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2istoliver · 3 years

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The Era of Misinformation Is Here To Stay

[Article extrated from THE INTERPRETER - THE NEW YORK TIMES]

By Max Fisher & Amanda Taub

This week alone, there’s a decent chance you’ve had at least one of these rumors, all false, relayed to you as fact: that President Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat, that Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools as part of a scheme to advance racial equality, and that border officials have been mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to hand out to refugee children.

All were amplified by partisan actors. But you’re just as likely, if not more so, to have heard it relayed from someone you know. And you may have noticed that these cycles of falsehood-fueled outrage keep recurring.

We are in an era of endemic misinformation — and outright disinformation. Plenty of bad actors are helping the trend along. But the real drivers, some experts believe, are social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation in the first place — and those forces are only on the rise.

“Why are misperceptions about contentious issues in politics and science seemingly so persistent and difficult to correct?” Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist, poses in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s not for want of good information, which is ubiquitous. Exposure to good information does not reliably instill accurate beliefs anyway. Rather, Dr. Nyhan writes, a growing body of evidence suggests that the ultimate culprits are “cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political elites.”

Put more simply, people become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping: a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems.

As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational beings who put truth-seeking above all else, we are social animals wired for survival. In times of perceived conflict or social change, we seek security in groups. And that makes us eager to consume information, true or not, that lets us see the world as a conflict putting our righteous ingroup against a nefarious outgroup.

This need can emerge especially out of a sense of social destabilization. As a result, misinformation is often prevalent among communities that feel destabilized by unwanted change or, in the case of some minorities, powerless in the face of dominant forces.

If you are, say, a conservative American who feels a sense of lost control amid the pandemic and Mr. Trump’s election loss, then misinformation reframing it all as a grand conflict between patriotic true Americans and scheming social justice warriors can feel enormously reassuring.

It’s why perhaps the greatest culprit of our era of misinformation may be, more than any one particular misinformer, the era-defining rise in social polarization.

“At the mass level, greater partisan divisions in social identity are generating intense hostility toward opposition partisans,” which has “seemingly increased the political system’s vulnerability to partisan misinformation,” Dr. Nyhan wrote in an earlier paper.

Growing hostility between the two halves of America feeds social distrust, which makes people more prone to rumor and falsehood. It also makes people cling much more tightly to their partisan identities. And once our brains switch into “identity-based conflict” mode, we become desperately hungry for information that will affirm that sense of us versus them, and much less concerned about things like truth or accuracy.

(In an email, Dr. Nyhan stressed that it can be methodologically difficult to nail down the precise relationship between the overall level of polarization in society and the overall level of misinformation, but that there is abundant evidence that an individual with more polarized views becomes more prone to believing falsehoods.)

The second driver of our misinformation era is also upgraded by polarization: high-profile political figures who encourage their followers to go ahead and indulge their desire for identity-affirming misinformation. After all, an atmosphere of all-out political conflict often benefits those leaders, at least in the short term, by rallying people behind them.

And then there is the third factor: a shift to social media, which is a powerful outlet for composers of disinformation, a pervasive vector for misinformation itself, and a multiplier of the other risk factors.

“Media has changed, the environment has changed, and that has a potentially big impact on our natural behavior,” William J. Brady, a Yale University social psychologist, said.

“When you post things, you’re highly aware of the feedback that you get, the social feedback in terms of likes and shares,” Dr. Brady said. So when misinformation appeals to social impulses more than the truth does, it gets more attention online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it.

“Depending on the platform, especially, humans are very sensitive to social reward,” he said. Research demonstrates that people who get positive feedback for posting inflammatory or false statements become much likelier to do so again in the future. “You are affected by that.”

In 2016, the media scholars Jieun Shin and Kjerstin Thorson analyzed a data set of 300 million tweets from the 2012 election. Twitter users, they found, “selectively share fact-checking messages that cheerlead their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party’s candidate.” And when users encountered a fact-check that revealed their candidate had gotten something wrong, their response wasn’t to get mad at the politician for lying to them. It was to attack the fact checkers.

“We have found that Twitter users tend to retweet to show approval, argue, gain attention and entertain,” researcher Jon-Patrick Allem wrote last year, summarizing a study he’d co-authored. “Truthfulness of a post or accuracy of a claim was not an identified motivation for retweeting.”

In another study, published last month in Nature, a team of psychologists tracked thousands of users interacting with false information. Republican test subjects who were shown a false headline about migrants trying to enter the United States (“Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests”) mostly identified it as false; only 16 percent called it accurate. But if the experimenters instead asked the subjects to decide whether to share the headline, 51 percent said they would.

“Most people do not want to spread misinformation,” the study’s authors wrote. “But the social media context focuses their attention on factors other than truth and accuracy.”

In a highly polarized society like today’s United States — or, for that matter, India or parts of Europe — those incentives pull heavily toward ingroup solidarity and outgroup derogation. They do not much favor consensus reality or abstract ideals of accuracy.

As people get more prone to misinformation, opportunists and charlatans are also getting better at exploiting this. That can mean tear-it-all-down populists who rise on promises to smash the establishment and control minorities. It can also mean government agencies or freelance hacker groups stirring up social divisions abroad for their benefit. But the roots of the crisis go deeper than them.

“The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a much-circulated MIT Technology Review article. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.”

In an ecosystem where that sense of identity conflict is all-consuming, she wrote, “belonging is stronger than facts.”

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#misinformation #anthropology #psychology #sociology #digital world #politics #inspainthesame socialmedia identity

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

…

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…

I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

…

At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

…

I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

…

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

…

DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

…

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

…

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…

"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

…

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

#scott alexander #substack #book review #fredrik deboer #public schooling #long #read the whole thing

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untamedunrestrained · 4 years

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I have to do this!

I recently came across this post made by @vespertineflora and I hesitated before reblogging it because I knew this was a hornet’s nest but I fully agreed with it so I eventually decided to reblog it, because that’s my philosophy if something jives with me a 100% I reblog it, if it doesn’t I don’t. Anyhow, after this I came across multiple posts by @vespertineflora where they put forth their POV in the various sex scenes in MDZS and I really liked their answers which compelled me to write this post.

The one thing I have realised when it comes to MDZS is that all my posts in this fandom are beyond chaotic so I don’t think this will be any different though considering the sex is confined to only one canon of this story hopefully this will atleast make sense. Though as I start this I have no idea where this is going so it is definitely going to be a little chaotic.

At this point I feel it’s important to mention what experience I have already had with danmei. Because if MDZS is your first foray into danmei I can appreciate how crazy the sex scenes must seem. Anyhow, my first foray into danmei was with “Hua Hua You Long” and if the sex scenes in MDZS are problematic believe you don’t want to be within a 100 yards of “Hua Hua You Long”. But, I have a very high tolerance for writing that makes me uncomfortable so I persevered for very long with HHYL but when it became amply clear that the only kind of sex our two main characters are going to indulge in was going to be straight up non-con I gave up. Like, I think I even tried to see if it changed by the very end before DNFing but it didn’t. I get the feeling that non-con/dub-con might be a big part of danmei.

Anyhow, before jumping into MDZS and this was straight after I finished “The Untamed”. In fact, it was the very same day, I came across this post talking about how the sex scenes in MDZS were fetishizing and that the novel presented a rape scene between minors as erotica and touched briefly on their first kiss. Now this post was very vague so I really couldn’t prepare myself one way or the other but knowing my limits I delved into the novel anyway. But, I was hyper critical of any kiss /sex scene between WWX and LWJ because of that post because I was perpetually on the lookout for that rape scene which I had no idea how I was going to swallow.

Having read the novel, there is one point I want to make before we dissect MDZS in particular. This novel was written in an online serialized format so the end of each chapter had to be something that would have to be compelling enough to have people subscribed and to keep people reading the work which is a big reason in the novel the past and present are presented as they are because if you read the novel, LWJ and WWX are never apart for long, if they separate in the past we immediately jump to the present. If we jump to the past it is always to a scene where they will meet. There are very few scenes where they are separated for any length of time, one of which is at the very beginning and the second is at the time the YunmengJiang Clan is attacked and the novel while covering the bases doesn’t dwell for long in this period because it is a period LWJ and WWX are separated and your audience are mostly here for those two. So, you try to make the scenes where your main characters are separated as few and far between. This directly implies that you are catering to a specific audience and we need to realise that we are not that specific target audience.

This book is written in a very niche genre and it is meant to be consumed by people who like stories in that genre and sex is a big part of that and unfortunately so are the non-con/dub-con elements in sex. So, I feel that the reason the author mostly put the sex scenes in the extras was to cater to her audience that do expect these scenes while reading danmei.

The fact is that the story of MDZS is so good that it got multiple adaptations and the live-action show propelled it to a stage the author didn’t intend it for. She wasn’t writing for such an international audience, she wasn’t catering for it either. The worldwide acclaim this story has gotten is unprecedented, I can tell you this because I have never in my life watched a Chinese Drama (well, except for The Untamed now) and I have never in my life completed a novel in the danmei genre (well, except for MDZS now). The fact that this story has found such a stage and the only fault people can find with it are the sex scenes should actually be pretty extraordinary considering when this story was being written it was expected to be consumed by Chinese readers who enjoyed this specific genre.

So, yeah the story isn’t written keeping in mind the sensibilities of the West. The author never intended so many people from different nationalities and cultures to read her story and it was written for a target audience who reads this genre expecting it to meet certain expectations and sex is very high on that list.

Now, I agree that just because we aren’t the target audience doesn’t mean we can’t have an opinion on the work. The fact that the sex scenes in MDZS are non-con/dub-con to please a certain audience doesn’t mean that you can’t call them out for being problematic. They are and you can but remember don’t paint everything with a broad brush. Nothing is as black or as white as people make it out to be and ultimately that is the moral of MDZS.

So, instead of broad sweeping statements, I want to take this opportunity to really dissect the nuances in the kiss/sex scenes between LWJ and WWX because at the end of the day I do really love the story of MDZS.

Blanket Spoiler Warning for all novel scenes from here on out!

First Kiss at Phoenix Mountain

I probably wouldn’t have noticed this scene if not for that post that had me in a hyper-alert state but just because this is something I would have normally given a pass still doesn’t mean it’s okay.

The very first kiss between LWJ and WWX is a kiss that takes place on Phoenix Mountain while WWX is blindfolded. Basically, in the Phoenix Mountain hunt when Jin ZiXuan bulls-eyes his target in the archery competition, WWX tries to one-up him by doing the feat blindfolded which he succeeds at much to Jin ZiXun’s chagrin who then tries to rile him up and which ultimately has WWX claiming that he can do the entire hunt blind-folded and still be the better one at the end of the day. So WWX is blindfolded when he feels someone approach who then proceeds to kiss the living daylights out of him, literally he is so weak-kneed he can’t stand up after the kiss. But, given that WWX doesn’t know who kissed him there is no question of consent, he can’t see who is kissing him and therefore he can’t consent to the kiss. This is definitely dubious consent if not outright non-consensual.

There are certain hints that he isn’t completely at the mercy of his secret admirer, first being that the reason he is able to approach WWX is because WWX doesn’t perceive any killing intent from this person and secondly WWX is elated that this lone cultivator is approaching him at a time when most cultivators are atleast somewhat afraid of him, so he lets him (yes because we already know it’s LWJ) come closer than he would have otherwise and doesn’t even take a protective stance when he is smashed against a tree. When both his wrists are captured he decides to kick his assailant but is shocked into stillness because his assailant starts kissing him at this point. He struggles when he comes to his senses but when he realises how badly the person kissing him is trembling he can’t bring himself to struggle any further. But, he again struggles when the person starts to french kiss him but at this point is overpowered.

So, breaking it down, he consents to this person’s approach into his personal space, doesn’t consent to the kiss but backs down when he realises that this person is struggling with their own emotions, definitely doesn’t consent to being French kissed but is overpowered. So, consensual followed by dub-con followed by non-con. Of course, it must be reiterated that WWX can always kick his assailant away but for whatever reason he doesn’t. Overall this entire kiss is dub-con at the most and isn’t the healthiest thing in the world.

But, in the context of the story it is viewed differently. For whatever reason WWX sees this entire experience in a positive light.

The previous scene seemed to be an absurd yet erotic daydream. Recalling what it had felt like, formless tickles crawled up all the way to the tip of his heart.

LWJ on the other hand is furious at himself because soon after this scene he can be found disintegrating a tree. Well, this proves two things, one he isn’t proud of his actions and second, that despite everything this is the only way he can express his love for WWX with WWX none the wiser. This scene highlights his struggle with what he already knows, he loves WWX yet he knows no way to express it. His parents were the worst role-models in that area and he has no concept of a man loving another man. His actions are wrong but the story portrays them more as cry for help, to showcase his struggle with his relentless feelings.

He had no idea that Lan WangJi was mad at himself—mad that he acted upon his urges, that he couldn’t control himself, that he took advantage of another in a way that was neither righteous nor abiding by his sect rules.

It is definitely dub-con but I guess it is more in service of character development than anything else. I’m curious as to what people feel about this first kiss.

Second Kiss with Drunk Lan Wangji after the Yi City Arc

Well, according to WWX it’s the first and it’s anybody’s guess if LWJ has any idea it happened.

We all know LWJ has zero alcohol tolerance and for somebody who has only had alcohol for the second time in his life that’s to be expected and unfortunately there can be no proper consent under the influence so yeah, this one is definitely non-consensual.

But, people might not see it that way. In fact, I’m pretty sure (okay not so sure) they don’t see it that way. Well, LWJ is plenty eager for being licked by WWX and well WWX is fully in his senses but since you can’t consent to something you can’t fully comprehend, it is still non-con.

The Hand-job with a once-again Drunk Lan Wangji

WWX really loves taking advantage of a drunk Lan Wangji. Well, this time things definitely go out of hand. To the extent that WWX realizes that his actions might be very cruel and selfish. Again taking into account the fact that LWJ is drunk these again become non-consensual but surprisingly the reason LWJ has such a violent reaction to the whole act is probably because he believes he took advantage of WWX and then when he tries to help WWX clean up he is rejected making him believe that WWX didn’t want to participate when nothing could be further from the truth, considering he initiated it.

My God, these two are really horrible at figuring out what’s going on between them. No wonder it takes a huge intervention for them to come to their senses.

The Sex Scene at the very end of the novel

Well, this is the only fully consensual kiss/ sex scene in the main novel. There are kisses followed by a blowjob followed by anal sex and all three are fully consensual. Though the third one seems to be rather painful, it’s still consensual. Also, while they are having sex WWX is constantly mouthing off that LWJ should have taken advantage of him back when they were fifteen and at the Cloud Recesses.

“If you liked me since such a long time ago, why didn’t you take me sooner? The back mountains of your Cloud Recesses would be quite a good location, wouldn’t it? When I snuck out to fool around alone, you should’ve tied me up and dragged me away, pinned me onto the grass like right now to do whatever you want to me…”

“You’re so strong, so I couldn’t have resisted. If I screamed, you could’ve silenced me. Or your Library Pavilion also would’ve been a great place, right in the middle of the scriptures scattered on the ground. We could’ve bought a few cutsleeve booklets to compare and learn, any position at all…”

Well, at this point the novel ends and as you can see despite it being about 900 pages long when translated into English it definitely doesn’t deliver much on the sex front so the author wrote a series of extras to make up for that deficit and it’s your choice if you want to read the extras with the sexual content. They don’t contribute to the story so it’s truly your wish.

Banquet (Parts 1-3)

This one doesn’t have any explicit sex scenes though WWX does try to play out a rape scenario but it fails rather spectacularly because LWJ has no idea what to do and when they try to reverse the positions WWX just gives in instead of actually putting up a struggle.

Incense Burner (Parts 1-2)

I’m finally here at the infamous incense burner extra. So, let’s do this (cracks her knuckles).

This extra is set on the premise that LWJ and WWX use an incense burner that transports them to a dream world where they both get a glimpse of each other’s dreams. WWX’s dream is of the two of them retired and living in the countryside in his own version of domestic bliss while LWJ’s dream is well, where this entire conversation on consent started. Now when LWJ first realizes which of his dreams they are in he doesn’t want to explore any further, he hesitates but WWX decides to investigate. While in the dream he tries to prevent WWX from seeing it to its full extent because he is definitely embarrassed by it. The dream they came across is of a fifteen-year-old LWJ raping a fifteen-year-old WWX and then seeing this the real WWX gets rather turned on and has very consensual sex with his husband, LWJ.

Truthfully, the weird thing is that this might be one of the best ways to deal with this kink and I don’t understand why people are so hung up on the rape scene because hasn’t it been made clear that those two boys are nothing more than figments of imagination. Really, we can’t impose consent on dream versions of people because they aren’t actually people. The only people who have sex in this scenario are the grown-up versions of LWJ and WWX who have consensual sex.

I feel that a rape fantasy is more easy to accept if the victim has it, like in this scenario if this was WWX’s dream the sentiment might have been different but considering this is the aggressor’s dream sympathies change and this is something LWJ definitely acknowledges, he fears being judged but all things considered it’s good WWX knows this side of him because considering how much he keeps spouting off about being raped he definitely wants to indulge in this fantasy. Though in no sex scene in the main novel or the extras do they actually indulge in such a fantasy.

There was also the point that we have no idea when LWJ first had this dream and considering how closely this dream follows WWX’s fantasy during their first sex scene might put the genesis of this dream at a later date which would imply that this wasn’t a dream born out of LWJ’s initial frustration and inability to understand his feelings towards WWX which does alter the perspective a little.

In fact, the second incense burner dream is more problematic when WWX gives a blow-job to an eighteen-year-old LWJ (for my sanity he’s eighteen) who is actually a dream consciousness of his much older husband, then proceeds to use the hilt of Bichen as a dildo till his husband in a much younger body decides to save his sword from the horror and fucks WWX himself. But, then he discovers that he likes spanking WWX and he proceeds to do so despite WWX’s discomfort with the act. Again, I don’t know how much the concept of consent can be applied to dream selves, but all things considered this would have been the more problematic of the incense burner extras. Because, the first part is definitely non-consensual followed by a sex scene that is at best dub-con. Again, this is all in a dream and WWX is never going to get the opportunity to have sex with a younger-version of his husband because he didn’t and now he can’t. So again, I have no idea if this should even be brought into the consent issue.

But, one of the best things about this extra is that when WWX wakes up from the dream he is scared that LWJ will spank him something he didn’t like at all and doesn’t desire to repeat. He tells him that and LWJ immediately tells him that he will not. Which speaks a lot about these two, they know they have to communicate with each other and I feel like they have a good idea of each other’s limits and while these two might be kinky as hell neither actually wants to do anything that the other will not enjoy. So, even though they haven’t always dealt with it optimally I can rest assured that they will do better in the future.

But, I truly feel like everyone in all this uproar regarding the alleged rape forgot that this extra is written for a completely different purpose. I feel like the real reason the author wrote this was to allow LWJ and WWX to have sex in their own bodies which is something they have never done!

From Dawn to Dusk - Rather shameless sex but all consensual.

Intrusion (Parts 1-3) - No explicit sex scene though it is implied.

Villainous Friends, Iron Hook (Parts 1-2), Lotus Seed Pod & Dream Come True - No sexual content.

#if you didn't know now you know #mdzs #mo dao zu shi #mo xiang tong xiu #wangxian #wei wuxian #lan wangji #all about the sex #myposts

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Anna Wiederkehr

Congress has less than a month to hammer out a deal on the next round of stimulus before expanded unemployment benefits expire. State and local governments are starting to feel the pinch of budget shortfalls. And while the U.S. got a piece of (relatively) good news in last week’s jobs report, which featured an unemployment rate 2.2 percentage points lower in June than it had been in May, the economy has been thrown back into chaos in the meantime, with a number of states pulling back on their reopenings amid spiking COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations.

Our newest survey of economists highlights just how consequential governmental decisions over the next month may be: On average, these economists think that a refusal by Congress to extend unemployment benefits or bail out state and local governments is just as likely to hurt the economy as local economies staying open in spite of COVID-19 spikes — or even closing because of the virus.

In partnership with the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, FiveThirtyEight asked 31 quantitative macroeconomic economists what they thought about a variety of subjects around the coronavirus recession and recovery efforts. The most recent survey was conducted from July 2 through 6, which means the June jobs report was fresh on respondents’ minds — but so was the state of the pandemic, along with challenges ahead for lawmakers.

“There’s a distinct risk that between now and November, Congress’s ability to continue fiscal support will be very limited by election-year politics,” said Jonathan Wright, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University who has been consulting with us on the design of the survey. “That could be more of a drag on the economy than the local and state shutdowns just because the effect would be so huge.”

With a congressional showdown looming, we asked the experts to estimate the probability that several policy decisions would have the biggest negative impact on U.S. gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2020. Among the five options we presented, the single most important to the economists was a decision by state and local governments to reclose their economies because of COVID-19 outbreaks. But a decision by Congress not to provide funding to state and local governments was close behind. And the weight given to choices made by the federal government — bailing out local governments, extending unemployment insurance and providing ongoing aid for small businesses — added up to be even more important when taken as a whole:

What are the biggest economic risk factors by year’s end?

Average probabilities that each scenario would have the largest negative impact on U.S. GDP in the fourth quarter, according to economists

Local or state response options Avg. Probability Decision to reverse local economic openings due to COVID-19 spikes 26% Decision to keep local economies open despite COVID-19 spikes 17 Total 43 Federal response options Not providing funding for state and local governments* 23% Ending/reducing expansion of unemployment benefits 20 Ending/cutting back on aid to small businesses 14 Total 57

* Funding to address budget shortfalls associated with COVID-19.

The survey of 31 economists was conducted July 2-6.

Source: FIVETHIRTYEIGHT/IGM COVID-19 ECONOMIC SURVEY

“[State and local governments] are facing severe budget crises and will be laying off workers to balance their budgets,” said Julie Smith, a professor of economics at Lafayette College. That, she said, could lead to longer periods of high unemployment and financial pain for many households. Meanwhile, she added, cutting back or ending the federal unemployment extension would cause many people’s incomes to decline dramatically, leaving them with much less money to spend — which could make a big dent in GDP.

Perhaps for this reason, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the economists’ fourth-quarter real GDP predictions. When we last asked the panel for its forecast, it thought that GDP would be growing by 4.1 percent at the end of the year, a big improvement from the -28.2 percent quarter-over-quarter annualized growth it foresaw for the second quarter of 2020. This time around, the panel is calling for less negative growth (-25.5 percent) in the second quarter and a very similar fourth-quarter growth rate to last time (3.8 percent). But the range around that end-of-year forecast has gotten a lot wider — a sign of just how much things could go wrong. The gap between our consensus forecast’s 10th and 90th percentile predictions for fourth-quarter GDP growth was 10.9 percentage points in the last survey; now that gap is 12.8 percentage points, with almost all of the extra uncertainty coming in the form of downside risk. (The panel’s consensus 10th percentile GDP growth forecast has dropped from -2.0 percent to -3.5 percent.)

The economists weren’t especially optimistic about the trajectory of the unemployment rate over the course of 2020, either. The consensus prediction was that the unemployment rate in December would be 10.1 percent, which is only 1 percentage point lower than the rate in June — and is still comparable to the unemployment rate at the height of the Great Recession. Stephen Cecchetti, a professor of international finance at the Brandeis International Business School, pointed out that workers are increasingly likely to be losing their jobs permanently, rather than temporarily, which will make it harder for them to get back into the labor force. And he added that it will take time for the economy to adjust to a new reality where working from home is the norm, which could also keep the unemployment rate from falling quickly. Cecchetti was also among the economists who thought that in a worst-case scenario, the unemployment rate could skyrocket again by the end of the year.

“There are a lot of people who haven’t been exposed to the virus,” he said. “It’s not hard to imagine new outbreaks in places like New Jersey or Massachusetts that force us to shut down all over again.”

About half of the economists in the survey also thought the country’s top earners would end the year with an even greater share of the nation’s personal income. In order to get a sense of how much the panel thought the COVID-19 recession would increase income inequality, we asked about a new metric created by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which found that in 2016, households in the top 10 percent of incomes (adjusted for household size) accounted for 37.6 percent of the country’s personal income. Fifty percent of the respondents thought this number would be significantly higher by the end of 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, while 47 percent thought it would be about the same. Only one respondent thought it would be lower.

“My best guess is that this pandemic is going to worsen income inequalities,” said Sarah Zubairy, a professor of economics at Texas A&M University. She hypothesized that this was because job loss has been concentrated among lower-wage workers who can’t do their jobs remotely, and who may find themselves ricocheting in and out of the labor force if states have to abruptly pull back their reopening plans.

And in another sign that the U.S. has been knocked off course by the virus — and the subsequent leadership response — our survey panel overwhelmingly believes (with 90 percent agreement) that China will beat both America and the European Union on the road back to pre-crisis real GDP levels. In retrospect, according to Wright, this was kind of a “no-brainer” because China’s economic growth so far has been quite swift, and it has tools to enact sweeping fiscal stimulus that aren’t available to less centrally controlled economies like the U.S. or the E.U. But some of this might also be based on the Chinese government’s reputation for — how should we put this? — releasing overly favorable public data. “When all is said and done, if they don’t like the actual data they can fudge the numbers,” Wright said. “Put those three things together, and there’s almost no way they can’t be the first back.”

Wright also pointed to another ominous result in the survey: 19 percent of respondents thought that the 10-year average real U.S. GDP growth rate would be reduced by 1 to 2 percent per year. To be sure, the vast majority (77 percent) of economists thought the 10-year average growth rate would be reduced by less, although only one person thought it would go up. But the responses were still alarming, Wright said, because they indicated a serious degree of pessimism about the speed with which the economy will not just return to where it was at the end of 2019, but also catch up with where it would have been if the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t happened.

However, Allan Timmermann, professor of finance and economics at the University of California, San Diego — who has also been consulting with us on the survey — was encouraged that the majority of respondents didn’t expect more long-term damage to growth. “This is still a large impact in terms of its cumulative effect on the economy,” he wrote in an email. “But it does suggest that most respondents think the economy will bounce back in due course — as opposed to leading us to a ‘lost decade’ scenario (as we have seen in Japan) with growth slowing down by an even larger amount.”

Overall, though, the latest survey responses paint a picture of America’s still-precarious road back to economic health. So much depends on the course of COVID-19 itself and how much the virus forces local economies to shut down again to slow its spread. But a lot is also riding on important policy decisions around the virus, which are still being debated. “I think economists have been surprised so far by the pace of the rebound,” Wright said. “But that hasn’t made them less worried about the weeks or months ahead.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Neil Paine

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abigailnussbaum · 5 years

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The Boys - Good & Bad

Being an itemized list of the strengths and weaknesses of the first season Amazon’s superhero show The Boys, based on the comic run of the same name by Garth Ennis, which I haven’t read.

GOOD:

The show looks good. It’s not tremendously visually inventive on the level of, say, Legion or Doom Patrol, but it’s got a definite style, and not just in the action scenes. The stagings pop, the street scenes look crisp and interesting, the boardroom scenes take advantage of the set designers’ inventiveness. There’s the requisite loss of saturation once our two main characters lose their respective love interests, but it’s not color-graded out of existence, the way a lot of other shows trying to evoke masculine despondency do. A “gritty”, laddish superhero show conjures up certain expectations where visuals are concerned, and The Boys exceeds them at almost every turn.

There are actual episodes! With beginnings and endings and common themes! I had no idea streaming shows could still do that, but The Boys is really good at finding mini-stories within its overarching plot and structuring its episodes around them (which should be a basic implement in a TV writer’s toolkit and instead has all-but disappeared). Episode 2 is about the Boys realizing how screwed they are by having captured a nearly-unkillable superhero who has seen their faces, and trying to figure out a way to kill him. Episode 5 is structured around Annie and Hughie’s visit to a superhero-themed Christian revivalist festival. It gives the entire season a more engaging structure, and pulls you along with the story in a way that most streaming shows don’t even attempt.

There are some genuinely clever worldbuilding choices that emerge from the “what if superheroes, but awful” premise. The fact that superheroes star in their own movies, for example, or that their power competitions become major sporting events, is hilarious, and perfectly conveys the sense of moral bankruptcy that I think the show is going for. And the crossover the show posits between superhero worship and white Evangelicalism is an obvious and perfect fit, tying into the latter’s barely-concealed love of power and authoritarianism. Also, there are some inventive demonstrations of how combining superpowers, limited intelligence, and corporate greed can lead to horrifying results, some funny - The Deep trying to rescue a dolphin from captivity - and some genuinely gutting - the plane crash scene in episode 4 is the queasy highlight of the season, as the viewer realizes just a few seconds before the characters do just how badly they’ve screwed up, and how horrible their future choices are going to have to be.

The cast is uniformly excellent, and pretty much everyone gets a lot of different layers to play. The highlights are Elisabeth Shue, Erin Moriarty, Jessie T. Usher, and Tomer Capon (bit of hometown pride here, but it’s easy to see why he’s such a well-regarded young actor in Israel), but pretty much everyone is good and interesting to watch. Even Karl Urban, who gets the show’s most thankless task - he has to carry most of the story while playing its least nuanced character - manages to infuse some humor and complexity into Billy.

There are a lot of interesting, complex relationships, the top one being Homelander and Madeline Stillwell. As a character says near the end of the season, it’s a relationship that is “hard to quantify” - does he want to fuck her, or kill her, or be her child? Does she want to control him or does she genuinely get off on his desire for her? Other relationships are less fraught - Frenchie and Kimiko are incredibly sweet together - but still a lot of fun to watch.

The show seems to understand that at the root of almost every villain, and certainly privileged ones, is childishness. You see this in the way The Deep sinks into self-pity after experiencing the consequences of his sexual assault on Annie, or the way A-Train becomes obsessed with blaming Hughie for his girlfriend’s death, even though he’s the one who killed her. You see it most of all in Homelander’s resentment of Madeline’s baby and the attention she lavishes on it. It’s simply stunning how openly envious this grown man is of a months-old infant, and it makes every scene the two share almost unbearably tense, because you’re just waiting for Homelander to snap and kill the baby. Which ends up much more effectively conveying the point the show is trying to make than the sudden shock of him actually doing it would have - the fact that this character would clearly feel themselves justified in killing an infant, and is only holding back because he knows there’ll be a fuss, is the sum total of the show’s criticism of absolute power.

(This emphasis also justifies the show’s insistence that Hughie is redeemable, because though he starts out quite immature, he does grow, unlike the superpowered villains. He starts the season killing a super who hasn’t really done anything to him, just for the rush of it, and ends it saving the life of the super whose selfishness destroyed his world, because he’s actually realized that his are not the only problems that matter.)

Someone seems to have realized that having a female (Asian) character whose name is simply The Female is an absolutely terrible idea, and the show gives her a name as soon as possible. There’s also hints that she may be regaining the power of speech.

BAD:

The use of violence - and particularly sexual violence - against women ends up privileging men, even when those men are the perpetrators. Both Hughie and Billy are motivated by the loss of the women they loved, and in both cases the show plumps for the classic approach of single scene featuring the love interest being angelic, and doesn’t bother to shade either of them in or give them a personality or a chance to speak on their own behalf. And even when the victim is a main character, as when The Deep assaults Annie, the focus is much more on him than on her. Annie processes her trauma in a scene and a half, and it ends up being folded into her overall dilemma over how to be a superhero. Whereas the Deep spends the rest of the season coping with the consequences of his actions and folding them into his general lack of self-esteem. While there’s the germ of an important point there - just because this guy has problems of his own doesn’t justify his assault on another person or make him particularly tragic or compelling - the show’s insistence on going back to that well, even as the season approaches its climax, is simply baffling.

This feels, in fact, like a smaller component of the show’s broader problem with sexual ethics, the fact that it seems to have no way of distinguishing between sexual behavior is depraved, and sexual behavior that is just weird or maybe a bit kinky. Like, the fact that the Deep has consensual sex with dolphins is not worse than, or even equivalent to, the fact that he assaulted Annie. The fact that Homelander prematurely ejaculates when he and Madeline have sex isn’t a worse reflection on his character than the fact that he may have raped Billy’s wife. And yet those cases are treated as equivalent by the narrative. It ends up feeling profoundly anti-sex, rather than anti-sexual-violence, an impression that is only intensified when Annie and Hughie - the show’s sole “good”, loving couple - have sex that is completely vanilla (and despite Hughie’s earlier assurances that he isn’t intimidated by Annie’s strength, he still ends up being the dominant one in bed, and she even lets him be on top). It also prevents the show from any serious discussion of the one aspect of sexuality that is unique to its setting, the possibility of supers inadvertently hurting their human partners. The scene in which Popclaw crushes a man’s head between her thighs is the nadir of the season precisely because it’s played for laughs, for that “aren’t we outrageous” vibe that everyone told me the comic was suffused with. When actually you could do something interesting and character-based with it, if the show actually cared to.

(Having said all this, I do think that the show is a lot better on the subject of sexual violence than it could have been, and a lot better than the source material might have dictated. It feels significant that - with the exception of the aforementioned Popclaw scene - we never see any act of sexual assault on screen. We see Homelander and the Deep scoping out their victims, Rebecca Butcher and Annie, and maneuvering them into a position of vulnerability. And we see the aftermath of the assault for both victims. But we don’t see the act itself, in a series that is otherwise perfectly happy to depict consensual sex, even if it judges anything resembling kink. I also thought the handling of Queen Maeve, as a woman who has lived for years under a sustained campaign of sexual harassment, was extremely powerful - again, the focus is on how the abuse twists the victim up and makes them feel powerless and alone, not on any overt act of violence.)

I really don’t get why I’m meant to care about Billy Butcher. It’s not even that I don’t like him - I just find him completely uninteresting. He works as an engine of plot and a way to inject chaos into the other characters’ lives (the repeated device in which he authoritatively promises to solve the team’s problems, only for the show to cut away to him alone, wearing an expression that makes it clear that he has no idea what to do and is about to make everything worse, is pretty funny and effective). But as a character in his own right and with his own story, he just feels too one-note and monomaniacal for me to care about. I care what happens to MM and Frenchie and Kimiku and Annie and Maeve. I even care a little what happens to Hughie. I simply can’t bring myself to give a fuck about Billy.

I don’t see why I should be rooting for Hughie and Annie to make it work. It’s great that he feels she helped him rediscover his moral compass, but in the meantime he lied to her, used her, and concealed the fact that he had murdered one of her teammates from her. Annie has the right of it when she hears his confession and replies “the thing is, I don’t care”. It would be one thing if their reconciliation at the end of the season was more of an ethical one, a case of Annie choosing to rescue Hughie and the Boys because she knows they don’t deserve to die, not because she forgives him. But I got the impression that we were meant to read it as a romantic reconciliation too, which Hughie hasn’t even come close to earning.

If you must have interchangeable Middle Eastern terrorists as your go-to, killable background villains, doesn’t it seem obvious that there should be at least a few positive, named Middle Eastern characters in the foreground? (I suppose Frenchie might count? But given Capon’s heritage, he could just as easily be a Sepharadic Jew, which doesn’t really avoid the problem of Islamophobia that the show cheerfully blunders into.)

The plot kind of loses the thread towards the end of the season, partly, I suspect, because of the need to set up characters and plot points for season 2. It’s a particular shame because the plotting had been so strong in the first half of the season.

The sound mix is terrible. It should tell you something that I even noticed this and worked out the right term to use for it, because I’m usually completely illiterate on these matters. But after the millionth time you’ve had to raise the volume during a dialogue scene, then immediately lower it during an action scene, you start to wonder if there isn’t something wrong.

Overall, this is a much smarter, more interesting, and more entertaining show than discussions of the comic had led me to expect, but I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t benefitting from the fact that we’re so saturated with superhero stories right now. There’s less pressure to be the one subversive superhero story, which leaves The Boys room to be more character-focused, and to use superheroes as more of a metaphor for the corrupting influence of power and the evil of corporate overreach. Its supers feel a lot more like generic celebrities - A-Train is an anxiety-ridden athlete; Annie is a pageant kid; Maeve is an aging movie star whose career and soul have been blighted by ubiquitous sexual harassment. Characters who are genuinely set apart by their superpowers, like Homelander, are in the minority (and even in Homelander’s case it turns out his psychopathy has more to do with having been raised in a lab).

Basically it feels like the people who adapted the comic saved it by telling a story that is much more generic than the original, which may be entirely to the good. But I do wonder whether the second season won’t veer further into exactly those parts of the show that I find least interesting. The final scene seems to suggest much more of an emphasis on Billy’s manpain and his conflict with Homelander, and the introduction of superpowered terrorists threatens to move the show away from the criticism of power that made the first season work.

#the boys #this was a lot better than i was expecting #while still having enough flaws #that i can easily see it falling apart in season 2 #still #if you were holding off because of the comic's reputation #the show is a lot smarter and more nuanced

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bikethevote · 4 years

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Bike The Vote L.A. Endorsement - Nithya Raman for City Council District 4

2020 Los Angeles CD4 Endorsement: Nithya Raman

Primary Election: Saturday, February 22 – Tuesday, March 3, 2020 7am-8pm Find your Council District: http://neighborhoodinfo.lacity.org/ Find a voting center: http://lavote.net/locator

Earlier this year, Bike The Vote L.A. made an endorsement of an exceptional candidate, Sarah Kate Levy in the City Council District 4 race. Additional candidates have entered the race, and we are pleased to report that Bike The Vote L.A. has decided to make a second endorsement of another superb candidate, Nithya Raman. In making this dual endorsement, we recognize the incredible opportunity available to CD4 voters, in having a choice of not just one, but two inspirational leaders who understand transportation equity and are ready to take action on safe streets.

Nithya Raman is an inspiring grassroots candidate with a long track record of advocacy and community organizing centered around equity. She’s trained as an urban planner, and it shows in her systematic approach to solving problems, and her deep understanding of the root causes behind L.A.’s transportation challenges. To Raman, transportation is not just a matter of getting around: it’s a critical aspect of environmental action, a public safety crisis that is injuring and killing too many residents, and an issue of equity that limits opportunity and access for people with disabilities and low income Angelenos.

In her detailed and inspirational response to Bike The Vote L.A., Raman articulates one of the most progressive transportation platforms ever put forward by a Southern California candidate for elected office. Raman rightly recognizes that what L.A. currently lacks is political will, and makes clear that she’s ready to turn the tide. We are impressed with her determination to improve access, efficiency, and the overall experience of bus service; a critical aspect of an equitable transportation system. In noting the ways in which the City has failed to build out a safe bike network, Raman rightly points to the need to reconsider on-street parking, too often considered a third rail by elected officials.

In November, Raman released an exceptional and cohesive environmental platform, that smartly puts protected bus lanes, protected bike lanes, and pedestrian-friendly design at the center of action to address Los Angeles’ worsening air quality. Stressing the need for immediate action, she highlights L.A.’s ready-to-implement Mobility Plan 2035 and its already-adopted Vision Zero policy, both of which are in search of leadership to bring about results.

As Raman notes, it is not only leadership that is lacking, but also a commitment to building consensus. We are impressed with Raman’s track record of effective community education, outreach, and coalition building as the founder of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition. Bringing this level of community organizing to issues of transportation equity would be transformative for safe streets advocacy.

As Los Angeles dithers on Vision Zero, we need effective leadership that understands the complexity and intersectionality of issues we face. Nithya Raman is a truly inspirational and deeply knowledgeable leader with a plan to turn the tide on the structural issues that negatively impact the day-to-day lives of Angelenos. Bike The Vote L.A. is pleased to endorse Nithya Raman for Los Angeles City Council District 4.

(See below for Nithya Raman’s full candidate questionnaire response)

1. Los Angeles Metro is constructing and planning multiple transit lines through CD4, including the Purple Line extension, the East Valley Transit Corridor, the Sepulveda corridor line, and the northern extension of the Crenshaw Line. How do you plan to solve the first mile/last mile problem and connect riders to these lines?

As a lifelong user of transit, and as someone who took multiple trains to commute from my home in Silver Lake to my job in Santa Monica, the lack of first / last mile connectivity was something that I thought about every single day. And I had a lot of time to think about it! I was a supercommuter – 90+ minutes each way, with a challenging last mile back to my house.

Here are a few solutions to the first/last mile problem I would work to put in place.

I’d make it easier to get on the bus. For people of all abilities and incomes, the bus is the most effective mover of people we have in the City of Los Angeles. And while we have a good bus network, we’ve been losing ridership steadily for many years. There are many reasons for this, including the rise of rideshare and the decrease in lower income residents in the city who make up the majority of bus ridership. But there’s one major reason that is fairly straightforward to address: bus frequency! Buses should run at a maximum of 10-minute intervals, and faster on heavy-use corridors, especially during rush hour. To get people to their destination faster and to make taking the bus more appealing, I’d also fight to build shelters for every bus station in the city, expand all-door boarding across the entire bus fleet, and build out the city’s network of bus lanes – some tactical lanes that shift from one side of the street to another depending on which way rush-hour traffic moves, and some dedicated lanes on major boulevards

Make it easier for people to walk, cycle, and scoot to the stations. Metro has found over and over again in surveys that the majority of train users are not getting to the station in cars – they’re mostly walking, but also biking and scooting. There’s simply no way to increase ridership without increasing access for pedestrians and cyclists.

I’d take a number of approaches to make walking and bike trips safer and more pleasant depending on the station and its needs: repairing sidewalks, planting lots of trees, lowering traffic speeds around the station, installing bicycle facilities, improving crosswalks, and more. A network of protected bike lanes and widened sidewalks that lead to the stations must be a part of the solution, especially in those areas where they’ve already been prescribed by the Mobility Plan 2035.

Metro has laid out detailed guidelines for how to improve infrastructure to maximize accessibility to train stations in their First Mile Last Mile Strategic Plan, and I would ensure that all stations in the District implement those guidelines.

While we’re at it: make it easier to take the train! First and last mile problems are important to address, but part of the reason why taking transit continues to be difficult in Los Angeles is that the headways on the trains are too long, especially for transit users who are using multiple modes (which is more than half of train users!). If my bus or drop off to the train station was late, I had to wait 9 minutes for another train during rush hour – way too long for someone who had to be at the office by a particular time. Investing as much as we are in building out new train lines while making it more inconvenient for users of existing transit infrastructure seems incredibly counterproductive.

Political will: I strongly believe that the most important element of improving first / last mile access is not a technical one: it’s political will.

Voters in LA have shown over and over again that they overwhelmingly support improvements to public transit, most recently in passing Measure M in 2016 with more than 70% of people in support. It is because of this widespread voter support that CD4 is able to have these historic investments in new rail. Yet without addressing the issues of first/last mile access to our trains, we are not keeping the promises that Metro and City leaders made to Angelenos. And we will likely fail to meet our broader climate goals for the city, which involve a 39% decrease in our vehicle miles traveled by 2035.

Keeping those promises to voters will require real political courage from councilmembers. Changes in traffic management and reductions in road space for cars have elicited and will continue to elicit loud opposition from some residents. As a result of such vocal opposition, City Councilmembers have mostly used their power over City streets to impede the development of safe, friendly, and accessible routes to and from transit that will encourage people to use the non-car alternatives that we’re building. They have impeded or ignored plans that both Metro has put in place, such as the First Mile Last Mile Strategic Plan, and that the City of Los Angeles has put in place, such as the 2010 Bicycle Plan, the Mobility Plan 2035, and Vision Zero.

We have all of the technical expertise and evidence we need to create an interconnected system of transit that works for users, and that offers safe first / last mile connectivity, much of it codified into the plans listed above. As councilmember, I will wholeheartedly support the planning work that Metro has done and make sure that the City follows through on its own plans.

2. News outlets are reporting that 242 Angelenos were killed in car crashes in 2018, showing that L.A. has failed to make significant progress towards Vision Zero since adopting the policy in 2015. Why do LA’s streets remain so deadly by design? What would you do to make them safer?

Higher speeds lead to greater numbers of deaths in car crashes. This is especially true for pedestrians, whose chances of significant injury or death rise drastically when cars are traveling at speeds higher than 20 mph.

The reason LA’s streets are so deadly is a bleak and simple one: our city’s leaders have chosen the preferences of car drivers over the safety of everyone else. Just last week, a councilmember said outright that if they slowed down car traffic to make the streets safer for other modes, voters would “have our heads on a rail.” As a result, we are facing a reality where Angelenos, primarily residents of color, put their bodies at serious risk every day just trying to cross the street. And instead of working to slow down traffic, the city has increased speed limits all over the city.

However, we do know how to solve these problems. We know where the dangerous streets are. And we know how to design roads to discourage speeding and other forms of unsafe driving. There are a number of evidence-backed methods at our disposal, including protected bike lanes, raised medians, bulb-outs, and daylighting intersections, just to name a few.

As councilmember, I’d move to get safety improvements on every High Injury Network street in my district, and fight to get similar infrastructure in place across the city. I also would not support changes in other parts of the city that will decrease the safety of pedestrians and cyclists.

3. Los Angeles’ traffic woes are compounded by the reality that many parents and students don’t feel safe allowing their children to walk or bike to school. Why do you think this is? What would you do as councilmember to improve active transportation options around schools?

This past April, two sisters were hit by a big rig on their way to school as they tried to cross Exposition Boulevard. Both died from their injuries. The driver never even saw them. Five months later, not a single change to the street’s design has even been proposed.

Parents don’t feel safe letting their children walk to school because in most of Los Angeles, they aren’t safe. Motor vehicle crashes are the number one single cause of death of children and adolescents, and our leaders haven’t taken adequate action to protect our youngest, most vulnerable residents from the greatest threat to their lives. It is something I think about so much as the mother of twin preschoolers who walk and use scooters and balance bikes around my neighborhood.

Improving active transportation options around schools and increasing safety will involve investments in street design, and this is something I am committed to doing. These changes will include many of the design interventions described above in the previous two answers.

An important element of executing these improvements is winning community support in advance of implementing changes. Through my work as a founder of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition and as co-chair of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Homelessness Committee, I was able to work with neighborhood councils throughout the region to win their support for much needed local resources for unhoused residents in the area. To obtain this support, SELAH members worked closely with Homelessness Committees and with the wider Councils to educate them on the needs and benefits of such services, and asked them to submit letters and statements in support of such services to the City. We also designed SELAH to bring in as many volunteers as possible. Through SELAH’s outreach, shower, and hot meal programs, hundreds of local residents have been able to volunteer to provide direct services for their unhoused neighbors. Through volunteering and getting educated, they have changed their perceptions of homelessness and many of them have become vocal advocates for more resources.

Similar methods, such as reaching out to Moms Clubs, PTAs, Education Committees on Neighborhood Councils, and other local stakeholders, will be essential in winning the public’s support for slowing traffic and other safety improvements around schools. As someone who has spent much of their career in building coalitions to support change, this is the kind of community outreach that I will prioritize as a Councilmember.

4. Neighborhood councils in CD4, including Silver Lake, Mid City West, and Los Feliz, have all shown strong support for a more bikeable CD4. Despite this, the few bike lanes in CD4 are discontinuous and dump riders out into dangerous thoroughfares. What do you see as the impediments to building out the adopted Mobility Plan 2035’s network of bike infrastructure? Which of the connections in CD4 do you see as a priority and will you push for as councilmember?

The Mobility Plan 2035 is an incredibly powerful weapon we have as a city to improve our air quality and combat climate change. If the City made all of the plan’s recommendations, we would easily meet the goals set by Mayor Garcetti in his Green New Deal to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 2035.

The biggest impediment to building out the network, in my view, is our city’s reluctance to part with on-street parking on major boulevards. There are simply better uses for the space, and no excuses not to have bike lanes on Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevard. There isn’t a recommendation in the Plan that I wouldn’t fight for, though.

5. Please respond to the following questions regarding specific CD4 corridors with known safety issues:

5A. Bike lanes on Rowena Ave. and Silver Lake Blvd. both terminate at Glendale Blvd., leaving a dangerous gap between these lanes and the L.A. River Path. Despite L.A.’s future plans for revitalization of the Los Angeles River, there are no bike lanes that access the entire segment of the L.A. River Path between Elysian Valley and Glendale. What will you do as councilmember to actively push for bike lanes on Glendale Blvd. and Fletcher Dr. to provide families with safe access by bike to the L.A. River Path?

One of the biggest issues with how our bicycle infrastructure has been built in Los Angeles is its lack of interconnectivity.

The lack of bike lanes on Glendale and Fletcher has rendered the Rowena Road Diet much less effective than it could be at getting people out of their cars and onto bikes. There’s no reason not to extend the same design that has made Rowena safer onto those streets. The welcome revitalization of the river makes these fixes all the more necessary.

And we shouldn’t stop just at the small section of Glendale Boulevard between Rowena and Fletcher — while it’s mostly not in my district, the portion of Glendale that runs south to Sunset and beyond is one of the most inhospitable to pedestrians and cyclists in the city, and must be addressed.

5B. Despite unanimous support from the Mid City West Community Council for a road diet on 6th Street to provide an important connection to LACMA and to West Hollywood, and in response to 3 fatalities on the street over 5 years, the office of Council District 4 opted instead for a modest plan that added left turn pockets at one intersection. Will you implement the LADOT-recommended road diet?

Yes. As Mid City expands into a major tourism and transit hub, we have to use every strategy available to prioritize alternative transit modes and street safety.

5C. Hyperion Ave. was recently the site of a horrific crash that took the life of local grandmother, Cristina Garcia. Citing the unsafe conditions of Hyperion, the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council has repeatedly called for safety improvements to this street, which LADOT has determined is part of the High Injury Network. Speed is the predominant factor in determining whether a crash is deadly. Would you support a road diet reconfiguration of Hyperion Ave. to reduce speeding and improve the safety of pedestrians, people on bikes, and turning drivers?

Absolutely. I also believe bike lanes could replace on-street parking on Hyperion between Griffith Park Boulevard and Rowena, creating a continuous network of lanes from Sunset to Glendale Boulevard. And while it’s not in my district, I’d support extending safety measures onto Fountain Ave. by King Middle School — it’s inexcusable to put hundreds of children next to such a dangerous street.

6. Over the past year, we have seen increased use of privately owned and shared mobility electric scooters throughout Los Angeles. What role do you see for this emerging transportation technology, and how can the City of Los Angeles act to ensure safe mobility for all road users during a time when many Angelenos are making shifts in their mobility choices?

Scooters are a flashpoint in LA, but I think that they are an exciting addition to our transit options, particularly as a solution to the aforementioned last-mile problem. Even if the current wave of venture-backed scooter companies close up shop, individuals will continue to use scooters, along with e-bikes and regular bicycles.

Unfortunately, like many things in Los Angeles, our lack of good management of scooters and scooter companies has led to conflicts between them and other users of the streets.

Emerging data suggests that scooter users are mostly a danger to themselves: the vast majority of scooter-related injuries are from people falling off their scooters , with almost no injuries resulting from collisions with pedestrians. But pedestrians on sidewalks have felt unsafe with scooters sharing that space. However, scooter users ride on the sidewalks because they feel unsafe on roads! We must make it easier and safer for people to use non-automobile modes of transit. That means implementing more protected bike lanes and all of the other street design solutions at our disposal.

#bikethevote #CD4

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understandingsexwork-blog · 5 years

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Understanding Sex Work and Applying an Intersectional Lens to Provide Resources to Grand Rapids Sex Workers

By Lauren Monahan, Kayla Kaminski, Marissa DeGonia, and Larenz Rivero

Sex work can be defined as a commercial exchange of a sexual service for money or other benefits such as housing, transportation, drugs, or more. This term is used to describe a wide range of transactions, and does not mean that all sex workers are one homogenous group. Some types of sex workers are escorts, exotic dancers, dominatrices, phone sex operators, sensual massage professionals, actors in adult films, or other professions that involve the trade of sex or erotic performances (Avenatti). Most frequently, the definition of sex work is limited to work that explicitly either involves sex or sexual gestures. This neglects the emotional work that takes place in the sex work industry and provides a limited scope to the needs and experiences of sex workers.

The language we use when speaking about sex work is important. The way we talk about sex work is not neutral as it influences the way people think about sex work and the way policy is created (Stella 2013). The language used to describe sex work and sex workers varies depending upon the type of sex work, the region, and the historical context. The language we use explains the differences in the histories of different kinds of sex workers, and the language used is often times framed in a very stereotypical and simplistic way. This erases the complexity of the lived realities of sex workers, whether they be good or bad (Stella 2013). Because the words that sex workers use to describe their experiences and their identities can be used to discredit them and enact violence, the words they themselves use may differ depending on who they are communicating with. While within their respective communities they may respect everyone’s choice of language to identify themselves, they may not use the same language when talking to people outside of that community. In this light, it is important to remember that language is culturally and linguistically specific and means different things depending on its translation and cultural context. The difference in language used is complicated and has many layers, but when an intersectional lens is employed we can begin to see how word choice intersects with intention and meaning.

For example, when speaking about consensual and forced sex work, there is a tendency to rush towards distinguishing between the two terms. It may be easy to draw a strict line in saying that consensual sex work is done by choice and forced sex work is not work, but rather abuse or assault. While it is important to acknowledge the difference between the two, there can be unintended consequences of doing so. By having a public opinion that sees sex work within this binary, the perspective that some sex workers should be blamed and criminalized while others should be victimized and saved becomes prominent. This can lead to a black-and-white public thought around the issue that can silence the voices of actual sex workers within the profession. Another unintended consequence is that it obscures the difference between good and bad working conditions (Stella 2013). Although workers may consent to the act, they may not consent to the working conditions they experience. A person may consent to a certain act but feel forced to do so in an area or setting by outside forces. This is why it is important that sex work is looked at through an evidence based, human rights advocacy lens. If we start raising the voices of sex workers over those that seek to simply criminalize or victimize them, we can start to move towards improving the conditions that all sex workers operate within so that each worker has the opportunity to decide what, where, and how they should perform in their profession.

Another complicated and racialized aspect of language present in sex work discourse is that around the word ‘pimp’. This word indicates a gendered, racialized, and classist image of who third party managers are in the industry (Stella 2013). This erases the diversity present amongst third party roles and creates a damaging narrative against poor men of color. By using the word ‘pimp,’ porn directors and producers, massage parlor managers, and escort service managers--as well as their potentially empowering or exploitative techniques are ignored.

Sex Work and LGBTQ Experiences

In an interview with the three New York City based activists Amber Hollibaugh, Ignacio Rivera, and Felix Gardon, sex work in relation to queer politics is explained. Sex work has always had a place amongst queer and trans communities. It has been both a source of income and livelihood as well as an issue that has shaped “the space between social and political margins and the centralities of queer and trans communities” (Shah 2012) It is impossible to speak about sex work without acknowledging its deep interweaving history with trans and queer communities, as well as how it intersects with race. The intersection between the marginalized identities of queer and trans people with the marginalization of sex workers cannot be ignored. It is the social factors around sex work, HIV transmission, poverty, and incarceration that connect to form a more complete picture of how sex work is neither victimless nor fully suppressive.

Sex work for many is seen as a problem, with sex workers being the victims. Amber Hollibaugh explain how the relationship between victimization and self empowerment through sex work is complicated. For Amber and many sex workers she knew, sex work was a privilege compared to the other options available. There were many reasons as to why people consensually choose to engage in sex work. People choose to do sex work during times of unemployment, as a way to do community organizing, or because their marginalized identities left them with few other choices.. For others, like activist and sex worker Ignacio Rivera, sex work was a way out of poverty while also being an avenue to pursue activism they felt other lesbian and gay organizations were ignoring. Others became sex workers to pay for school. Regardless of the reason, there are many workers who engage in sex work while also holding legal jobs to support their financial needs.

Historically, the lens that non-normative sex has been perceived through has conflated LGBTQ identities and sex work. To the police in New York, during the 1960’s-1980’s, being visibly LGBTQ was indicative of being a sex worker and LGBTQ people were incarcerated at high rates. At the time, people could be arrested for prostitution for merely carrying a condom on them. Hallibaugh reports that about half of the sex workers she worked with in New York City were “endlessly incarcerated” (Shah 2012). By understanding the way that LGBTQ narratives are intertwined with the negative narratives of sex work, we can better see that sex work is not inherently problematic, just as LGBTQ identities are not. Rather, society’s notion of normative sex and bodies creates problematic situations for sex workers.

The successful attempt to marginalize and stratify sex work is a function of a greater cause to regulate bodies. Bodies “have been regulated by the state, starting with slavery and forced sterilizations, to the scare tactics around HIV and STDs and sex work” (Shah 2012). This is all to dictate the way that people should use their bodies, and when those people do not use their bodies in that way they are ostracized, marginalized, and discriminated against. This leads to violence against sex workers and marginalized groups that is validated by the underlying ideologies set forth by the state. By looking at the ways that bodies have been controlled throughout history, we can see that bodies are and have been controlled by race and sexuality, where black people are the most controlled and sex outside reproduction being considered immoral or vagrant. This, allows us to see the multiple societal forces that stigmatize sex work.

In order to create safer environments and long lasting ideologies that destigmatize sex workers, sexual liberation must be considered. By seeing sex work as a path to sexual liberation, we get closer to seeing sex work as legitimate work. It is important to validate this profession because it leads to more open discussions that focus on harm reduction and prevention for the sex work industry. By removing the negative stigma from sex work and legitimizing it as a form of work, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups who have been ostracized from other forms of normative work because of their identities have a legitimate avenue to make their living and to create community.

Overall, this change to destigmatizing and decriminalizing sex work allows individuals to express their own bodily autonomy, reduces the power of the state in regulating bodies, and works towards expanding the narrow category of what normative bodies must be and how they must act. The activists interviewed assert that we need to see race, class, gender, and sexuality as intersecting and to see the way that power constitutes them.

Decriminalization vs. Legalization of Sex Work

There has been debate over whether decriminalization is better than legalization of sex work. Distinguishing the difference is vital in terms of legislation regarding sex work. Although both legalization and decriminalization sound appealing for the rights of sex workers, the former carries with it many unintended consequences.

University of Rhode Island professor Donna Hughes explains the two terms as follows: “Legalization would mean the regulation of prostitution with laws regarding where, when, and how prostitution could take place. Decriminalization eliminates all laws and prohibits the state and law-enforcement officials from intervening in any prostitution-related activities or transactions, unless other laws apply.” Even though legalizing prostitution is often seen as a tolerant, practical solution, the legalized model “disproportionately excludes sex workers who are already marginalized, like people who use drugs or who are undocumented”, Smith argues. One key fact to remember is that those who resort to sex work as an occupation are often doing so as means of support for their children and/or living expenses. Research has shown that criminalizing the acts of sex workers “creates conditions of impunity and enhances sex workers’ vulnerabilities to violence and exploitation, including trafficking.” Therefore, those that make a living doing sex work in a society that criminalizes it are forced to work in more vulnerable situations, increasing the risk of abuse, violence, and sex trafficking. Another reason sex workers may not prefer legalization is that it provides a new system for controlling bodies, which is exactly the opposite of what sex workers want from legalization (Lutnick 2009). The process it takes to legally work in the sex industry is extensive and requires getting permits and subjecting oneself to medical exams. By placing standards of who can do sex work under a legalized system, bodies are controlled and deemed acceptable or not for sex work.

Failing to comply with the legal rules of sex work would make a sex worker a criminal. The consequences of having sexual crimes on one’s record range far and wide, further marginalizing sex workers. Having a charge for prostitution, for example, can affect housing, employment, and the opportunity to receive social benefits. This further limits the chances of getting out of the sex work industry if one wishes to do so.

Many sex workers have opted for decriminalization instead of legalization (Lutnick 2009). It provides freedom, safety, and support while allowing people control over their own bodies. Decriminalization would essentially make sex work operate as any other business would. This would enable workers to seek out legal help and support to deal with exploitive and unsafe working conditions. It also allows sex workers to be able to employ the police for their protection, which would reduce the amount of immobility experienced by sex workers who may be trapped in bad situations. By decriminalizing sex work, the process of de-stigmatizing sex work is furthered and open negotiations create consent and safer conditions.

An article in the AMA Journal of Ethics by Erin Albright and Kate D'Adamo argues four reasons to oppose criminalizing sex work:

increased violence

erosion of trust

increased vulnerability

stigma

When sex workers are pushed into more vulnerable communities, not only does their risk of violence increase but they are more prone to never report that violence. Fear of judgment, discrimination, and a lower quality of service erodes trust between healthcare professionals and sex workers. As previously mentioned, having a record with prostitution increases one’s vulnerability in terms of limited employment opportunities, housing options, and chance to receive any social benefits. Lastly, criminalization fuels stigma. “Research supports the fact that sex workers are some of the most marginalized people in the world,” says Albright and D’Adamo. “Too often, sex workers are spoken for instead of given a platform for speaking themselves, and a result is a lack of recognition and enforcement of their basic human rights.”

Criminalizing sex work ultimately creates the cycle of the discrimination and marginalization of sex workers. Decriminalizing sex work would counter the stigma against sex work and be a large step into reducing the harm and violence sex workers often encounter.

Sex Work in Michigan

A study was conducted in 2004 by the State of Michigan called “HIV/AIDS and Health Related Needs Among Commercial Sex Workers in Michigan” in search of statistics and research from commercial sex workers on their health related needs, expectations and resources for sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS. 59 subjects participated from Benton Harbor, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Flint, and Ypsilanti which were given structured self-reported interviews on their experience for exchanging sex for drugs and money (Lapinski-LaFaive 2004). Data from the study showed that the majority of participants were from Detroit and that their number one fear of contributing to sex work was contracting HIV/AIDS despite 90% of the participants reporting that they had been tested for HIV/AIDS in the past.

Data from the study showed:

Detroit had the highest percentage of interviews conducted.

22% of the participants expressed their main concern was contracting HIV/AIDS.

13.6% responded to getting killed or injured was their primary concern.

66% of participants reported to having only one primary partner.

One of Michigan’s recommendations is to implement prevention interventions to encourage risk reduction strategies. There is limited research done on the Grand Rapids area in specific, but the Nokomis Foundation, an organization which provides help to women and girls involved in street prostitution, states that from the information known, there is estimated to be hundreds of people involved in prostitution in the city. However, there is limited awareness, knowledge, and understanding about those involved. An article by The Nokomis Foundation focused on the sex work and prostitution rates within Grand Rapids and stated that within Grand Rapids, the crack/cocaine influx was proportional to the prostitution rates in the areas of Fulton and 28th Street. Popular areas of the city of Grand Rapids are known to be Fulton, 28th Street, Division Ave, Grandville Ave, and Madison Ave. The article references that women often partake in prostitution in Grand Rapids because of the winter weather. Some people offer their sexual services in exchange for someone taking them home at night to avoid the dangerously cold temperatures. Research on sex work and resources for sex workers within the Grand Rapids community is lacking and more research needs to be focused on this portion of Michigan’s population.

Resources

Importance of Access to Resources

Due to criminalization of sex work within the United States, sex workers are often left without access to the same resources that other members of their community can access. Criminalization escalates risks and vulnerabilities of sex workers and often prevents them from receiving reliable sexual information, harm reduction services, medical services, legal help, and mental health services. Below, we aim to give resources to Grand Valley students, Grand Rapid residents, and local service providers to better help the community who participate in the sex work industry.

Education for Local Service Providers

In order to have accessible resources within our community, we must push service providers to be sex work competent. We can do this by providing them information on what sex work is, important terminology, information on how criminalization adversely affects sex workers’ health, the needs and risk for people in the sex work industry, and how to effectively communicate with sex workers in our communities.

Cassandra Avenatti, an executive board member of Sex Workers Outreach Project-Chicago (SWOP), created an online training presentation titled “Understanding Sex Work & Supporting Individuals Involved in the Sex Trade” (Avenatti). This training includes an introductory lesson on the sex work industry and the criminalization of sex work, as well as guidelines that service providers should utilize when working with sex workers.

“Understanding Sex Work & Supporting Individuals Involved in the Sex Trade”

The National Healthcare for the Homeless Council also provides some competency training on sex work and some of its intersections with other social issues. These trainings come in many different formats, but some of interest for Grand Rapids businesses are the remote webinars and online courses.

Training from the National Healthcare for the Homeless Council

Resources for Sex Workers in the Grand Rapids Area

Harm Reduction Services

Harm reduction services focus on reducing the harm caused by drug usage or other practices that can be detrimental to people’s health. The Grand Rapid’s sex worker community may find the following services useful in providing sexual healthcare and education, reducing STD/HIV transmission, reducing opioid overdoses, LGBTQ-specific healthcare needs, and more.

The Red Project is a 501c3 non-profit organization that aims to reduce risk, provide healthcare related services, and prevent HIV transmission. A list of their many services offered can be found at redproject.org/services/, and a few are outlined below. All services are offered for free and anonymously.

Rapid HIV and Hepatitis C testing from five walk-in locations in Grand Rapids. Locations and times found by calling the number below or located on their website. Website Phone: (616) 456-9063

Needle exchange, sexual health products, and personal hygiene products. Locations and times can be located on their website. Website

Opioid overdose reversal training and Nalaxone/Narcan dispersal. Locations and times can be located on their website. Website

Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) assistance and early intervention programs. Assistance can be found by calling the number below and asking for Nathan Bentley, the Red Project’s Early Intervention Specialist and PrEP Coordinator. Website Phone: (616) 456-9063

San Francisco Sex Information provides free and non-judgemental information on sex practices and sexual health by phone or email. They also provide information via their website. Website Phone: (415) 989-7374 Email: [email protected] Planned Parenthood is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that provides healthcare for millions of people worldwide for free or reduced cost.

The Grand Rapid’s Planned Parenthood branch provides general healthcare, birth control, pregnancy testing, sexual education, abortion services, HIV services, STD testing and vaccines, LGBTQ-specific services such as hormone therapy, and more. A full list of services and how to access them can be found at their website. Website

Planned Parenthood provides an online chat or text messaging service that connect you with educators that can give answers to sexual education, birth control, pregnancy, abortion, and STD questions. Text Messaging Number: Text “PPNOW” to 774636

Sex Worker Allied Mental Health Services

Some mental healthcare providers identify themselves as sex worker allied. Below are a few that are providing services to Grand Rapids or surrounding areas that identified online as being sex worker allied.

Brenda Benjamin, Licensed Professional Counselor Located: Grandville, Michigan Phone: (616) 952-2525

Sharon Depcinski, Clinical Social Work/Therapist Located: Grand Rapids, Michigan Phone: (616) 236-2992

Victoria Fisher, Clinical Social Work/Therapist Located: Grand Rapids, Michigan Phone: (616) 710-4378

Transitional Housing & Residential Assistance

Some sex workers may choose at some point to leave the industry. Regardless of the reason, leaving the industry can be a difficult and vulnerable time. Some organizations aim to help make that transition easier by offering discreet counseling, a supportive community, and residential assistance. One such organization is Eve’s Angels, a faith-based nonprofit led by former sex workers that offers counseling, transitional housing, reintegration programs, and a supportive and understanding community.

To contact Eve’s Angels in Grand Rapids, go to their website or write to them at PO Box 150923 Grand Rapids, MI 49515 USA.

Human Trafficking Assistance

While sex work is not synonymous with sex trafficking or human trafficking, some members of the sex work industry can be at a higher risk of being human trafficked. The National Human Trafficking Hotline provides a way to report human trafficking or get safely out of human trafficking.

National Human Trafficking Resource Center Website SMS: 233733 (Text “HELP” or “INFO”) Hotline: 1 (888) 373-7888 (24 hours, 7 days a week) Languages: English, Spanish and 200 more languages

Michigan Laws Regarding Prostitution and Local Legal Assistance

Knowing Michigan law is important for sex workers who have to navigate within its constraints. Though prostitution is only one kind of sex work, it tends to be the one that is criminalized most often within states. The act of prostitution and soliciting prostitution are considered misdemeanors under Michigan laws, while pimping/pandering is considered a felony.

If you are stopped by law enforcement officers for prostitution or suspected prostitution, SWOP-MI recommends staying calm and polite with the officer, remain silent if possible, refuse consent to be searched, try to remember all details of the encounter, and ask for an attorney. It is also recommended to not attempt to run away from, resist, or lie to the officer (“What To Do”).

Michigan laws of interest for sex workers that trade sex include:

750.448-750.462 of the Michigan Penal Code, (“Michigan Penal Code,” 2009) which deals with the laws regarding prostitution.

750.451a of the Michigan Penal Code (2009), which states that prostitution laws in Michigan do not pertain to officers while they are performing their duties. While its purpose is to allow officers to go undercover without being found out, it allows room for potential abuse in that law enforcement officers can coerce vulnerable individuals into performing act of prostitution.

There are various criminal defense lawyers that serve the Grand Rapids population and specialize in prostitution or sexual crimes, including those outlined below.

The Criminal Defense Law Center West Michigan Website Phone: (616) 438-6719

The Bar One Defense Firm Website Phone: (248) 826-2565

References

Albright, E., & D'Adamo, K. (2017, January 01). Decreasing Human Trafficking through Sex Work Decriminalization. Retrieved February 24, 2019, from https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/decreasing-human-trafficking-through-sex-work-decriminalization/2017-01

Avenatti, C. (n.d.). Understanding Sex Work & Supporting Individuals Involved in the Sex Trade.

Retrieved from https://www.nhchc.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/cultural-competence-w-persons-involved-with-the-sex-trade_avenatti1.pdf.

Bruckert, C., Caouette, A., Clamen, J., Gillies, K. Kiselbach, S., Laliberte, E.,... Symons, E.

(2013, April). Language Matters: Talking About Sex Work. Retrieved from https://www.nswp.org/sites/nswp.org/files/StellaInfoSheetLanguageMatters.pdf.

Chapter 750. Michigan Penal Code. (2009, February). [PDF Document]. Retrieved from

http://legislature.mi.gov/documents/mcl/pdf/mcl-chap750.pdf.

Clune, D., & Hosey, J. (n.d.). How We Can Do Better: Helping Prostituted Women and Girls in Grand Rapids Make Healthy Choices. Retrieved from

http://www.nokomisfoundation.org/documents/WeCanDoBetter.pdf.

Eve’s Angels Inc. NFP. (n.d.) In Guidestar. Retrieved from

https://www.guidestar.org/profile/26-3823877.

Lapinski-LaFaive, M. K., & Simpson, H. L. (2004). HIV/AIDS and Health Related Needs

Among Commercial Sex Workers in Michigan. Retrieved from https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdch/HIV_Needs_Commercial_Sex_Workers_2004_389436_7.pdf.

Lutnick, A., & Cohan, D. (2009). Criminalization, legalization or decriminalization of sex work: What female sex workers say in San Francisco, USA. Reproductive Health Matters, 17(34), 38-46. doi:10.1016/s0968-8080(09)34469-9.

National Human Trafficking Hotline. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://humantraffickinghotline.org/.

Paglia, A. (2017, November 16). Sex Trafficking vs. Sex Work: What You Need to Know

Human Trafficking Search. Retrieved from http://humantraffickingsearch.org/2017725sex-trafficking-vs-sex-work-what-you-need-to-know/.

San Francisco Sex Information. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://sfsi.org/.

Services. (n.d.) In The Red Project. Retrieved from http://redproject.org/services/.

Shah, S.P. (2012). Sex Work and Queer Politics in Three Acts. The Scholarly & Feminist Online, 10.1-10.2. Retrieved from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/a-new-queer-agenda/sex-work-and-queer-politics-in-three-acts.

Training and Technical Assistance. (n.d.) In National Health Care for the Homeless Council. Retrieved from https://www.nhchc.org/training-technical-assistance/.

What To Do If You Are Stopped By Law Enforcement. (n.d.) Retrieved from

http://www.swop-mi.org/swop.law.htm.

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alex-alford-film · 5 years

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WATCH ME - Film Three

For my third film, I wanted to go off campus and use a real actor. Luckily enough, I had some friends who were willing to let me use their house and a friend who lives in LA and is an actual actress. That made my job of getting off campus much, much easier. The real challenge of this film boiled down to the shoot itself, which was very complex and had to be done in very little time.

My entire shotlist was 43 shots. We had 4 hours to get all of these shots. We only combined two or three of them and cut none of them. I knew this wouldn’t be possible unless I had a great first AD by my side, and that’s where my friend Jeremy Owens came in. Jeremy kept the whole crew on track and allowed to finish the shoot on time. Speaking of crew, this was the largest crew I have had work on my film so far this semester. I had a first AD, a first AC, a gaffer, a production designer, and a grip. Although more people on set meant that there were many more moving parts, I felt like it was a great experience for me to be in charge of that many people and at the end of the day, the shoot went faster once we got into a good rhythm.

After the shoot came editing, which was definitely the most intense it has been for me this semester. This film involved doing a lot of foley work as we shot this in a house where people actually live - with it being a 200, I told them I would be doing the sound in post and that they could go about their normal business. While this was good for them, it meant that I had to spend a lot of time in post with footsteps, doorknob noises, tape handling noise, clothing rustles, and more. However, the timing of the piece is what really drove me crazy.

This movie is a sort of pseudo-horror movie, and any good horror movie relies on timing combined with an atmosphere that really makes for a spooky piece. That meant that it was absolutely vital that my film had a good score to accompany it. Upon screening the rough cut, the consensus what more or less what I expected - the edit felt too “loose.” And I agree with those comments: without the score, this film really drags. However, I worked with a great composer at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and Composition and she really cranked out an awesome score - it’s just cheesy enough to be fun, but just spooky enough to be taken seriously.

That being said, there were a lot of things that I learned about working with a composer - especially on such a short timeline. Because the film had to be picture locked before they could begin composing, I, unfortunately, had to lock the film before getting class feedback. Everything I changed from the rough to the final cut all has to do with sound and color. It was here that I had to make a choice: which was more important to me? An added shot or two, or shaving a few seconds off of one shot in favor of the other? Or a score that occupies the entire movie, highlights many key moments, and is basically essential to the impact of the film? I hope it is obvious and apparent that I chose the latter.

The last struggle I had with this film was timing. I know that I went over the time limit of five minutes for this film. However, I don’t see that as a problem. The documentary I made was supposed to be at least three minutes long and mine came in at a little over two with credits. The film was shot in such a way that everything edits together perfectly - it is essentially one long scene - and so shaving any additional minutes off would make it feel incredibly awkward. Had I known it would have run long in the final edit, I would have made changes to the story. However, when a film is all action and no dialogue, it can be hard to estimate a concrete runtime based on the screenplay alone.

Overall, I think this film was a great success. I love the atmosphere, the cinematography, and the score. I think it’s a lot of fun and turned out more or less how I wanted it to. I got off campus, got some real actors, and had a lot of fun doing it. I gained a lot of experience especially in the areas of sound design - whether it’s doing my own or working with a composer. I’m proud to have this film added to my portfolio.

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homestuckhiveswap · 6 years

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The Third Anniversary of RPGStuck: a community examination

by /u/DrewLinky, previous article here.

Hello again everyone! Today's a very special day: it's the third anniversary of RPGStuck, a burgeoning community dedicated to roleplay and tabletop gaming, as its name suggests. For the occasion I decided to write another article. Enjoy!

INTRODUCTION

Anyone who has more than a cursory familiarity with Homestuck is probably also aware that it has spawned innumerable fanworks in a truly stunning variety of mediums; the community’s works of art in a litany of styles are unending, and the music community is burgeoning to this day. It seems as if there is no end to the ways that people will take inspiration from the webcomic and craft their own way of celebrating it.

One of the more unique and interesting ways in which this has been done may be found in a community that is now called RPGStuck. For those that may be unfamiliar: RPG is an acronym for “role-playing game”, a genre of games where, as the name implies, players take on the role of fictional characters. This may be done in numerous ways, but one of the more classic forms of RPGs come in the form of tabletop games, such as Dungeons and Dragons.

Indeed, RPGStuck is based around just such an idea. They have taken core concepts of Homestuck and transmuted it such that it is viable as a tabletop game. I recently got in contact with members of the RPGStuck community who helped develop and guide the project over its lifetime: user 12yz12ab has even written an entire document dedicated to its history, which may be found here.

Those interested in the full and in-depth details will want to look at the related document; otherwise I’ve decided to describe their history in a way that is more accessible to people who may not be familiar with Homestuck or tabletop gaming in general, or are simply looking for a less involved read. As it is, the story of RPGStuck begins three years ago today, on the 14th of March in 2015.

RPGStuck’s community logo, designed by /u/12yz12ab.

BEGINNINGS

Homestuck itself was in the midst of yet another pause, with the fandom in general waiting for the next batch of updates. People were growing restless, which was typical for pauses at that point. With more conventional means of entertaining themselves beginning to grow stale, one user named AnionCation made a post on the Homestuck subreddit on the 9th of March, 2015 to see if anyone would be interested in a roleplaying game based around Homestuck.

The response was great, perhaps even greater than expected: 72 replies to the thread were made, and soon after people began discussing how this should be organized. As with any ambitious project there were responses geared towards the decidedly negative: doubts were cast as to the viability of this project, especially over the ability of people in charge to govern such an unwieldy project. Important to understand is that RPGs typically have an upper limit of players that can be sustained before it begins to suffer problems, and the number of people interested was more than any campaign can reasonably handle.

AnionCation continued unwaveringly, however, and she outlined a system in which the entire story, or “campaign”, would have different sections played by different groups of people, or “sessions”. This idea and the latter term are both in keeping with a storytelling convention in Homestuck itself and served as a rather clever way to handle the disproportionately large numbers of people that wanted to engage in the campaign.

Some days of discussion trying to tweak this overall system were had, and people attempted to fill in knowledge gaps in others who were at that point unfamiliar with the overall idea of roleplaying games: it was determined that the roleplay would be conducted on Reddit itself, through a play-by-post system.

A helpful post that served as an introduction to roleplaying was created, and a friend of AnionCation named Andres-gamer “introduced a rudimentary system loosely based off of Dungeons and Dragons to use for the new roleplay”. The name of the community was conceptualized on the 12th, and then two days later on the 14th they officially began playing, which is by common consensus the true anniversary of RPGStuck.

THE FIRST YEAR

CAMPAIGN ONE

The first day was actually referred to as “Day 0”: in roleplaying games it’s often necessary to start off campaigns by conceptualizing your character and establishing it in a world with the other characters that will be played. “Day 1” then was when the “game” in earnest began: the initial driving event—an apocalypse—and a larger in-game universe referred to as SABATH would serve as the forces that set things in motion for each session.

Naturally, the system did not work at first. “People were regularly forgotten about and dropped to be picked up again later.” Just starting the game had its difficulties, and even once players were more established it did not get any easier. This confusion led to some people permanently leaving the project, a mark of how rough and unpolished RPGStuck was in its infancy.

Yet, despite these difficulties most people involved persevered. A user known as ATTheorytime, or AT, came up with an idea for introducing more players as other, ancillary characters such as non-player characters (NPCs) in order to help smooth the process out some.

While this particular idea was never incorporated, a similar one involving managers for the game manifested: there was apparently a shortage of people willing to be facilitators, or “dungeon masters” (DMs), and AT’s suggestion helped to mitigate this problem. With the influx of new DMs that had no experience running RPGStuck at that point, it was decided that it was time to begin another campaign in order to help address these organizational problems.

CAMPAIGN TWO

The first campaign in its entirety came to be referred to as C1. This naming convention stuck for all later campaigns, and thus RPGStuck embarked on C2, which was begun on Homestuck’s 6th anniversary on the 13th of April, 2015 and ran concurrently with C1. The new campaign also started off roughly but ultimately was proven worthwhile, being enormously helpful both to those new to playing it and to those managing it.

A commissioned picture of some of the characters that survived C1. From left to right: Nick, Rukshu, Zach, Alex, Lyra, Kara, Faerzen and Faerzen, Jonah, and Tarane.

Managing these campaigns involved some small hierarchy: as previously mentioned, a dungeon master facilitated each individual session, and these DMs were collectively supervised by AnionCation and AT. At some point a Skype group was created so that DMs could discuss matters together, and then all of the players created their own chat.

While initially watched over, this group chat was eventually abandoned by mods and left to run itself, which proved ultimately to be a disaster, and a new chat was formed on Skype to hold everyone. In an amusing aside, a user named DouchemasterMcChest was banned from this new chat and returned in spite to the original, turning the forgotten Skype group into a “cesspool”. This became an in-joke in RPGStuck known as the “Bane Plane”. As might be expected, over time the Bane Plane was abandoned and now no longer exists.

As for C2, the system was still fraught with problems. The chat and other features made things run more smoothly for players in general, but the administration still encountered challenges like sudden DM departures, which threw an entire session off kilter and required an immediate replacement. At this point, a new person from C2 named Nanakishi, or Becks, brought up the idea of hosting community events.

These events would manifest as both in-character and out-of-character parties or socials; as the names imply, in-character (IC) means the event was carried out while people were assuming the mantles of their characters, and out-of-character (OOC) means the events were held with people assuming their real identities.

THE COMMUNITY STRENGTHENS

At this point the community was still relatively small but everyone was close to each other, which is more or less typical of roleplaying groups. Outside of RPGStuck itself, community members often participated in other games such as Town of Salem or Board Game Online. This continued for a month or so, and then Becks came into contact with /r/Homestuck’s own moderator /u/aberrantArtificer—a player and DM in C1—and another user named Jumbuck, also known as Zion. Together, they began conceiving of ideas that would drastically expand the dimensions of the gameplay for RPGStuck.

The arbitrary and somewhat chaotic manner in which C1 and C2 were started is due in no small part to the absence of a lot of gameplay mechanics: having few rules allowed for sessions to be more free-form, but codifying mechanics would help smooth gameplay out and make it easier for players to know what to do in a given situation. To rectify this, and in keeping with tabletop gaming in general, the team started putting together some vital documents: a Player’s Handbook was assembled in order to make it easier for players and DMs alike to reference clearly established rules, which would in turn make gameplay more steady for all involved. Additional documents such as a database of enemies players could fight and a guide to DMing were also created.

Art concept for an Ice Sentinel monster, drawn by /u/tangledThespian. This monster was later incorporated into the game.

A Grist Scarab drawn by the same person, also included in the game. This serves as an example of how the community’s involvement has actively shaped the game as it’s developed over the years.

CAMPAIGN THREE

With the increase in organization, it was decided to launch yet another campaign: in July of 2015, AT and user PissyDuck formally announced signups for C3. With C1 and C2 being so rough and still in progress, many viewed this as unfavorable. Even with this, established players and many new players alike decided to participate. In total, 76 characters—some players using more than one—were created for this campaign.

C3 was larger than its predecessors and thus necessitated different handling. C1 and C2 were each based around a core plot that each individual session contributed to in some way, but C3 was the first campaign where sessions had completely independent plots, which allowed DMs to handle their sessions with more creative license than before. “One user was even inspired to create a session on a separate subreddit for a few of his friends in real life.” For a couple of months, the mood of the community seemed only to rise.

Throughout this process, the administrators were constantly involved with managing the community in both proactive and reactive ways. Anion, Becks, and AT were typically hands-on with how they dealt with players or even with community demands in general. At some point in September, a census was conducted on the RPGStuck subreddit, which showed that many people wanted more events outside of the game sessions themselves.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that RPGStuck had been using IRC throughout its history for various purposes. It was common for people to roleplay there in more casual or non-canon settings for fun, allowing people to continue playing as their character without being constrained by rules. Fights between characters were organized, and this activity led to a variety of creative ideas outside of the scope of RPGStuck itself.

Events for the rest of the year proceeded in much the same fashion. At some point in late October 2015, one of the groups still playing in C1 started pushing rapidly towards the endgame (although it would be another year still before the campaign was actually finished). A plethora of side projects were initiated, including a second version of the rules for the game known as “2e” being developed. Further details of these events and projects may be found in the previously linked document by 12yz12ab.

Before anyone knew it, the first anniversary of RPGStuck arrived. A small celebration was held, but then on April 24th of 2016 AnionCation stepped down from being the head of RPGStuck. Although she retained the honorary position of headmod of the subreddit, Becks was officially handed the reins. For a couple of months, things assumed a quiet calm.

THE SECOND YEAR

CAMPAIGN FOUR

On the 28th of June, things were shaken up drastically: C4 was officially announced alongside the induction of the completed 2e ruleset. For some time up to this point, the other campaigns had been stagnating, and the announcement was accompanied by the biggest burst of activity RPGStuck had ever seen.

C4 was run by Becks and aberrantArtificer: it was organized where players were sorted manually into groups with other people. Organizers also took into account the preferences of the players involved, so that people with similar interests were grouped together. After a month’s worth of preparation, on the 26th of July sessions for C4 were officially announced. Gameplay began in August with over 100 players, the largest campaign to date.

C1 was still around at this point—it had been decided that C4 would not commence until it was finished, but delays and other problems conspired such that C4 began even without the conclusion of C1. It was thus that 12yz12ab stepped in to try and coax C1 to its end, although it still took an impressive amount of time. The campaign dragged to its end over the course of four months and then on the 23rd of November 2016 the first campaign of RPGStuck was finally ended, complete with a finale written by 12yz12ab and aberrantArtificer.

For a few months, the other three campaigns proceeded as normal. Then some time into 2017, talk about beginning C5 was cropping up in the community. The discussion involved the possibility of letting C5 be run entirely by the community, but from the outset it seemed to be a misguided idea: “The chat was open access and was a vitriolic mess for much of the beginning, further hammering in the point that a completely community-driven campaign was out of the question.” C5 was tabled indefinitely, but the flurry of activity served as an indication to the administrators that expanding RPGStuck’s scope as a community was necessary.

An illustrated storybook created by /u/tangledThespian for the independent session known as Ancestorstuck, which formed as an offshoot from C4. Such works showcase the incredible creativity and talent that went into these games.

So many people were involved at this point, and many of them so active, that people began to openly organize their own sessions. This process took off in earnest in the first half of 2017, and even aside from independent sessions a variety of projects were begun. One such example was by a user named Mathmatt878, called Whose Turn is it Anyways? as a parody on the improvisational comedy show Whose Line is it Anyway?, which served as a discussion post with a different prompt or topic from week to week. Projects like this one only served to attract more and more people as time went by, until it became clear to all involved that the community now had enough energy to keep itself going indefinitely.

THE THIRD YEAR

BEYOND CAMPAIGNS

The second anniversary of RPGStuck was met with even more community games and events for people to participate in, and the sense of togetherness deepened for all involved. Around this time, new sessions run independently shifted from being the exception to being the rule, and officially announced campaigns became gradually less prominent. The Player’s Handbook was fleshed out even more in preparation for a new version to be released, and still more side projects were completed: a user named TWRedditaccount created a program that allowed people to quickly and easily create sprite art for their characters, and a user named spinydoughnut33 released an RPGStuck album entitled The Lands of Chronostuck, a first for the community.

Amazingly, RPGStuck has only continued to grow in size, sometimes by leaps and bounds. The second anniversary to now involves so many distinct events that it feels impossible to list them all in a thorough fashion, including more talk about C5; due to people utilizing sessions of their own so often now it is surmised that C5 might never happen, although the possibility is still in the air. 12yz12ab comments: “we promised ourselves that it'll happen after one of two major events people are waiting for happen, but neither of those are going to happen anytime soon either”. A mysterious promise to be sure, but a tantalizing one.

LEGACY

Aside from this, there has also been a general shift from Skype to Discord for chatting with other people (which has an homage to the #bane_plane, now their dedicated shitposting channel). Their official Player’s Handbook had a number of expansions that massively deepened gameplay, all of which may be found in the Related Materials in appendix A under RPGStuck. Projects like Whose Turn is it Anyway? are still in production, alongside other more recent creations such as a series of podcasts. The administration even holds a census to better understand the people in the community.

At this point RPGStuck boasts an active subreddit with over 550 subscribers and its own Discord server. Those interested in hearing the rest of the last year’s events and learning more about RPGStuck would do well to read 12yz12ab’s document, or better still to go and talk with the community members themselves. They show absolutely no signs of slowing down anytime soon, and they stand as a shining example of the potential that the Homestuck fandom has to offer.

Picture of a mix of characters from C1 and C2 enjoying RPGStuck Game Night, drawn by /u/irydium.

#homestuck #rpgstuck #hiveswap #reddit #sburb #article

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poolload740 · 3 years

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York Latitude Chiller Manual

The Liquid Chiller will be completely assembled with all interconnecting refrigerant piping and internal wiring, ready for field installation. The unit can be covered with an optional coat of Caribbean Blue enamel overspray. The unit will be pressure-tested, evacuated, and charged with dry Nitrogen (N 2) for shipment, and York ‘L’ (POE).

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York furnaces offer high energy efficiency and reliable comfort for homes across the U.S. As one of the nation’s leading furnace manufacturers, York delivers the warmth your family needs throughout the cold season while conserving energy to keep your utility bills low. York furnaces come with a selection of manuals to help you better understand how your furnace operates, how to use it, and how to care for it.

York furnace manuals should always be kept after installation for future references. If your York furnace manuals have been misplaced or are otherwise inaccessible, don’t sweat! HVAC.com has you covered – access your York furnace manuals online, as well as manuals for HVAC equipment manufactured by other leading brands.

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November 30, 2019

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your-dietician · 3 years

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Highlights of the American Diabetes Association's 2021 Annual Meeting

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/health/diabetes/highlights-of-the-american-diabetes-associations-2021-annual-meeting/

Highlights of the American Diabetes Association's 2021 Annual Meeting

The American Diabetes Association’s annual conference, known as the ADA Scientific Sessions, is always the biggest diabetes event of the year, and 2021 marked the second time this 5-day congress was held completely online because of the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.

When held in person, the conference normally convenes roughly 16,000 physicians, researchers, and diabetes industry experts from across the globe. This 81st annual event drew 11,600 people from 119 countries between June 25 and 29 — slightly lower than the 12,527 registered attendees for the 2020 virtual event. For both, the event organizers expected more people to tune in afterward, thanks to the recorded online sessions being made available for up to 3 months following the conference.

Despite its virtual nature, this year’s conference included nearly 200 presentations with more than 900 presenters on any range of topics. And to top it off, there were roughly 1,100 research posters delving into the latest science in diabetes. You can catch up on some of the action by searching hashtag #ADA2021.

Many of the big themes this year were extensions of what we saw in 2020 with the first-ever virtual SciSessions, but with even deeper focus. Below is our team’s summary of conference highlights.

Of course, the novel coronavirus that took the world to its knees was a main focal point and recurring theme in a large majority of research presented at this year’s Scientific Sessions.

Whether the topic officially had to do with COVID-19 or not, this was on everyone’s mind — from telehealth to research delays because of shutdowns, hospitalizations, etc. New research highlighted how people with underlying health conditions are six times more likely to die of COVID-19, and diabetes is the second most reported condition tied to those deaths in the U.S.

“Seeing the devastating impact of the pandemic on people with diabetes, the ADA is emboldened to work even harder to lead the fight against diabetes,” said the ADA’s chief scientific and medical officer, Dr. Robert Gabbay. “Our mission is reinforced by researchers from around the globe committed to closely studying specific impacts and interventions to help people living with diabetes during this COVID-19 era.”

Research from the T1D Exchange presented at ADA showed that among people with type 1 diabetes (T1D), use of diabetes technology lowered the risk of adverse outcomes with COVID-19. That point was emphasized throughout the conference, though it was offset by the common barriers of access and affordability issues — as well as racial and ethnic disparities in diabetes technology use.

One disturbing research presentation illustrated how type 2 diabetes (T2D) in children had skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. More pediatric patients were hospitalized between March and December 2020 than in the previous year. It also shows that stay-at-home orders resulting from COVID-19 exacerbated T2D risk for children overall, largely because of limited physical activity, more screen time and sedentary behaviors, disrupted sleep, and higher intake of processed foods and differing eating patterns during the day. A notable stat presented in one session showed that 1 in 4 PWDs in America reported the pandemic had interfered with their ability to obtain healthy food.

“While our study examined hospital admissions for type 2 diabetes in children at one center, the results may be a microcosm of what is happening at other children’s hospitals across the country,” said Dr. Daniel S. Hsia of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA. “Unfortunately, COVID-19 disrupted our lives in more ways than we realize. Our study reinforces the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle for children even under such difficult circumstances.”

Another study conducted in October 2020 showed that 1 in 5 adults with diabetes reported anxiety or depression. Nearly half of adults (or 47 percent) with T1D reported moderate to severe distress compared with only 11 percent of adults with T2D. That research came from Dr. Sarah C. Westen at the University of Florida, and she told attendees that it meant PWDs with these pandemic-related psychosocial concerns needed follow-up diabetes care aimed at mental health.

Overall, the most common themes were that COVID-19 led to increased health anxiety, limited social interaction, and routine disruption. Many presenters also emphasized the need for more longitudinal research to better understand how these psychosocial factors specifically impacted diabetes management during the pandemic.

“While we are beyond eager to return to ‘normal’ and are well aware of the devastation that continues to occur because of COVID, we hope to take these silver linings, learn from them, and continue to implement things that we found particularly helpful that resulted out of necessity because of the pandemic,” said Catlin Dennis, MPH, of the Oregon-based Novel Interventions in Children’s Healthcare (NICH) at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. She presented in a session titled “When COVID-19 Clashes with Diabetes.”

Not surprisingly, racial disparities and inequities within diabetes care were a focal point at the ADA conference as well. Many presenters noted that existing disparities were brought to light quite glaringly during the height of COVID-19.

In August 2020, the ADA published a “Health Equity Bill of Rights” that included statements on access to insulin and other diabetes meds, affordable healthcare, and ensuring that PWDs are able to be free from stigma and discrimination. As of April 2021, the ADA is encouraging scientists to apply for grants to conduct research touching on the impact of disparities in diabetes care.

“We can’t improve the health of all Americans without first addressing health inequities in our healthcare system. It’s crucial that we take a groundwater approach to solving these problems so that the solutions are both sustainable and effective. We have an obligation to dismantle these inequities and eliminate the devastating impact they have on families and communities,” ADA CEO Tracey D. Brown said.

One of the few really eye-popping developments this year was the announcement of a consensus statement between American and European diabetes experts, recognizing for the first time ever that there is, in fact, such thing as adult type 1 diabetes (T1D).

Yes, nearly a quarter century after T1D was officially classified and renamed from “juvenile diabetes,” medical experts have now finally issued official guidance on standards of care for adults with T1D.

The “Management of Type 1 Diabetes in Adults—2021 Draft ADA/EASD Consensus Report” is a multiyear effort between the ADA and European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD). It includes a new diagnostic algorithm for T1D that begins with measuring islet autoantibodies.

“We know we have guidance for the management of people with type 1 diabetes, but this gets mixed into broader guidelines and many of those broader guidelines are mostly derived from data in people with type 2 diabetes,” said Dr. Anne Peters, a well-known endocrinologist at the University of Southern California (USC) and director of the USC Clinical Diabetes Programs. “The EASD and the ADA recognized that there was a need to develop a comparable consensus report that specifically addresses the needs of people with type 1 diabetes.”

The report lays out that to achieve individualized care, patients should undergo an initial needs assessment. It also addresses behavior considerations such as alcohol and tobacco use, sleep, sick day management, driving, employment, physical activity, and nutrition.

“There is no one eating pattern recommended,” said Amy Hess-Fischl, a registered dietician and nutritionist and certified diabetes care and education specialist (CDCES) at the University of Chicago. “It is all based on the individual sitting in front of us.”

The report notes that there are four critical times for ongoing diabetes management support and education: at diagnosis, annually or when the patient is not meeting treatment targets, when complicating factors develop, and when transitions in life and care occur.

Dr. Jeremy Pettus, endocrinologist at the University of California, San Diego, worked in the consensus group that evaluated an array of medications that might be useful for T1D — some of them more commonly used for type 2 diabetes currently.

“There are other things wrong in type 1 diabetes physiology that we could potentially address with medications to help the vast majority of T1Ds get their blood sugars down to where they need them to be, help lose weight, improve cardiovascular outcomes,” he said. “Type 1s, even with good glycemic control, are still at high risk for cardiovascular disease.”

A hope is that these newer guidelines can help better diagnose T1D in varying age ranges, to help quell common misdiagnosis. But also, to further emphasize that individualized care is necessary when treating someone with the condition.

Another big theme for this Scientific Sessions — and 2021 overall — was the 100th anniversary of insulin’s discovery.

While so much progress has happened in diabetes and with insulin specifically since that game-changing discovery in 1921 by Drs. Frederick G. Banting and Charles Best in Toronto, the conference also highlighted how there is much left to be done for PWDs.

Affordability is at crisis levels in the U.S. and too many can’t get the life-sustaining insulin they need. Yet ironically, many people with type 2 diabetes continue to live in fear of being prescribed this medication.

Sessions delved into the policy sides of insulin accessibility as well as research on new types of insulin and other islet and beta cell transplants, which fall under the “cure” umbrella.

Dr. Ruth S. Weinstock at State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University, who currently serves as the ADA’s Science and Medicine division president, highlighted in her Sunday morning address that cutting-edge research is driving new therapies and technologies as well as hope for a diabetes cure. But there’s a lot to be concerned about, too.

“As wonderful as the discovery of insulin was, there was a need for purer and more physiological preparations and better insulin delivery systems,” she said. “We have better insulins now, but their administration is still burdensome and associated with challenges. And importantly, hypoglycemia and hypoglycemia unawareness remain problems, increasing in prevalence with longer diabetes duration.”

She pointed to the price of insulin in the U.S. being higher than anywhere else in the world, and encouraged ADA attendees to work toward a goal of more affordable insulin by January 2022 — the century-mark since a 14-year-old received the first-ever dose of insulin.

Meanwhile, developments in pancreatic beta cells garnered attention at the SciSessions as a possible path toward a T1D cure.

Dr. Esther Latres of the JDRF presented updates on manufacturing insulin-producing cells from stem cells, protecting the beta cells (without immunosuppressive drugs) from being destroyed during the immune system attack on a person’s body that leads to T1D.

Dr. Quinn Peterson of the Mayo Clinic presented his latest research on growing pancreatic islets from stem cells, showing findings that scientifically significant insulin production can be prompted using his technique.

As these researchers encouraged more advances in this type of diabetes research, it coincided with the recent news of President Joe Biden’s proposal for a Moonshot Initiative. This would provide $6.5 billion in the federal budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund cure-focused research on cancer and other conditions like diabetes. If that proposal gets approved and implemented, it could lead to even more T1D research on advanced treatments and a potential cure.

Another hot topic at the ADA conference this year was the growing emphasis on Time in Range (TIR), which provides more information about glucose control than the traditional 3-month average known as the A1C.

Multiple diabetes experts in a variety of presentations highlighted the importance of TIR as they discussed latest research findings and management, complications that can materialize despite one’s A1C result, and even policy implications from looking at TIR rather than just A1C.

Generated mainly from the use of continuous glucose monitors (CGM), TIR was highlighted for how it helps people stay within the ideal 70-180 mg/dL range as often as possible in order to improve their diabetes management. This was mentioned in countless presentations and research posters.

In one of the sessions posing the question “Is CGM use an effective tool in primary care?” medical professionals and diabetes experts debated whether this tech can be useful for health consumers beyond diabetes care.

Short answer: It depends on the level of engagement a patient may have, but for those with diabetes who are dependent on insulin, the benefits of CGM are no longer in question. Presenters noted that CGM use allows a move away from focusing solely on A1C, with TIR data instead allowing healthcare providers to make better adjustments to insulin or diabetes meds, as well as determine how eating patterns or other aspects of a person’s life might be tweaked to achieve better outcomes.

The eagerly anticipated full results of the phase 3 SURPASS trials were shared at ADA 2021, generating a lot of buzz.

The study followed up on results from early 2021 focused on tirzepatide, a new once-weekly injectable glucose-lowering combo drug (dual GIP and GLP-1 receptor agonist) from Eli Lilly. It’s still in development, but like the exciting initial results, this latest research shows the new drug leads to a sizable A1C reduction as well as weight loss and fewer hypoglycemic episodes for people with type 2 diabetes.

The ADA conference also traditionally features many different research talks focused on diabetes complications. This year, there were multiple sessions aimed at kidney and cardiovascular risk for PWDs, including how various medications — especially for those with T2D — can reduce the risk of these possible complications.

There were sessions focused on spinal cord stimulation to treat painful neuropathy in the feet and toes, as well as how retinopathy is being treated more effectively now than even just a few years back.

One topic that caught our eye was “diabetes foot selfies.” Although some medical appointments to diagnosis, assess, or treat D-complications must happen in person, during the COVID-19 crisis there was a larger trend of people snapping photos of their feet and toes to have their clinicians look at those virtually to help guide decision-making.

“The COVID-19 pandemic required a rapid shift in best care practices,” said Brian M. Schmidt from the University of Michigan Medical School. “This had a huge impact on patients with diabetic foot ulcers and other complications because most of the time those patients were seen exclusively in face-to-face interactions.”

In California, Dr. Laura Shin discussed how her clinic had also used telemedicine and other methods to provide virtual care for patients with diabetes foot issues. They sent info packets to patients, families, and caregivers on conducting “three-minute foot exams,” and how to take selfies in helping clinicians prescribe care and identify high risk instances.

“A large part of us being able to treat these patients as best we could, especially with using different telemedicine technologies, was the ‘foot selfie.’ If they were flexible or agile enough, they could take the pictures themselves using their cell phones, or have a family member or caregiver take the pictures,” she said.

“With COVID-19, we have learned a lot about accessing patients,” Shin added. “Utilizing different tools and avenues for telemedicine was extremely helpful for us and for our patients with diabetes and diabetic foot care needs. And although it’s not a replacement for inpatient visits, I think we were still able to manage to keep a lot of these patients safe, keep them out of the hospital, and keep them moving in the world.”

An anticipated highlight of the ADA SciSessions each year has traditionally been the sprawling exhibit hall, where scores of diabetes companies go all out with elaborate displays. Sales reps try to woo physicians with the latest and greatest new gadgets and tools, and many companies coordinate timing of announcements and new products with this large conference — particularly since it falls in the final month before the fiscal quarter ends and they’re eager to wow investors.

Of course it’s just not the same with the event being online. The virtual exhibit hall is more of a rudimentary marketing tool where you can click on materials and videos but without the fanfare and opportunity to ask questions face-to-face. But there were still some topics of interest here.

Afrezza inhaled insulin

New research was presented on MannKind’s Afrezza inhaled insulin. This ultra rapid-acting inhalable drug has been available in the U.S. for adults with T1D since 2015, but it’s still being studied for possible use in children and adolescents as well as for those with T2D.

In two smaller studies, MannKind showed data that Afrezza is safe in children and adults with T2D.

Researchers tested Afrezza in 30 children between 8-17 and found the inhaled insulin was safe and saw its peak action about 10-15 minutes after inhalation. Within 2 hours, it was out of their systems. For post-meal glucose drops, the children saw the peak decrease 30-60 minutes after inhalation. All of that shows Afrezza works the same in children as it does in adults. While there was a slight cough observed for some after inhalation, there was no severe hypoglycemia. This research shows a final phase 3 clinical study can now move forward, paving the way for eventual pediatric approval.

As for T2 adults, Afrezza improved their TIR throughout the day to a total 62 percent of time, or 4 additional hours each day with lower amounts of highs and lows.

Medtronic’s new products

Medtronic presented important data on its future technology, including its Extended Wear Infusion Set that is already approved in Europe but is still in development for the U.S. This infusion set could last twice as long as existing infusion sets available for insulin pumps today — meaning it could be worn on the body for up to 7 days, compared with the traditional 2 or 3 days. Research presented at the ADA conference shows that Medtronic’s extended wear set lasted that long for up to 75 percent of the 350+ study participants, which beat out the 67 percent for the current 2-3 day sets.

This extended wear set is already filed with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is awaiting review and approval, and if OK’d it would be the first time the U.S. would see an infusion set allowed to be worn for this long.

Medtronic also presented data on Time in Range for its Bluetooth-connected 770G system, keeping up with competing diabetes device companies that presented TIR research but also setting the foundation for its upcoming 780G device (aka the Advanced Hybrid Closed Loop system) that is pending before the FDA.

With that approval, we will soon have a trio of closed loop commercial systems to choose from: Medtronic’s 780G, Tandem’s Control-IQ and Omnipod 5, the latter of which will be the first tubeless patch pump option with automated glucose control.

CamAPS FX closed loop system

In a clinical study from the University of Cambridge, Dr. Julia Fuchs presented data on the future CamAPS FX closed loop system in kids and teens with T1D. This technology is U.K.-based CamDiab’s version of a hybrid closed loop system, combining an Android smartphone app with a Dexcom G6 CGM and an internationally available insulin pump (either the Dana Diabecare RS pump or the Dana i-pump by Korean company SOOIL).

This system adjusts insulin every 8-12 minutes based on the user’s needs, with a set target glucose of 105 mg/dL. For study participants in the U.S. who didn’t have access to those international pumps, the researchers used a Medtronic insulin pump and CGM. After 6 months, participants spent an average of 3.6 hours more time in range each day, or 68 percent TIR. Their A1C results also dropped by 1.1 percent, and use of the system also had other glucose-lowering benefits, they say.

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newstfionline · 6 years

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U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials

By Andrew Jacobs, NY Times, July 8, 2018

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

The showdown over the issue was recounted by more than a dozen participants from several countries, many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from the United States.

Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.

“We were astonished, appalled and also saddened,” said Patti Rundall, the policy director of the British advocacy group Baby Milk Action, who has attended meetings of the assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, since the late 1980s.

“What happened was tantamount to blackmail, with the U.S. holding the world hostage and trying to overturn nearly 40 years of consensus on best way to protect infant and young child health,” she said.

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure--and the Americans did not threaten them.

The State Department declined to respond to questions, saying it could not discuss private diplomatic conversations. The Department of Health and Human Services, the lead agency in the effort to modify the resolution, explained the decision to contest the resolution’s wording but said H.H.S. was not involved in threatening Ecuador.

“The resolution as originally drafted placed unnecessary hurdles for mothers seeking to provide nutrition to their children,” an H.H.S. spokesman said in an email. “We recognize not all women are able to breast-feed for a variety of reasons. These women should have the choice and access to alternatives for the health of their babies, and not be stigmatized for the ways in which they are able to do so.” The spokesman asked to remain anonymous in order to speak more freely.

Although lobbyists from the baby food industry attended the meetings in Geneva, health advocates said they saw no direct evidence that they played a role in Washington’s strong-arm tactics. The $70 billion industry, which is dominated by a handful of American and European companies, has seen sales flatten in wealthy countries in recent years, as more women embrace breast-feeding. Overall, global sales are expected to rise by 4 percent in 2018, according to Euromonitor, with most of that growth occurring in developing nations.

The intensity of the administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported W.H.O.’s longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding.

During the deliberations, some American delegates even suggested the United States might cut its contribution the W.H.O., several negotiators said. Washington is the single largest contributor to the health organization, providing $845 million, or roughly 15 percent of its budget, last year.

The confrontation was the latest example of the Trump administration siding with corporate interests on numerous public health and environmental issues.

In talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Americans have been pushing for language that would limit the ability of Canada, Mexico and the United States to put warning labels on junk food and sugary beverages, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.

During the same Geneva meeting where the breast-feeding resolution was debated, the United States succeeded in removing statements supporting soda taxes from a document that advises countries grappling with soaring rates of obesity.

The Americans also sought, unsuccessfully, to thwart a W.H.O. effort aimed at helping poor countries obtain access to lifesaving medicines. Washington, supporting the pharmaceutical industry, has long resisted calls to modify patent laws as a way of increasing drug availability in the developing world, but health advocates say the Trump administration has ratcheted up its opposition to such efforts.

Ilona Kickbusch, director of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, said there was a growing fear that the Trump administration could cause lasting damage to international health institutions like the W.H.O. that have been vital in containing epidemics like Ebola and the rising death toll from diabetes and cardiovascular disease in the developing world.

“It’s making everyone very nervous, because if you can’t agree on health multilateralism, what kind of multilateralism can you agree on?” Ms. Kickbusch asked.

Elisabeth Sterken, director of the Infant Feeding Action Coalition in Canada, said four decades of research have established the importance of breast milk, which provides essential nutrients as well as hormones and antibodies that protect newborns against infectious disease.

A 2016 Lancet study found that universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk.

#breast-feeding #WHO #world health organization

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joleneellis29 · 3 years

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Kinky sex: 26 tips for beginners to spice up your sex life

The beginner’s guide to kinky sex, from role play to bondage and beyond.

If you've ever picked up a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey or accidentally wondered into your local Ann Summers store, you might have a vague understanding of what kinky sex entails. But while we can't knock EL James for bringing kink into the public consciousness, the stereotypes depicted in popular culture are often way off the mark.

Kinky sex is a way of experimenting with boundaries in the bedroom which sometimes involves a good spanking, but it also comes with emotional, physical and even spiritual benefits that could improve your relationships and transform your self-esteem. All that from a bit of slap and tickle? Bear with us...

We spoke to Bodyworker and Sex & Intimacy Coach Libby Sheppard, gynaecologist and co-founder of Hanx Sarah Welsh, and sex and dating expert at The Stag Company Clarissa Bloom, about the pros and cons of exploring kinky sex, plus we share 26 expert tips for beginners on how to enjoy a positive, safe and sexy kink experience:

What is kinky sex? Sexual attitudes have changed and so has society’s perceptions of what is considered risqué in the bedroom. These days kinky sex is best described as anything unconventional – that is to say, outside of kissing, vaginal penetration, masturbation and oral sex. But what one person may view as kinky, another might consider vanilla love-making, so it's not an exact science. 'Kinky sex can mean different things to different people and plays out along a broad spectrum,' says Sheppard. 'But it is basically any sexual act that utilises aspects of fantasy, role play or polarity/power dynamics and isn’t limited to penis-in-vagina sex.'

What one person may view as kinky, another might consider vanilla love-making, so it's not an exact science.

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The truth is you can set your own kinky parameters. So if you and your partner enjoy experimenting in ways that feel wild and sexy and outlandish to you, then that defines your kink. 'Kinky sex involves something that you enjoy adding to your experience,' says Sheppard. 'Examples of kinky sex might be: acting out sexual fantasies, using toys like butt plugs, floggers or pussy pumps, using restraints or bondage or involving extra people - threesomes, or group sex.'

Kinky sex misconceptions and myths Attitudes are changing, but stepping outside the boundaries of sexual norms still often comes with a side serving of judgement and may be considered taboo. ‘We recently conducted a survey exploring fantasy with over 600 responses, and unsurprisingly, kink and its many aspects came up again and again,’ says Welsh. ‘It’s not as underground, weird or unusual as some perceive it to be.’

The most common misconception is that kinky sex exclusively involves being trussed up in a gimp suit and spanked into submission.

The most common misconception is that kinky sex exclusively involves being trussed up in a gimp suit and spanked into submission. While this certainly does happen, there is more to kink than BDSM.

There’s also a false perception that the person in the dominant role (AKA the Dom) is the one in control and calling the shots, when often it’s the reverse. ‘Most of the time, the person playing the Dom is performing this act to please their partner whose kink is to be submissive,’ says Bloom.

Kinky sex benefits Sexual gratification aside, kinky sex can benefit your mental health, your self-confidence and even your stress levels. A study from Northern Illinois University found that couples who engaged in positive, consensual sadomasochistic activity had lower cortisol levels – the stress hormone – and reported increased feelings of intimacy.

Understanding what you find arousing is important, as your sexual wellness is an essential element of your wellbeing.

Exploring kink is also technically an act of self-care, explains Welsh. ‘Taking ownership of your pleasure and understanding what you find arousing is really important, as your sexual wellness is an essential element of your overall wellbeing,’ she says.

There’s also the social aspect to consider. Meeting others with similar fantasies in the kink community and finding your 'tribe' can be hugely validating. ‘Being able to talk openly about what turns you on without fear of judgement is an amazing experience and the kink lifestyle has a huge community aspect,’ says Bloom. ‘From local meet-ups to regular events, there are often things going on in each town across the UK.’

Kinky sex safety tips Everyone has different limits and boundaries, and it’s important to respect that. Follow our 6 tips to make sure kinky sex is a safe, positive experience for everyone involved:

Research first: before trying out any kink, do plenty of research to make sure it’s really for you – especially for kinks sitting at the more extreme end of the scale. The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance is a good place to start. Build up slowly: sometimes kinky sex involves mixing pain and pleasure, so it’s important to start slow. ‘I often recommend building up to a fantasy or a fetish if you’re doing it for the first time,’ says Bloom. ‘Take baby steps and see what you do and don’t like.’ Establish boundaries: informed consent is the most important aspect of exploring kinky sex, so lay the ground rules before you get started. Communication is key, so talk through with your partner(s) about what you are and aren’t expecting, and where your limits are. Choose a safe word: it's important to establish a safe word so you can swiftly end any scenario you're not comfortable with if things get too much – and don’t be afraid to use it. As with all sex, kink should be completely consensual so if one or both of you isn’t enjoying the experience, use that safe word and stop immediately. Practise bondage safety: never leave a restrained person unattended, even for a moment. If the Dominant needs to leave the room for any reason whatsoever, always release the submissive to avoid catastrophe. Remember after-care: kink can be emotionally and physically draining, so always follow a session with aftercare and check-in with your partner to make sure they’re OK. Lots of hugs, loving touches and an open chat about the experience you’ve just shared will quickly reset the vibe.

26 kinky sex tips for beginners Keen to give kink a try? The key to exploring your kinky side starts with open, honest communication and fun! So sit down and talk about what turns you on with your other half before you get started. Discussing your sexual desires with a trusted partner can also serve as foreplay and be seriously steamy. So talk about it, plan what you hope to explore together and enjoy the ride! As long as you're all consenting adults, anything goes and the world is your rubber lobster:

1. Sensory deprivation Depriving any one of the sensations associated with sexual pleasure can sharpen the rest, so something as simple as switching off the lights can be remarkably erotic. 'Removing one sense can be a simple and safe way to begin with kinky sex,' says Sheppard. 'Try blindfolding your partner or using sound-muffling headphones.'

2. Bondage Restraint can be a part of power play or sensory deprivation, so it adds to feelings of complete submission. It can also be tantalising if you're tied up and unable to resist the tickle of a feather or the sting of an ice cube.

There are a million different ways to restrict someone’s movement. 'Don’t go straight for ropes or silk ties, they can be fiddly to undo quickly and you risk tying them too tight,' advises Sheppard. 'Soft leather handcuffs are a comfortable, pleasurable alternative.' Using shibari rope or bondage tape are also popular ways to experiment with bondage.

3. Orgasm denial If you've ever found yourself on the brink of orgasm but you've managed to hold back for a moment, you will know how tantalising orgasm denial can be. Known as edging, hovering over the precipice of sexual pleasure can prolong the party and make the eventual reward even more intense. Sex toys can really add to this, as you can control your lovers orgasm by simply switching off every time they get close to the edge. Reading up on tantric sex can also help brush up your delayed orgasm skills.

4. Role play Role play includes everything from fantasy pillow talk to fancy dress. If you're shy and the idea of acting out your sexual fantasies feels rather awkward, role play might surprise you. By adopting a different persona in the bedroom, fans of role play often find it easier to explore sexual situations they might not otherwise feel comfortable with. Popular role play scenarios often involve power play such as boss and secretary, but this is your sexual fantasy so if pretending to be two ponies in a meadow gets you off, don't hold back. Provided you've agreed in advance, role play can bring you closer to your partner and help you live out your wildest dreams - so ride that pony!

5. Group sex Group sex is the epitome of kink and most of us have fantasised about inviting additional people into the bedroom for a threesome or an orgy. However, with relationship hang-ups and safety measures to consider, group sex with friends does not always translate that well into real life. The easiest way to dip your toe in the multiples pond is to invite a stranger to join you (easily done via most dating apps now) or attend a sex party to see how it feels first. We hear Killing Kittens is a great place to start.

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6. Swinging Swinging differs from group sex, as it refers to the practice of swapping partners rather than a fleshy free for all. While it's easy to draw parallels between adultery and swinging, provided it's between consenting adults and everyone's having a jolly good time, what's not to enjoy? Thanks to the communication and trust that comes with swinging, swing fans report enhanced intimacy and devotion in their relationships, so throw your keys onto the coffee table and get stuck in.

7. Mutual masturbation Something as simple as mutual masturbation with your lover can be surprisingly kinky. Try sitting opposite each other on the bed but only touching yourself and see how things pan out. Watching your lover while pleasuring yourself can be incredibly sexy, increase shared intimacy and feels like a private sex show. Add sex toys into the mix for guaranteed orgasmic bliss.

8. Watch porn together If you've never watched porn or it's a hobby you usually enjoy alone, you are in for a treat. All those oily naked bodies you see writhing around on screen? Watch porn together and you can replicate it with real live flesh! It's also useful for tips and suggestions for sexual positions and role play games. The catch: watching too much porn may lead to unrealistic expectations about genital size, hairlessness and staying power.

9. Make a sex tape Technology has come on leaps and bounds and these days everyone and their dog can press record on their smartphone and make a sexy video. However, don't be disappointed if your sex tape doesn't turn out like the porn films. Find an area in your home with good lighting, wear your sexiest outfit and don't be afraid to delete it if you're not keen on the finished product. And do not invite your dog.

10. Sex with strangers Sex with strangers can be seriously kinky but also comes with its fair share of risks so proceed with caution. Most dating apps come with casual hook up functionality these days, but if this doesn't appeal you can create the idea of stranger sex without putting yourself at risk. Sign up to a webcam, join Chatroulette to indulge in virtual sex with people you don't know or simply use your imagination.

10. Experiment with sex toys From a clit-tingling Rechargeable Wand to a Vibrating Blowjob Simulator, sex toys can add extra sugar to any kinky scenario. To help you get started on your kink journey we recommend the Bondage Starter Kit or try a flogger to tickle and tease your lover into submission. Once you've graduated to an experienced kinkster, throw some spreaders into the mix and don't forget the lube.

11. Try rough sex If scratching, slapping, pinching and spitting turns you on, then you might be ready to try rough sex. Rough sex sits under the BDSM umbrella (this stands for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) and incorporates everything from a bit of slap and tickle to a full on spanking and strangulation. But the onus is always on being Safe, Sane and Consensual, so do your homework before you proceed so there are no nasty surprises.

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12. Enjoy exhibitionism Do you love to be the centre of attention and get turned on by the concept of being seen? Exhibitionism is a sexual kink in which the person feels sexual arousal at the idea (or in some cases reality) of being seen engaged in sexual activities by others, and it can be seriously fun to play. Either at home with your lover or via webcam with the world, exhibitionists and kink go hand in hand and this stage was made for you.

13. Try your hand at voyeurism Conversely, voyeurism is all about the erotic joy of watching, so if you like to sit in the shadows and quietly observe the world (or watch the above mentioned exhibitionists take centre stage) then chances are you're a voyeur. This kink can have a seedy underbelly as not everyone likes being watched, so make sure you ask first as no one likes a peeping Tom.

14. Impact play Impact play involving spanking, flogging, whipping or paddling is a great entry point for BDSM play and features highly on the kink hot list. If you've never enjoyed a good spanking you'll be reassured to hear that if you target the fleshy bits, it doesn't have to hurt and the vibrations can elicit a tantalising range of physical and emotional responses to boot. Bend over baby.

15. Try cuckolding Traditionally used as a way to cast major shade, a cuckold is the (often long suffering) husband of an adulterous wife. However, the kink community have made this word their own and these days cuckolding is all part of the fun. Turned on by the idea of seeing your wife getting slammed by another man? Or perhaps you want her to cheat and then relay the encounter to you in exquisite detail? You my friend are a cuckold and if it gets you off, all power to you! It works both ways and if you're a woman who finds the humiliation of adultery rather alluring, you can call yourself a cuckquean. You'll need to be pretty committed to cuckoldry if you're prepared to put your marriage at risk, but proponents of cuckolding seem to love it. If you're on the fence, try pretending and see how that feels. Sometimes simply talking about your sexual fantasies is enough. 16. Pump your pussy This kinky little game requires the correct accessories, but once you've invested in a vagina pump you're all set. Pussy and clit pumps work by creating a vacuum over the labia and/or clitoris. Increasing blood flow makes the area become (temporarily) engorged and consequently more sensitive and ergo more pleasurable; perfect for a good pounding.

17. Temperature play A classic party trick on the kink scene, using hot or cold temperatures to stimulate the skin can provoke a sensual reaction and turn the heat up in the bedroom. Temperature play is often combined with sensory deprivation to increase sensation, so throw a blindfold and some handcuffs into the mix, but it does come with risks so play safely. Don't leave ice on the skin for too long to prevent frostbite and invest in purpose built BDSM Wax Play candles to avoid injury. And if you really must play with fire, keep an extinguisher close to hand. 18. Talk dirty If you're a newbie or your sex life needs a leg up, talking dirty is a surefire way to get you in the mood. Sexual arousal starts in the brain so whispering what you'd like to do to your lover (or have done to you) is a great way to kick off proceedings. To prolong foreplay start early in the day by calling home (or texting) on your lunch break to talk about the sexy plans you have for later. If you're new to kink and can't find the words, try listening to erotic stories together. You'll be amazed at just how sexy listening to a story and using your imagination can be.

19. Pegging The pros of pegging (switching places and shagging your man-friend up the bum with a strap-on dildo) go beyond tickling his G-spot. Pegging proponents report enjoying the power play that comes with switching places. For women it's a great opportunity to subvert gender roles and show him who's boss, while some men enjoy experimenting with their submissive side. Bend over boys! But don't forget the lube.

20. Sex furniture Did you know there's an entire section on Amazon dedicated exclusively to sex furniture? Thats's right folks, you can purchase ramps, cushions, wedges and stools designed specifically to boost your sex life and make your kinky encounters considerably more comfortable in the process. Just make sure you wipe your sex wedge down before Auntie Margaret pops round and needs to rest her bad knee.

21. Period sex Period sex is still considered wildly taboo even though it's perfectly commonplace and we've all done it either accidentally or on purpose at least once before. If you're preparing to shag someone who is bleeding, just think of it as extra red hot lube and dive right in. Contrary to popular belief period sex is not unhygienic and nothing bad will happen to you (aside from ruining your sheets if you don't put a towel down). And for the bleeder? Prepare for relief from cramps, an increased libido, a shorter period and some seriously steamy messy play. Some people really like it, so don't be shy. 22. Anal sex Up to 90 per cent of gay men and about a third of heterosexual couples enjoy anal sex from time to time, so it's not all that taboo. If you're on the fence, the anal area is equipped with a truckload of sensitive nerve endings in both men and women which can provide exquisite feelings of pleasure as a result, so it is worth investigating your back end. Just make sure you have bucketloads of water-based lubricants at hand and a well-placed pillow to bite. 23. Power play Power play exists in every relationship even if you aren't engaging in kinky sex, but it can really ramp things up in the bedroom. In BDSM circles power play refers to the practice of dominance and submission and requires advanced levels of communication, trust and intimacy to succeed, so think of it as the ultimate sex game starting in the mind. A good place to start is the good old fashioned servant and master routine, so surrender completely to your lover (or vice versa) and pander to their every whim for an incredibly intimate, powerful and sexy time.

24. Fetish The term fetish is often used interchangeably with kink to refer to any sexual activity that falls outside the mainstream appetite. But fetish is actually a subset of kinky sex, and technically refers to the fixation of an inanimate object that’s not typically sexual such as body parts - notably feet!

Fetishists tend to require the object of their attraction at hand to become sexually aroused. 'Kinky sex involves something that you enjoy adding to your experiences, as opposed to a fetish, which suggests you are dependent on that idea/experience for your sexual arousal and enjoyment and cannot experience sexual satisfaction without it,' says Sheppard.

Having said that, anyone can experiment with fetish play. To get started try toe sucking, have hot sex in front of the mirror (katoptronphilia) or try peeing on your lover (urophilia) but if you're keen on cannibal-influenced sex (vorarephilia) please stick to role play.

25. Humiliation play Erotic humiliation is the consensual use of psychological humiliation to get your rocks off, so it requires serious commitment and you need to know what you've signed up to before you get involved. If the mixed and powerful emotions of being humiliated by your lover leaves you weak at the knees, this could be the kink for you, but map out some clear boundaries before you get started and don't forget the all important safe word.

26. Switching While most kinksters have a very clear idea of where they sit on the kinky spectrum and are either dominant or submissive, some people like to switch, which means they enjoy both dominant and submissive play. Studies have found that switching can have remarkable results, as BDSM play reduces anxiety by bringing the mind to an altered “flow” state of consciousness. Where do we sign up?

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