Pretty sure Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with HRT prescriptions. You'd need a psychiatric doctor to prescribe something like that, and he'd probably insist on a pretty thorough examination. And since doctors don't generally like giving out prescriptions needlessly, he'd probably want to hear about some symptoms of illness first.

Preference alone would be insufficient, just like going to your doctor and insisting you want your stomach stapled for weight loss would be insufficient to get the surgery. He will most likely make you try other, less permanent things first.

To an extent, sure. That's more about keeping a community alive through a dry spell, though.

Digital communities can easily take years to build, that's not unusual at all. There's always lulls in that early period where the community is mostly dead, but there'll usually be 1-2 people just kinda keeping it on life support. Bones of the Moon has been doing that with our poetry sub for instance, if not for them, that sub would have died-died quite awhile ago. But since they (still, even) post there periodically, it winds up popping up on people's new or local feeds every once in awhile and reminding everyone it exists, and once in awhile someone else posts there.

That's the main reason I think people do it. Just kinda getting the community past that early period where most communities die out if left unassisted.

How many accomplishments/benefits of the UN are you aware of/can conveniently list?

I expect that any such proposal would be vetoed upon reaching the Security Council.

Important to remember, nobody thought the Security Council was actually a good idea. We added it because it was necessary to prevent the UN from meeting the same fate as its predecessor the League of Nations--fizzling out due to not enough big countries joining something that would limit their power.

It's not a good system, it's just better than nothing, and nothing was basically the alternative that the UN arose from. In that regard it has been very successful.

I didn't read past the paywall, but it sounded like it would be missing the point a bit in the coverage of the online discourse. Hardcore online anti-vaxxers are either grifters, conspiracy theorists or Darwinists playing dress-up. A Darwinist will point to underlying health issues because they think people dying of preventable diseases is the proper way for society to function. This is frankly a very common view among edgy 15 year old boys that have taken a bio 1 class (I remember having held it myself for a little bit), and as a result, will always have a large number of online proponents. Unless we suddenly stop having kids entirely or something, then the problem would largely go away over the course of a couple decades. This is likely the largest group of voices, at any rate, as its bolstered by other social Darwinists for whom it isn't just a phase.

The grifter makes money off of all this, so of course they'll automatically discredit any threat to their income.

The conspiracy theorist won't really believe anything anyone with any power or authority says, so they're usually a lost cause to everyone outside their own personal circle.

None of these people (except the conspiracy theorist sometimes, ironically) care all that much about the lives of strangers, most especially the edgy teenager. There's a reason he's always telling people to commit suicide as a casual insult. So ... what'd we expect again...? And how much money are we able/willing to invest into education to combat it?

It wouldn't even all require a critical thinking focus, a small tweak to the bio 1 curriculum where we go into a little more depth on evolution factors would probably make a noticeable difference. Push the taxonomy unit off to bio 2 or something to make room, that's not particularly important unless you're planning on continuing in the sciences anyway.

A clickbaity opinion piece from 14 years ago? I'm not impressed. I thought we were talking about the Russo-Ukrainian War anyway.

western and ukrainian media been saying russia collapsing, Ukraine winning, for 4 years

This really just indicates you don't read any western media. Because, no, that is not what they have looked like the past 4 years at all.

This guy may have been saying it, I'm not sure, but he's just a guy on youtube, he can say whatever he wants. If people want to get their information from a guy on youtube, that's up to them.

Even worse, apparently only a single base had all the supplies for it. That was a single point of failure that, when struck, caused the failure of the entire supply mission.

You'd think the Navy would be a little better prepared. Here I thought redundancy was an important part of military conduct and operations.

He already knew he could. He budged it during Avengers Age of Ultron, and he probably would have noticed it move (Thor did). But he stopped trying so he didn't embarrass both himself (by claiming to be worthy of godhood when he's a pretty humble guy) and Thor (by being just as good as him despite being mortal).

So, when the opportunity came again, it was a no-brainer. He knew he could, and he knew it'd be useful to him.

Yeah, if anything about it bothered you, that was probably smart. The trilogy is, among other things, a very slow yet steady escalation of horror.

She did write two other trilogies in the same setting following different characters that you may prefer more. Different narrators does change the prose, but she still manages that same fluidity, which is what I always loved so much about it.

Romans and coups. An Austrian Hapsburg and another Austrian Hapsburg. Russia and taking massive casualties.

Yeah, I take several random samples of the prose from throughout the book, just to get a good sense of the overall style. Though I do always begin with the first paragraph, and on at least one case, that was enough to immediately close and buy the book.

That being the over-the-top, sorta Victorian prose of Jacqueline Carey:

Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo’s child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me. It is hard for me to resent my parents, although I envy them their naïveté...

She then keeps going just like that for three large books, probably totaling something like 2k pages. I loved every page of it.