Susan Ferrari

Apropos of nothing much: where you were born, where your parents were born, where your grandparents were born—that is all luck. It doesn’t make you any more or any less virtuous

‘markwayne.’ that is some trashy shit right there. i shouldn’t have to know about a guy named markwayne until the day im finally ready to hire a monster truck chauffeur

It was in those spaces, in the late 2010s, that I realized that the fundamentalist Christians I’d grown up with weren’t the only people enforcing rigid ideas about how others should think. After arriving in New York with mainstream Democratic views, I took classes heavy on critical theories that fixated on identity categories and reflexively decried capitalism and the West. Within influential LGBTQ organizations, gay rights had given way to radical queer politics, and academic theories about sex and gender had hardened into doctrine. Widespread revulsion toward Donald Trump had narrowed the boundaries of permissible discussion on the left. The more Trump and his followers opposed something, the more we were supposed to support it. The prevailing view was that any debate within our side would become ammunition for the right.

For a long time, I feared that if I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself, I would lose the only community I’d ever really belonged in. As controversy flared up nationally about pediatric gender medicine, though, I started voicing concerns, rooted in my own experiences, over what looked to me like a rush to medical treatment. For all the sloganeering about protecting trans kids, I heard no discussion about protecting effeminate gay boys from unnecessary medicalization. When I and others asked whether progressive norms might be nudging effeminate gay boys to think of themselves as girls, no one wanted to hear it. Instead of answers, we were given the LGBTQ community’s official line. “Gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things,” the Human Rights Campaign asserts. But the confidence with which people claim that the two have nothing to do with each other is hard to square with research findings: According to data collected mostly before the recent surge in pediatric-dysphoria diagnoses, most prepubescent children who experienced gender distress went on to experience same-sex attraction and ultimately did not pursue a gender transition. Of 70 adolescents whom Dutch clinicians subjected to puberty suppression from 2000 to 2008, the overwhelming majority were attracted exclusively to people of their biological sex.

Straightforward right-wing agitprop. The idea that thousands of kids were pushed into gender-affirming surgeries because the left shuts down debate is a laughable conspiracy theory. The overwhelming social pressure is to be cis, not trans!

If we're not in academia to create safe spaces, Black graduate students get pushed out. If they, by some miracle, finish their PhDs despite the hurdles, it's accompanied by trauma and health issues.

There's been a lot of debate within the Democratic establishment about what rhetoric to use via ICE.

Well, an incumbent doesn't lose by 48 percentage points very often—and her vote on collaborating with ICE was the defining issue here.

I'm sorry to remind everyone of the existence of hte worst magazine in America, but Kansas is literally taking away trans' people's driver's licenses, and the Atlantic has decided to publish a thumbsucker about whether effeminate boys are feeling pressured to transition

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

Quote from Washington Times editorial board "[Radical liberals] don't realize that, when they express contempt for the man who holds the country's highest office, they reveal their contempt for the Americans who put him there."

Uh no...we definitely realize it.

Ad for Rothy’s shoes with the subject line “Blue check mark-style [sic]”

What on earth is “blue check-mark style” supposed to mean in the current era of Twitter?

Because we put... incels in charge of the Pentagon???

The US is broadly a country that likes to invest in science. Even among Republicans this is true. But we are governed by an administration that is opposed to science, and is using procedural tools to limit spending and increase political control over the process.

Democracy is dying in America.

ICE is a murderous secret police force. We’re about to bomb Iran for Israel. Your kids are shot at in school daily, and pedophiles run our government. There’s no healthcare, and your food is poisonous.

We need real leaders - not career politicians.

[guy who sang baby beluga] the festering belly is splitting, each half digested soul fumbling for a knife

The level of rage I have towards the New York Times that enabled this while blaming us for it is indescribable.

A tortoiseshell cat and a stuffed owl sitting side-by-side in an armchair

Kitty and sky kitty

Normalize laughing derisively in men's faces when they deserve it.

Even this is a massive understatement of the actual costs, since all of those things require advance planning, paperwork, and (in some cases) scheduling document retrievals (often only possible during work hours). The cost doesn't have to be high in dollars to be a prohibitive tax on voters.

I am seeing nonprofits lay off staff, cut services, and in some cases close outright. The very programs that help those most at risk are being run into the ground so a murderous regime can build concentration camps and ballrooms.

Tyler Austin Harper on twitter: I’ve spent the last year working on a story about the Mellon Foundation, the mega-wealthy private nonprofit that has a monopoly on humanities funding in America. The article, about how Mellon has held the humanities hostage to its progressive political ideology, is out today.

hey cool man while you were deep in research or whatever you might want to catch up on some other stuff that has happened in the world in the past year

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

I misread this as “newfangled bitches,” which I suppose still works.

Inside the climate group working everywhere but DC: ‘You can still have huge wins’ Climate Cabinet supports candidates in state and city races as the federal government ignores the climate crisis

Climate win: In Naperville, IL, which gets its power in part from a coal plant that's one of the top 10 climate polluters in the country, city councilmembers just voted to stop negotiations w/ the agency keeping them hooked on coal.

I first wrote about this here: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities Is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the last best hope for American arts and letters—or is it killing them?

This week, we have 2 critiques of the Mellon Foundation's politics, one from the most effective journalist of the anti-DEI hysteria

Pretty easy to see where this goes next--establish the narrative, then write the legislation:

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

The Atlantic piece on how the Mellon foundation is to blame for reactionaries defunding the humanities is a remarkable piece of blame shifting.

I found myself wondering whether the author would have felt as entitled to a meeting with previous presidents Earl Lewis or Don Randel as he seemed to feel with the first woman to lead Mellon...

99% of modern security products are just some company going "would you like this app that gamifies paranoia" and you going "yeag" like just don't do it. just turn it off

Okay, this is the best caption I've seen on this photo.

34,000 signing up for this work AFTER seeing their fellow citizens gunned down by federal thugs in cold blood? I'm chugging whatever the opposite of doomerism is