Tohe

yeah. and you can even include "thing that reduces the barrier to doing the task" as a catalyst/enzyme

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

(screenshot from the linked RNZ article)

it took me less than three minutes, and that's only because I wrote a whole paragraphs on why this is a stupid idea. all you really need to put is "don't pass this bill" if you want. it'll only take 30 seconds.

This bill is about hurting people, not about clarity. It is exclusionary and skirts just shy of breaching the human rights act. "Biological sex" is not a neatly-defined box, and this law makes no attempt to state what it means by that. This bill is a waste of time and a waste of taxpayer money.

And then remember to VOTE!

Check that your submission made it to publication.

Encourage the people you know to do the same.

How: Go to the Parliament Submissions And Advice page, and search for your name or the name of the organisation you submitted under:

https://www3.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/submissions-and-advice/

If your submission did *not* make it to publication, contact the secretariat of the Select Committee (ideally by email) and ask them why not. Keep it civil- don't give them cause to turn themselves into the victims.

Email: [email protected]

There are two main responses people are getting.

One: That they haven't finished uploading yet.

They uploaded 12000 submissions in mid July. Since the first day, fewer than twenty additional submissions have been published.

Let them know you are watching. Keep checking, and if your submission is not up within 3-5 working days of getting a 'not yet' email, email them again.

Two: That your submission was struck from the record because it 'breached the Privacy Act by disclosing the private medical details of a third party'.

Now this sounds serious and reasonable- what has this been applied to? Well. It seems to be as simple as saying 'My daughter is trans and that is why I am in opposition to this Bill'. No further details needed.

Our identities as 'private medical details'.

Precedent: this has not been applied (aka 'my daughter is disabled') in submissions to past bills regarding disability. It *has* been applied to submissions to past bills regarding domestic violence- for the safety of victims, or for the risk of defamation to the accused. Regardless, the heavy handed way it is being applied now is not right. Shed light on it.

apart from how problematic it is to erase the representation of paraplegic people who are full time wheelchair users for no good reason (because dc certainly didn't have pure intentions of representing the disabled community, they're a multimillionaire company who wanted to nostalgia-bait with barbara back as batgirl considering how popular the redhead batgirl is), let's also consider how her disability is written – or not written – right now.

a fake spinal implant that gives her more mobility than able-bodied people have, a constant threat of "the chip malfunctioning with overuse" but she's been beaten multiple times pretty bad and nothing happens, the only time she was referenced to have chronic pain and muscle tension as well as used multiple mobility aids as during batgirls (2022).

combine this with the fact there was and there isn't any genuine sentiment from dc editorial, they didn't give her an implant for representation OR for good story progression. if you read oracle stories after the killing joke, you know a huge part of barbara's development is accepting her disability and learning to live a good, BETTER life as a paraplegic woman and wheelchair users. there's multiple instances where she talks about liking her life better, knowing she can do more as oracle, learning to let go of batgirl and pass it on. that was all erased for her to be infantilized and forced back into something she had outgrew.

her disability exists in a way that allows writers to pretend it don't, so they disrespect not only her being disabled, but decades of stories where the character became someone they actively erased by forcing her back to batgirl. a reminder babs is obsessed with her autonomy and indepence and she could have both while being a wheelchair user, but now her implant can be literally HACKED and WAS by THE JOKER. the man who originally took her agency, violated her body and will. and he does it AGAIN by controlling her body through the implant to the point she has to take it off herself!

barbara would never choose mobility she was more than capable of living and thriving without over her autonomy. she wouldn't accept the risk of losing control when she's a trained martial artist in combat specific for disabled wheelchair users.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

number one rule is get stainless steel shit. stainless steel water bottle stainless steel straw, you dont want that rubber plastic etc shit it grows mold like a mf. turns out that was the main culprit of what happened to me, my reusable water bottle was plastic and it didn't matter how much i let it soak or cleaned it out.

get this either if you can or can't afford the stainless steel stuff and just be really on cleaning it; staw cleaner looks like this:

and get one its mammas the bottle cleaner for your cup:

You put that tablet in the bottle, add hot water, let it fizz and soak for a bit and hey presto, any stains or discolouration or weird little crevices are suddenly removed of their hidden nasty bits.

My niece kept saying her water bottle tasted weird, and she washed it and washed it, and then me and my mum were like GIVE IT HERE and we put a denture tablet in it and added the straw to it and it started fizzing up the straw and all this black gunk started coming out the weird curvy bits of the fitted straw like a Coke-mentos experiment.

It’ll taste slightly minty unless you rinse rinse rinse rinse rinse rinse but that’s not a terrible thing, and let’s face it, denture tablets are for cleaning dentures so, you know, designed to clean things that go in mouths.