Perhaps they did, but it was a first past the post voting system and resulted in a hung parliament.

I mean, I’m anti-meds for treating exogenic issues when something can be done for those exogenic issues.

If I’m sitting at home with the heater on and I start feeling warm and flushed, I wouldn’t take an ibuprofen (as an anti-pyretic) to bring my temperature down, I’ll turn the heater off.

It’s the same for mental health, if the sole source of the stress/sorrow is external, medication is nothing more than a bandaid, which is better than nothing if the exogenic influence is outside your individual control (which it often is)… But we are at a point where the majority of people with mental health issues are experiencing a level of exogenic influence and there are enough of us that if we organised we could change the factors that are causing or worsening our mental health symptoms.

So it bears talking about, is medication always appropriate?

Medication is important, especially for endogenic conditions, and medication is life saving. But if you have exogenic depression and the meds aren’t working, the new prescription is protest.

This is what is breaking my mental health.

Life is not guaranteed to be good, nature is cruel and has no rhyme or reason. People die and suffer in horrific ways every day because of nature.

Why the fuck are we adding to that cruelty!?

The chaos of the natural order of the universe sucks and you’ve got to learn to cope with that. But I’ve always found that side of life easy to accept because it is so inevitably universally unavailable.

I was born with a genetic illness, it causes lifelong disability due to structural deformity, but can also just randomly cause fatal aneurysms in young people. That’s nature, that sucks, but hey, what are you going to do? Figure out how to do what you need to do to live and live it.

But then I’m born into a country with no disability discrimination laws, and no right to access laws. Fortunately we had public healthcare and public disability services, and public welfare services, and when I was younger a disability act was finally brought in (though it’s often just lip service)

Growing up I felt safe and secure knowing I had a good social support system…but the public disability services shut down and was replaced by an insurance model, the public healthcare has been functionally split to a semi public copay system and a private paid system, and the welfare pension is so far below the poverty line that people on a disability pension don’t earn enough money to meet the eligibility for public housing.

(yes, You can be too poor, for public/social housing.)

And it’s one thing for law and legislation to lag behind the needs of the people, it’s another thing altogether when an individual or small group of individuals in power systematically impose laws to remove the support and resources you used to have, for barely no more reason than “they want to”.

I can’t help but feel that a significant portion of my suffering is the result of the few people in the local conservative government that shut down the public disability service providers because it was “costing too much” … Even though the insurance model they replaced it with costs the government more and supports less people than the previous system, and supports them less effectively.

And how do you live with that?

Like it’s one thing for nature to have cursed me to suffer, but a human being heard my story, and countless stories like mine, and still said “nah, fuck em” when it came to vote.

We are living with psychopaths and sociopaths in complete control over our lives. The suffering is happening for a reason, and the reason is that those who are causing the suffering are enjoying the situation (because it gives them money, power, influence, or straight up sadism)

How the fuck do you reconcile that and “learn to sit with your emotions” in one CBT session and in the very next session my therapist is going to teach me about “enforcing my boundaries”… How do I enforce my personal boundary to get the homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic and ableist government to stop abusing me? Oh, I don’t, I sit with that emotion.

I can’t afford the pills they recommend.

I would say women are revengeful.

Vindictive is an “unreasonable” desire for revenge, and what makes the desire “unreasonable” is going to depend on every individual situation, so I don’t think you can generalise that women are vindictive.

I would also hesitate to use the term “vengeful” too, due the nuance of vengeful being a perceived injustice over revengeful being for a known injustice. Again that’s always going to depend on the specific situation and context of what has happened.

When you look at being revengeful through a broader lens, I disagree that women are more prone to revengefulness or vindictiveness than men, I think the ways women express their revenge is gender-specific and can draw more attention to itself than masculine approaches to revenge.

So I think it’s fair to generalise that people in general have the capacity to feel revengeful, and as a marginalised class women are often revengeful, and as additional minor injustices are compounded on systemic injustice, the revenge of women is perceived as vindictiveness.

But that doesn’t mean women are vindictive.

I’m a sweet Tramsvestite, from Transitsexual, Trainsylvania~~~~

The only prison rape jokes I’ve heard in the last 10 years are about paedophiles “getting what they deserve in prison”

Which I didn’t really think was a funny haha joke, just a “I don’t know how to respond or fathom paedophilia, it’s deeply uncomfortable and unsettling…haha”

I also personally don’t know how I feel about those kinds of jokes.

The rule in comedy is never punch down, but hopefully that’s where you’ve got to aim if you’re targeting a convicted child molester, I don’t think I’m better than anyone, I believe all human life has equal inherent value…but I also think I’m better than a child molester and that given control of a runaway trolley, their life has less value.

That sure is some cognitive dissonance, so cracking a joke at the expense of a paedophile in prison is easier than confronting my own opinions towards the value of human life.

Wow, I’m not American so I didn’t realise Texas was holding out that long, wasn’t Massachusetts offering state sanctioned marriages in like 04/05? That timeline is mind blowing! To have one state doing so much for equal rights while the other fights in court to actively do less.

I thought here in Australia, Tasmania was bad waiting until 1997 when their overseas neighbour to the north (Vic) was 1980… Then we didn’t get any form of same sex marriage until 2017.

But 2003!

You have actually broken my brain with this fact…

If the Queer Eye fans of today watched an OG episode I think they’d pass out from shock.

I was living under a rock when the new Queer Eye came out and some of the young residents at work were raving about it. The things I kept overhearing had me thinking “They can’t possibly be talking about catty old Carson”

The homophobia of the 2000s paired perfectly with all the other toxic body shaming and slut shaming the media was doing at the time.

Bridge building was exactly right. It was about getting the language of “gay” into the homes of everyday people and in a tone that was happy and humerus, not divisive. Yeswere the butt of the joke, but at least it was just a joke, unlike in the years prior when it was violence.

We still have the language in the household of everyday people, but in many households the only reason the word “gay” gets brought up is for someone to spit at it and praise Trump. The happy humour is lost, the tone is shifting to vitriol and if we’re not careful the next step will be violence again.

Yeah, having lived on the cusp as well, it sucked but it sounds like you and I both managed to catch the better half of that cultural transition.

In the early 2000s, coming out of the 90s it felt like every week someone you knew got jumped on the street and was in hospital getting their face sewn back together.

A boy at a school near me was violently raped and murdered by 2 other boys who then claimed gay panic as their legal defence. I remember the details of this case (which I won’t go into, it was vile) because it was so close to home and so grotesque, but stories like this were a seasonal occurrence across the country.

I myself coped my fair share of physical trauma, I was lucky to only get bashed once and I was with a group, but I was less lucky when it came to correctional sexual assault.

And it felt like this for most of my youth, and I pushed to build confidence and assertiveness and develop vigilance skills to protect myself.

Slowly over time I felt less afraid, and it was only in hindsight, as the “FCK H8” campaign started spreading in my country from America, it dawned on me that I didn’t feel safer because I was getting more confident, I felt safer because it was safer. Sooooo much safer.

And that was just in ~8 years of my adolescent life in the 2000s, so I can extrapolate from that how bad it was in the 8 years before I was paying attention to the world, and the 8 years before that, and before that.

My state is currently considered the more gay friendly, ironic seeing as we were the last state to reduce the criminal sentence for homosexuality from the death penalty in 1949…but then my state was the 2nd state to decriminalised homosexuality in 1980 compared to the last state in my country, 1997. So I guess we picked up queer steam.

For added historical context, after it was decided that death might be a little to harsh a punishment, “attempted buggery” (aka, two men flirting with each other) could carry a 7 year sentence, and buggery “with or without consent” anywhere from 14 to life.

In 1957 they re-opened a whole ass 19th century goal exclusively to house hordes of gay prisoners who had been arrested for gay crimes.

If you’re interested in some history, dig into “Cooma” the world’s first and only (hopefully) gay prison. Police inflated arrests with entrapment stings to stock the cells because the prisoners were being used for medical experiments around chemical castration and conversion for scientific research and “rehabilitation”, the men were tortured in an attempt to “cure” them so they would be “safe to release”, the prison conveniently lost their archives so they can’t say when they stopped experimenting on gay prisoners, but the last gay prisoners to be sent to Cooma was around 1982.

Edit: I rambled so long I never made an actual point.

It sucked for us in the 2000s, but it was exponentially worse for every year you go back. That’s a trend I want to continue, I want kids 10 years from now to say “wow it’s tough being queer, there’s so much queer baiting in the media” because it would make me so happy for that to be the biggest problem gay kids face.

I don’t say “back in my day things were worse” to mean “be greatful and shut up” but rather “wow I can’t believe the young people in our community are still suffering, at least they’re not being physically harmed like it was back in the day, but this is still not okay, let’s look at where we came from to remember where we are going, and keep fighting for our rights, together”

My talent as a homophobic millennial knew no bounds in the 2000s

I’d unironically call some straight girl a raging lesbo for wearing old burkes, then jump on the GSA forum and tell some teenager “it’s okay to be gay, it gets better, when I first came out you’d get bashed so things are improving” like I wasn’t part of the ongoing problem…

What was wrong with us back then!?

(I was definitely transphobic AF back then too! I have no excuses for it, especially because it turns out I tick that box as well)

Like what?

No no no, we get to eat the tacos in the kitchen while we wait for the jello to set.

I’m a stay at home wife, I make sure my husband has a homecooked meal that I slaved over for hours! Like corned beef in aspic with celery jello salad.

Oops I didn’t make enough for myself, that’s okay I already had a taco as a snack, and my husband works so hard all day to support my life here in this kitchen so he deserves the whole bowl of jello to himself.

While he’s eating I’ll just add some things to the shopping list, we need more marichino cherries, and we’re out of rat poison.

I mean even just from a totally innocent position, I’m exhausted right now and in the past month I’ve almost died falling down the stairs 5 times from the sleep deprivation (the ER is getting sick of my clumsiness)

I know I’ll sleep better once my cohabitation separation is finalised.

This morning I brushed my teeth with my partner’s athletes foot ointment. Didn’t even realise it tasted like ass and felt like wax until I was trying to spit it out and wondering why it was clinging to my teeth. I’m just not human anymore, I am physically and mentally burnt out carrying the entire cognitive and household labour load of the relationship for the last 10 years.

Wow, it’s almost as if other places exist and had different responses to covid.

A quick google would reveal that police were used to enforce lock down measures in places such as UK and AUS.

Victoria Police alone gave out 39,985 covid lock down violation orders in the 2.5 years we had lockdown orders in place.

The Engagement party fined we all remember. Idiots.

General lockdown law breaking

Including such crimes as, playing video games with 3 people in a lounge room, and having 9 people over for dinner.

And this is why I loved being a community education teacher.

I get to decide where we’re going for an excursion/field trip. I choose which activities we do. I not only get to participate but I’m expected to actively get involved to encourage my students. I get paid to do it.

I’m literally living the dream.

I had a student ask “what’s the big red building on [Street]” and enough students were curious that we spent 20 minutes talking about the building. It’s the pipeworks and gas mains museum and I’ve wanted to visit for years but never had time or justification for the adult entry fee …so you bet we took a field trip the following week!

(another upside to community ed, we can plan and initiate a field trip on 20 minutes notice. Last week the toilets in the classroom started spilling over and we couldn’t physically be in the building, but class had just started, so we grabbed our bags, I grabbed the field trip kit, and we walked to the train and went to the beach. “Change of plans, maths class is cancelled, we’re doing environmental science today, who’s ready to learn about coastal ecosystems”)

A few staff members and I have joked that we’d save so much money just ditching our school building entirely and literally every class is a field trip. Field trips are some of the most fun, most engaging, and honestly sometimes the most effective ways to learn something. Place based learning and hands on learning utilises a different part of our developmental skills compared to classroom based learning, as well as community engagement and life skills developed from getting out into the community and learning how the world works.

But the way America does excursions and field trips is odd to me, because they’re often expensive and you get a chartered bus and it’s a curated experience. Vs Australian community ed where a field trip is often “walking to the local train station to talk to the station staff and learn about the ticketing system” it’s free and is like 40 minutes out of our class then we walk back to school and you do several things like that a week.

This is super helpful! The legend in question is my great grand aunt (that term is so much less of a mouthful!)

Most of the people I call “Aunty” are my cousins, and the people I call “Cousin” appear to be my 1st cousin once removed, 1st cousin twice removed, and 2nd cousins once removed. (we’ve definitely been using “removed” wrong in my family, we would say “removed” for the lateral move across the tree, not the vertical parent child line. Eg I would say “she’s my 2nd cousin” but I’d mean 1st cousin once removed, or I’d say “he’s my cousin twice removed” but what I’d mean is, he’s my 3rd cousin)

We’re definitely still going to stick with our age based language in our family. No point getting clinical when the language we use is about the dynamics we hold. if you’re 20+ years older you’re my aunty/uncle, if you’re the same age you’re a cousin, if you’re younger than me you’re my nibbling. It’s all vibes based relationship terminology.

Lasik is a great example, thank you!

Though I wouldn’t put glasses in the same category because it’s not a cure, it’s a medical device to correct the medical issue and it requires you to use the device for the rest of your life, if you stop using the device your symptoms immediately return, that’s not a cure. Glasses are the equivalent of insulin for diabetes. It’s treatment, not cure, without it, the disease takes full effect, but with it, yes you will be functionally cured as long as you have your glasses/insulin available, but even when functionally cured, you will always be a person with low vision/diabetes and always need ongoing treatment…until there’s a “cure”.

If my poor vision was cured by getting glasses I wouldn’t be squinting while I’m typing this in size 18 font (my glasses are in the other room and I’m too lazy to get them), and I wouldn’t suddenly be completely disabled by my lack of vision when it rains (glasses need to come with windscreen wipers! I can’t see shit in the rain)

I’m really struggling to think of any, most coming to mind are bacterial or viral, though I’m certain there are thousands of chronic human pathologies we’ve cured, some we probably don’t even remember curing because the terminology is so outdated (though sadly dropsy is still a thing, and frustratingly consumption isn’t eradicated yet …but it could be!)

Can you give me a starting point if you’ve got one on your tongue? I’d like to journey down the Wikipedia rabbit hole tonight!

“you people are next” doesn’t sound direct to me because “next” for what? Next for a random vigilante to shoot, next to die in general, next to face bad PR?

My interpretation also leaves no room to imply I’ll be the one actioning whatever the “next” thing is. I’d use “you’re next” in the same use case as “karma will get you” or “the universe will balance out your luck” it’s more of a cosmic wish than a rise to action.

It’s not just about the money, seeing the UHC letter in your mailbox when you are not expecting it will bring back flashes of that night and that trauma.

It’s like knocking on the door of a veteran at random intervals throughout the year too show them pictures of the war. It’s dehumanising.