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I feel like this would be much better suited as an article. Or like, at least with a synopsis. An hour is a long time to watch some guy sitting with his phone in his hand without at least having a preview of what he's discussing.

Stopping or stalling development in the second or third tanner stage isn't uncommon. There's woefully little study of how different medication combinations affect our bodies, but Powers suggests progesterone (p2) when attempting to continue breast development if you've stalled. But you're doing that.

It may make sense to ramp up estrogen to a method with more bioavailability. I don't know what the bioavailability of patches is, but I know that sublingual is more effective than oral, and that intramuscular estradiol valerate has the highest bioavailability. I jumped straight to injections, but I'd probably ramp up from a lower dose and availability if i were starting again, to mimic typical puberty.

We have informed consent in Massachusetts, so we have a lot of options if you find a cooperative doctor.

I also use bicalutamide to reduce testosterone rather than more common AAs, because it isn't a diuretic.

Obviously you'd have to talk to your doctor, but that's some of what I gathered in the course of my own transition.

Moving blankets are a wonderful solution. Hang them over your windows and enjoy the quiet. Get thick ones. Uhaul has good ones.

Check out this modern day Holocaust-denial level bullshit. Eventually this will be known to be just as malicious. It's weird that it isn't already.

Putin only pays to derail Democrat energy.

Oh, sorry, and Xi.

Taking a quick look at some population density maps, it's not hard to see why this might be the case. The US is very spread out in comparison to the world's denser population centers, and even in comparison to Europe. Buses and trains connecting cities and towns not only have further to go, but the funding for them is more spread out. We've got pretty robust subway and bus systems in many of our metro areas, with New York and Boston being particularly notable, but if you want to leave the city you need a car. That means that we're going to have to cater to that kind of transportation to a greater degree than a smaller country that can easily connect most of its populace with public transportation.

In a lot of the US, if you don't have access to some sort of personal vehicle or a taxi service, you're not going anywhere without a major hike. There are some cases where this could be improved, like extending commuter rails further, but it's not a fix for everywhere.

Also, in the case of states with low population density they both lack the funding and the public support for increased public services like robust transportation. Some of these payee states that can't cover the cost of their own roads anyway are skeptical of supporting public services, and their conservative legislature seems to like it that way.

We can definitely do better, but sometimes I feel like the folks who say we should just get rid of cars and all take public transport have never been out in the sticks.

I've had pretty decent luck with Notesnook. I wish they'd give it the capability to open multiple windows, but at least it hasn't lost me any writing like Notion and Obsidian did.

I literally mean political manipulation. Fully bad faith attempts to derail the Democratic party via arguments that the person in question doesn't actually believe. Again, this may not be that, but I think it's a mistake to pretend that Beehaw is somehow immune to this technique that the right is demonstrably using on other platforms.

We are in a notably leftist, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian space with users who clearly speak their minds and bring the conversations had here into bigger spaces. It is ripe for being targeted by bad actors.

To be fair, Beehaw has been clearly inundated with bad faith arguments about the election for weeks. Let's not pretend it hasn't. This may not be that, but it's not appropriate to scold users for calling out dead obvious political manipulation.

Okay, so if we take it as a given that Trump's supporters are largely, even mostly racists, how does that allow us to 'start moving forward'?

I'm honestly less and less sure that pointing fingers, even for good reason, is politically useful at all. To those who are already convinced, it seems heroic, sure. But for those who aren't? All it does is put them on the defensive and entrench their position.

I'm not saying we shouldn't call out racism when we see it, because we should. The left needs to call out injustice, because the right isn't about to do it. But like, that can't be the entirety of our political strategy. It doesn't work. It makes us look preachy and more importantly it puts the impetus for us getting our goals accomplished on racists.

When we're focusing all our political energy on decrying the wrongness of the right, our visible political identity becomes just that: criticism. That's not what wins elections. If anything, it signals to the racists on the right that this is a rallying point for them, and it gives them the opportunity to turn to others who tend to lean Republican and say, "See what monsters they think you are? We know what you're really like."

If we want to win the election, we need positive energy. We need to motivate our own base, and we need to give people on the fringes of our ideologies something that draws them in rather than something that makes them feel defensive. That doesn't mean we can't also call out injustice, but we have to do it with empowering language, not with language that shifts power to those we see as an obstacle.

This is why the Obama campaign's "Yes We Can" slogan was so effective. It allowed Obama to have a platform for addressing the obstacles he wanted to direct attention at, but it did it in a way that highlighted Democratic agency rather than simply saying "this is wrong". Each time one of these problems was touched on, he could again touch back on the positive energy of "Yes We Can" and it energized crowds and voters rather than making them feel bored and doomed.

"Or We're Fucked" isn't a very good campaign slogan, as we've seen with Biden. Harris has a chance to move away from that, and seems to be doing so. You can already feel the power shifting, because her campaign uses her personal confidence and magnetism to show voters that she can handle it. Yes, we have problems, but they're not going to crack her armor and make her stop expressing joy. Yes, the right is sinister, but we don't have to obsess over it. We can call them weird and move on with our actual work, while building confidence that we have the ability to get it done.

Dress for the job that you want.

If you want to get something done, you're a lot better off if you know that you can do it. We need to know that the injustices of the right are just some ill-tempered old fogies spouting off about a time that's passed as they slowly fade away. We need to know that their weirdness is ultimately going to lose.

Their threat is real, to be sure, but if we focus on the threat and give it power, we give ourselves nothing. We need to build that power inward, and for that we need energy that focuses on our own confidence in our ability to get things done.

Harris and Walz seem to know this, which is a great sign. Once they're in, we can put their feet to the fire on taking care of this stuff, but just pointing at the Republicans and identifying the reasons they're a large ideologically motivated threat just makes the optics seem more and more hopeless for us and more and more like the wild thrashing of a dying prey animal to the right.

If we focus on our goals regardless of any crazy bullshit they run up their flagpoles, we get to pick the focus. If we let ourselves be led about with patter and distracting hand-waving, we may well miss the plot.

Are a lot of Republicans racist? Obviously. Is laser focusing on it to the point of in-fighting going to give us the ability to render their racism irrelevant to public policy? I'm skeptical.

Too much hand wringing. We do better when we're not tiptoeing around our own words and actions terrified to sneeze.

Yeah, it very much depends on the person. I find that just my voice isn't as helpful as my voice and visible body and face, but only if I'm in a space where I feel confident and self-actualized.

A biiiig part of that though may be that I'm trans and my voice is the least passing part of me. Also my voice and text don't have dimples.