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Ohhh my God, the current VA for Foghorn Leghorn actually dubbed it.

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nothing gives off a "people online/people outside" feel as reading mainstream publications or hearing laymen say there's some kind of big thing going on and we have to call our congresspeople and our school district supervisor about it and politicize it as much as possible, only to then look at a paper by a person studying said phenomenon which says "the data we have actually says probably nothing much is going on"

#for a while in the 1970s and 80s there was another reading war and the claim of one side was that reading ability had been in decline since+ #sometime in the 60s. subtext that the hippies were at fault #but the actual student test scores people had were like. the 5th graders of a single small town. a competency test of all WWI draftees #I guess the best impression people had was changes in SAT and PSAT scores but even that was marred by the inclusion of private schools #which actually probably skewed scores HIGHER later in the century

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>be me

>reading historical paper from 1987

>cites general knowledge that there are people blaming the decline in literacy on electronic media

>scroll back to top of paper to reread "Volume 22 no. 1 (Winter 1987)"

#I guess this has to be referring to the television and the phone #you remember McLuhan? the culture wars over rabbit-ear television? all that jazz?

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me: what do you got for me, libgen?

guy wearing a t-shirt with the little sci-hub raven on it: uroflowmetry analysis comparison of cisgender women and transgender men (2019]

me: and?

the guy: ...and?

#I kid I found some more but

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there's a lot on HIV and AIDS tho, which like you really can't knock that it's good to have robust science, but most other stuff on transgender healthcare is apparently focused either on behavioral/moral/social questions surrounding HRT and doctor-patient relationships, or it's about mental health

I knew there wasn't a whole lot of research into transgender healthcare but like. there is really not a lot of research.

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I knew there wasn't a whole lot of research into transgender healthcare but like. there is really not a lot of research.

#like I knew hormone replacement therapy is relatively common for cis women but I didn't expect that a libgen search for ''hormone+ #+replacement therapy'' would turn up hundreds of papers on cis women's breast cancer risk and almost nothing on trans people #I found one. ONE. paper on libgen that didn't even compare trans women's to cis women's risk of iatrogenic breast cancer but instead asked+ #''given what we know about cis women receiving hrt what might that mean for trans women?'' #MIGHT #we haven't done a study we're just asking hypotheticals

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"He who gazes into his own asshole might take care lest he thereby become an asshole."

— Nietzsche, more or less

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if only wine were so vital to life as they say. then the petty feuds between the viticulturists of California and Europe would instead be sport to match the Olympians

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#Clarence's dad from True Romance (1993) telling the Florentine mob that Florentines were all descended from Bakersfield hillbillies

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Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.

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apparently, my biggest hater opinion is that nothing justifies the publishing of an additional 2 million books a year, no matter whether the books are celebrity memoirs or travel guides or recipe books or fiction or whatever

#alternatively you could accept that millions of people don't make a living wage on only writing books

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sometimes being on social media feels like being in a competition to see who can find the most convoluted, abstract way of calling someone a jerkoff

#not that it isn't often funny

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