Erika’s (Too) Online

In the end I made a batch of sourdough pancakes and 3 loaves of bread, and it was delicious and I should be well fed for the next while.

Oh yeah it's totally not going to actually help sex workers, which is terrible because ON THE FACE OF IT, it clearly ought to.

I would be extremely amused and delighted if this wound up supporting what's actually a pretty radical cause that is nonetheless a basic human rights issue

"The following month, Republican members of the Senate sponsored the FIRM Act—which has not yet been put to a vote—aiming to prohibit banks from factoring in 'reputation risk' when making decisions about customers."

This is literally one of the reasons sex workers can't access financial services.

Donald Trump Orders Crackdown on Politically Motivated ‘Debanking’ In a new executive order, the US president has called on federal regulators to investigate and punish banks for alleged discrimination against conservatives and certain types of business.

Something tells me that financial discrimination against sex workers doesn't count as "politically motivated debanking"

Trump's drops IVF promise, preferring to blame women for infertility Instead of treatment, Project 2025 proposes shaming patients for premarital sex

This seems like it's going to go well.

Protip: Yelling at women has never accomplished culture change to the best of my knowledge

The problem is that it’s not contamination from TERF island. They’re borrowing US legal language. It’s always been a back and forth. The main advantage we have in the US is federalism.

If you weren’t listening when trans people were saying that the goal is to basically eliminate trans people from society, maybe you should start. This is in the UK but uses US precedents because we’re in an arms race for who can have the most awful everything.

I tend to label with the intended end product, e.g. “sourdough pancakes”

Love an unmarked irrealis mood

a fun part of sourdough baking is all the bowls of gloop I leave to ferment on the counter that my poor spouse has to just believe are meant to be something NOT gloop at some unspecified future point

it’s SO FUNNY, and my spouse keeps calling it “their favorite book” and also laughing at the notes grad-school-me left in it 20 years ago

photo of a blond toddler with messy hair in a messy room covered with crayons holding a copy of Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature from ~2005. It has a bright red cover with a classic picture of bearded wise Karl Marx on it.

The wee beastie has become weirdly attached to one of my old grad school texts. I think they just like the cover?

thanks! I should definitely poke at a couple of these.

Does anyone have favorite places to read or pitch long-form think pieces? Asking for me.

Cool, enjoy your futile struggle.

bsky.app/profile/erik...

so many words to actually be on the same page ❤️

I just get so angry at the reverse purity and danger reaction that science and medicine are so good and perfect and what kind of idiot are you if you reject them or want to MIX THEM with something else? because that ALSO plays very directly into the scam sales pitch.

the frustrating part is that this in particular is so solvable, but no one wants to pay for it publicly anywhere

Yeah it’s not like anyone is actually systematically serving marginalized communities better, and so probably the response needs to center actually doing that.

Fun fact I actually have an article about how ethnography kind of fucked me up even though I was in a fairly safe and fun fieldwork context where I got off EASY.

sorry already said something similar, I just think about this a lot in particular but especially after last weekend when I had fun going to an urgent care that HAD NO EQUIPMENT. No x-ray, no EKG, no labs. It’s hard to ask people to trust medicine in the face of its sometimes deliberate uselessness.

The only remotely woo thing I’ve ever used it for was as a hangover cure in Japan, a thing it’s widely sold for 😂 which again, non-Western epistemologies etc., not exactly a quack anti-science scam in that context, although it would be in the US.

omg the Michigan bio/arch drinking night started Friday at 5 and ended.. when it ended.

I have a friend who’s both a phone psychic and a phone sex worker and both those jobs are actually kind of the same and those jobs are basically a sympathetic listening voice/advice on demand and for not THAT much money all things considered.

I also keep thinking about how much access to medical care of all kinds is such a problem for so many reasons across so many different systems and how much the scams are so often more affordable/accessible/there for you when so often the system isn’t?

Fortunately I think linganth training is a little less squishy than pure socio-cultural anthro, but like, damn if I wasn’t doing a minimally traumatic “fun” topic in a nice safe place and STILL. STILL.

Ethnography really is a mindfuck though and sometimes I sit around and think about what hearing all kinds of rhetoric about marriage and fertility and age and value did to me as a young single person in my 20s and 30s. I don’t agree and yet I have these reflexes in my head! Which are not good!

oh ffs that’s terrible