Pocket Realities

Rather than regulate guns, Texas seeks to teach battlefield trauma care beginning in the third grade | Boing Boing:

Texas legislators have a fantastic new idea to save their children’s lives from gun violence, instituting a battlefield trauma care training program beginning in the third grade! Rather than make it harder to get guns, they will just start teaching children to treat gun wounds. Perhaps by the time kids get to High School they can help in the OR.

From bleeding control stations to school safety officers to bulletproof backpacks, a giant industry has sprung up around not doing anything to prevent gun violence. It is amazing that the United States can and is willing to market to people who want their children to be safer, but the country isn’t willing to do anything to make children safer.

It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible:

The Onion folks – Obviously satire, re: editorial choices at major outlets and the attempts of their journalists to reconsider the harm they do.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.

We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.

It is against free speech to stop us from fixating on the genitals.

And poignantly:

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.

Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.

—The Onion Editorial Board

YouTube Speedrunner Becomes Full-Blown Fascist In Record Time:

According to reports, the speedrun, which took only three minutes and four seconds, began when Flannery opened the video-streaming platform, watched a neutral, 10-second news clip, and then immediately clicked through over 80 pieces of algorithm-suggested content made by various extremist influencers, many with titles like “The Truth About Grooming,” “Why The Aryan Bloodline Matters,” and “The Dangers Of Female Consent.”

• via The Onion