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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I mean yes you’re right but also most microorganisms that cause disease die quickly without their little droplets and particles to cling to.

    On the other hand, procedure masks rely on those droplets to be the microorganism carriers that they can more easily stop instead of falling back on electrostatic attraction as the lil guys float through em.

    In conclusion, infectious disease is a land of contrasts and while hospitals can rely on technologically advanced hvac systems to maintain a narrow range of temperature and humidity that represents a trade off between reduced micro environments, reduced airborne transmission and safely storing all their poultices and potions, normal people need to just do our best and maybe should accept the reduced mold and microorganisms over all in exchange for more chance of airborne transmission when cleaning our homes and workplaces (which are all fucked if there’s airborne transmission anyway because no one has appropriate air cleaners in their home or workplace).


  • If you’re able to hold it long enough and you’re truly worried, folding a wet paper towel over a couple of times and using the hand soap to clean the seat and then folding it over again to get a “rinse” before you sit down is a better way to go about it.

    “I’m worried about germs on the toilet seat”

    “Well, they gave you paper towels, soap and running water, why not clean the motherfucker?”

    “Nah, imma just put the thinnest material known to man in between my butt and the seat”


  • ~Things people don’t want to know~

    Putting a layer of tissue between your butt and the toilet seat doesnt provide enough of a barrier against microorganisms over the time it takes to shit or piss to prevent transmission.

    Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.

    The n95 (and other) rating(s) are over time in free, circulating, open air. Derate safe exposure time sharply for use inside or in spaces with stagnant or unmoving air.







  • i’m not.

    if you want to understand why the history of racism against irish americans after the wave of immigration in response to the manmade famine doesn’t factor into racism irish americans experience today (none, zero, irish americans do not experience racism today), read my top level comment.

    the defining factors are that irish americans were integrated into white supremacist power structures and black americans weren’t, that st. patricks day isn’t treated with any reverence in the united states and is instead one of the big four drinking holidays and the negative stereotypes of irish americans from the 1800s don’t survive today in word or in deed.

    i chose not to touch on the lingering economic impact of racism against irish americans as opposed to racism against black americans because they’re in two different universes. one was largely dismantled before any of us were born and the other is still systemic and pervasive to this day.






  • Irish people are white.

    They didn’t start out that way in America, because race is a social construct used by the state to achieve its ends and when a shit ton of Irish people were coming over to the United States to escape the manmade potato famine the terms of their acceptance into American society was that they’d be doing the shittiest work.

    American society dealt with this contradiction by adopting the racial pseudoscience that put Irish people below “real whites”.

    Whiteness isn’t something innate that can be measured objectively (although pseudoscientific methods claim to be able to do so!), it’s a basic subjective measure of where one stands in the white supremacist power structure.

    The white supremacist power structure informs all sorts of stuff like can you get a loan, can you get insurance, do you need to be more afraid of dying to the cops than usual, how loud can you play your music, pretty much every aspect of life in America.

    After Catholicism became more widely accepted in the us, and a shit ton of Irish people became cops (so that the white supremacist state could surveil their communities) Irish people were eventually considered white.

    Black people in America aren’t white. That might seem like an obvious thing to say, but it’s important to be clear that the process of integration that the Irish immigrant wave went through was never really offered to black Americans.

    A person could argue that we are living through that process right now and I think there is a process of integration going on but it’s not making black Americans part of the broader white American group but instead giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital. That’s a significantly different deal.

    Anyway, there’s this thing called racism, which is where a society uses the completely made up category of race to discriminate against groups of people to achieve its ends.

    Some examples of American racism are slavery, segregation, redlining, the treatment of agricultural workers, the treatment of rail workers, etc.

    What’s important is that racism is when a society (or its members) discriminate against some group. There is power in the discrimination and it’s being used against a group.

    If a bank decides not to lend to white people it doesn’t hurt white people because there’s literally all the other banks that they can go to and get loans. There is discrimination being used against a group in that example, but it has no power over them because they’ll just go to all the banks that (and I’m quoting directly from a Bank of America sign here) don’t “serve coloreds”.

    Okay, so why am I saying this? We’re talking about food!

    There’s an old stereotype that black people eat watermelon and fried chicken. There’s a long and storied history to the food stereotypes of black Americans but I’ll spare you the tangent and just say it’s visible in all sorts of Jim crow and segregation era media and arts and crafts stuff.

    If you got one of those “antique mall” type places you can probably see some of it there.

    During and before Jim Crow and segregation, those stereotypes were deployed to depict black Americans as at best ignorant country bumpkins and at worst subhuman apes.

    So to serve the stereotypical food of a racist caricature on a day that is intended to remember the freeing of the last slaves is at best thoughtless reproduction of a racist stereotype and at worst malicious intentional reification of a racist stereotype!

    But why isn’t it racist to serve corned beef on saint patricks day? Well for one thing, saint Patrick’s day isn’t seriously celebrated as a remembrance of Irish American culture or the experience of immigrants almost anywhere in the us. It’s one of the big four, a drinking holiday with a dress code.

    It’s also not perpetuating harmful stereotype to run a homemade Reuben special on saint Patrick’s day. No one bites into a Rachel and thinks “lol, those dumb micks are only good for driving spikes, drinking and swearing allegiance to Rome” or “if only they could multiply the way they multiply, maybe they wouldn’t be so poor, sad!”

    Now that’s not to say it’s racist to prepare or eat fried chicken or watermelon. As a southerner I got strong feelings about both.

    But pretty much it boils down to Irish people are white.

    E: I fucking made a stupid ass mistake and substituted greenwood for the freeing of the last slaves when describing the context of Juneteenth. My dumbass brain was going “tell em about how greenwood and Parrish street were about giving black Americans a seat at the table of capital, instead of equality under white supremacy” over and over again the whole time I was writing this stream of consciousness ass post and when I couldn’t find a place to shoehorn it in the ol’ brain took over and did it anyway. Thanks to fryhyde for pointing it out!





  • I’m so sorry for not being clearer about the meaning my words have.

    In the context of a shooting by cops I’m using “no threat” to mean no threat that merits deadly force, not that it wasnt a crazy situation.

    My point was never to say that the situation wasn’t unique or that fear or feeling threatened never factored in, but the situation in which that woman was shot didn’t constitute a threat to anyone that merited deadly force.

    She was unarmed (again, I remember some news trying to say that her pocketknife constituted a weapon but whatever), was climbing in through a barrier that she had to be lifted up to reach and could have been restrained with several different tools or techniques at the disposal of the cop that shot her.

    If there were no other options available then a person could believe otherwise and plenty of cops have gotten off for killings because they said their service weapon was their only option.

    I was hoping it would be clear what I meant by “no threat” when I explained how lots of people had said all those things they thought the cop could have done, but that’s my fault.