homhom9000

Was looking for people to follow on substack and Vicky Xu came up mentioning they're a political prisoner from China. I haven't heard of them but this peaked my interest because nothing beyond "political prisoner from China" was mentioned. Turns out they have a Wikipedia page (camera side eye). Here's an excerpt:

During a 2014 gap year, Xu taught Mandarin at a high school in Perth, Australia. While there, she encountered Mike Chinoy's documentary on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a subject censored in China. This revelation prompted her to reevaluate her previous views on Chinese politics.

Instead of returning to Beijing, Xu pursued a degree in political science at the University of Melbourne. She also completed a six-month exchange semester at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she interned at the Truman Institute. Her academic and journalistic experiences, including interviews with Chinese dissidents such as Wu Lebao, shaped her perspectives.

She learned her journalism from the best /s

Bonus persecution fetish post in why she left Twitter:

Right after Elon Musk took over Twitter, someone from the recently-fired human rights team leaked to Rolling Stone that they’d been working on an investigation into the trolling of me, and sadly found most of the hate towards me on Twitter to be “organic”.

To be clear, separate investigations found that China did send their bot armies after me, and continues to.

What the Twitter internal investigation meant was that the number of people who actually hated/hate me was greater than the number of bots the Chinese government allocated to my case. Government propaganda worked that well, making people who didn’t even know me hate my guts.

"Most of the people that hate me were real but that's propaganda at work."

Extra Bonus restack on the China never invading another country question. The time period? Ancient China. Checkmate tankies:

Substack CW: meantion of SA and Sex

Wikipedia

I have to fill in some forms and email it but the forms are a xerox of a file, saved as a PDF. So, most PDF reader and fillers are unable to recognize I'm trying to type on the document. I also need to provide a signature on the document but it's doesn't have to be a certified signature( I ran into this with adobe). Anyone know of any good software to use?

I had some luck with master pdf editor 5 but it gave the file a watermark that I had remove with libre office, and I still couldn't sign it.

I was reading through a few different topics that had significant developments in 2019 but, naturally, due to the pandemic they became pigeon holed in memory. So what were big news events of 2019 that we either forgot about or haven't gotten back to?

I can go first. [CW, content not mentioned but is related to the scandal: sexual assault, rape, gang rape] Reminds that Burning Sun nightclub scandal in South Korea that was unfolding in 2019? Looks like since that time, all participants have served and are out of jail, which is disgusting how short of a time they got. Police were involved but none were significantly prosecuted.

Affirmative action was killed and yet, we still need to hear issues about your kids not getting into school because some Black kid took their spot or whatever

In 2020, the Fairfax County School Board adopted a new, “holistic” admissions policy that the board said was intended to increase socioeconomic diversity at the school. Under the new policy, the school filled part of the incoming class with the top students at each public middle school in the area. To fill the remaining 100 seats, school officials considered a variety of factors, including academic performance, whether the applicant comes from a low-income family, and whether English is the applicant’s second language. In reviewing an application, school officials did not know an applicant’s name, ethnicity, race, or sex.

The number of Asian American students offered admission at TJ, as the school is known, fell by 19 percentage points under the new policy: Instead of receiving 73% of the offers in the new class, Asian American students received 54% of all offers made for the class of 2025. The number of offers made to Black and Hispanic students, on the other hand, roughly quadrupled.

And the conclusion parents got from this is that the new admission policy is trying to target Asians and not that top students from public schools with lower socioeconomic status'(who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic- another issue that should be targetted) were historically ignored from going to this school in favor of rich kids who had studied for the school since 3rd grade.

At least the linked article said what the real concern is

In the second round, a certain number of seats would be set aside for kids from each of the county’s neighborhoods. The move wouldn’t guarantee diversity, but it would give poorer kids a better shot.The pushback came loud and fast. Parents from McLean and other wealthy neighborhoods booed Domenech at a school-board meeting and e-mailed by the hundreds to protest. They feared their kids would be “cheated out of a seat at Jefferson,” says Domenech, and the school board killed his plan.

They don't want fair schooling admissions, they want an elite K-12 school program that keeps out the poors and undesirables. I would be lying if I said I didn't feel schadenfreude for kids still not getting in but I digress.

AA is predicated on imaginary children who have no academic ability being given golden ticket admission at the detriment of hard working smart kids. Then it causes unnecessary division between the Asian and Black community because the "lazy uneducated poor" Black kids are taking spots from the "hard working" Asian kids(subtext White kids)(yes it's just racism). When in reality, it's education was gutted so much that public schools have to "compete" with private schools on who gives a better education-which ends up being the private school that received enough funds to run in the first place (another fallout of racist policy where white kids didn't want to go to integrated schools).

I wish the energy was put towards better public education funding and not adding unnecessary legitimization to private education framed as undeserving children getting ahead.

Anyone have thoughts? I rarely get to see opinions on Affirmative Action from the left, since we have way more to worry about.

The person who robbed me in uninsured so my safety support representative denied my claim

Source: twitter

CW: talk about weight, mention of ED

I'll preface with: I'll be blunt from here on out, as I can't get better without truth. I know I'm overweight, and I've always known/always have been.

My mom spent a good amount of her life obsessing over weight (no thanks to my dad). She isn't at the level to have ED or anything but would find new fad diets to start (but not finish), have motivational food posters around, comments on how bad she or anyone else is eating and how it's a bad thing, things like that. My dad was never shy to tell me how fat I was and how fat I was getting. Said the same to my mom as well. My mom would comfort me during those outbursts, but still put me on similar fad diets or weight loss programs. None of them stuck.

What triggered the current push to lose weight were 2 things:

1. There's a traveling adult bouncy house that's coming to my area, but there is a weight limit. My friends seemed excited to go, but I'll feel so much shame to say I can't because I'm too big. I also don't want my weight to get in the way of doing other fun things down the line.

2. I plan to travel for my 30th birthday and the country is pretty fatphobic, I don't think I'll be able to (mentally) handle it and feel it'll be better to lose weight than draw unnecessary attention to myself. I visited a parent's home country a few years ago, it's been a long time since going, and my grandma couldn't say anything else to me than how big I was. I couldn't say anything back but take it, knowing the people around me were hearing it too. Some people would say something too like "She's just thick nothing wrong with that", but I just felt more shame that I couldn't say anything back, and deep down I agreed with her. It was embarrassing, and I felt embarrassed to look that way. I don't want to experience that again.

I don't even know if these are good enough reason to lose weight or if it just a self-esteem thing or both. I also can't tell if this is actual motivation or my own internalized fatphobia. Deep down, I like to imagine myself as thinner, only because it'll be more convenient to move through life that way. I'm otherwise happy.

Last year I lost a bit of weight, one of my friends complimented me on the loss, and it freaked me out. I felt perceived and observed, it opened up my mind to the fear that people were thinking negative things about my weight the whole time and only felt comfortable enough to talk about it because it was going down. The panic slowed down my progress and I gained the weight back.

I'll feel guilty abandoning the HAES cause and the fat community. Like I was only following it because I'm bigger and needed to cope. And when I get thinner, I won't need them anymore for comfort. I also feel shame losing weight because it admits that there was a "problem" and I didn't do anything about it until now. It also proved all the terrible, maybe well-meaning, people from my life right. All their comments were correct, and I was too prideful to admit it. That opens me up to being treated differently if I do lose the weight, and it makes me angry. Like my friends and family would be impressed but think "what took you so long?". Then, will I be respected more? Will more people be attracted to me now? I'll forever feel like people are only interested in being close to me because I'm thinner, just like how some people want nothing to do with me because I'm bigger.

I never really felt like my weight was an issue, it only stopped me from doing activities with a weight limit. I still exercise and whatnot without issue. But, since a young age, I was always told it was an issue, so it sits in the back of my mind constantly.

Fears:

• I'm scared that I won't succeed
• I'm scared that I will but will forever have to obsess over my weight and eating habits like my mom
• I'm scared it'll yo-yo back and forth, or I'll just gain it all again (so why even start)
• I'm scared my personality will change, and I'll get cocky like the other fit people who lost a lot of weight and get to brag about it
• I'm scared of how I will be perceived during or even after the journey, comments like "homhom lost so much weight it looks good" make me feel like people will be relying on me to keep the weight off, opening up the possibility of being a failure
• I'm scared I won't be able to eat yummy food again so I can maintain the new body
• I'm scared more people will be attracted to me <- I don't get this one, I think it's also about perception

S/N: my current Doctor has a side practice that specializes in weight loss. She never made me feel bad for being overweight, and never pushed the practice on me. All of my yearly physicals are perfect, too, minus a few vitamin deficiencies. I've also been in therapy for a while, but never felt comfortable enough to discuss weight, I don't discuss with many friends either.

That's why instead of having 1 fully functional shipping services, we have many half assed and inefficient ones.

Anyone have any other stories about the inefficiency of the innovations capitalism breeds to make me feel better?