light exercise with exposure to heat is going to be enough to give your body quite a workout.

Over time you can walk more vigorously, but I recommend starting walking at a leisurely pace if you are unaccustomed to going out in extreme heat.

Your body adapts to heat in multiple ways. Your heart rate increases, and the efficiency of your circulatory system improves. Your body does things like dilating blood vessels more, but it also builds more capillaries (tiny blood vessels) close to the skin, which helps your body to pump heat to the skin. Your capacity for sweating also increases. This process takes a few weeks, so take care not to go from 0 to 100 while trying to acclimate to the heat.

When you start becoming heat-adapted you will notice that you start tolerating hotter and hotter temperatures. You might even start feeling cold at temperatures you once felt comfortable at. Like in the peak of summer, I feel cold when the air temperature gets as low as 75°F (~24°C) and feel totally comfortable at 78°F (~25.5°C) or even higher.

Here are some benefits to heat-acclimating:

You can set your thermostat higher, so your air conditioner operates less, and/or spend a greater portion of time not using your AC at all, which both saves money and protects the environment, and can sometimes improve air quality (indoor air quality is not always great in spaces that are always closed.)

Your aerobic fitness improves, to where your aerobic capacity will be higher than before when you return to exercising in normal or cooler temperatures.

Your risk of heat exhaustion or heat stroke is reduced.

You will be both more comfortable and safer in situations (like being outdoors or in indoor non-air-conditioned spaces) where you cannot control the heat.

You increase the range of activities that are comfortable and safe for you to do in hot weather, and thus help to make your life more enjoyable and a bit more stable or resilient in the face of heat waves or just generally hot weather.

Stay safe everyone. But recognize that avoidance is not the best strategy for dealing with summer heat or heat waves. If you isolate yourself in a heavily air-conditioned environment, you are not only wasting money, but you are weakening your body.

Keep in mind, we all have our limitations, and people with medical conditions may have a limited ability to acclimate to the heat. Listen to your body and make sure to ramp up gradually and take care to stay adequately hydrate and consume enough electrolytes.

But everyone can benefit to some degree from heat acclimation. And for those of us who sometimes have to be in situations where we are active and exposed to extreme heat, it's a necessity and we will ultimately be much safer and healthier if we train our bodies to adapt slowly and gradually. The highest risk of heat exposure comes when you are not acclimated to heat and then you are suddenly exposed to extreme heat! This is the worst case situation!

Home Depot currently sells a large number of plants that are invasive in North America. People buy these plants, and then plant them in their yards, and they spread out into wild ecosystems where they displace native plants and threaten biodiversity. They also create a massive problem for land managers and property owners, who expend countless volunteer hours and even money trying to control these plants.

And Home Depot is profitting off these things. Most of the people buying these plants simply don't know any better, they aren't as knowledgeable about this stuff, they don't actively want to harm the environment, they're just buying stuff because it's for sale and looks pretty. It is super irresponsible for them to keep selling these plants, and it's super unnecessary too. There are thousands of plants native to North America and they could be selling 100% locally native plants and thus making a positive difference in the environment rather than having a negative effect.

Please sign this petition and please share it, not just here on Tumblr but on other sites too, like if you're on Facebook or other networks that reach an older demographic more interested in gardening and landscaping, it can be valuable to share there too!

If we give enough pushback, they will change. We just need to get the word out. This petition already has 70,000 signatures and it is very close to its goal, but it will have an even larger effect if we get it a larger number of signatures. I'd love to see 150,000 or 300,000 or even more.

This is a very general-audience petition, anyone can sign it.

Share it into any group you know, like any group of people who are remotely environmentally-minded. Share it on other social media.

One, I’ve been abused by women multiple times, and these women have often tended to react by getting offended or defensive when I bring up ways in which they were hurting me, and they either did not apologize or did so too little too late. Also, when I was abused and tried to go to others in my life for support, a lot of people downplayed or ignored the abuse and almost no people (only one) acknowledged the abuse and encouraged me to get out of the relationships. I think this reaction was worsened by societal stereotypes of abuse as something men do to women, and stereotypes that women are good communicators who are emotionally mature and treat others well whereas men are bad communicators who are emotionally immature and treat others poorly. Posts like this reinforce these stereotypes, which is not only re-traumatizing to victims of abuse at the hands of women (which can affect people of all genders), but is going to result in more of the sort of dismissal of abuse that I experienced when I tried going to others in my life for support in a time of need.

Two, even though I’m not a man, I am often gendered male by people and this brings with it all the negative stereotypes people have about men and accompanying cold or harsh treatment. Negative overgeneralizations about men hurt me and other people who are sometimes gendered male by others, just as they hurt actual men. In addition the hurt can be worse because it reinforces that people are misgendering me on top of wrongly stereotyping me. But it can also be hurtful even to men (both trans and cis) and perhaps more so in some ways.

These two points interact. Having to deal with negative stereotypes about men, when I’m not even a man, and when I haven’t engaged in the negative behaviors myself, is frustrating on its own, but the frustration is made so much worse by also having trauma at the hands of women who were doing the things men are stereotyped as doing, and having dealt with people ignoring me when I tried to seek help for those things, in large part because people gendered me male and they had categorically excluded the possibility of women doing these things to men, because society constantly hammers them with the idea that they are things men do to women. So it’s like, I’m being punished for doing a thing I didn’t do, when others are doing the thing to me, and society is refusing to acknowledge that the thing is being done to me and instead treating me as if I were doing it.

Stop to think how incredibly degrading that is. And this is the reality I live every day. And it’s a reality that is enforced by posts like this.

Now let’s see if any women who reblogged this post apologizes to me or if it really was all talk and they just wanted to rant or make negative comments about men.

P.S. I am all about women talking openly about their trauma at the hands of men. I too have trauma at the hands of men too and have also experienced men doing the toxic thing described above, and my gender identity is more female than male so I identify with women experiencing this stuff to a large degree. But I just want people to speak about their specific trauma instead of launching into sweeping anti-male overgeneralizations.

The fact that I too have this trauma illustrates a third point on which posts like this hurt me, which is that I have my own mental struggles at the hands of men and I sometimes struggle with negatively overgeneralizing, which for me is directly related to depression. It can be a struggle for me to avoid falling into these negative thought patterns, especially when I empathize intensely with the people behind the posts So lastly, posts like this also place me at greater risk of falling back into depression.

Yeah.

Territory. 

I was all excited because I found this fairly recent article online talking about how there is a need to include men in sex positivity, and then I read the whole article and pretty much all the author is calling for is for men to listen to women more and to intervene more with other men doing bad things to women.

And I’m like, dude. I don’t think you get it.

Like, if you live as a man, you can listen to women all you want, you can take women’s studies in college, be a raging feminist, pour countless hours in feminist movements and activism, and this will do little to nothing to tear down your internal shame and guilt associated with sex. And in many cases, it might even make it worse if you are listening to the (numerous) women who are ranting about the horrible things men have done to them and have taken it to generalizing negatively about men and/or talking about men as if their sexuality is inherently threatening or inherently bad. Many women are trauma survivors and trauma survivors don’t always exhibit fully rational thinking, as I can testify as I have my own trauma and have struggled with irrationally demonizing people (including men) in the past too.

The men who need to listen to women more are not going to have much overlap with the men who are reading an article on the need for sex positivity for men, written by a woman, on a feminist website.

And then the article starts going into how, after listening to women, men can move things forward by using their male privilege to influence other men, blah blah blah.

I’m really sick of the attitude that all men are responsible for the bad behavior of other men and the idea that feminism is going to move forward by the men who are already engaged in it, doing more to engage other men. There’s a huge assumption in here, which is that all men necessarily have power over other men. In many cases, they simply don’t have this power at all, and in the few cases where they do, it is limited and highly situational.

I have a story about this. When I was in middle school, there was a (heteronormative) exercise we were given in home economics class, in which they divided the class into girls and boys and had us, in groups, list what qualities we found attractive in the opposite sex. I was put in the boys group. The group was dominated by a small group of kids who were loud and a few of whom would actively bully me. Really quickly they started writing down objectifying stuff that I didn’t relate to. I knew that if I spoke up, I would just get bullied and shut down. So I was quiet, and the group drew up and presented a list of really objectifying, misogynistic things that did not at all reflect what I (or even what the majority of the people in our group) actually believed.

The teacher, who to her credit was pretty aware of the social dynamic, realized what had happened and then kinda publicly shamed the boys who had written the list, and then excluded those boys and asked the rest of us to come up with our own list after-the-fact. Interestingly, the list we came up with was not at all misogynistic and focused on personality and behaviors rather than appearance.

But what is the lesson here? The solution wasn’t for boys to police boys. Boys policing boys had been failing for months because the culture was persisting on its own. The solution was for an authority figure to step in and prevent a small subset of more aggressive boys from dominating the conversation. And in this instance, the authority figure happened to be a woman, proving that it doesn’t have to be men who take action. The person’s gender wasn’t even important, the key was that the person had the power and authority to shut down the boys whose behavior was problematic.

Out in the real world, black men and other BIPOC men often aren’t in a position to speak up against white men who are engaging in misogynistic behaviors, especially in racist settings. Why? Because they don’t have power and authority. If they tried to speak up, they might even be subjected to violence. The same is true of queer men and GNC men as they are often less likely to be taken seriously and more likely to be subjected to derision or violence. Neurodivergent men also have a really hard time. They might misread a situation in the first place and make a fool out of themselves, and they might feel afraid of getting involved even if they think something is bad, because of past experiences with humiliation after they misread a situation (I know I struggled with this a lot when younger.) And they might not say or do the “right things” and they might end up targeted in a situation where they try to help. And socioeconomic status is a factor too. Men of high social status and wealth can get away with behaviors that a lot of people couldn’t and people of low status certainly couldn’t. Just look at all the examples of some rich white college student sexually assaulting someone at a frat party and getting away with it because his dad has connections. People of high status are often able to get off the hook for crimes through lawyers and connections, whereas in an altercation, people of low status are more likely to end up getting charged with a crime, convicted, and put in jaiil.

So…look at how this topic had gotten derailed. I started by searching for information about how to include men in sex positivity, and now I’m talking about how men are expected to police other men but in reality, they’re usually powerless to do so.

This is a serious problem in feminism, and I have news for you. For once, the problem here isn’t men. It’s women (and some men and others who join and support their voices) who are failing at intersectionality, blaming all men for a problem that is really limited to a specific subset of men, and expecting men who have no real power to do anything about these men, to do something.

It’s time for us to include men in sex positivity. And including men does not mean that we insist that men stop other men who are engaging in bad behaviors before they get included and supported. Including men does not mean insisting on men listen to women say the same things over and over again before their own voice gets included and heard.

If we don’t change our approach, this issue is never going to progress. We need to include men in the sex positive movement now. And we need to include these men with an understanding that they are responsible for their own actions, but not the actions of other men. We need to stop assuming that men all have inherent power over other men. And we need to start examining the racism, classism, ableism, and other bigoted assumptions in the expectation of men to solve all these problems themselves. And we also need to start examining the ways some self-identified “feminists” talk about men and male sexuality that is deliberately excluding them from sex positivity and from feminism in general, i.e. talking about men as if they are inherenetly bad and specifically talking about male sexuality and male attraction to women as if it were inherently predatory, and how this idea not only excludes men from sex positivity and feminism, but it also lets men off the hook when they engage in bad behavior, and wrongly targets the men who do not engage in these behaviors.

Why Can’t We Build Better Towns? 

A lot of people are talking about sustainable urban development. So why aren’t we making progress? Well, a large portion of the land in the United States is zoned for single-family detached housing, which means it’s illegal to build anything besides inefficient, car-dependent suburban sprawl. Let’s change that!

Inspired by this awesome Climate Town video: The Suburbs are Bleeding America Dry. I recommend watching it if you want to learn more about this subject.

Trust

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“Most hospitals in America are non-profits, which means they must have financial assistance or Charity Care policies. This is gonna sound weird, but what that means is that if you make under a certain amount of money, the hospital legally has to forgive your hospital bills. Let me show you how this works. Type in the hospital name with ‘financial assistance’ after. Should be the top link. Let’s check. What you wanna do is look for financial assistance applications and policies. Let’s check the policy. From here, what you’re looking for is a sliding scale of benefits. 0-300% of the poverty guidelines, they will forgive 100% of your medical bills. So you can see here that 300% is $37,470, so if you make under that amount, the hospital will legally forgive your medical bills. If you’re a larger household, you can check it out from here. If you wanna test it out, I run a non-profit that does this so DM me, and I will actually do it for you, and see if we can crush those medical bills.” The guy’s Tiktok handle is @dollarfor.

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts lately that are like “If you’re not a member of such-and-such oppressed or marginalized group, you have no right to discuss such-and-such issue affecting that group.”

And I have a huge problem with this attitude, for a lot of different reasons:

These sorts of attitudes put pressure on people to “out” themselves about certain identities, such as being gay, trans, or having certain types of mental illness or trauma, to name a few. Some of these identities or experiences are things that can open people up to negative consequences, such as hate or backlash, consequences to career and professional life, sparking family drama, or others in their life closing off from them. So when you insist on someone being a member of a certain group in order to join the dialogue, you keep people out who don’t want to “out” themselves. Ironically, the people who are at the greatest risk of being harmed by such outing, are themselves the ones who are most oppressed and marginalized (such as closeted LGBTQ people living in highly homophobic and/or transphobic subcultures, or people who have a mental illness or condition or type of trauma that has the strongest stigma against it)

This attitude creates an incentive for people to play up “how oppressed” they are, in extreme cases, encouraging people to lie or misrepresent their identities and experiences, or in milder cases, just to exaggerate somewhat, in order for people to take them more seriously. This incentive also ends up encouraging members of the marginalized group to start comparing themselves to others, and it creates all sorts of unhealthy ways of thinking. You get people feeling like their experiences are not valid because they are “not oppressed enough”. And you get people arguing amonst themselves and dividing themselves into a hierarchy based on who is “more oppressed”. It’s terrible for everyone, terrible for the group, terrible for the cause.

Sometimes, legitimate perspectives get excluded, because members of privileged groups and/or outsiders to a particular experience or identity, sometimes have highly insightful, intelligent, or useful things to say about the topic at hand. There can be multiple reasons for this: One reason is that people who are privileged on one axis, might be marginalized in another, and many aspects of marginalization or being subjected to hate or bigotry are universal, and a lot can be gained by analogy. For example, I’m allosexual, but I’ve gained a tremendous amount of insight into my gender identity and sexuality through talking to asexual people and others on the ace spectrum. But there’s a second, different reason that including the voices of mainstream and/or privileged people is useful. Sometimes these people have better access to information, education, or resources, and they also sometimes think more rationally. As an example, I’ve struggled with quite a lot of mental illness myself, but I don’t necessarily think that I always get the best help by talking to people with more severe struggles than my own; sometimes talking to these people can help, but it’s also useful to talk to people who have only milder or slight struggles with mental illness, because these people have healthier and more rational minds overall, and they are often able to share and explain coping mechanisms and ways of thinking about things or ways of handling situations, that are more effective and can help me to pull myself out of mental illness and/or stay out of it, and live a better life. Another very different example of this is trauma: when I have extensive trauma around a certain topic, I might get triggered, getting angry or upset in unpredictable ways, when that topic comes up, and this might cloud my judgment, making what I say less rational and/or reasonalbe. A person without trauma might be able to stay calm and ultimately might have more rational or reasonable things to say about the topic.

So all of these things point to the same conclusion: I want all people to be able to talk about all issues. I don’t want to exclude people from the dialogue just because they’re a member of a privileged or mainstream group, with respect to an issue where I am a member of an oppressed or marginalized group. Excluding people in this fashion creates all sorts of bad outcomes.

There are times when a bunch of privileged people enter into the dialogue and start voicing a bunch of misconceptions and/or bigotry, and it can get exhausting, mentally and emotionally.

But here’s the thing. The problem isn’t that these people are privileged, the problem is that they’re voicing bigotry and/or wasting people’s time by repeating the same misconceptions. There are times when a community needs moderation or policing, and even when it can be necessary to remove or exclude people from the dialogue or from the space. But I want it to be done based on the people’s behavior, not their identity.

It’s the only sustainable way to do it. Any other way will necessarily create perverse incentives, creating incentives for vulnerable people to “out” themselves, creating incentives for people to exaggerate or play up their “oppression” in ways that are less-than-fully truthful, and that end up encouraging unhealthy comparisons, and it ends up also excluding valuable perspectives that might help everyone.

because the more the privileged group is exposed to our marginalised communities, the more they grow and learn and understand. the more they’re able to speak up for us in environments that don’t give us a voice.