There is evidence of a number of uses of vernacular written language in archeological sites. The matter of literacy as mentioned around the advent of the Doomsday Book was not a measure of who could read common vernacular they way literate tends to mean today. It was a measure of who had completed their letters. A set form of schooling that covered about six years worth of language education and numeracy. So it’s kind of hard to track actual literacy rates given sources at the time because the bar to count as “literate” by census records was specific. The majority of college level modern users of language would be unable to clear that bar. I would not be considered literate because I can only write vernacular. So you are semi-correct in that sense yes only nobles and men of the church were “literate” by standards of the time.

There are a number of archeological finds throughout the medieval ages that showed a general upward trend of the skill of being able to read and write fairly basic missives amongst humble people. A lot of our surviving evidence of peasant writing is on very rudimentary materials like bark and it is very practical use. People learned the skill from other people for doing stuff like writing IOUs or orders for goods or as reminders and most examples that survived were under 20 words in length. In a lot of places being able to read and write wasn’t considered remarkable enough to record as a special skill unless you could do it in Latin. This is why you find books written for common people like the Dite de Hosebondrie ( Husbandry) for the peasant farmer or guides for common housewives in the 13th century in “rustic” language styles. Books were uncommon and expensive and you had to go to them to read them but the people who they were written for weren’t always nobles or clergy.

https://www.medievalists.net/2024/11/medieval-daily-life-on-birchbark/

Not quite true that nobles and priests were the only ones that knew how to read. Lower classes absolutely knew how to read they just didn’t use that knowledge for writing books - they used it for communicating and for legal purposes. The lower classes were actually quite litigious and a subsect of them required literacy as a means of self advocacy, occasional resistance and survival.

The concept of the peasantry being unschooled, idiot commons without the brains and means to aquire knowledge has always been a way to keep you and I, people who came after as their legacy, distanced from their history so we could instead align ourselves with the rich and powerful who could be seen as the “creators” of society and culture.

Those peasants and serfs were a lot more like us than people think.

Looking at humans from a capitalist standpoint, since we are living in a highly mechanized and optimized labor society there will always be a surplus of labour. Not everyone needs to work and over time less and less people will need to work to sustain the whole. Defining humans as worthy to live or not based on their capacity to work means you accept some humans as surplus, fungible and ultimately liquidatable because the system has no use for them even if they are healthy and ablebodied.

This is not how you treat people. This is how you appraise livestock.

If you have ever attempted to change your name you know it is way more annoying to change your name than accept someone else’s change of name. The amount of admin it takes to make that update in your social circle even before you try and make it legal is a test of social fortitude and willpower.

Remember when someone is changing their name they are very aware of the imposition of the mental load they are placing on you. Grace goes a long way.

Not quite. The Conservative party mostly put their money on a bunch of culture war stuff and were aiming to defang a bunch of regulatory bodies. Carney is basically an Old School conservative who is trying to appeal to the conservative votership who ditched the actual Conservative party by pulling a bunch of moves that flatter areas that are dependant on oil so he can compete with what are essentially American psy-ops to goad Canadian resource heavy provinces into making policy which favours private American business.

He’s trying to be a unifying force since most of the country was going to vote blue and the political situation with the states requires a lot of solidarity. He is basically a fiscal conservative Monarchist wet dream while keeping quiet on not rolling back Progressive social agendas of yesteryear. So… Lesser of two evils mostly.

It’s not just family and upbringing it’s kind of enforced by basically everyone a little bit. House is a mess - oh (fem partner) must be struggling poor dear. The state of the house just sits in a corner of their mind all day everyday like a weight dragging them down like the telltale heart.

Once you see the effect of it you can’t really unsee it.

No kidding. The enforcement is often kind of brutal too. As a couple the house not being clean creates a pervasive sense of judgement that falls on the feminine half of a couple. It doesn’t matter if they are a killer breadwinner with an amazing career and winning at life the messaging and conditioning from childhood and enforced by older friends and relatives is still that they are at their core a failure if their house doesn’t meet regulation. That judgement is not extended to the masculine partner because he’s kind of expected to be a hapless subordinate who maybe helps but is not responsible for it. That old “sorry about the state of the place” is practically just begging for social leniency from deeply ingrained shame.

If your fem partner is neurotic about cleanliness that’s basically why. They are made to feel horrible about themselves when company comes calling.

I did not call Americans morons nor was my intention to tell you what to do to solve the problem. I simply told you why there isn’t more help coming from the outside. It’s not a matter of people deliberately sitting on their hands.

Unless American leadership breaks the International rules enough to get the sign on of multiple countries to work in concert against America in a world war you are on your own because of rules designed to allow countries to self govern. Other countries cannot alter another country’s government for good or for ill. This is not an indictment of the voting habits or a rebuke of the process of citizen power the American public.

Whether you or any other country solve your problem democratically or through violent collapse the world is handcuffed. There are civil wars going on right now in other countries and the rules are the same for them as they are for you. The world will recognize whatever government is effectively in power once the dust settles but outsiders cannot lawfully tip the scale and go kingmaking unless one side of the conflict violates the rules of war. War itself is not internationally illegal. The US falling into a full on civil war is kosher from an international law standpoint.

The USA has a historic tendency to ignore that international legality and go kingmaking themselves utilizing the resource of spies and subterfuge ONLY because they are singularly powerful enough on the world stage to get away with it. America essentially declared itself a world police force and the sheer infrastructure they have worldwide means that no individual country can compete. Look for yourself how many bases America has on foreign soil compared to every other country. How many armaments and millitary force and how, their ethics policies of their intelligence agencies differ. America is singularly unique. It may be why you believe the rest of the world will help you “fix” things but that’s not in the interests of the rest of the world.

Foriegn leaders are “standing up to America” but they are doing so by cutting themselves free of American coercion for the security and benefit of their own citizens. By framing America out of the picture and moving reliance to other countries and letting America starve itself once the supply chain contracts and treaties expire they will decrease American influence on world policy. It doesn’t benifit those countries to try and swoop in and shore up a crumbling empire which has held guns to their heads for generations. International help currently isn’t coming for American citizens. Unless your country fixes it’s problems itself fairly soon the “standing up to America” that is happening will level your economy and diplomatic power as other governments profit from the diminishing of American hard power that will continue for decades.

Believing that someone is or should be coming to your rescue may not be in your best interest. Not when so many stand to gain long term from your division.

The word in trans communities for this is “ew-phoria”. Calling it a fetish is also kind of… Not great. Fetishes are tied into sexual gratification and gender euphoria /dysphoria is an independent mechanism that ties more closely with identity. It doesn’t make trans people horny and the idea that that’s what is what is happening is used often to trivialize trans experiences.

Think of the typical nature of being cis as (mostly) ascribing no value to sexually dimorphic physical features. Like you can have feelings about whether those things are attractive and the validation you receive for meeting a social standard but that’s an external reinforcement system working its way inward.

Being trans is the opposite. Every sexual characteristic is not value neutral. Perceiving sex characteristics in relation to yourself either makes you feel amazing like someone has shot dopamine directly into your soul or bad like you are not actually a human. All forms of perception of these characteristics causes this effect and it is automatic and instant. Logically even if you believe these things should be valueless, obtainable by all genders if you have this feedback system you don’t get to decide on how or what these things make you feel or in what proportion. The source of the feedback is entirely internal which is why it is often is at complete odds with external systems of validation and if you tried to logically explain it or lessen these feelings with logic you often just can’t. The heart doesn’t only want what the heart wants the heart has a shock collar on you.

In the case of facial hair particularly because it’s not something you have to experience with your eyes to know it’s there touch is fundamentally important. Remember dysphoria is more than being strictly about being perceived by others it is about being perceived by yourself. Other people looking at you and using your pronouns is just another way of perception of yourself. Like other people performing the job of being a mirror. Experiencing your own body however is in things like how you move, what bits of your body bump into things, your height, your weight distribution. Imagine if everytime you touch your face the slight scratch of the existence of thicker hair caused your neurological system to fire depression meds directly into your system. That’s what’s happening. Touch perception.

Sometimes this internal reward systems finds things about a social portion of experience that people that sucks really bad but because it equates to other people reacting to your body’s sexually dimorphic characteristics when it happens to them it hits the same feel good button of other positive external recognition by a third party of having those sex characteristics.

So even while you experience the massive illogical dopamine hit from the internal reward system you can recognize logically at the same time that the phenomenon causing the reaction is a societal problem that is bad and should not exist.

Hence Ew-phoria.

Because that would require either a terrorist action or a bunch of Internationally illegal tampering with American Democracy or declaring war against the World power with the the largest standing army and deepest pockets for arsonal. The rest of the world is effectively held hostage while Americans solve their own problems.

It’s the reason why a lot of bad people in power stay in power. There can be tariffs and sanctions and all manner or soft power deals but the rules are rules. Sovereignty and a right to run your country mostly the way you want is protected as a right and and the US used its positioning as the least devastated megapower/millitary supremacy post WWII to basically bend the world over and get a lot of acceptions to a lot of rules.

Okay. Can we take a minute to just acknowledge that this comment has a little neurotypical ableism and regional bias? Some people literally need more context than others do to understand the tone of a text. Just because you do not need that assistance with context clues in play doesn’t mean everyone also doesn’t need that.

Kindness and extending a little help costs us so little.

Honestly, from most of my experience in dealing with fox news poisoned people who are not total wastes irl : pedophillia is an actual hard line. Most of them have this fantasy of if they found a child predator that they would beat their face in. It is the act inexcusable.

They also are quite fond of the language of conspiracy theories and just the implication has gotten some of them to start thinking.

Will actual hard proof and just hearsay of not just Trump but a number of his people hit some of them like a truck? Yes. Will it sway every Republican? No. But considering how much of their power is based off the Evengelical idea that they are morally on high I would expect a shockwave. His support is already diminishing but add in the firey rage of having a known pedo in that holy of holy offices valued so intensely by the American-supremacists of the crowd and some frozen gears will start moving and every little bit helps.

In the case of JKR that talking point kind of sailed on. Nobody really cares if you enjoy something second hand or where the money and interest played out years ago. The books, the old movies, the merch you picked up at a garage sale…

Problem is when you support the latest and greatest newly licenced thing that lines her pockets with cash because she is USING that cash to do direct damage to the community. She’s been financially backing anti-trans groups and lobbying in the UK. Just ONE of her little go fund mes was chipping in a 700,000"£ donation to the lawyers who got gender recognition certificates made worthless in the UK Supreme Court. Ticket sales to events, merch deals, video game titles, remakes… It propells demand which means a nice big chunk of that coin passes right through her pockets and right into directly funding her hate and her fans go on to brigade trans support spaces which often are necessary emergency mental health support for weeks after a big release online. More than one suicide can be laid at the feet of these mobs.

The difference between that and Kevin Spacey is at least he’s moldering quietly.

I imagine the closest we are gunna get modern wise is Ostrich meat which tastes like the midway point between chicken and beef.

I feel validated in an opinion I have had for ages : that in all the talk about 2nd Amendment rights Americans do guns are nothing but a security blanket they clutch to make them feel like Democracy will be saved or be maintained as long as they clutch their emotional support weapon. They will watch rights be stripped from them, their neighbours carted off in wagons and none of them will shoot even if they have the weapon on their person while this is happening. They will protest, they will write and verbalize their dissent and they will appeal to authority and band together democratically but the ownership of the weapons themselves are useless. Realistically if someone from the government comes for them they will likely go quietly because no one is coming to save them. At that point it’s basically over. The system is too big to fight.

The real resistance is in numbers not armaments. It doesn’t matter what you are wielding if you have solidarity and organization and the bravery to misbehave. Resistance can be in attacking the gears that make things run by not doing your job or doing it poorly. Refusing to comply in a multitude of ways like sending things to the wrong place or making ‘mistakes’ that cost time and effort to fix. A government can only force compliance so much and at the end of the day runs on good faith. Guns are a distraction to jingle in your face so you stay isolated. Building walls between you and other humans with dreams you will defend your own little fort against the tides of tyranny.

I spent months at a deadlock with a temp name that was just kind of fine. Asked a few cis people how they felt about their name and got a resounding set of “meh!”

Went with my temporary placeholder name. It doesn’t have to be great. It just doesn’t have to hurt.

I spent months at a deadlock with a temp name that was just kind of fine. Asked a few cis people how they felt about their name and got a resounding set of “meh!”

Went with my temporary placeholder name. It doesn’t have to be great. It just doesn’t have to hurt.

The person who is ridiculed because they are different, disowned from their families because they can’t meet the demands of pretending to be someone they are not, denied the social accommodation that makes their lives comfortable, refused housing because of how they look, denied the health care that helps them feel centered because it creeps out the people who do not have their condition… How can their mind be still?

Trans health is dependent on the people around us the same way your health is dependent on the people around you. Trans joy is as possible as trans suffering. The difference is in other people allowing it to happen.

Sad part is it doesn’t matter if they retract the news statement people are already thinking the guy is some kind of trans avenger or something. The trans people are enemies part gets screamed. The “it was a mormon cis guy who has the parlance of the average 22 year old internet troll” gets whispered real quiet.

Depends. Vancouver is one of the most queer and specifically trans inclusive places in the world at present. Culturally speaking there aren’t a lot of places where a lot of queer accommodation is almost mainstream. Gender neutral bathrooms are becoming wider spread with segregated bathrooms often including signage specifically welcoming trans people. Our informed consent system for trans healthcare is something the UK trans folk have been envious of for years on years and there is a current practice of trans acceptance in schools and vibrant villiage dating scenes that take trans acceptance as a mission.

It isn’t perfect, certainly transphobia still exists here but it’s about as “bastion” like as you are gunna get.