Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

When I had my hysterectomy, I was told recovery would be quick because I was young, fit & otherwise healthy.

They were wrong. The surgeon made an error and despite signs of post op bleeding, discharged me & went on vacation.

When I returned to the ER, I was ignored & gaslit

They told me it was “normal” to be in more pain 8 days after surgery than on day 1 (it’s not).

They said “what do you want us to do?”

They refused to run any tests beyond basic vitals, and scolded me for wasting their time

I knew something was wrong, but I was young and hadn’t yet learned how to advocate for myself.

The pain, swelling and bruising were getting worse with each passing day. I was dizzy, listless and had no appetite.

I slept ALL the time.

I was not getting better

I did what anyone would do, I went back to the ER. Surely this time they would take me seriously?

They didn’t. They made no attempt to hide their frustration that I had returned”. They made misogynistic comments about how “sensitive” I was & that being in pain was normal

I went home feeling completely dejected and disrespected, but also starting to gaslight myself.

Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe this was normal pain. Maybe I did need to suck it up.

I tried to force myself to eat and go for light walks. I tried to play through the pain.

I was vomiting everything up and frequently collapsing from fatigue.

I could not suck this up.

My boyfriend had to carry me into the ER for a third attempt to get help

They did the exact same thing. Asked what we expected them to do. Told us the pain was normal. Refused to call a consult or run tests.

Thankfully my boyfriend believed me over them. He was certain if I went home, I wouldn’t make it through the night

He refused to let them discharge me. He told them, loudly and sternly, that he was not taking me home to die. That they needed to do their jobs.

They threatened to call security but he did not back down.

Thankfully a doctor overheard him and decided to look in and see if he could calm the situation.

When he saw me, half unconscious and white as a ghost, he immediately ordered tests. He told the triage staff not to call security and to take me into a private room

It turns out my boyfriend was right. Had I gone home that night, I wouldn’t have made it to morning.

I had a massive internal bleed and a giant infected abscess which had been growing since the surgeon sent me home.

I was rushed to another hospital for emergency surgery and given 50/50 odds of survival. I spent over a month in the hospital, developed a second hospital acquired infection, and needed 11 months to fully recover.

I survived due to luck & privilege. Had my boyfriend not believed me, I wouldn’t be here. Had he not been a white man? He likely would have been removed & I would have died

This is medical misogyny. They didn’t listen because I was a woman. They thought I was being dramatic

I tell this story because of what happened to Adriana Smith. A young black woman in Georgia who tried to get medical care for severe headaches, and was dismissed and gaslit instead.

She suffered brain death at home because no one believed her. Because of misogynoir.

To make matters worse, she’s been turned into a medical experiment because she was nine weeks pregnant and living in a state with an abortion ban. She’s on organ & tissue support being treated as a human incubator.

No care when alive & forced “care” when dead

Misogyny in medicine kills. It maims. It disables and traumatizes.

Women are frequently treated as hysterical and not given the medical care they require.

We often need a man to accompany us just to be taken seriously.

It’s not right and it needs to change

I will forever deal with medical PTSD because of what I went through, but at least I survived.

Adriana wasn’t so lucky, and no one’s survival should ever be based on luck, privilege or their ability to find a man to speak for them

I survived due to luck and privilege, Adriana didn’t.

What’s worse, due to abortion bans and dangerous forced birth policies, her body is kept alive on organ and tissue support without her family’s consent.

We must do better:

https://www.disabledginger.com/p/adriana-smith-misogyny-and-the-cruelty

#misogyny #misogynoir #ableism #patriarchy #abortion #mybodymychoice #disability #ableism #uspol

If you are protesting the Trump regime's war on America, you need to know your rights. (You need to know them regardless.)

The ACLU is offering training: https://act.aclu.org/a/2025-kyr-training-2

h/t @jennifer

Finally! A decent AI risk management tool!

https://airiskbutt.com/

In addition, despite claims that ShotSpotter only records audio of gunshots, the microphones are in fact always on, and there have been instances of the police submitting ShotSpotter recordings of human voices as evidence in criminal trials.

Did.a video on the raw milk thing!

Contents: media literacy about agriculture & lots of talk about poop. Because cows

https://youtu.be/piB_DdO2D6I?si=LWwsq-t3jP_Wftg8

BROOKLYN! Pop in at 6pm tonight for a screening of InterRebellium @ P.I.T. (Property is Theft), organized in collaboration with the NYC anarchist book fair.

#Trump’s tax bill to cost 830,000 jobs and drive up bills and pollution emissions, experts warn - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/22/trump-republican-tax-bill "demolish key components of climate legislation signed by Joe Biden that has spurred a record torrent of renewable energy and electric vehicle investment in the US."

EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis - https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/eu-ruling-tracking-based-advertising-by-google-microsoft-amazon-x-across-europe-has-no-legal-basis/ this is big #tcf #adtech

Recent leaks have undermined the kinds of lies that the drafters of the Constitution intended journalists to expose when they wrote the First Amendment’s press clause.

That’s exactly why journalist-source confidentiality needs protecting.

https://freedom.press/issues/recent-leaks-reinforce-why-journalist-source-confidentiality-needs-protecting/

"I believe this process has created a symbolic society — one where people are elevated not by any actual ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by their ability to make the right noises and look the right way to get ahead. The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots — people that have learned enough to impress the people above them, because the business idiots have had power for decades..."
[link in previous toot]

Ed Zitron doing a pretty solid impression of a modern-day Veblen here.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

This is probably obvious to everyone already, but I jotted down a brief note about why having a `robots.txt` matters when creating tarpits for LLM bot zombies scouring the web for content--even when, especially when, they don't read them.

https://inkdroid.org/2025/05/22/tarpit/

This week’s comic is now up on Daily Kos
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THE NEW SNEETCHES
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/22/2323427/-Cartoon-Tom-the-Dancing-Bug-and-The-New-Sneetches

This is how our society ends: with the "smart" people committing voluntary intellectual suicide. Congratulations to all the AI bandwagon-hoppers out there - this is what your ignorant enthusiasm has helped to create. Oh well. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/05/thinking-being-offloaded-to-ai-even-in-elite-medical-programs.html

Good news if you want to buy a house, bad news if you need to have a job.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/05/a-harbinger-tech-jobs-plunge-in-san-francisco-silicon-valley-brings-condo-prices-drop-back-to-2015-single-family-home-to-2018.html

With their votes in favor of a disastrous law giving the cryptocurrency crooks even more incentive to rip off the rest of us, these 16 Democratic senators demonstrated that they are as corrupt as Trump and the Republican party. Everyone's assets are about to be at huge risk.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-05-21-democratic-senators-deserve-primary-crypto-bill/

#Google putting wrong medical advice in their #AI Overviews.

This is not funny. It is not acceptable. Today I saw someone who had asked a health-related question to Google Search. The AI Overview presented mixed-up, wrong information. I urged the person to ignore the AI Overview and use the regular site links.

They didn't know there were any regular site links, because the AI Overview filled essentially their entire window and they didn't know to scroll down. This is a common situation with busy, nontechie users.

They have depended on Google to point them at accurate information for so many years, and now Google Search spews out convincing looking AI garbage. This is not an anomaly.

Google's AI Overviews are full of wrong, partially wrong (even more dangerous!), and just plain misinformation. Answers that are completely reversed from supposed source pages because the AI didn't understand the wording. Measurements wrong. Math wrong.

It doesn't matter how often AI Overviews are correct, because you NEVER KNOW when they're going to be wrong, either completely or partly (again, mixing true with false -- like contaminating a well).

And now Google is trying to convince users to use "AI Search" instead -- "Hey Ma', no more list of blue links!" -- making it even harder to see that so many of their answers are, if you'll excuse the expression, bulls*it, sometimes dangerous as well.

This is unconscionable. Frankly, whether Google understands this or not, this behavior is uncaring and evil. Apparently Google's leadership no longer feels any shame at all. Disgusting.

Wonder where it's going?

"i don't understand this economy when nursing homes are so expensive they bankrupt our grandparents but nursing home aides need to use food banks. daycare is so expensive it eats up one parent's entire paycheck and yet daycare providers only make $10/hr and need second jobs

college costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and puts students into debt for life and yet we have thousands of professors living in their cars.

everything we need is astronomically expensive and yet almost none of the money we pay is going towards the people actually doing the work and providing the services."

- @missmayn

#capitalism

🔴 This week’s comic is now up on Boing Boing
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THE NEW SNEETCHES
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https://boingboing.net/2025/05/21/tom-the-dancing-bug-the-new-sneetches.html