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It's wild bc my YouTube comments are 90% "I'm a city person, I had no idea!" 0.01% angry conservatives (they've mostly given up on me 🤠) and 9.99% "I live/work/grew up in a rural area! And thank God someone's saying it out loud!" (this is the wind beneath my skeets, thank you!)

Let’s be clear here, when scientists say mistakes were made at the start of the pandemic, we DO NOT mean that we did too much. We mean not socially distancing quickly enough, not making tests widely available, and not acknowledging COVID is airborne and distributing N95 masks to everyone.

And, shocker, antisemitism is *really popular* so sometimes dog whistles spread *really fast*. I can think of two that have become popular *among people on the left* in JUST THE LAST SIX MONTHS

So yeah, new ones happen. And if behooves you to listen when someone tells you that you’ve missed a memo.

The thing about dog whistles, I remind people, is that *you can’t hear them if you aren’t in on them*

Oh ffs I was already having a shitty evening and I come on here to be hopefully pleasantly distracted and instead it’s antisemitic dog whistle time again

Listen if we're gonna play "paint the electoral map red" w the continental US & never have a real talk about how land doesn't vote, let's commit to the mf bit

You'll also hear people say "Farm workers are the real farmers!" If you really care about that? It's kinda like.... deep down you believe farmers are inherently more worthy of respect than workers. I think we're better off unpacking that, than quibbling over the definition of "real farmer."

Omg it’s exactly like how people insist “Christian” means “good person” and therefore assholes cant be Christian.

So sometimes you open an envelope in an archive and whoops, smallpox scabs. Biosecurity is a very well known problem in history and archaeology and it is not going to lead to a smallpox outbreak, especially since there's plenty of vaccine to go around for ring vaccination.

Dear everyone freaking out about this: a) viral DNA sequences != infectious virus that can be transmitted to another person; b) we still have the smallpox vaccine; it's the same as the mpox vaccine; c) smallpox samples turn up all the time, people get vaccinated and nothing happens

If you want to know more about how *legal* immigration for farm workers can actually make them *more* vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, & even trafficking, this linked article from cdmigrante.org is GREAT.

Yeah so NYT asked me ~2 yrs ago to write an op-ed about how the Colorado is running dry, & what we should do to keep this exact thing from happening. I said "There's only one real answer. Bill farmers by how much water they use. Duh." NYT editorial staff freaked tf out & cancelled the piece.

By the way, the migrant workers caught up in this $200 million human trafficking ring ALL CAME TO THE US LEGALLY. The way "legal immigration" for farm workers is set up, it can actually be easier to traffic them than undocumented workers. Kinda seems like a bad system!

OBO was (still is?) the largest human trafficking bust in the 21s century US. The folks running it made ~$200 million. There's a lot of money in slavery. What can I say. OBO led directly to the anti-slavery H2A reforms in 2024. Which, again, Trump repealed in June 2025. Because they worked.

Nu, see also "two tickets to her concert I should buy?!"

How?? Well, one of the 2024 rules was "If you're driving a crew around on public roads, they're people not cargo. So they gotta be in a vehicle for people. With seat belts." If you're just scooting around the farm, it's fine to sit in a pickup bed! But not on public roads!

Yep, "you can't just fire people, keep their passports, do brutality, not even a little bit" was in some anti-slavery reforms to the H2A program in 2024. Farmers were outraged at the "gov't overreach & red tape." They went hard for Trump in '24, & he repealed those farm worker regs in June 2025.

Think about how many times you’ve read “in case of emergency take stairs.” That is a metaphor for how disabled people are treated in an emergency. Often even the advice disabled folks get (“have a 3 month supply of all medications!”) isn’t even possible. It’s beyond time to do better.

I don't think inheriting land & wealth makes people bad. I just don't think it makes them good either! Picking farmers by inheritance lottery means everyone else in farm country has to just… hope they know what noblesse oblige is. And that's no way to live! Accountability is good!