#the new amsterdams

[am-i-a-boy-or-a-crybaby]

WHOLESOME KIDS SONG FOR ELECTION SEASON BLUES !!!!

(Sorry for no poem lol)

My siblings and I had a cd from a local kid’s band that had a song that I think was so important to my social-emotional development as a kid. A while back I showed it to one of my friends and he cried about how he wished he had something like this as a kid to show him that being different was something that shouldn’t have to be an issue. It’s not perfect, but it’s incredibly cute and has dinosaurs so it gets extra points from me. Felt like sharing :)

Love, Grayson 🤍

[nathanieljams]

I managed to grab this over the weekend at a store that specializes in emo records and video game OSTs, and boy does it take me back to some of the quieter moments of a very specific time of my life. Seems apt for a chunky sweater kinda day.

[communistkenobi]

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change. Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Sutton-in-Ashfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted. “We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

this article is interesting because it demonstrates that cis people can very easily apply structural thinking to sex assignment - this couple immediately identifies that their daughter, having mistakenly been assigned male at birth by the registrar, will have administrative problems in employment, education, travel, and so on. they pretty adeptly identify the foundational role that sex assignment plays in the administrative and civil functions of a state, and how incorrect sex markers effectively produce a ‘rational’ reason for discrimination within these administrative and civil arenas:

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document. But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

And given that this was published in The Guardian, this article makes zero mention as to why it’s impossible for this couple to receive an updated birth certificate with correct information (something the author notes was possible to do a year ago), but the reason is obviously transphobia. 

Now one might ask why there’s no exception for cis people whose birth certificates were recorded incorrectly at birth, but this reveals the instability of cissexualism. How would you determine who is a cis person with a mistaken birth certificate, versus a trans person who wants to change their mistaken sex assignment record? Sure, you could say well, this is an infant, of course she’s “really” “biologically” female (something the parents argue in the article as grounds for having their child’s birth certificate re-issued), but 1) that certainly can’t be argued for in all cases, 2) 'biological sex' is understood by medical doctors as alterable through hormones and surgery, which trans people are often required to undergo in order to change their records, and 3) binary sex assignment is already imprecise and discretionary, particularly if infants have sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary F/M assignment standards (which is part of how the category of intersex emerges, framing this failure to conform to state census categories as a biological defect - and in fact, many intersex people do not discover they are intersex until the onset of puberty or later, at which point they are even less in luck if they want to change their sex assignment - and if they don’t, if they are cis but have sex characteristics that do not conform to cis standards, they will be discriminated against anyway). 

Even setting aside the issue of transgender and intersex people for a moment, states fuck up all the time in administration! you've probably either experienced this directly or know someone who's had some kind of record fucked up by the government at some point in their life. If you get married they could fuck up changing your last name, fuck up your disability status, record your social insurance number wrong, print the wrong address on your driver’s license, fail to acknowledge you as a dependent when filing taxes, incorrectly mark you as having graduated when you’re still a student, fuck up your immigration paperwork, record your name wrong during immigration, etc etc into infinity, and this is not even getting into errors that occur when different levels of government pass information between one another. This level of administrative rigidity is purely to punish people who fail to perform cissexualism correctly, and in the case of this couple's child, the administrative error of the state is imputed to them as a personal failure that she and her parents will now have to deal with for the rest of their lives. 

I think the ultimate analysis is not that transphobia will become less precise and hit more "wrong" targets as it expands its reach, but that this is the exact same operational logic as all other liberal state measures - if you encounter a systemic issue, it’s your fault for not avoiding it, fuck you, go away. You’re poor because you’re lazy, you’re unhoused because you’re lazy, you’re disabled because you’re lazy, and your daughter is now administratively transsexual because you’re lazy. In this case, we don’t even need to assume the intentions of the state - they outright say it:

The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified. “The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.

[sillyfroggremlin]

watching/rewatching a show when you already have an established favorite character is great because every time they come on screen it's like

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[daffodil-hill]

don't really know why spotify is obsessed with playing ex's and oh's by the new amsterdams today but hey i'm here for it

[reasonsforhope]

"Amsterdam’s roofs have just been converted into a giant sponge that will make the city more climate resilient.

The Dutch have always been famous for their ability to control water, born out of the necessity of their homeland, much of which is below sea level.

Now, their expert water management skills are transforming the city skyline in the capital city of Amsterdam from one of terracotta tile, concrete, and shingles into green grass and brown earth.

It’s part of a new climate-resiliency trend in architecture and civic planning known as the ‘sponge city concept,’ in which a garden of water-loving plants, mosses, and soil absorbs excess rainwater before feeding it into the building for use in flushing toilets or watering plants on the ground.

If heavy rains are predicted, a smart valve system empties the stored rainwater into the municipal storm drains and sewers in advance of the weather, allowing the roof to soak up water and reduce flooding in the city.

In this way, the rooftops of buildings can be wrung out and filled up just like a sponge.

In Amsterdam, 45,000 square meters, or 11 acres of flat metropolitan rooftops have already been fitted with these systems, and the contracting firms behind the technology say they make sense in dry climates like Spain just as much as in wet climates like Amsterdam...

A 4-year project of different firms and organizations called Resilio, the resilient network for smart climate adaptive rooftops, rolled out thousands of square meters of sponge city technology into new buildings. As with many climate technologies, the costs are high upfront but tend to result in savings from several expenditures like water utilities and water damage, over a long-enough time horizon...

All together, Amsterdam’s sponge capacity is over 120,000 gallons.

“We think the concept is applicable to many urban areas around the world,” Kasper Spaan from Waternet, Amsterdam’s public water management organization, told Wired Magazine. “In the south of Europe–Italy and Spain–where there are really drought-stressed areas, there’s new attention for rainwater catchment.”

Indeed the sponge city concept comes into a different shade when installed in drought-prone regions. Waters absorbed by rooftops during heavy rains can be used for municipal purposes to reduce pressure on underground aquifers or rivers, or be sweated out under the Sun’s rays which cools the interior of the building naturally.

Additionally, if solar panels were added on top of the rooftop garden, the evaporation would keep the panels cooler, which has been shown in other projects to improve their energy generation.

“Our philosophy in the end is not that on every roof, everything is possible,” says Spaan, “but that on every roof, something is possible.”

Matt Simon, reporting on the Resilio project for Wired, said succinctly that perhaps science fiction authors have missed the mark when it came to envisioning the city of the future, and that rather than being a glittering metropolis of glass, metal, and marble as smooth as a pannacotta, it will look an awful lot more like an enormous sculpture garden."

-via Good News Network, May 15, 2024

[jewish-microwave-laser]

holy shit a huge mob of people in amsterdam just attacked a bunch of fans of an israeli soccer team as they were leaving the stadium

there are videos of a group of people yelling "fuck you palestine," as well as of people wearing a keffiyeh and saying "free palestine" beating someone up. cnn has not been able to verify any videos as of yet

so far it looks like 10 israeli citizens were injured, and about 30 people have been arrested so far. jerusalem post adds that 1 person was kidnapped and at least 2 remain missing

the state of israel is sending two rescue planes to amsterdam to help israeli citizens return. israeli citizens have been advised to stay inside their hotel rooms, and the israeli and dutch governments are coordinating to safely transport israelis from their hotels to the airport so they can leave. us officials have already compared it to a pogrom

this occurred two days before the anniversary of kristallnacht

this is a very fresh story, keep your eyes on the news and don't spread something unless it's backed up by trustworthy news sources. there is a LOT of islamophobia, racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism going around about this right now (including in some of the below sources). none of that will be tolerated on this post

i am also linking the youtube videos below. they're distressing, please watch with caution. i'm mostly linking them so y'all know i wasn't pulling the bit about the videos out of my ass

[probablyasocialecologist]

The New York Times has killed an investigation by one of its own reporters into Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam earlier this month. In an internal Times email inadvertently shared with The Electronic Intifada, Dutch reporter Christiaan Triebert explained to a manager that he had pitched “a visual investigation I was conducting into the events of [6-8 November] in Amsterdam.” “Unfortunately, that story was killed,” he wrote. “I regret that the planned moment-by-moment visual investigation was not further pursued.” “This has been very frustrating, to say the least,” Triebert wrote. The email was addressed to senior Times manager Charlie Stadtlander – a former senior press officer for the US National Security Agency and for the US army. Triebert appeared interested in carrying out reporting that would set the record straight, remediating the false narrative insistently advanced by his own newspaper – that the Israeli fans were victims of mob violence motivated by anti-Jewish hatred.

[...]

To date, The New York Times has published more than a dozen articles substantially focused on the violence in Amsterdam. This is an astonishingly high number compared, say, to how the newspaper has ignored or consistently downplayed grave crimes perpetrated by Israelis in Palestine, including systematic and well-documented sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli forces. The Times coverage not only includes numerous news articles baselessly spinning the Amsterdam violence as “anti-Semitic,” but opinion columns with inflammatory headlines such as “Amsterdam Is About Jew Hatred – and Gaza,” “A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’” and “The Age of the Pogrom Returns.” The willingness of the Times to falsely portray Israel and Israelis as victims in this case is reminiscent of how it has insistently advanced the debunked narrative of “mass rapes” by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023, including false reporting by its star correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman. Such atrocity propaganda masquerading as journalism has been used to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

18 November 2024

[mysharona1987]

[kosherkept]

was it not less than 24 hours after the amsterdam pogrom that people began to justify the attacks by saying “oh well, the jews weren’t all the best people to ever live, so any jew who isn’t a saint probably deserves it anyway.”?

there is no such thing as a “good jew.” you may be “one of the good ones” for a time, if you disavow israel enough, but eventually the “bad jews” who won’t do that just won’t be enough anymore. antisemites will want more targets and you’re next on the chopping block. the only thing that trying to make yourself into “one of the good ones” will do is buy yourself time. and i don’t believe any of you are honestly wise enough to know what to do with that time. who would be? the goal posts shift too fast.

i can’t stop thinking about the man who was recorded in the alleyway telling his attackers “i’m not jewish, im not jewish,” to try to get them to leave him alone, but he got assaulted anyway. after he finishes talking he gets punched clean across the face. was he jewish? i have no clue. but whether he was or wasn’t: trying to distance himself from jewish people wasn’t good enough. they wanted him hurt or dead anyways. once antisemites have recognized you as a jew, as best, you have a little bit of time to spend on some very thin ice before they decide you’re up next. at worst, that happens, because they don’t even listen to you. this whole thing makes my head hurt. pay attention during purim for the love of g-d

[stewy]

FREEMA AGYEMAN as Dr. Helen Sharpe in New Amsterdam.

[some-zer0]

Damascus Arc my beloved

[communistkenobi]

“It’s so crazy JKR is misgendering a real cis WOMAN who was raised as a GIRL her whole LIFE what a dummy” is such a dogshit argument lol stop ceding ground to the idea that cis women have a more legitimate claim to womanhood because they were “born and raised” a woman and that’s why it makes this misgendering “more” ridiculous somehow. transphobes being constantly wrong about who is “actually transgender” is not their trans clocking radar ‘misfiring,’ they are proudly, openly, and successfully terrorising the public into accepting a very narrow & particular white suprematist notion of gendered divisions in society. JKR is not ‘mistaken’ she’s a fucking white supremacist who hangs out with other white supremacists & advances white supremacy through the language of transphobia. why is anyone still acting like she’s “making mistakes” where have you people been

[casasupernovas]

she is stunning your honour

[literaryspinster]

She's a bad bitch for many reasons but the biggest one is actually having the brains to treat a character played by Freema Agyeman right.

[aardvaark]

medical drama necessities:

doctors exclusively use the paddles for defibrillators. the electrode pads that are very common today do not seem to exist.

the show has never heard of any medical professional besides a doctor in its entire life. what is a nurse??

the best doctors never explain The Treatment TM, they just administer it in the middle of an emergency while their colleagues shout "what are you doing??" and try to pull them away.

doctor massively crosses legal or ethical lines but doesn’t get any punishment because they’re the main character

doctors really, really want to stab a hole in your throat. trying the heimlich maneuver first? nah, that’s silly.

the faster you do CPR, the better it works.

doctors have a wildly disproportionately high rate of getting into emergencies themselves. you’re guaranteed to require emergency surgery at least once, it’s in your contract.

don’t you hate it when your workplace is interrupted by a bomb, a blackout, the ceiling caving in, a car crashing right in through the ground floor walls, a highly infectious fatal disease outbreak, and every possible natural disaster known to man?

failed paternity test = the kid was accidentally switched at birth

"i’ve never seen anything like this before. this is a once in a lifetime case" - thing that someone will say every week about the most recent rare disease or unusual surgery.

creative surgery with some interesting tools. i’ve seen everything from a ballpoint pen to a pig being used in tv medical procedures.

doctors scrubs are oddly well-fitted, particularly on the women.

everyone is having sex in the on-call rooms or supply closets. also, no one knows how to lock or barricade doors.

"please get rabies shots if you are bitten by a bat or stray animal" psa episode

no one throws up. and if they do throw up, it’s fully captured by one of those little bowls and we don’t see anything except maybe some spit.

live worms, spiders, or even small fish inside people’s bodies.

incarcerated patient transferred to the hospital from prison. almost certainly a murderer or did some other particularly messed up thing, and very likely to be on death row if the show’s set in a place where death penalty still stands.

patient wakes up in hospital, pulls out their IV and tries to leave (special shoutout to this one because it makes me gag every time, that thing is IN YOUR VEIN).