“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
Here, have a study (x) showing that mothers underestimate their daughter’s physical capacity from as young as 11 months old (though in reality it’s identical to that of their son’s at the same age). And if you think that parents acting on those expectations won’t alter their children’s development, then I have a sloped bridge to sell you.
Masked government agents are killing people in the streets, abducting people from their homes in the middle of the night, and arresting those who speak out. If this were happening in another country, what would you call it? [Cartoon by Mike Luckovich]
I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.
I am not that old, and I didn’t have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.
reblog if you remember having to ration your text messages and accidentally opening the internet on your phone was the end of the world
I want to be very clear on this. You can be out drinking with your friends on Friday night and dead on Sunday because of meningitis. Does that sound a little specific? Guess why I have such a specific scenario in mind.
And getting vaccinated is an easy way to prevent that. There is no medical reason to stop recommending that vaccine. There’s no new study that shows that it’s unsafe, there’s no replacement that’s better. This is literally the government making its citizenry less safe for no reason.
When I was about to go to college my dad, who is a thoracic surgeon specialized in lung cancer, sat me down and told me I could be a stoner, but absolutely not a cigarette smoker
His logic was:
He’s operated on hundreds of cig smokers but no stoners
The average stoner doesn’t smoke nearly as many joints as a cig smoker smokes cigarettes. Many cig smokers will smoke 10+ cigs a day but the average stoner doesn’t smoke that many joints
Joints don’t have as many carcinogens
It is generally harder to quit nicotine than weed
People can have medicinal cannabis but no one has medicinal cigarettes
He was a stoner in med school and turned out fine but some of his cig smoking classmates are already dead
@buticaaba you are absolutely correct! My dad hates vapes. He says the lungs of cig smokers look black and kind of like asphalt, and that the lungs of vape smokers retain their pink color but are covered in burn like blisters. He participated in a double lung transplant on a 20 year old vape smoker and has done multiple drainings of vape smoker lungs that filled with fluids because they’re absolutely full of blisters.
When you smoke cigs you’re clogging your lungs with tar and other nasty stuff, but when you hit a vape you’re quite literally giving your lungs chemical burns.
The U.S. economy added just 50,000 jobs in December and a meager 584,000 jobs in all of 2025, according to a new report released today by the BLS. Last year was the worst year for job gains outside of a recession since 2003. And nearly 85% of the job gains happened by April. There was little hiring the rest of the year.
The unemployment rate was 4.4% in December, up from 4% in January. Wages did grow 3.8% in 2025, which was above the 3% inflation rate we experienced for most of the year.
For the full year, payroll gains averaged 49,000 a month, compared to 168,000 in 2024, according to the BLS.
Bottom line: Between rising prices and no new jobs, most Americans are struggling to pay their bills. Hence, the affordability crisis that’s apparently a “hoax” and a “con job,” according to Donald Trump.
Hence, a political reckoning for Republicans, particularly if Democrats focus on affordability in this year’s midterm elections. Key planks of such a platform should be: (1) eliminating many of Trump’s tariffs, (2) busting up monopolies, (3) giving workers more power through unions, (4) raising the minimum wage, and (5) lowering the costs of healthcare, housing, and childcare.
ALT
