A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

I wish you well for whatever remains of recovering from the illness, it sounds like you’ve had a rough time.

In the past, with similar issues, I’ve had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

“as asexuality to the manosphere is like Antarctica to a flat earther”

Damn, this quote is fire.

That’s a good quote. And by good, I mean helpful in understanding the cycle of assholery.

There’s not a shortage in stores, to my knowledge, but I directly know a large number of people struggling to make ends meet. Multiple people being made homeless due to gas and electric bills, or building their life schedules around opportunities to get a free or cheap meal because even people with jobs are feeling the pinch.

So mostly what many others elsewhere in the world are experiencing, it just feels extra grim because much of the problems can be directly attributed to the Tory government who are currently in power. They’re almost certainly going to be voted out next year, but I wonder whether it’ll be possible to repair the damage that’s been done since 2010.

Whilst this only applies to a minority of people who use these services, if you’re disabled, having someone else stand in line for you is a godsend.

Oof. A friend of a friend who was studying in Israel cried when Netanyahu was elected and I feel like I increasingly understand why

I know, right? I didn’t expect to watch it through to the end, but that was mesmerising

I work in science and I am interested in branching into a more scientific communication role because I’m fascinated by the ways that misinformation propagates. Bullshit that’s packaged up and delivered effectively will be received better than good science communicated poorly. The problem is that being a good scientist doesn’t make you a good scientific communicator.

I’ve found online spaces like Reddit and Lemmy to be a fun challenge along these lines — how well can I craft my point to be informative but also appealing to many. How can I tell people what they want to hear while also telling them what they need to hear? Or in other words:

Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down… 🎶

For future reference, the extra stuff is everything after the question mark. It’s not always bad stuff; the question mark is for a bunch of queries, including links to specific time stamps on YouTube videos. Adding ?t=42 to the end of a clean YouTube link will start the video at 42 seconds as an example: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?t=42

Although these “query strings” are sometimes useful, most of the time, they’re just for tracking purposes and can be removed with no issue. “If you don’t know what it does, it’s probably not needed” is a good rule of thumb

Yeah, this is why the vast majority of my Reddit interactions are deep in a thread. Some of the comments I’m most proud of have like 40 upvotes, compared to some of my most popular, which have thousands; at that scale though, the 40 feels more meaningful because it’s 40 people who have said they like the thing you wrote