Yay, teamwork!

Good kitty

I can’t imagine that it would ever have enough impact to reduce their population significantly

There are people who speak up, but it’s definitely not a sizeable demographic. Even before the genocide started, Israelis who protested Israel’s human rights abuses and wars faced a heckton of suppression. A friend of a friend was hospitalised after being severely beaten by right wing counter protesters at an anti-genocide demonstration. Far from taking action to stop it, the police (as they were watching it happen) laughed at her and said she deserved it.

Children are taught from a young age of the necessity of Zionism, and that they are fundamentally superior to Palestinians and other Arabs, who are inherently violent and dangerous. They twist the knife of the generational trauma of the holocaust, because scared and hurt people are easier to manipulate to hate.

Compulsory military service in the IDF is another powerful tool used to shape Israeli’s opinions; There’s been a lot of research on how the military has a shockingly strong effectiveness at shifting the views of those who serve in it, leading to galvanisation of an us-vs-them way of thinking. People who refuse compulsory service are routinely imprisoned, sometimes for longer than their term of service would be.

Press freedoms are heavily restricted. A friend who was studying in Israel in the late 2010s was astounded by how homogenous the media landscape was, especially in terms of news. There are some organisations that do good work, but they themselves have documented how difficult it is to be a journalist in Israel who isn’t willing to be a propaganda mouthpiece. +972mag is one of the few publications in this space , and they do some absolutely incredible journalism, so check them out if you’d like to be able to get an insight into some of the on-the-ground politics in Israel. Their editorial team includes both Israelis and Palestinians, and much (if not all) of their work is available in both English and Hebrew — because even if there aren’t many in Israel inclined to listen, they want to get their work out to as many people as possible

I deeply and sincerely love whoever made this image

There are worker protection regulations for temperature in the UK, which account for both excessive cold and heat. However, whereas there is an explicitly stated minimum temperature for indoor workplaces (16°C, or 13°C if the work involves rigorous physical exertion), there is no stated upper bound, only that employers must ensure the safety of their workers with respect to heat stress, by maintaining a “reasonable” temperature at work.

We honestly need an update to the regulations, because part of why there isn’t nearly as much guidance for excessive heat is that when the regulations were written, it was assumed that the only workplaces that would be at risk of excessive temperatures were places like bakeries and foundries. Although a kitchen like the one in the article obviously has plenty of equipment outputting additional heat, places like this getting too warm probably wasn’t conceived of when these regulations were written — and it’s only going to get worse.

Unfortunately, the word “reasonable” is pretty fluffy, and I can imagine some workplaces only shutting once workers start experiencing heat stress. And in some cases that I know of, some asshole employers will continue pushing employees past that point — the employees would no doubt succeed if they tried to take action against their employer at this point, because that’s clearly beyond what’s reasonable, but it’s much easier to prove “the temperature was this high” than it is to argue that the temperatures were unreasonable.

I learned a bunch of this from a friend who was concerned for her employees — she was complaining to me about how much work it took for her to figure out what constituted “reasonable” and how the lack of clearer regulations about excessive heat not only made it easier for asshole employers to exploit their workers, but also harder for employers like her to protect her workers (another friend, who was a manager but didn’t directly employ the people working under him concurred, because it took him a lot of arguing to convince the higher ups that AC was necessary in the office)

It’d probably still count as littering, which would be fineable, I imagine

Not only are cashews healthy for them, they also go nuts for them (pun not intended, but I am delighted to have made an accidental pun). I forgot to mention “unsalted” in my comment, so I’m glad you mentioned it

I once had a crow friend who would knock on my window if I was late coming out to give them their seeds. It was just the one crow that was bold enough to do this. Sometimes he’d do it way earlier than usual, and I am 100% confident that he wasn’t mistaken, just being a cheeky asshole and trying his luck. I miss that asshole bird.

Seconding the crow effigy idea (well, I didn’t do it with an effigy, I just left them a couple of shiny stuff).

For me, what I did was sit on my doorstep for a while, to get them used to the sight of me. And then I made sure they saw me leaving the shiny thing. I wasn’t forbidden from feeding them, so I also let them see me putting out some seeds.

Although feeding them is prohibited, the crow effigy idea person said to have a few cashews or similar in the little nesty thing, and I agree that this would be likely be necessary to draw them over at first.

If you’re okay with bending the rules a tad, if the sitting outside thing works and you’re able to not scare them away, then leaving behind just a cashew or two in your wake (if the crows are nearby) could help them to begin to associate you with good stuff.

Though if they’re dive bombing you, it might be challenging to come back from that

I’m trying to persuade my partner to play it with me at the moment. He seems open to it, but experiences inertia around starting a new game.

Privatisation, combined with a government that seems allergic to actually making there be any penalties for water companies’ fuck ups.

For instance, you mention the excess of rain that the UK receives — well another way the water companies keep fucking up is that when it rains, and the amount of water going down drains is too much for them to process, they end up discharging raw sewage into rivers, polluting many rivers that would otherwise be swimmable (last summer, I lived in a place near a river that was beautiful to swim in during hot weather, but before actually doing so, I checked an online map (from a charity doing data activism) to see if there were any points where sewage was typically discharged from, and if there had been recent instances of this. Turns out that one of the most popular swimming spots was downstream of one of these sewage points)

This is meant to be a thing that is only done in the most exceptional of circumstances, but it’s something that is done frequently, all over the countries, because it’s cheaper to do this than to actually improve water infrastructure. Water companies say “we had to do it because of exceptional levels of rain”, but when occasional bouts of exceptionally high levels of rain is the norm, that excuse is more full of shit than our rivers.

My best friend died of COVID. His loved ones weren’t able to be by his side in those last moments, for obvious reasons, and that left a wound that really disrupted my ability to grieve in the wake of his death. If I had been allowed to be there with him, I know that to actually do so would expose myself to a lot of risk, even though it was likely that we had been infected with the same strain of COVID (due to us being bubbled together and falling ill at the same time — me and his housemate had recovered by the time he died, but it would’ve still been risky for us to be there).

Despite this, I honestly don’t know whether I would have been able to stop myself from being there with him at the end. It’s easy to have disdain for people being foolish in this way, but I also have a lot of sympathy for people who make this choice — it’s not necessarily a case of people being unaware of the risk.

I feel like the ideal world would be if there could be collaboration between healthcare workers and members of a community to find a compromise solution that would allow burial practices to be preserved as much as possible, whilst also minimising risk of transmission. I imagine this might look like healthcare workers being involved in the process, rather than simply handing the body over to the family members as would happen if someone died from something other than an infectious disease. It seems like something that should be possible, in theory.

Of course, the problem is that healthcare workers and services are already stretched thin enough as it is, and I don’t imagine they’d have the capacity to even consider doing something like this. I was reading the other day that Trump’s cuts to things like USAID has really impacted the ability to respond to this epidemic

Nerds on this thread may be interested in linguistic research on emoji as gesture by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.

Here’s an open-access academic paper for the mega-nerds out there

With an overview of that article written for a more general audience, in The Conversation

For those who prefer their edutainment in audio format, McCulloch and Gawne’s podcast is a fun and eclectic listen. Here’s the episode on emoji as gesture.

Further Reading

For those wanting to learn more, McCulloch’s 2019 book “Because Internet” is a delightfully fun read that I can strongly recommend. It looks at the wider picture of how the internet has changed communication, with a chapter dedicated to emoji. There’s been a lot of productive discussion (both academic and informal) in this area since then, and McCulloch’s work has been a key factor in driving that.

Also, I’ve not yet read it, but Lauren Gawne has a more recent (2025) book titled "Gesture: a slim guide " that says it’s “suitable for readers of all backgrounds”.

If you’re interested in either of these books, then you should support the authors and purchase the book(s) if you have the means to. Certainly, that’s preferable to downloading it for free from a shadow library like Anna’s Archive(Wikipedia has reliable and up to date links to this site (so you know what sites to avoid, ofc) and pointing you there means I’m not directly linking you to the naughty site.

N.b. I am a biochemist, not a linguist, and so my word-nerdery is purely of the hobbyist variety. I don’t have particular domain knowledge in this area.

Also, this comment is in part because I linked these resources to a friend not too long ago, so I had it mostly to hand.

Glad you’re still here with us. For a variety of reasons, I’m similar. The average person is pretty pro-NHS, but when it comes to politicians, there seems to be a lack of political will to change anything.

I think something that makes it harder is that it’s not just a case of funding (though that is also needed), but a restructuring to reverse some of the insidious privatisation and outsourcing that’s so prevalent these days. Additionally, there needs to be more money put into skilled administrators — whenever there’s talks about cutting the fat from the NHS, pointing the fingers at “unnecessary” administrative staff is an easy tactic, but a lack of skilled administrators means that medical staff have to spend more time filling in forms and chasing up referrals.

A while back, I spent a couple of weeks in hospital despite there being nothing medically wrong with me

My carer had died a few months prior, and social care services were fucking around a lot so I spent a long while without any daily living support at all, except the occasional friend travelling across the country to spend a weekend helping me. A friend who hadn’t heard from me for a while called emergency services, because they were worried I might have tried to kill myself, because the last thing they had heard from me was pretty concerning in that respect (I was in a bad place mental health wise).

When paramedics got there, they found me on the floor, having had a fall. I hadn’t even in a week, and was severely dehydrated. They took me to hospital, got me hydrated and stuff, but then I was in limbo for a while. They couldn’t discharge me, because it wasn’t safe to send me back home without care. But the various services that were meant to be supporting people like me just weren’t working. It was basically like the NHS and social care services being the meme with two versions of spiderman pointing to each other.

And so I took up a valuable hospital bed for multiple weeks, in a place that wasn’t well situated to even support me. It made me so angry because of the inefficiency of it all. It’s all so preventable, but there’s so much inefficiency.

And that’s not even counting all the x-rays I’ve had following a fall that I had because wheelchair services were fucking me around, so I had preventable falls that cost the NHS more money.

Yeah, but my point is that there’s currently a lack of political will to do that

“single payer healthcare is forever”

The chronically underfunded NHS creaks as I weep.

I don’t disagree with her point though. In the UK, after decades of neoliberalism reigning supreme, I am often extremely depressed at how it’s changed things culturally. I was born in the 90s, so all of my life, I have seen the people who are struggling most scrutinised ever closer, and the state becomes more and more like a business.

If the NHS didn’t already exist, I can’t fathom there being political will to implement it right now. There would be far too much outcry over people “reaping rewards from the system despite not contributing to it”. There was that kind of opposition when the NHS was founded too, but far less of it. It was a different world. As I understand it, the Reagan and Thatcher era of politics were a big part of what caused things to change.

Learning the history helps ground me. A political philosopher I read a bunch of last year who influenced me greatly was Frederic Jameson, who advocated that we should “always historicise”, because connecting to our history is a great tool in resisting the cultural logic of late stage capitalism.

Or to put it a different way: the society we live in has a way of making itself seem eternal and immutable, but things have not always been this way, and they need not always remain this way. If AOC spearheaded a campaign that led to single payer healthcare, but the scheme was later repealed, that achievement would still last forever, in that it could serve as a template for those in future.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense. I’m just depressed and trying to clutch at hope. I’d say I don’t know if it’s working, but hey, I’m still alive — that’s something. I should probably get some sleep though

“leftist” means a heckton of different things depending on who you’re asking. Some people strongly feel that “leftist” means something distinct from “someone who is left wing”, whereas others don’t make that distinction. Of that latter category, some people use “leftist” to mean someone who is leftwing in an absolute sense, whereas other people use it in a relative sense, such that they would consider Bernie, who is on the leftmost fringes of a not very left wing (but more left wing than the GOP) party, a leftist.

I agree that when we’re talking about politics, it’s important to try to be precise in what words we use (especially when discussing politicians whose views may have shifted over time, as you highlight). However, the reality is that there is no single, agreed upon definition for terms like “leftist”, and no authority by which we can definitively say who is using it wrong or right.

Even if Bernie isn’t a leftist, he was certainly perceived that way by much of his party, who don’t care about making granular distinctions between “Socialist Democrat” and “leftist” when for the Democrats, both of those collapse down to “way more left wing than we want to go”.

Though I would also note that the person you’re replying to didn’t explicitly state that Bernie was a leftist. This isn’t just me being persnickety — I get that they did heavily imply Bernie was a leftist. The point I’m trying to make is that there are a lot of people who don’t think Bernie is/was a leftist, but, as one of the more left wing people in his party, could have been a passageway towards getting more candidates who are genuinely leftist (and indeed, some of the Dems pushing against Bernie likely shared this view)