A group calling itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense showed up at a protest this week carrying weapons.

Hey folks,

I was wondering if y'all had some suggested readings on gender and gender identity.

I feel like it's an area in which my understanding is noticeably weak and scaffolded on a more holistic understanding of social constructions and identity with a bunch of haphazard theoretical analogies gluing things together. There are a bunch of things that fall into understanding blackholes when you build the understanding by relating things to political and racial identity struggles lol.

I've seen some explanations geared towards other cis folks that never landed because it often relied on bringing awareness towards elements of gender that are typically unperceived but still seemingly strongly registered (I saw someone provide a partial explanation to some guys by having them imagine being referred to via gendered terms geared towards women. Seemed to have triggered some innate sense of discomforted but to be frank I didn't understand why, I've let plenty of folks do so as long as it didn't seem intentionally malicious).

I plan on squeezing trans liberation beyond pink or blue in my next few books but was looking for further things to engage with.

Thanks comrades

I've been finding myself struggling with insane levels of burnout over the past few weeks and was wondering how others navigate it. I used to feel similar burnout as a child/teen and just withdraw for months or at one point years at a time with minimal socialization or just let hyperfocus consume me and get absorbed into a singular hobby often at the detriment of other things. When both of those don't work I would just set myself up to be overwhelmed with an impossible stack of tasks to induce anxiety as a driver. The first two I feel I can't do anymore due to being a lot more disastrous in adult life and also antithetical to what my current goals are.

I recently finished a master's program and around when that high ended I noticed the burnout creep in. I am trying to set other goals such as organizing a local chapter of the org I joined but all of my current goals are hinged on other people and their pace which I don't want to rush but I feel this soul-deep exhaustion creeping in that I know tends to suck me into listless and lethargy. I can't fully rest, but can't charge forward to maintain the runner's high anymore either and it's driving me a bit nutty.

A thread here talking about "ahh" had an evil twin version appear on . Over here, just about all the criticism was against the idea of self-censorship and hating it based on that idea. Over on the other side, I saw a bunch of people hating it for that sure, but a bunch was also talking about how, "uneducated" it makes you sound and how it's similar to things like the "aks" pronunciation of ask, the phrase "gyat damn" or "finna". The whole time I'm reading that wondering if they're that unaware of where the association comes from or if they're just dog-whistling. Unlike their sweet dems, they seem almost unaware of how their behavior is akin to the smiling Fox. (Hint as to the common denominator between these terms: they're staples of AAVE).

Usually, I'm not too sensitive to microaggressions, having grown up on the internet, but sometimes I'd rather them just call me the slur and get it over with .

I do want to express thanks to folks here for somehow avoiding that, I think I read every comment in the thread here and didn't see it once.

I have more thoughts such as how it seems to interplay with respectability politics etc. but I would probably want to make this more coherent first and I'm typing this during my break at work. Mostly needed to vent. The real lesson is I need to avoid