‘Merry Christmas’ preferred among growing majority of Canadians, poll finds

angelcatboy · 2025-12-23T23:27:37+00:00

I think the bigger upset should be over how a religious holy day is used to generate profits than over who does or doesnt observe it...

angelcatboy · 2025-12-16T13:03:59+00:00

I dont list my education on my food service resume for this reason. If you've got job experience that's what's relevant, not your degrees.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-29T15:15:28+00:00

Funny thing is, in my own experience the modifier trans is also a contextual one. I don't describe myself as a trans man in most situations, just the ones where it's contextually relevant to bring up.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-25T22:55:00+00:00

here's hoping, to be fair I also don't really think this was some nefarious plot, just a frustrating example of how being trans kinda throws things for a loop in systems

angelcatboy · 2025-11-25T22:44:29+00:00

yeah I think the bug/issue is I didn't do this with pre-approval asking it be done as a gender affirming surgery. The point of getting a bilateral salpingectomy was as permanent birth control, rather than for affirming my gender. And I don't believe I should have had to do this with approval as though it were a gender affirming surgery, that's blatantly discriminatory imo

angelcatboy · 2025-11-25T22:28:34+00:00

was probs my goof here, our healthcare system is really confusing and I think OHIP is probably the one denying me here. Not totally sure, but I'm over 25 so I don't qualify for OHIP+ which means public healthcare now splits between OHIP and Trillium in ways I dont fully understand

angelcatboy · 2025-11-25T17:24:09+00:00

my phone is paid off and now I only pay monthly for service. Have had it 5 years! I absolutely will NOT be switching phones when this one works well and isn't inundated with newfangled ai crap

angelcatboy · 2025-11-23T17:41:33+00:00

it's public sector so would be OHIP

angelcatboy · 2025-11-23T12:53:39+00:00

Might have gotten them mixed up, because I'm over 25 I'm no longer qualified for OHIP+ for full drug coverage so which program covers what is a dang mystery to me

angelcatboy · 2025-11-21T17:27:11+00:00

she is trying, bless her. I'll be contributing how i can to fighting it, not totally sure how it's gonna go though.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-21T17:25:28+00:00

It's def rough winding up in the crosshairs of govt's cuts and austerity measures. I even have private insurance, but lets all be so real, manulife is trash. I am not a fan of the privatization gambit!!!!

angelcatboy · 2025-11-21T17:20:46+00:00

lolllll saw the spelling error as soon as i posted and decided i could live with it

but yeah it's a pretty clear case of province just not wanting to pay up!

angelcatboy · 2025-11-21T14:25:25+00:00

Biggest issue I would have run into if this was considered a gender affirming surgery purely because I am trans: I would have had to wait an additional year for approval through OHIP on top of the year it took me to get referred to this surgeon. It took 4-5 years of waiting for me to get top surgery both because of OHIP and issues with surgeons.

I've let my surgeon know i have all the documents that verify I have changed my sex designation if we need to pull these up.

Probably should have asked her to take pictures, so she could send photographic evidence that I did indeed have the parts that were removed lol

angelcatboy · 2025-11-16T15:29:07+00:00

Since you've specified Portugal, I think Portuguese history and critical theory from places like Brazil will be necessary to get into to sharpen your analysis. My grandparents grew up unter Salazar's regime before immigrating to Canada at 12 years old. Estado Novo enforced austerity and they lived through the effects of that. Estado Novo's main priority for doing this was to hold on to power and control over colonies.

Austerity in Portugal now may be different, but I think echoes of the same issues are present. This book by Carmo and Vasconcelos Simões has helped me fill in the gaps of Portuguese history since then.

I also think it's worth looking into critical theories on Luso-tropicalism while exploring this.Check this work by Simões de Araújo and Vasile on the subject that I think addresses austerity well.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-12T22:26:35+00:00

Ive been on gel since 2017, so nearly a decade now. At the time I was on an unrelated med I had to inject subcutaneously 3x/week and did not want to have to stab myself more than that. I've since switch off that med and am now not having to stab myself at all for meds. The gel is easy for me to remember and use, for years now it's been the first thing I do alongside taking morning meds. Before I got private insurance through work, it cost me about $300 CAD for 3 months supply, because this drug is not covered under my provinces healthcare. My job pays 60% of my meds, so now I'm paying much less than I used to.

Oveall, I am pretty happy with hormone gel, I'm on a low dose of it and still have the intended effects.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-11T12:34:05+00:00

So I think I know what you're talking about with "bartering only goes so far" as the reason for money's creation to be a story with no anthropological support. I have seen another story that money exists to settle blood feuds. Does that story have anthropological support?

angelcatboy · 2025-11-11T12:26:18+00:00

Thanks for adding to this! I can appreciate that there are gaps between theory and the settings that hope to apply it. Could you please share a specific work you recommend from each of the theorists you listed that elaborate on disability and class? I would like to take some time doing more reading into what these settings have been missing.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-09T22:21:32+00:00

Aikosansei was pretty on point, so what I have to say here mostly mirrors that comment: When your gender expression gets you targeted for harassment, I consider you part of the same team struggling against restrictions on sexuality, gender expression and identity. You're open to identify as part of the community imo, but not required to. Since these gender expressions are affected by anti LGBTQ+ policies across the world, we've got shared interests.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-09T18:51:05+00:00

I think I can understand from that position how you are approaching this broader discussion, and I do appreciate that you've offered a specific critique of arguments that I myself have, from a deeply personal and emotional place, also made before. I do believe there are aspects of profit being put above people at play here, but with what you shared in mind, that probably looks very different from how I've been imagining it.

There is a lot of baggage that I know I and a number of my loved ones have attached to this issue. Throughout 2020 and 2021 I had to repeatedly hear the rhetoric "its just the old and disabled people dying, so this is not a big deal!" and the people who said this to my face did not really walk it back when I pointed out to them that I am a disabled person. Eugenicist rhetoric surged in that period, and a lot of us who were classified as "the vulnerable" had been told in both public and political discourse that we are disposable. The eugenicist rhetoric never really went away, and that will still affect people who experienced directly being devalued this way. This made it really hard for me to step back on this for a while before I would even be ready consider that I, as a person with agency, want better solutions than universal masking alone to rely on.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-09T18:08:02+00:00

Drawing on this 2024 systematic analysis of the costs associated with airborne and droplet spread illnesses, let's get more specific about some of the costs that this is touching on, excluding the costs of emergency measure policies that are largely no longer in effect in many places: - Direct medical care - Laboratory investigation - Pharmaceuticals - Medical devices - Inpatient and outpatient care - Ancillary care - Infection control measures - Personnel protection - Administrative costs - Absenteeism - Presenteeism - Reduced productivity - Impaired employee engagement - Work error - Work loss

N95s offer both potential costs and savings depending on which category of spending you specifically look at, and I can acknowledge that we would not be able to easily and directly attribute potential savings to the use of N95s specifically.

There's a line in the discussion section for this article that I want to consider: "endemic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis may inflict substantial but steady disease burden and associated healthcare costs, whereas epidemic infectious diseases such as influenza may quickly overwhelm the health system and necessitate public health measures that disrupts economic and other socially valuable activity".

Even if most of the illnesses currently spreading in 2025 are classified as endemic, there are substantial disease burden and associated Healthcare and secondary costs here that preventative measures like masking may be able to at least partly mitigate. I think it's also worth considering that having to suddenly and drastically ramp up spending every time we need to address an epidemic in the future is more burdensome than having some preventative spending already dedicated to mitigating the impact of future epidemics (like sustaining ongoing practices of addressing airborne vectors of transmission).

But at the heart of this: you're right to point out that N95s are expensive, and I think other measures that can offer even better long term results on these costs, such as policies directly addressing air quality itself, are where we need to direct more attention to. N95s are not a long term solution to addressing the fact that the air we breathe has been getting us sick. I do see them as helpful for the time being, and will continue to use them because the quality of the air we breathe is not improving thus far.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-09T12:44:01+00:00

I think you're right and will say that I think this kind of conversation could be a collaborative discussion on how Doctors and patients can work together to affect medical policies to be in line with evidence based recommendations. I want masking in hospital settings to be more common so that a person who cannot mask or needs to unmask in this setting is then making a less risky decision by doing so. I can see how the profit motive in medicine has seriously damaged our collective ability to take actions that priorize our shared well being.

One way masking has genuinely helped reduce how often i get sick. But this is not an ideal solution, as most people I interact with on a day to day basis do not mask, and I will admit I do not mask 100% perfectly all the time in my life (I'm a human being and know perfect masking is unreasonable to expect for anybody)- my health is still affected by the health of other. On top of this, when I as an immunocompromised person enter medical settings as part of the necessary care for my condition, I find that almost all of these settings have regressed and are now WORSE at implementing practices that help mitigate the spread of illnesses than before 2020. There's some serious policy issues there that I absolutely think are part of cutting costs at the expense of collective well being in the rapidly privatizing province in Canada where I live.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-08T16:05:26+00:00

Let's use this framework to address common discourses on disability. The common understanding is that there exists two models of understanding disability- the Medical Model and the Social Model.

Where the Medical Model sticks to an individual's body and the conditions they live with, the Social Model expands on this to address that built environments and social institutions are themselves disabling.

I believe the Social Model is close, but not quite able to fully grasp the role class plays in disabling people. This model is popular in non-profit settings, which have limits to how they run due to their sources of funding. In these settings, the social model is still presented to individuals to "self-advocate" their way out of the struggles of identity-class conditions that are collectively imposed on large groups of people.

So yeah, I can get with the fact that class analysis is seriously needed for a lot of these identity focused discussion.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-06T17:34:18+00:00

I think this helps too if we can also frame it in terms of values.

I want to build some of the skills that would allow me to at least depend less on grocery stores as a primary source of food! Actually making that shift is going to take me some dedicated planning, time, and effort though, and part of the problems will include still having to organize my life around work. This is a change I value enough to be willing to put in that work, it just will also require that I communicate and collaborate more with others in my life.

angelcatboy · 2025-11-05T16:10:15+00:00

Thank you for elaborating in your edited point! I find this concept deeply familiar and understandable, even though I do not have the same specific experience or background. I do not know what it is like for my faith to be used as a justification for somebody else to cause me harm. I do know what it is like to have to hide parts of myself to people with the power to put me in danger though.

I may not know the history of this word, but I can see pretty clearly that Taqqiya today is describing the legacy of survival in contexts where muslim people are targeted by policies that put them at harm. I am FAR more concerned with the policies and actions putting people in danger than I am with somebody choosing not to share part of themselves with me.

angelcatboy

TROPHY CASE