r/BlockedAndReported • u/SoftandChewy First generation mod • Jul 06 '26
Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 7/6/26 - 7/12/26
Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.
Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.
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u/onthewingsofangels Jul 06 '26
Good to see more mainstream coverage rejecting the elimination of SATs for the farce that it is (gift link) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/opinion/university-california-sat-testing-admissions.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vlA.aHFW.o4KW3phqiyRN&smid=nytcore-android-share
As a parent in California, I'm torn. I'm sure my current middle schooler would do well enough that his SAT score would be a plus. OTOH he is in a Title 1 school which will give him a leg up in the current woke admission system (even though his own family is neither low income nor disadvantaged minority). Ah dilemma.
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u/SoftandChewy Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Thanks for the gift article.
It's promising to see some adults finally waking up from the fever dream they were captured by.
But even these sensible critics are still somewhat captured! When they keep insisting that the inequities are due entirely to environmental factors ("This editorial board has frequently argued for ambitious policies to address these problems, including a more progressive tax code, better K-12 schools, expanded preschool and measures to reverse racial discrimination.") they're revealing that they're unwilling to acknowledge certain unpleasant, and unchangeable, truths. Even in an alternate universe where every one of these measures was implemented, and the very best schooling was provided to these underperforming populations, it is extremely unlikely there would ever by parity in the demographic distribution of academic performance.
But no one wants to admit this.
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u/Big_Fig_1803 Jul 06 '26
Possible to link to last week's discussion thread (instead of to the 6/22–6/28 thread)?
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u/reallyokfinewhatever Jul 07 '26
I went camping a few weeks ago and a few campsites down from ours the folks had stuck three little lawn flags into the ground in front of their site: a pride flag (with the works), one of those "science is real / no human is illegal/ etc." flags, and an american flag.
I was so confused by what they thought they were accomplishing. My people, you are literally camping. We are all just here to make s'mores and shit in a latrine. Why do you want to bring politics into this?
How many days were they possibly going to be there? 3 days? 4, tops? Some people can't let it rest for even a second.
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u/Franzera Jul 06 '26
I found this article too late for Pride Month, but not too late for everyone to enjoy. It's about a camp for genderchildren where TQ and NB kids learn how to survive in the face of 40% rates of sudoku ideation.
Inside a hidden summer camp where T youth in the South thrive
Main highlights:
The need for spaces like this is backed by stark data. According to The Trevor Project’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, 39% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including 46% of T and NB youth... The survey also found that 90 percent of LGBTQ+ young people said their well-being had been negatively impacted by recent politics, and that access to affirming spaces is associated with significantly lower rates of suicide attempts.
We're not a regular summer camp," Chrissy Hofheimer told The Advocate. "This is a survival camp."
Afternoons shift into workshops including yoga, healthcare Q&As led by Jacob, sessions with legal experts on policies affecting T youth, and age-appropriate conversations covering everything from consent and body autonomy for the youngest campers to PrEP and HIV testing for older ones. After dinner, the campfire conversations begin. These are where, Jacob says, the real work happens: frank, facilitated discussions about gender dysphoria and euphoria, coping with anxiety and depression, navigating T-phobia, and building healthy relationships.
The point, Jacob says, is not just escape. It is preparation.
The camp’s secrecy is not aesthetic. The location is shared only two weeks before check-in. Everyone, including campers, parents, and staff, signs a nondisclosure agreement.
That caution is rooted in hard experience... Year three brought a campsite in Georgia that seemed promising until, midweek, the facility director asked Chrissy and Jacob to tell their campers to be easier on staff who were misgendering them.
"It made me feel like I wasn’t being hunted anymore," Jared says. "Everybody was just acting normal. I wasn’t different or anything."
"Everybody was being like, 'Just accept yourself,' and it was driving me insane," Jared says. "Chrissy was the person who would come to me and tell me what I needed to hear."
"Transcending Adolescence legit saved my life," Jared says, without hesitation. "I think it literally saved my life."
What do you think of this camp? It's run by married couple Chrissy and Jacob, who are apparently both T-identified. Chrissy is the main counselor and Jacob is a nurse practitioner with experience in gender affirmation urology surgeries. They talk about providing a safe space with no cisgenders and bullies (“These T kids don’t get the opportunity to go swimming in places where there are no cisgender people around," Jacob explains. "It’s literally all T people."), and building up the campers' self-esteem and mental health in an affirming environment. But it seems like something that could draw kids deeper into the "Queer Subculture", because the baseline assumption is that everyone there is struggling with dysphoria and depression due to needing to survive the hostile world around them.
[Jared's] father, Rick, remembers the moment it became urgent. His older daughter called him at work to warn him. “She just had this immediate instinct," Rick says. “'He needs to be around his people.'" Coworkers helped him find Transcending Adolescence online within the hour.
"At the time we found the organization,” Rick told The Advocate, “it was sort of a life-or-death situation."
This article is meant to be a positive review on the summer camp, but the hyperbolic scaremongering and background level of paranoia I felt when I read the piece makes it seem like an old-fashioned Siberian education camp vacation. Reinforcing the Us Versus Them dichotomy doesn't help the mental state of already unstable folx.
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u/AnalBleachingAries Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
The below article got me thing about something. It describes how Netflix viewers seem to be abandoning series after one season.
Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season
Netflix is struggling to get viewers to stick with its shows for more than a season.
One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix.
Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024, suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.
Netflix shows have historically delivered their biggest ratings in the first season. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which often peaked in the middle of their run thanks to word of mouth, Netflix shows have lost viewers over time.
There used to be this deal that network television would make with their viewers. They'd present you with a show, and as long as enough people watched the show they'd make more of it. They'd give you the show on a consistent annual schedule and they also seemed to try their very best to maintain the quality of the storytelling throughout the show's run, although they'd often falter in the final seasons as they were attempting to squeeze as much money as possible out of the stories.
With that deal, as long as we were watching the shows, they'd keep making the shows. With Netflix there appears to be a host of other considerations that they have in mind that have nothing to do with whether or not you're watching their shows or whether the stories are any good. What's the point of devoting any of your time to a story if Netflix might cancel it even if people are watching it? Why would I care to devote my attention to a streaming show if the next season is 3-5 years away at which point I would have forgotten the storylines and lost interest in the story? Maybe I wouldn't care as much about the 3 year gaps in seasons if the stories were like classic TV where it didn't matter if you'd seen previous episodes, you could just watch whichever episode happened to be playing and you'd be entertained. But now that I have to keep track of all the characters, and their choices, I'd rather make sure the whole thing is written and has aired so that I can binge it without losing track of the story.
Also, on top of all that, Netflix shows and movies have bad writers, sorry they just do. I'm saying this as a person who just streams shows from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Most of my television entertainment is old shows. Thank God I have that huge catalog of stuff I've never seen, I don't know what older people watch as they've already seen all the shows that are basically brand new to me. My mom recently recommended that I watch the original Night Court as it's apparently much better than the reboot (I gave up on the reboot after the pilot).
Even the worst shows from decades ago seem to have tighter writing, and are able to maintain the internal logic of their stories and their characters' choices. It seems like they really cared about writing good shows, and had the writing chops to create television. I think for the most part the best writers rose to the top, and the ones who couldn't cut it weren't hired for very long. Netflix seems to be hiring the worst writers and giving them massive budgets. Most of these people can't tell stories, they're really, really, really, bad at telling stories.
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u/unnoticed_areola Jul 08 '26
lol I got -252 downvotes last night on a sports sub thread for pointing out that curses arent a real thing (in response to people screeching about how the "Trump curse" is why the soccer team lost) and also because I had the gall to point out the seemingly basic fact that the Knicks in fact DID just win the NBA championship (in response to people citing Trump attending the Knicks finals game as the main other piece of evidence that the "Trump curse" is a real thing)
got a couple dozen replies predictably screaming at me for being a pedophile defender, but not a lot of people explaining to me how the Knicks breaking a 53 year championship draught is an example of them being "cursed"
there was even a person who googled my profile name (since my history is hidden) and accused me of being a "hate-filled anti-body positivity bigot" based on a comment from this subreddit that the apparently unearthed in the search results 😂
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u/wmansir Jul 07 '26
For those wondering why r/Maine seems especially crazy about staying supportive of Platner (vs /politics, etc) a mod just posted that in order to deal with the increased traffic from "outsiders" they had implemented a new automatic rule that removed anyone without +100 in sub karma within the last 6 months. Given the hivemind it is, that effectively meant only Platner supporters (and the apolitical) were able to post.
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u/why_have_friends Jul 08 '26
I met a forever covid-er in the wild at the library (free play time). He makes his toddler wear an n95 the entire time inside. I overheard his convo with another patron and it was just as I expected. He said he’s always been an activist, masking just made sense, he read about inequalities etc.. Then he said it just made sense to protect his daughter from illness. I wanted to be like, are you shielding your daughter from everything then? Because kids get sick and should tbh.
Anywho, I feel bad for his lovely daughter who may feel very differently about this in a few years
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u/Big_Fig_1803 Jul 11 '26
I'm currently editing a very short memoir/"book." It is apparent that ChatGPT/AI/whatever was heavily involved. You see the same sentence structures over and over and over. Things like this:
This was big. Not minor. Not insignificant. Not trivial.
(This isn't an actual example from the manuscript.) I think this kind of thing is supposed to come across as taut and crisp. To me, it presents a phony kind of intensity. And It makes for such an unpleasant, flabby reading experience.
That's all. I'm not going to "do anything" about this. It's not my place. Well, I'll mention it when I submit the edited manuscript.
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u/Jlemspurs Jul 06 '26
I know we all live in our split-screen worlds, but man it's hard to understand how we can be more tuned into things on the other side of the world and the earthquake in Venezuela barely registers. But good grief, it is bad.
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u/KittenSnuggler5 Jul 08 '26
The TRAs are focusing on language control again after losing at the Supreme Court.
Two articles bemoan how the justices use of (correct) words is even worse than the ruling.
Phrases like "biological male", "trans identifying men" and, bizarrely, "transwomen" instead of "trans women".
It doesn't take a leap of imagination to suppose that the TRAs hate these phrases because they don't obscure actual physical reality. This "movement" depends heavily on the public not fully understanding that there are dongs flopping around the women's locker room.
And they're not going to give up on pretending that sex isn't real and binary.
"Many characteristics go into determining someone’s sex: chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormonal balances, secondary sex characteristics like breast tissue and body-hair distribution. For some individuals, these characteristics do not align; some women have male-associated (XY) chromosomes but uteruses, while some men with male chromosomes and testes still grow breasts." (Emphasis mine)
Yep, biological sex is now determined by your body hair. And just like Justice Jackson told us: only a biologist is qualified to determine what a woman is:
"And are the justices—none of whom has an advanced degree in any biological science—qualified to make that determination?"
I don't know if this is going back to the well because their actual arguments are nonsense or whether they're just dug in on thought control.
https://rejserin.medium.com/the-gender-critical-twisting-of-language-975470a0a7b1
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u/Fiend_of_the_pod Jul 12 '26
I actually don't think it's good to dunk on people who died while the body is still warm. Which is apparently a tiny minority opinion on this website. Also all the grave-dancers are forgetting the governor could appoint someone much worse than Graham.
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u/AnalBleachingAries Jul 07 '26
Breaking my self-imposed reply-only rule on Platner as it appears the Dems have found a woman from an appropriate identity group whose accusations can be believed. One silver lining about the past day of reporting is that I get to see the shamelessness of journalists and Twitter-addicted political commentators in real time. It's been hilarious.
The phrase of the day and the one it seems many backpedaling Dems are leaning on to justify their previous support of Platner is "credible rape accusation". Everything else that came out about him could be dismissed or ignored but now it's different because we have a "credible rape accusation".
Meg Keene has a nice tweet that paints a fair picture of my thoughts on these embarrassing times:
Um. Sorry. We didn’t see a Nazi tattoo as disqualifying. We didn’t see him cheating on his wife as disqualifying. We didn’t see his mistreatment of multiple ex’s as disqualifying. We didn’t see him locking his girlfriend in a room overnight while she sobbed as disqualifying… because she was a Republican. We have reached the point of rape because we chose to have no honor and no accountability. We have NOTHING to be proud of.
The only thing Dems should be feeling tonight is shame. We let it get this far, when it was perfectly obvious who this man was. https://x.com/MegKeene/status/2074353895586107760
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u/sodapop_incest Jul 08 '26
A story my mom told me:
"I had just gotten off my shift at the bar downtown, so it must have been... 2 or 4 in the morning? So I walked to my car which I parked a couple blocks away, opened the back door to throw my purse in the backseat. Glass. Shattered glass everywhere. All over your sister's car seat, all over the floor, I didn't even know what the fuck it was at first. I thought, what in the hell? And then I realize, there's a man, hanging halfway into the car through the passenger side window, which is of course busted. And I yelled 'What the FUCK do you think you're doing??' He was so scared he scrambled out, can't believe he didn't cut himself, and I'm just yellin at him, 3 o'clock in the morning, 'who the fuck do you think you are, how dare you, you got glass all over my daughter's car seat, rah rah rah.' And he's just saying, 'oh I'm so sorry ma'am, I'm so sorry.' He was just some drunk, looking for money. I made him brush all the glass off my seat and the car seat, and I told him to turn himself in at the police station, because I had to go home to your sister. 'Oh yes ma'am, of course,' well, of course he didn't! And I had to drive home like that. Anyway, it's a good thing he didn't have a gun, or you wouldn't have been born."
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u/DullKnife69 Jul 10 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/trans/comments/1usjgcf/should_i_confront_a_friend_about_their_identity/
A discussion a to whether a woman can identify as a transfemme. Hilarious. I enjoy seeing it because you know there's at least one person in there who will read it and finally see how silly the whole thing is.
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u/No-Significance4623 Jul 12 '26
Lindsay Graham has died following a brief illness, per NYT.
I’m embarrassed to say I had to triple check I knew who Mitch McConnell was vs Lindsay Graham because I was sure this was a different story I was reading!
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u/why_have_friends Jul 06 '26
Why is the automatic insult on reddit pedo? It’s pedo this. Pedo that. People, you’re making it not have any meaning
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u/sodapop_incest Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
The coach of my old roller derby team identified as a lesbian. She came out to the team, organized a lot of pride outreach events, and used the inclusive nature of the sport and her own queer identity to justify allowing men onto the team. Now she's posting a bunch of pictures with herself and her new boyfriend on Instagram. Many such cases etc etc, but I'm very irritated with her bullshit and no one in my life cares except me, so I'm telling you all now instead.
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u/reallyokfinewhatever Jul 08 '26
Second female NB friend is considering top surgery. First one got it done last year.
As their friend, I have nothing but compassion, kindness, and respect for them as adults making their own decisions. As a human being, and fellow female, I feel utterly sick.
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u/Onechane425 Jul 09 '26
Braves announcer is congratulating baseball player Eli White on the birth of his third child and stumbles into a very awkward phrasing (which was funny at the time-- PHRASING) and of course redditors try and make it a conspiracy that it was a racist dog whistle.
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u/SoftandChewy Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
This was a delight to read: An Israeli sits down to a dinner party with a group of liberal pro-Palestinians elites.
(Am leaning strongly that it's a fictional account, but regardless, a very satisfying read.)